Only Through Faith
Notes
Transcript
Only Through Faith
Only Through Faith
Good Morning
Before we get started this morning, I’d just like to take a second to thank all of the people who came together to pull this off
The ability to adapt to what needs to be done isn’t always an easy thing, but our worship and a/v teams have been more than up to the task
This morning =
Background
Paul writing back to churches that He planted on his first missionary journey
But men had come from Jerusalem and were adding to the gospel
We see the brilliance in his argument
The two things the judiazers were teaching was adherence to the law and circumcision
Paul goes all the way back to Abraham, before either of those two things are mentioned in Scripture
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— just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”?
Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.
For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.” Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”— so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.
Galatians 3:1-
Pray
Polar Opposites
Polar Opposites
v1
Reached the fever pitch of his argument
We’ve been talking about how Paul takes a very fatherly tone with the Galatians
And that’s not the gentle fatherly tone
Its corrective and brash
“Oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?”
This departure from justification by faith was so different, nobody in their right mind would believe that
We might ask it a little different
“What are you talking about? Are you high?”
He goes on to say that they personally witnessed the preaching of the true gospel
“It was before your eyes”
This is not second hand or second generation
These were the same people who had listened to Paul preach the Gospel
And what they are believing now, is such a departure from the truth
That Paul says someone must have put a spell on you!
Spurgeon Commentary: Galatians Exposition
There is such glory, such beauty, such perfection, such wisdom, such divinity in Christ crucified that, if you turn from that sight to anything else—no matter how scientific and learned it may be—you are “foolish” indeed, and somebody has “bewitched you.”
v2
Show them their error
Appeals to their experience
Ask them about their own Justification
He is going to remind them of what they know
“did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by faith?”
v3
Sanctification
“are you now being perfected by the flesh”?
How we begin in the faith must be how we are sustained in the faith
There are some who will say, God did his part, now its time for you to do your part
That is wholly unbiblical
The same Spirit that took out that heart of stone and put in the heart of flesh is the same Spirit that sustains you day by day
You can do no more to keep your salvation than you could to earn your salvation
We have the same issues as the Galatians
Dick Kaufmann
“Christians think that we are saved by the gospel, but then we grow by applying biblical principles to every area of our life. but we are not just saved by the gospel, we grow by applying the gospel to every area of our life”
Our growth in Christ comes when the Spirit leads us to love God more, and out of that love, we desire to please Him.
We can slip into believing in the false gospel of try harder.
If I want to grow, I just have to read more, to pray more, to sin less
But the false gospel of try harder is relying on our own effort to keep the law
Instead, Paul says the same way you were dependent on the Spirit to be saved, you are still dependent on the Spirit to be sanctified.
v4
Suffer so many things?
NIV says Experience
The word in the greek literally means to experience
The overwhelming amount of times the word is translated, it means a negative experience
But here is one of those times where the context would override common usage
Did you experience these things for nothing
What things? Look at verse 5
v5
Continues to force a choice
Their experience of the Spirit
Their experience of the miracles that happened among them through the Apostle’s ministry
Do the miracles you witness among you happen by works or faith?
Uses Abraham as the example
v6
Abraham believed God
If we aren’t careful we read this wrong
We read it as if Abraham’s belief is a work that He did
As if Abraham did something good, but not quite good enough, and God credited it to him anyway
The office
Creed’s Perfect Cartwheel
Baby bending over to pick something up and falling over
“I did it!”
Michael said, “oh, ok, well, good job”
It was nowhere near perfect, or even good, but we can count that if you want
But that picture is not what this means at all
When God credits righteousness to Abraham
He is conferring a legal status on Him
This is Justification
Why did Abraham believe God? Because of faith
Scripture is very clear, Faith is a Gift of God, not of works, so that no man can boast
Paul says what was true of Abraham is also true of us
Tim Keller
“You don’t clean up your life in order to earn credited righteousness. Rather, your receive it even while you are a sinner”
So think of a pardon
A pardon doesn’t say that you aren’t guilty, a pardon confers on you legal innocence in spite of your guilt
Hold onto that, we will come back to it
Faith precedes Circumcision
Faith precedes Circumcision
v7
In verse 6, Paul quotes from
Why is that important?
Because God doesn’t institute the covenant with Abraham and command circumcision until
These Judiazers were telling the Galatians that circumcision is a sign of God’s people
God gave Abraham the sign of circumcision to remind them of the promise that God made
And next week, we are going to see that Paul argues that the promise is fulfilled in Jesus
But this morning, the point here is that Circumcision was a way of identifiying those who were part of the covenant
Who were the sons of Abraham
Remember the song from Preschool?
Father Abraham, had many sons
And many sons had father Abraham
I am one of them, and so are you
So let’s just praise the Lord
And then it would break into a Christianized version of the hokey pokey
So Paul says
Who are the sons of Abraham? Believers
v8
This is not a new plan, this was the original plan
God told Abraham from the beginning that all the nations would be blessed through him
v9
It is faith that Identifies us with Abraham
And if it is faith that identifies us as Children of Abraham, then the old covenant sign of circumcision means nothing
Faith is Greater than Law
Faith is Greater than Law
v10
The law is not a curse in itself
The law is a curse because we cannot keep it
The law is a curse because it condems
What is the curse of the law? DEATH
Paul will say in Romans
All have sinned and come short of the Glory of God (Romans 3:23)
He goes on to say that our sin has earned us death
For the Wages of Sin is death ()
And we can go all the way back to the garden to see that death is the curse
And God said “on the day that you eat from it, you shall surely die”
In order to be justified under the law, you must keep the whole thing
For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.
To break any part of the law, is to be guilty of it all (verse)
Spurgeon Commentary: Galatians Exposition
All that the law can do for sinners is judge them, condemn them, and curse them. All the people in the world who think themselves good, all the mere moralists, all those who, however amiable they may be, however excellent and religious they may be, are trusting to be saved by good works, are all under the curse, as surely as the drunkard, or the liar, or the swearer is under the curse.
Commission “abide by all the things in the law”
Omission “and do them”
v11
Quoting Scripture (Habbakuk 2:4)
Martin Luther
Was a monk
Visited famous church in Rome
Pope had declared anyone who climed the staircase in front of the church could have their sin or someone else’s sin forgiven
Paid money to climb the stairs
Pray and kiss the steps as you climbed up on your knees
As Luther is climbing, this verse, Habbakuk 2:4 came into his mind
He got up, and went home to Wittenburg
He later recounted it saying
“Before those words broke upon my mind I hated God and was angry with Him… but when, by the Spirit of God, I understood those words ‘the Just shall live by faith’, then I felt born again like a new man; I entered through the open doors into the very paradise of God”
Justified = Declared Righteous, to be accepted
You cannot be declared righteous by the law, it is the laws job to declare your unrighteousness
If anyone could be justified by the law, then that is how a righteous person would live
For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.
v12
The law is not of faith
John Stott
Quoting Scripture
The Message of Galatians 1. The Argument from Their Own Experience (Verses 2–5)
This is the difference between them: the law says ‘Do this’; the gospel says ‘Christ has done it all’. The law requires works of human achievement; the gospel requires faith in Christ’s achievement. The law makes demands and bids us obey; the gospel brings promises and bids us believe. So the law and the gospel are contrary to one another. They are not two aspects of the same thing, or interpretations of the same Christianity.
v13
Christ became a curse, to rescue us from the curse of the law
Propitiation
New Testament VIII: Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians Suffering from the Curse, He Released Them from the Curse
Just as, when someone is condemned to death, another innocent person who chooses to die for him releases him from that punishment, so Christ also did
So we come back to our idea of pardon
God is Holy and Just, so how can God pardon our sin?
How is it that God is able to Pardon us, even when we are still guilty?
Because Jesus Christ, who was innocent, became a curse
So that our curse was lifted, and we received His innocence
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Sometimes it can be hard for us to remember, that the sin that was placed on him was all our sin
We aren’t like an etch-a-sketch where our sins are written down
God doesn’t shake everything clean and then hand it back to us and say alright, don’t put anything else on there
God shakes everything clean and rips the knobs off so that nothing can be added ever again
v14
v15
Only faith in Jesus allows us to recieve that Spirit
The blessing of Abraham is found in Jesus
v
Through Jesus, The blessing is sent out to the Gentiles
Conclusion
Conclusion
If you straddle the fence, all you get is splinters
Some of us this morning are exhausted.
We’ve been trying to push ourselves to gain some ongoing blessing
And because we have bought into this false gospel of try harder
we are anxious and insecure, because we can never know if what we are doing is enough
we are bitter, because the more we try to control ourselves and our lives
the more we resent God’s law
we resent God’s law
We are angry, because others don’t seem to have to struggle like we do
Some of us this morning need to be reminded, as the Galatians were, that it is faith that makes us Children of God
We might like to think of ourselves as good people, who want to help and not hurt people
The Message of Galatians 1. The Argument from Their Own Experience (Verses 2–5)
This is the difference between them: the law says ‘Do this’; the gospel says ‘Christ has done it all’. The law requires works of human achievement; the gospel requires faith in Christ’s achievement. The law makes demands and bids us obey; the gospel brings promises and bids us believe. So the law and the gospel are contrary to one another. They are not two aspects of the same thing, or interpretations of the same Christianity. At least in the sphere of justification, as Luther says, ‘the establishing of the law is the abolishing of the Gospel’.
But the truth is we are ALL guilty of sin
And that sin carries the penalty of death
And the only thing that can save us from that sin and death is the blood of Jesus
So much of my life, I saw the first sons issue as the riotous living and squandering of the inheritance
But the son’s real issue was his heart, the heart that drove him to ask his father for his inheritance in the first place
Some of us this morning need to be reminded that God doesn’t save us through faith and then leave us to do the rest ourselves
Why doesn’t the father ask him where he’d been? why doesn’t he scold the boy? because the outer actions are only the symptom. The heart was the disease
And the entire point of that parable is that both sons have the same heart
The answer to our sin isn’t to try harder, it is to repent and to cling to the one who became a curse for us, that we could be declared righteous
One leads to riotous living, the other to prideful law keeping, but they share the same heart.
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
We have created functional saviors,
So many of us are walking around with Functional saviors
we know that Jesus saved us, and paid for our sin
Dick Kaufmann
But we live our lives as if we need something else
“Christians think that we are saved by the gospel, but then we grow by applying biblical principles to every area of our life. but we are not just saved by the gospel, we grow by applying the gospel to every area of our life”
Our growth in Christ comes when the Spirit leads us to love God more, and out of that love, we desire to please Him.
Whether that be safety, comfort, approval or control
We can slip into believing in the false gospel of try harder.
We need to be reminded this morning that a functional savior is no savior at all
If I want to grow, I just have to read more, to pray more, to sin less
But the false gospel of try harder is relying on our own effort to keep the law
Instead, Paul says the same way you were dependent on the Spirit to be saved, you are still dependent on the Spirit to be sanctified.
The same grace that saved us is what sustains us
The answer to our sin isn’t to try harder, it is to repent and to cling to the one who became a curse for us, that we could be declared righteous