Don’t Go Back

Subject: Why would a free man walk back into the jailhouse?

Complement: Because he has forgotten what his freedom is for, how his freedom is kept, and what that old yoke really was.

Dominant Thought: Christ set us free for freedom itself, so the believer must stand firm and never again let the yoke be laid across his neck.

Aim: To move the believer who is drifting back toward performance religion, old habits, and old bondage to plant his feet in the finished work of Christ and refuse the yoke.

Propositional Statement: Every believer must stand firm in the freedom Christ purchased and refuse to submit again to slavery.

Big Idea: Christ did not set you free so you could go back.

Sermon Thesis: In Galatians 5:1 Paul shows that the freedom Christ purchased has a purpose, a posture, and a peril — and the believer who understands all three will never go back.

Galatians 5:1 ESV

1 For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

INTRODUCTION

A man walked out of the penitentiary after twenty-seven years. The gate rolled back. He had his papers in his shirt pocket and a bus ticket folded in his hand. Free. Legally, lawfully, on-the-record free.

Three weeks later his sister came into the kitchen at six o'clock in the morning and found him standing up against the wall. Not sitting. Not fixing coffee. Standing. She said, “What you doing?”

He said, “Waiting on count.”

Nobody was counting. Nobody had counted that man in three weeks. Wasn't a guard within ninety miles of that kitchen. But twenty-seven years of six o'clock had gotten down in his bones, and his bones had not yet gotten the news that the gate was open.

He was free. And he was still doing time. And I want you to understand that both of those things were true at the same time.

Now Paul is writing to a whole church full of people standing against that kitchen wall. Blood-bought people. Gate-open people. People whose release papers were signed in the blood of Jesus Christ Himself. And they are lining up for count. They are volunteering for it.

So the question on the table this morning is not whether you are free. If you are in Christ, that is settled. The question this morning is the one that will not let me alone: why would a free man walk back into the jailhouse?

Paul has just finished with Hagar and Sarah. He has just told them whose children they are. And now he takes four chapters of argument and drives it down into one sentence.

Don't go back.

Transition: And the first thing Paul wants us to see is not what we ran from, but what we were turned loose for. The text teaches. . .

I. FREEDOM HAS A PURPOSE

“For freedom Christ has set us free…”

Read that clause slowly and you will hear Paul stutter. “For freedom… has set us free.” He uses the noun and then he uses the verb, and grammatically he did not have to do that. He is repeating himself on purpose. He is doing what a mother does when the child is halfway out the door and not listening — she does not say it once and hope. She says the thing, and then she says the thing again.

The word, in the biblical language (ἐλευθερία), names the standing of a freeborn citizen — a man who belonged to the city and not to a master, who could walk clean through the marketplace without checking whose name was written on his back.

And here is the weight of it. Paul does not say Christ freed you in order to get something out of you. He does not say Christ freed you so you could be useful. He says, “Christ freed you for freedom.” Freedom is not the hallway. Freedom is the room.

Illustration. My mother has china in a china cabinet. Had it my whole life. The good kind — the kind that does not go in the dishwasher, the kind that gets its own shelf. And I asked her when I was a boy when we were going to eat off it, and she told me what she has told everybody who ever asked. On a special day. Now hear me. I am a grown man now, and to this day I have never eaten one meal off my mother's china. Special days came. Graduations came. Weddings came. Babies were born, folks were buried, the family came home and went back again. And that china is still sitting behind that glass — clean, perfect, and untouched.

Application. Somebody in this room is doing that with grace.

You will not say it out loud. It sounds ridiculous out loud. But here is the arrangement you have quietly made with God: you will accept the forgiveness once you have earned it. You have got your salvation up behind the glass. On its own shelf. Waiting on a version of yourself special enough to deserve it.

So, when the thing you swore off in January shows up again in July, you do not run to God. You go silent on Him. You stop praying — not because you stopped believing, but because you have decided you are not currently qualified to be in the room.

That is not humility, beloved. That is a payment plan on a debt already marked paid. Every month you are still sending money to an account that closed at Calvary.

So hear it. If the freedom was for freedom, there is no waiting period. There is no worthy occasion. The occasion is today. Right now. In that chair. With that thing still on your record.

He did not give it to you to keep behind glass. He gave it to you to eat off of.

Don't go back to the cabinet.

Transition: But a freedom you are meant to live in is a freedom somebody is going to try to take, and so Paul tells us how to keep it. Paul explains. . .

II. FREEDOM HAS A POSTURE

“…stand firm therefore…”

Illustration. We used to play football on the dirt lot behind the house — no pads, no lines, no grown folks. And the whole game came down to the same thing every time. Somebody would get down close, and one of the big boys would say the words that made your stomach drop: first and goal. And there was nothing to do then. No play to call. No scheme to save you. You just dug your toe into that dirt and you got low and you decided, before he ever came, that he was not getting through you. And I have seen boys who could not catch and could not throw and could not run become somebody's hero on that dirt for one reason only. They would not move.

That is the word, in our text (στήκετε) — stand firm. The word pictures a man planted rather than propped, feet set down into the ground like something with roots instead of something leaning on a wall.

And notice Paul does not say get free. He cannot say that. Christ already did that and Paul will not insult the cross by making it a group project. He says stand — and he says it in the present tense, which in the Greek means keep on standing. Not stood, one time. Standing. Ongoing. Because the deliverance was a moment but the standing is a lifestyle.

Application. So let me walk one down with you.

Then look again at what Paul actually said. He did not say get free. He said stand — and he said it about ground you did not buy. You are not holding yourself up. You are standing on something that was purchased outright and cannot be repossessed. Those boys on the dirt lot were never the strongest ones out there. They had just settled it before the ball was ever snapped.

Settle it before the ball is snapped. And don't go back.

Transition: Because there is something waiting for the believer who stops standing, and Paul names it without softening it. Paul shows us. . .

III. FREEDOM HAS A PERIL

“…and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

The yoke is ζυγός (zygos) — the wooden crossbar laid over the neck of an ox, carved and shaped to fit that particular neck so well that an animal who wears it long enough stops feeling it at all.

And the verb Paul uses (ἐνέχεσθε) means— to be held in, to be caught, the word you would use for a snare closing on a leg. Paul puts it in the passive. He is not warning them that they might pick the yoke up. He is warning them that they might stand still long enough to let it be laid on them.

But the word that carries Paul's grief is the little one in the middle. πάλιν (palin). Again. Not a new bondage. The same one. The one you already got out of.

Illustration. There was a woman on Henderson Avenue in Cedar Grove who finally packed her car. Took her three years to do it and she did it in twenty minutes with the trunk lid up and the neighbors pretending not to watch. Everybody on that block was pulling for her. And the sun had not gone all the way down before that car came back up Henderson and parked in the same spot in front of the same porch light. And I want to be careful how I say this, because there is a whole world of hurt in that turnaround that no one on the outside understands. But what she said later was this. She could not stand how quiet the new place was. She did not go back because the yoke was good. She went back because the yoke was familiar, and freedom was silent, and she did not yet know how to live in a house where nobody was yelling.

Application. Some of you are not tempted by sin. You are tempted by familiarity.

The thing you are drifting back toward is not attractive — it is just known. It fit your neck. And I want you to walk all the way to the end of that road with me, because there is a day coming when every one of us stands before Him and gives an account, and I do not want anybody in this room to come up to that day carrying a yoke Jesus already took off.

Imagine it. The books are open. The cross has done everything it said it would do. And a man steps forward still wearing the crossbar, still keeping score, still trying to pay, and the Lord says, “Son, I settled that. Why are you still wearing that thing?”

Beloved, that is a grief I would not wish on my worst enemy — to have spent a whole Christian life in a yoke that had already been unbuckled. So put it down now. Not next year. Now.

And if you are sitting here today and the truth is you have already turned the car around — you got out and you went back and you are ashamed of yourself for it and you have not told a soul — then let me be the one to tell you what the porch light on Henderson Avenue could not: the house you left is not the only house. There is a Father with the door open and He has been open the whole time you were gone, and He is not going to make you explain the mileage. Come home. But don't go back.

Transition: And the only reason I can stand here and tell anybody not to go back is because of what happened to Somebody who would not turn around.

CELEBRATION

There was One who came to a place where the road bent back, and He did not take it. In the garden with sweat like blood falling down, He could have gone back. All of heaven was behind Him and one word would have turned Him around. He did not go back.

They laid a beam across His shoulders — wood, shaped to the neck, a yoke if there ever was one — and He carried my yoke up a hill so I would never have to wear it.

Nailed my record to it. Nailed my payment plan to it. Nailed the china I was saving for a day that never came to it.

And He bowed His head and He said, It is finished, and He did not go back.

They took Him down and they put Him in a borrowed tomb and they rolled a stone across the door and set a seal on it. Friday night, He is in the ground. Saturday, He is still in the ground. Saturday, everybody who ever loved Him is sitting in a room somewhere thinking it is over. Saturday, hell is having a celebration and the gate is shut.

But early Sunday morning — early, while it was still dark — the stone that was supposed to hold Him started to move. And He came up out of the grave with all power in His hands. He came up with my chains hanging off His wrists. He came up and He walked out and left the grave clothes folded, because He was not planning on coming back for them.

And if the grave could not get Him to turn around, then your Thursday cannot. Your record cannot. That yoke cannot. He is alive right now, and He is standing, and He is holding you up.

So stand up. Stand firm. And whatever you do — don't go back.

Soli Deo Gloria