A Tale of Two Mothers

And yet, when he wrote to the Corinthians, he began that letter with some nice words, “I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus,”

That’s a nice intro.

We don’t know of the Galatians having blatant sin like the Corinthians.

But we do know that they have accepted some bad teaching, which is offensive to God Himself and truth.

While Paul had nice words for the Corinthians, he didn’t have nice words for the Galatians.

, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—”

, “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? ...”

, “Are you so foolish? ...”

They began by trusting in the work of Christ alone.

But over time, they began to adopt legalism.

What prompted Paul to write to them, was they were embracing Christ and works.

Thinking that our works, our obedience is what gives Christ His power.

Think of the freedom that we have in Christ, and strangely, they are abandoning that freedom to be under the law.

says, they “desire to be under the law”.

That’s a riddle.

The law condemns.

Jesus freed us from that condemnation.

And now they want to go back under it?

They want to go back to the very thing that Christ freed them from?

Do you see why Paul is so perplexed?

They are a riddle.

They are true Christians, but they’ve also accepted some really bad teaching.

So what do we do?

Remember, every riddle has an answer.

Let’s look at Paul’s solution to the riddle of the Galatians.

Open your Bibles to Galatians 4:21-31.

Read Galatians 4:21-31.

The first clue to solving the riddle of the legalism is Know Your Mother.

I know that sounds weird.

It’s a weird first point.

We see this in verses 22-26.

Paul says go back to the Law.

Typically, when we think of the Law in the Bible, we think of:

The Ten Commandments.

Or the book of Leviticus or Deuteronomy.

But really, to the Jewish mind, the Law would have been the Torah, the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Bible.

He goes all the way back to Abraham.

God had promised Abraham that he would become the father of a great nation.

But Abraham was no spring chicken.

He was getting old.

His wife was getting old.

They thought they were getting too old for children.

So Sarah suggested that Abraham, take her handmaiden, Hagar, and use her as a surrogate, in order to try and produce a son by their own efforts.

God had promised them something.

But instead of trusting God to fulfill His promise, they demonstrated faithlessness and tried to manufacture it on their own.

Hagar became pregnant with a son, his name was Ishmael.

But God was not pleased with this, and made it very clear that Ishmael, the son of the handmaiden Hagar, was not the son that would receive God’s promises.

God would supernaturally make it possible for Sarah, even in her old age, to become pregnant.

And so, at the age of 90, Sarah became a mother to Isaac.

Abraham was promised a child.

In the Bible everyone wanted to be a child of Abraham, but that was not enough.

Everyone wants to be a child of Abraham, but that’s not enough.

Abraham was promised a son, but not all his sons would receive the inheritance.

Not all the sons of Abraham were promised an inheritance.

Only one son would become the father of God’s people.

Only one son would have the privilege of having Jesus come from his descendants.

So the question isn’t, “Is Abraham my father? But am I that son?”

How do you know if you’re that son?

That’s why Paul talks about mothers.

That’s why the first point is “Know who your mother is.”

Who’s your mother?

One son was born from a slave.

The other son was born from a free woman.

The free woman’s son, Sarah’s son, was the promised son.

Paul is uses this as an example or an illustration of the Galatians.

They’ve forgotten who their mother is.

They’re living like children of the slave woman.

When all the way down in verse 31, Paul has to remind them, “So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.”

If Hagar represents the Law, you don’t want her to be your mother.

Because if you are under the Law she rules you.

The power of the Law is that it condemns.

Where it finds sin … there is punishment.

And all people until they are converted, their mother is the Law.

The Law rules them.

The Law condemns them.

The Law punishes them.

This is why when we go

Hagar was a handmaiden, and there was nothing wrong with that.

But there is something wrong with the handmaiden being more than a handmaiden.

When she becomes your mother something is wrong.

The purpose of the Law is to condemn.

It shows us where we have disobeyed.

But when you get that wrong, and you think the Law saves, or provides salvation, now you’re in a trap, because you will never be good enough.

Paul reminds them of who their mother is … the free woman.

Where the Law condemns, those who are free have grace and a promise.

This is Christianity 101.

We know that we are saved by grace alone, through Christ alone.

This is basic Christianity.

So the thought of the Galatians drifting into this kind of legalism is absurd.

Because we always say it’s by Christ alone.

Yet, they aren’t alone.

We do this as well.

Legalism is not just a threat to those outside the church, but especially to those inside the church.

When we start thinking about what makes us a Christian in terms of our actions instead of Christ’s … then we are on the path to legalism.

Why are you going to heaven?

If you can only describe why your going to heaven in terms of what you have done … you’re on the path to legalism.

This is a fine line, and it’s hard.

Because if I were to ask you why you are going to heaven, I bet the majority of you would point to an action of yours.

Could be your repentance.

Could be your obedience.

Could be how you’ve changed.

Those are all good, but they are not why you are going to heaven.

They are the evidence of your conversion.

They are proof of your conversion.

But when you make those things the why -

When your actions are the why you are going to heaven, then when someone asks you how to go to heaven, what are you going to tell them?

Are you going to point to your actions?

Be like me?

Act like me?

That’s works righteousness.

That’s legalism.

We aren’t pointing people to us.

Why you are going to heaven is because of Jesus Christ.

Because He did what you could not do.

The first answer to the riddle of legalism is to know who your mother is … Grace.

You are a child of grace.

This is your first line of defense against legalism.

This is where you start.

If legalism is a real threat and it is, especially among mature Christians, then we need to always remember how we were made right with God.

It’s because of what He did.

The second part of the solution to the riddle of legalism is Rejoice In God’s Power.

This is found in verse 27.

“For it is written, “Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband.”

These words were originally found in .

They were originally written to Israel as they were about to enter into their exile.

Israel’s time in exile would be a pause in their national history.

They would lose their land.

They would lose their kings.

Some would even lose their identity as they were absorbed into other culture.

Those words were meant to comfort a nation that was about to go into hard times.

God was telling them to rejoice.

But not in vain.

There was a purpose in their rejoicing.

They would be like a woman who desperately wanted to have children of her own, and finally conceived and delivered a child.

They were to rejoice because something was done.

Paul is telling the Galatians that the defense against legalism or even the correction of legalism is to rejoice and specifically to rejoice in God’s power.

In the next chapter we will read of the fruit of the Spirit, and the second fruit mentioned is joy.

Christians are to be characterized by an attitude of joy.

Here we are to be a people who rejoice.

We aren’t supposed to walk around with silly smiles on our faces for no reason though and laughing into the wind.

You know who walks around with smiles on their faces for no reason?

Puppies and crazy people.

Puppies are just in love with life and they don’t know why.

Ever seen a dog chase it’s own tail?

Life is so good, he’s just gonna chase his tail.

That’s nonsense.

Then there are the people who have crazy smiles on their faces, and laugh for no reason.

This is not how we are.

We aren’t forcing ourselves into fake attitudes, we aren’t being something that we’re not.

We are to be joyful, but there is a purpose behind our joy.

In verses 27-30 I see 3 reasons for us to have joy.

The first is that God brings something from nothing.

God saved you when you were nothing.

You were spiritually dead.

Think back to your own conversion.

The analogy is often said that God found you floundering in the ocean and he threw you a life ring.

All you had to do was grab hold of that life ring.

Only the Bible never describes our conversion that way.

He doesn’t describe us as people seeking or desiring Him, and hoping He would throw us a life ring.

Instead, we are described as people who:

Walk in enmity against Him.

Willfully rebel and sin against Him.

Are dead in our trespasses, unable to respond to Him.

My favorite example of what we were before our conversion is the Valley of Dry Bones in .

Ezekiel finds himself in the middle of a valley, surrounded by dry, bones that have been bleached in the hot sun.

These bones are a picture of us in our unconverted state.

It’s not that we needed a life ring thrown at us.

We were dead.

You throw a life ring to someone who’s dead, and it will just float in the ocean.

We couldn’t grab a life ring because there was no life in our bones, no muscles to cause those bones to reach out.

Dead.

And what God would do to those dry bones becomes a picture of what God does in salvation.

God says, “Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

All of a sudden those dry bones in the valley received life.

Ligaments formed.

Muscles formed.

The bones connected.

They received life.

But even more so, they knew God.

They received faith from God Himself.

Personalize the Valley of Dry Bones with yourself.

You didn’t come to God because you were smarter than anyone.

You were dead.

And just as those skeletons received life, you received life.

This frees you from legalism because you cannot say you somehow performed better than anyone else, or were more obedient, because you were dead.

And when you come to that humble point of realizing just how much you needed God to save you … there is joy.

But not in yourself, but in the power of God.

The second reason for joy is that you were born again by the Spirit.

Hopefully, by now you see that you once were dead and your conversion was supernatural.

This next point is even more special.

The Holy Spirit Himself was a part of your conversion.

You see this at the tail end of verse 29, that we are born according to the Spirit.

You didn’t make yourself born again.

says, “he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior,”

This keeps you from legalism because conversion is because of the Spirit.

I’m giving you a reason to purposefully rejoice, and this reason is the personal involvement of the Holy Spirit, the 2nd Member of the Trinity within your own life.

Have you gone to a concert when the artist is touring across the country?

Usually at some point in the concert there is a song where the artist squeezes in a reference to whatever city he’s in.

And when the singer says the city’s name, the crowd goes wild.

But really the artist doesn’t know anything about the city he’s in.

He just says it for a rise.

He doesn’t know the people, the streets or the neighborhoods.

God is saving a people, and He knows all of those that He saves.

He knows more than our streets and neighborhoods.

He knows your name.

He knows the day you were born and the day you will die.

He knows your heart.

And in conversion, He knows you individually, dwells within you individually..

You are not just a nameless person in a crowd.

You are someone that the Holy Spirit has uniquely converted, regenerated and dwells within.

The third reason for joy is that you have an inheritance coming.

This inheritance is not for those who are enslaved, but for those who are in Christ.

Verse 30, “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.”

This life isn’t it.

This life is just a momentary bleep in the scope of eternity.

Because we have an inheritance, a future ahead of us.

What is the inheritance?

An eternity with God.

An eternity of no more fear, suffering, sickness or sin.

If you are in Christ … this is yours.

When we focus on what God has done, and rejoice over what He has accomplished, it keeps us from ever thinking that our worth is based on our behavior.

This frees you from legalism.

We rejoice in God’s power.

The last clue to the riddle of legalism, is found in verses 29-30, Root Out What Enslaves.

“But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.”

You may remember that after Isaac was born, there was trouble in Abraham’s household.

Sarah, finally had her son of promise.

And Hagar, who formerly was a handmaiden, employed to serve Sarah, was now a mother of one of Abraham’s sons.

She was not content to be just a slave anymore.

Sarah saw Ishmael mocking and persecuting Isaac.

Hagar and her son needed to go.

Paul’s been nice until now, but he’s no longer pulling any punches.

The true biblical Gospel cannot dwell in peace with legalism of any kind.

We have two factions here.

There are those who believe that it’s all a work of God.

says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.”

That means I am unable to come to Jesus unless He draws me to Himself.

He died for my sins completely.

And He lived completely for me as well.

So that when I stand before God on judgement day, God sees Jesus not me.

Then there those who say Jesus did most of the work, but I did some also.

These two groups cannot dwell in unity with one another.

Why?

Because one says all the glory goes to God alone.

All the credit goes to God alone.

While the other fights for the glorification of man as well.

One seeks to give God all the credit.

The other wants to rob God of all the credit, and give some to himself.

Paul reminds the Galatians that Hagar and her son persecuted Isaac, he who was free.

They represent those who live under the law.

Those who are under the law hate the free grace of God.

The grace that we have received from Christ is free and unearned.

We did nothing to receive it.

We did nothing to earn it.

You never made yourself worthy of it.

famously say, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Here’s where we see Paul’s point acted out.

When you talk about this free gift, those who are under the law get frustrated.

They hate it.

I am not talking philosophically, or hypothetically.

This hatred is real.

Yesterday, we went out for Gospel to the Valley, and in the group I was in we saw this demonstrated in a few of our conversations.

We had 2 different people, from 2 different religions, both say that we receive salvation because of our baptism and things that we do.

And when we tried to clarify that salvation is free and unearned, it was flat out rejected.

It is made fun of and called a cheap grace.

The idea of us receiving salvation on Christ’s work alone is offensive to those under the law.

This is why later on in Galatians Paul will say that the cross is offensive.

It’s not the blood, it’s not the death, it’s not the execution that’s offensive.

It’s that Jesus is doing the work for you.

Paul is calling for church discipline here.

I Corinthians it’s said to be foolishness to those who are perishing.

There cannot be unity or peace between those who hold to grace and those who hold to works.

They are fundamentally opposed to each other.

Paul says some hard words -

“Cast out the slave woman and her son …”

“Get those Judaizers out of there.”

“Get anyone who thinks that it’s Jesus plus something out of there.”

Today, there is a push for ecumenism.

This means for churches that believe different things to join hands and start working together.

We see it with Catholicism and Christianity.

We see it with true Bible believing orthodox Christianity and mainline liberal Christianity.

And we see with with Christianity and even world religions.

The hope is that we can push our differences aside and all sing kumbaya together.

But this will never work.

One says, “I’m doing this all for God and His glory.”

The other says, “I’m doing this for man, and ridicules free grace.”

The only way it will work is if those who hold to Scripture alone, start welcoming in some extra ideas.

We see this with Catholicism and sometimes even Mormonism.

They say, “We believe the same foundation, just the extras are different.”

Ammonia is fine to clean with in Windex.

Bleach is fine to wash your clothes with.

Add the 2 together and you have a dangerous gas.

When you add things to the foundation of the Gospel, it’s no longer what you started with.

It’s a deadly gas.

Paul said, “If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.”

And when we refuse, we are called:

Dogmatics.

Fundamentalists.

Literalists.

Old fuddy duddies.

Maybe you don’t believe me?

Try stressing the work of Christ alone, you’ll find opposition.

Stress our inability to respond to God on our own, you’ll find opposition.

And so the solution is root out whatever enslaves, get rid of them.

As a body may we always find ourselves exploring and dwelling in the freedom of the Gospel.

Marvelling at the price that was paid for your freedom.

It’s interesting that the more you talk about Christ redeeming us, the more people get unsatisfied with it.

When we go evangelizing

This needs to be what sets us apart as a body, that we continue to look to Christ.

May we be frequently humbled.

And always grateful for what Jesus has done in our lives.

As a body, may our message always be Christ.

Paul told the the Corinthians to continue to proclaim the Lord’s death until He returns.

So what is our message?

The Lord’s death.

Christ crucified.

When you talk about what we believe -

It’s Jesus alone.

It’s the cross alone.

It’s Him redeeming us.

And as individuals may this be a constant theme in our lives.

We talk about giving God glory, but how do we do that?

In the context of this passage, by looking for any hint of pride and self-righteousness and getting rid of it, and boasting only in Jesus.

I was talking with some folks yesterday about Gospel to the Valley.

I hope you never get tired of hearing of Jesus alone.

Because it’s not cliche’.

It’s needed

Most of our community, most of the world, still think it’s Jesus AND something.

And we need to be a voice that says, “It’s all Jesus.”

The threat of legalism is real.

It’s firm in those who are outside of Christ.

They think that it’s their efforts that make them right with God.

It can affect all Christians, but it seems as if it is more prone to affect people who have been Christians longer.

But it can also affect Christians.

It seems to affect people who have been Christians longer.

We become more familiar with our lifestyle and good works, and forget what brought us into the kingdom.

This is why we must be aggressive against it.

Remember:

How your faith started.

Frequently look to active power of God.

And never be satisfied with anything that aims to bring you out of the grace of Christ.

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