Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B: , Galatians 1:10-24

Housekeeping Stuff & Announcements:

Welcome guests to the family gathering, introduce yourself.

Thank the band.

Invite guests to parlor after service.

Through the month of July, we have been collecting our annual offering to combat world hunger and to provide assistance during disasters through the Southern Baptist Convention.

Our goal this year is $3,700, and so far, we’ve received $1,9??.

This is the last week that we will take this offering, although you can give to World Hunger and Disaster Relief efforts throughout the year.

Our church family and Monterey Baptist Church on Lomas have partnered together with Shine Partnerships to provide support and care for students and teachers at Manzano High School.

At this point, we’re getting our foot in the door, and you’ll see on the Page that there is a Shine training at Monterey on August 7 at 1 pm.

Unfortunately, I misunderstood Aaron (Monterey’s pastor), and that training is for the school coordinator and church leadership only.

It’s not an open invite at this point.

Sorry for the mistake.

Totally my fault.

Please forgive me.

Eric and Megan Wong are going to be leaving for their mission trip to Peru with Wheels for the World, where they will share the gospel and the love of Christ with those who need mobility assistance such as wheelchairs.

Please pray for them during this next week.

This is Gary and Stacy Lowe’s last Sunday with us, as they are moving to Texas this week.

I’ve so appreciated their ministry, and especially how Gary has allowed me to lean on him during Sunday nights.

Keep them in your prayers as they embark on this next chapter of their life.

Eric/Megan’s missions trip, Gary & Stacy Lowe’s last Sunday, Shine Training on August 7 at 1:00 pm at Monterey

PRAY

Opening

PRAY, remembering to mention Eric & Megan, and Gary & Stacy.

Today, as we continue our series called “Dear Church,” from the letter that Paul wrote to the churches in the Roman province of Galatia, we are going to spend some time looking at the calling of and initial ministry life of the apostle Paul.

We looked a little at his amazing encounter and conversion back in June, immediately following VBS in the message entitled “But These Are Written...”

Given the fact that Paul spends a large portion of the beginning of Galatians on his personal conversion and early Christian experience, we’re going to need to go back and repeat a little about his life from that message back in June in order to understand Galatians well.

We’ll just hit some highlights:

We meet Saul of Tarsus in the 58th verse of the 7th chapter of the book of Acts, a young Pharisee, possibly a member of the Sanhedrin, who watches over the coats of the men who kill the first Christian martyr, Stephen.

Following that moment, a massive persecution breaks out against Christianity in Jerusalem, and Saul is riding that wave as the leader of the pack.

This man was zealous to get rid of what he believed was a heretical group of Jews who were blaspheming against Yahweh.

Saul gets permission from the chief priests to go to Damascus and start cleaning house there as well, and heads out with an entourage of people in support.

But Jesus breaks onto the stage of his life in a most dramatic fashion:

Conversion narrative from Acts:

Conversion narrative from Acts:

Acts 9:1-8

Acts 9:17-21

Saul is blind and broken.

This wasn’t some vision or dream.

This was Jesus showing up and revealing Himself in His glory to Saul in real space and time, because even the men with Saul heard the sound.

Saul waits for a Christian named Ananias to come and pray over him, lay his hands on him, and then Saul regains his sight.

Summarize

Plot to kill him.

He flees, apparently to

The points of the sermon:

Saul immediately goes from terrorist to testifier.

He begins to go to the synagogues in Damascus and declare the truth of the Gospel:

Acts 9:20-

So Saul immediately starts to proclaim that Jesus is the Son of God.

It’s not long (Acts only says “many days”) before the Jews make a plan to kill Saul, so he leaves the city, and according to what he says in verse 17 of , goes off to Arabia for some time.

I’ll make some more references back to the book of Acts as we go through our focal passage today, but we probably won’t jump over there and read anything, just to save time.

What we find here in our focal passage from the book of Galatians is Paul beginning to recount his own personal testimony of his faith in Jesus for a specific purpose.

Last week, we saw that Paul was struggling with the fact that the Galatians had “so quickly” begun to turn away to a “different gospel,” that isn’t really a gospel at all.

What had started to infiltrate the church in Galatia was the idea that legalism, specifically the following of the Hebrew ceremonial law, was necessary for salvation.

Accompanied by that was apparently the suggestion that Paul didn’t have the authority of the church to do the things he was doing or to preach the things he was preaching.

Paul here begins to address that issue with the Galatian believers.

What we find here in our focal passage from the book of Galatians

I’ll make some references back to the book of Acts as we go through our focal passage today, but we probably won’t jump over there and read anything, just to save time.

The idea of Apostleship and apostleship.

The first thing that Paul deals with is the source of the Gospel:

1) The Gospel is God-revealed, not man-invented.

In what we looked at last week, Paul addressed that there is only one true Gospel—which Paul had already preached to them— and that if anyone came to the churches in Galatia and preached anything different than that, they were to be anathematized: cursed with the wrath of God.

One thing that we skipped over really addressing in our first message in Galatians was Paul’s initial introduction, which we often kind of cruise past when we start reading a book, especially one of Paul’s epistles.

Paul says that he is an Apostle, and that he is one “not from men or by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father...” This verse is truly our first hint in the letter of what is amiss in the churches of Galatia: Paul leads with defending his calling and ministry.

Some clarifying is necessary, and some scholars will disagree with me here, and some here in this room might disagree with me, but that’s ok.

The Greek apostolos means, in its simplest definition, “a messenger or one who is sent.”

In this way, there are “apostles” today… there are people who are set apart by the work of the Holy Spirit and by the church to proclaim the message of the Gospel.

However, those who might be considered as “apostles” today have had to learn the message of the Gospel through it being passed down and carried along through the evangelism of others.

So in a way, “apostles” today are at least partially “from” or “by” others.

I’ll call these apostles—those who are at least partially from or by others— “little a apostles.”

But Paul wasn’t one of these.

The other definition of apostolos is “a special messenger of Jesus Christ, a restricted group.”

These are “big A Apostles.”

Paul, Peter, the others in the Twelve (aside from Judas Iscariot, of course), and James by my own count (there are more that are unnamed, see ), were appointed not by men at all (for James, it is clear that Christ appeared to him as well, ).

For Paul, we just read that Jesus broke into his life dramatically, and called him off of the path that he was on.

Paul’s conversion could not have been more sudden: Jesus appeared to Him specifically, and directly called him into a new relationship with Him and into a new life of service, and Paul went from terrorizing the church to defending her.

So for the rest of this message, at least, if I say “apostle” or “apostles,” I generally mean the “big A” kind.

Paul continues his defense of his Apostleship in verses 11 and 12:

Paul continues his defense of his Apostleship in verses 11 and 12:

Paul is clear that his conversion didn’t come from another’s testimony, or through a message on the Gospel, or by his own personal reflections and ruminations on the Old Testament.

His conversion to faith in the Gospel came by direct revelation of Jesus.

Timothy Keller writes:

David Platt wrote this about the grace of the Gospel:

If you think about it, you have to admit that we would not make this gospel up.

If we were given the power to determine how one earned God’s favor and a place in heaven, we would make up a scoring system, something that emphasized human works.

Why?

Because the natural default mode of the human heart is works-righteousness.

The message of grace—that the work has already been done—is counter-intuitive.

Grace offends our natural sensibilities.

Works-righteousness is motivated by unbelief.

We do not naturally trust grace.

We want control.

This supports the reality that people did not make up the gospel of grace; it came from God.

In verses 16-20, which I won’t read again, Paul basically takes an oath that he didn’t go to Jerusalem and learn the message of the Gospel, but that he went off into Arabia for a time, as the Lord reinterpreted the Old Testament to him.

For Paul, then, is declaring that his authority as an Apostle comes from the direct work of God in his life.

These others who have come in and are “troubling” the Galatian believers might claim to be apostles, but they’re the “little a” kind…

galatians 1:16-

This is a big sticking point in evangelism today.

People struggle to believe that the message of Jesus Christ could be anything other than a man-made idea to get people to behave well, or to manipulate them to give their time or their money or whatever.