First Responder Training

Main Idea

Restoration is our mission, burden-bearing is our calling, and self-examination is our safeguard.

Summarize Flesh v Spirit and highlight vv. 25-26. This serves as the interpretive lens needed for today’s passage. Being ‘conceited’ means being proud without justification or reason… or in other words… You are ‘falsely proud’ and vainly glorifying yourself. How do we avoid being falsely proud while keeping in step with the Spirit? The answer? Training.

If you enjoy watching medical or police dramas, you have likely seen how first responders are trained to step into risky or emotionally charged situations. They are trained to enter these scenarios with calmness, the ability to quickly assess their surroundings and the victim's current state, and the skill to control the emotional temperature. One drama I watched depicted a coast guard helicopter lowering a medic into the sea to rescue a married couple. The man was panicking and flailing so wildly that he was unknowingly pushing his wife under the waves. In a controlled manner, the medic swiftly punched the man in the face! He then pulled the wife above water, lifted them onto a gurney, and got them to dry land. Was this a bit unorthodox? Maybe… maybe not. He was trained to calm the panic and rescue the victim.

Similarly, we are called to value and focus on our training in godliness (1 Tim 4:7-8). I want to suggest to you this morning that this passage serves as a way to be trained as a first responder by the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Passage

Galatians 6:1–5 CSB

1 Brothers and sisters, if someone is overtaken in any wrongdoing, you who are spiritual, restore such a person with a gentle spirit, watching out for yourselves so that you also won’t be tempted. 2 Carry one another’s burdens; in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. 3 For if anyone considers himself to be something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. 4 Let each person examine his own work, and then he can take pride in himself alone, and not compare himself with someone else. 5 For each person will have to carry his own load.

🛟 Restore

Brothers and Sisters: Paul addresses the believing community. This serves as guidance for those who walk by the Spirit, emphasizing their responsibility to support their spiritual siblings when they stumble.

Overtaken in wrongdoing. This refers to another believer who has fallen into sin. The word ‘overtaken’ means to be caught by surprise. This scenario is more about a sudden impulse than willful, habitual sin, much like a fish is lured in and snagged by bait. It does not describe a person who ‘practices’ fleshly living. Instead, it refers to a brother or sister who has been caught off guard by temptation and succumbed to it.

You who are spiritual. Again, this refers to Christians who are ‘spiritual’ because they walk with the Spirit and bear His fruit. If you consider yourself a Christian, this is how a trained spiritual person acts as a first responder. They arrive, assess the situation, take note of the person’s current condition, and act according to the will of the Spirit, as they are walking with Him and bearing His fruit. In contrast, the Pharisees of Jesus’ day and the Judaizers were legalistic. They responded in a distinct manner: condemning and conceited (the very attitude Paul advised against). In their pride and false piety, they revealed that they were acting according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. Hold on to that image… we will come back to it later.

Restore. Your job is to avoid being conceited like the legalistic Pharisees who believe they are too spiritual to fall into such sins. Instead, you should restore your fallen sibling. Consider an artist restoring a faded and grungy painting, a mechanic restoring a classic car, or a doctor setting a broken bone. What image comes to mind when you think of someone doing restoration in these examples? Right! They are caring, loving, and gentle. Or, in Paul’s words, you are to let the law of love guide you and allow the Spirit’s fruit of gentleness to motivate you to help restore your sibling. As Paul says in 2 Cor. 5, we are Ministers of Reconciliation. Why? Because we have experienced reconciliation to God while we were in sin.

Watch your back. Pride comes before the fall, and you may very well fall prey to what you think you’re impervious to. The "you’s in this passage shift from the plural you, or as we say in the South — y’all — to the singular you. There is a responsibility for all of us (all of y’all who are spiritual) to ensure that you (individually) aren’t tempted. This whole passage interplays between focusing on corporate accountability and individual responsibility. As we learned in the previous passage, all of us are susceptible to falling back into the works of the flesh. As you enter into the mess your sibling has made and work to pull them out of the mud, if you aren’t careful, a conceited mind and heart may push you right into the muddy sin along with them.

🪨 Carry

Be a burden-bearer. If you love your sibling, will you leave them in a difficult situation? Wasn’t that the point of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan? The religious leaders sidestepped the man in the ditch because they couldn’t be bothered, but the Samaritan man, who should have been the one to reject the Jew in the ditch due to their pre-existing animosity, is the one who reached down, lifted him up, and helped restore him to health. This is a perfect picture of carrying a burden for someone else that is not your own. For this man, the burden was being beaten half to death and needing someone else to help him get back on his feet. For us today, that burden could take many different forms. It could be when someone has succumbed to temptation. It could be marital strife, medical issues, wayward children, financial struggles, or any number of life issues that are — at times — too much for us to handle. The Greek word for ‘burden’ implies just that: a load that is too great for any one person. We cannot allow our brothers and sisters to be crushed by the weight of such burdens. To do so is to be unloving. The high call of every Christian is to be a burden-bearer, just as Christ bore the burdens that we could not carry. There is no greater example of bearing burdens than what Jesus did for us on the cross.

Fulfill the Law of Christ. What is this law? Does this mean we must set aside the law of Moses and consolidate all of Jesus’ teachings in one place so we can analyze them and ensure we adhere to those instead? Have we traded one set of rules for another? Well, yes and no. If you want to list all the rules in Jesus’ lawbook so you can follow them, then you are still under the influence of a legalistic mindset. That is a perspective you need to move away from. We should all aspire to meet the standards established by Jesus, but what Paul is referring to here is the law he has already mentioned — the law of love — and it is this law that fulfills the fullness of the Mosaic law (v. 5:14) and of Jesus’ teachings because He also fulfilled the Mosaic law!

Deception. Don’t pull the wool over your own eyes. Don’t think you are someone highly esteemed and special when you are not. Have you ever seen a grown man, in his40s, trying to stay hip with the college crowd? Or worse, a grown man lost in his own fantasy world at a ComicCon? Isn’t it incredibly sad to see someone trying to be someone they are not? Pride and a conceited heart can make you believe that you are righteous when you really aren’t. The legalist will see their rule-keeping and claim to be righteous while failing to recognize their pride. The way they carry themselves resembles the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18. Or maybe they see themselves as too good to help a brother or sister in need by co-bearing that particular burden, as Jesus described in Matthew 23:4:

Matthew 23:4 CSB

4 They tie up heavy loads that are hard to carry and put them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves aren’t willing to lift a finger to move them.

Paul says that these types of people deceive themselves. It’s not the devil engaging you in spiritual warfare… you are doing it to yourself… so the refrain of 5:25-26 must persist: If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit… Let us not become conceited. That is a doorway into all of the other works of the flesh... and we must avoid that at all costs.

🩻 Examine

So what do we do? How can we protect ourselves from temptation, and how do we avoid deceiving ourselves? Paul provides four steps in response, and if we don’t view verses 4-5 as appropriate responses to verses 1-3, we can easily become confused and mistakenly believe that Paul is contradicting himself. What do I mean by that? Next, Paul instructs us to examine our own work even though he has been criticizing works throughout the letter. He tells us to take pride while condemning pride (in the form of being conceited), and he encourages us to focus on carrying our own load after just telling us to carry each other’s burdens. What gives?

That is why we keep 5:25-26 at heart. If we want to walk by the Spirit and avoid being ‘falsely proud,’ then

You should humble yourself and gently restore your backslidden sibling in love.

Keep a check on your own heart and spiritual growth.

Let’s dive in that second point.

Examine your own work. In this context, I don’t believe this refers to works of the law. It can encompass that, but more broadly, it refers to a person’s conduct, actions, and responsibility for the tasks and stewardship that God has given them. For weeks now, we have been clarifying the nature of works. Scripture highlights the futility of relying on works to achieve righteousness. The right view of works is when they are performed from a heart that has already been redeemed as an act of gratitude and service. We labor for Christ because we have been saved… not in order to be saved. These works, then, should always have a fruity flavor, if you know what I mean. That is what you can examine. Are you laboring out of love or hate? Joy or envy? Peace or dissension?

Take pride. Up until now, we have defined being ‘conceited’ as being falsely proud… meaning that a person is prideful without a real reason. The justification is merely a figment of their imagination or a deceptive thought in their mind. This, however, is a pride that can be justified. Parents take pride in their children in many ways. One can take pride in their work when they step back and admire the finished product. Our mechanic can take pride in a fully restored classic car. If we examine the work done in the Spirit that bears spiritual fruit, then we can rightly differentiate between the work being done in us to make us more like Christ, of which is accomplished by the Spirit’s work. It is the cooperative effort of sanctification between us and the Spirit that I take pride in, knowing that my works are empowered by God for my good. Thus, I can appropriately take pride in what the Spirit is doing in me and in the tasks He is graciously giving me. This is precisely what we see Paul doing in other letters, such as:

2 Corinthians 10:13–17 CSB

13 We, however, will not boast beyond measure but according to the measure of the area of ministry that God has assigned to us, which reaches even to you. 14 For we are not overextending ourselves, as if we had not reached you, since we have come to you with the gospel of Christ. 15 We are not boasting beyond measure about other people’s labors. On the contrary, we have the hope that as your faith increases, our area of ministry will be greatly enlarged, 16 so that we may preach the gospel to the regions beyond you without boasting about what has already been done in someone else’s area of ministry. 17 So let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.

Don’t compare. If you examine your own heart and take pride in the Spirit's work within you, you won’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others. Regarding your spiritual growth, you are where you are. You don’t need to be jealous of someone who is more mature than you, and you don’t need to look down on one another who is less mature. The Spirit is working in all the redeemed saints to bring them to maturity, and we can praise Him for it. We can look at those who are more mature and praise God for where they are while having a healthy desire to aspire to their level. As we have already discussed, we don’t become arrogant or judgmental toward those who are weaker in faith than we are. In humility, we reach down to pull them up. There is no scenario in which comparing yourself to others will be beneficial. Instead, we are encouraged to focus on our own growth and praise God for what He is doing in us.

Carry your own burdens.This is the focus of this final exhortation. Some loads are too heavy to bear alone, while others are solely our responsibility. The burden mentioned at the beginning of the passage is overwhelmingly heavy for a single individual to carry. This load, however, is different. It is a different Greek word that alludes to a soldier’s backpack or an individual’s satchel. Soldiers in wartime must take responsibility for their own weapons and supplies. They must ensure the safety of their position; no one else can fulfill that role for them. The verb tense reinforces this idea. It is in the active future tense — you will have to carry — suggesting that you must do so now and will always hold that responsibility. You and only you are accountable to God for your actions and obligations. For instance, I am a husband and a father. No one else is (or can be) responsible for being a faithful spouse to my wife. No one else can be a father to my children. I alone bear the God-given duty to lead and provide for my family. That responsibility rests on my shoulders. However, when I face challenges and difficulties in fulfilling these roles, I have supportive siblings around me who help share those burdens. If Kelly is away on a trip and one of my kids gets sick, I may need help in getting the others to school, for example.

As Spirit-filled believers, we are called to be trained first responders in the family of faith… people who don’t walk past the fallen but step into the mess with gentleness, humility, and love. Restoration is not optional; it’s a sacred responsibility in our job description. But it must be done carefully, guarding our own hearts, avoiding spiritual arrogance and pride, and bearing one another’s burdens without abandoning personal responsibility. This is part of what it means to walk and be led by the Spirit. In His power, we restore the broken, carry the burdens, and remain faithful to the unique load God has entrusted to each of us.

This is how we fulfill the law of Christ.

🔥 Application Points:

1. Be a Responder, Not a Spectator.

A response to sin calls for restoration, not finger-pointing and condemnation.

Move toward the fallen with gentleness, not judgment.

➤ Reflect: Do I respond to others’ failures with compassion—or with pride disguised as piety?

2. Check Your Own Heart Before Checking Theirs.

False pride makes rescuers fall; humility keeps them standing strong and able to assist.

Examine yourself before trying to correct someone else. Burden-bearing is a true measure of Christlike love.

➤ Reflect: Is there any pride or comparison in my heart that’s distorting how I see others?

3. Carry What’s Yours to Carry.

You can’t outsource your personal responsibility before God.

Own your spiritual growth, your calling, and your walk with Christ.

➤ Act: What part of my walk am I expecting others to carry for me, that God has assigned to me?