A LITTLE YEAST

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

It certainly isn’t God, for He is the one who called you to freedom. This false teaching is like a little yeast that spreads through the whole batch of dough! I am trusting the Lord to keep you from believing false teachings. God will judge that person, whoever he is, who has been confusing you.\

Dear brothers and sisters, if I were still preaching that you must be circumcised—as some say I do—why am I still being persecuted? If I were no longer preaching salvation through the cross of Christ, no one would be offended.

I just wish that those troublemakers who want to mutilate you by circumcision would mutilate themselves.

Galatians 5:8-12 NLT

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Have you ever colored eggs for Easter?

The process requires you to have a half cup of boiling hot water before adding a teaspoon of white vinegar and then some food coloring.

How much food coloring do you have to add?

Like the vinegar, not much. As little as ten drops added to the small amount of white vinegar converts the once plain water to dye into which the eggs can be submerged for coloring.

Now, here’s the thing. Once the water is colored, there’s no going back to what it was. Its purity has been corrupted by the food coloring drops and vinegar. You have to discard it and get fresh water again.

Paul makes a similar argument in today’s scripture passage as he continues to address the sinister work of the Judaizers as they worked to adversely influence the Christians in Galatia. This adverse influence revolved around the Jews asserting that following the Law of the old covenant, the Law give to Moses by God, was still a requirement for salvation in addition to believing in Jesus. This insidious introduction of additional standards to be saved was much like the drops of food coloring and vinegar added to the water to dye eggs. Once it was allowed to infiltrate the hearts and minds of the Galatians, it would corrupt and compromise what was once holy and pure, the belief in the true Gospel that salvation came from a simple belief in Jesus as Savior alone.

In our verses today, Paul uses another illustration, one that Jesus used often as well and that was the matter of yeast as representative of sin. Look again at what Paul said here:

This false teaching is like a little yeast that spreads through the whole batch of dough! v9

When bread is prepared for baking, the rule of thumb is to take the amount of flour and add 1 to 1.5% of that weight in yeast. You can see that 98.5 to 99% of the dough is the mixed flour, oil, sugar, and water. It dominates the batch but what changes everything is the yeast. Without it, the dough would never raise and bake into the fluffy bread people like to eat. A little bit of yeast makes a big different and drastically alters what it applied to.

The false teaching of the Judaizers was like this. They were encouraging the men in the Galatian church to get circumcised as a condition of salvation. Paul makes sure the Christ believers in Galatia knew that this wasn’t from God, the One who called His people to freedom through one source and one source only, His Son Jesus.

All this was so frustrating to the Apostle. It was so out of his control and so he did what he could do. He trusted the Lord to keep the Galatian believers from believing in false teachings, knowing that His judgment would fall on those who were trying to mislead and corrupt His Gospel.

Today, it only takes a little bit of sin (yeast) to enter into our lives and bring corruption and impurity. We always need to have our guards up to ensure we stay focused on Jesus and the life He lived, always striving to model our own lives after His.

When we do this, we can eliminate the yeast of iniquity from infiltrating out hearts and minds and instead live in cleanliness and wholesome truth, spiritually strong and legitimate through the Lord who is the only One who can make us that way.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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