August 21 - Galatians 5: Live Freely

My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit. Then you won't feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?   (5:16-18)

What does this mean - to "live freely?" To be "animated and motivated by God's Spirit?" To no longer feel the compulsions of selfishness? Crabb provides some real, meaningful words that shed light and conviction (and my words seems so trivial):

• "As you live the Christian life, free from condemnation for past, present, and future sins and free at any moment and in any circumstance to love, you become aware of deep longings in your heart that remain unsatisfied despite your best efforts at faith and obedience. 
• The pain of those unmet longings becomes within you a void, an empty space, a lonely feeling of incompleteness. The desire for relief from that pain seems more compelling than your desire to love. And the disappointments you've suffered in your relationships have created wounds that beg so strongly for relief that nothing seems more necessary to your well-being.
• Consistent with the message of your culture, your resolve shifts from loving others to healing your wounds, to feeling complete as a loved and significant person. The corruption lying dormant within you since conception, the spirit of entitlement, now roars into death-dealing life.
• You become convinced that your wounds must be healed, your void must be filled, before you can love. That conviction is the devil's lie disguised as My Spirit's empathic tenderness.
• With that conviction ruling within you, you live your life in the flesh, in the corruption of demanding satisfaction, and you become addicted to the experience of satisfaction, whether through food, sex, ministry, close relationships, worship times, meaningful work, or happy family life.
• ...You then fall off one side of the horse into a modern form of the Galatian heresy, one that teaches that you can do something to get on better terms with Me... That's legalism....  If living well brings a pleasant experience and enjoyable blessings, you feel a self-satisfaction that you mistake for worship. And the more self-satisfied you become with My apparent response to your desire for the good life, the more superficial and less sacrificial your love becomes.
• ...I saved you so that you could believe in Me even when I seem absent and unresponsive (faith), to wait in confidence that My plan is on course for an unimaginably happy ending (hope); and to relate to Me in humble, nondemanding worship and to others with a wise and priority concern for their well-being (love)....
• And now you fall off the other side of the horse. You exchange legalism for license.  The voice within you (which My Spirit longs to transform into the hope of glory) degenerates into a powerful force that tempts you to do whatever relieves your pain, heals your wounds, and restores the experience of completion that you can't stop wanting.  You now live by the flesh and lose your freedom to resist its demands. 
• The inevitable result is a deeper suffering than unmet longings. You now suffer from the inability to love. Your freedom to live for your own experience of completeness destroys your freedom to love, to care about anyone more than yourself....

To live by My Spirit means to love others no matter how painfully you're hurting or how badly you fail. Focus more on loving others than resisting temptation.... Make every effort not to sin less but to love more.... You are free not to do everything right and not to do whatever pleases you in the moment. You are free to love."  (66LL)