
* From ** James Montgomery Boice, comment on Galatians 5:13 in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Abridged: New Testament. I choose to trust you to shape and guide my life. O Lord, you call me to true freedom: not following my own flawed, selfish impulses, but living guided by your presence and principles. In what areas of life do you want to invite the Spirit to empower you to deny your selfish desires and love others more fully as you love yourself? When have you experienced what Pastor Hamilton sometimes calls “inner nudges” that move you toward the right choices, away from what is harmful? How can you learn to be more attuned to the Holy Spirit’s leading in your life, especially in your closest relationships? Paul described the way of life he was talking about with the phrase “be guided by the Spirit,” pointing his readers to the only one who can give us the ability to serve each other in love. We all have selfish impulses, especially when we’re able to choose freely.
In verse 13 Paul bluntly stated a painful truth. In fact-this is the paradox-it is the Christian form of being free.” ** The point of a deeply committed love relationship is to give each partner the God-given freedom to “serve each other through love.” “It is ironical that, having urged the Galatians not to become slaves to law, Paul should now encourage them to become slaves of one another, for that is what “serve” means….The Galatians are to be slaves of one another, though this slavery is not at all like the first. We typically define “freedom” as “the right to do what you want, make your own decisions, and express your own opinions,” or even “the ability to do what you want because you have no obligations or responsibilities.” * When the apostle Paul said the Galatian Christians were called to “freedom” (Greek eleutheria) he meant something very different-the right (and power) to do what God wants. 15 But if you bite and devour each other, be careful that you don’t get eaten up by each other!ġ6 I say be guided by the Spirit and you won’t carry out your selfish desires. 14 All the Law has been fulfilled in a single statement: Love your neighbor as yourself. It also links to a recently expanded Glossary of dictionary terms, which gathers together all the relevant linguistic terms, from abbreviation to zero article.Daily Scripture SATURDAY 5.7.22 Galatians 5:13-16ġ3 You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters only don’t let this freedom be an opportunity to indulge your selfish impulses, but serve each other through love. To this end, Macmillan has created a helpful new page, ‘ Anatomy of a dictionary entry’, which breaks down all the parts, showing readers exactly what they’re looking at. So it’s useful to know the various features that a dictionary offers. When I showed him that the broader sense of unique was considered valid, Mr P, to his credit, accepted the facts. At the very least, he would not have linked to the dictionary in trying to argue his case. If Mr P had read past the first line, he would have had to revise his position. Scrolling down, I found a usage note on the complications of unique, including an explicit assertion that this broader sense of the word is ‘grammatically acceptable’. In Macmillan Dictionary, this is the primary sense. Just below it was a secondary sense showing that unique also means special or unusual. To support his position, Mr P linked to a dictionary entry for unique and said, ‘That’s the definition.’ But when I visited the page, I found more than just the definition that Mr P approved of – the ‘one of a kind’ sense. On the face of it, it’s a reasonable claim.
Mr P believed that unique was absolute – that something is either unique or not. I’ll call this reader Mr P, for prescriptive. When I wrote an A–Z of English usage myths on Twitter a while ago, one reader baulked at my suggestion that the word unique is gradable – that you can say something is ‘fairly unique’ or ‘very unique’. It’s also possible to not use a dictionary properly.