Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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HUMAN BEINGS have a remarkably high capacity for foolishness.
My favorite is the story of a man who woke one morning in the dead of a Minnesota winter to find that the engine of his car had frozen.
His solution?
Pour hot gasoline into his car.
So he put some into a pot and warmed it on his kitchen stove.
As you can guess, that didn’t go so well.
Or there’s the story of two truck drivers who stopped before a low-hanging overpass to decide whether their eighteen-wheeler could go under it.
The driver pointed out that the overpass only had a clearance of thirteen feet, one inch, yet their truck required at least fourteen feet.
But his colleague had an even more astute observation.
There weren’t any cops around, so they should just go for it.
And they did.
Again it didn’t go so well.
The only way you could top this kind of folly would be to try to finish the Christian life in your own strength.
That’s not a good idea; in fact, it’s foolish.
Yet how prone we are to do this very thing!
The Christians in Galatia are trying to finish the Christian race in their own strength.
And Paul is beside himself as a result.
He can’t believe it; surely some devilry is at work in Galatia, prompting such madness.
Hence Paul peppers them with a string of rhetorical questions:
O foolish Galatians!
Who has bewitched you?
It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.
Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?
Are you so foolish?
Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?
Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain?
Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith …? (3:1–5)
This isn’t Paul’s first, or only, rebuke of these “foolish” Galatians.
The letter’s opening salvo is similarly chiding (cf.
1:6–9).
But here Paul doesn’t simply repeat his earlier rebuke; he further clarifies the issues at stake.
The Galatians are attempting to do the unthinkable: they’re contemplating circumcision and thus trying to finish the Christian race by the flesh rather than by the Spirit (3:3).
But why would adult male converts to Christ, living in the ancient world, want to get circumcised?
There was no doubt some social pressure, given their precarious identity.
But ultimately they’d become convinced that circumcision was the key to finishing the race, crossing the finish line, and finding success with God on the Last Day.
Presumably they’d been told by the agitators, the Judaizers, that no matter how well they’d started, they wouldn’t find success at the finish without undergoing circumcision.
Or to put it in theological terms, the Galatians had become convinced that they needed circumcision in order to be saved.
No doubt what was being touted in Antioch was also being promulgated in Galatia.
Certain men were telling these believers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved” (Acts 15:1).
And evidently the Galatians were buying it.
Thus Paul is distraught over his wayward flock, for their behavior implies nothing less than a departure from the gospel.
And a departure from the gospel, in turn, jeopardizes their entire future.
Paul fears he’s labored over them in vain (4:11).
Though they were “running well,” they’re not any longer (5:7).
Indeed, they appear to have “fallen away from grace” (5:4), having turned away from the One who “called [them] in the grace of Christ” (1:6).
And if they don’t finish the race by grace, they can’t possibly receive the prize.
It’s that simple.
To go to circumcision is to leave Christ; but leaving Christ will only leave them utterly exposed on the Day of Judgment.
Christ will be of no help to them on that day.
So what’s Paul’s response?
In short, he pleads with the Galatians not to look to the Law but instead to stick with the Spirit.
If they want to finish their race, they must rely on the Spirit’s empowering presence.
The Law, with its works, won’t lift a finger to help.
The Spirit alone is able to grant them success in their race.
The question for the Galatians, then, is a crucial one for you and me as well.
How can we promote the presence of the Spirit?
Or more accurately, by what means does God pour the Spirit into our lives?
Paul says God is the one “who supplies the Spirit to you” (3:5).
But our question is, how?
This paragraph of Galatians is designed to answer that question and to get the Galatians back on track, to finish the race by the Spirit and not by the flesh.
God Supplies the Spirit through the Cross of Christ (3:1)
But before Paul points the Galatians to the key issue, he takes them back to how they began their life in the Spirit.
He reminds them how it all began with something they saw, indeed, with something they encountered.
“It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified” (3:1).
The Galatians began life in the Spirit when they saw Jesus Christ crucified.
Notice that Paul emphasizes how visible this sight of Christ was: “It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified” (3:1).
This is an allusion to more than vivid, imaginative preaching.
Paul wants them to recall how he physically embodied the cross of Christ.
The Galatians thus saw the crucified Christ in the crucified Paul.
How? Through, Paul says, his own apostolic suffering.
As a result of his many trials and tribulations, he has indeed been “crucified with Christ” (2:20).
And in the flesh-and-blood of his very real suffering—the gash across his forehead, the welts on his arm, the black-and-blue around his eyes, the scars down his back—the Galatians see the crucified Christ publicly portrayed.
But Paul reminds them of how they saw the crucified Christ to reinforce the fact that the Spirit comes only through the cross of Christ.
That is to say, God only supplies us with the Spirit if our sins have been forgiven because of the death of Jesus Christ.
Unless our sins have been washed away by the blood of Christ, the Holy Spirit cannot enter our lives.
Apart from having our sins forgiven, the Holy Spirit would destroy, not sanctify us.
Paul’s point, then, is that the Spirit comes through the cross of Christ and only through the cross of Christ.
The Spirit never does an end run around the cross.
It all begins with the forgiveness of sins God accomplishes in the death of Jesus.
This is the door through which the Spirit travels; the door is opened by the death of Christ.
But this is also where we must return, again and again, as we continue to struggle with sin.
Every day we must pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12).
While a true believer cannot lose his union with the Spirit, he can interrupt his communion with the Spirit.
And sin is the great disruption to communion with God.
Like unplugging the cord to your computer, sin cuts us off from the source of power.
This is why confession of sin ought to be a regular part of our Christian life.
“Confess your sins to one another,” James tells us (5:16).
Have you ever noticed how almost instantly we feel stronger when we’ve confessed sin?
How do we explain this empowerment?
Confession takes us back to the cross, where we see the crucified Christ.
And there we gaze afresh at God’s forgiveness and there receive a fresh outpouring of God’s Spirit.
“Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19, 20).
God Supplies the Spirit in Response to the Hearing of Faith (3:2, 5)
But if the cross of Christ and the forgiveness of sins is the door God opens to enter into our sinful lives, then what’s the door we open to allow God to enter?
Paul points the way with a rhetorical question intended to cut to the chase: “Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?” (3:2).
Of course, the Galatians know they didn’t receive the Spirit by getting circumcised or by doing any of the other works of the Law.
When Peter preached in Joppa to Cornelius and those of his household, the Holy Spirit simply came upon them as Peter was speaking to them.
“And the believers from among the circumcised who had come with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit was poured out even on the Gentiles” (Acts 10:45).
How did the Spirit come upon these Gentiles or those in Galatia?
As Paul says, not by “works of the law” but by “hearing with faith.”
But the giving of the Spirit isn’t a onetime thing.
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