Junk Drawer Jesus - The Ruler (Galatians 3:1-14)

Too Short to Ride

When I was growing up, I loved the amusement parks… we had a lot of them around. Fantasy Farm was the place for little kids.. that was a field trip every year. Then Lesourdsville Lake and Americana, Cedar Point, and then Kings Island. You know what sign at the amusement park I hated the most as a kid? The “you have to be this tall to ride this ride” sign. I remember how disappointed I was I didn’t get to ride the racer at Kings Island because I was too short. I wanted on that ride.

They still have those signs. Recently a mother shared on TikTok that she and her son were at Universal Orlando and he was denied access to the Hagrid Motorbike ride. The boy was disappointed, but all was not lost. Before leaving to find another ride, a Universal attendant gave her son a height certificate, guaranteeing that when the boy is tall enough, he can come back and hand in that certificate and go right to the front of the line… along with his family. Not totally bad to be too short.

If you want to talk to God, you have to be this tall

Coming up short. Do you think God has one of those signs outside of his throne room? “In order to talk to God today, you have to be this good.” You think I joke. I remember being told as a kid, that if I wasn’t right with God (and you can insert just about any definition into what that means there), if I wasn’t right with God, God would not hear my prayers. In order to talk to God today, you have to be this tall.

How many of you have been asked “How’s your walk with the Lord?” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that line. How do you feel when someone asks that? What do you want to say? Are you going to be honest? The presumption there is that there is some sort of measure to live up to in order to “walk with the Lord.” Entire Christian paradigms are built around that idea, that we have to constantly measure up to this seemingly arbitrary standard of walking with the Lord.

In fact, there’s all sorts of “being right with God” myths lurking in our spiritual junk drawer. “If you’d been living right, that bad thing would not have happened this week.” The thought is… “if you’re bad, Jesus is going to treat you bad. You’re not going to have his blessing.” Or here’s another one along those lines… “that really bad thing happened to me this week because God’s trying to get my attention.” “His life is going downhill because he’s not walking with the Lord.” How many of you have heard that.. either someone said it to you, or someone said it about someone else.

And while many would protest what I’m about to say, I firmly believe this to be the case… all of this “being right with God” stuff is little more than the health, wealth, and prosperity Gospel in a different disguise. Because what we’re really saying is that “If you live right, God’s going to bless your socks off”, usually with financial comfort, a decent house, a steady job, great kids, and a happy retirement. And I want to ask the question… how many of us are “living right” and “doing right” so that God won’t do something negative to us?

The ruler

This is all tied to another item that we find in our spiritual junk drawers… a ruler. How many of you have a ruler in your junk drawer? For a long, long time, I still had the wooden ruler I had used in elementary school. We keep those around, though these days the tape measure is so much more convenient.

Our spiritual junk drawers are a cluttered collection of religious ideas, many of which aren’t helpful nor do they line up with the scriptures but still get ingrained in the way that we live. Last week we talked about the cosmic scale...the wrong or junk idea that God is weighing our good works against our bad/sinful works and rewarding us accordingly. We found out that we cannot tip the scale in our favor because our ability to save ourselves with our own actions is doomed to fail before we even start.

The ruler is another way that we measure… and in this instance, the spiritual ruler is how we measure where we are in our faith journey, to gauge how far we’ve climbed or walked spiritually. And the the question becomes… are we good enough? Have we measured up enough?

The health, wealth and prosperity Gospel is all about believing that God will reward us with material things if we believe God enough for it, if we claim it and pray hard enough. But that problem doesn’t stop there. We have books and podcasts and movies all making the claim that if we don’t live well enough according to God’s standards, if we don’t obey enough, we will not get God’s spiritual blessings. Those are one and the same thing. There is no difference between the claim that God will give you something good if you have enough faith and the claim that God will give you his blessing if you have enough good works.

We need the ruler because we need to always be aware of just how much is enough to please God today. maybe you have had it creep into your life when something bad happens—a relationship fails, a job is lost, or health deteriorates—and to help explain why, we often start measuring ourselves. We ask, “ Am I not a good enough person? Should I pray harder, give more, believe more, be nicer, so that life can be easier?”

The Problem with Measuring Up

The Bible is pretty clear about this kind of thinking. In fact, St. Paul spends almost an entire letter dealing with this problem. We read it moments ago. St. Paul is writing to a few congregations in what we know now as Turkey. And these churches are terribly confused about what it means to be right with God. And the reason they are confused is because they’ve been duped by a bunch of religious teachers who were claiming that faith in Jesus is not enough to live the Christian life and be good with God. They were claiming that being on God’s good side was all dependent on how well you did the dos and don’ts found in the Bible. The more you do the dos and don’ts… the closer to God you’ll be.

And unlike any other place in his letters, St Paul is absolutely unglued. He’s fuming here in chapter 3. You can hear his anger barely under control in a series of 7 questions he just fires off, rat-a-tat-tat.

Galatians 3:1–16 “You foolish Galatians! Who has cast a spell on you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?

I only want to learn this from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by believing what you heard?

Are you so foolish?

After beginning by the Spirit, are you now finishing by the flesh?

Did you experience so much for nothing—if in fact it was for nothing?

So then, does God give you the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law?

Or is it by believing what you heard—just like Abraham who believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness?

We’re not sure what all Paul had heard, but he had heard enough. Who has cast a spell on you? Are you foolish? Help me understand… how is it you think that you can get on God’s good side and stay on God’s good side by being a good person? By doing the works of the law? The law cannot make you right with God… the law cannot make God pleased with you. Behavior cannot do any of that.

Jacob’s Ladder

But oh, we try. There’s the story in the Old Testament about a guy named Jacob. Jacob is on the run from his brother. Jacob had stolen his brother’s inheritance and now Esau, the brother, has said, he’d kill Jacob. While Jacob sleeps, he has a vision of a ladder reaching to heaven, and on that ladder, angels are going up and down the ladder, and in the vision, God, at the top of the ladder, comes down and tells Jacob that all of the promises given to his grandpa Abraham are his. It’s important to note that God comes down. But in our attempts to close the gap between ourselves and God himself, what have we done to the story?

When I was growing up there was a popular Christian song, “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder”. There was another popular Christian song “We are climbing the ladder he gave us”. What have we done with Jacob’s ladder? The ladder is another ruler. And if we are going to be good with Jesus, if we’re going to “walk with the Lord”, we best be climbing Jacob’s ladder on our quest to God, getting better and better morality as we go.

That’s works salvation. And there’s no amount of climbing that will get us to God. Jacob’s ladder was never meant for us to climb. In fact, the very notion of us climbing the ladder to God is a hijacking of the story.

Paul says “stop it already.” Living as if obedience is the key to being right with God and having a good walk with Jesus is nothing more than living under the curse of the law. Put the rulers away. You’ll never be obedient enough. The only way we will ever measure up is for Jesus to come down the ladder to where we are. And that’s exactly what he did. That’s exactly what he does for you.

Only Christ will ever be enough

There’s only one who will ever be enough. It’s Jesus. How’s your walk with God? I don’t know. My walk with God is Jesus walking with God for me on my behalf.

I can’t stress this enough… God doesn’t treat you good or bad based on your behavior. That’s works salvation 101, even if it’s the Christian life. And this is how absolutely devastating this can be. If God is treating you good or bad based on your behavior, quite frankly, that’s conditional love. And I was taught that as a kid. “Oh yeah, sure you’re a Christian, you’re going to heaven, but you better be good or Jesus won’t give you all his blessings. In fact, if you’re not a good boy, Jesus is going to punish you and make your life miserable. You’ll only get to heaven by the skin of your teeth.”

Jesus becomes another version of Santa Claus… good boys get the presents, and bad boys get the coal. And so what happens when life is miserable? Yeah… Jesus went bye, bye. All you get is coal for your life. You’re not obedient enough. And the message is “Hurray, I get to go to heaven, but I’ll never have the great Christian life because I can’t behave.”

I was really believing that. And Galatians rings out like a clarion bell:

You foolish Galatians! Who has cast a spell on you? When did you start believing that being good was the key to living the Christian life?

Paul just smashes that notion to bits. This is so devastating. What a prison to live in… either over-confident that you do measure up, or there’s no confidence that you do measure up. “How’s your walk with the Lord?” Yeah, the reality is that nobody’s walk with the Lord measures up, so stop asking. The person asking the question has deluded themselves into thinking that it’s possible for obedience to bridge the gap between myself and Jesus in my Christian walk. No, that idea presumes love is conditional. Grace is conditional. Blessings are conditional.

You know what the answer is? We read it earlier:

Galatians 3:14 The blessing of Abraham (is) by Christ Jesus, so that we could receive the promised Spirit through faith.

If you’ve been here at The Table this isn’t a shock to you because we say this all the time, but we say this all the time because we are so forgetful. The blessing is by Jesus. Jesus is enough. Jesus walks up to the sign and says, “I’m tall enough and I’m bringing Bresson with me… I’m tall enough on his behalf.” That’s how this works. He has done the dos and don’ts for us so that God is never displeased with us. We’re always enough because Jesus is always enough. And because Jesus is enough, there’s this:

Obedience is not the key to the Christian life. Faith is.

Living the Christian life isn’t about the dos and the don’ts, it’s about faith. St. Paul said it flat out when he says this:

Galatians 3:9 Those who have faith are blessed with Abraham, who had faith.

It’s not about good works, it’s not about obedience… it’s about faith in Jesus who has done it all for me. One of the reasons why we get caught up in the idea that we have to be enough with our good works is because we don’t realize how much of Jesus we already have. We don’t realize that Jesus has already been enough for us. Jesus is enough for us so that we can enjoy all of God all of the time… all of being in His family, all of His promises, all of His love, all of His mercy… it’s all ours, even if we’re a mess.

God is closest… right now

It’s not about our ability to get closer to God, to walk with God. This is about God walking with us. That’s the other side… someone wants to know… how’s your walk with God… wrong question… how’s God’s walk with me? That’s the question. And God has answered that.

Hebrews 13:5 Be satisfied with what you have, for he himself has said, I will never leave you or abandon you.

Be satisfied with what you have. You have Jesus. And Jesus himself has said, I will never leave you or abandon you. That’s God’s walk with me. God is living at ground level with you and me. When life is falling apart, when life is grand… it doesn’t matter. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, all of the time. He’s not worried about a ruler… our manufactured rulers… trying to measure up. We can’t. He already has. And because he has, he is always with us.

I had someone in the past year tell me that God must be mad at them because nothing is going right. And I’m sure it’s because I’m so far from him. And the reality is “no.” Terrible thinking. He’s not far. He’s not mad at you. He’s still right here, living with us in the midst of our mess.

He’s close… in Word and Sacrament

People want to know “how”. “How do you know this.” Because this is what He has promised. God has taken all of His promises, all of His truth, all of His power, and wrapped them up in one place, in one person—Jesus Christ. If you ever want to know how God feels about you, what He’s like, and what He’s done, look to Him. He is present in His Word and in His Sacrament. You want to see and smell and feel his presence? It’s here in His community.

Jesus comes near to us in His church. When someone feels that God is far away, I always have to ask… so, when are you spending time with His body? Because it’s His Word, His Sacrament, but it’s also our words, our touch, our text messages, our prayers… all of this is used by God to be close to His people. Through the church, His hands and His feet, He comforts and cares for the world. It is here in His church, where the ruler is put away, and He tells us that He is enough for us. Again.

Let’s Pray

The Table

You’re never going to be tall enough to come to the Table. I remember as a kid beating myself up as I sat there waiting for the communion plate to be passed to me. I had the idea that I had to be good enough for the Table. Until I read an author who told me, you’ll never be good enough. The Table isn’t about you. It’s about Jesus. It’s not a memorial. It’s not whether we are worthy. There’s only One who is worthy for this Table and He’s the One who makes you worthy when you receive his body and his blood in faith. Put your rulers away. Jesus is the only one who measures up. And He does it FOR YOU.

Benediction