Baggage Claim — Carry On - Friday
Today’s Verse
Galatians 5:6
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. (ESV)
When I was in high school, I decided early on that I wanted to go for an honors diploma. There were enough honors, AP, and dual enrollment classes in the humanities that I could avoid the STEM classes that weren’t quite my forte. For four years, I worked hard to keep my GPA up and join as many clubs as I could, thinking it would all be good to show when I applied to colleges. By my senior year, everything was going pretty smoothly. There had been some grades and test scores I’d wished were higher, but it seemed like that honors diploma was in the bag, so to speak. I just needed to keep on and not mess up too much.
Well, I hadn’t taken into account that by my senior year, I was still required to take a math class, and my options were very limited. I ended up in Honors Pre-Calculus, and let me tell you, I was not ready for honors math of any kind. A couple of weeks before graduation, I found myself in the school counselor’s office trying to wrap my head around the position I was in. When I laid it all out as I understood, he agreed: “Yep, if you get anything below an A on your Honors Pre-Calculus final exam, you will not graduate with an honors diploma.” After working hard to scrape by with a C+ in the class, an A on the final exam sounded difficult, at best, to accomplish. But after 4 years of working towards an honors diploma, I didn’t want to give that up, either. You better believe I studied hard for that test, and barely squeaked out with the grade I needed.
But here’s the thing: did that honors diploma mean anything when I applied for college? Maybe, maybe not. Has anyone asked me about it since then? No, absolutely no one. Have I even looked at it? Probably not. It’s just sat in some random box somewhere collecting dust. The dust mites sure don’t care if they sit on the word “honors” or not. But at the time, it felt like the thing I needed to do or earn to be accepted.
Friends, Jesus accepts you with open arms, whether you’ve checked all the boxes or not. This is the point Paul so desperately wanted to drive home to the Galatians: you don’t have to earn your salvation or meet a set of standards to be loved by God. It’s not about works, it's about faith. Your worth, your value, and your identity are not found in how well you perform or what you do. They are found in Christ, the One who fulfilled the law (Matthew 5:17). The love we’re after is not something we earn, but something He freely gives.
REFLECTION
How are you still striving to “earn” God’s love? Do you feel like you need to check off certain boxes to be worthy? There is freedom in Christ that we cannot find anywhere else. Let us live like it!
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