02/28/10
Embracing the Gospel
Summary: Movements and systems of religion that esteem culture and tradition above all else are not built around God’s Gospel of grace and freedom in Jesus Christ; but on a works-based system of morality that demands people to perform and conform for the approval of both people and God.
Welcome…it’s good to be with you.
We’re in week three of our Galatians series…
The overarching theme of Galatians is that God’s heart…his good plan for you and me is that we would live free and full lives…In the same way that a ball was designed to bounce (and children take great delight in them), we were designed by God to be free…free to know and enjoy Him, free to love Him…free to enjoy and love those that he places in our lives…free to delight in His good creation…free to explore and invest in this world with our unique passions and abilities…free to dream, free to hope…and when we live in that way, God is both glorified and delighted…
The author of Galatians, Paul writes in chapter 5…
Galatians 5:1 says… “So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law.”
We discovered in week one that after the Apostle Paul planted churches in Galatia (modern-day Turkey) some Jewish leaders came onto the scene and started teaching what Paul refers to as a message that ‘pretends to be good news.’ They were pressing these young believers to adopt the customs and traditions of Judaism, specifically the custom of circumcision. Essentially, they’re saying…it’s okay if you have Jesus, but to complete your salvation and to really show that you belong to God, you need Jesus PLUS this tradition…Jesus PLUS this custom…Jesus PLUS this mark of identification.
So…the Galatians are confused, and they’re starting to go along with these religious leaders, saying to themselves; ‘Maybe we do need circumcision. Maybe Jesus isn’t enough. Maybe we need Jesus plus something else…
Have you ever been there?
Historically, Christians have done this exceptionally well, and at times, destructively. Jesus isn’t enough; we actually need Jesus plus our own marks of identification. We need Jesus plus traditions (nothing wrong with traditions until they usurp Scripture and are used to set one group of persons apart as more spiritual than another).
Let me give you some examples…“We have Jesus, but we also take communion the right way…we take communion weekly, and some only do it quarterly. Our tradition is better…”
Or, “We have Jesus, but we baptize this way…and it’s clear that you don’t, you’re wrong, we’re right.” Or, “We worship Jesus, but our style is better…we have a more heart-felt, expressive worship…well, our style is more of a reflective, intellectually informed, worship style…we’re more spiritual. We have Jesus, but also the right political views. We’re all Republicans and we all know that Jesus was a Republican
The message becomes…If you conform to our movement, you’re in, you’re good…don’t conform, you’re bad…follow and you’ll earn the title and badge…don’t follow, you could be publicly humiliated, shamed, and ostracized.
Illustration – friend …in high school, struggling with pornography, confessed to his pastor who made him get up in front of his peers (guys and girls) and confess his sin, afterward, his pastor told him that his confession wasn’t heart-felt enough…which left this guy reeling in his relationship with God.
Movements and systems of religion that esteem culture and tradition above all else are not built around God’s Gospel of grace and freedom in Jesus Christ; but on a works-based system of morality that demands people to perform and conform for the approval of both people and God.
And Paul, in Galatians is screaming… ‘No…it’s not true. This message and method of religion is unbiblical; it’s a false gospel…and a threat to the freedom that we have in Christ. NO!!
In chapter 3, Paul is going to continue to build his argument, placing religion, which we talked about last week that says (I obey therefore, I’m accepted) up against Gospel (which says, I’m accepted because of what Jesus Christ has done for me, therefore I love and obey God gladly!
Go with me to the last verse of chapter two…
Galatians 2:21-3:1
Paul will start and end his argument by appealing to cross of Christ…He asks, have you lost sight of the cross!
The Good News of God’s unmerited love and mercy for us is rooted in the cross of Jesus Christ.
If we forget the cross…or minimize the cross of Christ…we will lose the Gospel of grace and freedom, and be left with religion on our hands.
Paul writes… “As for me, may I never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Galatians 6:14a
Paul will come back to the cross…
As we follow the text, Paul is going to ask a succession of questions, in what was a common rhetorical style in the 1st century, to build his argument for these believers.
Galatians 3:2-4
Paul says…ok…first question…Holy Spirit. ‘Was the Holy Spirit something you achieved?’ Or did you receive the Holy Spirit? Was it something you earned, or was it a gift?
Paul writes about the Holy Spirit in Ephesians 1:13…
“And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago.
When you chose to embrace the good news of Christ crucified for you, and you surrendered to him as the Lord of your life, God took up residency in your life, and essentially said, ‘He/She belongs to me.’
How do I recognize this? We experience the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives as he illuminates Scripture, convicts us of sin, as He leads and guides us to know and follow Jesus, and as He cultivates things in our lives (Galatians 5…love, joy, peace, patience…)
The Holy Spirit is God’s gift to you (John 15…I will send HS; Acts 1)
However, if we think that our standing with God hangs on our effort or morality, we’re going to get caught up in the same vicious cycle that these young believers in Galatia are wrapped in… I understand this because I’ve lived this way…and still recognize the tendencies in me to approach God via religion and rules…and I’ve seen this way of living play itself out in so many people’s lives.
Let me give you an example…see if this is familiar…
We sin (It’s a lie, it’s lust, selfishness, an explosion of anger, call it what you may)…and the Holy Spirit convicts us of that sin…
So here’s how we so often respond…‘Dang it,’ I messed up, I need to do better. I’ve got to get on my A-game, stop disappointing God…I’m going to go to church…I need to read my Bible…need to fix myself for God…So rather than running to God in repentance and to receive His grace, we run in a frantic, fear-based attempt to fix ourselves thinking that we might somehow achieve his forgiveness…
Paul is reminding us… ‘Nope, you came to Christ by His grace…you received the Holy Spirit by grace…you live every moment of every day in the freedom of His grace…
A very important message in Galatians is that it is possible to begin your journey with Christ by faith (trusting in the grace of God for you), but take a left turn and start living by (law) ‘your own effort.’
If you find yourself today frustrated, irritated, stressed out, feeling like a failure in your journey with God, it is possible that you are attempting to achieve what you can only freely receive from Christ. Scripture is clear that you’re running down a dead-end path.
Galatians 3:6-9 (Emphasize the underlined parts)
Go to Genesis 15:5-6 – “Then the Lord took Abram outside and said to him, ‘Look up into the sky and count the stars if you can. That’s how many descendants you will have! And Abram believed the Lord, and the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith.”
Not a lot of time…Paul’s point? God carved out early on the way for man to come to him…it’s not like, people used to made right with God through the law, but now we come through faith in Christ. Going back to Abraham, man has always related to God by trusting in His promises and leadership.
Galatians 3:10-12 (Deuteronomy 27)
The moral law in the Old Testament represented the demands of God. It said that good, righteous people do these things. Think about the law with me… (Don’t kill, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife, don’t steal, honor your father and mother). Are those laws good?
Yes, those are perfectly good laws. The law says…if you want to be a friend of God, no problem, you just need to be perfect…perfect in thought, deed, intention, motive, everything…continually perfect, without fail every day.
Illustration – It would be like you showing up at a new job, and your boss hands you a job description, and he says, ‘we demand perfection here…today, and every day. If you’re not perfect, I will fire you. Oh, and here are the company rules…how do they look? They look good. Ok, you need to follow them to a T…if you break one of them, you’re fired (some of you have this boss).’ And he says, “Oh, and I can see your heart, your conscience, your motives, and your mind. Keep the company rules perfectly, and all will be good.” How many of you would last at a job like that?
The more I study God’s Word and law, the more I’m convinced that the problem isn’t with the law…The problem is that something is terribly wrong with you and me. As Paul writes in Romans 7; We see good and can’t do it. We see wrong and yet we run to it like without a 2nd thought.
Illustration - I ask my boys not to hit each other, and they still do…When my son hits his brother, I ask them… ‘why did you hit him? Did you understand me? Yes… Is it a good thing to not hit your brother? Yes…it is good to not hit my brother. Why did you hit him? I don’t know…just did, I guess.
Why?
Jeremiah 17:9 says that…"The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?”
The Judaizers are saying…Keep the rules and God will be happy. The problem is that we don’t keep the rules! There’s nothing wrong with the rules, laws, and expectations…something is wrong with us. !
Do you see why something has to be done if we are to have any hope?
The question is, is it something that we do? Or, is it something that God does? Is it us moving toward God, or God coming toward us?
Religion says that we need rules, laws, discipline, piety, and self-improvement to work our way to God, toward the ultimate good.
The Bible says that we need God! That the eternal God has come to us as a man in ultimate humility to do for us what we could never do for ourselves.
What then, is the purpose of the law for us today? The law reveals our desperate need for Christ…our complete and utter lostness without him, so much so that when we hear about Jesus it is like cool water on a hot day.
The Gospel becomes the Greatest News for the world!
Galatians 3:13-14 (Pitchers/Glasses example)
Illustration – I was sitting with a good friend over breakfast while we were away over the Christmas holiday. My friend’s name is Ken…
Ken asked me this question…Jed, do you know what is tragic about the cross? It’s not that Jesus was wrongly accused. It’s not that he was condemned to death as an innocent man. The tragedy of the cross is not that he was stripped and beaten and mocked and ridiculed and then left to hang on a cross, naked and alone. It’s not that his friends abandoned him in that moment.
No…(any of us could choose someone who we would die for…)
Here’s what Scripture says about the tragedy of the cross.
The Bible says that Jesus didn’t die merely as an example of love and ultimate sacrifice, as some modern-day movements will say…He didn’t even die simply to show us that He loved you and me (although he did do that)…
2 Corinthians 5:21 – “For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.”
1 Peter 2:24 – “He (Christ) personally carried our sins in his body on the cross so that we can be dead to sin and live for what is right. By his wounds you are healed. Once you were like sheep who wandered away. But now you have turned to your Shepherd, the Guardian of your souls.”
When Jesus died, God poured into Christ all of our sin…all of our wickedness…all of the evil in this world and in our lives…all of our shame, our guilt, our bitterness and hatred and segregation and racism and injustice and selfishness and brokenness, and He poured those things into Christ so that on the cross, Christ, the perfect, sinless, blameless Son of God became your sin…he became my sin…
If you are caught up in envy and jealousy, Christ became envious and jealous on the cross. If you are privately engaged in lust, infidelity, pornography, Jesus became filled with lust, unfaithful, and immoral on the cross. If you are filled with anger and rage, Jesus became your temper and fits of rage…if you are living with the burden of regret because of sins from the past, Jesus became those sins on the cross…If you have worshipped other God, Christ became an idolater for you.
Isaiah 53:4-6
The Cross is the Stage for the Greatest Exchange that the world has ever seen…
I’m sinful…Jesus was perfect.
I deserve to die…Jesus did.
I was an enemy of God…Jesus made me a friend.
I deserve hell, Jesus gives me heaven freely.
I am a law-breaker, Jesus erased my rap sheet.
I was broken, in Christ I am healed.
I wandered away from God, now, in Christ, I have returned!
The question becomes, How do I embrace this good news?
Matthew 11:28-30
Embracing the Gospel is like learning to walk…The Bible says that we walk back to Jesus…we’re honest with him that we have wandered far from him…we have built our lives on everything but him…we have worshiped far less than him…we have tried to live without his loving leadership and rightful authority.
We repent…Repentance is the essence of the Christian faith (like taking out the trash, it needs to be done all of the time).
In repentance, we trust Jesus to be our Savior. To forgive, to make us right with God, as he has promised…and we praise him for what He has done on our behalf.
What if I’m a follower of Jesus, but I’ve been operating by works?
Embracing the Gospel is not simply a one-time event…it is a life-long journey.
The way of faith is truly a way…
Many of us have believed that embracing the Gospel is simply a one-time event…when something goes wrong, we think, “I accepted Christ, what’s wrong with me
Embracing the Gospel is the difference between strapping on skis and racing down a mountain, and actually learning to ski…the more you learn to embrace the Gospel, the more delightful and freeing it becomes.
It’s about learning to walk with Him in the freedom of His grace…
(My prayer for you is that you might learn to walk in the freedom of God’s grace…that you would not spend any more time attempting to achieve what you can only receive.)
Communion – weekly practice and reminder that Christ is enough for us…that he has become sin so that we might become right with God…when we come, we confess sin…we’re honest with God…we take the elements to remember…and we praise God for his grace to us.
