We're going to have a time of prayer this morning, and I want us to focus that on the situation in Colorado that caught our attention so tragically this last week. Of course, the whole nation has been touched by it, but there are a number of families who have been directly impacted and affected by the loss of children or their children who were attending this school at the time.
It is rather amazing, isn't it, that intelligent, educated, smart people in our country have such a hard time figuring out why this kind of thing happens in our schools? Our nation has turned from God, and this is part of the consequence of that.
I'd like for us to bow right now, and would you pray just silently right where you're seated for some aspect of this that God would lay on your heart at this very moment, for the families, the churches that are meeting this morning, that are touched by the tragedy, our nation?
This moment of silent prayer, we bring our requests and petitions to you, praying we trust in the Spirit as you would have us to pray for those scores and hundreds of people who have been directly touched by the events of this past week. Hear our prayers and answer according to your will, and in it all we pray that you will be honored through the advance of the gospel in ways that now would be perhaps beyond our ability to imagine. In Christ's name we pray, amen.
I invite you now to open your Bible with me to the book of Galatians and the fifth chapter, Galatians chapter 5. I'm going to begin reading in verse 1 of Galatians 5. Please follow along in your Bible as I do so. It was for freedom that Christ set us free. Therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to the yoke of bondage. Hold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you.
And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision that he is under obligation to keep the whole law. You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law. You have fallen from grace. For we through the Spirit by faith are waiting for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything but faith working through love. You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth?
This persuasion did not come from him who calls you. A little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough. I have confidence in you, in the Lord, that you will adopt no other view, but the one who is disturbing you shall bear his judgment, whoever he is. But I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted? Then the stumbling block of the cross has been abolished. Would that those who are troubling you would even mutilate themselves.
Do you remember as a child perhaps your mother giving you lunch money and saying as you went out the door, now don't lose it. And sure enough by noontime when you were supposed to be able to buy lunch, the money had disappeared somewhere. Our study tells us about something that is far more precious than lunch money. And the Apostle Paul says to us, now don't lose this.
The letter we are looking at, Galatians, was written by Paul because the Christians in that region of Asia Minor had had their faith undermined by false teaching. He had delivered to them the pure unadulterated gospel of the grace of God. The salvation that is a relationship with God is found by grace through faith in the cross sacrifice of Jesus, plus nothing else. Nothing of human works, nothing of law keeping, nothing of religious rituals.
However, after Paul had left there, certain teachers came called Judaizers who taught that keeping the rituals of the Jewish law were necessary. For example, that of circumcision. They said that these rituals were necessary as an addition to faith. And in doing so, they hijacked the Galatians' confidence in the simple gospel of Jesus Christ. And apparently many of the Galatians had bought into this false gospel, deserting the true gospel. Paul is alarmed.
If Paul were alive today, he would still be alarmed because the same heresy is still infecting the church. There are still those who add human works to grace, insisting that Christians must perform in a particular manner in order to really please God. They say the faith relationship is not enough in itself. It's a fine start perhaps. But there needs to be something more than just faith. You need to keep religious duty, or you need to conform your life to our rules.
Then you will be pleasing to God. This idea is taught regarding salvation. There are those who teach that salvation is by faith plus baptism, or church membership, or the sacraments of the church, or that it's by faith plus giving up all of your sins and living a good life. But it's always salvation by faith plus something. But the teaching is also applied regarding the Christian life.
There are those who say, yes, it is true that our pleasing the Lord as Christians is a walk of faith, but there are also certain rules of conduct that you must follow. There are certain expectations that we have of you. And if you keep those expectations, then you will be pleasing to God. For example, there are those who say, if you really want to be pleasing to God, it's not only a walk of faith, but you have to have devotions every day of your life.
You have to spend an hour in devotions, in Bible reading, in prayer, in order to be pleasing to God. There are those who say, if you're going to be pleasing to God, it's a walk of faith, but you also need to be a soul winner. You need to be a person who's out there on the streets confronting people about their need for Jesus Christ. You must be a soul winner if you're really going to be pleasing to God. Others say, the Christian life is a walk of faith, but you need to be in church.
And every time those church doors are open, you and your family should be there. Then there are those who say, regarding this idea, the Galatian heresy being applied to the Christian life, that the Christian life is a walk of faith, but you have to tithe. You have to give 10% of your income to God if you really want to please the Lord. You say, wait a minute, I thought all those things were required. I want to say to you, not one of those things is required. Not one of them.
I know that some of us think that God is not pleased with us unless we perform in some way. But only then is God satisfied. If we have tried hard enough, if we've kept this evangelical ritual, whatever it may be, in addition to our simply loving Jesus and walking with Him by faith. Today the church is infected with this idea that the Christian life certainly is a relationship, but it's also got to be certain rules that you keep.
What the Apostle Paul is saying in our text today is this, that Christ set you free from the bondage of performance. The bondage of performance. You don't have to do something to be accepted by Him. He accepts you in Christ as having Christ's righteousness already. It is not necessary for you to perform in some way to try to further please Him. Your righteousness comes by faith, not by the works that you practice.
You see, God accepts you on the basis of the relationship that you have with Him through faith in His Son. Not because you act right. Not because you work hard to avoid some sin. But because you have a relationship with Him. Paul relates what I think are some of his deepest convictions in the book of Galatians. Convictions about this spiritual error that had led the Galatian believers from their freedom in Christ into bondage and obligation.
It is this heresy, at least in part, that causes so many Christians for whom Jesus died and whom Jesus set free to live their lives in shame and guilt and a constant sense of failure. It is because this heresy has crept into our thinking. Paul begins sharing his heart by telling us of his contention that you can lose your freedom. Paul is in a battle for the faith of these people, but he is also in a battle for the definition of grace itself. And he is very alarmed by what he sees.
He sees the Galatians giving up the concept of grace, adding to that works, and in doing so losing their inheritance in Christ, their rights as the sons of God, their joy in their salvation. He seems to list for us here some of the consequences of becoming performance oriented in our faith. Becoming a slave to regulations. First of all, he says in verse 2, if that is you, Christ will not benefit you.
What he is saying here is that Jesus brings to us a wealth of spiritual blessings, but these are lost. They are of no profit, no benefit to us if we insist on adding works to our faith. If we insist on trying to work our way to God. If we insist on laboring in some fashion in order to try to please Him. Paul says when you adopt that mindset, the benefits that Jesus died for and gave to you are of no benefit any longer.
Here's what Paul says, to live by grace means to depend on God's abundant supply of every need. To live by law means to depend upon my own strength, the flesh, and be left to get by without God's supply. That's what Paul is saying here. When we become works and performance oriented, we rob ourselves of our spiritual inheritance and lose our spiritual power and our salvation, assurance, and joy. Secondly, Paul says you can lose your freedom, be careful, because here's another consequence.
You obligate yourself to the whole law, he says. To start down this road of keeping rules only brings increasing slavery. He is saying here, look, if you're going to begin keeping rules, then you have to understand that you have to keep all of them. He says the law is not like a cafeteria where you pick out what you want to keep. If you pick out one thing, you're obligated to all of it. You place yourself under all of it.
Worsby tells about a motorist in his book, a motorist who gets a ticket for running a red light. When the officer is talking to him, he begins to protest and he says, well, listen officer, I've never killed anybody or stolen anybody. But of course he still gets the ticket because he broke the law. Worsby then comments, no amount of obedience can make up for one act of disobedience. No amount of obedience can make up for one act of disobedience.
James puts it this way, if you keep the whole law and yet offend in one point, you're guilty of it all. The law is going to get you. You're condemned under it. Paul goes on to say, if you're going to take this mindset of law keeping, you've been severed from Christ. Some therefore understand this to mean that you're cut off from your salvation. That is not what Paul is talking about. But he is saying that we're cut off from Christ as the energizing power of our lives.
That we no longer remain in this sphere where Jesus is at work. And because of that, it's as though we've been severed from him and we've fallen from grace. He's not talking about salvation, falling out of salvation, but he's saying we're falling out of the sphere of grace into which we were born again. The idea is that the law and grace do not mix.
And if we can insist on adding rule keeping to our understanding of salvation or of the Christian life, we're no longer operating in the grace of God. Legalism has replaced God's grace. There are churches that teach a mixture of grace and rule keeping. To them to be saved you must believe, but then do something else. To others they teach to be a good spiritual Christian, you must live a life of faith, but then also do these other things.
Paul is warning us not to allow anyone to lay upon us a yoke of man-made obligations. This brings some questions to mind, doesn't it? What about James, chapter 2, verse 24, where James says, a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. That seems to contradict everything Paul says, doesn't it? A man is justified by works and not by faith alone.
It's for that reason that Martin Luther did not accept the book of James as being in the Bible, because he could not reconcile what James is saying, what Paul is saying, and he was so committed to the truth of justification by faith. So he threw James out. We don't have to do that, by the way. Because you see, James is talking about a different aspect of salvation. He is saying if a person lays claim to faith, if he says he is justified, it's not enough just to use words.
There have to be works that back it up. There has to be evidence in his life, and that is James' whole point in all five chapters of his book, how God changes the life of the person who genuinely comes to faith. Somebody else says in response to what we've said this morning already, well then, pastor, are you saying that all rules are wrong? And I can throw off the rules of my parents, because those are man-made obligations, aren't they?
Or I can throw off the lifestyle regulations on my college campus. I don't need to worry about the red lights anymore. Those are man-made rules, and Christ has set me free. Well, obviously, rules are necessary for any community, whether it be the community of the home and the family, or it be a college campus, or it be the civic community in which we live, rules are necessary.
However, and here's the point, if we say that keeping those rules is the way that we please God, if it is the keeping of those rules in our thinking that makes us spiritual, then we have crossed the line into heresy. Rules are a part of life. They're necessary.
But the point is that when we use those rules as a way of kind of earning brownie points with God, or thinking somehow God is more pleased with us because we have our devotions every day, or because we memorize a hundred verses a year, or because we tithe our money, that God is more pleased with us and this is evidence that I am spiritual because I do these things, then that is legalism. That is the very heresy Paul is warning about in the book of Galatians.
Not that any of those things are wrong. They're good. But we dare not set them up as the standard for us being pleasing to God and spiritual people. Paul gives a confession in the next few verses, verses five and six. He says, confession is this, that we hope expectantly for complete righteousness. Some people would think after what Paul is saying here about freedom that he must be rather careless or apathetic about people living right. Paul is deeply committed to righteousness in the life.
He was passionate about it, but he knew that righteousness would never come through human performance. It only comes by faith in the promises of God. So Paul writes of a condition of righteousness that is yet in the future. He says we hope for righteousness. He's talking about the culmination of our righteousness on that day when Jesus comes for us. Already, God looks at us as being righteous in Christ.
Romans five one, therefore having been declared righteous in the eyes of God by faith, we have peace with God. But later in the very same book of Romans, the apostle Paul says we're still waiting for righteousness in another sense. He says we groan within ourselves having the first fruits of the spirit waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. He's thinking about that time when we will be with Jesus and changed completely to be like him, body, soul, and spirit.
Paul says after our initial justification, which was by faith and through the spirit, so now we hope for the culmination of our righteousness by faith and through the spirit, not by works and through our own self-effort, our own performance. He says it is by faith and through the spirit that we yet long for the culmination of the righteousness that God has promised to us. That is a hope for all who belong to Jesus Christ.
Paul's point here is that righteousness from beginning to end, from the very moment of justification to the time of our glorification when we're with Jesus, righteousness from beginning to end is by faith and apart from works. He ratifies this in Romans 1.17 where he says, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the righteous man shall live by faith.
But I want to get to Paul's conclusions in verses 7 through 12 as he rather brings this argument to its head. In verses 7 through 12 he shares several conclusions with us, first about true believers, then about the false teachers, and finally about the cross itself. He says about true believers, they will continue in the truth. They will continue on in the truth. He says, you were running well, who hindered you from obeying the truth?
Paul is here commenting upon their beginning, but is saying something's happened. And he uses a very common metaphor in his thinking, and that is the metaphor of an athletic race. He says, you were chugging along pretty well doing that marathon, but somebody cut you off. Somebody caused you to stumble. Somebody caused you to step out of the race. He says, what's happened? He says, this persuasion, this influence that did that is not from God. And he says, I want you to know that it's dangerous.
He said, it's like leaven. It will affect everything. It's like yeast that works through the whole batch of dough. That little bit of leaven, that false teaching about grace that you have accepted, is going to ruin it all. He goes on to state his confidence in them in the Lord. I like the way he says that, I have confidence in you in the Lord. I'm not sure he had confidence in them unless it was in the Lord.
But in the Lord, he had confidence in these Galatians that they would continue on, that they would not allow their minds to settle down and accept this false gospel that had entered in. Because Paul is convinced, as I am convinced, because I believe the Bible clearly teaches this, that true believers will continue in the truth.
We who are true believers may stumble here and there, we may accept something that's false here or believe something that's not true there, but inevitably we will be brought back to the truth by the Holy Spirit. And that is what Paul is saying here. One of the evidences that a person is genuinely a believer is that he continues on in the faith. And Paul is just convinced in the Lord that they're genuine, that they will continue. Paul then has a conclusion regarding the false teachers.
He says they will come into judgment. These false teachers had disturbed them. Interesting picture in the word disturbed. It means literally to shake back and forth in the pictures of a dog that gets a hold of something like a little rag doll or maybe the newspaper or a ball he's playing with and he begins to shake it back and forth. It makes me dizzy to do that. He is saying that that's what the Galatians were like.
These false teachers had come and grabbed a hold of them and just shaken them back and forth with their false teaching. They had troubled them. They had upset their minds and their confidence in the Lord. Paul didn't know the exact identity of who the key individual was that was responsible for this false teaching. He says whoever he is, he is going to bear his burden. He is going to be condemned because of this. Paul has this confidence about false teachers. They will come into judgment.
God will deal with them in his way and in his time, but they will come into judgment. Finally, Paul has a conclusion he wants to share regarding the cross. He says the stumbling block of the cross has been abolished if I preach circumcision. In other words, Paul is saying here that those who want to make their own way to God, those who want to add things on to the simple gospel of the grace of God, those who want to try to do religion their own way are going to be tripped up by the cross.
He says let me tell you this about the cross. It is a marvelous means of salvation, but it presents a stumbling block to people who want to do it their own way. The word stumbling block, there is a particular word that Paul draws upon from a trap. Let's think of it in terms of a mousetrap. It's that little piece of the trap in the center where you place the peanut butter or the cheese. That little piece of wood. That is what he is talking about here.
Or to use a different kind of trap, it is that stick that holds up the box. Remember as a kid trying to catch birds, putting a box out there and some seed under it and a stick and then pulling out the stick so the box would fall on the birds? It's the word for that stick. Paul is saying here people who want to do religion their own way, create their own way to God, who want to add on things to what God has said are people who are going to find that the cross is the trap for them.
You will not let them get away with it because at the cross God provided salvation and righteousness as a gift. The cross is God's mean of providing righteousness to all who believe and those who try to go some other way are going to find the cross to be a stumbling block. One of the restaurant chains has this little phrase. It says no rules, just right. I would like to take that thought and apply it to the gospel of grace. No rules, just righteousness.
You don't have to keep rules to impress God or to please God or to make God happier with you than he is already happy with you in Jesus. You don't have to become more righteous in his sight. You are completely righteous in his sight. No rules, just righteousness. Many of us feel comfortable with a certain level of legalism. We rather like to have the standards out here where we can see them and measure ourselves because it makes us feel good about ourselves when we are keeping those standards.
That is nothing less than pride. On the other hand, there are those who have been taught these external rules and they know they never keep them. Their lives are filled with guilt and shame. I preached in a church one time and the people came to me after a few weeks and said, you are not preaching the Bible. I said why not? They said because we don't feel guilty enough when we leave here.
I understood exactly what they were saying because they had been taught for many years the idea of legalism, that they needed to feel guilty in order to feel good, that they had to go away from church feeling ashamed of their failures in order to think that somehow now I am pleasing God because I feel ashamed enough. Robbed of their joy and their freedom in Christ. There are those who see the message of grace as being just too easy. It just can't be that simple.
They fear that the message of grace is going to lead people into careless living. Oh, people will just do whatever they want to do if you teach them the grace of God. But they are deceived. Jesus Christ set you free from the bondage of performance. Today I want to urge you to live in the spiritual freedom of Christ, not in the human legalisms of religion.
Don't allow yourself or others to force you into some mold of their making and to make you feel as though if you don't keep their standards then you are not spiritual. The story is told of Hans the tailor. He had a reputation of doing wonderful suits. One day an influential businessman was visiting the city in which Hans worked. When he heard about Hans he went to order a suit and he went to work on the suit. He came to pick it up eventually.
But the customer found that one sleeve was twisted this way and the other sleeve was twisted that way and one shoulder bulged out and another caved in. So he pulled and he twisted and finally he managed to make his body fit into this suit that Hans had prepared for him. As he was riding on the bus one of the passengers noticed his odd appearance and asked him if Hans the tailor had made his suit. And the man replied affirmatively.
The other bus rider said, well amazing I knew that he was a good tailor but I had no idea he could make a suit fit so perfectly someone as deformed as you. Commenting on this Richard Foster says, often that is just what we do in church. We get some idea of what the Christian faith should look like then we push and shove people into the most grotesque configurations until they fit wonderfully. That is death he says. It is a wooden legalism which destroys the soul.
Legalism might be defined as obedience without love. What we are going to discover as we go on and study Galatians chapter 5 is that there are no rules except that of love. And we are going to see that God is pleased not because we keep some external standard that we create or someone else creates for us. But God is pleased because he sees us loving and he is the one who puts that love in our hearts. And he changes us from the inside out. He doesn't try to conform us from the outside in.
Would you pray with me? I remember there were a lot of us this morning including myself who grew up in teaching that was some form of legalism. That is so hard to flush out of our minds. So difficult to deal with because there are many of us today who are hindered in our walk with you because we think we are not performing well enough. And there are others of us who have this standard set out there and we have performed well and we are proud of it.
Lord help us to get out of our hearts the false teaching and the heresy that Paul was so concerned about in this book of Galatians. And I pray that this week we will walk in the freedom of Jesus. For some of us that will be a new liberating joyous exhilarating experience as we lay aside the bondage of rules and understand that whether it is salvation or it is our walk with you that it is by faith through the spirit. Oh Lord teach us to walk that way. To live that way in the freedom of Jesus.
In his name I pray. Amen. God bless you. We are dismissed. We are dismissed