I tell you that if a young child inherits an estate, he has no more authority over it than a slave even though it all belongs to him. Instead, he is under the authority of people appointed to care for him and the estate until he reaches maturity. So also, when we were spiritual children, we were under the authority of the world's basic rules for human behavior. But when the right time had come, God sent his Son to be born like one of us, born of a human mother, under the authority of God's basic rules. The Son was sent to emancipate us from our slavery to these rules so that we could be adopted as God's children. Now that you are his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, so you, like the Son, can call out to him, "Daddy, Father!". Instead of being a slave, you are now also a son, and because of the work of God's Son, our Champion, you also are one of God's heirs.
Before you knew God, you were slaves to things which are not really gods at all. But now that you know God and he has become intimate with you, why would you abandon him to become slaves again to those weak and pathetic things? You act as if the most important thing is to properly celebrate the various holidays. I am afraid that all the work I have done for you might have been wasted.
Please, fellow teammates, join with me as I have with you. Far from rejecting me, the first time I preached the Good News to you (though you could easily have despised me because of my illness), you received me as a messenger of God, or even as Jesus our Champion. There was joy in you then, and, had you been able to, you would have even plucked out your own eyes and given them to me. Are we now enemies because I have told you the truth? The teachers you are now listening to enthusiastically pursue you, but not for a good cause. They want to alienate you from me, so that you may pursue them alone. Enthusiasm is only good when it's for a good cause, and then only if you keep it up when I'm away.
My dear children, I had thought that I was finished with the labor of bringing you to birth in Christ, but it seems that I have to do it all over again. I long to be with you, so I wouldn't have to talk this way. What happened to you?
Those of you who want to be bound again to follow God's basic rules, do you realize what those rules say? In the authoritative writings we read that Abraham had two sons, one born of a servant and one of a free woman. The servant's son was born by human effort alone, but the free woman's son was born as a result of God's promise. These are physical representations of spiritual truths, for they represent God's two covenants. The servant woman, Hagar, represents Mount Sinai in Arabia, where God's people were bound under the authority of the covenant to live according to his basic rules. She is like the old Jerusalem, and those who still seek to live by those rules are her spiritual children and so are bound in slavery like her. But the free woman, Sarah, is like God's heavenly Jerusalem, set free by God's promised new covenant and the mother of all who have been so freed. And there will be many of them, for God tells us in his authoritative writings: "Celebrate your family, you childless single woman who has never given birth, for you will have more children than the married woman."
Like Sarah's son Isaac, we, fellow teammates, are children of God's promise. But then as now, the child born solely of human effort persecuted the child born by the work of God's Spirit. But the authoritative writings say to us "Send away the servant and her son, for the son of the servant will not inherit with the son of the free woman." And we, fellow teammates, are not spiritual children of a servant, but of the free woman, with the inheritance that follows.
