Get the Message Right

There’s a story about a poor man who came to the door of one of those nice, old homes in Riverview one afternoon, asking the owner for money.

“I won’t GIVE you the money,” said the man who answered the door. “But I’ll let you earn it. My porch needs to be painted. Will you do that in exchange for 200 bucks?”

“Well, sure,” the poor man said. “No problem.”

So, the homeowner directed the man to the garage, where several buckets of paint and a brush were ready to be used.

“I’ll be inside. Let me know when you’re done,” the homeowner said. “No problem,” the man replied.

A couple of hours passed, and the homeowner heard another knock on the door. When he opened it, the poor man was standing there.

“I’m finished,” he said. “Already?! That was quick!”

“No problem,” the visitor said. “In fact, I gave her two coats.”

“Well, that’s great,” the homeowner said, reaching into his pocket for his wallet.

“Thank you so much,” the painter said. “And by the way, I was thinking you should probably know that’s not a Porsche that you asked me to paint; it’s a Mercedes. But I figured it out; no problem.” [Constable, Tom. Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible. Galaxie Software, 2003.]

No problem, right? Well, no. There’s a big problem.

Maybe he did good work. Maybe he got good paint coverage over the whole car, maybe he didn’t leave drips of paint on the driveway, maybe he even cleaned the brush and put away the cans of paint when he was done.

But he’d obviously gotten the message wrong from the start, and because of that, it didn’t really matter how well he’d painted that Mercedes. What mattered in the end was that he hadn’t done what he’d been told to do.

Getting the message right is what matters, especially when we’re talking about the message of the gospel.

As we begin our study of the Book of Galatians this week, I want you to keep that story about the painter in mind. Think about how upset the Mercedes owner must have been when he heard how badly the painter had interpreted his instructions.

I think the Apostle Paul must have felt something similar when he heard about what had been going on in these churches he’d planted during his first missionary journey.

Paul loved these people, and it hurt him to think that his preaching among them had been in vain. But that’s how it seemed to him after he’d heard that they’d been seduced into following false doctrine.

And as we work our way through this letter to the Galatian churches, we’ll hear some of Paul’s frustration. And even more than that, we’ll see his zeal for the true gospel.

We’re going to look at the introduction to this letter today. But first, let’s get some perspective on the background.

Galatia was a region of modern-day Turkey that stretched from the Black Sea in the north to the Mediterranean Sea in the south. Paul traveled through the southern portion of this area in his first missionary journey and through the northern portion of it in his second journey.

Scholars are divided on whether this letter was addressed to the northern or southern Galatians, and the way you answer that question bears directly on when it was written.

I think the most likely theory is that he was writing to the Galatians in the southern part of this region. I think he probably wrote this letter after his first missionary journey and before the Jerusalem Council that’s described in Acts, chapter 15.

The timing of the letter is especially important because of the false teaching Paul was confronting in it.

Not long after the gospel began to spread from Judea and Samaria into the Gentile world, Jewish “missionaries” began to visit many of the churches that had been planted by Paul and the other apostles.

These men claimed to be Christians, and some of them may, indeed, have been saved.

But instead of the simple message of salvation by the grace of God through faith in his Son, Jesus Christ, their message to the new Gentile believers was that they could only be truly saved if they submitted themselves to the Mosaic Law.

The men would have to be circumcised, they said, and all would have to observe the various Jewish feast days, dietary restrictions and other laws. Only if they did so would they be acceptable to God, they said.

This would be a problem not just for the churches of Galatia, but also for many other of the churches that were being planted around this time.

In fact, the Acts 15 Council that I talked about was a gathering of the apostles and elders of the church at that time in Jerusalem. There, they debated what to do about all these Gentiles who were placing their faith in Jesus.

Should they be Judaized — in other words, should they be required to take on the manners and customs and rituals of the Jewish faith? Or was something completely new taking place?

We can get an idea of what this debate looked like from Luke’s account in Acts, chapter 15.

Acts 15:1–12 NASB95

1 Some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” 2 And when Paul and Barnabas had great dissension and debate with them, the brethren determined that Paul and Barnabas and some others of them should go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and elders concerning this issue. 3 Therefore, being sent on their way by the church, they were passing through both Phoenicia and Samaria, describing in detail the conversion of the Gentiles, and were bringing great joy to all the brethren. 4 When they arrived at Jerusalem, they were received by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they reported all that God had done with them. 5 But some of the sect of the Pharisees who had believed stood up, saying, “It is necessary to circumcise them and to direct them to observe the Law of Moses.” 6 The apostles and the elders came together to look into this matter. 7 After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, “Brethren, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and believe. 8 “And God, who knows the heart, testified to them giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He also did to us; 9 and He made no distinction between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith. 10 “Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? 11 “But we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they also are.” 12 All the people kept silent, and they were listening to Barnabas and Paul as they were relating what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles.

Now, you’ll hear Paul make some of the same arguments in the Book of Galatians that you’ve just heard Peter make here. And the linchpin of Peter’s argument here is in verse 11: “We believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they also are.”

Neither circumcision nor the feast days nor the food restrictions nor any of the Mosaic Law had the power to save. We can only be saved BY God’s grace, THROUGH faith in Jesus alone.

And it seems that Peter’s argument was persuasive, because James, the half-brother of Jesus — who seems to have been one of the main leaders of the Jerusalem church — said, beginning in verse 19:

Acts 15:19–20 NASB95

19 “Therefore it is my judgment that we do not trouble those who are turning to God from among the Gentiles, 20 but that we write to them that they abstain from things contaminated by idols and from fornication and from what is strangled and from blood.

Don’t trouble the new Gentile believers with circumcision or the rest of the Mosaic Law, he said. Only tell them to abstain from idolatry, fornication, and consuming blood or things that had been strangled, he said.

And this is part of the reason I think Paul’s letter was written BEFORE the Jerusalem Council: We don’t see any reference in Galatians to the restrictions listed in verse 20, which we’d expect to see if he’d written this letter AFTER the Jerusalem Council.

But the thing I want you to see is that the leaders of the young Church were very much interested in getting the message right. And they were very interested in making sure that new followers of Jesus had the message right, as well.

So, when Paul heard that the Judaizers had visited Galatia and preached false doctrine to these new believers, he was disappointed in them and incensed with the false teachers.

You might even say he was offended.

And his frustration shows up in the very first verses of this letter. Whereas it was normal for him to offer a word of praise and thanksgiving for the recipients of his letters, to the Galatians, he says, essentially: Hey, it’s Paul. God bless you. What on EARTH is going on there?!

He’s not beating around the bush. He gets right to the point. He’s blunt and even a little coarse in places.

And the reason he’s so blunt is that the false doctrine that has beguiled some of the Galatian Christians is the antithesis of the true gospel — it’s contrary to what Jesus taught, and it’s dangerous on an eternal scale.

We were talking about this during the Smoke and Fire Men’s Bible Study on Thursday, and I pointed out something that you might’ve heard before: Every other world religion is fixated on what WE must do to be saved or to have eternal life or enlightenment or whatever.

But Christianity centers itself on what’s been done FOR us by Jesus. His life of perfect obedience, His sacrificial death on the cross, and His supernatural resurrection from the dead are all the work that needed to be done for your salvation.

All you bring to the table is your faith in Him and His finished work. And, significantly, even that faith is a gift from God.

And I want you to understand that this false doctrine of grace through faith PLUS works isn’t something that went away after the early Church had passed on. We see it in the Catholic church, even today.

In fact, Martin Luther, one of the architects of the Protestant Reformation, pointed to Galatians as the basis of his split from the Catholic Church. Indeed, he loved this letter so much that he compared it to his wife.

But even the rise of Protestantism didn’t squash the false teaching that had so alarmed Paul. We still see it today.

Amy Ford reminded me last week that the gospel “has often been rejected and despised because of missionaries who traveled the world, trying to change the way people dressed or governed themselves or even had sex, rather than just preaching the word.”

And she’s right. Even today, we see Christians defining themselves by all the things they’re against, rather than defining themselves as sinners saved and transformed by grace.

And the implication they leave is that you can’t be saved until you’ve cleaned yourself up — that you aren’t really acceptable to God unless you’ve given up alcohol and drugs, stopped cussing, renounced homosexuality and other sexual sins, and so on.

But that’s not how any of us came to Christ. We came to Him in the filth of our own transgressions. And then, AFTER we’ve placed our faith in Him, HE began to clean us up through the Holy Spirit who dwells within us.

I don’t know what your sins were when you came to faith in Jesus, but I DO know that you were STILL a sinner when you turned to Him in faith.

And I know that — even if you HAD been able to clean yourself up completely — you’d still have been just as lost before you placed your faith in Him as you’d have been if you’d kept right on doing all the evil things you’d been doing. There’s nothing you could have done to make up for all the ways you’d ALREADY sinned against God.

We are saved BY grace alone, THROUGH faith alone, IN Christ alone. He alone brings freedom from the bondage of sin. And He doesn’t free us from one sort of bondage so that we can take on ANOTHER form of bondage, the bondage of legalism.

What’s legalism? “As a belief legalism is the conviction that we can make ourselves acceptable to God by keeping rules.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003).]

“As a practice legalism is the keeping of rules with a view to gaining merit with God. In a larger sense legalism is the belief that we can make ourselves acceptable to God by our good works.” [Ibid.]

So, with all that as introduction, let’s take a look at the introduction to this letter.

Galatians 1:1–5 NASB95

1 Paul, an apostle (not sent from men nor through the agency of man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead), 2 and all the brethren who are with me, To the churches of Galatia: 3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, 4 who gave Himself for our sins so that He might rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, 5 to whom be the glory forevermore. Amen.

Right off the bat, Paul defends his apostolic calling. He wasn’t called as an apostle by the disciples of Jesus or by anyone else — He was called by Jesus Himself to take the message of the gospel to the Gentiles.

And that means that Paul speaks and writes in the authority of Jesus. The false teachers couldn’t claim that. They were claiming the authority of Moses. But Jesus is the prophet greater than Moses, and He said He had fulfilled the Law.

So, right off the bat, Paul is making sure the Galatians understand that this gospel message he preaches is from the very Son of God and that any message contradicting it is contrary to the teachings of Jesus.

Jesus is the one who gave Himself for our sins to rescue us from this evil age.

He lived a life of perfect obedience to the Father to show us what such a life would look like. And then, He gave Himself as a sacrifice at the cross.

There, the sinless Son of God took upon Himself the guilt, the shame, and the punishment that we all deserve for our sins against God. He suffered and died on the cross for us and in our place.

He died so that all who place their faith in Him can be saved. He bore the punishment we deserve so that we who follow Him in faith can become adopted sons and daughters of God, citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven.

He didn’t wait for us to clean up our acts. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Not once we’d proved ourselves worthy.

We AREN’T worthy. We never COULD be worthy. HOW could we be worthy of God Himself, in the Person of His Son, bearing the punishment WE deserve for our sins against HIM?!

That’s why it’s called grace! Grace is someone stooping down to do something to benefit someone who doesn’t deserve it and can’t repay the gracious act.

Jesus gave His life at the cross, because that was the ONLY way to redeem sinful and fallen people from their sins.

But He didn’t have to do it. He could have just said, “No thanks. They’re all too wretched and evil. They’re selfish and idolatrous and faithless. Why would I die for THEM?”

What He said, though, was this: “You did not choose Me, but I chose you.” What He said was this: “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.”

Did you hear that? Knowing that we would come along and sin against Him, He gave His life for us and called us friends. Even when we were still enemies of God, rebels against His kingdom, Jesus called us friends.

In His abundant grace, Jesus CHOSE to give Himself as a sacrifice for sin. He CHOSE to love the unloveable. He CHOSE to be faithful to the faithless. He CHOSE to give His life as an atonement for the sins of those He would make His friends through faith in Him.

THIS is the message of the gospel, and we need to be sure we get it right.

We are saved BY grace, THROUGH faith, plus nothing. Does that mean Christians should go on sinning? What would Paul say? Of course not.

But that’s a different message. That’s a message about sanctification, about the Holy Spirit making us more and more like Jesus.

And when we mix THAT message into the simple message of the gospel, we burden people with a burden even WE didn’t carry when we came to faith in Jesus.

Look, I’ve struggled this week to come up with an application for what I’m teaching today.

Perhaps the best I can do is this: I wish we’d talk a lot more in public about grace than sin. Now, we HAVE to talk about sin in order to make grace understood. But the WAY we talk about sin — especially around non-believers — is important.

When we talk about sin, do they hear love and grace or do they hear condemnation? We’re not in a position to condemn anyone for ANYTHING.

How would we react if a homosexual couple joined us for worship one morning? Or someone who still smelled of booze from the big party last night? Or someone still suffering the effects of narcotics withdrawal?

Would we be loving and gracious? Or would they get the distinct impression that we don’t think they’re good enough to sit here and listen to the good news of a Savior who died for their sins and ours?

Just as Jesus chose to love the unloveable — that’s you and me, by the way — WE can choose to do so, as well. Just as Jesus chose to call friends we who were opposed to Him, we can choose to do so, as well.

Let’s go be like Jesus. And let’s get the message right.