Galatians 1:6-10; What Holds us Together (Household of Faith, part 2)

Introduction: My mom comes from a large family, so by extension so do I. My mom is the 2nd oldest of 9 children. My grandma had so many babies that when my mom was pregnant with me, my grandma was pregnant with my uncle. That’s right, I have an uncle who is 7 months younger than me. I grew up with aunts & uncles who were more like cousins. We played together, got in trouble together, & fought with each other. We were close, but as we all got older, & started drifting apart, I started noticing that it was harder & harder to stay close, especially after my grandmother passed away. That was in 2002. In my opinion, Grandma Miller was kind of like the glue that held us all together.

Do you know that the church is like a large extended family? It is a community that has God as our Father, Christ as our brother (we are joint heirs together with Him), believers are siblings (brothers and sisters in Christ). In Christ we have a shared identity & sense of belonging. Through the Holy Spirit we show mutual support & care for one another. We do life together through good and bad times.

And like all families, we have our differences too. Church life is family life, which means it gets hard sometimes. There are challenges. Like real families, church families can have conflict and be dysfunctional too. Sometimes we fight, & don’t get along. But I believe that what holds us together as a church is stronger than whatever might desire to tear us apart. What holds us together is what we come to in today’s passage-

Galatians 1:6-10, I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel, 7which is not another; but there are some who trouble you & want to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. 9As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed. 10For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.

The church is the household of faith, we are a family, and what holds us together is the Gospel, not just any Gospel but the real Gospel.

1. The PURE Gospel, vs. 6.

Paul started laying the groundwork for this argument in his greeting. Galatians 1:4, (our Lord Jesus Christ) gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father… That one sentence is the Gospel in a nutshell, but as Paul begins to unpack it here in vs. 6, we begin to learn more and more about what the Gospel is & what it isn’t.

E.g., bank tellers are trained to spot counterfeit cash with the "feel, look, tilt" method,focusing on security features like embedded fibers, watermarks, security threads (visible under UV light), fine-line printing, and unique serial numbers. With experience, they can spot a counterfeit bill just by how it feels when it passes through their hands. How can they do that? They spend a lot of time handling the real thing. Which is what we must do with the Gospel. Spend time with the real thing so that you can spot the fake thing just by how it feels. So, what is the real thing?

It is the Gospel of God’s Calling-“Him who called you” is a reference to God, not to Paul. It is true that Paul preached to these people during his 1st missionary journey with Barnabas (Acts 13-14). The cities of Galatia were Antioch in Pisidia (not Antioch in Syria), Iconium, Lystra, & Derbe. After going through these cities, making disciples, & planting churches, they went back through them on their way home to encourage them in the faith. So these people heard the external call of the Gospel through Paul’s preaching, but they responded in faith because of the internal call of God by the Holy Spirit. This is where grace comes in.

It is the Gospel of God’s Kindness. Grace- favor & kindness. We respond to the Gospel not because we are good, but because God is. By the free gift of His grace, God gives His Holy Spirit to sinners to convict them of their sins so that they can respond to the Gospel by faith. This is what Jesus meant in John 3:6-8, That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Ephesians 2:8-9, For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9not of works, lest anyone should boast.

It is the Gospel of God’s Christ. Christ- Messiah, God’s anointed One who is sent to save people from their sins. This is the Gospel that Paul preached to the Galatians, a mixed church of Jews & Gentiles. As was his custom, Paul always preached the Gospel to Jews first, then to Gentiles. Acts 13:16-41 records the sermon Paul preached about Jesus in Antioch, which I think he kept on preaching in Iconium, Lystra, & Derbe. Paul’s Gospel is summed up in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures...

This is the Gospel that Paul preached, the Gospel the Galatians had believed, & the pure Gospel that they were turning away from to a different Gospel.They were deserting the pure & proven Gospel that saves people for a perverted version that saves no one.

2. The PERVERTED Gospel, vs. 7-9.

The word “different” at the end of vs. 6 is “heteros,” it means other, or another, but refers to something else entirely. It’s different in the sense that it is unlike the true Gospel in nature, quality, form, & degree. Today, we’re not going into detail about what the difference actually was; that will come later as the book unfolds before us.

Today, we won’t focus on what the Gospel perversion was; we want to focus on what the pure Gospel is: Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God came in the flesh, lived a perfect life, died a righteous death as a sacrifice for sin & as a substitute for sinners, & He rose from the dead.  Romans 10:9, that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. That’s the Good News of the real, true, & pure Gospel of Christ.

That Gospel is what the Galatians were turning away from, & whatever it was they were turning towards, it wasn’t that. It was a Gospel of another kind, but as Paul says here in vs. 7, it’s really not another because there is only One, True, Gospel. This word for “another” in vs. 7 means any of various alternatives. So, whatever it was they were getting & turning towards was an alternative Gospel, a perverted Gospel.

Some people had infiltrated these churches & were troubling them, causing a disturbance & great distress by what they were teaching & the believers were buying it.What Paul wanted them to get is that it was a perverted Gospel, it had been changed, altered, & distorted into something else entirely from the pure Gospel.

John Piper wrote a sermon on these verses titled, “when not to believe an angel.” When can you not believe an angel, or another person, or even yourself? When the message exchanges the pure & unadulterated Gospel for a perverted one.  Paul makes some pretty dramatic & scary comments in vss. 8-9, that if anyone, even himself, or an angel from heaven came to them & preached a different, alternative, perverted gospelfrom the pure & proven Gospel then let them be cursed.

A curse is a big deal.Accursed (anathema)- a cursed thing, an object of detestation. It refers to putting someone under God’s judgment. The Gospel belongs to God, it is His message of salvation, by His calling, kindness, & Christ, and He will punish those who distort it. It is such a serious offense that Paul repeats the curse in vs. 9, if anyone preaches any other gospel than the one, they already received, let that person be cursed; even if the new one they are preaching is a Gospel that pleases you more.

3. The PLEASING Gospel, vs. 10.

Paul asks the question, do I now persuade men, or God? do I seek to please men?Apparently, in the background of the context, Paul was being accused of a message that pleased people, that made it easier for them to believe & be saved. Which sounds like a good thing, but it’s not.

Paul was being accused of “easy-believism” because he did not require Gentile believers (non-Jewish people) to become Jews before coming to Jesus, i.e., he didn’t require them to submit to circumcision & Jewish ceremonial law in order to be saved. This is what opened him up to the charge that he was preaching a people-pleasing gospel.

As Max Anders puts it- Paul adamantly denies the charge and states clearly that his motive is to please only God. He was concerned with preserving truth not increasing his approval ratings.

To please people is to desert Christ. You must choose: serve people’s fickle pleasures or serve the faithful Christ.

Paul chose to preach the pure Gospel of God, the pure Gospel of Grace, the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ, and we must do the same! This Gospel is the thing that holds us together as a church when everything else in the world would seek to pull us apart.

There are people-pleasing gospels & we need to watch out for them. There are gospel messages of self-help & personal happiness rather than self-denial & personal holiness. There are gospel messages that err on the side that being saved means having a license to sin; since you can’t lose it just do whatever you want. There are gospel messages that err on the opposite extreme that being saved means keeping a set of legalistic rules; if you can’t keep them, you can’t stay saved. There is the contemporary therapeutic gospel that accepts and covers for mankind’s weak & sinful nature rather than seeking to change it by the gospel. It’s the gospel of seeking my kingdom first rather than what Jesus said, Matthew 6:33, But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.

We must turn away from all perverted forms of people-pleasing gospels. John Stott says, “to turn from the gospel of grace is to turn from the God of grace… You cannot touch the gospel and leave the church untouched, because the church is created by and lives by the gospel.”

Let me put it a different way- the gospel is what holds us together. A lot of things are going to come our way. A lot of trouble is going to be thrown at us. A lot of things will change, some things must change, but the one thing that never can change is the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Gospel is what holds us together.