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In this episode Pastor Harris will pick back up in Galatians, chapter 4:6-12 and discuss the process of maturing in God and many aspects surrounding that idea.  He points out how important it is to realize that simply asking the Lord Jesus into your heart does not automatically make you a fully matured Christian.  Furthermore, we should all try to avoid immaturing ourselves as a believer as well. 

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In this message Pastor Harris is going to tell us the Christmas story as presented by the Apostle Paul.  The amazing thing is that Paul tells the Christmas story and explains it with five easy words.  This is what Paul writes.  “When the fullness of time was come, God. sent. forth. his. Son. That is it. That is the Christmas story as told by the Apostle Paul.

Obviously his version is very short and it is also extremely powerful. The major point the Apostle was making is this.  Christmas is a total God thing.  Human beings never had anything to do with it and never will have anything to do with it. In fact Paul writes, “God sent forth his son”, in other words, it was our God who took the initiative, without our knowledge, without our approval, and without our cooperation. God orchestrated the Christmas events. He decided the timing, he chose the place and he dictated the circumstances.

In addition, he did not hold an election to see if the human race wanted him to appear in human flesh, he just did it on his own. The fact of the matter is this, if WE had orchestrated the Christmas story it would have been drastically changed.  For one thing we would have made certain that the son would have been born in Rome, in the capital city of the world and not some village in the backwater corner of the empire. 

For another thing, we would have insisted on his being born in a comfortable house and not some rustic cave in a barren hillside. And here is another thing we might have done, we might have selected someone like an emperor or an empress of the Roman empire to be his parents. We certainly would not have selected some pheasant girl and a carpenter to raise this kid.

However, when God sent forth his son, he did choose a cave outside the judean village known as Bethlehem. And God did choose two peasants to raise his only begotten son, in fact the woman he chose to raise his own son was virgin.  This provides the centerpiece for Pastor Harris’s message today.  I know everyone wants to get right into today’s teaching.

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In the previous episodes of the Breaking the Chains series on the epistles to the Galatians. Pastor Harris makes a rather revolutionary claim.  He suggested that the Abrahamic covenant, the great agreement described in Genesis 15, is really the New Testament covenant. In other words, he believed that the Abrahamic Covenant was an initiation of the new covenant.  This covenant was established on a dark starry night sometime around 1750 BC. But that covenant was not fully finalized until 30AD on a lonely hill outside of Jerusalem at a place called Golgotha. When a young man named Jesus of Nazarath whispered the words, “It is finished.” and everything that began with Abraham was fully accomplished.  

The problem had been this: from the initiation of God’s covenant with Abraham until Christ breathed his last breath, people had to look forward to a savior who was yet to come. However when Christ died, he became the ultimate sacrifice for sin and now we, that are under the new covenant, can look back to a completed work.

Pastor Harris knew that this concept would be shocking to some people but he felt he had based everything that he has taught us so far on solid scriptural evidence. He has shown us in God’s word that Christ was personally present when Abraham’s covenant was initiated in Genesis 15. He has shown us how the father and son interacted in the midst of five sacrificial animals. He has also shown us how a comatose Abraham could contribute nothing to this.

Galatians 3:17-25 proves the accuracy of what Pastor Harris has been sharing.  The apostle demonstrates to us how God and his son had initiated the Abrahamic covenant some 430 years prior to the giving of the law to Moses on Mt. Sinea. Granted the text of Galatians does not specifically say that God and his son established that covenant, but I would ask this… what covenant could it have been that God established 430 years prior to the exodus if it was not the Abrahamic covenant?

Here is our text, the Apostle Paul will state specifically that no other covenant, not even the Law of Moses replaced or superseded the covenant of Abraham.  This is where Pastor Harris will begin his teaching in this episode.

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You may recall the churches in Galatia were founded by the missionary activities of the Apostle Paul. But the believers in that area had turned away from the true gospel messages Paul had delivered to them.  In fact Paul said they had turned to another gospel. These congregations had allowed themselves to be seduced into believing that the Pauline Gospel of Jesus plus nothing was not adequate to save them.  So they decided to adopt the concept of Jesus plus circumcision, Jesus plus rules, and Jesus plus the law.

Of courses Paul was amazed by this, and we should be as well.  We should even be asking ourselves how this possibly could have happened, how could these Galatians be duped so easily. The apostle Paul explains the “How” of this in chapters one and two of Galatians. He tells us how certain Christians from Jerusalem had come to the region immediately on the departure of Paul and Barnabus. These men were Hebrew believers in Christ who still hung tenaciously to their Jewish roots.  Paul refers to them as Pharisee Christians.

Once in Galatia these Pharisee Christian had convinced these new believers that Gentiles like them could not receive the blessings of salvation unless they first became Jews. That was essential. After All they claimed the Bible is clear that the blessings of salvation were only promised to Abraham and his seed and knowone else.

Gentiles like these believers in Galatia could only inherit those promises by being incorporated into the family of Abraham.  The only way for this incorporation to accor, these Pharisees taught, was for them to be circumcised just like Abraham who was a gentile himself at the time of his circumcision. However that was not all that they had taught.  They had also taught that anyone who had totally appropriated the promises of God, had to rigidly obey the laws of God as given to Moses on Mt. Sinei. In other words, they had to at least obey God’s moral law, or the ten commandments.  And whether or not they appropriated the promises depended on their being circumcised and obeying God.

The Pharisee Christians were adamant, if the Galatians would first be circumcised, then live according to God’s moral law they would be saved.  However, if they broke God’s moral law their salvation would be forfeited. Without question the Apostle Paul was repulsed by these teachings and he was equally repulsed by the fact that the Galatian converts had so willingly fallen for it. So Paul sat down and dictated the epistle to the Galations in an attempt to straighten out the situation. Our text for today represents one of the apostles' most succinct arguments.

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In this series we have been examining what Pastor Harris calls the Pharisee Gospel. Over the past seven episodes we have taken a close look at the various arguments of a group of Pharisee Christians used to convince believers in Galatia that they should abandon the concept of grace and submit to Jewish law. These Pharisee Christians were so convincing that many of the Galatians believed and concluded that they had not been saved at all.

All this confusion began because these Galatians had bought into the Pharisee Christian argument that the only way for anyone to become saved was to become a Jew. Since the Galatians had not become Jews it appeared to them that even though they had believed upon the Lord Jesus Christ that they really had no relationship with God. The grace message had to be an illusion, after all they had been reminded again and again that Jesus himself had said that salvation is of the Jews. But that raised a huge question which was this, since they were not Jews, was there any way for them to be saved? Afterall, how on earth can a gentile become a Jew?  The Galatians had certainly asked themselves this. Isn't the term Jewish, an ethnic classification as well as a religious classification.  Well they knew the answer to this, of course it is.

Since being Jewish is a matter of genetic lineage, how can any gentile ever be saved? Obviously it would be impossible. But before Pastor Harris provides these answers, let us be reminded of one thing.  In the Bible, God’s chosen people, the Jews, are also known as Hebrews. And there is a subtle but important difference between the Jews and the Hebrews. 

The term Hebrews represents the entire lineage of the man known as Adam Bentera. While the term Jew represents one of the 12 tribes that descended from Adam Bentera.  That tribe is the Tribe of Judah. According to Word of God, the tribe of Judah was the tribe that finally inherited the promises that God had originally told Abraham.

So when we use the word Hebrew we are talking about the offspring of Adam.  When we use the word Jew we are talking about one portion of the offspring of Adam. With that in mind, Pastor Harris will demonstrate how the Pharisee Christians dealt with this issue with Gentiles being saved since they were not the offspring of Adam.  Then he will tell us how the apostle Paul understood how Gentiles become Jews.

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I hope everyone continues to enjoy the “Breaking the Chains” series.  This series sure continues to bring a very unique insight into the process of being born again and how the spirit continues to work in the believer from that point forward.  This week I was talking with a listener and we were discussing this series.  As we briefly discussed our thoughts and take aways thus far we both came to a similar thought.  What this series so far has helped reveal to us is how we as humans have difficulty simply receiving. That is, receiving from God the gifts he bestows on us… plus nothing else.  We don't need to meet a requirement, or follow specific guidelines to keep this gift.  The funny thing to me is that it is such a simplistic concept, but yet so difficult to comprehend.  In this episode, Pastor Harris will continue to help us understand this concept with an in depth review of his most quoted bible verse.

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In the last message of the Breaking the Chains series, Pastor Harris examined the thorny issue of the curse of the law in the so-called “Jerusalem incident”.  This incident involved a confrontation between the Apostle Paul and the leaders of the church in Jerusalem. What made this confrontation tricky was that some of the leaders in the church were some of the original 12 disciples of Jesus. Also present in the leadership were certain Christians from a Pharisee sect who had become very vocal in the church over the years.  They argued continually that a person must become a Jew to be part of the masonic community. In other words they had to be circumcised and submit to a proselyte baptism.

The debate was heated, but in the end James the brother of Jesus and the 12 disciples agreed to accept the position in which the apostle Paul had argued on his second trip to Jerusalem. They decided once and for all, gentiles would be allowed to become Christians without becoming Jews. In other words, gentiles would not be required to be circumcised, or to obey ceremonial laws of Judaism. This was the agreement.

When the conference concluded they all returned to the city of Antioch in Syria. Having now established the official position of the 12 apostles in Jerusalem, Paul went to work building a great church in a beautiful gentile city.  The municipality represented one of the most progressive cities in the Roman empire. It was located in the northwest most boundary of the Roman province of Syria.

The Apostle Paul’s aggressive work in this location soon had this church booming.  People were coming to Christ by the hundreds.  However, while the church in Antioch was expanding, the church in Jerusalem had entered a definite decline, the church was going downhill and fast.

In this message Pastor Harris will fill us in as to why one church thrived and one church died.

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In the last episode we saw that the Apostle Paul had introduced the believers in Galatia to the concept of freedom in Christ. Paul knew once he had introduced this idea the legalists would show up in force, and they did!  Legalists came to Galatia to challenge this concept, and when Paul journeyed to Jerusalem they showed up again.

Anytime freedom in Christ is championed, whether it be now or then, legalists will always voice an abjection. 

However, the Apostle Paul was ready for the legalists. When Paul left Antioch for Jerusalem he brought with them what Pastor Harris calls a secret weapon. And he brought the secret weapon to the private meeting with the Jerusalem church. The apostle would need this secret weapon because the word of the meeting had leaked out to the Pharisee Christians in Jerusalem and they immediately crashed the meeting.

The secret weapon that Paul had brought was actually a young believer named Titus, and this man Titus had never been circumcised. In other words he was a full blown gentile, meaning that his body bore no external sign of righteous standing with God.  This young man was special.  He enjoyed such a deep intimate relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ that everyone at this meeting could see Christ in him. Especially when he was compared to those narrow minded legalists who suddenly burst into the meeting room.

Oddly enough, there is no record that Titus ever spoke a word in that meeting.  Apparently he just sat there dead to himself and alive in Christ and preached a silent sermon of Grace.

Those in the room could see that this Christian faith is based on a relationship with the living Christ, not rules, it always had, and it always will, and Titus was living evidence of that relationship.  And he did this without him ever having obeyed a single rule, Jesus had come to dwell in his heart and every apostle there could see it. He was living proof that salvation is based upon faith, and faith alone. In fact salvation has always involved Jesus plus nothing, and is not Jesus plus the law.

It had better not ever be Jesus plus the law because none of us can keep that law.  We have fallen to a sinful nature and that nature will not allow us to keep that law.  The only human being that had ever been able to keep that law was Jesus Christ and he kept it perfectly.

In this message Pastor Harris will examine the concept of the law and will examine why we cannot keep it and why struggling to keep the law will never save us.

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In this episode we will learn that the letter to Galatians is focused on two major struggles for the earliest church and how the outcome of those struggles would determine the future direction of the body of Christ on earth. These two struggles were as follows. Salvation by Grace vs Salvation by Works, and Spirituality by Grace vs Spirituality by Works. We should be aware that one major difference exists between these two concepts. Salvation and Spirituality.

In this message Pastor Harris will focus on the former concept of salvation. This issue of Salvation came to a head in the earliest church in what Pastor Harris calls “The Jerusalem Incident”.

In the text for today, Galatians 2:1-10 the Apostle Paul describes a second visit he made to the church in Jerusalem. As you may recall, Paul's first visit to Jerusalem was a rather traumatic affair. On that occasion the Apostle Paul was not allowed to address the Jerusalem church at all. He was limited to having a series of discussions with Simon Peter and James the Just, the brother of Jesus.

On this first visit, the leadership would not allow him to address the church.  So, he decided to go out and preach on the streets of Jerusalem and the street preaching stirred up the temple elite. Within days the temple authorities began to threaten reprisals against the fledgling Christian community. So the leaders of the church quickly went to Paul and urged him to leave Jerusalem. They asked him to return to his hometown of Tarshis.

Being a man under the authority he did as he was told and he remained in Tarshish for the next 11 years. But now in Galatians 2:1-10 Paul personally describes his return to the scene  of his banishment. He returns to Jerusalem but this time things would be different as Pastor Harris will demonstrate today.

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In the past two episodes we have seen how certain Pharisee Christians have visited the church in Galatia. When they arrived they told the Galatians that the message they preach is just another Gospel of the same kind of what Paul preached. However, in the epistle to the Galatians that Paul writes, he says, no no no this is not the gospel I preach.  This is another gospel the opposite of what I preach.

Paul goes on to tell the churches that the gospel these Pharisee Christians were preaching was really a perversion of the true Gospel.  In fact it was damnable in its content and doctrine. The verb translated into English as pervert in Galatian 1:7b is the Greek word Medestresti means to mix an alien solution with a pure base and in doing so it changes the entire chemical makeup of the base. In other words, what the Pharisee Christians mixed into the pure Gospel base had changed the base into something totally different.

The Pharisee Christians had taken the pure Gospel which is Jesus plus nothing, and they had added into it the works of the law.  Thus the base was altered to become Jesus plus the law, or Jesus plus rules. The problem is this, when anything is added to the pure gospel of Jesus plus nothing, it will create a gospel of another kind, and this creates something we call religion. That is how religion is born as a perversion of the true gospel message. 

These Pharisee Christians had launched a number of accusations against Paul in Galatia.  One of those accusations is that the theological stance of the apostle Paul had come from God knows where, while they (the Pharisees) had received their doctrine from the 12 apostles in Jerusalem.

In this message we will hear the apostles answer to this issue.  Paul explains to the Galatians where he received the Gospel and why the Gospel represents the real thing.

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