What does it cost to get into God’s family?

Have you ever walked into a place thinking you knew exactly what it was, and then learned the history and realized it was so much bigger than you thought?

That is actually a pretty good picture of what the Apostle Paul is trying to do in Galatians 3. He wants the churches he planted to understand the history of what God has been doing, because when you understand that history, your experience of walking with God changes completely.

Here is the big idea for this whole passage: Jesus was cursed so that we can be blessed by adoption into God's family. That is where we are headed, and getting there requires a little backstory.

The whole Bible in a few minutes

In the beginning, God created everything and made human beings to reflect his image, to be his representatives in the world. He put them in a garden, gave them meaningful work, provided everything they needed, and simply asked them to walk with him. But almost immediately, humanity decided that we could probably do a better job running things than God could. That decision introduced what the Bible calls sin, and sin acts like a kind of virus wreaking havoc in a perfect system.

From there, things unravel fast. Brothers turn on brothers. People build towers trying to reach God on their own terms. The pattern is relentless: humanity keeps trying to work its way back to God, and keeps failing.

So God narrows his focus. He finds a man named Abraham and makes him an extraordinary promise: through your family, I am going to bless the whole world (Genesis 12:3). Abraham had no children at the time and no reason to believe this was possible. But he trusted God anyway. And that trust, that faith, was credited to him as righteousness. Not his performance, Abraham’s trust that what he had heard from God was true and would happen.

Abraham's family grows into a nation called Israel. God gives them laws, a land, a system of worship. He shows up among them in remarkable ways. He keeps showing up and asking: will you just walk with me? And over and over again they say yes, and then they do not walk with him.

Then Jesus comes through this same family, and he announces that everything the law and the prophets were pointing toward has now arrived. “Trust in me,” he says, “and I will make you right with God.” And some people did. And from that small group, a message began to spread that was never meant to stay inside one family. It was always meant to reach the whole world.

O foolish Galatians

That is the history. And Paul is pretty upset because the churches in Galatia are throwing it away.

He opens Galatians 3 with one of the most direct rebukes in the New Testament: "O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?" These are people who heard the gospel, trusted Jesus, and experienced the Holy Spirit working among them. And now they believing the lie that trusting Jesus is a good start, but they also need to follow a long list of religious rules to be truly accepted by God.

Paul asks a simple question: how did you get into God's grace in the first place? Did you follow enough rules to earn it? Or did you just hear that Jesus was crucified for your sin and trust that somehow, in spite of everything, that was enough?

You heard it and trusted it. So why are you now trying to earn what was already given to you for free?

He puts it plainly: did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? (Galatians 3:2) The Holy Spirit showing up in your life, changing you from the inside, doing things in your community that you could not manufacture on your own, that is not something you worked for. That is a gift. And if you think you can now work hard enough to keep it, you have misunderstood how you got it in the first place.

Access to God's family is available through trust

Here is where Abraham comes back in. Paul makes a remarkable claim in Galatians 3:7: it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham, not those who are biologically descended from him. Those who trust God the way Abraham trusted God are those who are part of God’s family.

That was a revolutionary idea. The Jewish people understood themselves as God's special family, chosen and set apart. Non-Jewish people, called Gentiles, were outsiders. But Paul says God told Abraham all the way back at the beginning that, “in you shall all the nations be blessed” (Galatians 3:8). The plan was always for this to reach everybody. And access to that family is through trust in Jesus, not through ancestry or rule-following.

This flips the question most of us come to church asking. We usually show up wondering how God fits into my story. How he can help me? What he can do for me? But Paul is inviting us to see ourselves as part of God's story instead. A story that has been going on for a very long time and is much bigger than any one of us.

Jesus took the curse so we could receive the blessing

Galatians 3:10 says something uncomfortable: everyone who relies on keeping the law to make themselves right with God is actually under a curse, because the law requires perfection, and no one can keep it perfectly. You do not get to pick which parts of the law to follow. The whole thing counts as one standard, and failing at any part of it means failing all of it.

That is the bad news. And we should not minimize it. Because when we start to minimize the bad news, we also minimize the good news that follows.

Here is the good news: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). Jesus, who never broke a single law, who lived the perfect life none of us could live, took on himself the curse that our failure deserved. He was hung on a tree, which in the ancient world carried a specific meaning of being under God's judgment. He took that judgment in our place.

Why? So that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Jesus. So that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith (Galatians 3:14).

The blessing of God is the presence of God. In the old system, even the most devout worshipers could only get so close to God's presence. There was always a curtain, always a separation. But because of what Jesus did, God's own Spirit now lives in the people who trust him. Not just close. Actually inside.

That is not something you earn. It is not something you maintain by following the right rules. It is a gift given to those who simply trust that Jesus has done what he said he did.

So what does your prayer life tell you?

How can we evaluate where we’re at with this? It might not be intuitive, but consider that how we pray and what we pray about may tell us something about what’s going on in our soul.

If our prayers are mostly a list of requests we bring to God hoping he will give us what we want, that might reveal a transactional view of faith. A spiritual ATM where we put in the right inputs and hope for the right output.

But if our prayers are honest conversations with someone we trust, that looks like a relationship. Asking Jesus to be at work in us and in others. Thanking him for access we did not earn. Admitting we cannot figure this out on our own and trusting that he can.

What does your prayer life tell you about who you actually trust most?

If you have never trusted Jesus with your sin and your standing before God, today is a great day to start. You did not earn the right to hear the good news. You just read it. For free. That is a gift from God.

If you started trusting Jesus a while ago but have slowly drifted into trying to keep his approval through your own performance, the invitation is the same: come back to trust. The same way you got in is the same way you stay. Not by clenching your teeth harder, but by resting in the one who already did the work.

Jesus was cursed so that we can be blessed by adoption into God's family. Access to God’s family is available through trusting Jesus. We would love to walk that out with you at Neighborhood Church in Ocala.

Editor note: This blog summary was generated with the assistance of AI and based on a sermon transcript and reviewed by a human editor. It is provided for convenience and may not fully reflect the original sermon. The original writing and delivery of the sermon were done without the input of AI. Please refer to the full message and Scripture for complete context and teaching.