Two Journeys

Pastor Andy Davis preaches on Galatians 3:15-22 and explains why the promises of God are superior to the Law of Moses.

So, we come this morning to Galatians 3:15-22. We come to what I'm going to call a 'black diamond' passage. So what do I mean by that? Well, you skiers will know what that means, alright? I learned to ski in the center of Massachusetts on a place called Ward Hill in Shrewsbury, it's 220 feet high. That's where I learned how to ski. I learned how to turn, and stop, and start, and all that kind of thing. And a couple years later, I went up to Sugarloaf, Maine, which has the second highest vertical drop east of the Mississippi, 3,000 foot vertical drop. And being a young man, and being ambitious, and thinking nothing could ever harm me, nothing could ever hurt me, I thought, "Never been injured before, why would I be injured now?" I went right to the summit, I'll never forget that. And at the summit, there are all these trails going off, and they were black diamond trails, expert trails. I was like, "No problem. Alright."

Vast overestimation of my skiing ability. And so, I chose one trail called Head Wall. It didn't mean much to me at the time. And as I skied it, I started it, I said, "Man, this is easy," forgetting I had 3,000 feet to get down, and I wasn't getting down many of those feet yet. And I came around the bend, and there were a bunch of skiers with their equipment off, and they were stretching out, and they were talking to one another about their strategies, I guess, on how to ski the cliff that was in front of them.

What was I doing there? I have no idea. I'm not even sure this is a good illustration, but we'll finish it. I had two choices, at that point. I could take off my equipment, and climb back up to the summit, and in shame, defeat, ride the chair back down to the intermediate level...Or I could just go, and being 19 or 20 years old, I just went. And I basically fell down the mountain. I did not ski it! I was being yelled at by others, who couldn't care less what happened to me, but they were concerned about the snow and what I was doing to the snow…And somehow, I got to the bottom. I spent rest of the day in wise defeat, on the bottom half of the mountain, skiing green circle trails. Those are the intermediate trails.

So, what do we do when we come to a complex text in Scripture? What do we do? Do we walk back up to the top of the mountain, take the chair lift down? Or do we, (that's why I said it's not a good illustration), fall down and have no idea what just happened?

Can we just set the illustration aside, and then just say, "There are complicated passages of Scripture?" And this is one of them, this is a black diamond passage. The difficulty does not lie in, generally, big picture, what Paul is saying. Generally, what big picture, Paul is saying, "We are saved from our sins by grace alone, through faith in Christ alone. We are saved on the basis of a promise from God, not on the basis of the law from God. We are saved by grace through faith and the promise of Christ." That's what he says. We get that. That's simple, it's straightforward, but Paul says more than that. And that's the issue here, if we're going to go beyond the milk down to the meat, the meat is in the details of what Paul says, and how he argues, and trying to follow in detail, and honor God by speaking this Scripture to us, to try to wrestle with it. That's the challenge. This is a hard passage.

For example, how do we understand Paul's seed versus seeds argument here? I'm going to explain why that's actually a really hard... It's hard to see how that's compelling at all, frankly. But if you look even further, which Paul intends to do, it's really very glorious. But it's not obvious, right away, how a collective noun like seed,' we should understand it in the singular, not the plural. That's a challenge. Or secondly, how do we understand the 430-year chronology? Actually, scholars tell us, "It was 645 years from Abraham until the giving of the law," so what's with the 430? What is he saying there? Did Paul make a mistake? Of course not. But how do we understand that?

A third, what in the world does Verse 20 mean? You heard it read, Kyle read it, but maybe your minds were flying already, right across it, we don't need to worry about that, but I kinda do. So, Verse 20, it says, "A mediator, however, does not represent just one party, but God is one." And then he goes onto the next verse. What in the world does that mean? How does it add anything to Paul's argument? FF Bruce, a scholar, says, "There are over 300 different interpretations of that verse," which means no one knows what it means. Those are three different... This is a very challenging passage, but what I want to do here, just before we even get into it, is to exhort you to glorify God by thinking deeply about Scripture.

Don't be lazy when you come to the Bible. I mean that, seven days a week, just when you have your quiet times as you're reading. Don't shrink back from difficult questions. There is milk in the Word of God, it's true. And it's sweet, and it's nourishing, but there's also meat, and it's strengthening, and it's invigorating, and we need to chew on it, and we need to try to understand it. Why should we make the effort? Why take the journey we're about to take? Why not just say, "God saves by grace and that's all you need to know?" Well, because I think we need to honor the nature of Scripture. Second Timothy 3:16-17, "All Scripture's God-breathed, and it's useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." So we want to embrace that, we want to go into it, we want to listen carefully and seriously to all Scripture, to understand, "What is God saying to me here? How can I be taught? How can I be rebuked? How can I be corrected? How can I be trained in righteousness?"

Oh, God, make me thoroughly equipped for every good work. I want to honor you, oh, Lord. You gave us this Scripture, help me to understand it. And so, we should listen to all Scripture like children listening to a loving Father who's speaking words to us. He's sitting us down and he's speaking earnestly to us. And we need to listen to what he says. So I commend you, Proverbs 2:1-6, listen to those words, "My son, if you accept my words, and if you store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom, and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight, and if you cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver, and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord, and you will find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom, and from His mouth come knowledge and understanding." I want you to pant after truth. I want you to search for it as for hidden silver.

So, this morning, shifting the image, we're going to go into the silver mine of God's truth in Galatians 3:15-22. We're going to put on our helmets with the headlamps on, and we're going to get our picks, and our shovels, and we're going to bring some five-hour Energy drinks, I guess, or some energy bars and we're going... We're not going to be here for five hours. Don't worry about that... But we're going to bring towels to wipe the sweat off our face. We're going to work at Scripture. We're going to try to understand it. And I don't know that all of you will get all of what you can out of this text, but you'll get more than you had when you walked in here, and whatever you get, praise God for it. But let's learn to work. Let's honor God, so that we can know him, and love him, and serve him better, and not shrink back from challenging mental strain on Scripture.

So let's dig in and let's begin by looking, as I've already said, at what I could consider the milk aspect here, Paul's overall argument. This is something anybody can get, and that is Paul is asserting, as he has been doing in Galatians, "We sinners are saved by grace alone, through faith in Christ alone, based on the promise of salvation through faith in Christ alone. That's how we sinners are made right with God." Now, the context of Galatians is that Paul had planted churches in Asia Minor in Galatia, many churches there. And he and Barnabas appointed elders in every church with prayer, and fasting, and then left. Because he was a circuit-riding, kind of trailblazing, church planting apostle, and he wasn't going to stay there. He entrusted those churches to the elders.

But sometime after that, some Jewish so-called believers in Christ came along. They're called by scholars 'the Judaizers.' They're not called that in the Bible, but they're the Judaizers, and they were trying to mix together the achievement of Christ on the cross with the law of Moses. Trying to put it together in a toxic brew of salvation, recipe in which faith in Christ alone is not enough. You must add to it, obedience to the law, and it begins with circumcision, and then it follows along the tracks of the Jewish Law, the dietary regulations, and all of those things. And that if you hold these two things together, you'll be saved from your sins. So, Paul writes Galatians, because he is deeply alarmed at what's happening in these churches he planted. And he says, "That is no Gospel at all. And let anyone who preaches anything other than the Gospel we commended to you, let him be eternally condemned." Very serious about that.

And so, he's very plain in Galatians 2:16, as to what saves us. What is our salvation? And he says it, "We know that a person is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So, we too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ, and not by observing the law, because by observing the law, no one will be justified." That's very plain. So that's Galatians 2:16. He says it very, very clearly, "We are justified, we are made right with God. We sinners, made right with God, simply by faith, not by obeying the law."

Now, in Chapter Three, he's trying to prove that to them and he begins in verses 1-5 by citing their own example. What happened with them? "Do you remember how it was when I came to Galatia and preached? Do you remember how you received the Spirit, how I preached the Gospel, you heard, you believed, and the Spirit descended, and you received the gift of the Holy Spirit? Do you remember how that was?" Look at verses 2-3 in Galatians 3, "I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the Law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish, having begun by the Spirit, are you now perfected by the flesh?"  No.

So from their experience, what they experienced in the receiving of the Spirit, he then goes even deeper to Old Testament Scriptures, to prove that saints in the Old Testament have always been justified by faith, and not by the Law. He goes right to the first Jew, the father of the Jewish nation, Abraham. And in verse 6, he cites Genesis 15:6 "Consider Abraham, he believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness." That is how we are declared righteous by the imputation of Christ's righteousness. We believe in Jesus and we are declared by the judge of all the Earth to be righteous. Praise God for that. That's the Gospel and that's what Abraham experienced too. And Abraham is not just an example of faith, but he's actually the paradigm example of how sinners are made right with God, but he is also the channel by which the seed, the Savior, comes into the world. So we'll talk about that in a minute, but he is the paradigm example.

So we all get saved the same way Abraham did, and we also get saved through Abraham, because of Jesus. And so, in verse 8, it says, "All nations will be blessed through you," Quoting Genesis 12:3. And so he is how all nations get saved. We all get saved the same way and through him. Paul also shows the two different ways to live. You can live by law or you can live by grace. Trusting in your own fleshly exertions in the law or by faith in the promise. So in verses 10-12, he says, "All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written, ' Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law," Deuteronomy 27:26. So very plainly, if you're trying to be justified by law, you're under a curse already. You're just under a curse, why? Because you have to do all the law, all the time, or you're cursed. And then he goes beyond, in verse 11, "Clearly, no one is justified before God by the law, because the righteous will live by faith," Habakkuk 2:4.

The context of Habakkuk 2 is of God's judgment on sinners. If you want to survive that judgment on sinners, you must live by faith. And then verse 12, "The law is not based on faith," it's an entirely different principle. "On the contrary, the man who does these things will live by them," Leviticus 18:5. So these are just two different ways to approach salvation, by faith or by law. That's what he's getting at, and then he resolves all of this so beautifully, as we saw last time in verses 13-14, "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. As it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree he redeemed us, in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith, we might receive the promise of the Spirit." Oh, that's so sweet and beautiful. So that brings us up to speed. That brings us right to Verse 15, what's happening now. Well, the Judaizers, Paul senses, very much, that he's in a debate with these enemies of the Gospel, these Judaizers. And he's anticipating what they're going to say back. And he does this incredibly, he does this a lot in Romans, "Now, one of you will say to me, such and such." He's always thinking what someone will say, "What's going to be the reaction?"

That's just good teaching. That's good preaching. So Paul is thinking about his enemies in the debate, the Judaizers. And he's saying, "Look, they're going to say, ' Look, alright, fine, we can see too, that Abraham was justified by faith apart from law, because there wasn't a law yet. We concede that to you, okay, but God gave the law through Moses. What are you going to do with that? God did that. So clearly, God intended the law to be part of how it is that sinners are made righteous with him. The law has to be part of the salvation package. So we concede what you're saying about Abraham, but it's not relevant to us, except that we are going to combine Abraham by faith in the promise, and then Moses, in the law, and that's what we [The Judiazers] are saying.'" So Paul is anticipating this. He's thinking, "This is what the Judaizers will say."

And so Paul is going to assert that salvation based on a promise is superior to salvation based on the law. And that's what we're looking at in verses 15-18, superior. Why is it superior? I'll tell you quickly why, because God gets the glory, not us, and because we get the security, and the guarantee, and we actually get saved. That's why it's superior. If salvation had been by the law, zero people would have been saved, and that's why it's superior. But let's look at what he says in verses 15-18. And he begins by taking an example from everyday life, and he's going to zero in on this idea of a covenant set up based on the promise. Abraham was the basis of the covenant, was a promise, or really, you could say, an array of promises made to Abraham. It's based on a promise. Look at verse 16, "The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed." And again, verse 18, "If the inheritance depends on the law, then it no longer depends on a promise, but God in His grace, gave it to Abraham through a promise." So there, it's established. The covenant with Abraham was set up on the basis of a promise. Now, that's already been established in verse 6, as we already said, "Consider Abraham, he believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness." What did he believe?  He believed the promise spoken by God.

Now, the background, of course, are an array of promises spoken by God. You remember how God called Abraham (at that time named Abram), out of Ur of the Chaldees? He said "Leave your country and your people, go to a land I'll show you." And then he says this, listen to all these promises, it's just a river of promises, "I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you. I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing, and I will bless those who bless you. And whoever curses you, I will curse, and all peoples on Earth will be blessed through you." Promise after promise, a river of good things that God's promising to do for Abram. And then, in Genesis 15:1, He says, "Do not fear, Abram, I am your shield and I am your very great reward." He promises him, himself, "I am your reward." And then he goes beyond that, to give him some details of promise. He says, "Come out and look at the starry night sky. Come out of your tent, and look up, and look at all those stars, and count them if you can." Then he speaks this incredible promise, "So shall your offspring be. You're going to have descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky." Abram believed the Lord and it was credited him as righteousness.

And then he goes beyond that, in Genesis 15:7, he says, "I'm going to give to you and to your offspring, this land forever." And so, that those are promises. The promise came first, not the law. Sequencing is going to be huge. And also, we know that the promise was based on a unilateral action by God, it's just something God is doing. He said, "I'm going to do this for you." He said, "I'm going to pour out blessing on you, Abraham." And so I like how one pastor put it, or one scholar, he said, "The promises, are of God, saying, 'I will, I will, I will,' The law is God saying, ' Thou shalt, thou shalt, thou shalt,' or, ' Thou shalt not.'" You see the difference? It's like night and day. And so God, unilaterally, is promising to bless Abraham and to give him all of these good things, just out of his grace. Law came later, circumcision came later, all of that. Now, this is a covenant. Now, the argument he's making in Verse 15, is a covenant, once ratified, cannot be changed. So how is this a covenant? Well, you remember in Genesis 15, we've been over it before, I consider Genesis 15 one of the great significant chapters in all the Bible, one of the key moments in redemptive history.

Abram, at that point, Abram asks God, "How do I know that I'm going to get all this? How can I know?" So it's an assurance question, "I need some assurance." So God has him sacrifice some animals and make a path, a bloody path with pieces from the sacrificed animals left and right, okay? And then, Abraham waits... he's there for a while, and then a deep sleep, a kind of a eerie thing comes over him, and then God appears in the form of a fire pot. This fire pot symbolizes the presence of God. Now, in a covenant cutting ceremony, and by the way, that's the verb used in Hebrew, you 'cut' a covenant. What do you cut? Well, I think you cut these animals. You cut them up and you make a path. And then, the two of you, you two that are making a covenant, you walk through the bloody path of those pieces. And you are saying to your covenant partner, "So may this happen to me, if I don't keep this covenant," that's what you're saying. But what's so fascinating about Genesis 15, is that God, in the symbolic form of the fire pot, moves through the pieces alone. Two things he's saying by that, first, "This is a unilateral covenant I am making. I'm making it with myself, on your behalf, but it's my covenant."

And this is awesome, "May I cease to exist, if I don't keep this covenant." I mean I don't know what more security you could ever have than that. "I will do this. I'm swearing to you that I will do this." Now, listen, God is not going to cease to exist. He's going to keep his covenant promise. Well, that's the covenant that was ratified, it was cut. What Paul's saying is, "You can't change it later." You can't change it. Look at verse 15, "Let me take an example from everyday life, just as no one can set aside or add to a human covenant that's been duly established, so it is in this case, you can't add to it, you can't take from it." So this is an everyday life example. Alright, someone makes a last will and testament, and they get it ratified, and legally, it's a legal document. It's there, it's a will.  Imagine, after a person's death, they have the time of the reading of the will, and the executor of the will is a member of the family, and he's crossed out everyone else's name, and wrote his name on every line. Would you be okay with that? Are you alright with that? I'm thinking that's why probate court exists, when that kind of thing happens. And that's going to get thrown out. It got changed after the fact, and this executor wrote his own name in, so he gets the house, and he gets the cars, and he gets the money, or whatever there is.

So what Paul's saying is, "We know you can't change a last will and testament later, you can't add to it or take away from it, it's a sealed document, it's done. So it is in this case, only infinitely more significant. You can't add something. So the law that came later doesn't change the covenant of promise. It doesn't change it." Alright, well, let me take another example from everyday life. What would you think of a father who says to his kids, "I'm going to take you, this upcoming week and next week," he says on Monday, "I'm going to take you guys, we're going to go to the beach, no matter what. You haven't been to the beach in a year. We are going together to the beach, so get excited, because we're going to the beach." And then, on Wednesday, he says, "By the way, we're only going to the beach, if you keep these 10 rules right here, okay? You got to do this, you got to do that, you got do that." I think that's unjust. Now, some of you parents may be being convicted right now, so don't do that. When you make an unconditional promise, keep it unconditionally. You'll be damaging your kid's ability to understand the Gospel. How weighty is that? So keep your promises.

Actually, this week, I asked three of my kids, I said basically, "Do I owe you anything? Have I made any promises to you I haven't kept?" I wanted to know and none of them could come up with anything, so that's good. But just whatever you promise, keep. Do you not see how the law coming later would nullify the promise? You say, "No, it's still there. I'm still promising to take you to the beach, but you have to keep these... " Well, the thing is, you don't need the promise, at that point, you see. Then it's just a simple condition of blessings and curses, "Keep the law. This is the blessing you get." It's just straight law, at that point. The promise has been invalidated, it's gone. And that's what happened with the Judaizers.

Do you now see it? For them, trying to combine promise with law, it just doesn't work. Basically, promise goes away and all you have, at that point, is law. So we have the immutability of the promise of God and that's awesome. God has promised us heaven, Amen. He has made a promise, "I will receive you. You will sit at the table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And nothing can stop that, so just be happy, rejoice, sorrowful maybe, but always rejoicing." Why? Because of this, because God's made us a promise in Christ and he will keep that promise. Secondly, he says the covenant with Abraham was made ultimately with Christ. Ultimately, God made his covenant with Christ. When he says, "Seed," God was thinking about Jesus. And this is pretty difficult here, this is rough sledding, but let's try it. Verse 16, "The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The Scriptures do not say "And to seeds," meaning many people, but, "And to your seed," meaning one person, who is Christ." So simply put, let me just tell you what I'm going to say about this. All of God's promises through Abraham or whatever promises there are to the people of God, are in Christ, all of them. They are, "Yes," and, "Amen," in Jesus. We get everything through Christ. That's the simple straightforward teaching. But how does he prove it? Now, that's where we go black diamond, suddenly. It's difficult to follow his logic here. How he's handling the Scripture. He's saying, fundamentally, "The salvation promise was made in light of the work of Christ on the cross and the empty tomb." The problem comes with something known as a collective noun. Okay, a collective noun. A collective noun is a noun that could be either singular or plural. 'Seed' or offspring is such a noun, sometimes it can be plural, sometimes it can be single, and then we have to try find out from context which it is.

Another good example would be hair. Hair is a collective noun. Suppose I said to you, "I want you to cut off your hair and give it to me." And for some reason, you decided to do that, and you came back bald as a bowling ball, and you handed me all your hair in a bag. And I said, "No, no, no, I didn't say 'hairs,' meaning many. I said 'hair,' meaning one." Wouldn't you feel a little... I mean, that's strange now, that wasn't clear. And that's how this whole argument is based, on that kind of logic. And it's the same in the Hebrew, as it is in the Greek, as it in the English, it's a collective noun. So does Paul have the right to do this? Sometimes you get the feeling with apostles, that they're like ambulance drivers on the rules of the road, and they can just run red lights, and they're fine, because they got the flashing light. Is that what's going on here? Can he do whatever he wants with the Scripture? No, it isn't. What he's doing, is he's just looking deeper than we do. He's looking beyond, to what's actually happening as God's making a promise to Abraham.

He understands more about the inter-Trinitarian relationship and what God's actually doing when he makes promises to us. He's going deeper. So first and foremost, the word seed' can, often does, mean something plural. As it says in Genesis 22:17, God says to Abraham, "I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring, or seed, multiply it as the stars of Heaven, and as the sand on the sea shore." That's definitely plural, no doubt about it. If I were a Judiazer, I'd go right to that verse and say, "Wait a minute, it's plural there, no doubt about it." But seed' can mean singular. Like in Genesis 4:25, the word 'seed' (same Hebrew word), just refers to Seth and to Seth alone. In Genesis 21:13, the word 'seed' can refer to Ishmael and to Ishmael alone. It does refer to Ishmael, so it could be singular. So what is Paul saying here? Well, all of God's promises focus on one of Abraham's descendants, not on them all. God is in the habit of taking Abraham's descendants, and choosing one out, and saying, "This one, not that one." And he does that with Isaac and Ishmael, you remember that? He had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. And he makes it very plain, that though both of them are biologically sons of Abraham, when he says, "Seed," he's meaning Isaac, not Ishmael.

He makes it very plain. And he says in Genesis 21:12, "Through Isaac, shall your offspring be named or reckoned." It's a decision God makes, it's election, he's choosing Isaac out, not Ishmael. After Sarah died, Abraham married another woman, Keturah. She had... Abraham had by her, multiple sons: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, Shuah, all these sons. God's saying, "They're all sons of Abraham, but it's through Isaac that the seed of Abraham is reckoned." He's choosing the one right. So he says, a verse later, in Genesis 25:3, "Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac." So that's a symbol of one chosen out of the many. There's just this one seed of Abraham, He's focusing on. Later, in Galatians, we'll see in Galatians Four, he had two sons: The sons of the slave woman, the sons of the free woman. So that's exactly how he's thinking here. God chooses one of Abraham's seed and works through that one, that one, not all the others. So God thinks singular, not plural in these salvation promises. It's the same thing that we see earlier in Genesis 3:15. You remember how Adam and Eve fell at the garden of Eden, and how then, the judgment comes, and then God speaks his Word of judgment to the serpent who represents Satan? And he says in Genesis 3:15, "I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed, " or offspring.

Again, collective, but he goes then, singular, "He will strike your head and you will bruise his heel." One seed, now, the woman, she... Adam said, "She would become the mother of all living." So all of us come from the woman, from Eve, but God had one seed in mind, and that seed was who? It was definitely Jesus. Jesus was the serpent crusher and he paid for it with his life, but he crushed the serpent, Amen? And that was that one seed, and so Paul isn't wrong here, he's just saying, When God is thinking seed,' he's not thinking seeds,' meaning many. He's thinking one, and it isn't Isaac, and it isn't Jacob. It's Jesus, ultimately. See, Isaac and Jacob, they're just sinners. They're symbolic. The physical lineage goes through them, that's important, but salvation comes through Jesus. Jesus is the seed. We are a Christ-centered people, Amen? Everything comes to us through Jesus. Just stop and worship Jesus right now. Just, in your hearts, say, "Thank you, Jesus, for all the inheritance you're giving me. Everything I have comes through you. You are the owner of the world." In Revelation 5, he gets the title deed with the Seven Seals of the world, and it's given to Jesus, and he can give it to anyone he wants to. He is the seed. "In Christ," 2 Corinthians 1:20, "All the promises that God have made are, 'Yes,' and, 'Amen.' "

And so, in Ephesians 1:3-4 it says, "Praise be to the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the Heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ." Do you hear that? "For He chose us in Him, before the creation of the world, to be holy and blameless in His sight." So we are chosen, we are elected, we are saved in Jesus. He is the seed. The promise comes through Jesus Christ. Next, he argues chronology, he says, "Now, which comes first, the promise or the law?" Clearly, promise first, then a law. And the law, verse 17, "Introduced 430 years later, does not set aside the covenant previously established by God, and thus, do away with the promise." It's the sequencing, this then that. If you have to be justified by law, then where was the law when Abraham was justified? The law came 430 years later, a long, long time later. And it doesn't nullify the earlier promise. It cannot. It cannot set it aside. Now, he's going to make the same argument, specifically on circumcision, in Romans 4.

By the way, the best commentary I have ever read on Galatians is the Book of Romans. Amen? Amen. That's the best commentary. Somebody asked, "What's the best commentary on Galatians?" – Romans. It just is. It's almost like to some degree, some of these themes are pencil sketches in Galatians and they're full oil portraits in Romans. He just goes into great detail. And so he does the same thing on sequencing with circumcision, Abraham, it was spoken. Abraham believed God, it was credited him as righteousness. In what condition was he when he was declared righteous? Was he circumcised or uncircumcised? Well, he was uncircumcised. He was like a Gentile. And circumcision came later, and it doesn't nullify the promise already made to him. It's just for a different reason. Okay? Centuries later, now, what's with this 430 years? Scholars tell us that, Jacob entered Egypt 215 years after this promise had been made. And then, the Exodus happened another 430 years after that." So that means the law was given 645 years after the promise was initially spoken to Abraham. Did Paul make a mistake with the whole 430? No. What he's saying is, that this promise was repeated from father to son, from Abraham to Isaac, and it's stated in Genesis 26, the same promise made to Isaac. And then, again, it's stated to Jacob. That's the last statement of the promise you have in the Book of Genesis. Then, 430 years later, the law comes.

So we're following promise. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, then a gap of 430 years, then comes the law. God had already ratified that covenant and does not nullify it at all. So in verse 18, The inheritance is either based on promise or a law. It can't be both. Do you see they're mutually exclusive on this? It's either going to be, unilaterally, "God will save us," or, "You have to earn it yourself, you have to save yourself." You can't mix them. It's either/or. And so verse 18, "If the inheritance depends on the law, then it no longer depends on the promise." Do you see that? It's either/or. It's either law or promise, it can't be both. So so much for the Judaizers, who were trying to combine them, you can't. It's law or promise. But God in his grace, gave it to a promise. So basically, what Paul's saying, he's saying, "Judaizers, God is against you. God intends to grace us with salvation." Amen? Just give it to us freely.

And by the way, isn't that the essence of an inheritance? Who could ever say, "I deserve to be in your will?" I mean try that sometime with a wealthy relative, alright? "I deserve to be in your will," try that. Look, it just doesn't work that way. Wills... Last will and test... That's always grace, it's a gift. And so God graces us, in verse 18, with salvation. God graces us with an inheritance, "I am your inheritance." And God himself is the inheritance. He's what we get. We get heaven with God. We get to look at the Glory of God. We get to be with God. How can we ever say, "I deserve that. Give it to me. As a matter of law, you owe it to me?" No, it's always going to be by grace. And so, summary, God promised to Abraham, and to his seed, Jesus Christ, an eternal Kingdom with himself as the central blessing, and through faith in the promise of Christ, we become heirs with Abraham. The covenant of salvation depends totally on God, because it is based on a promise. The law could not be added to this ratified covenant. The inheritance does not come from law.

Then why was the law given? Isn't that what they're going to say? It's like the next thing. Alright "Well, if it's not for salvation, then what was it given for? Why was the law given at all?" Look at verses 19-22, "What then, was the purpose of the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the seed to whom the promise referred had come. The law was put into effect through angels by a mediator." Scratch your head on that one. I didn't even list that as part of the black diamond list. "A mediator, however, does not represent just one party, but God is one. [Verse 21] Is the law, therefore, opposed to the promises of God? Absolutely not, for if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law, but the Scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe."

Alright, so the question's asked here, "Why then, was the law given, if not for salvation?" Verse 19 says it directly, "What then, was the purpose of the law?" God descended in fire, in Genesis 15, and made a covenant with Abraham. He came down in fire, in the fire pot. But then later, he came down in fire to the top of Mount Sinai. I don't understand that. God and fire makes a promise covenant. God descends in fire and gives the law, what is he doing then? It is God, right, that gave the law? How do we understand his actions? What is he doing in giving us the law? What is the point of it? The Ten Commandments, we're told in Exodus 32, were the engraving of God's own finger. It's not like God didn't know that this was happening. Moses didn't write this. God wrote the Ten Commandments directly. What was God doing in all that? What was the purpose? Well, the answer Paul gives right here in this verse is, "The law was added because of transgressions, until the seed, the promised seed should come."

What does that mean? Well, first, I need to tell you, this is not a complete answer to the purpose of the law. The law actually has multiple purposes in our lives. But we're going to the center of the issue of salvation, on the issue of sinners being made right with God. What is the purpose there? The purpose was, "It was given because of transgressions." Now, that phrase is not incredibly clear. So I think when you're reading a difficult passage and you're trying to understand, "What does this mean, the law was given because of transgressions." Well, what I like to do, is go to a good commentary. I think that's good, don't you agree? Have you guys heard of any good commentaries on the Book of Galatians?  Have you heard any? I mean is there one that we can buy? Actually, they're really inexpensive. You can get a whole bunch of commentaries, a whole commentary set for about six or seven bucks. Frankly, most churches will give them to you. As a matter of fact, I'll tell you, on behalf of the elders, if you don't have a Bible, lean forward and there's one, take it home, we'll replace it. The best commentary on Galatians is Romans. Alright?

So what does it say in Romans? Well, this is what's going on here. The purpose of the law was to increase the transgression of Adam. That's a head scratcher. You're like, "Wait a minute, I thought God was against sin?" Well, God's more against sin than you can possibly imagine. He hates it with a passion. But the law was not given to reduce the number of sins. It was actually to draw it out and multiply it. Alright, what do I mean by that? Well, in Romans chapter 5, we have the Doctrine of original sin. Adam sinned at the garden and we all sinned in him. Positionally, we are born as human beings, sinners. And that's why infants die, because they're children of Adam, and they're under the same judgment, even though they didn't commit a volitional sin like Adam did. But once we get older, and we understand the laws, and all that, when things start to happen, then we commit our own volitional sins. And that's exactly why it was given. It says, "The law... " This is Romans 5:20, note this, "The law was added, so that the trespass might increase." It's counter-intuitive. We think, "Oh, laws are given, so we sin less." That's not what's going on. It was given to draw it out, so here's the image I have.

Imagine a jar, crystal clear jar, filled with river water, and you just sit it there, and don't move it for a while, and everything just settles to the bottom. It's all at the bottom, and so you look at it like this, and it looks clear as crystal. Let's say that the jar has lid on it, and you pick it up, and you shake it, and then put it back down. Now, it's all cloudy, nasty. I wouldn't drink that, alright. That's the human heart. And the law shakes up the hidden evils of the human heart, and makes them obvious to us. It shows us, like on the cover of the bulletin, our chains. We're in chains. The whole world is in chains to sin, and we can't break out, and the law makes it plain. And it doesn't matter what statements of the law you look at. You could take the Ten Commandments, right? "Well, I'm just going to focus... I'm just going to try to keep the Ten Commandments." You can't. Because you have heard that it was said, "You shall not murder, but if you're even angry with your brother, you're in danger of the fire of hell."

"Well, I'm going to try to... I'm not going to commit adultery. I've never commit... " But if you lust after a woman, you commit adultery in your heart. You say, "Wait a minute, that's not fair. You're looking at my heart." Well, read the Tenth Commandment, "You shall not covet." What part of your body do you use to covet? He's looking in the mind and the heart. And Jesus told us, he says, "That's how I'm looking at the Ten Commandments. I'm looking at your heart, not just, did you not murder? But,  'have you ever been murderously angry at anyone?', not just, 'Did you commit adultery?', but 'Have you ever done so in your heart?' Coveting, 'Have you ever yearned for something that didn't belong to you?'" You can't keep it, and so it shakes you up, and shows you that. Or you could look at, how about 613 Commandments? You can't keep 10, how about keeping 600 of them? Can't keep that one. Alright, Jesus made it simple, he just organized them all into two: "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind," and second is like it, "Love your neighbor as yourself."  You can't keep that either.

All that happens is the law shakes up, and shows you the vileness of your heart, and it brings you to the point, in Romans 7, where you say, "What a wretched person I am, who will rescue me? Who will rescue me from sin?" Law does that, it shows you your need for sin and we're going to get there in Galatians next. It brings you, like a schoolmaster, right to Christ. It brings you to the foot of the cross. It shows you your chains. That's the purpose of the law. The law itself, nothing wrong with it, holy, and righteous, and good. That's why it does what it... You look at the commandment and say, "This is a good commandment. I just can't keep it." And so it brings us right to the cross. Look at verse 24, though it's not in our text, it says, "The law was put in charge to lead us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith." Law itself brings wrath, Romans 4:15, It brings death, Romans 7:5. We can't keep it, because it's weakened by the flesh, Romans 8:3. And so that's why the law was added. It was added, so that the trespass might increase. Now, the law is inferior to the promise, because of its mediators, verses 19-20. I know you're tired. I told you you'd need a towel, wipe the sweat off your face. This is the time for the five-hour energy drink, so go ahead and knock it back, we're almost done.

But what in the world is verse 19-20? The law is inferior, because of the mediators. "It was put into effect through angels by a mediator. A mediator, however, does not represent just one party, but God is one." Alright basically, in a mediated covenant, you have two parties, two individuals, and a deal is being made between the two of them, you have a mediator going between the two, etcetera. What he's saying here, is that the old covenant law mediated by angels and by Moses is inferior, because of the two parties, okay? God and man. Both of them have to keep the deal. Blessings and curses, that's the nature of the law. But the promise is not so. Remember, who was it that walked through the pieces of the animal? God alone. And so God is one. He's the only one with whom he made the covenant. It's an inter-Trinitarian covenant, and so there's no need, in this sense, for a mediator. God made it with himself. God is one. That's what he's saying. Now, I'm not denying Christ is our mediator, it's a different teaching and different moment. But that's the best I can make. Now, there are 301 possible interpretations for verse 20. I don't know if it's right, but what it's saying is, it's superior, because God made the deal with himself, not with us, in which case it would have been weakened.

And say, what in the world is the angels? What do the angels have to do? I'm not going to tell you, except that there's some verses here that talk about it. Hebrews 2:2 and Acts 7:53 both mentioned that angels were involved in giving Moses the law. I think they just carried it down to him. You see the same thing in Revelation 1:1, the revelation was given to God the Father, given by God the Father to Jesus, he gave it to an angel, who gave it to John, who gave it to us. That's what it says in Revelation 1:1. But the law is not contrary to the promises of God. Verse 21, "Is the law, therefore, opposed to the promises of God? Absolutely not, for if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law." What is going on with this? If they were both trying to save you, they would be in competition. But that's not what the law's trying to do. The law is not trying to save you from sin, it's trying to show you that you're a sinner. By the way, that's the whole problem with legalists. Okay? Basically, God gave the law to show us that we are sinful. Legalists use the law to show God that we are righteous. Do you see how perverted that is? The legalist takes the law and says, "Look how righteous I am." That was not the point. It was to show you that you need a Savior.

And so we've already learned this last week in Galatians 2:21, "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained by the law, then Christ died for nothing." So, no, the law is not opposed to the promise of God, frankly, the law really helps the promise of God. It brings you to the one who can make the promise and keep it. It brings you to Jesus, the promise maker, the promise keeper. That's what the law does. They're not in competition. They're actually working together, ultimately. So righteousness cannot come by the law. Verse 22, "The Scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe." So on the cover of your bulletin, there's some shackles there, empty now, praise God. My chains have fallen off. I'm set free now. I'm free from the guilt and condemnation of my sins. I'm free from the authority and power of sins. Sin has no right to command me, and now, as a child of God, I am free to tell every temptation that ever comes to me, "Be gone from me. I am no longer a slave to sin." There's no single temptation that ever comes to me with authority to command me. I have the authority to tell it, "No." I can crush every temptation. Now, I'm free, and so are you, if you're a Christian. But, apart from Christ, the whole world's in chains, and the law is given to shed light on those chains, and show them to them. That's all. They don't set them free.

So what application can we take from this? Well, come to Christ. Believe in him. Trust in him. Trust in Jesus. Let him free you from sin. Let him free you from the condemnation. He is the promise maker, he is the promise keeper. Look to Christ and to Christ alone. Salvation is a free gift of God and I'm begging you, don't leave this place unregenerate, don't leave it under the wrath of God, trust in Jesus. You don't need to move a muscle, you don't need to do anything, that's salvation by law, just believe. Repent and believe, turn away from your sins, and say, "I need a Savior," and believe.

Second of all, see the value of hard work in Scripture. Don't be lazy and don't expect your pastors to be lazy. Don't settle for milk, if there's meat in the passage. Demand that nicely of your elders. Okay? If the Lord tarries sometime, I'll be gone, but there'll be other people here, if this is still a healthy church, you folks will want to hear meat from the Word, and not get lazy. And do the hard work yourself in your quiet times. Dig into the word of God, and learn deeply, and be mature, don't be like a child. Thirdly, embrace the promise of eternal life in Christ, delight in it. I love Romans 4:16, "The promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham's offspring." You are guaranteed of heaven, think about that. I just say to you, again, that should make you happier than you are right now. And some of you are looking very happy right now, and that's great. Be even happier, you're guaranteed, because it's promise, not law. He's promised you heaven and he will keep it.

And then, finally, understand how to be sanctified by promise, not by law. This is tricky and we'll talk more about it, but I just want to give you a first whiff at it. If you have a sin problem in your life, sanctification by law says, "I'm on my own. I'm on my own. I got to... I've got to face this problem myself." Sanctified by trust in the promise says, "Every command of God is actually promise for me, someday I'm going to be holy." So I'm going to take that like Joshua facing the walled city of Jericho, I'm going to say, "God's promised us this whole land. I can take this city by the power of God." And then, you do the things He tells you to do, walk around the wall seven times, and give out a shout. He's going to win the victory and you're going to do some things. You will take some stands and you're going to do some things, but that sanctification by faith, not by law. So whatever sin you're struggling with, take the blood of Christ, and the death of Christ, and resurrection of Christ, and apply it to that, as part of the promised land of your holiness, and say, "I can be holy. God, do it in me."

Close in prayer now, please. Father, we thank you for this challenging passage, for all the things we have learned. Thank you for the patience of the people of God here, listening carefully to these many verses. Oh, God, take these truths and press them deep into our hearts for your Glory, we pray in Jesus name, Amen.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches on Galatians 3:11-14, explaining the meaning of God's grace and God's wrath, and that in Christ alone we have salvation.

September 11, 2001 is a day that would burn in our memories for as long as we live. Those of us who were alive at that time and were following the events of that day, saw the Twin Towers struck by Boeing 767s and explode in fire, and then eventually come crashing down to earth. We will never forget the terror of those images in our minds, the terror of such a sight. For many of us, the most horrible aspect of that day was the sight of people throwing themselves from the building in order to escape being burned to death, falling, maybe almost 1,000 feet to certain death. They were not suicidal as they went to their jobs that day, they were not depressed, they were not filled with any hatred of life as they walked through the halls of the 105th floor and turned on their lights, and turned on their computers, and looked out the window at the Manhattan skyline, and at the New York Harbor as they had done many times before. Jumping out of that same window 55 minutes later would never have occurred to them.

But when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, and caused their world around them to be engulfed in smoke, in flame, intense searing heat, billowing smoke, they tried to escape, I'm sure, through the hallway. There was no way to get through there, no way to use the elevators, no way to get to the stairs, they went back to their office and looked out of the window, maybe they shattered the window themselves, maybe it was already shattered by the crash. At least 200 people died that day in that way, they made that terrifying bewildering decision, to jump is better than to stay. One particular photo taken by Richard Drew of the Associated Press was entitled "The Falling Man" was run the next day in the New York Times on page seven, but then because of the outcry against it, saying it had somehow desecrated the memories of those that died, the New York Times never ran such a photo again.

On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, Susie Linfield, a journalism professor at NYU, published a story in a New York magazine called "Jumpers," she had this to say: "The jumper photographs make clear to us the utter vulnerability of the victims. Those trapped in the Towers had only two choices- To jump to their deaths or to be incinerated- which is to say they had no choice at all. To moralize either 'choice'- to despise one as cowardly and valorize the other as heroic is to misunderstand both. What the 9/11 victims faced was the absence of options." That last comment stuck in my mind with incredible power, it seemed that these tragic people had no choice, there was no way to escape the searing fire that was engulfing their world. Even more tragic, I think, are the videos of people on the highest floors of the World Trade Center that day, leaning out and waving white pieces of cloth desperate for some kind of savior, smoke billowing out of the windows around them. They could see fire below them as they looked down. And they're just looking for some kind of savior and it's actually very difficult to watch, at least it was for me even 12 years later.

Now, these tragic people illustrate the central lesson of today's sermon. They give me an understanding of Jesus Christ is the only savior that there is from the wrath of God. I'm going to make three assertions in this sermon and the world hates all three of them. The first is that this world is facing a future raging inferno of immeasurable heat, of infinite power, and eternal duration, this coming inferno is the just wrath of God against sin. It is a fire that will destroy this entire world in judgment and will consume the enemies of God in hell. Secondly, Christ, Jesus Christ is God's only provision for escape from this coming wrath. Christ's death on the cross is the only way that sinners can be saved from this fire. Thirdly, just as those people had no way to save themselves from the raging inferno, we cannot save ourselves from the coming wrath. Our works cannot make us righteous in the sight of God. Just as there was no way for those tragic people to climb down to safety, there is no way for us to use the law of God to climb up to safety.

Oh, how the world hates and fights these three assertions, all three of them. The world says, "There is no coming wrath of God" or "God, if He exists, loves everyone and will rescue everyone from hell, would not send anyone to hell, it's unworthy of God to display anger or wrath," those kinds of things. The world says that Christ is not the only way to heaven and that it's arrogant for us as Christians to claim that he is, that he is the only way to heaven. Third, the world says that we actually can pay for our sins by our good works, righteousness in God's sight can be obtained by observing some kind of law or pattern of morality.

Now, these assertions that I've made here are hated and opposed by many in the world today, but these assertions that I've made are taught powerfully in the text that we are going to be looking at today, Galatians 2:21 and then Galatians 3:10-14. I kept as my jump off point, as I was meditating on this, Galatians 2:21. It's a text that captivated my mind and my imagination and my thoughts for much longer than I thought it would be. Galatians 2:21 says, "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing." So I concentrated on the phrase, the grace of God, in Galatians 2:21. We're in the middle here in Galatians, of Paul's train of thought as he's explaining the Gospel of salvation through faith in Christ. The grace of God, then in Galatians 2:21, is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the gracious provision that God has made for us sinners.

I meditate on what the grace of God saves us from. It saves us mainly from the curse of God, the wrath of God.  I concentrate on the significance of Christ becoming a curse for us in Galatians 3:13. I zero in on the idea of setting aside the grace of God. He says, "I do not set aside the grace of God." The word 'set aside' means to nullify, to render as nothing. I just like the translation 'set aside,' I think it's the best translation. How the human race tries to avoid the cross of Christ in various ways, especially by gaining righteousness through the law. I zero in on the logic of the verse, that righteousness cannot be gained any other way. That if righteousness could be gained in some other way, then Christ died for nothing. This is the doctrine of the exclusivity of Christ and of the Gospel. And I'm going to talk about these themes and I'm going to end with the Spirit-filled life, the promise of the Spirit-filled life, which I will not develop in length because it's developed more, later in Galatians. But it's the answer to all of the things that come up as we contemplate these things.

These are the four main points of my sermon. First, why the world needs the grace of God: That is the wrath of God. Why does the world need grace? Because of the coming wrath. Secondly, the only way the grace of God comes to the world is through the cross of Christ. Third, how the world sets aside the grace of God, especially through self-righteousness. And then fourth, how the grace of God makes sinners righteous in his sight, first by justification and second through the Spirit-filled life. Those are the four points of the sermon.

First, why the world needs the grace of God, and that is the wrath of God, this is the reason why. Look at verse 21, "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing." We focus here on the grace of God, what is the grace of God? It's not a theme that's unfolded clearly or emphasized in the Old Testament, it seems as though God was reserving full emphasis on the grace of God for the coming of Jesus into the world. And in some of the translations, the word 'grace' doesn't pop up very often in the Old Testament. But then a river of grace is proclaimed in the New Testament. I like to start at John 1:14: "The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us and we have seen His glory. Glory of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." And then a few verses later in John 1:17, "For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." With the coming of Jesus into the world, we have a dawning of the grace of God flowing to the world, not that there wasn't grace in the Old Testament, certainly there was. But it is by Christ that grace comes.

Now, the word 'grace' especially flows through the pen of the Apostle Paul. No biblical writer wrote more about grace than Paul. 86 times, he mentions 'grace', 86 times. He opens all of his epistles the same way, "Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." So what is grace? We said it before, but I like this definition. Grace is the subtle determination in the heart of God. That's what it is. It starts in the heart, the mind of God, toward us in Christ. Grace is the determination, the subtle determination in the heart of God to do us good, we who deserved to be punished eternally. So those aspects of grace, determination in the heart of God, a river of goodness flowing to us as sinners, despite the fact we deserved wrath and judgment. I think that's grace.

Now, grace is especially for salvation from his wrath in reference to our sins. That's a home base of grace. We're sinners and we deserve wrath and judgment, and God saves us by his grace. Ephesians 1:7-8 says in Jesus, "In Him, we have redemption through His blood. The forgiveness of sins according to the riches of His grace that He lavished on us." We have redemption from sin through the riches of grace. Grace is especially on display in reference to the wrath of God. Romans 3:23-25: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by His grace, through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Him as a propitiation, through faith in His blood." The word 'propitiation,' if you study it and you understand it in the Greek language, it means the setting aside of the wrath of God by a blood sacrifice. So God's wrath set aside by the sacrifice of Christ, so God's grace is on display in that he does not treat us as our sins deserve. Amen, hallelujah. "He does not treat us as our sins deserve," Psalm 103:10.

Now, in Galatians 2:21, the need for grace is seen in the fact that we sinners lack righteousness. Look again at the verse. "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained by the law, Christ died for nothing." So clearly we lack righteousness. We need to gain righteousness. Unless our righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and teacher of the law, we will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. We lack the necessary righteousness. Why is that? Because we are sinners, we are unrighteous in God's sight. We who lack righteousness, we are, turn it around, unrighteous to God. What is this unrighteousness? It has to do with our sins. We have violated God's laws. We have broken his laws, but friends, it goes infinitely deeper than that. It goes to the very core of our being.

I was listening to a John Piper sermon some time ago. He was summarizing all of Romans 1-7, a summarizing of those seven chapters. If I'm not careful, I might lurch off in that direction right now. But he is summarizing and he is zeroing in on this issue of sin. What is sin? And this is what John Piper said: "What makes sin is not first that it hurts people, but that it blasphemes God. This is the ultimate evil and this is the ultimate outrage of the universe. The glory of God is not honored. The holiness of God is not reverenced. The greatness of God is not admired. The power of God is not praised. The truth of God is not sought. The wisdom of God is not esteemed. The beauty of God is not treasured. The goodness of God is not savored. The faithfulness of God is not trusted. The promises of God are not relied upon. The commandments of God are not obeyed. The justice of God is not respected. The wrath of God is not feared. The grace of God is not cherished. The presence of God is not prized. The person of God is not loved. That is sin."

The infinite all-glorious Creator of the universe, by whom and for whom all things exist, the one about whom it is said, in him we live and move and have our being, is disregarded, disbelieved, disobeyed and dishonored by everybody in the world apart from Christ. That is the ultimate outrage of the universe. And God is outraged by it. Why? Because God is perfectly holy. He is perfectly holy. It's the most important attribute in the Bible. You could say, "Why would I say that?" Well, it's the only one that's stated three times in a row. There's no other attribute that's stated three times in a row. But in Isaiah 6:3, we have these glorious seraphim and they're calling to one another, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; The whole earth is full of His glory." The holiness of God, theologians tell us, has to do with his separation.

God is infinitely above all creation. He is the Creator and we all are creature. And there's an infinite gap between Creator and creature. That's the holiness. And that's why the holy angels, the burning seraphim who never have committed any sin still are crying "Holy, holy, holy" as they cover their faces. Infinite gap between all creation and God. But it also, especially in the Bible, has to do with God's infinite hatred for sin, his separation from all evil. Habakkuk 1:13: God's eyes are too pure to look on evil, he cannot tolerate wrong. It says in 1 John 1:5, “this is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in Him, there's no darkness at all.” God hates evil. And he's passionate about that. He's a passionate being and we who are created in his image, we have emotions because he had them first. Now his are pure and perfect, ours are not. But God is a passionate being and he hates all forms of evil with a fiery passion.

Listen, Isaiah 30:27 and 28. It says there, "Behold, the name of the Lord comes from afar with burning anger and dense clouds of smoke. His lips are full of wrath, His tongue is a consuming fire, His breath is like a rushing torrent, rising up to the neck. He shakes the nations in the sieve of destruction." That's our God. And the Bible asserts the universality of sin. There is no one righteous, not even one. Romans 3:9-12: "There's no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away. They've together become worthless. There's no one who does good, not even one." The Bible tells us the wages of sin is death, eternal separation from God, not merely physical death but the second death in the lake of fire. The Bible teaches this. "The soul who sins shall die," Ezekiel 18:4.

Now, in our text today, the wrath of God is expressed in curse language, that's why we're even talking about wrath today, it has to do with curse. Look at verse 10 of Galatians 3, Galatians 3:10, it says there, "All who rely on observing the law are under a curse. For it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in this book of the Law.'" Now, in the old covenant, the curse of God meant that He was actively opposing you in your life. He was fighting against what you were doing on Earth in the old covenant. That's what the curse meant. God was fighting you, he was opposed to you. He was against your prosperity, he was against your happiness, against your health, against your efforts, what you were trying to do. That's what the curse means. So we have this in Deuteronomy 28:15-19. "If you do not obey the Lord, your God, and if you do not carefully follow all His commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you. You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country. Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed. The fruit of your womb will be cursed and the crops of your land. And the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. You'll be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out." It actually goes on many verses beyond that.

 Now, Galatians 3:10 says that the curse comes on those who do not continually obey everything written in the law. So it's all the law, all the time, or you get cursed. That's what the law does. Now, the Old Testament curses, those earthbound curses that I was talking about, they were real curses. They actually happened, things actually occurred physically to the Jews. But they were just symbolic of a far greater curse that's yet to come, far greater curse that's yet to come.

The Bible is filled with the doctrine of the wrath of God. The past wrath of God, the present wrath of God, and the future wrath of God. In the past, we have the flood of Noah in which every living thing that had the breath of life in its nostrils perished except what was on the ark. We have Sodom and Gomorrah in which God rained down fiery sulfur, "from the Lord out of the heavens," it specifically says in Genesis 19. And the next day, Abraham looked out over the plains where Sodom and Gomorrah had been just the day before, teeming cities, and there was nothing but dense smoke rising from the plain. These are pictures of the judgment and wrath of God, the past wrath of God. The Bible also asserts the doctrine of God's present wrath. It says in Psalms 7:11: "God is a righteous judge, a God who expresses His wrath every day." Every day. But listen, past and present wrath merely warn of the infinitely more consequential future wrath of God. Any wrath that happens on Earth is just a symbol of the future wrath yet to come.

And that wrath is going to be physical. It says in 2 Peter 3:10: "The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the Earth and everything in it will be laid bare." That's the coming wrath of God. But even more terrifying than what God will do to creation is what he will do to his enemies, both angels and humans. And that is the doctrine of hell, the second death, the wrath of God displayed in hell. No one taught more about hell than Jesus. No one said more about the fire that is to come than Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, he said that, if you are angry in your heart with your brother, you're in danger of the fire of hell. If you look lustfully at a woman, you're in danger of the fire of hell. It's better for you to cut off your right hand or gouge out your right eye and escape going to hell than to have all of your physical equipment and be cast into the eternal fire, and he said plainly, "The fire does not go out, the warm never dies."

And he says in Matthew 25 "When the Son of Man comes in His glory and all the angels with Him, He will sit on His throne in heavenly glory and all of the nations will be gathered before Him and He will separate the people, one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats." And he's going to put the sheep, the believers on his right and the unregenerate on his left. And then he will say to those on his left, "Depart from me, you who are cursed." So there's that word 'curse.' "Depart from me, you are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

This is why the world needs the grace of God and Christ. This is why we need it. But the world sets aside the grace of God. The world sets aside the grace of God concerning this issue of the wrath of God by denying that he has a wrath. Mostly, non-Christians set it aside by not thinking about him and not thinking about it. And they effectively deny that it even exists, that it's coming. Now, picture again those desperate souls leaning out of the upper floors of the World Trade Center on September 11th, and they're waving their white shirts and they're trying desperately for a savior because they can feel the heat, they can smell the smoke. They know it's real. But this fire, they can't see anything. They can't see the flames, they can't smell the smoke, it's as though it's not around, you have to believe or you don't think it's coming. So if you don't have any faith, there's nothing to escape.

They don't see the fire, they deny it. Zephaniah 1:12, "They are complacent, thinking the Lord would do nothing either good or bad." Even worse for me though is Christians, so-called. People in the Christian world who deny this doctrine of the wrath of God, who are embarrassed by it, who think it's unworthy of God to have any kind of wrath at all. They think of a higher God, a wrath-free God, an anger-free God. Recently, I was reading about how Keith Getty and Stuart Townend wrote one of the greatest hymns of our time. We're going to close this service by singing it, "In Christ Alone." And then this verse is what they write: "In Christ alone, Who took on flesh, fullness of God in helpless babe" [incarnation.] "This gift of love and righteousness, scorned by the ones he came to save. Till on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied. For every sin on him was laid, here in the death of Christ I live." Well, a Presbyterian denomination, PCUSA, wanted to use that hymn in their hymnal but they just want to change it a little bit. So they contacted Getty and Townend and then asked if they could adjust the lyrics on that verse a little bit. From "Till on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied," to "Till on that cross as Jesus died, the love of God was magnified."

Why would they want to do that? Well, hymnal committee chair, Mary Louise Bringle said this, "The song has been removed from our contents list with deep regret over losing its otherwise poignant and powerful witness. The view on the committee is that the cross is primarily about God's need to assuage God's anger, that if we have that view, it would have a negative effect on the hymnal's ability to form the faith of coming generations." Well, that's very mild, even worse, is Anglican priest Bosco Peters, what he said, "The understanding is that God the Father was angry at us in our sinfulness and that God took out his rage on Christ instead of on us and this now enables God the Father to love us. This understanding is heresy. God doesn't have anger management issues." No, he doesn't. Our God is slow to anger, he doesn't lash out quickly, he never has to regret anything he does and he will not regret the smoke of their torment rising forever and ever. he's not embarrassed about it, he's warned us about it. No, he doesn't have anger management issues but he has anger, he has wrath, and that's why we need the grace of God and we must not set aside the grace of God by denying the wrath of God. Secondly, the only way the grace of God comes into the world is the cross of Christ.

Look again at 2:21, "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing." Christ is the only way that the grace of God comes to this world. Trying to save ourselves by law would be to set aside the grace of God. There is no other way for sinners to be made righteous, do you see how foolish the world is in getting angry about Christ being the only way to be saved? Picture again those poor souls on the upper floors of the World Trade Center, picture this time though an incredibly heroic and courageous rescuer descending perhaps from a rope ladder, hanging from a helicopter, they managed to get close enough to reach out to one of these folks that's waving the white shirt and saying, "Here, I've got you, come on" and the guy recoiling in anger and says, "I want multiple options to get off this floor and I'm not going out until there are many ways for me to get off this burning floor."

I think that's how this must look to the holy angels in heaven, as they look down amazed that anyone would not believe in Christ, amazed that we would want multiple ways to get off the burning floor; how foolish. Now, the incarnation itself, the coming of God into the world proved right away we could not save ourselves, just the incarnation, that's why he came. Isaiah 59:15-16: "The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice," no righteousness. He saw that there was no one. He was appalled that there was no one to intervene so his own arm worked salvation for him and his own righteousness sustained him. God looked at the human race, no saviors there, none. So he entered the world himself. Isaiah 59:15-16. So it's poignant at the birth of Christ, but see, even more poignant at the death of Christ and that's where our verse takes us. "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing." This is the very issue that Jesus was settling as he wrestled in prayer in Gethsemane, wasn't it? Didn't he go to Gethsemane, fall on his face before God and sweating great drops of blood, he cried out to his Abba Father, he said, "Abba Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me, yet not as I will but as you will?" So Father, is it possible? Is there any other way?

The answer is implied, not openly stated because he goes back a second time and says, "My Father, if it is not possible, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may Your will be done." "No, my Son, there is no other way. No other way." Settled by Jesus in Gethsemane, there is no other way. Christ alone is the incarnate Son of God. He alone died under the wrath of God. He alone satisfied the just penalty for our sins, for the wages in his death. And Christ alone rose from the dead, vindicating sinners like you and me. Christ alone is the Savior. Even more plainly, Jesus became a curse for us. Look at verse 13 of Galatians 3: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.'" Now, this is amazing, not just Jesus was cursed for us, but Jesus became a curse for us. I meditated on this a long time.

It's similar to the grammar that we have in another exclusivity verse, John 14:6: Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Do you hear what Jesus said there? Let's hear it on the middle one. "I am the truth." Not merely "I speak the truth" or "I embrace the truth," or "I exemplify the truth." We should all speak the truth. We should all embrace the truth. We should all exemplify the truth. And we may, by the blood of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, we can. But Jesus is the only one who can say these words, "I am the truth." "I am the truth. I am the distilled essence of all truth there is in the universe. All roads of truth lead to me. I am the truth." Alright, now take that and bring it to Galatians 3:13: "I am the curse. I am the distilled essence of curse. All curse for the people of God, all curse leads to this one place, the curse of the cross." And go even deeper, what does God curse but that which he hates? The curse of God is the hatred of God. It's God's opposition, it's ground zero of the infinite nuclear strike of God's holy wrath.

Christ on the cross was the very essence of everything that God has ever hated or ever would hate, while at the same time being his infinitely beloved Son. It's a mystery we will never be able to understand, but this is the mystery of the substitutionary atonement of Jesus. Jesus was the distilled essence of everything God hates. Sin is utterly disgusting, it's repulsive to God. He hates it with all of his heart. Think of the most repulsive sinner you've ever heard of that later came to faith in Christ. Think of their disgusting actions, how repulsive they are to you.

Corrie ten Boom talked about how difficult it was for her to shake the hand of an SS guard that she had known in the concentration camp, how hard that was for her. She was repulsed by what this man had done, the way that he tortured, and even killed, innocent people in the concentration camp. She was repulsed, but let me tell you something: her sense of justice and repulsion is like a flickering candle compared to the sun, the raging sun of God's repulsion. God is far more repulsed at what that SS guard did than Corrie ten Boom.

I heard another story years ago, and I've never been able to find it since, but it had to do with a man that Charles Spurgeon led to faith in Christ. This man was an alcoholic, he was addicted to gin. He drank all of his family's money, all of it, for food, clothing, everything, including for medicine. It turned out that his young daughter had a serious but treatable illness, and this man drank the money for the medicine, so that she died. The neighbors were outraged at this story. She had nothing but threadbare rags, and they wanted her buried in a beautiful little dress. So they took an offering, and they took up a collection, and they bought a beautiful dress, and they buried... They clothed this little girl and put her... Put this beautiful clothed girl, this dead girl in a casket where she was to be... In which she was to be buried the next day. That night, this man broke into the undertaker's shop, opened the casket, took the dress off the dead body of his daughter, closed the casket, sold the dress for money, and drank it. He later came to faith in Christ.

I have a hard time even telling that story. I picture my own kids. I picture just a father acting like that. What do you do with the repulsion, what do you do with the revulsion? Well I'll tell you what God did. He poured it out on Jesus, instead of on that man. So Jesus became in some sense, the kind of cesspool, the toxic waste dump of everything God ever hated in his elect, in his sheep. Everything he's ever hated in you and me, all of it in one place. And then he poured out the wrath, his just wrath on Jesus. Jesus became a curse for me, and for you. I can't... I almost can't put this into words. How could God perfectly hate and perfectly love Jesus at the same time?

But this is what's going on at the cross. A parallel verse, we've already heard it, 2 Corinthians 5:21, "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us." Just be sin. He was sin on the cross, so that "in Him, we might become the righteousness of God." Now meditate on this because of this substitution and this exchange, we have become by faith, in Christ, the very essence of everything God loves. We have become the righteousness of God in Christ. That's awesome, that's awesome! And Christ is the only way that that salvation can happen. He is the only way. God did not send his Son into the world to provide one of many paths to heaven. He didn't pour out his wrath on Jesus to provide one of many ways to reach heaven. It's because there was no other way. Now, the world sets aside the grace of God by denying the exclusivity of the cross. We are a weird people. We, post-modern tolerance-loving people, are just weird, and we think weird, especially on this exclusivity issue.

Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University in 2010, wrote a book, God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World- and Why Their Differences Matter. This is what he said in his introduction, "It has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true. This claim is as odd as it is intriguing. No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one in the same. Capitalism and Socialism are so obviously at odds that their differences barely bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy, yet scholars continue to claim that such different religions as Hinduism and Islam, Christianity and Judaism, by some", [I love this,] "some miracle of the imagination are essentially the same. And this view resounds in the echo chamber of popular culture. Not the least in Dan Brown's multi million dollar franchise The DaVinci Code." It's weird, they're not all the same, they can't be all the same.

The pastor of Watts Street Baptist Church right in our own town taught a number of years ago that spiritual truth is like an underwater river and Christianity is just one of many wells that we can use to get down to that water. Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, they're all equally valid ways of drinking that spiritual water. These folks say that it is arrogant for us to claim that Christianity is the only way. That makes no sense to me. Do you struggle with that? Arrogant. Listen, if I invented a new rootbeer in my shop and I came out and told you it is the greatest rootbeer that has ever been made. As a matter of fact, it's the greatest drink that's ever been offered to another human being, that would be arrogant. I didn't invent Christianity, I discovered it or actually, it discovered me. Christ discovered me. How is it arrogant for us to go as missionaries to the ends of the world to say there's only one way for humans to be saved? There's no arrogance here.

Thirdly, how the world sets aside the grace of God and that is through self-righteousness. Look again in Galatians 2:21. "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing." The number one way that the world sets aside the grace of God is by trying to save ourselves by our good works, by self-righteousness.

Self-Righteousness Option #1: Pagan Morality

So, the essence of legalism, this Judaizer legalism and all that, is the idea that present or future obedience to the law of God can cover or pay for a past disobedience. The more common way of talking about it is, "My good deeds outweigh my bad." So you've got a bunch of bad deeds, that means you didn't keep the law. Then you have some good deeds, you did keep the law and this can be used to pay for that. That's the basic transaction, the basic idea. So, what is the “law” if righteousness could be gained through the law? Well, Paul means immediately the law of Moses (and we'll get to that), but I want to give you three different levels of law that people use. First is basic pagan morality. The every day life sense of right and wrong. The Greek philosopher mentality. The Aristotle or Plato type of virtue and they define it, that kind of thing. Aristotle said it's the glorious mean, the average... You take outgoing energy, etcetera and the extreme version of that is rashness and the lack of it is cowardice, and the perfect mean right in the middle is courage. And he goes down, Aristotle does this in all these... And the perfect individual goes right down the center in all of these attributes, so he says.

The Japanese warrior code used Bushido and they had seven different attributes of virtue. Immanuel Kant had his. Benjamin Franklin, you can look up, he had 13 laws of morality that he tried to follow, 13. Like intemperance, temperance. Eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation. Silence, speak not only what may benefit yourself. Speak only what may benefit yourself or others, avoid trifling conversations. Order, let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time. Etcetera, etcetera, yadda, yadda, yadda. Sorry, Ben Franklin, but there it is. Alright? So this is just common every day pagan morality.

So the average every day person that you'll meet in the office tomorrow who says to you, "I'm basically a good person," ask them what they mean by a “good person.” Take the word 'basically' out. I don't know what it means. I think it means, "I'm not a good person." I don't know. Or "I'm kinda a good person." But alright, on what basis? Well, I try... And they're going to lay out some sketch at the law that they've come up with. Okay, but this is setting aside the grace of God. Do you see it? They have invented their own morality, which they try to live up to but don't really. When they do live up to it, they boast about it, when they don't live up to it, they think they can pay for it by the times they do live up to their own moral schemes. And they're forgetting the central and most important command of God. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, will all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength." And they never keep it anyway.

The second level of morality is religious morality. And again, that's man-originated as well, with some demonic help. And so the world has set up pagan religions, and they have their own rules and regulations, their own laws that they follow, and people feel good or don't feel good based on whether they keep their religious laws. Followers of Dagon had to avoid stepping on the threshold. Which was one of the funniest laws ever because the reason... Never mind, that's another story, another time. Followers of Moloch had to offer their children as a burnt offering to that demonic god. Followers of Buddha have to seek out enlightenment by following the Noble Eightfold Path. Followers of Allah and Mohammad have to embrace the five pillars of Islam. All of these false religions have their own laws, their own moral systems, but none of them come from God. So they have set aside the grace of God to establish these man-made religions. Concerning Moloch, God said through Jeremiah 7:31: "They have built the high places of Topheth in the valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire- Something I did not command nor did it enter my mind." I didn't tell you to do these things. And so you can't use these laws to become righteous in my sight. Actually repugnant.

Now, some of the religious laws are the same as the Ten Commandments. They have to do with basic morality that Romans 2 says is written on their hearts anyway. But their consciences sometimes accuse them, sometimes defend them. They don't keep those moral laws. The highest level of laws, the one that I think Paul means here, and that's the law of God. "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing." This is talking about the perfect law of God that came down from Mt. Sinai, from God himself. This is God's perfect standard of morality. And so it says in Roman 7:12: "So then the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good." But again, Galatians 3:10: "All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the Law.'" All the law, all the time or you get cursed. And by the way, if you understand the sentence I'm speaking to you it's already too late. We've already violated it already. And so, therefore, Romans 4:15: "The law brings wrath." That's all. Not salvation.

The death of Christ, therefore, settles forever that no one could be made righteous in God's sight by the law. "I do not set aside the grace of God for if righteousness could be gained by the law, then Christ died for nothing." Now listen, if righteousness could've been gained by the law of God by keeping it, what God would've done from heaven is pointed to the law and said, "Human race, do this. Do this." And not send Jesus. And what would've happened if righteousness could be gained by the law? Some would gain it. They would be spiritual athletes who'd be climbing hand over hand, foot over foot, like this, making it to heaven by their own efforts. And God would have to listen to them for eternity, boasting on their achievements. And so God set it up that we would be saved only by grace. For it says in Ephesians 2:8-9: "For by grace are you saved through faith and this not out of or from yourself. It is the gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast."

Fourth. How the grace of God makes sinners righteous. Justification leading to the Spirit-filled life. Justification is plain. It's the gift of righteousness simply because God says so, simply because he declares you to be righteous in Jesus. All you have to do is hear this Gospel, repent, believe, and the full righteousness of Christ will be imputed, credited to you and you will be in God's sight as righteous as Jesus was in God's sight cursed on the cross. How beautiful is that? Oh, Thank God for his grace. Thank God for his grace. Thank God that you can stand before him and say, "Though I was and still am a sinner, I am righteous in your sight through faith in Jesus. Thank you." So look at Galatian 2:16. It said very plainly how sinners are justified. “We know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we too had put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law, no one will be justified.” So justification by faith makes sinners positionally righteous in the sight of God. We have become the righteousness of God in Christ.

That leads to the promise of the Spirit. The Spirit was promised in the Old Testament. The Spirit himself is a promise of future perfection. And so if you believe in Jesus, you're instantly given the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit. The Spirit comes and lives in you. Look at verse 14. "He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham"... Notice that word blessing. Not cursed now, blessing. "The blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit." And then the Spirit living inside us leads us to follow the perfect law of God, to love God with all our heart and love our neighbors ourselves, and all of the other commands he wants us to follow. He says, "This is the way. Walk in it." But we're not justified by that walk, we're justified by faith in Christ. The Spirit lives within us and by faith, we step, day after day, later it's going to say in Galatians 5, "Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit." Galatians 5:16, "Walk by the Spirit and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh." Galatians 5:18, "If you're led by the Spirit, you're not under law." We'll talk much more in the future, God-willing, about the Spirit-filled life.

What applications can we take from this? Well, I want to zero in on this one phrase, "Do not set aside the grace of God." Do not set it aside. First, if you are an unbeliever, you're a non-Christian, you came here today and God brought you here by his sovereign grace. I'm pleading with you, do not set aside the grace of God. There will be no other Savior. No one else has descended from heaven and is sticking out his hand to grab you and pull you off the burning floor. There is going to be no other Savior. He's the only one. Do not set aside the grace of God by thinking you can save yourself by your own works. Your good deeds do not outweigh your bad, they cannot pay for your bad, and they aren't even good. Come to Christ. Trust in him and every day, say to Jesus, "Christ, you are my righteousness. You are my righteousness." Every day, say that him.

Secondly, embrace and tremble at the idea of the coming wrath of God. It is coming. We don't smell the smoke, we don't see the flames or feel the heat of the flames, but if you believe the Word of God, there is a coming wrath. Jesus rescues us from the coming wrath. 1 Thessalonians 1:10. The universe is going to be incinerated. The elements will melt in the heat, it is coming. Worse than that, the enemies of God will be consumed forever and ever in fire. Fear, trembling, tremble at it, understand you were rescued from it if you're a Christian. If you're not yet a Christian, danger is hanging over you right now. For us as evangelists, let us be faithful to share in light of that coming wrath.

Thirdly, embrace and celebrate in the exclusivity of Christ. This is going to be assaulted over the next part of the century if the Lord doesn't tarry. It's just going to get hotter and hotter in the United States of America. We have to stand firm and not burn pinches of incense to other gods, as though Jesus is just one of many gods. We need to stand firm and say, "He is the only God. He is the only Savior. We worship Christ alone." We need to stand firm on that. We need to preach that salvation is found in no one else, "For there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved," Acts 4:12. And then let's preach that Gospel. There is no other Savior. And when people bring up Buddhism, Hinduism, and all that, think of the things we've talked about here in this message.

Fourthly, meditate on the concept that Christ became a curse for you. If you've been redeemed through faith in Christ, nothing you face in your life now or will ever face for the rest of eternity can be classified as curse. Nothing. Could be cancer, could be unemployment, could be severe pain, it could be all kinds of things but none of it is curse. Christ sucked curse out of your case and took it on himself. God may discipline you for sin because he loves you. But there's an infinite difference between the discipline of a loving father and a curse of a wrath-filled God. Those are two different things.

Don't wait for the other shoe to drop. God has been good to you. He's going to keep being good to you. Nothing but good to you. Some Christians are like, "God's going to get me. I have been so blessed up to now but he's going to get me. He's going to get... " What do you mean by "get you?" "I know I'm not going to hell, but, yeah, this might happen." Look, anything that happens to you is a display of God's love. There is no curse coming for you if you're in Christ. We're done.

And fifth and finally, understand that there are two ways to live. You can live by trusting in your own morality through the law or you can live by faith in Christ's shed blood and the power of the Holy Spirit. Two ways to live, law versus grace. Flesh versus spirit, Holy Spirit. Okay, walk by the power of the Spirit and you will not gratify the deeds of the flesh. Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank You for the things that we've learned in this very rich text. I pray that You would please strengthen each of us to understand the Word of God. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

Well, Christmas season is upon us, in case you didn't know; decorations enough to tell us that. Also the lavish time of busyness, and activity, and planning, and preparation. One of my favorite aspects of Christmas are the stories that go along the Christmas season. I love reading those stories or watching movie renditions of them. Last night we watched –it’s kind of a family tradition to watch - the 1970 Scrooge presentation with Albert Finney. It was kind of a musical thing; music is a little odd for me, how people just break out into song in the middle of things. I don't tend to do that, maybe some of your families do that, but the musical aspect doesn't interfere. It's really a poignant story, and we love to watch that and the transformation of an individual from a stingy miser, a wicked miser, to a very generous, lavish person by the visitation of some ghosts. We'll get to all that later, I'll talk about that later, but that's the story, you know it well.

Or the story written by O. Henry, The Gift of The Magi; you know that one, a young couple penniless, living in the city, set in I think the late 19th century, and they're trying to think of a really nice Christmas gift they can get for each other, but they don't have very much money at all. And so they each give up something very precious to them to buy a valuable gift for the other. Though the wife gives up her long hair to, I think a wig maker or something like that, she sells her hair so that she can buy a chain for his pocket watch. And then he, for his part, sells the pocket watch, so he can buy her an expensive set of combs for her hair. And so, that's how that goes. You know that story, The Gift of the Magi. And then, of course, the story of the Little Drummer Boy. I don't know that that ever really happened, but there he was, and all he had to offer was his drumming, and then “he smiled at me” and all of that. And so, you know the Claymation one, have you ever seen that one? I don't know who invented Claymation, but the guy must have been a genius. And of course, It's A Wonderful Life, and some of you have seen that, trying to find out what life would have been like without George Bailey. I have no idea what life would - I guess we all know what life would have been like without George Bailey since he was fictitious. But at any rate, Clarence, the angel, his guardian angel, shows up and shows him the value of his life. And all of these stories kind of a rich part of the tapestry of our culture.

But you know, the Lord has spoken a far more poignant story in the actual birth narratives of Jesus Christ. And as you go, you deal with all of them, some of it's just straight out silliness, frankly. Some of it, very poignant, but nothing trumps actually going back and reading in Luke and in Matthew, the account, the historical account of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. And by contrast, it's just so simple and profound. And it is vital for us as Christians to go over this Christmas story again and again. It's vital to our faith for us to remember the actual events of the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

And in Luke Chapter 2, I'm just going to read this account Verses 1-20. The value of hearing again of the birth of Christ. There it says:

"In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria). And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth and Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem, the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. And he went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. And while they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her first born, a son, and she wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the Inn. And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shown around them. And they were terrified. But the angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid, for I bring you good news of a great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David, a savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. And this will be assigned to you, you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.' Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel praising God and saying 'Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace to men on whom His favor rests.' And when the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, 'Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.' So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph and the baby who was lying in the manger. And when they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child. And all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. Shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told."

That's so profound, isn't it, as you look at that. And some time ago, I preached a sermon demonstrating the supernatural and natural aspects of that birth narrative. And it's good to meditate on that, some aspects of Jesus' birth are the same way every child has ever been born, and others are very unusual, supernatural even, the angelic visitations and the glory of God shining all around. And how perfect is it that there's a blending of both, because Jesus was both son of man and also Son of God.

Matthew's gospel tells the story more from Joseph's point of view. It gives the genealogy of Jesus Christ, how through Joseph, through the lineage of David, Jesus had the right to be King of the Jews. And then it tells of Mary becoming pregnant through the Holy Spirit, and Joseph resolving to divorce her quietly, and then an angel appearing to Joseph in a dream, saying, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins." Matthew then tells how Joseph obeyed the voice of the angel, what the angel told him to do. He married Mary, took her home as his wife, but he had no union with her until after the baby was born. Matthew 2 recounts the story of the Magi coming from a distant land to, following a star right to Bethlehem, the house where Jesus was, and how they gave him gifts of gold and incense and myrrh, and they bowed down and worshipped him, and then they returned to their country by another route. But how Herod jealous and wicked and selfish, his jealousy triggered by the visit of the Magi, unleashed the first persecution in direct connection with Jesus, and that is the slaughter of the babies in Bethlehem and its vicinity who are two years old and under. And so, we have these narratives, these birth narratives, showing that Jesus stepped into time, he stepped into history, he's an actual individual, a human being. He's not a myth, he's not a legend.

We also have in the New Testament, doctrinal explanations of the birth of Christ. For example, in 1 Timothy 3:16 there it says, "Beyond all question, the mystery of Godliness is great. He appeared in a body, was vindicated by the spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory." And then earlier in that same book, 1 Timothy 1:15, "Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am the worst." I love that verse. And that just shows the purpose of Jesus being born to save sinners.

Then in the Old Testament, you have all these prophetic foretellings of Jesus. The predictions through the eyes of the prophets, centuries before Jesus was even born. Like Isaiah 7:14, which is also quoted in Matthew Chapter 1, "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel". And that means God with us. The idea of the incarnation predicted there centuries before Jesus was born. Or the location of his birth in Micah 5-2, "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times."

Well, it's easy as you hear these verses, you hear all of these things, to become numb to it. I mean, we've heard it again and again, there's nothing new. And I would hope you'd be shocked if I came up with something entirely new. Like they recently discovered a new birth narrative of Jesus. I read about it in the National Enquirer. It's awesome. And you can find all kinds of new details; I hope you would all be sharp enough to reject any new birth narratives. And in fact, God is saying, you don't need any new narratives, you don't need any new insights, you don't need anything new here. The fact that any of this could make you numb, or you could become bored, just shows your own wandering hearts. What we need to do is have the Lord do a renewing work in us so that we can hear these things and remember again the significance of the birth of Christ.

The world garbles the Christmas message year after year, we hear about it, and it gets worse every year. Materialism rises up to confuse the message of Christmas. You know, it was Jesus that said, "A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." Doesn't it seem like, like the retailers are trying to challenge Jesus on that point? In effect saying, yes, your life does consist in the abundance of your possessions. And so, retailers are counting on a really good Christmas to save the year, and they want you to buy, buy, buy, you know, jewelry and electronic gadgets and automobiles and other things. I bet all of you are waiting for that Lexus in the driveway with a big red bow on the top, right? The spouse is going to say, take it back, we can't afford it. But along with this comes the secular kind of winter holiday kind of thing, you know, more and more, a sense of the secularization of our country and the fact that we're losing the sense of Christ being the center of Christmas and radio stations playing that seasonal music. And we hear that year after year, and then characters like Santa Claus and the Grinch who piggybacks on Santa Claus, I guess, Frosty the Snowman in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and all of that, just diverting attention from the center of everything, and that is Christ. Even Dickens classic, how much better a story would it have been if that regeneration had been done by the Holy Spirit because someone preached the Gospel to him, wouldn't have that been better than three ghosts, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, Future? And then he just throws open all of his benevolence and generosity to the poor, because Christ has changed his heart. Somebody ought to write that story, maybe someone has, I don't know. But GK Chesterton was talking about Dickens classic, defended it as literature and having some noble themes, but he said this concerning Dickens, "We must not ask Dickens what Christmas is, for with all his heat and eloquence, he does not know." And that really is a symbol for our secular nation, they just don't seem to know what Christmas is about any more than they know what Thanksgiving is about. Thanksgiving is about God, it's about thanking God for the blessings of our lives, and Christmas is about the gift of Jesus as Savior of the world. And so for us, as Christians, we know the center, we understand what Christmas is about, but we still need to be renewed.

We need our faith. Renewed faith comes by hearing, and faith is renewed by hearing about Christ, and that's what I want to do today. And I want to do it just from one verse. I want to look at 2 Corinthians 8:9, and I want to talk about how Christ, through His poverty, has made us rich. For those of you thinking, we're getting a Galatians sermon now because the title is wrong, we're not, okay?  But we're going to talk today about how Christ through His poverty has enriched us. Look again at the verse, 2 Corinthians 8:9, "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes, He became poor, so that you, through His poverty, might become rich." And isn't it interesting how the verse begins with what you already know? You know the grace of God in Christ, you know the grace of Christ. I'm not telling you Paul says anything new. And so it is with me in this sermon today, I'm not bringing any new insights, not bringing any new thoughts about the birth of Christ. You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so, it's my pleasure to keep reminding you of things you already know, so you don't forget them, and they don't fade from your heart. And so, the verse begins with a sense of what it is we already know.

And it is vital to our faith to keep the sense of the mystery of the Godliness, the gift of Godliness through Christ fresh. The miracle of Christmas is summed up plainly in these verses. John 1:1, "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the Word was God." Verse 14, "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us, and we have seen His glory, glory of the only begotten, from the Father, full of grace and truth." And also in these verses, in Luke Chapter 1:30-35, as the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and says, "'Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give Him the name Jesus, and He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give Him the throne of his father David, and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever. His kingdom will never end.' 'How will this be?' Mary asked the angel, 'since I'm a virgin.' The angel answered, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. And so, the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God.'" So there's the center of the mystery of Christmas, the incarnation, Son of God, Son of man, born of a virgin, son of his father, David, but also son of the most High God. And the reason for the incarnation made plan in these verses, Luke 19:10, "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost." How Jesus is seeking and saving lost people even now, through the power of the Holy Spirit. And again, Matthew 20:28, "The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many." Now, our text this morning puts the incarnation of Jesus in terms of wealth and poverty, and is worthy tracing this verse out phrase by phrase to try to understand it.

The origins of Christmas, according to 2 Corinthians 8:9 is the grace of Jesus. It all starts with the Grace of Jesus in that Verse. "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, it says, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes, He became poor so that you through his poverty might become rich." Usually, when we think of grace; we focus on the first person of the Trinity, God the Father, and the gift of Jesus is definitely display of the grace of God, but here in this verse, it focuses on the grace of Jesus. What do we mean by grace? Grace is a settled determination in the heart of God the Father, also here in this verse, the heart of Jesus to do us good. It's a determination to do you good, you who deserved infinite wrath and judgment. And so, I think you really have to put those things together, what we deserved and what we receive. And as you put those two together, you really understand Biblical grace. We deserved wrath because we were sinners, we violated the laws of God. We had sinned against Almighty God, and that's an infinite sin, and therefore we deserved infinite punishment, but instead, what do we get? We get infinite wealth. We get riches beyond all measure, and that is grace.

So, Christmas started in the mind of God the Father and God the Son before the foundation of the world. Listen to 2 Timothy 1:8-10, speaking there about "God who has saved us and called us to a holy life, not because of anything we have done, but because of His own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time. But has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel." So before the beginning of time, God worked out and determined to save you, and Jesus just determined in our verse to make you rich, he wanted to make you infinitely wealthy. And so this is the grace of Christ Jesus, where it all began. Before God said, Let there be light, before there were rivers or oceans or continents, before there were stars in the cosmos, before any of these things, God determined to do you good, and Jesus determined to pay the price.

And so, Christmas started by the grace of Christ before he entered the world. You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich yet for your sakes, He became poor. Jesus was willing to leave the glory of Heaven for the suffering and death of the earth. Now, he's the only one, only human being that's ever been born, the only human being that's ever lived that made a conscious decision to enter this world. That's language that we could never use. It's what he said to Pontius Pilate. You remember when he was on trial for being King, this is the King of the Jews. Pilate said to Him, oh, so you are a king. And "Jesus said, You are right in saying that I am a king. In fact, for this reason, I was born and for this, I came into the world to testify to the truth." It's an extraordinary statement he's making there. I chose to enter the world. It says the same thing earlier in John 6:38-40, "For I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but to do the will of Him who sent me. And this is the will of Him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that He has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day."

And so Jesus made a conscious decision to enter the world. And so Christ began before he entered the world, and the text says, infinitely rich, infinitely rich. It's a simple straightforward assertion of the text. "…the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich..."

Alright, how rich? How rich was Jesus? How many of you have ever been to the Biltmore Hotel? Don't raise your - or is it a hotel? No, it's a house. Alright, and I've been there, gold bathtubs, jewels and the walls. Extraordinary wealth. I've actually been to the Vanderbilt summer cottage at The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island. I've been to both of their houses. And The Breakers is just extraordinary, the lavish wealth; it's like one mansion after another there in Newport, Rhode Island. That wealthy? Or how about the Bill Gates home? Have you looked into that, $157 million home. Who is he going to sell it to? When you have a home worth 157 million, I don't know who you're going to - you're going to take a loss on it, probably. $157 million home there in Medina, Washington, overlooking Lake Washington. Spectacularly beautiful. There's kind of like an online tour, if you're so inclined. It's an amazing thing, state-of-the-art home where if you come in as a guest of Bill and Melinda Gates, they're going to give you a little electronic chip and you can kind of program the heater, temperature of the room, whatever room you want, you just program ahead of time and wherever you go, it will program the room to be climate controlled. What happens if you have two guests in the room. Frequently a husband and wife, one likes it hot, a little colder, I don't know how that works. But that kind of wealth or perhaps you've seen online, someone sent this to me once, The House That Golf Built, this was Tiger Woods home on an island off the coast of Florida, where he gets to see both the sunrise and the sunset over water, and it's this incredible house with all this glass, all the like glass windows, and it's like the master bedroom overlooking water right there, and then you find out at the end that he raised it and built his own mansion at that place. That kind of wealth. Friends, there's nothing on Earth that even comes close to the wealth of Jesus before he entered the world. Nothing comes close. I don't care what mansion you've seen, Vanderbilt or The Breakers. How rich was Christ before entering the world? Well, I want to focus on those things that He left behind. There were some things that he took with them into the world because he never stopped being God, but there are some things he left behind, and so as I was making this list, I was thinking specifically about those things he left behind to enter the world.

First, he was rich in glory shared with his father. He was radiant in glory. What do we mean by that? Well, Jesus is the radiance of God's glory. And before He entered the world, Jesus was perfectly radiating the glory of God. Well, we learned in 1 Timothy 6 that "God dwells in unapproachable light." He's so blindingly glorious, sitting on the throne of Heaven, that the seraphim in Isaiah 6, have to cover their faces. They cover their face, they've got six wings. "With two wings they cover their faces; with two, they covered their feet; and with two, they're flying." And they're crying out, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of His glory." And then John 12:41, it says, "Isaiah said this, because he was speaking about Jesus' glory." He saw Jesus' glory and wrote about Him. And so that was Jesus' glory that radiates heaven and earth. In Revelation 1:16, after Jesus has ascended back into heaven, John has a vision of Jesus. In Revelation 1:16, it says, "… his face was like the sun shining at full strength." He couldn't look at the face of Jesus, the radiant glory shining from him. In his incarnation Jesus left this radiant glory behind. At the end of his time on Earth, he asked his father for it back. In John 17:5, he says, "And now father glorify me with the glory I had with you before the world began." That's an incredible prayer, because it says in Isaiah 42:8, Yahweh says this," I am the Lord, that is my name, I will not share my glory with another or give My praise to idols." And so God will not share His glory with another but Jesus isn't another, the mystery of the trinity, and so he had the glory of God before he entered the world.

He was also rich in achievements in creation. Heaven and earth put on display the handy work of Jesus. It says in John 1:3, "Through Jesus all things were made, and without him nothing was made that has been made." Colossians 1, 16 and 17 says, "For by Him, by Jesus, all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, where the thrones, or powers, or rulers or authorities, all things were created by Him, and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." Psalm 104 recounts, down here on Earth, all of nature, all of these realms of biology of animals in the sea and on land and moving through the air, and all of it displaying the glory of God. And it says in Psalm 104:31, "May the glory of the Lord endure forever. May the Lord rejoice in his works," but the Scripture teaches those are Jesus' works. He was rich in works and the heavenly hosts that were worshipping and knew that Jesus made all things, including themselves, and gave Him glory for that.

Thirdly, He was rich in power over the universe, directly reigning over the universe. He openly ruled over heaven and earth, his power was openly displayed and unquestioned. He ruled over stars and planets, over winds and rain, over birds and fish, over angels and men. Nebuchadnezzar said of Him, "He does as He pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth, no one can hold back his hand or say to him: 'what have you done?'"

And Jesus was simply rich in possessions, he just owned a lot. As a matter of fact, he owned everything. Everything that could be owned, he owned. Psalm 95, 4 and 5 says, "In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land." I like Psalm 50, verse 10-12 says, "Every animal in the forest is mine and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, I know that creatures of the field they're all mine, if I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the World is mine and everything in it." He claims ownership over the nations of the Earth. In Psalm 60, 7 and 8, "Gilead is mine, Manasseh is mine. Ephraim is my helmet, Judah is my scepter, Moab is my washbasin. Upon Edom, I tossed my sandal. Over Philistia, I shout in triumph." He owned it all. He was the King of kings and Lord of lords.

Fifth, he is rich in angelic, worship and service. He had a 100 million angels doing his bidding. 100 million. Thousands upon thousands attended Him. 10,000 times 10,000 stood before him. Only geeks like me would do the math - that's 100 million angels. 100 million ready to do His bidding, ready to obey Him. They were the ones that are crying to one another, holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. And sixthly and finally, he was rich in happiness and satisfaction, completely blessed in heaven. Before he took on a human body, Jesus never knew pain or suffering. Book of Hebrew says "He learned obedience by what he suffered. He had never suffered anything before that," except perhaps one thing, he saw the damage that sin had done to the universe and specifically to his chosen people, and it grieved Him, and it motivated him to leave all of that comfort and power and pleasure behind and take on a human body and enter this world. And so that's where Christ started, that's how infinitely wealthy he started. Where did he end up?

Well, he ended up infinitely immeasurably poor. "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes, He became poor." Now, this was Christ free choice, but he became perfectly poor. Daniel read these verses earlier, listen to them again in Philippians 2:6-8, "Jesus being, in very nature, God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross."

So Jesus at the cross, I would contend, is the poorest man that ever lived Any of those things that would alleviate the suffering of life were gone from him, and he had actually infinite suffering as our sin bearer. So he became a human being, He became weak, He became beset with suffering, He became a servant. He was temptable, it says in Hebrews 2:18, "He Himself suffered when He was tempted, and he was tempted in every way, just as we are yet was without sin, able to become hungry, and tired, and thirsty, able to feel pain, able to suffer and able to die." In Isaiah 53:3, "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering." He was born a baby. And at one level, this absolutely had to be because he had to fulfill the fact that it would be the seed of a woman who had crushed the serpents head, but Adam was formed from the dust of the earth, fully formed as an adult human being. So we still need to see some aspect of volition on the part of Jesus to be born so completely helpless in the normal way, absolutely helpless, stripped of all visible glory and power, needing to be swaddled like a newborn baby does by a human mother and needing to learn everything. This will just blow the circuits of your brain. How can Jesus be omniscient and need to learn things? Does anyone know the answer to that? But Jesus did. He was God, and also needed to learn everything. He was completely mute as all babies are. I know they make sounds, but those aren't words. They'll let you know and they're hungry, and tired, and have needs or in pain, they definitely do. But he couldn't talk. He had to learn how to talk. He who was the Word incarnate, couldn't say a word when he was born.

When he was born, a Jew, therefore a member of a conquered people under the heel of the Romans, they were effectively slaves in their own Promised Land, and within the Jewish nation born of unusually poor parents. If you look at the actual circumstances of his birth, very few babies in the world are born into that level of poverty. Joseph and Mary were clearly Godly, but they're also poor. Because it says in Leviticus 12, 7 and 8, "These are the regulations for the woman who gives birth to a boy or a girl, if she cannot afford a lamb, she is to bring two doves or young pigeons, one for a burnt offering, and the other for sin offering." So they met the criteria of too poor to offer the real offering, so they had to offer the poor man's offering. And look at the poverty of the circumstances of his birth, poor people generally have better birth circumstances than Jesus did: Born in a barn, laid in a manger where animals eat their food.

In many ways, they were like homeless people at that particular point, and His poverty would continue throughout His life. To one disciple who wanted to follow him, he said, remember how the disciples said, "I'll follow you wherever you go" and He said, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head." He was supported by a group of women who supported him out of their means. He was a servant of all, humble toward anyone who asked, hated and opposed by many, but the ultimate poverty was the death on the cross. The infinite downward journey was made complete when Jesus died under the wrath of God and the cross, as His clothes are being gambled for there in fulfillment of prophecy, He has no earthly possessions left, nothing, it's all gone. And then God pours out his wrath on Jesus. Our sin bearer suffering in our place, despised and rejected, hated and mocked, stripped of all possible dignity, he died, a death of an accursed man. No one ever has been as poor as Jesus was at that particular moment.

Still rich though. Still rich though. I don't like those theologies of what they call the kenosis, the emptying, how Jesus stopped being God, He would never stop being God. He was always the second person of the Trinity, and we can't quite fathom how he can be both sin bearer and also the second person of the Trinity, but the Father, the Son and the Spirit, that's eternal. It will never change. And so Jesus forever was and is God the Son. He never stopped being the son of God. He displayed supernatural power over the winds and rains, over fish, over donkeys, over people, over every illness, even over death. He displayed supernatural power. He was rich in wisdom. No one ever spoke the way he did. Supernatural knowledge, he knew people's minds and thoughts, even what they were thinking in the secrets of their hearts. And he was rich in love, his father loved him with a perfect love. It says in Hebrews 1:9, "You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness. Therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions." He was perfect in His character, and so the characteristics of Jesus, the nature of Jesus, the perfections of Jesus, drew forth the affections of his father, and so he testified at his baptism, "This is my beloved Son, whom I love. With Him, I am well pleased." And he was rich in love toward others, He poured out compassion and love toward others.

So, what did Christ accomplish? Well, he made you rich. That's what he accomplished. We know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for our sakes, He became poor. So that through his poverty, we might become rich. It was all for us.

Now, perhaps you didn't know that you were poor, perhaps you didn't know. There was a group of people in the Book of Revelation that didn't know either. And in Revelation 3:17, it says, "You say, I'm rich, I've acquired wealth and do not need a thing, but you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked." If you are out of fellowship with God, it doesn't matter how much money you make every year, it doesn't matter where you live, it doesn't matter what's in the bank account, you are infinitely poverty-stricken in the eyes of heaven. Everything we own will someday be taken from us, "…we brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out of it," 1st Timothy 6:7. The Vanderbilts left their beautiful homes behind, and now they're museums. Maybe someday Bill Gates's home will be a museum too if the Lord tarries, we don't know. But you can't bring it with you. And all of our beauty, and power, and strength, and skill are temporary and fading, as it says in Isaiah 40, 6 and 7, "All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall because the breath of the Lord blows on them." We are like grass, and you might be young and strong and vibrant and capable and skillful and healthy, but it's all temporary, because all of our human capabilities and acquisitions are temporary. And apart from Christ, we were rebellious and we were under the wrath of God, as it says in Romans 3, "There is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God."  And again, in Titus 3:3, "At one time, we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived, and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures, we lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. And we were powerless to resist the devil." As it says in Romans 5:6, "At that time, we were powerless. At the right time when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly." "We were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. And we were dead in our transgressions and sins," Ephesians 2 says, "and we were under the death penalty, for the wages of sin is death." That's what we were.

We were infinitely poverty-stricken, but Christ has made us rich, Amen. He has made us richer than your wildest dreams can imagine. Can't even imagine how wealthy we are. First and foremost, we are adopted as sons and daughters of the living God. We are heirs, as I said last week, with Abraham, heirs of the world. The meek will inherit the Earth, and if you're a child of God, you're one of those meek. If you're a son, daughter of Abraham, you're going to be named in his will and you will get some of the new heaven and new earth, infinitely rich, and death cannot take it from you, because you'll never die. You're rich in forgiveness, rich in righteousness, rich in adoption, rich in inheritance and rich in the Holy Spirit.

And Christ is richer too. What did he get? Well, he got us. Now, you would say that's not really much, but he doesn't look on it that way. We were created in the image of God and now redeemed through His blood and transformed back into the image of God, and he gained a "multitude from every tribe and language and people and nation" that will stand around the throne in white robes, holding palm branches in their hands and saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb." And he gets more and more and more of those people every day. It was a very, very good investment. He gets richer and richer every single day, as more and more of the elect come to faith in Christ.

So what application can we take from 2 Corinthians 8:9? Well, first, just receive the gift of God's grace. Receive the gift of God's grace. Perhaps you're a visitor here today, perhaps you're not a Christian, perhaps you're on the outside looking in, trust in Christ. You've heard the gospel plainly revealed this morning that God sent His son to save sinners like you. Trust in Him. You don't have to do any good works. As we've been saying in the book of Galatians, just by simple faith in Jesus, all your sins will be removed, and you will be adopted because he suffered wrath in your place. As JI Packer summed it all up in these words, “Adoption through propitiation, you are adopted as a son or daughter of the living God, because Jesus died in your place under the wrath of God.” Trust in Him.

Secondly, if you've come to Christ already just revel in the gift of grace, feel your wealth, understand that you're an heir of heaven, understand this, meditate on how Christ's poverty has made you rich, and feel that. It has nothing to do with material possessions. Anything given to you this week will be, at some point, destroyed, as Isaiah 40 said, "It's grass, it's going to wither and fall." But you are rich in ways that no thief can steal from you, and no moth and rust can destroy. You are infinitely wealthy.

And thirdly, understand how this grace compels you to act like Jesus and be gracious to the poor around you. That's the home base of 2 Corinthians 8:9, that's what it's all about. What is Paul doing in 2 Corinthians 8, he's raising money, he's raising money based on the example of the Macedonian Christians who were gracious, and despite the fact that they were really poor, gave lots of money to alleviate the poverty of Jewish Christians in Palestine. And so he's talking to the Corinthians, saying, I want you to know what the Macedonians did, you might want to think about giving. And then he talks about Jesus, and he says, "Look, Jesus is our example. You have been made rich by Jesus. Now, make others rich."

Make others rich. How do we do that? Well we could start with money. Money is the beginning. Okay, we're surrounded by people who don't know the name of Jesus. They go to the ends of the earth, and we should care about unreached people groups. There are 7296 unreached people groups. We should care about them and desire to reach them with the Gospel, and money is involved in that. It takes money to send missionaries and support them on the mission field. We're about halfway to our goal, Lottie Moon. I have full confidence that this church will meet the goal, but I urge you to be sacrificial. Think about how much God has given you and be generous and have compassion on poverty-stricken people, have compassion on the poor and needy right around us and to the ends of the earth. As I was doing research for a talk I'm going to give a week from today at the cross-conference, I'm doing a talk on Mercy Ministry, lessons on Mercy Ministry throughout church history, good and bad. I can't think of a crueler topic, alright? I'm probably up to 36 pages, and they've given me 50 minutes. I think I'm going to appeal for another 50 minutes, but I don't think they're going to give it to me. I think I've got that length of time, and that's it. So now I have to go back and just get it down to these few stories.

But one of the things I've learned is the incredible gap between the richest nations and the poorest nation, now it's wider than it's ever been in history. Before the industrial revolution, the gap was generally 4:1, that the wealthy nations per capita made four times as much as the poorest nations. Now, nearly half the world population, more than 3 billion people live on less $2.50 a day. The average American, $90 a day. Think about that. That's like 45:1. So what do we do with that information? What should we do with the fact that 1.3 billion people live in extreme poverty, about $1 a day, the fact that 1 billion children worldwide are living in poverty, 22,000 children die every day, directly due to poverty? What do we do with that information, the fact that more than 1 billion people lack adequate access to clean drinking water and 400 million of these are children, the fact that almost a billion people, 870 million people worldwide do not have enough food to eat, the fact that there are preventable diseases that take out the lives of people, like diarrhea even?

The first human being I ever saw die, died of diarrhea in Northern Pakistan. It was a little baby, 20 days old, and the parents had ignorantly cut off that child's fluids because they thought it would solve the diarrhea problem, with exactly the opposite. And gave, by the time that we had the child, got the child, the doctor got the child, child had double pneumonia and very low pulse, low blood pressure. We couldn't get a vein. We tried to give it fluids, and it died. And it was the first person I ever saw die. But you just feel like it's eminently preventable. It could have been prevented.

 So what do we do with that? What should we think? Well, I don't desire to make you feel guilty. I do desire to make you feel accountable, that all of the wealth that God has given you, you're accountable, and you're going to give an account for it so I'm I. I another lesson I've learned as I prepared for this talk, the most effective Mercy Ministry is intimate connection with the poor, not just money. If all you do is fly over and drop money down on them, you actually, in many cases, going to hurt them. A key principle in doing Mercy Ministry is don't do for others what they can do for themselves. That's key principle, because if you're doing for others what they can and should be doing for themselves, you're hurting them, but there are genuinely needy people who can't do certain things for themselves, start with orphans, and others. So I guess what I would urge you to do as 2014 comes near, ask the Lord, what does he want you to do with your wealth? Don't deny that you have wealth. Think about 2 Corinthians 8, that you have been made wealthy and say, Lord, give me an outlet, and challenge yourself with the verse I consider to be most challenging on Mercy Ministry in the entire Bible. It's Isaiah 58:10, it says there, "If you spend yourself on behalf of the needy," just that phrase is enough, it's a lot easier to spend your money than to spend yourself, but it's nowhere near as effective. If you're willing to give your time and your energy to build relationships with poor people, you're going to find out what their needs really are, and then you can help them in ways that will really be life transformational. So, I challenge you concerning Lottie Moon, be sacrificial, let's meet our goal, but let's go beyond that, and let's each of us find patterns of ministry to the poor and needy in the year 2014. Close with me in prayer.

Lord, we thank you for the extraordinary wealth you've given us, and I don't mean material wealth. I mean the riches of the Gospel blessed in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. Thank you for that, thank you for the gospel that sets us free from sin. How are imprisoned spirits are no longer chained to sin, and we're set free to follow Christ. Lord, we thank you also for our material blessings, but we're mindful that they come with accountability. Help us to be wise, help us to be generous to the poor and needy, but not foolish. Help us to be willing to invest ourselves, so we can find out the best way to help poor and needy right here in Durham and to the ends of the earth. We pray in Jesus name, Amen.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches on Galatians 3:6-14 and is how we can become adopted sons and daughters of Abraham by simple faith in Christ.

Turn in your Bibles to Galatians 3:6-14. You just heard Rick read it very beautifully for us. As we come to this incredible passage of Scripture, my mind goes to an Old Testament passage. This text is rich with Old Testament quotations, one after the other, and Paul is meditating on these. I'm brought to Isaiah 55:8-9, which says there, "My thoughts," this is the Lord speaking to the human race, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, says the Lord. As the Heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts."

Why do I begin there? Because as I look at the text today, the text testifies that everyone who has faith in Jesus Christ, is mysteriously a child of Abraham. And what I want you to do, is to see in the text, (and understand the significance of it), to help you to see that God willed, in a very mysterious way, a single individual living 4,000 years ago to be the father of our faith. He was living in Ur of the Chaldees at that point, and God called him to leave his country, his homeland, and begin a life of faith, of journeying in faith. And that this man, Abraham, is our father in faith. I want you to understand the significance of that, and that if you are not a child of Abraham, you will get nothing of his inheritance, which is everything in the world. And so it's incredibly beneficial to be an honorary Jew, and that's what we Gentile believers in Christ are. We have been adopted as sons and daughters of Abraham.

Now, about nine years ago, I was on route to a ministry opportunity in Romania, and I was at an airport in Italy, and I saw a group of a certain sect of Jews walking through the airport. And I don't know what it is, I hadn't seen that type of attire in America before. Maybe if I went to certain larger cities I would. But this was a sect of Judaism that took very seriously some aspects of the law of Moses. And they had black hats, and they had long beards, and they had the ear-locks, and they had the flowing robes. And right around that time, I was thinking about, and memorizing, and working on Romans 9-11. And there in Romans 11, it talks about how God has established this incredible olive tree with this root system, and the root system were the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And that I, as a believer in Jesus Christ, am like a wild olive shoot, and I've been grafted into this Jewish tree, and I've got Jewish sap flowing through me now, through that root system. And I thought, I toyed with the idea of going up to these, I don't know, Italian Jews, or something like that, and saying, "I just want you to know that I'm an honorary Jew." And to see how that conversation would go. I think if you went up to an average person in America, who wasn't biblically literate, and said, "You can be an honorary Jew," they would say, "Why in the world would I want to do that?"

And so we would either be rejected by the Orthodox Jews, especially after the events of the 20th century, and the horrors of the Holocaust. Rejected, the whole concept rejected, out of hand by them. Or from the average non-biblically literate citizen of the US, we would receive a yawn and a question, "What difference would that make? What do I get for being an honorary Jew?" And so my desire today, is to try to make that clear through Galatians 3:6-14. As we come into this incredible plan of God, a plan that no human being could ever have concocted, no human could ever have crafted this, I think about that passage in Isaiah 55. God's ways are not our ways, as the heavens are higher than the Earth, so are his ways soaring above us.

We come into the incredible plan of God here, and looking down the corridors of time, the eternity, and the unity of God's salvation plan floats to the top here for me. The eternity of it, the fact that this is a salvation plan that was crafted in the mind of God before the world began. It's an eternal plan, it's right on schedule. God knew exactly what he was doing when he crafted this plan. Many passages teach the eternality of God's salvation plan. First Corinthians 2:7 says, "We speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began."  The hidden wisdom of God, the secret wisdom of God, and God destined it for your glory and mine before time began. In 2 Timothy 1:9-10, speaking of how God has saved us, and called us to a holy life, "not because of anything we have done, but because of His own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it is now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus." So, if you're elect, if you're one of the children of God, God gave you grace. In his mind, He gave you grace in Christ Jesus before the world began.

Titus 1:2 speaks of a faith and knowledge resting on the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time. Ephesians 1 says that, "God chose us in Christ before the creation of the world, to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love, He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ." And then Peter speaks of the same thing, focusing on the death of Christ, on the death of Jesus in our place. 1 Peter 1 speaks of the, "Precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He, [Jesus], Was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last time for your sake."  So God had all of this worked out before the creation of the world. As history began, he started to unfold his plan. He knew exactly what was going to happen. The eternality of the plan of God is on my mind here, but also the unity of the plan of God. God has willed to save sinners from all over the world, from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation, to save sinners out of their nations the same way. Everybody gets saved the same way. Isn't that incredible? And that he's been working this out from 4,000 years ago. Even before that, by faith in the promise of God, that ultimately is Jesus Christ, sinners are justified. So that means that every Old Testament saint was saved the same way as every New Testament saint, and everyone that's ever been saved from sin. We've all been saved the same way. Hebrews 11, that faith chapter, traces all this out, beginning with Abel and the sacrifice that he offered, right on through, through Enoch's walking with God, through Noah's building the ark, all the way through. And the message, the unified message of Hebrews 11, is that all of those people were justified by faith, apart from works of the law. Same message that we have here in Galatians.

Romans chapter 4 teaches that both Abraham and David, and therefore, all Old Testament saints, were justified by faith in the promised Christ. Basically, Old Testament saints looked ahead, based on the word of God, looked ahead to a Christ who hadn't even been born yet, the same way we look back to a Christ who's already ascended to heaven. And neither they nor we can see him with our own eyes, we're justified the exact same way. So we have the eternality and the unity of the plan of God. Now, the Apostle Paul is giving here a powerful answer to the false teachers that were troubling the Gentile Christians in Galatian churches. He's giving a powerful answer to the Judaizers. These were Jewish people who would come in after Paul and Barnabas had planted these churches in Asia Minor, and they'd preach the pure Gospel, Paul and Barnabas did, they established healthy churches, and then they left. And then in come these Judaizers, these false teachers, who were trying to blend the work of Christ with the law of Moses, and said, "This is the recipe for human salvation, the work of Christ on the cross plus your obedience to the law of Moses. If you do these two things, you will be saved." And no doubt, these Judaizers were very intimidating to Gentile Christians. They came with a raft of Old Testament Scriptures. They came with clear precepts, line upon line from the laws of Moses. And these neophytes, these Gentiles who had very little knowledge of the Jewish religion, had no ability to refute them, they could not answer them. They were helpless, and they needed a defender, they needed a champion, and that was the Apostle Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles. And he steps in, it's left to a Jew. Paul is a Jew, and he's able to marshal, as he does here beautifully in this section that you heard Rick read for us, one Old Testament Scripture after another to prove his basic point, sinners are justified by faith alone, and not by works of the law. And that's what he's trying to prove. The Judaizers were intimidating people, who are misusing these Old Testament Scriptures. Paul knew them better than they did. He knew the scriptures and he said, "You're just not looking closely enough." And so he taught plainly from the Old Testament, justification by faith alone. And this is incredible encouragement to us, who read centuries later about all of this.

We come to the Book of Galatians, and we as believers in Christ, can be assured and encouraged about our salvation. And we can know that our sins are truly forgiven, not by our works, but simply by faith in Christ. And we are free from condemnation by the law. We are free from all fear of condemnation, we are done with that, because Christ has become a curse for us. And we are, in some mysterious way, adopted sons and daughters of Abraham, and we stand to inherit what Abraham stood to inherit. And we will sit at table someday in the kingdom, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, because of the work of Jesus Christ. Now, we have to prove all of this from Scripture, these assertions. We have to make it clear, and so Paul's going to give positive and negative proof from the Old Testament Scriptures, that these things are so.

Now, he has already, in Galatians 3:1-5, appealed to their experience, the Galatians' experience with the Gospel. You remember, we talked about that last time? Look again in verses 1-5, Galatians 3:1-5, he says there, "You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? Have you suffered so much for nothing –if it really was for nothing? Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?" And so he's going back to their experience, "You remember how it was when I came to your town, and I preached Christ crucified, and as you heard, you didn't do anything? You didn't go out and obey anything. You just heard, believed, and the Holy Spirit was poured out on you, you remember? Remember how it was when the Spirit flooded into your lives, and you were filled with joy, and filled with confidence, and assurance that your sins were forgiven, and you began to live the Spirit-filled life? You were filled with all of that. Do you remember how it was?" So he's going back to their experience. Now, he's going to say, "How it was for you, that's the way it has always been. Back to the time of Abraham, that's how sinners have always been made right with God." So he's going to give positive evidence from the case of Abraham, and from that, based on how was Abraham justified, he's going to draw a powerful implication, "You, believers in Christ, are children of Abraham." And then he's going to go negative on them the rest of the verse, from verse 10-14. He's going to talk about what the law cannot do, "It cannot justify, the law can only curse you." And so he's going to show that the law only brings curses, but that Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, and so, therefore, the implication is you can be free from all curses by faith in Christ, so that's where we're going.

Let's look first at the positive Old Testament proof, Abraham was justified by faith. Verses 6-9. Look at verse 6 right away, "Consider Abraham, he believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness." This is the centerpiece of Paul's argument here. He's going to bring in as witness number one, as central evidence, this man Abraham. Abraham was the father of the Jewish nation. This is brilliant strategy by the Apostle Paul, isn't it? Here are these Judaizers, they're trying to pull rank on these poor Gentile converts, and Paul pulls rank on them, "So let's look at the case of Abraham. You remember Abraham, don't you? Father of the nation. Let's try to find out what he discovered concerning justification." It's just really brilliant here. The Judaizers claim to have all the history, and the logic, and the law on their side, and Paul trumps them all by reaching for Abraham. And so he raises up Abraham as an example, and the awesome assertion he makes here, is that Abraham was justified by faith, and not by works of the law. This is proof.

The outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Gentiles, on the Galatians, that was proof of their experience, but it goes even deeper than that. Abraham, centuries before that, was justified the exact same way. The verse begins, in verse 6, ESV has it a little clearer, "Just as Abraham believed God, and it was credited, or counted to him as righteousness." In other words, verses 1-5, what you guys experienced, what happened to you, hearing with faith, God forgiving, God blessing, that exact same thing happened in Abraham's life. "Just as," that's how the verse begins, "Just as Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness." Now, this is an incredibly important statement, "Abraham believed God. " Now, look at it carefully, it does not say he believed in God, okay? It's true he believed in God, but even the demons believe that there is a God and they shudder. It's a different thing, a higher thing, to believe God. Believe what? Believe what God has spoken, believe the promise. "I believe God when he says this to me." You see what I'm saying?

Now, you have to believe in God to believe God, and so he believed what God had spoken to him, he believed the promise that he had made, he believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Now, what does that mean? The words 'credited' are very important for our faith. We believe that righteousness was credited to Abraham's account. He was seen to be, on the basis of faith, righteous in the sight of God. You can't put a price on the value of that. If you are not that righteous, if you are not perfectly righteous, you cannot be with God. It says in Habakkuk chapter 1:13, [God's] "eyes are too pure to look on evil. He cannot tolerate wrong." If you are not perfectly righteous, you cannot be with God. Perfect righteousness is required, but this is what this statement is saying, that perfect righteousness was credited to Abraham's account on the basis of his faith.

Now, how many of you, I don't want you to raise your hands, but how many of you have anonymous numbered accounts in Swiss banks? I know you're saying, you're saying, "If I had one, I wouldn't be raising my hand here and I have it for that very reason." I don't know that much about them, except for movies that I watch, where millions of dollars get wired to the account, and they find out that the money's there, and then something happens in the movie. Do you realize what kind of righteousness was wired to your account when you believed in Jesus? It's absolutely limitless, perfect righteousness credited to you the moment you trusted in Jesus, and that's what needed to happen, because without perfect righteousness, you can't go to heaven. And so Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned, or credited to him as righteousness. Not only did this happen for him, but he became a paradigm, an example for everyone that would follow.  It's the same for everyone.

Now, God's purpose, God's saving purpose was for all nations. From the very beginning, he intended to save all nations. Amazingly, he intended to save all nations through this man Abraham. Now, who was Abraham? Abraham was, by some accounts, it seems, a moon-worshipping pagan living in Ur of the Chaldeans, where we would call Babylon, in that area. And at some point in his life, he heard God speak to him. God called him out of the darkness of paganism and he gave him this statement. He says, and this is Genesis 12:1-3, God said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people, and your father's household, and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you. I will make your name great and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you, I will curse, [Listen] and all peoples on Earth will be blessed through you." That is staggeringly important. All peoples on Earth, every single people group, every single nation on the face of the Earth, blessed through this man, Abraham. That was God's intention from the very beginning. God was intending to save the nations, to save people, to save Gentiles. Is that relevant to the Galatians? Yes, they're Gentiles. And God was intending to save the Gentiles, the Galatians through Abraham. And so he makes it plain. Look at verse 8 in our text, "The Scripture foresaw... " Interesting expression there. "The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and announce the Gospel in advance to Abraham. All nations will be blessed through you." He's quoting Genesis 12:3. God intended to save people from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation, through this one nation, the Jews, through this one man, Abraham.

And Paul personifies Scripture. I find that amazing, the Genesis account, "The Scripture foresaw." Isn't that an interesting expression? It's like the Scripture could know something in advance. But I think we really know that it's God who is doing the foreseeing. And that God knew, that one day, he would be justifying Gentiles through Abraham. And he announced it in the Scripture, made it plain. I think that's what's going on there. And so notice, he also says, "He announced the Scripture," announced the Gospel in advance to Abraham. Again, the unity of the work of God. It is always only been one message that saves. It's the Gospel that was announced, "All peoples on Earth will be blessed through you." It was the Gospel, and so this saving message came through.

Now, that was just the beginning of Abraham's life of faith. I don't know how God communicated to Abraham. I don't know if it was a still small voice, or an audible voice, or what happened. But I know he heard Him and he began to orient his life that way. And it's hard to trace out exactly what happened from the first calling, and the events of his life. But in due time, at the proper time, he moved to the promised land. He went to the land that God showed him and he began to travel in that land as a stranger in a foreign country. He lived in tents and he was not able to settle down there. The land wasn't his yet, and so he was traveling as a stranger in a foreign country. But he was hearing God speaking to him and he was worshipping God. And he was setting up altars in the promised land, and calling on the name of the Lord. And it says that, "Abraham was called God's friend and he had a relationship with Him." And so by faith, he's developing his love relationship with God. At a certain time, he and his nephew Lot, their herdsmen quarreled, and there wasn't enough land for their sheep, and all that. And so they separated, and Lot went down to Sodom and Gomorrah, where he was. And God walked through the land with Abraham, and he said, "Look at this land. Look at the length and the width of it. Look at it. I'm going to give this land to you and to your offspring forever." And so Abraham heard him say that, and he believed that.

But then came beautifully, Genesis 15, one of the great chapters in the Bible. I've been thinking about Genesis 15 for years. I'll never stop thinking about it. And it's in my mind, as I began this sermon. When it says, "As the Heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways."  That's about what God said to Abraham that night. Abraham decided not to take any of the plunder from the battle with the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he said, "I don't want any of their filthy money." And then God appeared to Abraham, and said, "Fear not, Abraham. I am your shield and I am your very great reward." I'm what you get. And he said, "Well, if we could have a conversation here. How can you give me anything, because I don't have an heir? And this guy Eliezer of Damascus is my heir. What are we going to do about that? You said, 'I'm going to be the father of many nations.' I'm not seeing that right now. Eliezer's a great guy, alright. I'm sure he'll be excited to get whatever it is I have to give him, but what's happening?" And God said, "This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir." And then I don't know if he said, "Come on out and look at the stars," but that's what happened. Imagine him going out of his tent and just looking up at the stars. And as the heavens are higher than the Earth, there is God in all of his immensity, and it's one of those beautiful starry nights. It must have been, maybe low humidity in a desert area and you can see a lot of stars. "Count them if you can, Abraham. So shall your offspring be." It's a promise. "You're going to have that many offspring. You're going to have that many descendants, like the stars in the night sky." Abraham believed the Lord and it was credited him as righteousness.

Now, I actually don't think that's the first time he believed him, but that was a key moment in his relationship and a paradigm example. The promise spoken, he heard, he believed that it's true. And he was justified on that basis. Isn't it amazing that one of those stars, one of those descendants would be Jesus, the Son of God, the Son of man, who would die on the cross for our sins, for Abraham's sins, Isaac's and Jacob's sins, and give us eternal life? But then God reiterated the promise concerning the land, "And by the way, I'm going to give you that land. I already told you. I haven't changed my mind." He says, "Well, how do I know that I'm going to get it? I'm still a stranger. I'm living in a tent. How do I know?" And that's when they had that awesome covenant cutting ceremony, where he laid out some animal pieces in a path, and a dreadful darkness came over Abraham, and God reiterated the promise, and was very clear, four centuries, that his people would be strangers in a country not their own. They'd be enslaved and mistreated, but God would punish that nation, he'd bring them out with great power, and they would inherit that land. And then a torch, and a fire pot came representing God, and he passed through the pieces, and the covenant cutting ceremony was sealed. In effect, God said, "May I cease to exist, may I be exploded like these animals, if I don't keep my promise to you." He swore by himself, he would do it. And Abraham believed all of that, descendants like the stars in the sky, and the land that would be his forever, his and his descendants. That's the faith of Abraham.

Now, sometime later, in Genesis 17, God gave him the gift of circumcision. In Genesis 17:4, "Behold my covenant is with you and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations." Very important statement. Thus Abraham was justified as an uncircumcised Gentile, that's the whole key. And Paul makes that point in Romans 4:9-11. He speaks of the blessedness of the Gospel, the blessedness of full forgiveness of sins. And he says, "Is this blessedness only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised?" Well, we have been saying that Abraham's faith was credited to him as righteousness. Under what circumstances was it credited? Was it after he was circumcised or before? ... I'm pausing for dramatic effect. Okay, I'm putting a big gap as we're waiting for the answer. Well, when was it? It was before he was circumcised. Ta-da! That's the whole point. He was an uncircumcised Gentile when he received the blessing of justification. It was not after, but before, and he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith, while he was still uncircumcised. Judaizers, leave town, you're finished because Abraham is the paradigm example of an uncircumcised Gentile, who received all of these blessings simply by faith. So where do we fit in? Well, true Jews, true Jews are of the same faith of Abraham, and so is anyone who is of the same faith as Abraham. We are also considered to be, reckoned to be, sons and daughters of Abraham.

Now, the Jews prided themselves in their genealogical descent from Abraham. They were children of Abraham and they talked about it a lot. After the exile to Babylon, when they came back, they were big into genealogies. And you had to prove from your genealogy that you were in the priesthood, you had to prove from your genealogy that you were even a Jew. And if you were of a mongrel race, they didn't want you. They were very zealous about being Jews and the genealogy is very important to them. And so in Jesus' day, when he came, Jesus faced his Jewish enemies who wanted to kill him, they hated him. And Jesus said, "You are doing the things your own father does," meaning the devil. And they said, "Abraham is our father." Hmm. Jesus answered, "If you were Abraham's children, then you would do the things Abraham did." In other words, just because you are genealogically connected to Abraham, doesn't mean you're actually a son or daughter of Abraham. And so Paul makes this exact same point in Romans 2:28-29, "A man is not a Jew, if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward in physical. No, a man is a Jew, if he is one inwardly. And circumcision is circumcision of the heart by the Spirit, not by the law. Such a man's praise does not come from men, but from God."

In other words, you want to know who the Jews are? Believers in Jesus. Whether they've been circumcised or uncircumcised is immaterial. It doesn't matter at all. What matters is, do you have the same faith as Abraham? And so he says, "Abraham's the father of all who believe, both Jew and Gentile." Romans 4:11 and 12, "So then Abraham is the father of all who believe, but have not been circumcised, in order that righteousness might be credited to them." And listen to this, Romans 4:12, "He is the father of the circumcised, who not only are circumcised, but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had, while he was still uncircumcised." Walking in the footsteps of faith after Abraham, that's how you can know whether you're a child of Abraham or not. Look at our text, look at verse 7, "Understand then, that those who believe are children of Abraham." And again, verse 9, "So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham."

This is the incredible implication of our text today. You can be a Jew. You can be a son or daughter of Abraham. Every single person in this room can be a son or daughter of Abraham, Caucasian-Americans and African-Americans alike can be sons and daughters of Abraham. Asian people, European, Latinos can be sons and daughters of Abraham. Men and women, boys and girls can be sons and daughters of Abraham. Wealthy German businessmen can be sons and daughters of Abraham. Frail, elderly women in nursing homes can be daughters of Abraham. Redneck Nazi skinheads, who have spent years shouting anti-Semitic threats, can be converted and become Jews. It's incredible. This is what it's teaching here. Anyone can be a child of Abraham, by faith in Jesus Christ. And what's required, is not obedience to the laws of Moses. What's required is faith in Jesus Christ. Now, many people would just respond with a yawn to that. Can I just deal with that right now? Let's put it this way. It says very plainly in Romans 4:12 that God has made Abraham heir of the world. Can I speak quite plainly to you? If you're not named in his will, you get nothing.

If you're not named in Abraham's will, you get nothing. He gets it all. Now, you may think, "That's not fair." Take it up with God. God chose Abraham and chose to save the world through Abraham. And if you are a son or daughter of Abraham, you are heir of the world too, and you'll get a piece of the new heaven, and the new Earth that's coming. By the way, that term "heir of the world" is not found, as far as I can tell, in the Old Testament. He was heir of the Promised Land. It's Romans that says, "Heir of the world." My feeling is, if God gives him that patch of ground and more, he has not violated his promise. He can be generous. If God doesn't give him that patch of ground, He has broken his promise. He's going to give him that plus everything. He is heir of the world. So it is not a yawning matter to be a son or daughter of Abraham. If you're not, you get nothing, but if you are a son or daughter of Abraham, you get everything. You get named in the will, along with Abraham, and so you get the inheritance. You get God as your reward.

You get to have him in heaven forever and forever. As he said to Abraham, "I am your shield and your very great reward," and you get to be an heir of the world. Alright, that's positive.

What about the negative proof in the Old Testament? Look at verses 10-14, "All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law.' Now, clearly, no one is justified before God by the law, because the righteous will live by faith. The law is not based on faith. On the contrary, the man who does these things will live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree." "He redeemed us," [verse 14] "in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith, we might receive the promise of the Spirit." Now, we've been talking about all the blessings, blessings flowing to us through Abraham.

We can get Abraham's blessings. Well, the Old Testament also speaks of curses, blessings and curses. The law is filled with blessings and curses. Yes, there's a bunch of blessings, but there's even a longer section dealing with curses. And to rely on obeying the law, is to live under a curse, according to Paul. In Deuteronomy 28, it lists blessings for complete obedience, but also curses for disobedience. Listen to Deuteronomy 28:15-19, "However, if you do not obey the Lord, your God, and do not carefully follow all His commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you, and overtake you. You'll be cursed in the city and cursed in the country. Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed. The fruit of your womb will be cursed. The crops of your land will be cursed. The calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks will be cursed. You'll be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out. You'll be cursed in the morning and cursed in the evening."

All of these things, the flowing of curses come on those who do not perfectly keep the law. But all of those are a pale shadow of the real curse. And the real curse doesn't happen here on Earth. The real curse is reflected for us in Matthew 25:41, When the judge of all the Earth will say to those on his left, the goats, the unbelievers, "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." That's the curse that Paul has in mind here, eternity in hell. Now, the specific curse falls on anyone who fails to obey everything in the law all the time. Look at verse 10, "All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law.' "

So here it is, I'll say it in two words. All the law, all the time. Anything short of that, you're condemned to hell. All the law, all the time. It says plainly in James 2:10, "Whoever keeps the whole law, and yet stumbles at just one point, is guilty of breaking all of it." And the law has no provision for covering of sin. All it does is turn on you at that point, accuse you and condemn you. That's all the law can do, it cannot save you. And so as Peter said, It's a yoke, a crushing yoke that neither we, nor our fathers were able to bear. Take a single aspect of it, "You shall not covet.” You shall not set your heart on anything that doesn't belong to you and desire it. Can you keep that law? Can you keep it for a day? Even if you could keep it for a day, it's only part of the law. And could you keep it the rest of your life? And the problem is, you've already broken it, so what are you going to do? By the time you hear about this, you're already a transgressor, you have no hope of salvation by the law, you're under a curse, if you rely on that to save you.

The obvious conclusion is justification cannot be by the law. verse 11, "Clearly, no one is justified before God by the law. On the contrary, the righteous will live by faith." Isn't that sweet, how Paul can't stay negative for very long? Curse, curse, curse, it's like, "Oh, just cling to this, the righteous will live by faith. Live by faith." Therefore, we have here, in verses 11 and 12, two ways to live, "The righteous can live by faith," or verse 12, "On the contrary, the man who does these things will live by them."  So you have two ways to live, by faith, by grace, by the Spirit, by the blood of Jesus, or by law, by self-effort, self-righteousness, whatever's good in your own sight, two different ways to live. And one of them leads to life, and one of them leads to death.

"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law," [it says], "By becoming a curse for us." What does that mean? He stood in our place, in our place, He became a curse. Notice that word, "He became a curse." What's so significant of that is, just as Christ became a curse, we can become righteous, actually righteous. Jesus was actually cursed for us. How was that? Well, he died on the cross, on a tree. And the Scripture says very plainly, "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree." Do you think that Saul of Tarsus was troubled by that verse when he's trying to consider the Messiahship, the Messianic credentials of Jesus? "How could it be? It doesn't make any sense. The Messiah, Son of David, hanging on a Roman cross, his blood shed. How could it be, that this one clearly cursed by God, could be the same one who spoke to me on the road to Damascus?"

I picture this, Paul puzzling it through, blinded by that light, waiting for Ananias to come lay hands on him, waiting to get baptized, praying, saying, "God, answer this for me. I don't understand. Jesus was cursed, right?" "Yes." "He was hung on a tree?" "Yes." "He's cursed, and yet, clearly, He is the Son of God, glorious, radiant, resurrected. How?" He became a curse for me. I deserve to die. He took my place. He's a substitute for me. He became a curse, so I am now free. I'm redeemed from the curse of the law, because Christ became a curse for me.

And the implication, you also, therefore, as a son or daughter of Abraham, can be blessed and not cursed. Verse 14, "He redeemed us, in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith, we might receive the promise of the Spirit." Now, we're going to talk more about the spiritual life in weeks to come, God willing, but this promise of the Spirit, the very way we began chapter 3, "The Spirit poured out on us, who are sons and daughters, not just of Abraham, but of Almighty God,"

What application can we take from this? Well, a number of things. First and foremost, I want you to look back at the eternality and unity of God's saving plan, and rejoice in it. God didn't throw this saving plan together at the last minute. He's been planning to save you before the world began. Secondly, see the immeasurable value of being a child of Abraham. He is heir of the world, if you are named in his will, you get everything. You get to be an heir of the new heaven and new Earth. Have you been grafted into that Jewish olive tree and are you now receiving life-giving sap through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?

Thirdly, understand that this blessing only comes to those who have faith like Abraham. Only to those who have faith like Abraham, those are the only true sons and daughters of Abraham. Fourth, understand that this faith is plainly faith in Christ Jesus. Can I make an appeal to you? Trust in Christ. You've come in here today, you're hearing the Gospel, you may never hear it this plainly again. I'm pleading with you, believe in Jesus now, for the forgiveness of your sins.

And now, if I can ask all of you, evaluate your lives now. Are you walking in the footsteps of the faith that Abraham had? John Piper uses an illustration here, and I want to close with this illustration, of an orchestra hall, and the music of the symphony is the Glory of God. And everybody here knows that faith is the pre-condition for entering that hall, and enjoying the music, but some people, we fear, look on saving faith like a ticket to enter the orchestra hall, and listen to the music someday, and if you've got that ticket, you've trusted in Jesus, you can stick that ticket in your pocket, and live however you want, and when the time comes, you can hand over that ticket, and enter the orchestra's hall, and listen to the music, which is the Glory of God. That is a faulty view of saving faith. Instead, saving faith is like an ear for the music, that you're given as a gift. It's not a ticket to get in. It's an ear for the music that you start to hear in your life and you start to love that music. And you love the music of the Glory of God, and you start to order your life, so you can hear more and more of it, and someday, you get to hear it completely with clear ears, forever and ever. Are you walking in the footsteps of the faith, that our father Abraham had, the Glory of God, fellowship with God, yearning for the things of God? Rejoice and be glad, if that's true of you, because you also, like Abraham, are an heir of the world. Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for the deep, rich, full truths in Galatians 3:6-14, more than we can fathom in 20 sermons or more. And Father, I thank you that we have become adopted sons and daughters of Abraham, and stand to receive, with Abraham, the inheritance of eternity with God, and citizenship in the New Jerusalem, and a piece of the new heaven, and new Earth. I pray that you would draw to faith any who hear this message, that they would trust and walk in the footsteps of the faith, that our father Abraham had, while he was still uncircumcised. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches Galatians 3:1-5, and explores the Apostle Paul's warns that justification is a free gift from the Holy Spirit and can not be earned by works.

So we come to Galatians 3:1-5, and as we do, I come to the issue of the perfection of Christians, how it is that Christians are made perfect once they have come to an initial saving faith in Christ. The title of this sermon is Christians are perfected by the Spirit and not by the law. We saw last time in Galatians 2:16 that clear statement, the doctrinal center, of the book of Galatians, really, of the Christian message to the world, of justification by faith alone apart from works of the law. So you can see it there in Galatians 2:16. There, Paul says, "We know that a person is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ." So he says, "We, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law. Because by observing the law, no one will be justified." So this is the answer to the Philippian jailer's question, "What must I do to be saved?" It's a question every single descendant of Adam should be asking. People don't realize the danger they're in and their sin. They don't understand how the wrath of God remains on them as long as they do not turn to Christ. As it says in John 3:36, once they have repented and turned to Christ, they are delivered from the wrath of God. But before that, they are vessels or objects of wrath and they're under judgment. And we should all, every single human being should be asking that question that the Philippian jailer asked, trembling, having just been rescued from committing suicide. He brings Paul and Silas out and asked them, "What must I do to be saved?" And the answer is, "Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved." And that is the answer. Justification by faith apart from works of the law.

We know that Paul is addressing a heresy that had come in after he had planted those churches in Asia Minor in Galatia, preaching Christ crucified, preaching justification by faith. In came some Judaizers afterwards, and they began messing it up. They began saying, “Faith in Christ is not enough. You need to add the works of the law, the Jewish law in particular. You have to be circumcised. You have to obey the Law of Moses in order to be saved.” Paul says, "This is no gospel at all. It's not good news at all to know that you can, buy your own law-keeping, save yourself, because no one can do it." And so he is writing to establish plainly, again, in the minds of these Galatian Christians, what is the Gospel?

So we are justified, we sinners are justified, we are made right with a holy God simply by faith in Jesus Christ. And that if you trust in Jesus and you put your faith in him, all of your sins will be forgiven. And you will be seen to be perfectly righteous in the sight of God, positionally righteous. The perfect work of Jesus Christ in law-keeping and in living under the Law of Moses, that perfect record of obedience will be imputed or credited to your account, and God will forever see you as obedient as his own Son. Isn't that staggering? I just can't say it enough. That if you're a Christian, God sees you as obedient as Jesus, perfectly righteous. But how then, after you've come to faith in Christ, after you have been justified, how then shall we live our lives? And we find that there is a call, an upward call of God in Christ Jesus toward perfection that's part of Christianity. We find that we are saved in stages, and that our salvation from sin is not complete. The positional aspect is instantaneous, it happens right at the beginning of the Christian life. You hear the Gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected, you repent and believe, and instantaneously, you're justified. But then begins that long journey of sanctification. And I think our text today addresses that. Having begun by the Spirit, you are not perfected by law-keeping. You're not perfected by the flesh, by human efforts.

But we're going to find in the gospel, we're going to find here in the book of Galatians, the same way you begin the Christian life, that's how you make progress in it as well. We are called on to be perfect every day. Matthew 5:48, Jesus said, "You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." And we begin to learn all of the areas, the scope, of that perfection, how it covers everything that there is in life. Every thought, every inclination or attitude of the heart, every occasion, every interaction with another human being, is an opportunity for you to be perfect, to love God with all of your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. You're going to find that sanctification calls on you to seek to be perfect, as Christ is perfect. But it's impossible to do it in the flesh.  We're going to find out that the same way that we began, through faith in Christ crucified and resurrected, by reliance in the spirit, that's how we make progress in the Christian life. And we're going to learn to rely, as Paul says in Philippians 1:6, on, “He who began a good work in us.” That he, the same one that began this good work in us, he's going to continue it. He's going to perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. God means to carry on our salvation the same way he began it, by us completely relying on Jesus. And to God be the glory then for every step we make, every advance we make in sanctification, God gets the full credit and the full glory.

So let's look at it step by step. Jonathan, what an incredible reading of scripture. That was awesome. But the impact of that, "Oh, foolish Galatians!" I was jumping at that moment.  It was startling to me. But it's right there in the text, so thank you, Jonathan, for highlighting that. That was like bold, italic, underscore there.  Powerful. But Paul begins a passionate appeal and he seems to be very distressed with the Galatians. He's very passionate about this, "Oh, foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?" And there's this little Greek word "oh" in there. And so it's an emotional word here. Same word you see in that in incredible doxology in Romans, "Oh, the depths of the riches, the wisdom, and the knowledge of God." There, that "oh" is one of rich joy and the depths of the wisdom of God and he's overwhelmed, it's a word of worship. But here, it really is a word of bitter disappointment. He's emotional here. Similar perhaps to the word "oh" in Jesus's statement, "Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you. How often I've longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you are unwilling." Same kind of bitter sadness at what's happening with these Galatian churches.

Paul is heartbroken that these churches that he has planted have in some way turned their back on the true gospel and have embraced this false doctrine of "works righteousness." They've turned their backs on the gospel of God and Christ. And he calls it "foolishness." "Oh, foolish Galatians." So there's the foolishness here, it's not a matter of stupidity. It's not that they're stupid or intellectually depleted or in some way lacking intelligence. Really, it's that moral stupidity that we get in the book of Proverbs, the fool of the book of Proverbs. There's a stubbornness of heart here, in this word "foolish." They're stubborn, their hearts are hard. And they were fools to exchange the truth of God for the lie of fleshly works. And again, I don't think it's spoken harshly or angrily. He's trying to wake them up out of the stupor of this false doctrine. And so I picture him saying it tenderly but sharply here.

Similar to Jesus on the road to Emmaus with those two disciples, where he says, "How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that God has spoken through the prophets. Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter into glory?" And so, at that point, Jesus then patiently explained the scriptures and showed why they were foolish not to be ready for the resurrection. And I think Paul does the same thing here. He doesn't just stop at calling them "fools," but he reasons with them based on their experience and then later, (we’ll study next week and beyond), based on the scriptures. And so in Galatians 3, he's going to talk first about their own experience with the gospel. That's what we are looking at today. Over the next few weeks, we will see that he's going to be reasoning from Abraham's experience as well. So he's going to reason with them from scripture and from experience, but experience first. And he's going to say, "Look at yourselves. Look at what happened to you. Look when the Holy Spirit came. And your relationship then to the law."

And he speaks here of the bewitching appeal of false teaching. "Who has bewitched you?" It's almost like, "Who has hypnotized you? Who's put the evil eye on you?" It's an interesting Greek word here. "Who's kinda put the evil eye on you to get you to believe this false doctrine?" Now, Paul's not using it literally, but it's almost like some mind control cult, some weird thing where you come back a year later and people are all walking around with this glazed look on their face, and they're all talking in a monotone. It's like, "What happened to you people? You've become weird, doctrinally weird. Who has bewitched you to follow this false doctrine?" And so, he appeals then to their first experience to try to win them back to how they first understood the gospel. Later in the book of Galatians, he's going to say, "What's happened to all your joy? Don't you remember how it was? You remember how joyful you were when you realized you were forgiven? How God had sent his son to die in your place? Don't you remember that? Can't we get back to that? And remember how you loved me at that time and how warm you were and how you embraced me? And you would've plucked out your eyes and given them to me. You were just so loving, and now you're set against me."

And so he goes back to their experience. "Let's go back to how it was when you first heard the gospel of Christ." And how did they first experience Christ? Well, they experienced Christ by faith. So look at it in verse one, "Oh, foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified." They first saw Christ. You could almost put quotations around that, but not really. They first saw Jesus crucified, publicly crucified. Now, how did they do this? Please don't imagine they had the Jesus film back then. I know you've heard of that ministry and people go all over places and they set up generators and they play the Jesus film. That's not what's going on here. You know what was going on? Just simple, clear preaching. It was just proclamation of Christ and him crucified. And friends, that's been going on for 20 centuries. It's going on all over the world right now. It's going on right here in this room. A simple proclamation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, born of a virgin, the one who lived a sinless life, who spoke all of his incredible teachings. This Jesus who spoke these parables, the Sermon on the Mount, who never sinned, the sinless Jesus. This one who did supernatural signs and wonders, who walked on water, who spoke to the wind and the waves and they obeyed him, who spoke to fish and they swam into fishermen's nets. Who could heal any disease and sickness, who could raise the dead, this Jesus was crucified. And he was publicly portrayed before your eyes as crucified.

They saw with the eyes of their heart. You know how it says in Ephesians 1:18, "May the eyes of your heart be enlightened." What are the eyes of the heart? It is faith. I really believe that. Faith is the eyesight of the soul. By faith, you see what cannot be seen based on words. So you hear the words of Christ and you can picture him in your mind's eye. You can survey the wondrous cross, and you can see Jesus, the Son of God, nailed to the cross. You can actually almost have a sense of what it was like when his hands and feet were pierced with those nails, as the nails were driven into the wood and as blood soaked into that wood and streamed down his body. You can picture that in your mind's eye. You can picture the circumstances, that eerie darkness that came over all the earth at that time. And you can hear his words saying, "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing." And the events as, Kyle talked about in the baptism, the gospels give us the events, what happened at the time. And the words he spoke, here he said, "Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit." And "My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?" And "It is finished." You can hear these words, and so Christ crucified is proclaimed, and I imagine you can see that now in your mind's eye, too, you can picture Christ crucified, you can picture him there. And more than that, along come the epistles, the apostolic preaching of the cross gave the explanation of why of the circumstances. They tell us why it is that the Son of God died. And how in 2 Corinthians 5:21, it says, "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him, we might become the righteousness of God" and how by faith in Christ all our sins are forgiven. And so, you foolish Galatians, we publicly portrayed, we placarded Jesus Christ crucified before your very eyes, and then the Spirit worked in you at that time, a supernatural work of regeneration. You were born again as you heard that gospel. Faith came by hearing, and you heard, and the faith sprang to life within your heart, just like that man born blind. You'd never seen light before that moment. But suddenly, at that moment, God said, "Let there be light," and in your heart, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ sprang up inside your hearts. And you didn't have to see anything, you're just listening to the gospel as it was being preached, and you believed. You remember how it was? By simple hearing with faith, you were justified. By simple hearing with faith, your sins were forgiven. And that was your first encounter with Jesus. That's how it all started for you. That's how you encountered Jesus. Do you remember how it was? But not only that, at that moment, you also experienced the third person of the Trinity. At that moment, you received the gift of the Holy Spirit. And so you experienced the Holy Spirit at that moment, too.

Look at verses 2-4, "I would like to learn just one thing from you. Did you receive the Spirit by observing a law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to finish your race or be perfected by the flesh, by human effort? [verse 4] Have you suffered so much for nothing if it really was for nothing?" So he now is appealing to their experience with the Spirit. He talks about the incredible gift of the Holy Spirit that came into their lives at that time. He asked a dramatic rhetorical question, "I just want to learn one thing from you." So he's underscoring by that use of kind of a dramatic rhetorical question, "Tell me something about yourselves. I want to ask one thing. I want you to go back to how it was at that time. You remember when you received the gift of the Holy Spirit? Do you remember how it was? The Holy Spirit came on you at that moment, the moment you heard and believed. You didn't go out on week's probation with a list of dos and don'ts and then based on how well you obeyed those dos and don'ts, then we saw which of you would get the Spirit. That's not how it happened. It was hearing, believing, and then the Spirit came. There was no time lapse. The Holy Spirit was poured out on you, uncircumcised, gentile believers in Jesus. That's how the Spirit came."

Now you may wonder, you say, "That really wasn't my experience with the Gospel. We didn't have signs and wonders. We didn't speak in tongues." You may have wondered. Well, back then in the apostolic era, frequently, the Holy Spirit would be poured out in a very signal way, a spectacular way. You remember how, on the day of Pentecost, all of the believers were gathered there in the upper room, you remember? And on that day of Pentecost, suddenly, there came a sound like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were staying, and they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. And all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them. That was a visible auditory... Just an actual experience of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. And unbelievers, people that hadn't come to faith in Christ yet, could hear the sound. And they gathered around the house, so it was something everybody experienced at that point.

Well, that same kind of experience happened at other times. You remember how Peter went to Cornelius's house, remember? And he preached to that Roman centurion and his family and friends that were gathered in the house. And as Peter was preaching about Christ crucified and resurrected, as that preaching was going on, while he was preaching, suddenly, the same thing happened again, like a mini-day of Pentecost happened. In Acts 10:44-47, "The Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God." So there was a clear sensory proof of the coming of the Spirit, that's something God did back then from time to time. Then Peter said, "Can anyone keep these people from being baptized with water? They've received the Holy Spirit just as we have." I believe that water baptism is an outward and visible sign of the true baptism that's already happened, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. If you're a genuine believer in Christ, you are immersed in the Holy Spirit. And if anyone doesn't have the Spirit, they're not a Christian. Romans 8 teaches that. So you are immersed in faith in Christ, by faith in Christ in the Spirit, you've already been baptized in the Spirit. We just testified to it outwardly to the world by the water baptism. And so they linked it back then, they said, "Look, these are uncircumcised Romans, these are uncircumcised Gentiles, but they've received the Holy Spirit." And I've already learned from that, that sheet being let down, "Don't call anything impure that God has made clean," He's purified these Gentiles now. They're clean by faith in Christ. Uncircumcised Gentiles. And the Holy Spirit came.

So, Galatians, remember how that was? I think the same thing must have happened for them. And they received a supernatural manifestation of the outpouring of the Spirit. Later, in our verse here, in verse five, he says, "Does God work miracles among you by works of the law or by believing what you heard?" And so, again, signs and wonders and miracles poured out on these Galatians. And they received the gift of the Holy Spirit. Now, we don't have those manifestations, but that doesn't mean that we don't receive the gift of the Spirit. I've already said in Romans chapter eight, If you have not received the gift of the Spirit, you're not justified. You're not a Christian. So every justified person, every genuine Christian, receives the Spirit. What does that mean? What does it mean to receive the Spirit? Well, it means to receive the gift of the third person of the Trinity, who, in some amazing way, comes and dwells in your heart. He dwells within you. He lives within you. John 14:16-17, Jesus said this, "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever – the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, cannot receive him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him for he lives with you and will be in you."

So the Spirit is going to be in you forever. The Spirit comes and dwells within your heart. And we're going to talk in future weeks about the varieties of the workings of the Spirit in the life of a believer. He comes at the beginning of the Christian life, at the moment of justification, and takes up residence within your life, and nothing is ever the same again, the third person of the Trinity. And then he fulfills the promise of radical transformation. He makes you into a new being. He is the fulfillment of the promise in Ezekiel, "I will take out the heart of stone, and I will put in you a heart of flesh, and I'll put my Spirit on you, and I will move you to follow my decrees and my laws. " So by the power of the Spirit, you then make progress in the Christian life and the Spirit fulfills that promise of radical transformation, so a genuine believer may love now what Christ loves and hate, genuinely hate, what Christ hates. And a genuine believer yearns for what Christ yearns for, and wills what Christ would will, and rejects what Christ would reject. Transformed from the inside by the Spirit, you have the same emotional reactions and you have the mind of Christ and think like he does, and out of that internally changed nature, you then live a different kind of life. That's biblical sanctification. That's what the Holy Spirit has come to do inside of us. And "It is not by law," he says, "but by the hearing with faith." He says that they're foolish and bewitched to think that having received the Holy Spirit by hearing with faith, they now make progress toward perfection by some other means, by human effort, by the flesh. They did not earn the Spirit. He was a beautiful gift given to them freely.

The gift of the Spirit is not earned by any works of piety. It is not earned by any moralistic laws, not earned by circumcision or dietary regulations, not earned by fasting. The Holy Spirit is not earned by any kind of self-denial. He is not earned by any good works of benevolence you may pour out on the poor and needy. The gift of the Holy Spirit is not given as a reward at all. The Spirit is not a wage given to workers. He is a gift given to sons and daughters. And so he says, "I would like to learn just one thing from you. Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law or by believing the message you heard? And then having begun by the Spirit, we are not perfected by the law." And this is kinda the centerpiece of my message today. Look at verse three. "Are you so foolish, having begun by the Spirit, are you now perfected in the flesh?" If the Spirit has begun to do all this in us, isn't it a clear indication that we cannot do anything apart from him?

Now, for Paul, it's pretty clear that there's still a journey yet to be traveled, "Well, what else could there be after justification?" Well, in God's perfect purposes and in his plans, He wills that we live in this world in our mortal bodies, our bodies of sin, these bodies of death, we are to live in this Satan-dominated world surrounded by other people who are regenerate, but also living in bodies of sin and bodies of death, or unregenerate people who are dead in their transgressions and sins and filled with murderous threats against the Lord's people, or just totally ambivalent or not interested. We are to live out lives of godliness in those circumstances. And that's the playing field of sanctification. He wants to see us living a perfect life in that setting. And he wants us to run a race now, a race toward perfection every single day.

Paul talks about this very beautifully in Philippians 3. I love Philippians 3, these verses. Look at verses 8- 12 in Philippians, you can just go over it or just listen. Philippians 3:8 and following. It says, "That I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ. The righteous that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection of the dead. Not that I have obtained all this or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me… So forgetting what lies behind and straining, [striving, pressing on] toward what lies ahead" I aim for perfection. So in that statement in Philippians, he says, "I press on to take hold of that [purpose] for which Christ Jesus took hold of me."  Okay, why did Christ take hold of me? He took hold of me that I would be perfect, holy, and blameless in his sight. So every day, I strive, I press after perfection every day. Now here's the challenging part, that means you have to work. You have to labor. You have to have holy resolutions. You have to have holy efforts. You have to strive, but you have to do it not in a legalistic way. How do we do that? How do we do that? How do we strive and not be legalistic? How do we make holy resolutions and not be legalistic? Well, everything comes down to the mentality as we do it. Everything comes down to this.

This is the internal journey that FBC talks about. How do we do it? First and foremost, in total reliance on Jesus Christ, him crucified and resurrected. Just say to yourself every day in your quiet time. John 15:5. Jesus, you said to me, "I am the vine, you are the branches. If a person remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit, for apart from me, you can do nothing." See, I think what's going on is that as the Galatians are trying to finish their race by human efforts, they feel like they're on their own. Like, Jesus came to town, Paul came to town, preaching the gospel and got them a good start, but now he's gone and they've got to run the rest of the race themselves. They're on their own now. And then on Judgement Day, the Lord can say, "Hey, look, I gave you an incredible, awesome start, what happened since then?" And so you become inward-focused and you're thinking, "What can I do?", and you've got all these challenges. And you see the perfection that you need to have in your lives, the way you think, the way you love, the way you live in every area, sins of commission, sins of omission. You're learning more and more of scripture and you're starting to get into the pile, and it's like, "How in the world can I be perfect like Jesus?" And you feel like you're on your own. But you're not. He is the vine, and you are the branch, and you abide in Jesus by the Spirit.

And you look to Christ crucified and you say, "He died my sins. The wrath of God against me is gone. I'm not afraid of the law's accusations anymore, I'm free from the law as it condemns me. I'm free. I'm a son, I'm a daughter, of the living God, and nothing I do or don't do today will change that. I'm secure in that love. But oh, I yearn to please my Heavenly Father. And sin is just poison and I don't want to do it today. And even though I can somehow drink it and not die, I can't drink it and not be sick. And so I don't want to sin today. I want to be free from all sin. Oh, Lord help me. I rely in you. I trust in you, Lord Jesus. Christ crucified, that's my death. I died a sin forever. Christ resurrected, that's my life, I can live a new life now by the Spirit." That's how you do it. As it says in Colossians 2:6-7, "So then just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, so continue to live in him."  The way you begin the Christian life is the way you continue, look to Christ crucified and resurrected. Trust in him. Hearing with faith, reliance in the Spirit, that's it.

And Paul's concern, verse 4, "Have you suffered so much for nothing if it really was for nothing?" They were persecuted for their faith, they were beat up by the surrounding community, the churches went through hard times. He said, "But now it's like you're that stony ground hearer. When trouble, persecution, difficulty comes, you're fading. Turning away from the true gospel." And he's concerned that his labor for them was in vain. Later, in Galatians 4:19, he's going to use women in labor language. He says, "My dear children, for whom I'm again in the pains of childbirth until Christ be formed in you." He's in anguish over these churches. It's like, "I'm afraid that everything I've done for you was in vain. If you go off into this worked-based religion, it's all for nothing." So, he's yearning that they understand. You experienced Jesus by hearing with faith. You experienced the Spirit by hearing with faith, and you are in a relationship now with God the Father also by hearing with faith, and that's it. So look what he says in verse 5, "Does God give you, [God the Father, does he give you] the Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law or by believing what you heard?"

You have a relationship with God by the gospel. You have an ongoing walk with God now because you believe the gospel, by faith and by the Spirit. God doesn't give any of these things as a wage. We were universally sinful. There was no one righteous. Not even one. All of us had fallen short of the glory of God. None of us declared righteous by observing the law. And God, I love this word, "supplies" his spirit to you by faith and not by law. And so he gives you a flow. So often, the Holy Spirit's like a river. There's a flow, the pouring out of the Spirit, he's like liquid. And there's a sense of an ongoing stream of power coming to you by the Father's command and not because you are law-keeping.

Alright, so, how do we apply this understanding? What application can we take from this? Well, first, I hope that there are some that have been invited here that are not Christians yet, and for you, I just want to say you have had Jesus Christ publicly portrayed as crucified before your eyes today. All you need to do is, having heard that, believe, and all of your sins will be forgiven. How sweet is that? Trust in the Lord. Believe in Jesus Christ. Call on the name of the Lord, and you will be saved. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

Now John Stott said, and I love this, "Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to first see it as something done by us." So what you need to do is say, "Lord, I'm a sinner. I've violated your laws. I have not loved you with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, I've not loved my neighbor as myself, I've violated the 10 Commandments. I've been lustful, I've been covetous in my heart, I've led a wicked life. And Jesus died because I was a sinner. Jesus died in my place. I trust in you to take my wrath away." So you call on the name of the Lord and you picture him in your mind's eye, and you cry out to him and you say, "Save me, Jesus, save me." And he will save you. For everyone who calls on the name on the Lord will be saved. But having received, then, justification as a gift. Now I'm talking to all of you. So now, make progress by the same pattern. Make progress by the same pattern. Understand salvation is a process. You have to be perfected, you have to grow in grace in the knowledge of Christ. And so he wants you to become more and more mature. More and more like Christ. He wants you to aim every day for perfection. It says in 2 Corinthians 13, "Aim for perfection." Every day. There is a journey, but you must make that journey by actively relying on Christ crucified and the power of the Spirit. You're not on your own, praise God. You're not on your own. So, I want to turn around and say, "What does sanctification by flesh look like?" What does it look like? How can I know if I am trying to make progress in the flesh? Well, let's start with what happens when you sin. Okay? What happens when you know you violated your conscience, you've violated God's standards?

When I was a Catholic (I was raised in the Catholic faith), I had to go to confession, and you were told that if you died with unconfessed sin, it will be longer in purgatory. That was the doctrine that was told to us at that time, and so you would go and confess your sins to the priest. Back in my day, they had just gotten away from the confessionals, you had to sit and face the guy, face-to-face, and go tell him all your deep, dark secrets. And then there's purgatory hanging in the background. And then after you confessed your sins to the priest, he would then give you a list of things you had to do. Hail Mary's, Our Father's, prayers, giving money to the poor, etcetra. That was the bill at the end of the time. It's like that's my sin bill. "And if I do these works, then I'm clear? Is that it? Got it." Okay? Now I'm not necessarily saying that that was a right preaching of Roman Catholic soteriology. I'm not entirely sure what their answer to the question, "What must I do to be saved?" is anymore. But I know this. Satan still tries to hand us that bill of good works to do after you sin. You know what I'm saying?

Until I do these seven things, I can't feel good anymore about my walk with God. God's smile, His fatherly smile to you, cannot be earned. It can't be earned, so just like the prodigal son, go back, throw yourself at the feet of your Father, have him lift you up, and put you in that robe again, that raiment and say, "I love you." And you didn't do anything. You are restored by faith in Jesus alone, not by works. It is so easy to get legalistic about this. You know what I'm saying? So you've sinned, and you try to earn your way back to God by doing good works. That is what working it out by the flesh.

Another way is you make a list of resolutions, of good things you want to do. 10 things you want to do in the year 2014. Look, I think there's nothing wrong and everything right with having goals. It says in Isaiah, "The noble man makes noble plans, and by noble deeds, he stands." It's good to have plans. But hold them loosely because God delights in throwing wrenches into your moral plans. He loves messing it up. It's God doing it, not Satan, it's God. He wants to know what you do when you don't do all the things you want to do, and Bible-reading and scripture memorization and fasting and praying and sharing the gospel and all that. You got this list, alright, "45 minutes of Bible reading every day. Hour of prayer every day. Going to memorize two verses a day throughout the year. I'm not going to go to bed any day in the year 2014 without sharing the gospel with someone," on and on. All of those are good things. Not one of them is bad. But what happens when you don't? And is it all up to you to do it, to crank it out?

So those are two aspects of what it starts to look like, having begun by the spirit, perfected in the flesh. What do you do when you sin? And how do you approach your lists of things you want to do to improve your Christian life? There's so many more things I could say. I guess I'd like to bring you back to Philippians 2:12-13, where it says very plainly, I love how it works to get there, it says, "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling." So work hard at it. If you don't work, you will not make progress toward perfection. But understand, "it is God who works in you to will and to act, according to His good purpose." So all of your working and all of your willing and all of your striving, do it by faith in Christ crucified and resurrected, and by the power of the Spirit. Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for the things we've learned today. That we should not be so foolish to think that we, having begun by the Spirit, are now perfected by the flesh. Help us, oh, Lord, to make genuine progress in the Christian life, but help us to do it by a constant reliance on Christ crucified and resurrected, and a constant reliance on the gift of the Holy Spirit. And knowing that our Father's smile is given us constantly as a gift of grace. It's blood bought, and it's our constant gift of grace. You love us and You'll never stop loving us. Help us to realize that, that we don't have to earn forgiveness. We pray this in Jesus's name. Amen.

Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on Galatians 2:20. The main subject of the sermon is how the Christian lives by faith in the Son of God.

I just discovered that the battery is out in this pulpit clock, so you guys are at my mercy now. No, I've got the watch here, and we'll keep an eye on it. But I tell you, I could without any difficulty preach for hours on this one verse. It's an incredible verse, and I'm looking forward to it. One of my favorite short stories that I've read is a tragic but powerful story written by Hans Christian Anderson in 1845, called The Little Match Girl. It's a story of a little girl who is forced out into the cold by her cruel father to sell matches. She has a bundle of matches in her little hand, and she's walking through the streets of the city on New Year's Eve. And so, it's a festive time, a time of celebration for many wealthy people. She's not among them, and she's on the outside looking in. She goes and sees these incredible mansions, these houses and these windows, and she can see roast goose, and just can see the steam rising from it. And all of the incredible dishes that are laid out on these banquet tables, one window after the other, and she's out in the cold.

She's on the outside looking in, and how she yearns to be included. How she yearns to have a place at the table. She would love to be welcomed in, and to have someone beckon to an empty chair, and that she would be able to sit down. And with a sense of joy and welcome, to be able to partake in that feast. She would love that, but no one invites her in; she doesn't really expect it. She finds an alcove, a little sheltered place, it's windy, it's cold, a little snowy and miserable, and she gets a little bit of a break from the wind. And she looks down at the matches in her hand, and pulls them out one at a time and strikes the match, then lights it, and looks at its glow and looks at the fire, as it flames to life, and burns for a little while, then flickers and goes out. And as she looks, she imagines that she's involved in one of these feasts, that she's actually sitting at a table and eating, and then the match goes out then she pulls out the next match and she lights it, and it flares and flames for a little while. And she looks at the warmth and the light of it, and then it flickers and dies. And little by little, of course, she burns every match in her hand one at a time. And in the story, she ends up falling asleep out in the cold. And ultimately, it seems, dying out there.

And I think about that in terms of the gospel, I think about that in terms of people who are not yet Christians, people who are on the outside looking in. What do they have to live for? They have in their hand a bundle of matches that represent temporal pleasures, earthly pleasures that flare up, and bring light and heat, and some pleasure just for a little while, and then they flicker and they die out. And when the bundle of matches is gone, then life is over, you die. And the incredible joy that I have as a preacher of the gospel is to tell you that God is spreading a wedding banquet and he is inviting outsiders in. And no one starts on the inside, everyone is on the outside. And at some point by repentance and faith, if you believe the invitation that the King is giving, you can walk through the doors, and there will be a place for you. And you will have a chair, and you'll have a name placard right there, it's going to be your name, that chair was meant for you. We find out in the fullness of Bible teaching, from before the foundation of the world, God saved that place for you.

And isn't that a glorious story to tell the outsiders of this world? To give them a warm and rich invitation to come into the banquet feast through faith in Christ. Are you on the outside? Are you in the cold? Are you looking at matches flaring up and burning for a little while then dying, and then going from pleasure to pleasure to pleasure until, at last, you die in the cold? Don't do that, don't leave this room unconverted. Don't leave here on the outside, don't leave here in the cold. Jesus said in a rich welcome, "Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy-laden, all you who are out in the cold, come and I will give you rest. I will give you a feast, I will set a place for you, and you will sit there, and it's just for you." Now, this is the glory of the passage I get to preach on today. I get to talk about the individual aspect of salvation. The fact that it's personalized, the fact that it's for you individually, I get to talk about that today. Eastern mystical religions, Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, there's a sense of the ultimate denial of the significance of the individual, that when you die, you become like a drop in an endless sea, when you reach Nirvana, whatever you reach, complete emptiness, you become nothing.

God did not create you to end up nothing. He created you a person in the image of God, as he is a person. And that individuality he will uphold for all eternity. And he saves individuals through repentance and faith in Christ. And so I'm going to preach on that today, I'm going to talk about the individual aspects of salvation through this one verse, Galatians 2:20. And what an incredible verse it is, look at it again, you heard Ashoke read it.

In Galatians 2:20 it says, "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me and the life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me." Now, your outline there is probably one of the most creative outlines I've ever done. That's a complete joke. If you look at it, it's just the phrases of the verse broken up numbered and that's it. You think, "What does the pastor do all week? I mean, this is what you come up with? I could do that." Maybe you could, maybe you should, I don't know, but this is it, and even worse, I'm not even going to follow this order, that's even worse. I'm actually going to go to the end of the verse first, and I'm going to want to talk there. I'm going to take it more in redemptive historical chronological order than the order of the verse.

I'm going to start with Christ's love for you. I'm going to start with his love for you individually before the world began. We're going to start there, and we're going to travel through what he did for you before you were ever born, how he gave Himself for you. And then how in a mystical way through faith in Christ you became united with Christ, and you were crucified with Christ through your faith in Him. And we're going to talk about the significance of the next phrase, "I no longer live." And a lot of my ethical implications are going to be in that. I want you to learn what that means "I no longer live."

And we're going to talk about the power of the Christian life, "Christ lives in me," and go back and talk more about that in that phrase, "the life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God," so that's the ordering of the sermon. And we're going to go from that to the Lord's Supper which is a representation, an ordinance set up to remind us of that wedding banquet, that feast that we're going to have in the kingdom of heaven. It's a foretaste, it's meant only for Christians. And so if you have not repented and trusted in Christ, if you're not testified to that by water baptism, we're asking that you not partake, we want you to know that you're an outsider, but you don't have to leave this room genuinely, spiritually an outsider. And you can partake in the next one of these that we do if you just repent, believe, and testify to that by water baptism, we will love to have you at the next one. But it is a beautiful kind of integrated message that the Lord has for us today, a welcome at a banquet table. We don't have to be outside in the cold. We can sit at the table.

So let's start with the end of the verse. And just as we look at it, we see the individuality, the personal aspect of Christianity throughout the verse, look at the emphasis, "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me, and the life that I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me." So I want to zero in on that last phrase, "Who loved me and gave Himself for me." Talking about Jesus, this is talking about the Son of God, about Jesus. And do you realize how true it would be but how different it would be if he had just changed one word to this, "Who loved us and gave Himself for us." Isn't it true? And frankly aren't most of the verses in the New Testament written in the first person plural in that sense, “we,” “us,” that type of thing? You're going to find those verses commonly.

But this verse doesn't say that, true as it is. This verse focuses on Jesus's individual love for his sheep, for his people, how he loves us by name, how he calls on us by name. He knows us individually, and so the apostle Paul has put his name in there. Jesus the Son of God loved Paul, he died for Paul. And so we have Biblical warrant, we have a Biblical ground for seeing a very intensely personal love here from Jesus. And what I want to do is go back and establish that love Biblically as having happened before the foundation of the world. It's an eternal love that we are talking about here. He loved me before the world began.

I love Jeremiah 31:3 which says, "I have loved you with an everlasting love." Or you could say an eternal love, it's a timeless love. It's a love that wasn't connected at all to time. He is not bound by time, and so before he said, "Let there be light," before there were oceans, before there were rivers, before there was anything, Jesus loved you personally. And you wonder how could that even be. It's a mystery of omniscience, it's a mystery of timelessness, but it's true. He set his love on you before the world began. It's a timeless love, and it's an absolutely immeasurable love.

Take a minute and look at Ephesians 3:17-19, an immeasurable love. So it's just the next book over, Ephesians 3:17-19. And there Paul says, "I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long in high and deep is the love of Christ. And that you would know that love that surpasses knowledge so that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." What a great prayer that is.

Pray that for someone this afternoon. Pray that for yourself, but pray it for someone else. What is he praying for there in Ephesians? He wants them to have a kind of a supernatural power to grasp something. A supernatural power to understand something. Something that's beyond comprehension. He actually says that in that verse in Ephesians. That which is beyond comprehending that you would comprehend it in some way. And that you would, in your mind, by faith, roam through the universe and get a sense of the universe of Jesus's love for me. How wide it is, and how long it is, and how high it is, and how deep is the love of Christ for me. It's an immeasurable love. It's boundless. There is no limit to that love. And so it is a timeless love before the foundation of the world, and it will extend to beyond the end of the world. It will never change. And it is an immeasurable love. It's a particular love. He set his love on us. He loved me and gave himself for me. So look at that. And I'm done with Ephesians. But look at that in Galatians, how Paul says, "He loved me. He knows me by name."

And so in that, my mind goes to John chapter 10. Jesus is the Good Shepherd, and the Good Shepherd knows his sheep, and the sheep know him. And he calls his sheep by name. Isn't that a wonderful statement? Our Good Shepherd calls us by name. He knows our names. Sometimes he repeats them. Simon, Simon. Martha, Martha, that kind of thing. He says these things, and he calls on us by name. And it says there in John 10 that his sheep hear his voice and they follow him. And he knows them and he dies for them. He lays down his life for them.

And so we have right in our text in Galatians, it's a self-sacrificial love. This is a love in which he has laid down his life for you, “who loved me and gave himself for me.” It's far greater than saying he took a bullet for us. I feel like it's more like he took a lightning strike for us. I often picture that the wrath of God, the just wrath of God, is like a lightning strike. It's omnipotence plus omniscience, together pointing toward my destruction, my eternal destruction. It's the power of God and the mind of God focused like a laser beam on my destruction. That's what I deserve. That's what hell is. It's God attending to me negatively. And Jesus stepped into that white hot, blue hot stream of wrath and took it for me. For us, yes, but I want to stick with the verse, "He loved me and gave himself for me." And so this is the beauty of this incredible love that Jesus has for us. He stepped in and laid down his life under the wrath of God in a way that we can't even possibly begin to imagine.

You'll get a clearer picture on Judgment Day of what it was worth. Right now you can only know it by faith, you read the scriptures, you have a sense of the wrath, a sense of the lake of fire, a sense of eternity, but you really don't know. And we have a sense of the justice of God and a sense of the holiness of God, but we really don't know. But Jesus laid down his life for us. And he said in John, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends." He identifies us. "You're my sheep. I lay down my life." He gave himself for us. And so it's a transformative love as well. And that's the thing I love about this. He does. He loves us too much to leave us the way we are.

And so that brings me to the Ephesians 5 passage, which just talks about how husbands have to love their wives. But let's just look at it in terms of what it says about Jesus's love for us. Husbands should listen to this and say, "I want to be a better husband." But that's not why I'm going to Ephesians 5. I want you to listen as a redeemed son or daughter of the living God and say, "This is how Jesus loved me." "Husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word and to present her to himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless." That's what the love of Jesus at the cross does for you and me. It transforms us. It changes us entirely from being wretched, filthy, nasty sinners, to being pure in his sight. It's a transformative love. And all of this is focused on you. If you're a believer in Jesus, it's focused on you by name. He knows you individually. And you're like, "How can it be? How can it be that so great a Savior, a King, who is ruling the earth? He is the King of kings and Lord of lords. How could it be that he loves me? Little old me?"

And I just want you to be careful not to limit him and think he is too small to both rule heaven and earth and care about little old you. He's big enough to do both. And as a matter of fact, he does both. He loves you intensely and individually as if you were the only one he's thinking about right now. And yet he's thinking about a multitude from all over the world, greater than anyone could count. It's mind boggling. Sometimes it's good for us to picture that. I often think about the nations being gathered before Jesus and is he going to separate them as a shepherd separates his sheep from the goats. And I don't know how to picture it. How would you picture 10 billion people in one place?

Can you picture that? I don't even know what that looks like. What's the largest crowd you ever seen? Fifty, seventy-five, a hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand most. The earth starts to curve friends, buildings get in the way, trees get in the way, 200,000, that's it. How can we imagine 10 billion people? And then he separates them out in who knows what percentage, let's say 10% Christians. Okay? I don't have any idea. One billion Christians. Doesn't that make you feel special? There's a billion of us, a billion of us. That's a vast sea of humanity, a vast sea of them, and somehow Jesus loves you individually. Somehow He knows you. Somehow He knows when you're crying, when you're happy, when you're tempted. He is intensely interested in you and will be for all eternity. It's mind boggling, and that's why Ephesians says, "I pray that you would have power to grasp this." It's, "That you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." It will stretch your mind, it'll stretch your heart to contemplate this. So, that's the kernel of the nut here, he loved me and gave himself for me. He died on the cross for me. He interposed his blood for me.

Now, let's go back to the beginning of the verse. Paul entered at this moment. "I have been crucified with Christ." What does that mean? When Paul repented and believed in Jesus in some mystical way, in some mysterious way, he became spiritually one with Jesus. And so Jesus' death became his death, and Jesus' resurrection and his life became his life. And so in some mind boggling way, Paul can say, "I have been crucified with Christ." Now, what we want to do here is understand the once for all aspect of this. He's not continually being crucified with Christ. That's not what he's talking about here. I know there are verses that talk about denying yourself and taking up your cross, and that's important, but that's not what he's talking about here. This is the one for all aspect. When I repented and believed, when I trusted in Jesus, I was at that moment crucified with Christ, dead. What does he mean? What he means is that every single human being on the face of the earth is descended from Adam and born in Adam, we die under Adam's death penalty. We deserve to die, every single human being. We are born in Adam.

And then as we grow, as we get older, as we start to understand the world, as we start to understand that there is a Creator, and more if we have the opportunity, we understand God's laws and understand his standards, we sin, we violate those laws. So, what led to Paul dying is in verse 19, he said, "Through the law I die to the law that I might live for God." So, the law killed him. He realized, he became aware, that he had violated the law. The commandment came (he explains in Romans 7:9), and sin rose up to meet the challenge of the commandment and violated the commandment and he died. And he realized he deserved the death penalty. Now, sinners die apart from Christ all the time. They go to hell. But here, by faith, we realized, "Okay, I was crucified mystically, spiritually with Jesus. His death became my death." And so the person that Paul was in Adam died forever. That old man, that old person died.

It's a positional thing. God saw him in Adam until that moment, the Damascus Road. And at that moment, when he repented and believed, he moved over, and God saw him in Christ. Isn't that beautiful? And so this whole thing is taught in Romans 6, you can look there later, but he says there in Romans 6, "What then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? May it never be! We died to sin." We died, not "We are dying." We died to sin. How can we live in it any longer? "Or don't you know that all of us who are baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?" It's teaching the same thing. We were united with Christ by faith in death and it's punctiliar, it's a once for all, that's it. If you are a Christian, you died. The person you were in Adam is dead. And you don't need to make any effort toward that, you don't have to kill the old man or any of that. People get confused about those things. No, no, if you're a Christian, that person you were in Adam is dead.

Now, you have habit patterns, the body of sin must be done away with. But that person, you died. I have been crucified with Christ once for all. And then he says, "And I no longer live." Now, you're like, "Well, didn't he just say that?" No, this is different now. I think what happens here is this is what you have to say to yourself. Again, later in Roman 6, "Consider yourselves dead to sin but alive to God." There's an ongoing thing you need to say. You need to say to yourself all the time, "I no longer live. I no longer live." What does that mean? Doesn't mean that you don't have a life in the body. The next verse says, "The life I now live in the body, etcetera," so we do have a life in the body. What does it mean? Well, I think clarity for me comes in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, listen to this verse. There it says, "For Christ's love compels us, or constrains us, because we're convinced that one died for all and therefore all died, and He died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them." That's what I think Paul means in Galatians 2:20, "I don't live for myself anymore."

Now, I think non Christians, they get up, and every day they ask this one question, "What do I want to do today?" What do I want to do today? Paul saying, "I don't ask that anymore." I don't. I don't ask that question. He says in Acts 20, "I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me, the task of testifying of the gospel of God's grace." "I don't live for myself anymore." And you have to learn to put those two together. Once for all I died... Forever died in Adam... That's dead... Dead to sin. Now I'm saying I no longer live. So, I don't get up in the morning and say, "What do I want to do today?" This is really hard for us. I think we may be culturally and just, where we are in history, it may be the hardest for us to say this of any people that has ever lived. We are choice-aholics. Do you know what I'm talking about? We are choice-aholics. Have you folks seen those new Coca-Cola vending machines that mix, you know, like, the fountain drink? You know what I'm talking about, I've seen them at Five Guys and Mo's. You know what I'm talking about? It's got an old-timey look, but it's not old-timey because it's got a touch screen on it, and you put a glass in or a cup, and then you get some choices. Have you ever been behind someone who's never used the machine before?

Not only are they learning how to use the machine, they are paralyzed by choice. They don't know what they want, they could mix some, a little of this, a little lemon, a little Cherry Coke, you could do... I mean, it's amazing what you can do. And the line is getting longer and longer behind that paralyzed individual. But there it is, we've got choice. And there's companies just giving us choices because that's what we want. We want to say every day, "What do I want to do?" That's the life in Adam, that's the essence of it. That's what Adam descendant people do. Everyday they say, "What do I want to to do?" Paul says, "I don't ask that anymore. I ask simply, what does Christ want me to do? How can I live for Jesus? And secondarily, related to that, how can I live for others?" Do you realize what an incredible benefit it is to be in this church and to have godly people who are living out faith in front of us, and we can learn from them?

I've had the benefit of just being close to Larry and Alana Parrish as they've cared for Andy. And many of you know that situation, some of you don't. Coming on a year and a half ago now, Andy was hit by a car, severe brain trauma, and it began, I would say one of the most challenging trials I've ever seen in my life. In some ways, you could say, it'd be easier for them if he had died in the road that day... Which Larry thought would happen and could have happened, the car was going 40 miles an hour. But God chose a different level of trial for them. And so I go over frequently on Thursday afternoons, and I've watched them caring for Andy, and it's just amazing. I'm just being discipled as I watch them. I was working on this sermon, and I was thinking about this phrase, "I know longer live." Larry and Alana don't get up saying, "What do I want to do today?" They just don't. They know what they're going to do today. They know what they're going to do. They're going to take care of Andy, and they're going to walk with Jesus doing it. That's what they're going to do. And both of them said at different times to me, individually, how he's worth it, Andy's worth it. And they said it so sweetly.

And it made me ashamed to think, "It would have been easier for them if... I just stopped thinking that. They don't think that way, they just are so delighted he's still alive. And the care level is just beyond imagination, it's just relentless. There's something they have to do every four hours without fail. I said, "What do you do at night, do you have to do it at night?" "Oh, yeah." But they don't, they have someone that they come in and hire, you know, at night. But occasionally that individual can't make it. And if they can't get someone to fill it, they do it. And so they stay up through the night and do that thing at midnight and four and whenever the schedule is and they do that. And I've learned about that, I learned what, "I know longer live," looks like. They haven't been to their beautiful lake house in a long time. They don't think, "When are we going to go to the lake?" They don't wonder about that. Day after day. Now, they would say that they're not perfect, none of us are. So, this is a hard thing to do, to say, "I know longer live." But I want to live like that, and I need examples like that and others who are going through sufferings or others, not just them, that are going through similar things. And there's a value to us to see it with your own eyes and to learn how to say it.

So, I commend that to you. I commend that saying. Learn how to say, "I know longer live, I'm not living for myself today. I'm not asking, what do I want to do today?" But it says, "Christ lives in me." And here's the power for the Christian life. Here's the mystery of the Christian life. It's just beyond imagination that we could even understand this. It says in John 14:23, "If anyone obeys my commandments, my Father will come and dwell with him, and we will live with him." He says, "We," including himself. So the Father and the Son... In John 14:23, "We will dwell with him." And a few verses later he says, "I will pray and ask the Father... And he will send the counselor or the Holy Spirit, who will live in you and be in you." And so in some mysterious way, we have God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. Christ lives in me. And that gives me the power to say, "I no longer live." I have a whole different kind of life that I'm living now. Christ lives in me. It's a mystery. Can only be accepted by faith, but by the power of the Holy Spirit we are enabled to walk in newness of life. And so that whole life is described. The life I live in the body now, I live by faith in the Son of God. I live every day by faith.

And Paul's going to make it very plain, and this is a hard thing to understand. There is a labor to the Christian life. There's hard work in the Christian life. It's hard to be a Christian. We're fighting the good fight of faith, we're laying aside every weight, and running with endurance this race marked in front of us, but we're doing it all by faith not by effort, if you know what I'm saying. Having begun by the spirit, we are not perfected by the flesh. So the way I put all that together is, moment by moment, I'm saying Christ lives in me. By faith in Christ, I will do this. I'm relying on Jesus at every moment. I'm thinking Christ in me at every moment. I want to speak the words of Christ. I want to think the thoughts of Christ. I want to serve as Christ did. As a matter of fact, Paul says in Philippians, "All I want is to know Christ and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead." This is the Christian life, moment by moment, this life that we live in the body. And it won't be long, dear friends, won't be long. Life is a mist, we are a vapor. It appears for a little while, and then it just vanishes, gone. And so this life you live in the body, you just live this way a very short amount of time, and you'll have eternity in Christ to worship him and praise him. But now, you know what you get to do now, you get to suffer now, and you get to have faith now and trust in him now, and you get to serve him now where others are suffering. That you get to do. You don't do any of those things in heaven, but you get to do that now. And you get to battle temptation now, and you get to live this life in the body by faith in the Son of God.

So what applications can we take from this? First and foremost, don't stay outside in the cold. Come into the feast, come into the feast. And I'm not referring to the Lord's Supper. I've already spoken about that. That's just a symbol, a very important symbol, but it's just a symbol. I'm asking you to come into the real feast through faith in Christ to know that your sins are forgiven, that God loves you, that Jesus loves you, he died for you, that you're going to heaven when you die. Just the sweetness of fellowship with that. And having come in, know all of these things. This is the feast. You get to have a banquet every day through the faith you have in the Son of God. By reading scripture, you can feast on your salvation day after day.

Then if you're a believer in Christ, come to faith in Christ, just learn how to live for him and for others and not for yourself. Learn how to be suspicious of the instinct you have to say, "What do I want to do today?" or "What's best for me in this situation? What are my preferences?" Live for others, live for the glory of God. And as we come to the Lord's Supper, understand what these tokens represent. They represent looking back. They represent the death of Christ, who loved you and gave himself for you. They represent each of you who is going to partake. You're going to take your own piece, and you're going to put it in your own mouth, and you're going to chew it and swallow it. That was your portion. It represents the individuality of your salvation here. And you get to take your own cup and drink it. It represents you partaking in Jesus. And it represents that incredible day that's coming soon when you will sit at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of heaven, and you will feast, and you will see Jesus, and you'll have the chance, along with maybe a billion other people, to tell him thank you for dying on the cross for you. Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for the truths of this one verse. Rich, full truths. We thank you, O Lord, that You, Jesus, set Your love on us before the world began, and that love is an everlasting love, a transforming love, and it's an individualized love. You know us by name and call us by name. And now as we partake in the Lord's Supper, we pray that You would pour forth Your Holy Spirit on us and strengthen us, O Lord, to partake of this in a worthy manner. Understanding our sinfulness, yes, but how completely covered our sins are through the blood of Christ, and looking forward by faith to the day when we will feast with You in the kingdom. In Jesus' name, amen.

 Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Galatians 2:11-21 and the call for unity from Paul based on the truth of scripture.

Revelation Chapter 7... I'm preaching in Galatians 2 this morning, but in Revelation 7, verse 9 and following, the Apostle John, in exile on the island of Patmos, has an awesome vision of the end of all of Christ's labors, of the end of the Gospel ministry of the great commission. There he has a vision of an astounding unity around the throne. "After this, I looked," [He said], "And there before me, was a multitude greater than anyone could count, from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation, standing before the throne. And they were dressed in white robes, signifying their perfect standing, and righteousness in Christ. And they were holding palm branches in their hands, and they were crying aloud to God, "Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the lamb."

What an awesome picture of unity there is, and also diversity, at the same time. People from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation, and the completion of the end of the Gospel. Jesus came into this sin fractured world. I've used the analogy before, that sin had an explosive effect on the human race, like that of a fragmentation grenade, and an explosive effect in the physical universe. Jesus uses language, "Whoever does not gather with me scatters." He uses this 'gathering' image a lot, "There are other sheep from other nations that must be gathered." And in First Corinthians 15, Jesus is bringing everything together, and making it one under the head, which is God.

We live in a fragmented world. Sin has fractured people, one from another. You see that in the Garden of Eden, how as soon as sin entered the world, Adam and Eve, the first couple, were fractured from one another and they were divided from one another. Within a chapter, a brother is trying to kill another brother, and on it's gone, ever since then. But today, as the sun makes it's 24-hour global circuit around the world, there are pockets of unity, supernaturally wrought unity, that just defy explanation. Only the Gospel can explain what's going on. There are people gathering to worship the resurrected Christ on this, the Lord's day, that their assemblies fly in the face of all logic, of all history.

These gatherings, unified by the Spirit around the Gospel, are flying in the face of, perhaps even centuries of racial strife, and disunity, and hatred, and warfare. There are simple gatherings of Christians, who, each individual have been transformed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They're made new men and new women, and they love each other, and they're worshipping together by the power of the Holy Spirit. In the Balkans and Bosnia, there are small evangelical house churches, where Serbs and Croats, who would have been at each other's throats previously, are now assembling to worship, and loving one another. I've met some of those folks.

In the Czech Republic and Romania, other former Eastern Bloc nations, there are people who used to serve the communist dictatorships, who have been transformed by the Gospel, and are now worshipping with people they used to persecute and torture. In Rwanda, we have Hutus and Tutsis that are assembling together. There was a genocidal war between them, but the Gospel sees some of them, and made them brothers and sisters in Christ. In Palestine, you have former Lebanese Muslims and former unbelieving Jews, who have all come together under Christ, believing in the same Gospel, and are showing a supernatural unity in Christ.

And in America, former racists, both black and white, are able to assemble together, and worship in harmony around the Gospel of Jesus. Isn't that awesome? And Jesus says, "We are all heading toward a kind of unity that just boggles the imagination. It is a unity patterned after the Trinity itself, that we will be as one with another, as the Father and the Son are one." And he prays in John 17, Verse 26, "Father, may they be progressively brought to unity, to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them, even as you love me." So what does that mean? If a local church puts on display a supernatural unity, a unity that only the Gospel can explain, it's good for evangelism and missions, that evangelism and missions in that community thrives, when that kind of thing happens.

A number of years ago, Martin Luther King Jr said, "I have a dream." Well, I have my own dream for First Baptist Church. I would love to see a supernatural unity happening in this church. I'd like to see more and more people walking to church here. Amen? I'm not asking you to walk from Cary, and from Chapel Hill, and all that. Although, who knows? It might do some of you good.  But you'd have to start at 3:00 in the morning, I guess. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about people right from this community, who don't need to drive here, and who have been reached by Matthew and others, that are reaching out with our urban ministry, and have come to faith in Christ, and make this their church. I'd love to see that. Is this a good time for the plug for the conference night? Any time's a good plug, right, Matthew? Anytime. Next Saturday, City Outreach Conference. In the morning, up 'til noon. I think it ends at noon. Or beyond, but just come. Maybe one o'clock. But come and learn how to reach out to people of a different culture, different racial background than you, because I just think that kind of unity is a fragrant aroma to God.  And it's so good for the Gospel.

Now, what does all that have to do with Galatians 2:11-21? Well, it has much in every way. The only thing that can produce that unity, that supernatural unity, is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The centerpiece of that Gospel is justification by faith alone, apart from works of the law. That gospel, which produces supernatural unity, is under direct assault by the devil in every generation. And it's only as the church protects that Gospel doctrine, will that supernatural unity happen. Satan hates this open display of unity, and he hates the doctrine of the cross, and so he fights it.

And so, in Paul's day, there was a war going on, spiritual, doctrinal war over the Gospel itself. The Apostle Paul was a traveling church-planting apostle to the Gentiles. He moved through Gentile areas, preaching the Gospel, and seeing amazing fruit among the Gentiles. And he moved through Asia Minor, Turkey, modern day Turkey, and preached the gospel in Galatia, and many Galatian Gentiles came to faith in Christ, genuinely converted, were drawn together as believers in Jesus. But sometime after Paul and Barnabas left, some false teachers came in, what Paul calls 'false brothers,' and they began to assault the doctrine of the gospel, and say that, "Christ crucified is not alone." "That's not all you need. You've got to add the Law of Moses. You've got to add obedience to the law or you cannot be saved." And so Paul was writing this epistle to the Galatians to defend the pure doctrine.

Now, last week, we saw that the assault came from false brothers. Remember, I said in Galatians chapter 1, "It's a false Gospel. They're preaching a Gospel that is no Gospel at all." Well, false gospels produce false brothers and so these are not Christians. They presented themselves as such, but they weren't. They didn't understand the gospel. And so, in Galatians 2:4, he calls them false brothers. So that's an assault from false brothers. Now, in this section today, we have an attack from a genuine brother in Christ. And he didn't even know that he was attacking it. He just had been, in some ways, taken captive by the devil, to do the devil's will, and that is the Apostle Peter. And that can happen. And so, here is Paul, again, the Lord raising up Paul to confront Peter, and sadly, Barnabas, and deal with them at the gospel level. That's what's going on. Let's try to understand the situation. The place was Antioch. Look at Verse 11, "When Peter came to Antioch, I, [Paul] opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong."  Literally, he stood condemned.

Antioch was, in my opinion, the second most important center of Christianity in the early days. After Jerusalem, the gospel moved out. Now, Antioch was north of Jerusalem, and I think, modern-day Turquey and the Gospel came there. The description of how the Gospel got it’s start is in Acts 11. In verse 20 and 21, it says, "Men from Cyprus and Cyrene went to Antioch, and began to speak to Greeks, also telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus. And the Lord's hand was with them, and a great number of people believed, and turned to the Lord." Amen, these are Gentile converts. This is after Cornelius had come to faith in Christ. We'll get into all that in a minute.

But now, these folks are going, and they're just doing nothing, but openly preaching to Gentiles, and the Lord's bringing in a harvest. Well, the church in Jerusalem heard about this, the leaders, and they sent Barnabas down there to see what was going on, and what a perfect choice Barnabas was. That's a nickname, it means 'son of encouragement'. His actual name was Joseph. He was Levite, a Jew, but a tremendously, sweetly encouraging man, and a perfect choice to be sent down there. And it says, "When he saw evidence of the grace of God, he was glad. And he thanked God for the work, and he taught them, and encouraged them, and built them up in their faith." And sometime later, he recruited Saul, he recruited the Apostle Paul from Tarsus, and brought him to Antioch. And the two of them, along with some others, were teaching the church there in Antioch.

Antioch became a strong center of the Gospel and a launching pad for missions. And so, in Acts 13, the church in Antioch sent out Paul and Barnabas on the very missionary journey that led to the Galatian churches being established. It was from that church in Antioch. Now, Peter came down from Jerusalem to Antioch, and he also was encouraged, and loved the work of God there, and the Lord had brought him through some things, and he joined in the fellowship there, and taught them, I'm sure, and encouraged them, and joined with them in their love feasts. Those were the fellowship meals, food that they would have ordinarily eaten at home, they would bring to the church to eat together. I don't think they called it potluck back then, but who knows? They brought it in, and they would share these meals together, and they would just enjoy eating together. And then, at the end of that, I think it would culminate in observance of the Lord's Supper. And it was a tremendous display of unity and love, and they would do that together, and Peter joined right in. And he would eat with Gentiles and Jews alike, believers in Christ. And this is amazing, because the Jewish laws, the laws of Moses, and their customs, would have forbidden this, before the coming of Christ.

The laws of Moses did establish the Jews as a separate people. There are certain ceremonial laws that set them apart from the Gentiles, and somewhat put a wall around them, so that they could maintain their national identity as Jews, such as circumcision, and the dietary regulations. Circumcision is a ritual done on all the boy babies when they are eight days old, and then that's the mark of the covenant with Abraham. And then you had the dietary regulations, foods that they were not allowed to eat. You remember the story of Daniel and how he refused to eat that Gentile food, because it wasn't approved by Leviticus 11, the dietary regulations. But secondly, there are also Jewish man-made restrictions. They were not in the word, but it went beyond these things, so that it got to the point where Jews almost couldn't do anything with Gentiles. They couldn't go in their houses, they couldn't interact with them, and that goes beyond what the Lord intended with the circumcision and dietary regulations, but they were happening. And it got to the point, where they couldn't even walk in a Gentile home, never mind sit down at fellowship.

Those things had so completely separated the Jews, apart from the Gentile world. I think you add to it, the bitterness that many Jews felt, that being under Gentile domination: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, one Gentile dominator after another. And they really hated, in many ways, the Gentiles. They didn't want anything to do with them. And so they had lots of rules that just separated them from any interaction whatsoever with the Gentile world. You remember when Jesus was there at the well, and the Samaritan woman comes, and Jesus just strikes up a conversation with her, and says, "Give me a drink." And she is shocked, "How is it that, you, a Jewish man, can have a conversation, ask me, a Gentile, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?" And then John put in parentheses, "For Jews to have no dealings with Samaritans." They don't do anything together. Well, that's extended, really, out to the whole Gentile world.

Well, Jesus, Jesus changed all of this. He changed it all. In Mark chapter Seven, Jesus taught them, He said, "Listen to me and understand." This is Mark 7:14-15, "Nothing outside of a man can make him unclean by going into him, rather it's what comes out of a man that makes him unclean." And then going further, in a few verses, Mark 7:18-19, he says, "Don't you see, that nothing that enters a man from the outside can ever make him unclean? For it doesn't go into his heart, but into his stomach, and then it passes out of his body." Again, parentheses. In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. Do you realize the significance of that? In his life, Jesus declared all foods clean. That's the end of kosher regulations.

By his death on the cross, Jesus fulfilled all types and shadows of the Old Covenant that pointed to the coming of Christ. He fulfilled them all, especially the animal sacrificial system, as we learned, as we study the Book of Hebrews, and he especially crushed all of those man-made regulations, that weren't even in the word of God. All of that was fulfilled and abolished in Jesus. Paul would then eventually teach, openly and clearly, in Ephesians chapter 2, that Jesus, concerning the hostility between Jew and Gentile, Jesus, he himself is our peace, who has made the two one, and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, that wall of hostility, by abolishing in His flesh the law, with it's commandments, and regulations. His purpose was to create, in himself, one new man out of the two, thus making peace. And in this one body, to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to their death their hostility. So there's no more barrier between Jew and Gentile, that's done. It's been fulfilled. It's gone forever. This led to the idea of one new man, not Jew, not Gentile, but Christian. Christian, believer in Jesus. And so it's amazing how it says in Acts 11:26, "The disciples were called Christians first there in Antioch." That's the one new man, the one new person, Christian, not Jew anymore, not Gentile, but Christian.

Now, the Church of Antioch was living out this beautiful truth. It was so wonderful. They would have their services together, and then they would have their love feast, and Jews and Gentiles eating together, and mingling together, and just having supernatural fellowship together. But not all believing, so-called 'believing' Jews accepted this. There were Pharisees, who came to faith in Christ, and who went to Antioch to try to shut it down, to end this freedom, and to bring believers, Jews and Gentiles alike, back under the yoke of Moses. So they came down from Jerusalem, claiming to be from James, and they started teaching this false doctrine. Acts 15, "Some men came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the brothers, 'Unless you are circumcised according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved. Without circumcision, you're going to hell.' " Now, here comes the real tragedy. Peter was drawn in by this. Peter, in some way, at some level, he was intimidated, it says in our text, "He was afraid of them." He had become, in some ways, a people pleaser here, and he broke off table fellowship with Gentiles, stopped eating with them.

Look at Verses 11-13, "When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly, he stood condemned. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and to separate himself from the Gentiles, because he was afraid of those who belong to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy, even Barnabas was led astray." Just picture this. One Lord's day, service is over, time has come for the love feast, time has come for them to have some fellowship together. The men from James had, perhaps, privately confronted Peter. He's been intimated. Legalists can be very intimidating people. They can cite chapter and verse, and Peter was not strong enough, or wise enough to stand up to them. He was afraid of them. And at that love feast, he walks into the room, and maybe some Gentiles, "Hey, Peter, would you sit with us?" And he's like, "No, I can't." He begs off.

And then more and more, and then little by little, I don't know if it happened in one week, but over a period of patterns, because the Greek implies that this went on over a period of time. He began to draw himself away. After a while, you've got... You can almost picture, in a room, a red line in the center, and you got all the Gentiles on one side, and all the Jews on the other. This is devastating for the Gospel. This is a great tragedy. And even Barnabas is on the wrong side of the line there, this son of encouragement, the one who came first, and saw all the good things that God was doing there, he drew back. Now, Paul calls it hypocrisy. It was hypocrisy for Peter and it was hypocrisy for Barnabas. They knew the truth. Look at verses 15 and 16, "We, who are Jews by birth," this is what Paul says to Peter, "We, who are Jews by birth, and not Gentile sinners, we know", [we can underscore that word], "We know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ."  So they're acting contrary to what they believe, that makes them hypocrites. It's hypocrisy.

Now, Peter should have known better. Amen? He should have. Think of his experiences. He was there when Jesus declared all foods clean. He was there when Christ appeared in His resurrection body and sent them to the ends of the Earth to preach the Gospel. He was there when the Holy Spirit was poured out on them and they began speaking in tongues on the day of Pentecost. He was certainly there when the same thing happened to a house full of Gentiles at Cornelius' house, when Peter had been specially prepared by the sovereign hand of God for that mission. He was the apostle to the Jews, but he was chosen by God to be the one to go and bring Cornelius, and his family, the Gentiles, first Gentile converts, into the church. And God had to get him ready for it, you remember? He's there in Joppa, and he's hungry, so he orders a sandwich, or something. I don't know what he ordered for lunch, probably not a sandwich. But anyway, he's waiting for lunch to come. And while he's waiting up on the roof, he's praying, and he has a vision. And he sees Heaven open, and a sheet being let down by it's four corners. And in that sheet, there are all kinds of animals, many unclean animals, and reptiles, and things that Jews were forbidden to eat. And with the sheet, came a voice from heaven, "Arise, Peter, kill and eat." Peter says for the fourth time, "Never Lord." He's good at saying, "No, Lord. Never Lord." He does it four times. Ask me or listen to another sermon, you'll know all four times. But this is the fourth time he said it, "No way, I'm not doing it. I have never eaten anything impure or unclean." Now, here comes the key statement, "Do not call anything impure, that God has made clean. God has the power to take dirty things and make them clean." Let me speak more directly. God has the power to take dirty people and make them clean. And that's the real issue. It's not food, ultimately, that we're talking about here. We're talking about people. We're talking about the power of justification, the power of the cleansing work of Jesus Christ. He has the power to take dirty people and make them clean.

Well, it happens three times. Does that tell you something about Peter? A bit hard headed, perhaps? The underscoring of this, three times he's puzzling about the vision. The men from Cornelius show up, he goes with them. The Spirit says, "Go." He arrives there. Cornelius falls on the ground, as though to worship him. He says, "Get up. I'm only a man." He comes in, he actually enters the house directly under the influence of the Spirit, he goes there. There's an assemblage of Gentiles. They're all there waiting to hear the Gospel. And he says, "I now realize how true it is, that God does not show favoritism, but accepts people from every nation, who fear Him, and do what is right." And as he began to preach the Gospel, the Holy Spirit fell on them, in the exact same way that the Spirit had fallen on the Jews in the upper room. Uncircumcised Gentiles had received the gift of the Holy Spirit, just as they were. And Peter understood the implication, "I should not call any person impure or unclean, who has come to faith in Christ." He got it. He understood it. He had to defend it again, in the next chapter, against these same people, these Jews who are very angry, "You went into the house of uncircumcised men and you ate with them." He defends what he did. He told the whole story, and they relented, and said, "Well, then, God has granted, even to the Gentiles, repentance unto life." So they understood all that.

Then it was Peter, in Acts 15, in the Jerusalem Council, who stood up, and carried the day with his recounting of that whole experience, and this is what he said. Peter, said, "Brothers, you know that some time ago, God made a choice, and we knew that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the Gospel, and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that He accepted them, the Gentiles, as He had accepted us, by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as He had did to us. He made no distinction, [listen to this], He made no distinction between them and us," [listen], "For He had purified their hearts by faith."  Can I just stop and say, is that true of you? Has God purified your heart by faith in Jesus? The Gospel has the power to do that through justification. The Gospel has the power to transform you from the inside out through faith in Jesus. But this is what Peter says, "Now, then," again, Jews on council, "Why do you try to test God, by putting on the necks of the disciples," the Gentile disciples, "A yoke that neither we, nor our fathers have ever been able to bear? No, we believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are." Did Peter get it? Yes. But after that, he fell into sin. Verse 13, "The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy, even Barnabas was led astray."  The beautiful unity of the Gospel is being destroyed by this.

The Gentile believers in Antioch must have felt like dirty second-class citizens. They didn't want to touch Peter. The whole thing, it was just so wrong. Paul's remedy is, once again, standing in the breach and standing up for truth. This must have been painful for him to do, but God raised him up to do it. Look at verses 14-18, rebuking Peter for hypocrisy and inconsistency. Paul has incredible clarity here, just as in the first half of the chapter, we have this phrase, "The truth of the Gospel," that's a key phrase. He defended that Titus didn't have to be circumcised, so that the truth of the Gospel might remain with the Gentiles. And so he says, "I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the Gospel."  God raises Paul up to defend the truth of the Gospel. And so what does he do? He publicly confronts Peter, verse 14, "When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the Gospel, I said to Peter. In front of them all, ‘You are a Jew, and yet you live like a Gentile, and not like a Jew. How then is it that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?’" 

Now, why this public rebuke? Why didn't he take him aside privately and talk to him? It's because of Peter's role in the church. Elders, leaders in the church, when they sin publicly, must be corrected publicly, because of the damage that's been done. There's no way that Peter, having been brought to private repentance, to a private consultation with Paul, could have then gone, individually, and undone all the damage that was done. It had to be done publicly. And so he's corrected publicly, and they're not walking in line with the truth of the Gospel. Clear implication of this, is the Gospel doctrine must be lived out, you must walk it out. It's got to be seen in our unity, in the way we live our lives. Now, just a brief thing, where does the quotation end here? Clearly, verse 14, Paul is talking to Peter. And it begins with a quotation mark, which is a modern invention, a contrivance, so we know where there are quotations. They didn't always have them. They didn't always do this. You know, quotation marks. We don't know, actually, when the quotation ends. When does he stop talking to Peter in the church in Antioch? Some say it's right at the end of this statement, "How is it then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?" But I actually would argue that it goes right to the end of the chapter, and that he basically preaches the Gospel of justification to Peter in front of all of those guys. And I just think it's more powerful that way. And so that's the way I'm going to treat this. We're going to move the fictitious, non-existing quotation mark to the end of the chapter.

He said this whole packet to Peter in front of them all. We have the true Gospel described here, justification by faith alone. The first issue he deals with in verse 14, is Peter's present behavior was inconsistent with his past behavior, "Something's wrong here. You have messed up at some level. Let's try to figure out what it is, because you are acting inconsistently. You're a Jew, and you live like a Gentile, and not like a Jew. How is it then, that you're now advocating Gentiles become Jews? It doesn't make any sense." Now, Peter had changed his behavior. I don't know that he'd gone so far, as to develop a taste for pork, there's no indication of that. But he knew that the dietary regulations were done and the circumcision regulation was done, he was living like a Gentile. At the love feasts, in terms of interaction with Gentile believers, that was done. He knew, he understood, he had been trained, he had moved on. Over against that, then, we had that pattern that Peter was showing, and then, now, we have this visit from James, and now, suddenly, Peter's behaving differently. Inconsistency, let's try to figure it out.

Issue number two then, is the impossibility of justification by works of the law. Look at verse 15 and 16. "We, who are Jews by birth, and not Gentile sinners, [Verse 16] We know that a person is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. [Law cannot justify. Only faith in Christ can justify.] We, too, have put our Faith in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ, and not by observing a law, because by observing the law, no one will be justified."

Alright, so what is this? Well, this is nothing less than the doctrinal center of this whole epistle. This is the center of everything. It's the issue of justification. Now, you may be a visitor here, you may not be a believer, you may not usually go to church, or you may have gone your whole life. Let's talk about justification. What is it? Justification is the legal declaration by the Judge of all the Earth, Almighty God, that you are not guilty of all your sins. You are forgiven, because God has credited to you the righteousness, the perfect righteousness of Christ. There's a double crediting or imputation. Your sin goes to Jesus, He dies the penalty you deserved under the law of God. And Christ's perfect righteousness, that he earned under the law, is given to you as a gift. And on that basis, God says, "You are righteous in my sight." Aww, isn't that sweet? I can't say it enough, if you are a Christian, you're forgiven. You are righteous in God's sight. You are seen to be perfectly obedient through the imputed righteousness of Christ and nothing will ever change that. You can have your good days, and bad days, and sanctification, but nothing will ever change your justification righteousness.

You didn't earn it by the law, it was given to you by a gift. As a matter of fact, he says in verse 21, "If righteousness could have been gained by the law, then Christ died for nothing." I'm not going to set aside the grace of God. The law of Moses did not set up a ladder that you could climb up to Heaven, if you could just be righteous enough. All the law ever did was tell you, "This is God's perfect standard, and if you don't live it, I'll kill you." That's what the law does. "Here's standard. Here's penalty." But there's no power. There's no power, no transforming power. And so, if you could have somehow earned your justification by law, Jesus would never have become incarnate by the Virgin Mary. He would never have died on the cross. Let me say it plainly, you could use this in evangelism. God didn't send His Son into the world to die on the cross, to provide one of many ways to get to Heaven. God did not send His Son into the world to die on the cross, to provide just one of many ways to Heaven. He did it, because there was no other way. And the law was no way at all, it's a yoke that no one can carry. That's justification. Now, Peter knew this. We've seen that. He understood it, but he was drawing back from table fellowship.

"We have been justified by faith in Christ. We, who are Jews by birth, and not Gentile sinners, we've been justified by faith, not by law. These Gentiles have been justified by faith, not by law, why are we doing this? Why are we going back to the law?" That's what he's saying. He also says that there are effects of the true Gospel, look at verses 17 and 18, "If while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not. If I rebuild what I destroyed, I prove that I am a law breaker." What Paul is saying here, is that, when you have been justified by faith, you start to live a different kind of life. You start to live it out. The vertical justification leads to horizontal unity with other people who've been justified, whether they're Jews or Gentiles. You're going to start living out of unity together. You're going to love each other. Jesus changes all of that. He's the one that transformed everything. Now, I said, back in Mark, chapter 7, Jesus just, if we can put it this way, just up and declared all foods clean. Who are you to do that? You know who He is? He is Lord of Heaven and Earth.

Did He have the right to say all of that is done now, did He? Yes. He had the right to do it. Jesus, He calls himself Lord of the Sabbath. The Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath. He can tell us what we're to do with the Sabbath. He can also tell us what to do with food. And He can say, "Yes, you have read in Leviticus 11 and in Deuteronomy, the law of dietary regulations. I'm telling you, it's all finished. You can go ahead and eat the raven, if you'd like to. You're free now to eat shellfish, if you guys really like that kind of thing."

"You're free now, if you'd like to eat pork, you are allowed to eat pork with no smiting of the conscience." Did he have the right to do it? Did Jesus promote sin? He did not promote sin. And yes, He had the right to do it. When Jesus tells you something, that settles it. Did Christ promote sin? No. No, Christ established a New Covenant free from ceremonial regulations. The time for identifying the Jews as a separate people is over. Once the Messiah came, it's done. No more circumcision, no more dietary regulations, just one person now, believer or not, whether you're from Jew or Gentile, it doesn't matter. Believe in Jesus, that's it. And so Christ did not promote sin.

Now, Paul says, "If we, then, rebuild what we destroyed…” why would we do that? We broke through that barrier, that dividing wall. We raised the thing, and plowed, and got rid of it. We're doing love feast together. Why are you back putting bricks and mortar back up between us? Why would you do that? Don't you prove, that if you're doing that, you're a law breaker of one kind or another? Either you're a law breaker then, or you're a law breaker now. What do you think Paul would say? "Peter, you're a law breaker now. You're breaking Christ's law of love. Let's get rid of this wall. God doesn't want it here. He doesn't want it here." Now, in verses 19 through 21, you wonder, "How in the world am I going to cover this today?" I'm not. I'm not. And I already planned not to. I'm going to preach, next time I preach in Galatians, a whole sermon on Galatians 2:20. I think that one verse is worthy of a whole sermon. You heard Sam quoted it in his testimony today, sweet. That's beautiful. It's a great, great verse. But let me just touch on it lightly, to show you how it fits into context, because so often, that verse is just grabbed out of context. We're not quite sure how it fits in. What Paul does here, in his conversation with Peter, is he puts everything on himself. He said, "I want to talk about what I've experienced." Verse 19, "For through the law, I died to the law, so that I might live for God." What does he mean by that? "The law killed me in my self-righteousness, and brought me dead to the foot of the cross, and Christ raised me from the dead spiritually. The law killed me, Christ raised me, and now, I'm done with the law, in it's power to condemn me, and kill me. But through the law, I died to the law. I'm free now from the law's condemnation, not from it's moral precepts, righteousness, 'Love God with all your heart, love your neighbors, yourself.' That's not it. But I'm free from the law and it's ability to send me to hell. I'm free from that. Praise God."

Verse 20, "I have been crucified with Christ.” "Spiritual union. When Jesus died, I died, and I no longer live. I'm living a whole new kind of life. The life I now live in the body, I'm living by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." Now, we're going to look at each of these statements more next time, but what he's saying is, "My individual salvation teaches me others have been individually saved, the same way we are one together in Christ. Let's have table fellowship together." So Peter, eat that ham sandwich. Walk across the red line there at Antioch, and sit down at table with some Gentile Christians, and say, "I'm sorry. Will you please forgive me? I messed up, but I love you and we're all one in Christ."

What application can we take from this? Well, I've already given you the central application. How tragic would it be for any of you to leave this room today unregenerate or unconverted? How tragic would that be for you? Hear, now, the simple Gospel. You already heard it, but I'll say it again. The law has the power to condemn you. The law commands you to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, every moment of your life. You haven't done it and you can't do it. And because you haven't done it, you're guilty, and condemned under the law. It has the power to send you to hell, but Christ came to take your guilt and your punishment on Himself. And if you trust in Him, His death on the cross has become yours. You united with Him, were crucified with Christ and you die. Your old nature person in Adam dies. And you are raised to new life in Christ. Trust in Him. Trust in Him.

Secondly, see the importance of Christian unity. Is it important that FBC put this doctrine on display here in our fellowship? Yes. This is incredibly important. Let's be as diverse as the providence of God will let us be. I am not speaking of theological diversity. There is one Lord, there is one faith, there is one baptism, there is one God and Father of all. But I'm talking about people who embrace that one Lord, and that one faith, and that one baptism, and that one God, who is Father of all. Those, I want fellowship with as many different folks like that as can be. They're incredibly encouraging. I'm talking about internationals. I'm talking about Hispanics. I'm talking about African-Americans. I'm talking about Caucasian Americans. I'm talking about as much diversity as the Lord would bring. We should pray toward it, and minister toward it, and delight in it, and just pray that the surrounding world will see it, and know that God sent Jesus.

Thirdly, let's know that that kind of unity can only be maintained with great effort, great effort. We have to make every effort to keep the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace. Satan's going to try to divide us. He's going to try to get us be upset at each other and angry at each other. And we have to make every effort, and sometimes, that's going to take some strong dealing, like Paul dealing with Peter. Sometimes that happens and done in love.

And fourth, leaders are vital to the health of the church. But that doesn't mean they're perfect, does it? Okay? Peter was a great man. God used him in a mighty way. Barnabas was a great man. God used him in a mighty way. They both needed correction. And you know what? Even though there's not clear indication of it, Paul needed correction too.

Let's finish with that interaction between Paul and Barnabas. In my opinion, at one point, Paul was right and Barnabas was wrong. It's right here. And another time, Barnabas was right, and Paul was wrong. And that's what the whole case of John Mark. Should Paul have given John Mark another chance? I think in the end, I think Barnabas was vindicated, that John Mark was useful to Paul in his ministry, as he says in 2 Timothy 4. Sometimes, iron's going to sharpen iron one way, and sometimes, the other iron sharpens the first iron, and we help each other to grow. Then leaders need to be humble and say, "Help me, correct me, show me where I can grow." And that's what plurality of elders does. We do that. That's what the church does. Leaders are essential to the health of the church, but that doesn't make them perfect.

Let's close in prayer. Lord, we thank you for the Gospel. Thank you for the chance we have here in Galatians to celebrate justification by faith alone every week, and I thank you for the lessons here of the confrontation that Paul did with Peter, and how you brought health from that difficult moment. I praise you for that. Now, help us to walk in the truth that we have learned. I want to just say thank you for what you did in Sam's life and their family are grateful for that. I thank you for the work you're doing at NC State, and I just pray your blessing, and with Kyle, I just pray for more and more baptisms in this church. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Pastor Andy Davis delivers an expository sermon on Galatians 2:1-11, and the importance of guarding the truthfulness of the Gospel.

Turn in your Bibles to Galatians 2:1-10. We're looking today at that incredible passage Bill just read for us. When I was a design engineer, I worked for a number of different companies. I worked for a company that made ion implanters, which was used for making semiconductors. I worked for a company that made eye surgical equipment. I worked for a company that made coffee-brewing equipment. So that's a wide range of engineering jobs, but my job as a design engineer was to come up basically with the recipe for a product, whatever it was, a recipe that was tested in the lab and that worked, so that we could then crank out hundreds if not thousands once we got the recipe right. And it struck me as I was thinking about Galatians 2 that that's an apt analogy. Companies all over this country are working on recipes for products, and in mechanical things we don't use that word "recipe" that's more something that's cooked, but I'm sticking with that word here.

For automobiles, they're working through the designs, coming up with the plans. For architects, they're working on blueprints and designs for structure and often those designs would be used again and again for the same type of house all over the country. People that work for companies that make confections or cookies or something like that, they literally are working on a recipe and chefs are trying different ingredients and they are trying for the right combination of ingredients to make a cookie or some kind of confection that's just going to melt in your mouth, and be very successful. Once the recipe is right they are going to crank out hundreds of thousands of these things and send them to the ends of the Earth, so they hope anyway. Pharmaceutical companies here in the RTP are coming up with recipes for drugs, addressing various issues like AIDS, or cancer, or MS. Once they get the recipe right, they're going to be cranking out hundreds of thousands of pills.

Other companies are trying to maintain existing recipes and protect them from being changed in any way, sometimes through their own foolishness. Think about Coca-Cola, remember when they changed their recipe? You guys remember the 1980s? And they came up with the New Coke and it bombed. Everybody wanted the old Coke back. Remember that whole story? And so for a while they ran them side by side, Coke Classic, remember that? Then the New Coke kind of disappeared, remember that? And Coke Classic ran for a while and then it was just Coca-Cola again. And so they've got that special recipe somewhere in a safe, I don't know where, maybe Atlanta, Georgia, and from now on I think they're going to guard it with their lives and not change anything. And I didn't realize this but 1.7 billion servings of Coca-Cola are served worldwide everyday. Everyday. If only the Gospel could be as widespread as Coca-Cola. It's just incredible. 

And then in some scary ways, think about what happened in 1982 with Tylenol, how somebody got into some bottles and laced it with cyanide and seven people died, and after that the industry came up with protections, so that you knew that when you broke open that bottle that it was going be protected from a poison having been added, etcetera. These are all examples of perfecting the recipe, getting the recipe right, and protecting that recipe once it's been gotten right, so that what gets cranked out and sent to the ends of the Earth is exactly as it should be, and frankly I think that's what's going on in Galatians 2:1-10. I think the apostle Paul was raised up in a marvelous way by the sovereign hand of God to protect the recipe of human salvation that had come down from heaven to Earth, that had been crafted in the mind of God before the foundation of the world, to protect it from anything being added to it or taken away from it, for anything added to this recipe is poison, and anything taken away from that recipe is absolutely essential to it.

God has crafted it as perfect – the Gospel. It is the power of salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and then for the Gentile, for in the gospel righteousness from God is revealed, righteousness, that is from faith to faith, justice is written. The righteous will live by faith. That's the Gospel. And the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, "What I received I passed on to you as of first importance. That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures." "I receive this," and we're going find out, and we've already learned, "from Heaven, from God, from Jesus himself," the apostle Paul would say, "and I passed it on to you."

God has raised this man up, apostle Paul, he raised him up to protect the recipe of the Gospel from adulteration, from being poisoned, from being changed. So let's try to understand our context. We're just kind of, to some degree, parachuting right into the midst of a flow, an argument, really a testimony that Paul has given for a point concerning him in the Gospel. Let's understand our context here in Galatians 2:1-10. Soon after the apostle Paul, who was a traveling, church-planting, evangelist and apostle had moved through modern-day Turkey, Asia Minor, Galatia. He planted some churches there through the simple preaching of the Word and through discipleship. He then left the area and other teachers came along and began contradicting or adding to the Gospel message that Paul preached, preaching a different gospel other than the one that he had preached. They were Jews. They were Jewish people who claimed to believe in Jesus, who loved (so they said), Jesus, who loved the work of Christ and the cross (so they said), but added to it the idea that the gentiles had to be circumcised. And they required Gentiles to obey the law of Moses, and said that if they weren't circumcised and if they weren't obedient to the law of Moses, they could not be saved.

These teachers are commonly called Judaizers because they were really trying to make gentiles into Jews. They were establishing this new doctrine, by in some very significant ways, discrediting the apostle Paul. They weren't slamming him, but to some degree, it seems that they were calling him a second-hander, kind of a second-generation guy who came along after the fact and who got his message, like a Johnny-come-lately, got his message from the Jerusalem leaders, apostles of Jerusalem, but got it wrong. He kind of apprenticed under them for a while, hung with them for a while, but now he's out and about and he's off, he's getting it wrong and that we Judaizers, we've got it right. We've got the real gospel and you've got to be circumcised and you've got to obey the Law of Moses. Yes, Jesus is wonderful, he's great, but in addition to that, you need the law of Moses.

And so this is a very serious attack on the Gospel. It's an attack on Paul but it's also an attack on the Gospel and so Paul in Galatians 1 and 2 is seeking to defend both his apostleship and his Gospel message. They go together, the man and his message go together. And so from the very beginning, if you look at Galatians 1:1, he says, "Paul an apostle." That means “sent one.” "Paul an apostle sent not from men nor by man but by Jesus Christ and by God the Father who raised him from the dead." So right away he's establishing, "My apostleship was not from human origin. It wasn't from man, it was from God, it was from Jesus." And then he adds, "Also his message was from heaven as well." Same thing. Look at verses 11 and 12, Galatians 1:11-12 he says, "I want you to know, brothers, that the Gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it. Rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ."

And so he spends the rest of Galatians 1 basically proving his independence from the Church of Jerusalem. He's independent. He's independent from the Jerusalem apostles. He's every bit as authoritative as they are. His calling originates like theirs did from Jesus. He's no second-hander. He's no Johnny-come-lately. And his desire in all this is not to stoke his ego so people will think well of him, it's but so that they will understand his mission and his message are from God and he needs to be listened to. He can't be dismissed. God has opened up a conduit of blessing to the churches through Paul, and if you shut that down you're going be missing significant messages that God has to say through me, he's saying that.

And you've already heard the Gospel from me [Paul] and you're going start questioning, that's the biggest problem of all. You will be receiving a gospel that's no gospel at all. But as the same time as he's seeking to distance himself and show some independence from the Jerusalem apostles he also wants to show unity with them. This is a challenge here. He's saying, "We are together and we are one in this," so that the gospel spreads from Jerusalem through Judea and Samaria on a unified, solid basis. It's built firm on a foundation that's not moving, there are no cracks in that foundation. As it says in Ephesians 2 that God's household, 2:19 and following, God's household is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. And in him, the whole building, the church is joined together and rises to become a Holy Temple in the Lord and in him, you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his spirit.”

Yeah, but if there's cracks in the foundation, if there's a rift between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles that's very, very significant. That's a problem. So that's what Paul is trying to do in Galatians 2:1-10.  He is a bit walking a tightrope here, across the Niagara Falls or something like that, with danger all around, and he needs to show independence but also unity at the same time, and that's what he's trying to do here. So the issue here are some false brothers, he said, "that rose up to challenge the doctrine." So who were these false brothers and how did they attack the Gospel? Look at verse 4. It said, "This matter arose because some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves." Now this may seem extremely harsh: They are not true Christians. They are not real brothers in Christ, they are false brothers. In our tolerance-loving age, we need to get a sense of Paul's commitment to the truth here, we really do.

And Paul is willing to speak the truth here, he's willing to tell the truth and it really makes sense. Look back at Galatians 1:6-9. There he says, "I'm astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to [What does he call it?] A different gospel which is really no gospel at all. [You see that?] Evidently, some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the Gospel of Christ. [But, verse 8] Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preach to you, let him be eternally condemned. As we have already said, so now I say again, if anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than the one you received, let him be eternally condemned!"

Now here's the formula. False gospels produce false brothers. It makes sense, doesn't it? You just see the consistency. He said, "It's a false Gospel, they're the ones propagating it, they must be false brothers." If you're not getting the right Gospel, then you're not a genuine believer in Christ. That's the issue, that's what's at stake here. Now these false brothers however are different than the Jews who are mentioned in 1 Thessalonians 2 who chased Paul from pillar to post, who persecuted him everywhere. They're different. They're Jews, yes, but they're not going say they hate Jesus and think of him as a deceiver of the people. They said they love Jesus. They said they follow Jesus. That they, I don't know what they said, appreciated Jesus' ministry. I don't know, how do you put it? Saying it's not enough but it's still pretty good, but they said they were in favor, or they love the work of Christ.

They're false brothers because they outwardly embraced Jesus as the Messiah but inwardly their goal was to transform the gentiles into Jews, that's what they were trying to do. So Paul accuses them there of infiltrating their ranks, coming in and spying out the freedom they have in Jesus, and they want to make them slaves. That's what he's saying, the freedom is from the freedom of the oppression of the law of Moses, of thinking “I've got to meticulously keep every jot and tittle or I'm going to go to Hell, I'm gonna be condemned.” It's blessings and curses and that's a burden, it's crushing. Freedom from the law's ability to condemn us and send us to Hell. Oh, what freedom is that!

And there were other freedoms too. Ceremonial laws that had served their purpose, their time was done and circumcision was part of that, the dietary regulations were part of that. They didn't need to be circumcised any more, the time of that was over. Once Jesus was identified to the world as a Jew born under the law, the time for that barrier, that dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentiles was gone. And there was no longer any need for markers of how the Jews were different than gentiles, that time has finished. Now God's working one new man out of the two, Christian. The only thing that matters is not circumcision, it's not un-circumcision, what matters is a new creation, faith in Jesus. He is doing a new work here and you're free now. You're free, free from condemnation, free from the law's regulations that separated you from one another. Perfectly free because God sent his son, Amen? Oh, you just need to revel in that freedom.

How sweet is it to be free from condemnation? How sweet is it to know you're forgiven? And so these false brothers have come to come make them slaves again, spy out their freedom, subterfuge, claiming to be something they weren't. Messengers of Satan really, ultimately, endangering the Gospel itself. And they were teaching a compulsion, there was a compulsion here. Not just, "Gentiles, you might want to think about getting circumcised. If I could just give you some advice, circumcision might help you." They're not saying that, are they? No, what are they saying? Look at verse three, "Yet not even Titus who was with me was compelled to be circumcised." There's the compulsion, right? Look down to verse 14, it's not in our text today but just go ahead and look. You're allowed to do that by the way, so just jump ahead. Verse 14 it says, "But when I saw that they were deviating from the truth of the Gospel I told Cephas, [Peter] in front of everyone, if you, who are a Jew, live like a gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel gentiles to live like Jews?" Again, compulsion. Okay, what's the compulsion? Well, it's really spelled out for us in Acts 15:1 and 5, all right? Acts 15:1 and 5 tells us the compulsion. Acts 15, “some men came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the brothers ‘unless you are circumcised according to the law of Moses, you cannot be saved.’” That's pretty compelling, isn't it? That's compelling. If you don't receive this religious ritual, you're going to Hell. Wow. And then again Acts 15:5, "Some of the believers came from the party of the Pharisees and stood up and said, 'It is necessary to circumcise them and command them to keep the law of Moses.'" Necessary for what? Well, we already covered that, for salvation and then secondarily, healthy membership in the church. If you're going to be a right member, a member in good standing of this church, oh, gentiles you must become Jews. That's what's going on.

So the backdrop of Galatians 2:1-10 is laid out for us plainly in Acts 15, leading to what happened in Acts 15, the Jerusalem Council. And so the Jerusalem Council happened when the Jerusalem leaders, the Apostles in Jerusalem, met together with Paul and Barnabas, and I'm sure some others, to decide this issue, to decide this circumcision question. So I think the Jerusalem Council is behind all of this, so we can address this passage now from the beginning. Look at verse 1 and 2, "14 years later, [after my first very brief visit to Jerusalem], 14 years later I went back to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along. I went in response to a revelation and set before them the Gospel that I preach among the gentiles." So he was led by God. Paul wasn't summoned by his overlords, the Jerusalem apostles, you see that? He wasn't. Why did he go to Jerusalem? God told him to go.

You see that? "I was led by a revelation." Paul frequently, as an apostle, was led in ways we wouldn't be led. Like remember the vision of the man from Macedonia? Come over and help us, and so he knew that it was time to go over to Europe, heading toward Europe, so he would be frequently guided by visions and revelations and so this was one of them. "Paul, I want you to go to Jerusalem." So he is again distancing himself from the Jerusalem apostles, "They didn't command me to go, I'm not their errand boy. I went because God told me to go. I went in response to a revelation." And so they met together in the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. Why did he go? God told him to go. He wanted Paul to defend the Gospel message that he was preaching among the gentiles. He went to defend the Gospel and to explain it. He brought Barnabas along with him to testify to the truth of his assertions because every matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. So he brought Barnabas, too, Barnabas was there on their missionary journey and he could explain it, and he also brought Titus. Now that's interesting. Titus was, at that point, no significant leader in the life of the church, he was just, we could say, a run-of-the-mill gentile convert. But very strategic for Paul to bring him, very strategic.

Okay, you think, you Judaizers think Gentiles, in abstraction, gentiles need to be circumcised in order to go to heaven and if they're not circumcised they're going to hell? Tell Titus, tell him. Tell him to his face. I think they were willing to do it. I get the sense there was a struggle there but there's a sense of an object lesson. This is a real man. These are real people that we're dealing with. They're filled with joy that their sins are forgiven through faith in Jesus and now you're bringing them back under the shadow of the law. This is a real individual. Also, going back to my recipe analogy or prototype or something like that, you kinda have, "Let's figure out with Titus 'cause we're about to be replicating this to the ends of the Earth. Let's figure out with this one individual 'cause we're gonna be doing this again and again for centuries." They wouldn't have known that but we know now. Are we doing this? Is this the recipe, Christ plus circumcision is salvation? Let's figure it out now. So, Titus was there as well.

Now, he's concerned about the unity of the church. He says, "I went in response to a revelation and set before them the Gospel that I preach among the gentiles but [I did this privately.] I did this privately to those who seem to be leaders for fear that I was running or had run my race in vain." Now, I don't know exactly, strategically why they met alone with Peter, James, and John, but they did, they met alone and they talked about doctrine. They worked it through privately and it was just the wisdom of God to do it that way. But he was afraid, he says, that he had run or was running his race in vain. Now what is he talking about that? Well, his race is his ministry. As he goes from city to city, from town to town, from place to place preaching the Gospel, persecuted, standing up for the Gospel, standing up for the doctrine, that's his race. Acts 20 in verse 24, he says there to the Ephesian elders, he says, "However, I consider my life worth nothing to me if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me, the task of testifying to the Gospel of God's grace." So that's his race. He's running that race. That's his external journey. He's running it. But he was afraid that he had run or had run his race in vain.

Now, he used this language a lot. He's afraid sometimes with the Thessalonians that because of persecution he had labored in vain there. And it has to do with having your work undone as though Paul had somehow built a sandcastle in Galatia or a bunch of sandcastles in these churches in Galatia and now the incoming tide was going to wash it all away, there'd be nothing left. If they could discredit Paul, if Paul's Gospel could be discredited, it's all undone. It's gone. All those gentiles would go back to worshipping whatever gods and goddesses they worshipped before he came and the whole thing would be in vain. So this is a key moment in redemptive history, guys, do you see that? We're trying to get the Gospel recipe right. It's just beginning to be spread to the gentiles and I would guess the absolute overwhelming majority of you folks are gentiles.

You're interested. This is your moment. Paul said, "I did it for you so that the truth of the Gospel might remain with you and me." So this is long before you were born, Paul was fighting for you. Praise God for that, amen. He was your champion, he was fighting for you and God raised him up. And I think it's right for you on Thanksgiving, which is coming up soon, thank God for people who died long before you were born who gave you gifts by protecting the Gospel and preaching it clearly and accurately. And so he fought for you and so he presents this Gospel, it says to those who seem to be important." I love that. They seem to be of reputation. We'll get to all that.

Peter, James, and John who were reputed to be pillars and they gave to Paul the right hand of fellowship, and what was the outcome? They agreed he was preaching the right Gospel and not even Titus was compelled to be circumcised. This is a key moment and Paul gives you a sense, a glimpse of the fight here. This wasn't a sweet little discussion. "Hey, what do you think?" "I don't know. What do you think?" Circumcision, yes, no. 51% we're in, alright. It wasn't that at all. There were convictions and passions on the part of the Judaizers, they were convinced, they were pointing chapter and verse, they were going to Genesis 17, they were going to other places and they were showing circumcision as a requirement. They're like, "What you do with that?" But notice the fight. It says here, "That these false brothers who'd infiltrated the ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus." Look at verse 5, "We did not give in to them for a moment. We stood firm." This is like, I hate to lower it to sports, but this is like a goal-line stand here. We're not going to yield for a moment or we lose, I can't yield.

And so I don't sense it was pleasant, do you? Do you sense this is a pleasant conversation? He's like, "False brothers, you guys are false, you're not even Christians. You don't even seem to understand grace, you don't understand what Jesus did. No, Titus will not be circumcised, over my dead body," that kind of thing. I don't know if all that got said but things like that. We didn't yield for a moment. Why, Paul, why are you fighting? So that the truth of the Gospel, oh Galatians, might remain with you. I wanted you to have the true Gospel, that's why I didn't yield. That recipe, that's poison. Christ plus law equals salvation, that's false. That's worse than cyanide being added to Tylenol. It deals with eternal souls. No, that gospel is not true. And so he fought for the Gospel, he fought against the false teachers and he did what Jude 3 says we must do. "Dear friends, [this is Jude 3] although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation that we share, I felt I had to write and urge you, [listen] to contend, to fight for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints."

Do you hear those words? We're going to fight for this thing, we're going to fight for the Gospel because it was once for all entrusted to the saints. Don't change it, don't add to it, it's poison. Don't take away from it, whatever you take is essential to it. Everything is perfect, just protect it, it was entrusted to you. And so Paul does that. Now the second aspect of what he's trying to do here is to show his relationship to the Jerusalem apostles and I've already touched on it but he wants to show independence and yet unity with them. He's walking this challenging tightrope, okay? But fundamentally, what Paul's saying is that God, Jesus, called me on the Damascus road to my ministry. It had nothing to do with these men, nothing. They didn't give me my apostleship and they didn't give me my message and they didn't add anything to my message. Neither. He doesn't say this, but neither did they take anything away from it. My message didn't come from those men and my authority didn't come from them. So he uses language that seems to be disrespectful but he's not meaning it. He says, "Those reputed to be pillars," and then he even goes beyond that, saying, "Hey, look, whatever they were doesn't matter to me. Makes no difference to me what James, Peter, and John were."

That sounds a little disrespectful, doesn't it? It's like them saying, "Well, it doesn't matter to me what you are Paul, frankly." But that's not what he's doing, it's not like he doesn't have good fellowship. He actually said, "We did have good fellowship, they extended to me the right hand of fellowship. I do respect them, I do honor them, but I didn't get anything from them. They didn't change my message. They didn't give me my apostleship, I got it from Jesus absolutely. So on the one hand, I am independent from these men, the Jerusalem leaders, in my calling as an apostle and my Gospel message, but on the other hand, guess what? We're preaching the same gospel, and guess what? The same God called us to our work and isn't that encouraging? Isn't that awesome to see how God can raise up different laborers to do different works but we're all preaching the same Gospel and we're accountable to the same God?"

Now that's what he's saying here. So he gives us in verse 1, “14 years later,” he's saying. "Look, they weren't teaching me anything, I didn't learn anything from them for 14 years, I wasn't even there, and I sure didn't get them on closed circuit TV or on the Web, alright? They weren't given anything to me, it was directly from God. And they seem to be leaders," he's not trying to be disrespectful. "Whatever... " verse 6, "Whatever they were makes no difference to me, God doesn't judge by external appearance." What is he doing there? He's saying, "I'm not accountable to them. I'm not going to stand before them on judgment day," that's what he's saying. Paul had an intense sense of personal accountability to God for his ministry, personal accountability.

And so he says in Galatians 1:10, "I am not seeking the approval of men. That's not what I'm in it for. I'm not trying to please men because if I were doing that I would no longer be a servant of Christ." And so he says in Acts 26:19 in his testimony to King Agrippa, he said, "So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from Heaven." That's how he sees it. “Jesus appeared to me from heaven. He told me to do something, I didn't disobey him. He told me to do this, it wasn't Peter, James, and John who told me to do this.” And why is that? Why does he have that sense of accountability? 2 Corinthians 5:10, "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ that each one may receive what is due him for the things done in the body, whether good or bad."

You are, I am, we're all going to be standing before Jesus someday. And so therefore he says in 1 Corinthians 4:1-4, "So then men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and those entrusted with the secret things of God. Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful to the one who gave it." Listen to this, 1 Corinthians 4:3, "I care very little if I'm judged by you or by any human court." Now again, that may seem disrespectful, doesn't it? But it isn't. What he's saying is, I'm not thinking about you in reference to my accountability, in reference to my stewardship. I'm thinking about the one who gave it to me. I care very little if I'm judged by you or by any human court. Can I just pause and say, wouldn't you love to get to that place? What kind of an evangelist would that make you? How bold would you be in standing for Christ if you really lived like that? I care very little if I'm judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I don't even judge myself, my conscience is clear but that doesn't make me innocent, it is the Lord who judges me.

So that's what he's saying here, he's independent and yet, praise God, praise God, united, united. They determined they had the same recipe. Christ plus nothing, sovereign grace, justification by faith alone, apart from works of the law. We're preaching the same Gospel, amen. And it's going to go to the ends of the Earth, we're going to replicate this thing again and again. It's going to make for the Lord a multitude of believers from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation. We have seen this Gospel crank out people, rescuing them from Hell and bringing them to heaven.

This Gospel recipe works. It is the power of God for salvation, and praise God they got it right. But it wasn't an accident that they got it right, amen? God sovereignly ordained that they would get it right, but he just used Paul to do it, and Peter and John. And so they gave them the right hand of fellowship and said, "We're preaching the same Gospel." And beyond that he could see, it's like, "I do respect Peter. God raised Peter up and God was at work in Peter's ministry just like in mine." He's not disrespecting Peter. He knows the story, I'm sure he knows it, how in Caesarea Philippi Jesus said, "What do you think about the son of man? Who is he? Some say this, some say... What about you? Who do you say that I am?" "You are the Christ, you are the son of the living God." Peter said that. Do you remember what Jesus said to Peter? "Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man but by my Father in Heaven." He had the same revelation of Jesus by the Father. Isn't that awesome?

God was at work in Peter's life. And Jesus then said to Peter, "You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it." How could Paul say, "I follow Jesus but I don't care about Peter." He didn't say that at all. He says the same God is at work in Peter's ministry to the Jews as he is in my ministry to the gentiles and we have complete unity together.

So where does that leave the Judaizers? On the outside. They're out in the cold, they're false teachers. The Jerusalem apostles and Paul were preaching the exact same message and they gave their right hand of fellowship but they say one more thing, one more thing. Please don't forget the poor as you do this. Look at verse 10. "All they ask was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do."

And so there's not a lot here, he just mentions it in passing and so I'm not going to belabor it, but wherever the Gospel's needed most there's also poverty there. We see that again and again. Satan impoverishes people at every level and so when people are held in thrall by Satan they tend to be crushed in every way, and so they're not blessed materially, they're poor. You folks know missiologists have looked at where are the unreached people groups and they say most of them are in North Africa, the Middle East, going across over through Iran and heading toward India, China, Indonesia, what they call the 10/40 window. Latitude 10 to 40, that swath, that's where most of the unreached people groups are. Well, guess what? 82% of the world's three billion poorest people live there too. So if you're going to go minister the Gospel, you're going to be staring into the jaws of poverty. And so remember the poor, Paul, as you preach the gospel, remember the poor and be concerned about them.

Okay, so what causes that poverty? Human sin, human sin directly and indirectly. Satan dominates peoples minds and hearts. The earth produces far more food than is needed to feed every one of the seven billion of us. Then why do people starve? Why is there poverty? Well, because of man-made religions, and cold-hearted governments, and vicious gangs, vigilante gangs that are trying to take over countries where there's anarchy, and wild-eyed insurgents, and revolutionaries, and greedy industrialists, and selfish tribal chiefs, and lazy fathers, and drug-addicted mothers, and cycles of social injustice, and all of that, and 100 other sins add up to poverty, add up to poverty. And wherever the Gospel goes, and people repent and genuinely start walking by the spirit, things change radically. So if you're going to go with the Gospel, you're going to go and minister to the poor and needy.

So what application can we take from this? I want to give you three main headings. Delighting in the Gospel, defending the Gospel, and extending the Gospel, those three.

Let's start with delighting in the Gospel. This is glorious. It is a joy to preach this gospel. Isn't it marvelous? To proclaim in Jesus the forgiveness of sins to all of you is a great privilege and joy. Do you know that saving love of Christ? Maybe you were invited today by a friend. I hope we're inviting people to church. I can promise you, dear church members, you invite people, they'll hear the Gospel every week, I promise you. I'm making a pledge before you, every week, at some point, I will clearly explain how lost people can be saved. So if you know you're lost, you know you're on the outside, this is for you. I just want to explain it to you, you can't save yourself by works. There's nothing you can do, no present obedience can pay for past disobedience to God's laws, it doesn't work that way. Instead what you need to do is humble yourself before Jesus and say, "You came, you're the Son of God, you died on the cross in my place, I trust in you, save me." Call on the name of the Lord and he will save you.

Delight in that. Embrace it by faith. Now if you've done that, you embraced in that years ago, now I'm just asking you to be happy about it. I'm asking you to show your joy everywhere you go. Even in the midst of great sorrow still always rejoicing. Delight in this Gospel. Delight in how much it glorifies God. It's so God-centered, isn't it? Not by works but by God. That's God-honoring, God-glorifying. Delight how it humbles you. You were saved contrary to your works, not by them. Delight in how it meets all of your needs. It secures for you a place in heaven. It gives you something to look forward to that cannot be taken from me, moth and rust cannot destroy, thieves cannot break in and steal, it's waiting for you and nothing can take it from you. All of your best days are in the future, rejoice in that and be happy. Delight that the Father is not angry with you at all. He is reconciled to you. Delight in that. Your sins are forgiven. Delight in the freedom you have in Christ, freedom from the law in its power to condemn but then freedom to keep the law in its power to instruct you what a good life is. Delight in your freedom.

Secondly, defending the Gospel. This Gospel, this recipe that God crafted or concocted before the foundation of the world is perfect. Let me say it again. The only thing that can be added to it is poison, the only things that can be taken from it are essential to its nature. We accept it as perfect just as it is, just as it is. So therefore, assume that there will be an attack on the Gospel in every generation. Satan relentlessly attacks this message and we must defend it. God raised up Paul to defend it. He has raised up us. It is entrusted once for all to the saints. It is to us to protect, to defend this Gospel message. We must contend for this faith. So let's pray, shall we, that FBC will continue to be faithful in the Gospel, don't assume it. Don't assume that 20 years from now in this building the Gospel will still be preached. We need to defend it, so pray that we would continue.

Don't begrudge, let me say this gently but clearly, don't begrudge the strong doctrinal flavor of our church's ministry. Don't begrudge it, rejoice in it. If the church has some failings in fellowship or in friendliness or in outreach or other things, let's fix those according to God's word but let's not give up on precision and care about doctrine. Delight in it. It's good that this church is careful about doctrine, it's a delight. The answer isn't that we become less doctrinally pure, that's not the right answer. And so let me speak to you elders. The elders are specifically called on to be watch guards in this area. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you. Guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in you. Protect it. And church, pray for the elders to do it. I don't know what direction Satan is going to come at in reference to this Gospel but let's pray that we would be protecting it.

And then thirdly, extending the Gospel. We have this perfect recipe but it needs to be out and about. We need to see it making Christians, amen. Let's get out and trade with it like the talents, like the five talents. Let's take it to the ends of the Earth. Let's go and share this. Let's say, assume that you're going to be surrounded, for the most part, at the workplace and whatever with unbelievers because that's probably generally true. And just start praying from it. God give me a chance to invite someone to church. Give me a chance to go deeper. Maybe I'm riding in a car with a coworker, maybe I'm taking a trip with them, we're going on a business trip or something, maybe it's just the two of us after hours in the office. Give me a chance to share the Gospel, I want to talk about it.

So let's extend it. And then concerning ministry to the poor, Paul was zealous, he said, "I was eager to do it." Ask God to give you an eagerness to care for the poor and needy. We so easily excuse ourselves from that and say, "Oh, it's because of this or that," and we don't get involved. Educate yourself on poverty worldwide and locally, right here. Let's find out where poverty is right around this church. Now, we need to always give top priority to the ministry of the soul. The Cross Conference that I'm going to be speaking at, at the end of the year, this is their slogan, something like this, "Christians are concerned about all forms of suffering but especially eternal suffering." So that puts it very well. Let's give a top priority to the Gospel but as we minister, we're going to care for the poor and needy.

And then finally, please consider, I'm urging you to consider coming to the City Outreach Conference on November 23rd. Matthew Hodges is putting this together, it's going to be fantastic. Dr. Carl Ellis is coming, he is an outstanding thinker and speaker. And the point of the conference is really for us more than anything else, that we would know how better to minister right around here. Did I get that right, brother? Is that about right? Anything else you want to say? Is that alright? But please talk to Matthew. Sacrifice some time that Friday, Saturday, and be part of that. Let me close in prayer. Father, we thank you for the joy of the Gospel. Thank you for the way you raised up Paul, really, as a hero to defend the freedom we gentiles have from the law, the crushing burden of the law. And I thank you for this time we've had to study together, in Jesus' name, amen.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on Galatians 1:11-24, and Paul's divine appointment to preach the gospel.

One of my favorite moments that we have occasionally here in the church, and the elders are talking about increasing the frequency, is when we hear testimonies from brothers and sisters in Christ of various ways that God is working in their lives and their ministries. Don't you love that? We get it every time there is a baptism, and so we get to hear the incredible story of how God brought that man or woman to faith in Christ. We all rejoice in that, sometimes with applause, I think always with applause at baptism, and we praise God for that. Or there will be other times that people will step up and just talk about their ministry. You just heard me pray for Jack. Isn't that incredible? Two thousand consecutive Monday nights. Sometimes on a December 25th, sometimes inclement weather, incredible faithfulness. Jack mentioned, sometimes on his anniversary. I wonder why he brought that up? But just saying what a godly woman Rita was, to free him up to do that ministry, if in fact he went. I don't know what's wise or not. You just need wisdom from God, should I go or not?  But for two thousand nights, individuals have stepped up and ministered, and I think that's incredible.

The sharing of testimonies. You see it sometimes at so-called revival meetings, or Billy Graham crusades. You see people getting up and talking about how God brought them to faith in Christ. I just love hearing those stories, don't you? I love hearing of God's faithfulness, whether in converting someone, or using someone in ministry, and you can share in that. For me, it's always seemed to be somewhat of a foretaste of Heaven, of heavenly fellowship.

I think a big portion of our time in Heaven will be going back over redemptive history, and what happened, and talking about it, and listening to it. And we are going be free people at that point. We'll be free from time constraints, free from anxieties, free from pride and arrogance, and sharing stories like that, free from pride and arrogance, and not wanting to really listen to someone else's stories. We're going to care intensely about what God has done in someone else's life, because we will be glorified. We will be free from selfishness, and we will be so eager to hear stories of brothers and sisters that lived in different ages and generations, some perhaps a thousand years ago, and how God used them, and what God did to bring them to faith in Christ. I am so eager for that. We are all going be church historians then, friends. Praise God. You may think church history's a bit of a snooze. It isn't, it's thrilling. Amen? Nathan? It is not a snooze.

You have a testimony right now on that. It's going to be awesome, because it's God at work in other people's lives. And to God be the glory. In my mind, as I begin this sermon today, I want you to go ahead to verse 24, and just look at it. And I just love what Paul says at the very end of the section, end of Chapter 1, "And they praised God, because of me." Isn't that an awesome statement? "They praised God, because of me." Friends, the only way that can happen is with the Gospel of God's sovereign grace at center place in our understanding, that we know it is only by the sovereign grace of God, that anything good happens in our lives. And so it's not, "They praised me for my courage, and my boldness, and my wisdom, and my discerning sensitivity to understanding what the right things were, and stepping out and doing them." No, no, no. "They praised God, because of me." It gives me something to yearn for and something to live for. I want that to be said of me at the end of my life, that other people had cause to praise God, because of me.

And so let us, as members of this church, celebrate sovereign grace. Let's understand that that is what Galatians is all about. But this testimony that we have here in Galatians 1, and that's what it is, this is the testimony of the Apostle Paul, is a testimony unlike any other there's ever been in church history. Paul is a unique individual in church history. His conversion story, his testimony of grace, is different than anyone else's testimony. In some very significant ways, because God had ordained (as he says right in the text), God had willed, even from his mother's womb, even from before the foundation of the world, He had willed to use this man, this Saul of Tarsus, this Apostle Paul, in ways He had chosen to use no one else. And so He brought him though significant things, and transformed him to, God be the Glory, to be an example. And we are going to talk about this from 1 Timothy 1, an example of how if God can save him, He can save anyone. That's really what the story is, but then beyond that, how God chose to use him, to give us much of the theology of salvation that we celebrate week after week.

The other Apostles, God used them as eyewitnesses of the Word who became flesh, eyewitnesses of his glory. They told the stories of his miracles, and were there when He broke the bread, and they were eyewitnesses of his resurrection, and all of that. But it's predominantly through Paul that we understand the theology of all the events. We get the facts through the eyewitnesses, but then we get the theology and the significance through the Apostle Paul. And so God willed for this individual, this Paul, to be raised up and converted in a spectacular way.  God showed him visions of Christ, and of the truth that He gave to no one else, and Paul wrote them down, and we still read them today. So what we have here, in the section we are looking at today, Galatians 1:11-24, we have Paul's defense for his apostleship. His defense, even more significantly, for his message. He is defending both his message and his apostleship, and he's going say that both his message and his apostleship were of divine, of supernatural origin. He's defending it.

Now, the attack made by the Judaizers, the false teachers that came in to Galatia.  The Apostle Paul, after he was converted was shaped, trained, and prepared by God himself, by Christ himself, to be the Apostle to the Gentiles. And in the fullness of time, at the right time, he went forth on a missionary journey with Barnabas, and he went through Asia Minor into Galatia, in modern-day Turkey, and he was a church planter there. He led people to Christ and he planted churches. But in a shockingly brief amount of time, after he and Barnabas left, some false teachers came in and infiltrated their ranks. They began teaching a different Gospel, which Paul said, and we looked last time, "Is no Gospel at all." A mixture of Christ plus works, Christ plus law equals salvation. A mixture, which ultimately, when it all boils down, the final analysis goes down to self-salvation. A so-called Gospel of self-salvation is no Gospel at all.

So in a shockingly brief amount of time after Paul had planted those churches, they started to turn in their hearts toward a different Gospel, and he's so disappointed, he's so shocked, he's so concerned about them. Later in this epistle, he's going to say that he is in childbirth over them, concerned and laboring for them. And so this section that we're looking at today, verses 11-24, is Paul's defense for his own apostleship, his own life story, his calling. It’s not so much so he can defend himself (we'll get into that), but so that he can defend the message he came to preach, and his right to teach them its implications. That's what he's doing.

Paul is one of the most attacked people in history. It goes on even to this present day. The attack on Paul is a timeless attack on the truth of the Gospel. And so these Judaizers were probably saying lukewarm things about Paul. "He's a good man, but he didn't get the Gospel right. He's a second-hander. He's not one of the first frontline apostles. He listened to those in Jerusalem, got it, but he garbled it, he didn't quite get it right. And now, you need to listen to us, we are the mouthpiece of the true church in Jerusalem. We are the ones who are telling you how you must be saved, through the work of Christ on the cross, yes, but also through the law of Moses, mixing those two together. And the Apostle Paul, a nice guy, I guess, but he's getting it wrong." Well, listen, that attack on Paul is a timeless one. It's an attack on the Gospel. It's a attack on our brains. We 21st century Christians need to be sure that Paul was an apostle, sent not from men, nor by man, but by Jesus Christ. And we need to be certain that the things he wrote, the things he taught are true, absolutely true. We need to have absolute confidence that God spoke through Paul.

We need to be sure when we sit down to read Romans, or 1 or 2 Corinthians, or 2 Thessalonians, that everything in there is God's own truth, and be confident in that. And so we have to listen to Paul's defense for his own ministry. Paul is under attack, and his defense for himself and his ministry here, is not because he's on some kind of ego trip. It's not because he's insecure and needs some affirmation or needs some assurance. It's not that at all. It's rather that he's trying to defend his right to teach the Gospel, and the Gospel that he actually did preach there in Galatia, that it was the true Gospel. The Book of Acts is filled with attacks on the Apostle Paul. It's just one after the other. As soon as he moves out, as soon as he comes to faith in Christ, and preaches the Gospel there in Damascus, he's persecuted. He's persecuted in Jerusalem. He's persecuted in Asia Minor, when he and Barnabas go out on that missionary journey. It's just in the Book of Acts, it's just one attack after another. The last eight chapters of the Book of Acts is Paul on trial, in one court setting after another, Paul defending himself against one attack after another.

The same thing happens, though, in other epistles. We see it in 2 Corinthians, how he defends himself from an attack, from what some people called the 'super apostles.' "We're the extra apostles. We're the super apostles." And so they're questioning Paul on this. And so he has to defend his ministry, which he does vigorously in 2 Corinthians. But here he does it in Galatians 1 and 2. He spends a lot of time defending himself. And I think it's because the Lord knew that Paul would be the key new covenant theologian. He would be the key individual, not the only one, now, we learn new covenant theology from John and from Peter and others as well, but he is the key advocate and articulator of the significance of Christ's death on the cross, and his resurrection, and the significance of Pentecost, and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. So he is defending himself, but not for his own sake.

Look at verse 10. He is not concerned what people think about him there. He says in verse 10, "Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God, or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ." He's not doing this because he is trying to please people or have people think well of him. In 1 Thessalonians 2:6, he says the same thing, "We were not looking for praise from men, not from you or anyone else." And again in 1 Corinthians 4:3, a very clear statement. He says, "I care very little, if I'm judged by you or by any human court. Actually, I don't even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that doesn't make me innocent. It's the Lord who judges me." The only one I care about is what the Lord thinks about me. Isn't that a strong statement? "I care very little if I'm judged by you or anyone else."

And so the issue here, that we're getting at in Galatians 1:11-24, is the link, the fundamental link between the man and his message. There is a link between Paul and the Gospel Paul preached, the Gospel he taught so plainly and clearly.  What he wants to do, look at verse 1 and we're going to compare it to verses 11-12, there's a strong link here. Verse 1, "Paul, an apostle, sent not from man, nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God, the Father, who raised Him from the dead." That's very similar to verse 11-12, "I want you to know, brothers, that the Gospel I preached, is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but rather I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ."

You see? In Verse 1, he says, "My apostleship came directly from God, from Christ," and then verse 11 and 12, "My message, the Gospel I preach, came directly from God as a revelation of Jesus Christ." So that's the issue. There's a link between his apostleship and his message. "I got my apostleship from God and I got my message from God." To some degree, this makes perfect sense. Now, an apostle is a sent one, a messenger, an ambassador from, let's say, a king to another country, something like that, with an official status to relay a message.

Imagine in the Middle Ages, that some herald shows up in royal regalia, he's got the king's crest on his chest, and he's got a scroll that he's waving, and he calls, "Hear ye, hear ye. All you citizens assemble." Everybody comes together, and he pulls out this scroll, and it's marked with a seal, and he waves it in front of them, and then he breaks the seal, and right before he's about to read the proclamation, someone from the crowd calls out, "That man is an impostor. I know who he is. He's a highway robber. He's probably assaulted the genuine messenger of the king and has taken his clothing. We can't trust a word he says." You see the significance of this, don't you? If the messenger is discredited, then the message is discredited. We can't listen to anything that the messenger says if you discredit the messenger. So that's what's going on here. Paul is proving that both his role as an apostle and his message came from the same source. It came from God. There is authority here, authority and truth. He has a right to preach and teach. He has a right to shape their understanding of the Gospel.

And the key idea here is that God speaks to us through people. He raises up people and gives them the authority to speak his truth. And we see this fundamentally getting established at Mount Sinai, you remember that? That time when God descended in fire and cloud, when the Jewish nation, having been delivered from bondage in Egypt, having passed through the Red Sea, coming to Mount Sinai, they're assembled at the base of the mountain, that the mountain is trembling, everyone's terrified. God descends in fire and cloud, and He speaks in this terrifyingly loud voice, "I am the Lord, your God, who led you out of Egypt, out of bondage. You shall have no other gods besides me," and gave them the Ten Commandments, verbally spoke to them.

The people were so terrified by what they heard, that they pleaded with Moses. They said, "Would you please go up the mountain, go up into the cloud, in the fire, and talk to God, and listen to him, and find out what He wants to say to us, and would you please come and tell us, so that we don't hear this great voice anymore, lest we hear it and die?" And God said, "What the people have said is good. It's a good thing. I wish they would always fear me like they fear me right now." And so Moses became the mouthpiece of God to the Jewish nation. He went up, heard from God, came down, and spoke God's Word, and he then opened up the office for the Jewish nation of prophet, that office was opened up, where individuals would hear the voice of God, and they would relay it to the people of God.

Moses said in Deuteronomy 18, "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers, and you must listen to him, for this is what you asked the Lord, your God, at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, 'Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God, nor see His great fire anymore or we will die.' And the Lord said to me, 'What they say is good. I will raise up a prophet like you, from among their brothers, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him.'" Well, that's the office of prophet. And so again and again, the prophets were raised up after Moses was dead and gone. The prophets came, and they would say things like, "Thus says the Lord," and they would speak, and the people had to listen to what they said, and if they didn't, there would be problems, judgment would come.

Now, once God had spoken through an individual, like Jeremiah, let's say, and he was established as a prophet of God, and the things he said came true, they would come and ask him, "Is there a word from the Lord today?" They wanted to hear from Him, and he was established in the office of prophet, and they recognized him as a genuine mouthpiece of God, and so the Word of the Lord would come, and they would speak. And so the apostles, the New Testament apostles, were chosen out from all of Jesus' disciples to be with Jesus, and to see Him, and to go with him, and to hear his teachings, and have a close relationship with him, and then eventually to be the foundation of the church, humanly speaking, along with the prophets of the Old Testament. And so it says in Ephesians 2:19-20 that, "God's household, [the church, is] built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone."

My understanding is that these mouthpieces of God were eventually the foundation of the Bible. The apostles and prophets, to me, equals Bible, the written Word of God. The apostles and prophets, as they testified to Jesus, that's the foundation of the church. That's what the church is built on. And so the apostles are the link that 20 centuries of Christians around the world have to the resurrected Christ. Their eyewitness testimony of Christ's words and deeds, and especially of his death and resurrection, is foundational to our faith. The authority of the apostles and the truth of their message was essential to the future of the church. Now, as the Lord would have it, He was going to raise up yet another man, this Saul of Tarsus, this Paul, to be an apostle, one untimely born, just handled differently. God had a different plan for him, and shaped him, and molded him, and prepared him differently.

And you think about all that the Lord intended to give us through Paul.  Think of all the things you know about Jesus because Paul wrote Romans. Think about all the things you know about spiritual gifts because he wrote 1 Corinthians, or love, because he wrote 1 Corinthians 13. Think about the specific things you know about the end times, because Paul wrote 2 Thessalonians. There are things that you know about God’s activity before the foundation of the world, because he wrote Romans 8 and Ephesians 1. Think of all of the things that God has given you through Paul. And when you get to heaven, go and find him and thank him, alright? And he'll say, "They glorify God because of me. It's because of God that you have anything good through me." But God willed to give all of this truth, this river of truth through this one individual. So Satan's attack on Paul back then, his time-bound attack back then, is actually an eternal attack on the church. Do you see that?

Paul has to defend his apostleship, not for his own sake, but for ours, and for the Galatian Christians, so that we can understand. And his main point in verse 11-12 is the supernatural origin of the Gospel that he preached. Look at it again, at verse 11-12, "I want you to know, brothers, that the Gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, rather I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ." This is the supernatural origin of the Gospel that he preached. This Gospel is the power of God for our salvation. And as I pointed out last week, it's not just for the beginning of the Christian life, it's for the rest of the Christian life. As Tim Keller put it beautifully, it's not the ABCs of Christianity, it's the A to Z. And so you're going to be under the ministry of the Gospel the rest of your life. You're not done being saved yet. And so you need to trust this Gospel message right on through, right 'til the end.

I love Romans 6:17. We talked about it at the new member weekend a few days ago, and it was just a beautiful time.  It’s a verse so rich with doctrine and truth. There it says, "Thanks be to God, that though you used to be slave to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed that form of teaching to which you were entrusted."  God entrusted your souls to doctrine. He entrusted your soul to a pattern of teaching and it's for your soul's health that you stay under that Gospel the rest of your life. And so Paul wants you to trust that Gospel right straight through. He wants you to keep trusting that Gospel. Satan wants you to not trust it. He wants to bring doubt, and different thoughts and confusions in, and that he's trying to assault the purity of your understanding of the Gospel. And here in Galatians, he's bringing in this man-made mixture Gospel of works and faith, things that do not go together. And so if Paul's Gospel was defective, it's man-made. But if Paul's Gospel was revealed from heaven, then it's perfect, and it will get you saved. It will finish the saving work in you, right through to heaven. This Gospel can get you to heaven. Praise God for that! It can get you to Heaven! It can forgive all of your sins and it can equip you every moment to fight indwelling sin. If you're entrusted to it, it can get you safely all the way to Heaven, if you keep believing its message. And so he's defending this. The world is filled with man-made Gospels. People are clever. I think they're demoniacally clever, frankly. I think demons are involved. I think Satan's involved, but I think he puts ideas, and thoughts, and visions, and weird thoughts in people's minds, and they come up with new religions.

I think Islam is ultimately a man-made religion. Mormonism is a man-made religion. Joseph Smith was a con artist, who was a very clever individual, and I think there's a Satanic input, and the Book of Mormon came from it, and it's a false religion, it's a false Gospel. It's not Christianity. I think Buddhism, Hinduism, these things are man-made religions. They're man-made Gospel. It's no Gospel at all. The true Gospel is heaven sent. It came down from heaven with Jesus. It's a message that God, 1 Corinthians 2:7, "Ordained for our salvation, before time began." It's a message that God worked out, if we can use that language of God, He worked it out, Father, Son and Spirit, before the foundation of the world, before time began, and then proclaimed it little by little in the Old Testament prophets.  They little by little let out more and more truth. And the Gospel was proclaimed ahead of time, through the prophets, Romans 1:1-3, and Romans 16:26.

This is a Gospel that God announced ahead of time through the prophets. Galatians 4, "When the time had fully come, God sent the Gospel in His Son, Jesus, born of a woman, born under the law." The Gospel is heaven sent. It descended from heaven to Earth. Jesus, in John 6, uses this descending language, "I have come down from heaven." Isn't that powerful, that image? "I have descended. " John 6:38-39  "I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but to do the will of Him who sent me. And this is the will of Him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that He has given me, but raise them up at the last day. " "I descended to raise you up." That's what Jesus said. This is the bread of life that descended from heaven like the manna did. This is a Gospel that is heaven sent. It's not anything that man made up. No one could have made this up. CS Lewis makes this point, "The Gospel must be true. No human being could ever have concocted this. Who would have ever thought of this, this Gospel of sovereign grace, contrary to human merit, by the death of the incarnate Son of God and his resurrection?" Who is going come up with that? No individual could have. This is something that we did not concoct. And Paul says in verse 12, "I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it. I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ."

Now, I'm going to digress. You don't know this, but I'm going to tell you. I'm going to digress from what I wrote here, because I don't really think what I wrote is the best way to say it. I'm going say something a little bit differently. What I do here in my outline here, is talk about how all of us receives the Gospel by revelation. Like Peter, at Caesarea at Philippi, we all have to have Christ directly revealed to our hearts, or we won't be converted. Friends, that's true, but I don't really think that's what Paul is saying here. He's saying, "I'm special," actually. That's what he's saying, "I'm unique. I didn't have the same kind of encounter with the Gospel that average people have." Is there anything wrong with being taught the Gospel by people? No, that's all of us. We should all say, "No, there's nothing wrong.” Thank God, there's nothing wrong. We were, all of us, taught the Gospel by people, but Paul wasn't, not in the same way we are. He got it directly from Jesus. That's what he's claiming here. He's saying in effect, "I am unique." Yes, you have the Gospel revealed to your heart by the Holy Spirit, definitely that's true, but that's off the point of what Paul's saying here. So that outline, put it aside. But truer, yes, in one sense, yes, God revealed Christ to you when you were born again. God revealed Christ to you when you were converted, but God revealed Christ in a special way to this man, Paul. He had a vision of Christ on the road to Damascus.

Paul talks about the transformation that happened with this Gospel, this powerful Gospel that came in his life, and changed everything. Look at verse 13 and 14, he said, "You have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism, beyond many Jews of my own age, and I was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers." "I was an expert Jew. I was a zealous Jew. I was a ladder-climbing Jew. I was a competitive Jew. I was looking at my schoolmates and I was getting better grades than them. I was better at memorizing Torah than they were. I was the best Jew on Earth." That's about what he's saying. Paul does a lot of this kind of boasting and it's interesting, but it's true. In Philippians 3:4-6, he says, "If anyone else, [any other Jewish, Judaizer-type person,] thinks he has reasons for confidence in the flesh, I have more." Paul does a lot of this kind of thing, "I'm better than you. Alright, I'll tell you what. Let's just lay out our Jewish credentials here. Let's lay them on the table and I win. I win every time, alright?" What is he talking about? He says, [I was] "circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel and the tribe of Benjamin. a Hebrew of Hebrews. In regard to the law, a Pharisee. As for zeal, a persecutor of the church. And as for legalistic righteousness, faultless."

In Acts 22:3-4, his testimony goes like this, "I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in the city, [Jerusalem]. Under Gamaliel, I was thoroughly trained in the law of our fathers," and here he's actually a little more humble than usual, "And was just as zealous for God as any of you are today.” I'll be equally zealous as you. "I persecuted the followers of this Way to their death, arresting both men and women, and throwing them in prison." Why does Paul talk about how much of an expert, excellent Jew he was? First of all, because he's dealing with Judaizers, they are his enemies in this debate. And he's saying, "I understand what you're saying. I understand the law of Moses as well as you do. I understand where all that leads, so I have the credentials to talk law with you," and by the way, he does it on behalf of those who can't. The Galatians are Gentiles. What do they know about all these, the minutiae of the law? They're overwhelmed. They're intimidated by these Jews, who are coming and saying, "You know nothing of the law. Let me tell you unwashed Gentiles how it is."

Paul steps forward as our champion, the Gentiles' champion, and says, "Look, I understand the law better than any of these people and I know it doesn't save souls. I know it. I'm able to tell you. I ran that race, it doesn't lead anywhere but hell. I considered my righteousness in that old system garbage. Whatever was to my gain, I considered loss, so that I could gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God, and is by faith." He can speak about all these things. He's our expert. Now, the point Paul is making here is, "That's how I used to live. A radical transformation has come to me." How do you explain that? How do you explain what happened to Saul of Tarsus? What explanation can you give?

Well, post-Freud and into our counseling kind of era psych, there are all kinds of people who want to do psychological analysis of Paul. But let's just cut to the chase. Either he was insane or he was radically converted by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A crazy man. You don't do a 180 degree about-face like he did. It's an astonishing conversion, a powerful testimony, and he's not insane. At one point, they claim that he was, in Acts 26:24, "Your great learning has driven you insane." He says, "I'm not crazy. The things I'm saying are true and they are reasonable." God converted Paul because He had a purpose for him. Look at verse 15 and 16, "But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me, so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles." Just stop there. This is an incredible thing. Paul says, "God set me apart from birth for this work. He had been training and preparing me to do this from the time I was born." Actually, if you read Ephesians 1, it was earlier than that. It says, "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms, with every spiritual blessing in Christ, for He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in His sight."

Before time began, before God said, "Let there be light," God had planned all of this. But Paul just says, "From birth, God set me apart from birth and called me by his grace," and that's an amazing statement, really. An amazing statement. He's saying, "Everything that happened to me before I was converted was part of God's plan for me." Isn't that an incredible statement? He's like, "Well, that was all that rebellion." The time he was hating Jesus, all that time, everything that happened, the way he was born, where he was born, the fact that he was a Roman citizen from birth was part of the package. The fact that he was born in Tarsus, but came to Jerusalem to study under Gamaliel, that was part of it. The fact that he was zealous for the law, that was part of it. The fact that he was an expert in the law.  The fact that he was a Pharisee, that he considered his legalistic righteousness to be blameless, that was all part of it. The fact that he was so driven and so ambitious was part of it. The fact that he went after the church and persecuted it. He was there with Stephen.

You know what I think happened? I think Stephen beat him in a debate. I think if you read between the lines, in Acts 6, Stephen was preaching from the Scriptures, that Jesus was the Christ and no one could refute him. No one could resist him or stand up against his wisdom of the Spirit, by which he spoke, and that includes Jews from the synagogue of Freedmen from Tarsus and Cilicia. I think Paul was there. He was like, "I can't beat this guy, Stephen." And so he was just there when Stephen was killed, and he was giving assent to his death. He was excited that Stephen was dying. And then, in Acts 8, he starts to destroy the church, and he starts to persecute it, and he's going after the church, and he's dragging off men and women, and throwing them in prison. But meanwhile, Stephen's points are working in his brain. And the behavior of these men and women, and the children in these Christian homes, and their tears, and their pain, and their deaths, it seems, because he voted against them, he consented to their deaths, and he was in some sense a murderer. In one sense, a murderer, a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and a violent man. And all of this, Paul's saying, "Is part of God's plan for me," all of it. Wow. And why? Because he was shaping him and preparing him to be the apostle to the Gentiles, and to be a trophy of God's grace that stood for all time.

Listen to 1 Timothy 1, "I thank Christ Jesus, our Lord, who has given me strength, that He considered me faithful, appointing me to His service, even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man. I was shown mercy, because I acted in ignorance and unbelief. The grace of our Lord was poured out on me, abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus." I love this verse, this one verse, you ought to memorize this one, 1 Timothy 1:15, "Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst." Oh, you should memorize that. You should cherish it, whenever you get attacked, or assaulted by Satan, the accuser, or the brethren, and say, "Go back. Yeah, but 1 Timothy 1:15 says, 'Here's a trustworthy saying. Christ came to save sinners like me. Yes, I am a sinner, but He came to save people like me. It's trustworthy and I will trust it. Of whom, I am the worst,'" he said. "But," verse 16, "For that very reason, I was shown mercy, so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display [put on display], His unlimited patience, as an example for those who would believe on Him and receive eternal life."

So here's the logic. If God can save Saul of Tarsus, breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples, He can save anyone, anytime, just like that. Just like that. Isn't that awesome? Doesn't that encourage you as an evangelist? Doesn't that encourage you as a missionary? Doesn't that encourage you, as you're praying for lost loved ones and co-workers? God can save anyone, anytime, and that's the point. And he says, "It was God's good pleasure to do it." God enjoys doing it. God enjoys saving sinners. I love what Jesus said in Luke 12:32, "Fear not, little flock, it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the Kingdom." God enjoys saving you. He delights in it. And so his immediate purpose was so that he might preach.

From the very beginning of Paul’s ministry, right from the calling, Jesus said, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" "Who are you, Lord?" "I'm Jesus, the one you're persecuting. Now, get up, and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do." Just right away in his conversion, right away, he's given a work. And so he goes to the synagogues in Damascus right away, and he begins preaching the Gospel. Wouldn't you love to have been there that Saturday or whenever that Sabbath was? He goes in there, "Oh, yeah, I know this guy. He's here to arrest all those Christians, weird people from that weird cult," and he opens his mouth and begins proving from the Scriptures, that Jesus is the Son of God.

What a stunned moment. How can we account for this, except by sovereign grace? But after God was pleased to reveal his Son in him, so that he might preach among the Gentiles, he says, "I did not consult any man. I didn't ask anyone. I didn't get trained. I didn't go to school. I didn't go to seminary. I especially didn't go to Jerusalem. I didn't sit at the feet of those who were apostles, before I was. I withdrew at that point. After preaching in Damascus and being let in over the wall in a basket, I went to Arabia." It's a picture of a retreat, maybe even in a desert, like Elijah out in the desert with the ravens bringing him food. Picture that or picture John the Baptist out in the desert, in the years before he began his public ministry. Or picture Jesus being driven by the Spirit out into the desert to be tempted by the Devil for 40 days.

There is Paul in Arabia and he's learning the Gospel. So the things he later wrote in Romans, Jesus taught him those things directly, by revelation. And so he was trained, and he says in verse 19, "I saw none of the other apostles, except James, the Lord's brother," and then he asserts, he said, "I'm not lying. I assure you that I'm not lying. And then I went to Syria and Silesia, and those churches in Judea, they hadn't even heard of me. I wasn't a second-hander who learned the Gospel from the apostles in Jerusalem, and then tried it out in the churches there around Judea. They'd never even heard of me." But eventually, they heard that this man, the very man who used to persecute and attack the Gospel, is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy and they praised God, because of me."

What application can we take from this? Well, how about this? How about come to Christ? How about trust in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins? Amen. The Gospel of God's grace is here for you. That's the whole point of Galatians, is so that you will know that this Gospel, the same Gospel that saved Saul of Tarsus, is here today.

God sent his Son, born of a virgin, who lived a sinless life, who died on the cross in your place, who God raised from the dead on the third day. If you repent of your sins and trust in him, you will be saved. You will be saved. Trust in him. This is a heaven-sent Gospel. And only a heaven-sent Gospel produces worship and glory to God for its converts. "And they praised God, because so-and-so got converted. They praised God, because aunt so-and-so, or brother so-and-so, or sister so-and-so got converted. They praised God, because my boss was converted." To God be the glory. Only by emphasizing sovereign grace will we understand that the worship and the glory goes to God. Let him who boast, boast in the Lord.

I would urge you trust Paul and his writings. Be suspicious of anybody who comes alongside, okay? Paul has written on a lot of controversial issues. And again and again, when you get into these controversial issues, like the role of women in ministry, divorce and remarriage, charismatic gifts, various other things, lots of controversial things, many of them in 1 Corinthians. You may wonder why I entrusted 1 Corinthians to the elders, and then left on sabbatical. No, I wouldn't do that to my friends. Go ahead, preach through all the controversial things, get those cleaned up and I'll return in the fall. But so many of those controversial things were entrusted to Paul. And again, and again, when you start getting into him, you hear some effort to discredit Paul, separate him from Jesus, "Jesus had this view of women and Paul had this view." Again and again, this discrediting of Paul, it's just Satan attacking Paul again. Trust everything Paul wrote. It's the Word of God, all of it.

And then, finally, if I can enhance, enrich your fellowship, let's share testimonies with each other, okay? Let's share how we came to faith in Christ. The elders want to do that more on Sunday mornings. We're going to be doing that with some of the candidates for elders over the next few weeks. Just praise God for what God's done in these men, in their lives. But we're going to have other testimonies of how God has worked in various people's lives. Find out from those that are suffering severe illness how God is being faithful in this time to give grace. Let's do real fellowship with each other. Let's not go down to current events, and to the weather, and all that. Tonight, at home fellowship, share with each other how God has been gracious to you and what God is doing in your life. That's a foretaste of heaven. Close with me in prayer.

Father, I thank you for the Apostle Paul. I thank you for how he defended his calling, how he defended his Gospel ministry. I thank you for the Gospel you gave him to preach, and I thank you for each brother and sister that's here today. God, there's been a burden on my heart this morning, that there might be somebody here today that walked in this place, knowing they're not converted. I want to pray for that person, whether man or woman, boy or girl. I want to pray right now that you would bring conversion by your sovereign grace, just like you did with Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. Bring a transformation in their heart right now, that they would look to Christ and him crucified, not trusting in their own works anymore, but looking to Jesus, and finding forgiveness at the cross. I pray that in Jesus' name, Amen.

Pastor Andy Davis begins a new series in the Book of Galatians and unfolds the dangers of an unbiblical gospel.

Many times in my mind I go back to that incredible account in Acts Chapter 16 when Paul and Silas were in the Philippian jail and they were in chains and being persecuted for preaching the Gospel of Christ, and they were singing praise songs to Jesus, giving glory and praise to God.  I think to myself, how much I long for that kind of faith, to be able to face any trial in my life with that kind of supernatural joy, and to be able to understand the root of their joy. It was in the Gospel of Jesus Christ that Paul and Silas knew that even if they were executed for preaching the Gospel, they were going to go to heaven and that they would be perfectly happy. They had every reason to sing and rejoice and delight in the Gospel, but there were also other people listening to them. There were other prisoners that were listening to them and especially there was the Philippian jailer. Suddenly God sent this incredible earthquake and the ground shook and the doors were opened and the chains fell off. The jailer called for lights. He was just about to kill himself because he thought all of his prisoners had run away. And Paul called out a message of life, "Don't harm yourself, we're all here." The jailer called for lights and rushed in and brought Paul and Silas out and fell trembling before them and asked this one question, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?"

Does that question stand over you today? Do you understand the significance of that question? What must I do to be saved? Can you understand the basic underpinnings of that question? There must be something I can do to be saved. There must be some action I can do. There must be some array of good works I can do to stop feeling so guilty before God, and to stop being so terrified of death and of judgment. Is there something I can do about this? Paul and Silas spoke the Gospel message of liberation, of freedom, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.” You will be rescued! There's nothing you can do to save yourself. There's nothing you can do to rescue yourself, just believe in Jesus and you will be saved. How powerful is that? How liberating is that message? And that is what I get to preach today, the liberating message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, jump ahead almost 15 centuries to the story of Martin Luther, one of my favorite characters from church history.  He was an incredible man, but he was, similar to the Philippian jailer, terrified to die. He was a lawyer. He was law student in route to go back to school, when he was caught in the middle of a thunder and lightning storm, and the lightning flashed all around, and he fell down into the mud. He was terrified to die. He was afraid that these lightning bolts were sent by Almighty God to kill him and to usher him into hell. The only thing he had to answer those terrors were the errors of medieval Catholicism.  So he cried out in the midst of that mud, rain, lightning, and thunder, "Help me, Saint Anne, I shall become a monk."

He cried out to a saint to save him. He made her a promise, that he would become a monk if she would just intercede with God to save his life, and he was good to his promise. He entered a monastery, and there he tried to earn his salvation by extended fasting, by labors, by meditations and long prayers, and by endless confessions to his father confessor. He was just trying to find some way to be delivered from a guilty conscience and from his terror of death, his terror of the wrath of God, that when he died he would be sent to hell and there he would suffer forever and ever in extreme torment. And so he was terrified by these things, and the only thing he could do was try to earn his forgiveness by good works, and he became the most extremely zealous monk there was in Germany. Scrubbing floors like no floors have ever been scrubbed before or probably since. He refused the meager blanket that was assigned to him in his monk's cell there and laid on a cold floor in the midst of a German winter, shivering, thinking that somehow his physical torments there would be a path of escape from the judgments of God.

But no matter how hard he worked, no matter how hard he tried, he could not stop the accusations of a guilty conscience and the terror of God behind all that. Just when things were blackest, Luther was entrusted with the responsibility of teaching the Bible at the University of Wittenberg and it saved his life, it saved his soul. For in that Bible, he discovered the Gospel. He realized that the medieval Catholic system, that barter, that exchange of doing good works to pay for bad, the whole thing was corrupt, it was not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He found in the Book of Romans the way out, that the Gospel pointed to the work of Christ crucified and resurrected and a righteousness that is ours by faith in Christ.

Now, the Book of Romans was a centerpiece of that discovery, but the Book of Galatians became a treasured and precious source of truth and strength to him. In this brief Epistle, the Apostle Paul is fighting against some people (we'll call them the Judaizers), false teachers, who are trying to mingle the work of Jesus Christ on the cross with law. They're trying to add to the work of Christ. It was Christ plus law equals salvation, that's what they were doing. And in refuting them, the Apostle Paul has given us a timeless message, refuting works righteousness in favor of a Gospel of grace, a Gospel of forgiveness, simply by faith and by the grace of God and by the work of Jesus Christ.

Luther delighted in this brief, clear, simple, powerful message of Galatians. He loved it. He said, "The epistle to Galatians is my epistle. It's mine." I'm grateful he's let all of us use it too, amen? But it was his. “It's my epistle.” He said, "To it I am, as it were, in wedlock. I'm married to this book, it is my Katie." That was the name of his wife, "Galatians is my Katie." He loved this message, he loved the simplicity, he loved the liberation from legalism, from thinking that somehow our law-keeping can pay for our sins. He loved that liberation. And Luther said, "There is no middle ground between Christian righteousness and works righteousness. There is no other alternative to Christian righteousness than works righteousness. If you don't build your confidence on the work of Christ, you must build your confidence on your own works, and there's no middle ground between the two of them." Amen. So what must I do to be saved? Believe in Jesus, trust in Jesus. So we come to the liberating message of the Book of Galatians.

We are going to find in this what some scholars have called "The Magna Carta of Christian freedom." Or others, "The battle cry of the Reformation," "The Christians' Declaration of Independence." We come in the Book of Galatians face-to-face with the Gospel, that's what we have here, the Gospel. Many people wrongly assume or think that the Gospel is just for unbelievers or beginner Christians. They think that, as Tim Keller put it beautifully, the Gospel is the ABCs of the Christian life. Well, he says, it is that, but it's also the A to Z of the Christian life. So again and again we are going to come back to the Gospel message and see how powerful it is for we who are Christians. One of the central observations that Keller makes is one of the most obvious things, Galatians was written to Christians. It was written to people who already believed in Jesus Christ, but they were straying from the simplicity and the clarity of the Gospel message, and they needed to come back again and understand the Gospel. Gospel is for us.

All over the world sin has enslaved people in its power. They are in the chains, just like Paul and Silas were in physical chains, they are in spiritual chains. They are in bondage to sin, in bondage to Satan's power. They are in chains they cannot see and chains they cannot break. The only liberation from this enslavement is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the power of God.  Romans 1:16-17 says the Gospel is "the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew then for the Gentile. For in the Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed, a righteousness that is from faith to faith. Just as it is written, ‘The righteous will live by faith.’"

Picture in your mind Paul and Silas in those physical chains. Then picture sinners, apart from the grace of Christ, at this point not having believed in the Gospel, in the same kind of chains. They are enslaved, they are in prison. Charles Wesley pictured it this way in the hymn And Can It Be, and I just love that verse that talks about salvation in those kinds of terms, that enslavement, the chains, "Long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature's night. Thine eye, [Jesus' eye] diffused a quickening ray. I woke, the dungeon flamed with light. My chains fell off. My heart was free, I rose, went forth and followed thee." That's liberation, Amen. And only the Gospel can set you free. Now, this is not an escape story, we are not talking about an escape story. I love escape stories. I've watched a number of movies that are about great escapes, like The Great Escape, that's one. Seventy-six POWs escaping from a German POW Camp through a 102 meter tunnel. That's a great movie. That's a great story. I've watched a movie about an escape from Alcatraz, how this one guy cleverly finds a way how to get off that island and makes his escape. Clint Eastwood was in that one.  Moving on. Then there's Harry Houdini, I watched a movie about him, how he used to do the Chinese water torture thing upside down in a cell of water. But here is the thing with an escape story. In every case, the escape artist is celebrated.

The Gospel is not about escape, it's about rescue! It's about rescue. And it's right here in Galatians 1 in the verse that you just heard read, in verse 4, Christ "gave himself for our sins to rescue us." Amen. We're going to get into that verse but I just want you to see it's a rescue mission. And the whole thing with rescue is the one being rescued can't deliver themselves. And to God alone be the glory for the deliverance. To God alone be the glory, to Jesus alone. We cannot save ourselves. Self-salvation through law-keeping is no Gospel at all. It does not work, and even if it did we would spend eternity insufferably praising ourselves and glorifying ourselves for our own great escape. Instead we're going to be glorifying Christ for His great rescue of us, His deliverance of us. It's a rescue. And so, we are going to celebrate this Gospel of rescue, this Gospel of liberation for many weeks together in the Book of Galatians.

Now, let me set some historical context, the Apostle Paul wrote this book. He was an apostle, we are going to talk about his apostleship. He was a church planting missionary who went through various regions, including what we now consider modern-day Turkey, and he went through that area and he planted churches. The name “Galatians” is linked to the word Gaul, linked to the history of France. So there were some Gauls that came apparently from that area and settled in Asia Minor. After terrorizing the Greeks and the Romans they settled there and the Roman Empire made Galatia, the place of the Gauls, a subset of Asia Minor, part of the Roman Empire. Paul visited this region with Barnabas on his first missionary journey. Acts 13 and 14 tells the story of how he planted these churches in Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, it tells the whole story about all of that. He was stoned and left for dead by hostile Jewish leaders who followed him from Antioch and Iconium to Lystra and they stoned him and left him for dead. But he wasn't dead. God raised him up out of that pile and he continued to preach. And at the end of that first missionary journey, Paul and Barnabas revisited the small churches they had planted.

They showed that shepherding heart and that concern for the works that they had done. It was out of that concern that he writes this epistle, because some time after Paul and Barnabas left, some other teachers came along, some false teachers. They were Jews who claimed to believe in Jesus and they believed that a combination of trusting in Christ plus obedience to the laws of Moses equaled salvation. They are who we will call the “Judaizers,” and they were preaching a false Gospel. In so doing, they also undermined the Galatians' confidence in the Apostle Paul as a faithful teacher of the Word. And so they said negative things about Paul. We'll get into what those negative things were, but it seems to me that they were saying that he got his message and his mission from the Apostles in Jerusalem, but he messed it up. They were saying that he didn't get the whole thing correct and so he himself had to be corrected. And they were adding to the message the rest of the ingredients of the recipe of how it is sinners get saved.

So they are questioning Paul, undermining him, and saying he is, to some degree, a second hander. That he's not a first-generation leader and his authority is less than that of the Apostles in Jerusalem, and that he wasn't teaching accurately the Gospel. So these Judaizers came and they were telling these Gentiles, these recent converts to Christ, these things and they (the Galatians) had no means with which to fight back. They didn't understand the law of Moses as well as these Jewish people did, and they couldn't resist.  So pretty soon after Paul and Barnabas left, they started believing this false Gospel and going off in a wrong direction, and so Paul writes this epistle. So look at Paul's Apostolic greeting.  He’s writing to correct their false understanding of the Gospel. He begins in 1:1-2, "Paul, an apostle--sent not from men nor by a man but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead--and all the brothers with me, to the churches in Galatia."

So it's not written to just one church, like Corinthians (which I think was written to just one church), or one individual, like 1 and 2 Timothy, or Titus. This is written to a region of churches. So he meant for this letter to be read to all of these churches. He calls himself an Apostle here, he's asserting his authority.

Apostle literally in the Greek means 'sent ones,' an emissary and an ambassador, someone sent out with a mission. Sometimes in the New Testament, the word is used of people like Barnabas or others that were basically the equivalent of missionaries, and so you do see that use. That would be an apostle with a lower case “a.”  Then there is this kind of use; Paul is an Apostle we could say, with an upper case “A.” And he is one of those original pillars on which the church was built, or the foundation on which the church was built as it testified to Jesus Christ, eyewitnesses and authoritative teachers of doctrine, that's what Apostle with capital A means. And so he wants them to know that his role as an Apostle, as a teacher of the Gospel, was given him by God Himself.

Now, there's nothing wrong with pastors receiving a commissioning from other people to serve. As a matter of fact, that's all we have these days. Churches like you give people like me the right to preach and to teach, generally by a congregational vote. But Paul didn't get his authority and his right to teach or his ministry from any congregational vote or from anybody at all. He got it directly from God through Jesus Christ, and so he has the authority to teach the Gospel, that's what he's claiming here. He was called into his ministry directly by Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. Saul, Paul had been a bitter enemy of the Gospel and of Jesus Christ.

He makes his appearance in the Bible as a young man who is consenting to the martyrdom, the killing of Stephen at the end of Acts 7. He then (in Acts 8) begins a career or bitterly persecuting the church, dragging off men and women and throwing them in prison. There are implications that he perhaps may have even killed some of them. He was a violent man, and he at least consented to their deaths, if he didn't actually himself do it. That's the kind of man he was. Meanwhile, he was also an excellent law-abiding Jew who was climbing the ladder of careerism and Judaism. He was getting greater and greater as a Jew and being recognized by the authority figures, the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees, all of these audiences seeing his greatness and Judaism and his law-keeping. And then he became an emissary from them to persecute the church, even getting letters from the authorities in Jerusalem to go to synagogues in Damascus to persecute the Christians there.

And it was while he was on his way to Damascus that suddenly a blinding light from heaven flashed. We're going talk more about this, God willing, next week. But he fell to the ground and he heard a voice saying to him (Acts 9:4-5), "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" "Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked. "I am Jesus." Oh, those words changed his life. "I am Jesus. I am the resurrected one. I am the savior. I am the God of the universe." "Who are you, Lord?" "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now, get up and go into the city and you'll be told what you must do." So from the very beginning his own salvation is linked with his calling to work for Jesus as an apostle. So he did not get his commission from any human beings or from any human source at all. The Lord told Ananias who was sent by Him to baptize Paul, the Lord said to Ananias, "Go! this man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer from my name." So he's going to be a messenger to the Jews, but especially to the Gentiles.

And notice what he says. "Paul, an apostle--sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead." And so the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is central to this message, how fitting is it? Do you see how fitting it is for us to finish the Gospel of Matthew and go right over into Galatians. Amen. For us to go right from the account of Jesus' death, burial, resurrection and commissioning of the Apostles into Galatians, which very accurately teaches what message it is that should be preached to the ends of the earth. What Gospel message is it that these Apostles should preach, and that is still with us today. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is central to everything, and it is God the Father who raised Him from the dead. It was a living Christ, it was a living Jesus that appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus and changed his whole life. The resurrection of Christ from the dead was the centerpiece of the Gospel and it was Paul's own joy and hope.

Then he says, "Grace and peace to you," it's a standard apostolic greeting. But in Galatians, I think it takes on an extra significance. Later he's going to say that they had fallen away from grace, and we'll talk about that difficult phrase. Basically there's a principle of grace by which we are saved and it's over against law or works, self-righteousness. We are saved by grace. We can't say it enough. We're saved by grace. What is grace? Grace is a disposition in the heart of God toward us. Start there, it's in the heart of God. It's God's attitude toward us. A disposition of love and benevolence and generosity toward us, to lavish on us, every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, to us who deserved eternal condemnation because we'd broken His laws. So to understand grace, it's in the heart of God. It results in gifts and good things flowing out from God to us. It comes to us through Jesus Christ. We receive it by faith and it's directly contrary to what we deserve.

Now, the last part is probably one of the more famous aspects of the definition of grace, unmerited favor. That is so weak and pale compared to the full-blooded understanding of grace. Unmerited favor is when you go find a total stranger and give him a $20 bill. Alright. Friends, eternal life is no $20 bill, and we were not total strangers. We were enemies. We were murderers. We were law breakers and we deserve condemnation, and God is giving us a river of blessings by grace. “Grace and peace to you.” Not by works but by grace we are saved. And in direct opposition, throughout this book they are going to be in direct opposition. You're either going to be saved by grace or you're going to be saved by works/law/self-righteousness. So in Galatians 2:21, he says, "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing." And later he says in Galatians 5:4, "You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace."

Then he gives us a marvelous quick synopsis of the Gospel message. If you know what to look for, these are sweet, sweet words and they're in the hymn, one of the verses of the hymn that we just sang. I leaned over to Christy, I said, "Do you realize that the rescue theme and Christ interposed his blood?" That's right from Galatians 1:3-4, it's beautiful. Look what it says, "Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ," verse 4, "Who gave Himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father to whom be glory forever and ever, amen." That's a very brief, quick summary of the Gospel message. It focuses on Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who gave Himself for our sins. This is the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Jesus interposed His precious blood. He stepped in between us and the lightning strike of the wrath of God. He took that strike for us. On the cross He died in our place. He interposed His precious blood, He laid down his life, He gave Himself. Why? For our sins. The Gospel is incredible. The Gospel tells us it was far worse than you could've possibly imagined about yourself and the answer is far more glorious and the future is far brighter than you possibly could have imagined for yourself.

It's really, really bad news and really, really good news. The really bad news is we were sinners, we were violators of the law of God and God's wrath was against us because of that written code that stood against us and was opposed to us. Jesus took that guilt on Himself. He took the condemnation that those sins deserve. He died in our place. He did it, it says, “to rescue us from the present evil age.” As I've said very plainly, we could not save ourselves. This is about rescue. We could not rescue ourselves, and so God sent His Son with deliverance and He rescued us, it says, from this present or the present evil age. Well, this is something that can only really be seen by faith, you can only see it with eyes of faith, this evil age that we live in. But many verses talk about it, don't they? Colossians 1:13, says, "He, God the Father, has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us or brought us into the Kingdom of the beloved Son." That's a rescue mission.

Jesus was sent by the Father to take us up out of Satan's dark kingdom and bring us into the beloved Kingdom of Christ. And so Ephesians 2:1-3 talks about how it was for us before we were Christians. It says, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live." You were living dead spiritually. You were the living dead. You were dead in your transgressions and sins as you lived. As you walked, it says, "And followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air." That's Satan. He is "the ruler of the kingdom in the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath”. But God, because of His great, rich mercy and grace to us in Christ, delivered us and rescued us by Jesus' blood. Amen? Hallelujah.

That's the rescue. We were enslaved to Satan's kingdom and could not save ourselves. So God sent His Son to rescue us from this present evil age. We are free now, we're free! We are free sons and daughters of the living God. We are free. We're free from sin, we're free from the law and its power to condemn us and send us to hell. We're free from hell itself, we're free from condemnation. But that freedom is not to be used for lust. It's not to be used for evil. We are now free to serve God as Jesus did. And Paul is going to get into that in Galatians 5. It's not freedom in the libertarian sense, it's a freedom to please God, and now we can do it by the Spirit. That is not a message of self-salvation, is it? That's a rescue in which Jesus has freed us, and so, therefore, to God be the glory, amen?

Look what it says, "According to the will of our God and Father to whom be glory forever and ever, amen." In self-salvation, you get the credit, you get the glory. You rescued yourself. But in salvation by grace, God gets the glory and we are going to go up there in Heaven when we're done and we're going praise Him forever and ever for saving us. It's good to do it now, don't you think? Just thank Him, say, "Thank you for saving me. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for your grace. I didn't deserve it. Thank you." Then Paul turns and it's like night and day here, or really day and night, praising God for the glory and then we go into bitter astonishment here.

Verses 6-7, "I am astonished that you were so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different Gospel, which is really no Gospel at all." Paul's usual pattern is warm thanksgiving and greetings. He thanks God for the Ephesians. He thanks God for the Philippians, richly and warmly thanks God for them. He thanks God for the Thessalonians and all the ways that God worked in their lives. He even thanks God for the Corinthians, for goodness' sakes. They were a messed up church. They had all kinds of problems, every problem you can have in pastoral ministry, the Corinthians had. They were all there and yet he thanks God. Listen to this, 1 Corinthians 1:4-6, "I always thanked God for you because of His grace given to you in Christ Jesus, for in Him you have been enriched in every way in, all your speaking, in all your knowledge, because our testimony about Christ was confirmed in you."

Galatians didn't get that. Galatians didn't get any box with a ribbon handed. No gift. They get, "I am astonished at you." Why? Why so different? Why does he treat the Galatians so differently than everyone else? Well, because they're turning away from the Gospel itself and he is in deep concern about them. He's not sure if they genuinely, finally turned away from the Gospel of grace. If so, he says, "Then you aren't really Christians," and this is incredibly grievous to him.

He is astonished. He says that they are so "quickly deserting the one who called them by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different Gospel, which is no Gospel at all." There's two issues here. There's a sense of sadness, a sense of shock for him, a sense of bitter disappointment. You could say, "Well, it's personal. He did all that work and it's turned out so badly." I don't deny that that might have been in his mind, but that's not what's motivating him to write here. Oh, it is personal, but it's not about Paul. It's about God. You're abandoning God, the one who called you. You're turning your back on Him.

And what's so amazing is that it's happened so quickly. This isn't second and third generation now. This isn't your grandkids. This is you. I don't get the sense of decades here. I get the sense of months, if not a couple years. After such a short time they have turned their backs on God and on the Gospel of grace. And they're turning to what he calls "a different Gospel which is no Gospel at all." What does he mean by that? The word 'gospel' means good news. How is it good news that you can save yourself if you're perfectly obedient to the law of God? How is that good news? That's bad news. As a matter of fact, it's a yoke, that it says at the Jerusalem Council neither we nor our ancestors were ever able to bear. No one can bear it. You must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. Can you bear that yoke? It's a crushing burden.

It's no good news, it's no Gospel, it's no good news here, it's no Gospel at all. Grace and law are opposites. The law couldn't save. We looked at that in the Book of Hebrews a year or so ago. The law held no salvation. There was no cleansing of the conscience from law. There was no way it could deliver anyone from sin. And so Paul then utters a curse on the false teachers in verses 7-9. Look at verse 7, "Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion, are trying to pervert the Gospel of Christ." Trying to reverse the Gospel. "They're trying to revise it, which means to reverse it," says Tim Keller. I love that image.

They're turning away from the full Gospel here. They're turning away from the truth and they're being thrown into confusion. There are some people that are confusing you. Now, isn't it beautiful, the clarity of mind that saving faith brings. Suddenly you can see things. You understand who God is. You understand the world that God made. You know how you fit into it. You understand your sins. You get it all. You see it clearly. That's why I think John 9, that man born blind that Jesus spits and makes mud and then he washes and he can see, is not just a physical miracle, an actual miracle, but it's a metaphor, a spiritual image of our own salvation. John Newton thought it so when he wrote Amazing Grace. "How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I'm found. I was blind, but now I can see". But now these false teachers come and things are confusing, they're throwing you into confusion. Satan is the god of confusion. And things aren't so clear anymore. Now they don't understand and now they're depressed and discouraged. Later he's going say, "What happened to all your joy? Remember how happy you were. You're not happy anymore."

Confusion has come in and so Paul utters a curse on them or on anyone that preaches a false Gospel. "Even if we or an angel from Heaven should preach a Gospel other than the one we preach to you, let him be eternally condemned." What an incredible statement. Let him go to hell forever and ever. Let him burn in hell forever, if he comes and preaches a false Gospel. He reaches for a lofty language, "Even if an angel from Heaven should come." Radiant, shining like lightning, like the angel that came and rolled back the stone and sat on it and his appearance was like lightning. If you ever saw an angel like that come and he stands in all this radiant glory and he preaches a Gospel other than the one we preach to you, let him be eternally condemned. Because Satan, you know, he can masquerade as an angel of light. He can do that, and so his messengers can look like servants of righteousness too. Paul uses that language. So even if you get a bright shining angel telling you another Gospel, let him be eternally condemned. But he actually adds himself to that.

"If I should come back later in two or three years and say, 'I think I've come to a new understanding of the Gospel. I've got a whole new way of understanding this and I start... I realize now the way that we harmonize the Old Testament and the New Testament is Christ plus law equals salvation.' If you ever hear me say that, then let me be eternally condemned." Doesn't matter who says it. What matters is that the Gospel itself can never be changed. And he says it again. He repeats it. He says, "I've already said. So now I say again if anyone is preaching to you a Gospel other than the one you accepted, let him be eternally condemned." It doesn't matter. So he says it twice. Paul's ultimate goal here is to please God and not men. He said, "I'm not trying to be popular here." I wonder if the Judaizers said that about him. "Paul's just trying to make it easy, easy believeism, don't have to keep any of these laws, he's got a big following in every Gentile city he goes. He's just trying to be popular."

Paul says, "No, I'm not, I'm trying to be faithful, trying to be faithful to the God who gave me this Gospel, that's what I'm trying to be. Am I now trying to please men or God? Am I trying to win the approval of men?" Now, that is such a temptation, isn't it? Do you feel that pull on your hearts? Trying to please people, trying to please human, a human audience. The irony with whole Judaizer-legalism thing is, the shoe is on the other foot. They're living for a human audience. They're living for the Sanhedrin or the Pharisees, with legalists that taught them their legalism to try to please them. There's always a human audience with legalism, always. "So I'm not trying to please men, but I'm trying to please God. If I were trying to please men I would not be a servant of Christ." That's his ultimate goal.

Now, what applications can we take from this beginning as we begin to look at Galatians? First, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a gift from heaven to us. You've heard it preached this morning, how God sent His Son, Jesus, who lived a sinless life perfectly obedient to the law we could not keep.

He kept it perfectly, and he is offering to you and to me a gift, a free gift of perfect righteousness, like a beautiful robe. He's just saying, "Here, put this on. It's my righteousness. I get all the credit, but you get the glory and the beauty and the salvation that comes. Put it on and you give me all that nasty, wicked sin and I will take the wrath and the punishment that that sin deserves." That's the exchange of the Gospel. Trust in Him, trust. Don't leave this place unconverted, unconvinced, because there is no other message. If you reject this Christ righteousness gift, the only thing left to you is your own works righteousness and it will not save you. Trust in Him. And if you've already trusted in Christ and been a Christian for years, understand what I said a number of minutes ago, the Gospel is still for you. "It's not the ABCs," as Tim Keller said. I love this, "It's the A to Z." Again and again you're going to come back to this, I am forgiven in Jesus. I'm forgiven in Christ. I can't use my good works to calm my conscience. That is such a thing we struggle with, right? Whenever you're guilty, whenever you violate God's law in some way and you are guilty and you've done something sinful, works righteousness says, "God demands some kind of works, a list of things and once you do those seven things you can start feeling good about yourself again." That's works righteousness. Throw it away. It is wickedness.

You come back again to the cross, you come back again to Jesus and say, "I'm a sinner. I'm a sinner, you know who I am. Thanks be to God that you saved me by your grace. Forgive me, cleanse me, renew me and restore me." And then when He does that, get up and walk in the power of the Spirit and serve God in righteousness and holiness, and live in that pattern the rest of your lives. We have a lot more to say in Galatians, but we'll stop right here. Let's close in prayer.

Father, we thank you for the things that we have learned. We thank you for the Gospel message. We thank you for the power of the Gospel to transform us. I thank you for the example of the Apostle Paul in preaching it to us. God, I pray that we would realize there's no middle ground between Christ's righteousness and self-righteousness. I pray that we would embrace by faith the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross and embrace by faith the gift of perfect righteousness and embrace by faith the gift of the Holy Spirit who empowers us now to walk in newness of life. Help us to understand this true Gospel we pray in Jesus' name.