Sermon Tone Analysis

Set Up of Galatians

Thanks for having me with you this morning.

My name is Greg Brower and I am the Classis Leader for Great Lakes City Classis.

Which is a weird job.

Before serving in this role, I was the pastor of Zion Reformed Church in Grandville for 17 years.

Back then, my kids knew what I did.

But now they aren’t so sure.

They ask and I tell them I mostly go to a lot of meetings.

My wife says I am a pastor to pastors, which is kind of true.

From what I can tell, I am kind of like a bishop, but without any actual power or authority.

I have a good friend who describes himself as a sheep dog.

It is his job to bark and make some noise to get the sheep turned back toward Jesus.

I think that is part of my job, too.

It is so easy as a pastor or a church to get focused on denominational issues or societal culture wars or politics and lose our focus on Jesus.

So, my hope today is get our eyes focused on Jesus and our hope in the gospel.

To do that today, I want to focus our attention on a letter from the apostle Paul to the church in Galatia.

As we read this letter, we need to remember we are reading someone else’s mail.

The letter was not written to us, but it can benefit us.

It was not written to our specific situation, but the truths it contains can illuminate our time, too.

But if it is to do that, we need to know a little about what was going on that led Paul to write this letter.

So this is the situation as near as we can tell.

Paul began his missionary journeys going to Jewish Synagogues and preaching the good news about Jesus.

Some Jews believed in most cities, but others freaked out and tried to stone, imprison, or get rid of Paul in some way and then he would go share the gospel with gentiles.

Paul didn’t make these gentiles get circumcise dor start following all the Jewish laws in order to follow Jesus.

This rocked the boat int he church.

So, a big council gets called in Jerusalem to decide what to do with all these Gentile converts to Christianity.

You can read about this in Acts 15, but after much debate the church decides gentiles don’t need to follow all the Jewish laws, but do tell them to not eat meat sacrificed to idols and to avoid sexual immorality.

And off Paul goes to continue his missionary journeys.

But, some people don’t like this decision and they go around following Paul on his missionary journeys undoing his work and telling people they need to become Jewish to be saved.

You have to stop eating bacon and get circumcised to follow Jesus.

Believe in jesus and become Jewish and then you can be saved.

is their basic message.

They have now followed Paul to Galatia and Paul writes this letter to get his churches back on track.

We pick up his letter in Galatians 2:11 as he tells a story about a confrontation he had with Peter, or Cephas, the great pillar of the church.

Text

Paul and Peter

I love this story about Peter.

He comes up to Antioch to visit Paul and has no problem eating with gentiles, but when the Judaizers come, Peter caves to peer pressure.

He knows they don’t like the decision of the Jerusalem counsel.

He is still leading the church in Jerusalem.

He doesn’t want any problems and he so he goes along to get along.

We’ve all had moments like this.

Moments when the pressure to fit in and avoid conflict won out over our desire to follow Jesus.

That time we stayed quiet when a family member said something racist or homophobic.

The time we cut back on our giving in order to pay for that trip with friends from church.

That time we joined in the gossip because it felt so good to be included in the inner circe.

Peter compromises his values to avoid some conflict.

Paul will have nothing of it.

Peter’s behavior is a very threat tot the gospel.

By his actions, he is telling these gentiles they are not truly Christians yet.

To be accepted there is more they have to do, more beyond just believing in Jesus.

In essence, these false teachers are saying to be saved you need Jesus and you need to follow the rules.

Salvation is no longer by the grace of Jesus, but by our ability to be good.

It is about grace and works!

This is an anti-gospel.

It stands against the good news we have found in Jesus.

Paul can not stand for this so he gets up and and confronts Peter in front over everyone.

This confrontation between Peter and Paul vividly illustrates two of three ways of thinking abut our faith and what it means to become a Christian.

The Temptation of Fences

I want to suggest to you that the Judaizers and Peter by following their example show one way people have twisted the gospel of grace into an entirely different sort of religion.

I like to call this a bounded set sort of religion.

In this kind of faith, the primary question we ask of people is whether they are in or out.

Do they meet the criteria of being a Christian or not.

Outside of the world of faith, in the world of kids sports, bounded sets are like kids travel teams.

You have to try out and spend a lot of money and if you are good enough you get to be on the team.

You are either on the team or you are not.

That’s a bounded set.

The desire to create a boundary is not all bad.

Shepherds do this whenever they put up a fence to keep their sheep safe.

If a sheep stays inside the fence, they will be protected from falling off a cliff, drowning in a lake, or getting eaten by a wolf.

When they leave the sheepfold, when they step outside the fence, they experience all sorts of dangers.

In church, this fence building comes form a good place.

We want to keep people from wandering into weird teaching.

We want to help them avoid making terrible moral choices hat could wreck their life and the lives of people around them.

And so we make rules.

The rules set the boundaries of who is a good Christian and who is not a Christian.

It makes life feel safer and more under our control.

This is what the Judaizers are saying to Peter, you need to follow Jesus and obey the Torah.

You need Jesus and no bacon.

Jesus and circumcision and peopler without Jesus and those other things are not safe for us to be around.

they are not real Christians.

Peter buys the lie and separates from the gentile believers.

People like you and me.

When most people think of these fence building churches, they think of conservative churches.

I think about churches with strict dress codes.

Of Bob Jones University that required dating students to always keep as much distance as a Bible between them.

I always wondered if there was a standard Bible or if students all started buying tiny travel Bibles.

or you have to support the right political party and give to Right to Life.

Traditionally, many baptist churches would say Christians don’t drink, smoke, swear or sleep around.

Mind you, I agree.

None of those things are great for us.

Those are good morals to live out.

But think about how that might play out.

Suppose someone follows all those rules, but has a terrible temper and yells at people all the time.

Or someone else may follow all those rules, but they gossip or they are greedy, constantly wanting more.

Or maybe they follow all those rules, but Jesus is just an add on to their life, they really come to church because they have a great business opportunity for you and they need more people to join their business and church is a great place to meet people.

All of those people would be in the circle, counted as good Christians even though in major ways they are not following Jesus.

But because they are in the circle no one worries about their spiritual growth.

Meanwhile, this other person struggles with a alcohol addiction, but they pray every day and are reading scripture and confessing their sins to a fellow believer for accountability, and they have a deep seated humility because of their struggle and so they are patient, kind, merciful and all sorts of other good things to people.

But, they don’t count as a Christian because they still drink sometimes.