Responding to a Person

Christian freedom is freedom of conscience, freedom from a legal system that couldn't be kept. It is freedom from the depressing awareness that we can't measure up to God. Christians do measure up in Christ. We have been "accepted in the Beloved" (Eph. 1:6).
The Galatians Christians had been adopted as sons of God, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and freed from external ceremonial law. They were free in the Spirit to act out their own maturity and liberty from within. That was Paul's theme. Christianity is not slavery to a religious system; it is absolute freedom. Through Jesus Christ we have been delivered from the tiring, relentless performance of religious ritual. The Old Covenant law was external. It was given to demonstrate what true holiness is, and to show men that they couldn't make it. The ceremonial practices were symbolic lessons that taught that DEATH was the punishment for sin. They pictured the final sacrifice of Christ. Once the reality came, there was no longer any need for the symbols.
Christian liberty is being free from having to fulfill the legal code to please God, and free from the frustration of not being able to keep an external set of rules. In a positive sense, it is the freedom to function by the internal working of the spirit, ours and the Holy Spirit. We are free to do what is right, and what is good, and what sustains and builds up life. Because Christian liberty begins with faith in Jesus Christ, Paul tells the Galatians not to put their ongoing day by day faith in circumcision or any other type of ceremonialism. According to Galatians 4:10, they had regressed from their freedom to observing "days, and months, and times, and years." For that reason Paul said, "I am afraid [for] you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor in vain" (4:11). They were trying to accept Jewish rituals that no longer had any value.
We are not reacting to a code. We are responding to a Person.

John 3:16 as: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that everyone who has faith in him may not perish but have eternal life."
If the call to faith is to be liberating, faith must be understood as trust rather than as belief. To claim that we are saved (or are members of the church) by having the right set of beliefs about God and Christ is merely to substitute a new form of law for the ancient codes.