It’s probably the most famous and most recognizable painting by an American artist: Grant Wood’s depiction of a simple unsmiling farm couple. The man is wearing a black coat over his overalls and a white shirt without a collar. He holds a pitchfork in his hand, a farmer’s tool for winnowing. The woman sports a simple cameo necklace, her lips pursed tight. They are standing in front of a typical farmhouse, but the pitch of the roof, the pointed shape of the window, and the cut-off view of something rising from the apex of the roof that could be a weather vane or a cross—all of this makes you wonder if Wood isn’t trying to say something about America’s connection between the sacred and the secular. Europe has its cathedrals that tower over the landscape, but in the American Midwest, religion and everyday life are so tightly bound together that a farmer could be a preacher, a house a church, and the winnowing of saint and sinner done by common folk. He appropriately called the painting American Gothic.

The backstory to the painter sheds more light. Grant Wood grew up in Anamosa, Iowa. But when he knew he wanted to be a painter, he figured he had to leave Iowa for Paris, where he joined up with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. He began to paint in the Impressionist style made famous by Monet, Renoir and Cezanne. But after a while, he had a chilling insight. He realized that every French landscape he painted had been better painted by French landscape artists. He headed back to Iowa, determined to paint what he knew: milk cows, clapboard houses, drab clothes, gossipy neighbors, barnyards and cornfields and little red schoolhouses—just everyday life, in other words. In doing so, he developed his own distinctive style that won him a place in the pantheon of great painters.

When we listen to the Apostle Paul in Galatians, he is making a defense for why he doesn’t think it necessary for Gentiles to live as Jews in order to be acceptable to God. It would be like Grant Wood having to become French in order to be a great painter, when he had all the resources right where he was to achieve that same end.

When Paul began his missionary work of telling Gentiles who Jesus was and what he had done for the whole world, he had to overcome one major objection. Jews who had put their faith in Jesus were still trying to work out how to be Jewish and be followers of Jesus at the same time. Initially it didn’t seem much of a conflict—they could just continue to live as Jews and celebrate Jesus as the messiah of Israel. But when Gentiles starting putting their faith in Jesus, too, the question of what made a Gentile just or righteous before God came into focus. And with it, the question was raised whether there would be two ways of being just—one for Jews and one for Gentiles. Jews wanted Gentiles to start living like Jews in order to be authentic Jesus followers. They wanted the men to be circumcised, and all to keep kosher and observe the laws of Moses.

Paul vehemently objected to that and says that if they do that, they were making the death of Jesus irrelevant. What’s the point of Jesus having suffered and died on the cross, if all it did was invite Gentiles to become Jews? Nothing had changed, he says. But Paul believed everything had changed, and he believed that because he believed he himself had been changed by believing in Jesus.

What does it take to be just? The word for just is also the word for righteous. It means to be straight. If you think of a plumb line hanging straight up and down, you get what it means to be just. If you imagine a board that is perfectly square to its intended line, without any crookedness at all, you understand what righteousness means. It means perfect. It means you are a straight arrow or a square guy.

The standard by which Jews measured whether they were just or righteous or straight or square with God was the Law. If you kept it perfectly, you were just. But Paul saw that the Law didn’t actually produce just people: it just proved to any who tried to be just just how unjust they really were. Instead of giving life, it gave death. Instead of encouraging your progress, it discourages you by showing how far from perfection you are.

The complete failure of the Law to give life was shown in the crucifixion of Jesus. Here was the perfect keeper of the Law, the divine Son of God, who was innocent in every way and completely faithful to God in all things. And yet the keepers of the Law set him on a cross anyway, and they did so by appealing to the Law. This proves, Paul says, that the Law can’t give life; it can only by itself deal death. There must be another way that sets Jews and Gentiles alike on like ground.

Faith is that common ground. Just faith. Faith operates, Paul says, apart from the Law for both Jews and Gentiles. And instead of pointing directly to faith as a work that we perform, he talks about the faith of Jesus Christ that makes us just.

Now, it may be hard to see that in our text at first, because when Paul talks about faith, our translators have made it faith IN Jesus Christ. But an equally valid way to translate the Greek is faith OF Jesus Christ. Is it our faith in Jesus Christ, or is it the faith of Jesus Christ on our behalf that makes all the difference? I believe it’s the latter—it’s the faith of Jesus Christ that makes us just or righteous or right with God, and then it’s Jesus’ continuing faith living in and through us that keeps us seeking justice and life for others.

If Jesus fulfilled all the requirements of the Law and all it did was lead him to death on the cross, then it showed that his relationship with God must have been grounded in something more than and other than the Law of Moses. In fact, Paul believed it was grounded in a faithfulness that was more like that of Abraham, who came before Moses. If Abraham was deemed just before God by trusting completely in God without the Law, then Gentiles shouldn’t have to keep the Law in order to be righteous—and here’s the kicker: neither should Jews.

But it’s not just Jews that are tempted to make personal behavior the litmus test for whether you are just or righteous. Christians have done the same thing.

I was reading recently about the career of the Texas Tornado, the fiery fundamentalist preacher of the last century from Fort Worth, J. Frank Norris. He was deeply influenced by the Third Baptist Church in Owensboro, Kentucky, which had been formed out of a revival some years earlier. The revival preacher described the formation of the church on this basis: Resolutions were unanimously adopted to the effect that no person should be received into, nor retained in fellowship, who engages in dancing, card-playing, drinking liquor as a beverage, renting property to liquor stores, or in any way investing money in or dealing in the liquor business. The church grew fast adding hundreds of members, owing apparently to the strictness of behavior that the church enforced. Norris went there to preach a revival and came back a changed man. He had been a well-educated and genteel pastor of the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, but he told his wife that while in Owensboro, he had really been saved for the first time and that he was coming home, and “we are going to start life over again and lick the tar out of that crowd and build the biggest church in the world.”[1]

Well, what Norris did was allegedly burn down the church for the insurance money, shoot dead a drunken man who had come to confront him in his office, drive over a thousand people from his church rolls, create nothing but havoc in Texas Baptist life, and become the source of dissension through Baptist churches everywhere. He certainly made a name for himself. And all of that in the name of turning the church into a place that made drinking and dancing and card-playing a test of true faith. The self-effort to be righteous can turn into self-righteousness if it isn’t done for the purpose of social righteousness.

This is the danger that faced the early church and every church of every age. The desire to be good is good, but while the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak. Making personal holiness the test of being a true Christian assures that everyone will fail in the end. The church that sets up moral behavior—however desirable and good that may be—over faith as the means of salvation is the church may be big but will always be in turmoil.

Paul’s way is revolutionary. He knows that only one human ever pleased God completely—Jesus Christ. He alone lived faithfully from beginning to end. And since now he is raised from the dead and available to live in us by his Spirit, we have a new way forward in faith. We have the power of his life in ours.

I am crucified with Christ, Paul says. It’s no longer about him, he’s saying. He is free from that concern and can now be concerned for others. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

The hallmarks of the faith of Jesus Christ are “love and self-giving”—did you hear it? … who loved me and gave himself for me? Love binds all things and all people together, while testing good works divides people from one another and God. Self-giving is the willingness to sacrifice yourself for the sake of another. You can’t do that while you are comparing yourself to someone else in regard to whether he or she is worthy. Love and self-giving are what Jesus fosters in you when he lives in you.

Ask yourself this question: Would you best define the beautiful Christian life by whether a person doesn’t drink or dance or chew or go with girls who do, as they say? Or would you say the beautiful Christian life is better defined by someone who stands by you as a loyal friend, someone who can be counted upon not to judge you but to build you up and protect you and never give up on you, someone who would give you the shirt off his back or refuse to live in blessed comfort when others are suffering? Is the beautiful Christian life better seen by someone who can look at you and see you or look at you and see Jesus?

The World Cup matches began in South Africa this weekend. Football matches, the kind of football where players really use their feet, don’t you know?! Argentina is one of the favorites, and the best player in the world right now, Lionel Messi, is on their side. Messi is incredibly skilled, but what’s more interesting is that he is being coached by the Argentine manager who is the most famous Argentine player of all time, Diego Maradona. When older Argentine fans watch Messi play, they have a hard time seeing Messi without seeing Maradona. Watching Messi gives you the feeling that he is somehow channeling the older star, who led Argentina to the 1986 World Cup championship over West Germany. When they look at Messi, they can’t help seeing the grace and flair of Maradona.

And isn’t that the way you want to live your life? So that others see Jesus in you? Not so carefully that you are full of care, but so faithfully that you are full of faith, so gracefully that you are full of grace? This is just faith: faith alone that makes you just, and faith that is joined to Jesus in making the world more just.