Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro: Tonight we enter into the 48th book of the bible, the book of Galatians...

Author

The apostle Paul wrote the book of Galatians addressing it to a group of church assemblies rather than to one.

Paul was born in the city of Tarsus in the southern part of the region of Galatia (modern-day Turkey).

After his conversion to Christ (around AD 34), Paul spent the remainder of his life ministering God’s grace and preaching the gospel.

He was executed for his faith around AD 67.

Purpose

This letter addresses a social and racial division in the churches of Galatia.

The first Christians in Jerusalem were Jewish but as the gospel spread out from that center, increasing numbers of Gentiles began to receive Christ...However, a group of teachers in Galatia were now insisting that the Gentile Christians practice all the traditional ceremonial customs of the law of Moses, as the Jewish Christians did…all 613 of them specifically the dietary laws and circumcision for full acceptance and to be completely pleasing to God.

In this letter Paul taught that the cultural divisions and disunity in the churches were due to a confusion about the nature of the gospel.

By insisting on Christ-plus-anything-else as a requirement for full acceptance by God, these teachers were presenting a whole different way of relating to God from the one Paul had given them.

It is this different gospel that was creating the cultural division and strife.

Paul forcefully and unapologetically fought the “different gospel” because to lose one’s grip of the true gospel is to desert and lose Christ Himself (1:6).

Therefore, everything was at stake in this debate.

The most obvious fact about the historical setting is often the most overlooked.

In the letter to the Galatians, Paul expounds in detail what the gospel is and how it works.

But the intended audience are all professing Christians.

It is not simply non-Christians but also believers who need continually to learn the gospel and apply it to their lives.”

Outline

This book can be broken into some nice and tidy portions...

The Personal (Galatians 1–2)

The Doctrinal (Galatians 3–4)

The Practical (Galatians 5–6)

Important to note...

Galatians is all about the doctrine of Christian freedom.

It declares total liberty in Christ from the religious laws of Moses

The law was given by God for a couple of big reasons…but let’s talk about one

To shoe us God’s holy standard and character

To reveal to us our sinful condition and need for a Savior…It Spiritually diagnoses us as sick

But the Law on it’s own can’t save us…it just shows us that we’re cursed

But because Jesus lived a perfect life and fulfilled its demands, He was able to take our place and take the punishment we deserved, becoming the curse for us, suffering its consequences, and defeating it once and for all by rising from the dead.

Paul wrote this...

Paul’s point was that Jesus died in a way that the Jews considered cursed (Crucifixtion)…but The weight of the true curse—our sins—was then placed on Him, and because of that, He was able to purchase for us freedom from sin and perfect liberty in Christ.

He was the perfect substitute for us, the only One who could bear the weight of all our sin.

Only Jesus could do it—and that’s why salvation is a gift of God’s grace and not something any human being could ever earn

The Personal - Chapter 1&2

Look at how Paul opens this letter up and introduces himself...

So Paul calls himself “an apostles” which means “Sent one” and he goes on to say, “Not from men, nor though men, but though Jesus”…in other words this is Paul putting on his full credits to deal with this issues here…he’s saying you didn’t put me in this office…Jesus did

Then he finishes his greeting with a clear exposition of the gospel…

So here Paul gives a good concise description of the gospel...

Who we are?: Helpless and lost.

thats why Paul said Jesus delivered us v.4

Think about that you don’t deliver people who are capable of saving themselves…you deliver people who are lost

How did Jesus deliver us?

He “gave himself for our sins” (v 4a).

He made a sacrifice which was substitutionary in nature.

The word “for” means “on behalf of” or “in place of”

Substitution is why the gospel is so revolutionary - Christ’s death was not just a general sacrifice, but a substitutionary one.

He did not merely buy us a “second chance”, giving us another opportunity to get life right and stay right with God.

He did all we needed to do, but cannot do.

Jesus did all we should have done, in our place, so when He becomes our Savior, we are absolutely free from penalty or condemnation.

How did the Father respond?

God accepted the work of Christ on our behalf by raising Him “from the dead” (v 1) and by giving us the “grace and peace” (v 3) that Christ won and achieved for us.

Why God did it?:

This was all done out of grace - Not because of anything we have done, but “according to the will of our God and Father” (v 4d).

We did not ask for rescue, but God in His grace planned what we didn’t realize we needed...

App: There is no indication of any other motivation or cause for Christ’s mission except the will of God.

There is nothing in us which merits it.

Salvation is sheer grace.

Paul opened with his blessing of grace and peace, but then got right down to business:

Paul’s obveously not happy…because the Christians in Galatia heard the good news of Jesus Christ from the greatest teacher in all of church history, next to Jesus Himself.

They sat under Paul’s teaching, but when he moved on to the next stop on his missionary journey, they turned from his teaching toward people who badmouthed him and turned them from the truth.

The Judaizers were reversing it, going backward to the bondage of the law instead of forward into the freedom of grace...Paul and Barnabas had already fought against that teaching just after their first missionary journey, while they were living in Antioch (Acts 15).

Did you know that when Jesus died on the cross...something significant happened in the temple

This veil had symbolically separated the people from the presence of God, but its rending at Christ’s death symbolized that anyone who received Him could now enter God’s presence.

Atonement’s price had been paid, and the world changed forever.

History, however, tells us that the Jews quickly began to offer sacrifices again, indicating the veil had been either stitched up or replaced.

App: It was a typical human response.

God removes a barrier; people put up another barrier as soon as possible, addicted to the self-sufficiency of their rituals and ceremonies.

What God simplifies, we complicate.

Paul wasn’t having it so he says this...

Like a doctor who knew he had to act quickly and decisively to save a patient, Paul moved to cut the cancer out.

Paul says here’s the…the public gospel that was publicly proclaimed by Jesus…the I proclaimed to you…If anyone comes and tries to sell you another one… don’t care how, much you might like it LET THEM BE ACCURSED

and he even says it again...

For the holy spirit to inspire that once is enough to say “I probably should listen” but for the Spirit to inspire Paul to say that twice is a sobering and scary warning

I shared this with some young ladies this past sat...

It wasn’t that Paul didn’t know what it was to be legalistic…look at v.13

and then he says...

You it’s important to understand that their are both public and personal aspects of walking with Jesus...

Paul believed in the public, preaching, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus…all of those things were publicly documented

But He also had a personal revelation of who Jesus was, and that took place when he V.17 “Went away to Arabia”

Paul did not travel to what we would call Saudi Arabia.

The area known in that day as Arabia in his day extended all the way to the city of Damascus.

Paul probably lived in some quiet desert place outside of Damascus

But Eventually the apostles in Jerusalem accepted him... and they all realized that God had given Paul a ministry to the Gentiles, just as He had given Peter a ministry to the Jews (Galatians 2:7).

Above all, Paul made one thing clear—the driving thought behind his ministry: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (v.

20).

This deep, personal conviction was founded on the pure doctrine of the gospel—Paul’s next topic.

So lets recap...

First - Paul refutes the idea that he came to his gospel message through his own reflection, reasoning and thinking - He recounts that, until his conversion, he was “intensely” hostile to the church and to Christianity (v 13).

He wanted to “destroy it”.

There was no gradual process of consideration, discussion, revision.

There was no way that Paul’s Christian message was the product of his own line of thinking.

Rather, it was the exact, polar opposite of where he had been going.

Pre-Christian Paul was so violently opposed to Christ that even watching the faith and certainty of Christian martyrs had no effect on him (Acts 7:54 – 8:1).

His experience is strong evidence that his conversion was via direct revelation.

As Acts 9:1-9 shows us, the risen Jesus met and instructed Paul directly.

Paul did not have simply a trance or a dream.

Christ was there in time and space, since even the other men with Paul recognized the presence (Acts 9:7).

So Paul became a “capital-A” apostle, like those who were apostles before him (Galatians 1:17).

Second, Paul undermines the claim that his gospel message was derived from others, from Christian leaders in Jerusalem.