—Galatians 4.8–11—

⁸ Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. ⁹ But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? ¹⁰ You are observing special days and months and seasons and years! ¹¹ I fear for you, that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you.


Back when I was an undergrad, I coached an intramural flag football team. One of the guys on the team was very fast and had really good hands, so it was natural that he would be a receiver. The only downfall was that he was about 5 feet 5 inches tall. Our quarterback was only about 5 feet 7 inches, so he had trouble seeing him on long routes.

As we got into games, I felt that a player with his talents should be getting more catches than he was getting. So, during practice one afternoon, I worked really hard on teaching him to run short routes across the field rather than long routes down the field and then use his speed to evade the defenders. We worked and worked and worked on it, and he seemed to catch on. But, in the next game, he went right back to running the deep routes.

It doesn’t feel good to put in all that time into someone and then have him or her go back to the old ways. Paul feels this way about the churches in Galatia. They had seemingly made so much progress, only to end up falling into the same things they did before they became Christians.

What is an area that you have lost some ground in? What do you need to do to regain it?