Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago we got to hear a presentation from Ken Ham, the founder of Answers In Genesis, at a Christian radio forum in State College.

Answers in Genesis is “an apologetics ministry dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ effectively by providing answers to questions about the Bible—particularly the Book of Genesis—regarding key issues such as creation, evolution, science, and the age of the earth.”

Over the years we have worked quite a bit with Answers In Genesis curriculum, so it was a treat to be able to go see Ken Ham in person.

The foundational convictions of his ministry are very much the same as ours here at Bethel--that the Bible is to be absolutely trusted from the very first verse, and that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are recorded as literal history—not myths or allegories.

God really did create the earth in six literal, consecutive days, He really did create a man named Adam out of the dust and a woman named Eve out of Adam’s rib, and He really did place them in a garden named Eden where they actually ate a piece of fruit that He had forbidden them to eat.

And we take the Bible at its word that these things all happened about six thousand years ago.

Now, that is by no means the majority report in the church today.

In fact, most churches in the United States in the first decade of the 21st Century would either deny that those things happened as literal history, or would claim that it is impossible to know for sure.

Instead of a so-called “Young Earth” Creation, they would affirm (along with secular scientists) that the Earth is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 billion years old, and that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are mythology rather than literal fact.

Those two positions, “Young Earth Creation” and “Old Earth Creation” are obviously very different opinions—both of them can’t be correct at the same time, and yet both of those positions are held by Bible-believing Christians.

And so during Ken Ham’s presentation the other week, the question was posed to him: “Would you question the salvation of someone who believed that the earth was billions of years old and that life evolved over millions of years?”

And without batting an eye, Ken said, “Well, of course you know what the Bible says in Romans 10:9: ‘If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead and that the earth is 6,000 years old and that Genesis 1 is literal history, you shall be saved!”

(That last part isn’t in there…).

He went on to make the point that your position on the age of the earth and your reading of Genesis 1-11 may be very important, but it does not save anyone!

As good as that conviction might be, it is not essential.

This is a distinction that we really have to hold on to as Christians, because we are always tempted to take something good in our Christian lives and treat it as though it were an essential.

When we do that, we are falling into the trap of legalism.

Legalism: Treating that which is good as though it were essential.

There are a lot of good and important distinctions that Christians hold to: Young Earth versus Old Earth, believers’ baptism versus infant baptism, Calvinism versus Arminianism, congregational leadership versus presbyterian leadership, dispensationalism versus covenant theology, secret rapture versus preterism—and the list goes on and on.

And all of these things are good things to have convictions on.

But when we make those distinctions essential to our salvation—when we validate our entire salvation based on whether we hold to one side or the other—then we are falling into the trap of legalism.

This warning is at the heart of Paul’s words to the Galatian Christians here in our passage.

In their case, they wanted to define their salvation in terms of whether they were circumcised or not.

And so Paul warns them that if they treat circumcision as though it were essential to their salvation, they would lose Jesus!

That is his warning in this passage:

When we fall into legalism, we lose Jesus

This is no exaggeration—look at the way he states it in verses 1-4:

Now there are at least three things these verses warn that we are in danger of losing when we lose Jesus: We lose our freedom in Jesus, we lose our peace in Jesus, and we lose our love in Jesus.

I want us to look at these warnings one at a time, and then to see what this Scripture tells us about how to “stand firm” in the freedom we have in Christ.

First, when we fall into legalism

I.

We Lose Our Freedom in Jesus (vv.

1-2)

The word “advantage” here in verse 2 is also translated “benefit” or “profit”.

If the Galatians insist on taking circumcision and making it essential for their salvation, they will lose any benefit of believing in Jesus.

A couple of years ago I had one of my student veterans suddenly disappear during the semester—he quit attending classes, and we couldn’t get hold of him on the phone.

Finally I tracked him down through a colleague at the CareerLINK office, who said that the student had to drop out of school because he couldn’t afford his bills.

Which was weird, because I had just helped him access all of his VA Educational Benefits that paid for his entire tuition and a generous stipend for living expenses.

Here we came to find out that he had gone and borrowed a ton of money so that he could live in a big lakeside house at Treasure Lake, and couldn’t afford the rent!

His VA Benefits were of no advantage to him, and he lost his education because he turned away from those benefits and got himself into all kinds of unnecessary debt!

In the same way, Paul says, when you fall into the trap of legalism, then

Your whole Christian life will rise or fall on how well you perform in that area you have made essential.

Think of that for a moment—do you really want your entire Christian life to be tied to what you believe about baptism?

About predestination?

About the King James Bible?

About the Second Coming?

Do you really want the validity of your faith to hinge on things like that?

Do you really want to live in that kind of bondage?

Because that’s what it is— “A yoke of slavery”.

Any time you begin a sentence with “I’m a Christian in good standing because *I*_______________”, you are flirting with legalism.

Because the only way to end that sentence is “I am a Christian in good standing because Jesus purchased my righteousness!”

When you succumb to legalism, you lose your freedom in Christ.

And when we lose that freedom in Jesus,

II.

We Lose our Peace In Jesus (vv.

3-4)

When you turn away from Christ and embrace legalism, you no longer have His perfect work covering you!

Paul warns the Galatians that if they begin counting themselves righteous in God’s sight based on what they do to keep the Law, then they have to keep the whole law!

They can’t pick and choose what parts of the Law to keep!

If you go flying down a residential street at 60 miles per hour and the cop pulls you over, you can’t just brush him off by saying, “It’s okay, officer—I wasn’t breaking the law!

I always wear my seat belt!” Just because you were perfectly keeping the law by buckling up every time you got behind the wheel does not excuse you for breaking the speed laws!

Wanting to earn your righteousness in one place means you have to earn it everywhere.

So, Christian, if you really deep down think that you are a good Christian because of what you believe about one point of doctrine (say, predestination), then you are obligated to get every single conceivable point of doctrine correct as well!

If you insist that a “good Christian” can only believe “just so” about this point of doctrine with absolute, settled, unalterable certainty, then you are obligated to carve out a “just so” position—with the same absolute, settled, unalterable certainty—about every single point of doctrine and theology throughout Christianity!

And that means, among other things—goodbye to any peace in your Christian life!

Instead of resting in the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ, you now have to earn your righteousness before Him by constant, unending struggle to be exactly, perfectly, precisely right about everything.

The grace of God no longer applies—you have to be perfect in order to be righteous before Him!

When we succumb to legalism, we lose Jesus.

We lose our freedom in Jesus—we have to constantly strive to earn our righteousness before God.

We lose our peace in Jesus—we can never be sure that we are right enough, good enough, perfect enough before Him.

And third, we see in verses 13-15 that when we succumb to legalism,

III.

We Lose our Love in Jesus (vv.

13-15)

If you have ever spent time in a church that has succumbed to legalism, you’ll understand the description Paul gives here.

As we saw last time, a church that is snared in the throes of legalism is a church that “bites and devours one another”.

Because when you really begin to believe that your righteousness before God is defined by how you perform, then

Other people’s performances become a threat to you.

If you derive the validity of your Christianity based on how theologically precise you are, for instance, then someone else who is more precise than you becomes a threat to you.

If you count your righteousness before God by how much money you give, then that means that someone who gives more is more righteous than you!

If you count yourself righteous before God because you teach Sunday School, then when someone else steps in to teach you are threatened by them!

And so you begin biting and devouring—knocking them down a peg or two during Bible study, going after them in church business meetings over expenditures, going behind their backs to keep them from “taking your ministry”.

Don’t you see there is no room for love in an atmosphere like that?

Paul warns us that when we take a good thing and make it the essential thing in our Christianity, we are succumbing to legalism.

And when we succumb to legalism, we lose Jesus.

We lose our freedom in Jesus and are enslaved to our performances.

We lose our peace in Jesus and can never rest—constantly trying to be better.

We lose our love in Jesus, and bite and devour and fight and maneuver and strive against one another.

And so what can we do?

What does this passage tell us about avoiding the bondage of legalism?

Because what we need to learn from these verses is

IV.

How To Stand Firm in Jesus

Now, the first thing that we have to affirm is that there really are issues that divide believers from non-believers.

Saying that we should not validate our Christianity based, for instance, on whether we believe in a Young Earth or an Old Earth does not mean that there are no issues worth dividing over.

It really does matter what you believe about salvation in Christ.

When you read verses 7-12, you see Paul making some pretty “black and white” statements about belief and unbelief—the false teachers “hindered them from believing the truth”.

Because of the false teachers, the Galatian Christians were in danger of losing the essential truth of Christianity.

And he goes on to say that he wished that the false teachers would be “cut off” from the Galatians—in fact, he uses some pretty harsh language in verse 12:

So we can see from this that there really are issues worth dividing over.

It really does matter what you believe about what it means to be a Christian, and that’s why it is so important that we don’t get tripped up over non-essentials.

Part of the problem with legalism is that everything is “a hill to die on”—everything is worth fighting over, because everything becomes a matter of achieving righteousness before God.