Among Wolves

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Good morning everyone! It is so good to see you all here with us at Redeemer Church. As Paul said, our mission is to first and foremost, glorify God by shining the light of Jesus. And the way we do that on Sunday mornings is by gathering together as a family to pray together, partake in the Lord’s Supper, to sing praises to God, and to hear His word preached, to have our hearts fed by God in these various ways. So again, I am excited that you decided to come and join our family this morning, to come and visit this body of believers and I hope you feel welcome and comfortable, and if you want to know more about Redeemer Church, please feel free to ask us any questions!
Today we are going to be starting a series of sermons through the book of Galatians found in the New Testament. And I am looking forward to digging into this book with you because as John Piper notes, this book, almost more than any other in the New Testament, is alive! From the very first page, you can’t help but feel the emotional punch of this book, the zeal with which it was written. There was something important at stake in these churches in Galatia and there was no time to waste in pleasantries. You see, this book was written because the foundations of the Christian faith upon which the church is built was being eroded by falsehoods about the nature of salvation. And Paul, the author of this book, passionately warns them to come back to the good news of the true gospel.
It is my hope that in this sermon series that in this sermon series, in the book of Galatians, you will see the beauty of Jesus and the truth of His gospel. And it is my prayer that you will take the truths found in this book and bury them deep into your hearts and allow it to mold you, change you, and strengthen the bones of your faith. And if you are not a believer that is visiting us, I thank you for being here and I pray that you will have a true and life changing encounter with God as we look into these words that He has written.
But before we begin to plunge into this book, let us first pray that the Holy Spirit teaches us.
I once heard the book of Galatians described as a book for recovering legalists and I think that is actually a fairly apt description of this book. To help understand what I mean, before we dig into Galatians, turn with me to Acts 15. In this chapter of the book of Acts, we see a pivotal moment in the very beginnings of the church. You see, the church began primarily through Jewish men and women placing their faith in Jesus. That is the gospel, right, repenting of your sins and placing your faith in the life of Jesus, His death for your sins on the cross, and in His resurrection. Now, eventually, Jewish Christians began to preach the gospel to Gentiles, to non-Jews and this brought with it a host of questions, the chief among them being, “Do these gentiles, in order to be saved, need to keep the Jewish Old Testament rules and customs and rites such as circumcision?” And the Jewish Christians had a big meeting to discuss those very questions. And as we see in verse 1 and 5 of Acts 15 there was a group known as the Judaiszers that said yes! These Gentiles must not only profess belief in Jesus but they must also keep the laws of the Old Testament. Now these Judaizers were essentially what we would call legalists. People who believe that your salvation comes from faith in Jesus plus your own work. For the Judaizers, it was faith plus adherence to the a long list of rules and regulations found in the OT.
Now, this brings us to the book of Galatians
Now, that brings us to the book of Galatians (ADD VERSES)
This book was written by a man who was actually at that council, that debate in Acts 15, an apostle named Paul. Verse 1 tells us that Paul is an apostle. Now the word apostle means “one sent by God”, and that it was not man, but Jesus Himself who appointed him as an apostle. Now the reason Paul wants to make it clear that the readers in the churches in Galatia, churches that Paul himself had a hand in establishing, knew that the words Paul was writing carried with them the weight and authority of Jesus. They were to know that the words they were reading were God’s words. And the same holds true for us. Understand that when you read this book, you are reading the word of God.
Now we learn in later chapters that Paul is writing this letter because the Judaizers have made their way down to the churches in Galatia, which are Gentile churches, and have begun preaching that there legalistic version of the gospel.
Read with me verses 6-7: 6 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 (meaning the legalistic gospel of faith plus adherence to OT law)— 7 not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you (meaning the Judaizers) and want to distort the gospel of Christ.”
Here you see Paul addressing these false teachers that had broken into the church Galatia, preaching, as we learn in following chapters, that in order for these Gentiles to be saved they must add works onto the gospel. And Paul was astonished that these churches so quickly began to follow after this legalistic false gospel. And brothers and sisters, much of what these Judaizers were teaching is alive and well today. Now, it looks differently, we do not have debates about circumcision in the church, but there are tendencies, patterns of thinking that mirror that of the Judaizers.
And I am convinced that each of us in this room that would claim to be a Christian, are actually recovering legalists.
We are the recovering legalists
Let me explain. Now this is a somewhat long explanation, but it will come around in the end, so stay with me (someone wake up Paul). You see, every soul longs for and seeks after freedom. Take the movie Braveheart, based on the life of William Wallace. You can say what you will about the historical accuracy of the movie, but what it does so well is capture the human beings longing for freedom. At the end of the movie, when William Wallace has been captured and is being brutally executed, he lets out one last cry, one last declaration for freedom. It is a powerful moment because you realize that all he wanted was for himself, his family, and his countrymen to be free from the tyrannical rule of England, and in that last moment he believes he is finally receiving in death the freedom from the tyranny and from the great burden he carried and to make everyone watching this horrible event know he believed that the pursuit of freedom was worth his very life. And so it is with every human being, we long for freedom. But it isn’t only a freedom from tyranny and oppressors that we humans seek. It is freedom from the burden of guilt and shame and condemnation that is rightly due to us for our sins against a holy God. The problem lies in that human beings often believe that the way you achieve freedom from sin is the William Wallace way, by the sweat of your own brow, by your own deeds and actions.
Surely there is something we can do to earn our freedom, to earn salvation from our sins! And some try Hinduism, or Buddhism, or Mormonism, or Catholicism, or a variety of other religions that say if you simply be good or if you adhere to these religious rules, or if you offer up the right prayers, or confess your sins to a priest, you can climb your way up the mountain to God and finally find the rest and freedom your soul craves. But as you continue to climb the mountain, you will begin to realize that you will never reach the top, that in fact you cannot reach the top because no matter how many good deeds you do, no matter how well you keep to the rules of your religion, your sin proclaims one resounding truth; you haven fallen short of the glory of God. And there is nothing you can do in your own power that can get you there, the freedom of our guilt and shame cannot be accomplished by our own power. All of this legalistic adherence to these religious or even secular and moralistic rules gets us no closer to God.
And Christian, even after salvation, like the Galatians and the Judaizers, our legalistic vestiges that still have a foothold in our flesh can begin to seep into our minds and hearts once again and whispers a crippling lie into our ears:
That even though you have placed your faith in Jesus, you must still earn God’s favor.
The Judaizers taught that obedience to God’s law was the way to ensure a right standing before God. So consequently you enhance your spiritual standing before God based on what you do. WE think that, “if I am reading the Bible enough, praying, going to worship and doing a number of other good things, then I have favor before God, that I am attributing to me salvation by keeping God happy with me”. But when we miss days in prayer or time in the word, or if we don’t attend worship enough, then we can start to think God is not pleased with us, we can feel as if we have failed and worse, maybe we are not truly saved. The legalist in us says, “surely I have to do something to earn the love of God”. That we have to believe in Jesus plus do certain things in order to be saved, that we have to work in our own power according to the churches rules in order to achieve a righteous standing before God.
And soon, our loving relationship with God turns into a check list of do and don’ts.
And this lie is deadly to our faith! This is why Paul says that any one in verses 8-9 that if anyone, even if it appears to be an angel from heaven, preaches that salvation comes from faith plus works, preaches a false gospel of legalism, they are accursed. The word accursed here comes from the grk word anathema, which means eternally condemned.
Why does Paul use such harsh language here? Because legalism undercuts the grace of the gospel. Listen to what apostle Peter had to say in Acts 15, “6 The apostles and elders met to consider this question. 7 After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. 8 God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. 9 He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. 10 Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? 11 No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”
Christian, you were saved by grace, you were saved by grace. And Paul, speaking to the Galatians, echoes this in verse 6.
Take a look at it again with me. I am going to read from the ESV and the NIV because there are two similar but distinct thoughts that Paul conveys in the greek here and each version of the Bible gives us a good look at them: The ESV says this, “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.” And the NIV, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.”
You see, what separates the gospel from all other religions and worldviews, what separetes from the legalism of the Judaizers and saves us from our own legalistic tendencies, is found in the word grace.
You see the word grace in the Bible, depending on where it is used, can mean a couple different things, but here it means one, earth-shaking thing: grace is the unmerited favor of God.
Take a look at the ESV version of verse 6, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you in the grace of Christ.” What does Paul mean here? This means that if you are a Christian in this room, from the beginning of time, God set His love and affections on you. Before you were even born Romans 8 says, He knew you. He knew every detail about who you would be, and because of no reason other than His own good pleasure and mercy, He chose to love you and show you. And because He chose to set His affections on you before the foundations of the world, it could not be because of anything you had done, you could not and did not merit His favor, His love. Take a parent and their child as an example. If they are a good parent, they love their child as soon as it is born, as soon as they find out it’s even there! Why? The baby hasn’t done anything to deserve love. In fact, as Ethan pointed out to me, infants are basically like pets you have to feed for the first several months. They are just cute adorable blobs that just kinda lay there. But the parents love them any way, though they have done nothing to deserve that love. It is the same with God. He called us into relationship with Him not out of our own goodness, because Christian, if that were the criteria, no one would be saved, but He called you into a relationship with Him out of His own good pleasure, out of His own grace toward you. Do you see the freedom in that? Your sins are forgiven not because of anything you did, not because you were baptized, not because you did enough good deeds, but simply because you trusted in what Jesus accomplished on your behalf on the cross, bearing your sins on Himself. You are free from the guilt and shame because the unmerited favor of God!
Now let’s look at the NIV; “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.”
Paul is also astonished that the Galatians are not only abandoning the fact that they were called into relationship by the grace of God, but that they were called to live in the grace of God!
What does Paul mean to live in the grace of God? Remember what legalism says, it says that the way you remain in the favor of God, the way you even remain saved is to add to the gospel, it is the gospel plus a religious checklist. Christian, there is no rest for you, there is no peace for you in legalism. There is only endless toil, more guilt and more shame because you simply cannot earn the favor of God, because Christian, He gives it to you freely.
Living in the grace of God means to live in the truth that God’s love for you, the delight He takes in you is not contingent on your performance for Him. Do you see the rest for your weary soul that is to be had in that? You can rest, you do not have to work to gain the favor or love of God, Christian, you already have it! He is pleased with you, not because of anything you have done, but because of what Christ has done for you! You can sit freely under the shade of the gospel, you can rest in the Father’s arms. In Psalm 23, David says, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, He makes me lie down in green pastures, and he leads me beside still waters.” Like David, God is inviting us to lie down, to put aside our legalistic tendencies, and rest in the green pastures of grace. To walk with Him in a loving relationship beside the calm waters of His love. And how does verse 4 of Psalm 23 start? He restores my soul.
Christian, when we recognize that we are called by the grace of God and we live in the grace of God, and that there is nothing you can do to make God love you more and there is nothing that you can do to make God love you any less, there is restoration for your tired soul that has been working in vain to add to what Jesus has already done for you. Brothers and sisters, rest in grace and head Paul’s warning to not abandon He who called you by grace to live in grace. Do not listen to the false teachers who claim that you must work for your salvation.
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