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THE GOOD NEWS OF GOD'S GRACE UNITES WILDLY DIVERSE PEOPLEGalatians 1:1-5INTRODUCTION When I was first considering whether God wanted Jane and I and our family to move to Janesville to plant a church, I read a lot of material on church planting. One of the dominant themes in everything I read was that the most important thing in planting a new church was to decide what was your target audience. In other words, to be successful at starting a church you needed to figure out whom you wanted to attract and then design your church services and programs around the likes and preferences of those whom you wished to attract. The implicit argument was that the unifying factor in a local church ought to be the demographics of the culture in which it existed. Is that right? Should you join a church because most of the people in the church are like you in certain demographic, sociological ways: they like the same music, dress in the same clothes, share similar life experiences, value the same lifestyle choices, live in the same kinds of homes, have the same political view? What exactly ought to be the unifying factors in the church? There are scores of things around which you can organize and seek to unify a church. Many churches are unified around certain programs, like AWANA or certain models of “doing church” like the seeker sensitive church model or the cell group model or the intergenerational church model. Other churches are unified around certain missions, like fulfilling the Great Commission or opposing abortion or racism and other social injustices or caring for the poor. Still other churches are unified around particular lifestyle preferences, like homeschooling or public schooling or Christian schooling or a particular kind of counter cultural lifestyle or a culture affirming lifestyle. However, it seems clear to me that the NT as a whole and the apostle Paul in particular argues that the church must be intentionally organized around the gospel of Jesus Christ. The only thing that can unify diverse human beings is the gospel of Jesus. Every local church must fight to keep the law free, God exalting, man humbling, grace motivated good news of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection for sinners at the center of everything that is done and said in the church. People must be encouraged to come to our church because here they can find the gospel of sovereign grace. We are to enjoy each other’s company because we are all sinners saved by grace. We must consciously and regularly tell ourselves that the reason we belong to this church is because we are all sinners saved by this same crucified and resurrected Christ. Our reason for being together is to grow up into the fullness of this Christ. We are here and we love each other because we share in common faith in Jesus Christ in his saving mercy. That is the unity for which we must fight as a church and as individuals. That is the point of what Paul says in these ten verses. MAIN POINT We must fight to be a church united by the one gospel and not by anything else because…I. God wants a church united by the gospel (vv. 1-2) If you have been here the past couple of Sundays or are familiar with chapter 1 of Galatians then there is something about what Paul says in 2:1-2 that on the surface appears to contradict what he said in chapter one. Look back at chapter one with me for just a moment. He argued in 1:1-2 that he was an apostle with as much authority as the original 12. The original 12 don’t have more authority than he just because they came first. Paul says in vv. 8-9 that the gospel he preached to the Galatians is the only true gospel and that if anyone; whether he or even an angel disagreed with any part of the gospel he preached they would go to an eternal hell. Then in vv. 11-24 he emphasizes that he did not consult with anyone, especially not with the original 12 apostles in Jerusalem about the content of the gospel he preached. He received the gospel directly from Jesus, just as the original apostles received it directly from Jesus and so there was no need for him to find out if he and they were preaching the same thing. He knew they were both preaching the same gospel because the same Christ had given the gospel to them and to he. In chapter 1 Paul makes clear that the gospel he preached to the Galatians came from God and was the only gospel that could save people. He claimed to never doubt that he had been given, by the revelation of Jesus Christ the only true gospel. We find out in 2:1 that Paul had preached the gospel for 14 years in absolute confidence that he was preaching the true gospel. So why did he go to Jerusalem and tell the original apostles his gospel fourteen years after Jesus appeared to him? What does Paul mean by saying that he “feared that he had run in vain?” After fourteen years was he now beginning to question himself and whether or not he had the true gospel? Whatever reason he went it cannot be that he was afraid that he was not preaching the gospel. He could not have written chapter one of this letter if that was the nature of his fear. It has to be something else. I want you to notice that in v. 2 he says the reason he went to Jerusalem is because of a revelation. In other words, he would never have gone to Jerusalem except that God told him to go. Not only did God tell him to go to Jerusalem but he also told him to explain the gospel he preached to the apostles in Jerusalem. That is exactly what he did. He went to Jerusalem and he explained, in a private meeting with James, Peter and John the gospel he was preaching to the Gentiles and the results he was seeing as he preached. (He went to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus. This journey is recorded for us in Acts 11:27-30. It took place after Paul, who at the time was still called Saul, his Hebrew name, had worked with Barnabas for a year in preaching the gospel in Antioch where the first non-Jewish, Gentile church had been formed. We find out in Acts that the journey had more than one purpose. Not only did God tell Paul to go there to tell the other apostles his gospel but they also went with a contribution to help the poor in the church in Jerusalem.) On a couple of other occasions in his letters, Paul expresses a similar concern about his ministry being in vain or to no purpose (Phil. 2:16, 1 Thess. 3:5). In each of those cases his fear is not that he did not preach the true gospel but rather he is afraid those who received the gospel will not continue to believe it and live in accord with it because of persecution or false teaching or some other temptation. Paul’s fear in this passage is this: he knows that if the apostles in Jerusalem are preaching a gospel that includes circumcision and the keeping of the Jewish laws in addition to believing in Christ, then it is only a matter of time until the churches he has helped to found are destroyed. All the work of the last 14 years will be vain if the original apostles are preaching a different gospel. He has preached a gospel that promises acceptance with God and inclusion in the church based upon trust in the living, dying and rising of Christ from the dead for every believing sinner. He has told both Jew and Gentile that law keeping in any form cannot satisfy God’s righteous requirements but that only Christ has perfectly fulfilled God’s law and therefore it is only through faith in Christ that sinners can be made right with God and brought into the fellowship of the church. Therefore, his fear in setting the gospel he preaches before these apostles is that he will discover that they are preaching Christ plus something else and thus all his work of preaching a law free gospel and establishing churches made up of Jew and Gentile will be overthrown. The church of Christ will be destroyed if the leaders of the church in Jerusalem are preaching that faith in Christ is not the condition for going to heaven. His fear is not that he is wrong but that they are wrong and because of who they are, all of his work of preaching the true gospel will be destroyed. The main thing I want you to note here is that Paul had this private interview with James, Peter and John because of a personal revelation from God. When Paul went to Jerusalem to have this interview, the controversy had not yet exploded in the church. We know from the first half of Acts 11 there were rumblings of this controversy within the church. There were some Jewish believers who were advocating that Gentiles must be circumcised and keep the Jewish law in order to be truly saved. However, when Paul went to Jerusalem, as recorded at the end of Acts 11 there was only one known church that was made up of mostly non-Jewish people. Up to this point, most everyone who had trusted Christ and who were in the church were already law keeping Jews. God knew what was coming and in order to preserve the unity of the church around the purity of the gospel he sent Paul to Jerusalem so that he and the other apostles could settle the matter in private, prior to the eruption of the controversy and thus present a united front in the fight to maintain the unity of the church around the law free gospel. This letter is being written in the heat of the controversy just prior to the church wide council that met in Jerusalem in Acts 15 to resolve it in an official manner. When Paul went to Jerusalem for this private interview he was not aware of how great the problem was going to become, but God did. God was working in ways that the apostles did not fully appreciate. Paul did not bring Titus with him on that journey to use as a test case. He was merely a traveling companion, probably sent as a representative of the Antioch church with the financial gift for the poor in Jerusalem. However, God sent Titus along for a different purpose. He wanted Paul to use the fact that Titus was not required to be circumcised by the Jerusalem apostles as an important piece of evidence to show that the Jerusalem apostles did not teach a different gospel than Paul. You need to listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you right now. Why do you come to church? Why are you involved in this church? The answer that we all ought to give to those questions is because I have found here a place where the man humbling, God honoring, Christ exalting, law free gospel of Jesus Christ is kept at the center of everything. This is the only thing that God wants a church to be united around. We dare not choose our church, nor be committed to a church for any other reason. A church dare not seek to organize and unite around any other thing. What makes us a church of Jesus Christ is that we are gathered together as sinners who deserve to be sent to hell but who have discovered, by God’s grace, that God has poured out his wrath against our sins upon his only Son. We have discovered that Jesus Christ did what we will never be able to do, he has kept God’s law perfectly for us so that God can justly count us perfectly righteous with the righteousness of Christ. We are here to grow up into Christ, not to find support for our particular lifestyle choices, not to be with people who think just like me on social or political issues, not because a particular method of “doing church” is employed, not because they play my kind of music. We are here to know Christ in all of his saving mercy for sinners like us. He is the center, nothing else. We must fight to be a church united by the one gospel and not by anything else because…
II. Satan is out to destroy the church by false teaching (vv. 3-5) Verses 3-5 are an interruption in Paul’s recounting of the private meeting he held with the apostles in Jerusalem. He is telling the story of that interview to show that he and the apostles all preach the same gospel. However, while he recounts the story he suddenly remembers something that at the time did not strike him as important but as he writes this letter it dawns on him what God has done without his awareness. Titus, a Greek, non-Jewish believer from the primarily Gentile church in Antioch where he and Barnabas have been working is with Paul during this interview. The apostles accept him as a brother in Christ without any question and without urging him to be circumcised. They treat him as an equal simply because he has faith in Christ, not because he has faith in Christ and is also living like a Jew! His logic is simple. If the apostles believed that living like a Jew was necessary for going to heaven then why did James, Peter and John treat Titus like a Christian, eat meals with him which Jews are forbidden to do and not require him to be circumcised and obey the Jewish traditions? The reason that I am sure that Paul has suddenly seized upon Titus’ presence as a remarkable evidence of God’s providence and has interrupted his main argument to bring it up is that the Greek grammar that follows in v. 4 is very awkward. If you compare English translations you will see that there is difficulty making the transition from v. 3 to v. 4. Verse 4 is actually an incomplete sentence in Greek and so translators have to supply what Paul leaves out to make a sentence. Paul, who is usually very precise in his use of the Greek language stumbles in his excitement over his recognition that the Jerusalem apostles did not require Titus’ circumcision. What he is saying in vv. 4-5 is this, “I bring up this example of Titus because what has happened now is that false brothers, under false pretenses, have slipped in among us in order to spy out our freedom in Christ and to take us back into the bondage of sin, death and hell by saying that human effort is required to gain heaven. However, when their agenda became obvious to us recently in Antioch, we, Barnabas and I, did not give into them for a moment so that the sin forgiving, law free, grace expressing gospel might be kept pure for you and all the other Gentile churches.” The time period he is referring to in vv. 4-5 is not when he was in Jerusalem for this private council but the recent debates he and Barnabas have engaged in Antioch with certain men who have come from the Jerusalem church teaching that Gentiles must become Jewish to be saved. This event is recorded in Acts 15:1-2. What Paul says in vv. 4-5 is something that is repeated scores, if not hundreds of times throughout the Bible. Jesus said it this way, “Watch out for false prophets for they come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly they are ferocious wolves (Matthew 7:17).” On another occasion Paul told the leaders of the church in Ephesus the last time he saw them, “I know that after I leave savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them (Acts 20:29-30).” In 2 Corinthians 11:13-15 he says, “For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness.” Do you hear the common thread in all of this? False teachers and their teaching do not look or sound like false teachers. They look and sound like sheep, like servants of righteousness, like real pastors and elders in the church. If you are going to make a counterfeit dollar bill your goal is to make it as close as you can to the real one. So when false teachers and false teaching arise in the church they and their message look and sound a lot like the real thing. False teachers and their false gospels come in varieties of forms. No false teacher believes he or she is a false teacher. False teachers use the Bible and talk about Jesus and share many of the same concerns that true gospel preachers share. They care about morality and opposing evil. They want to promote healthy marriages and families. They use spiritual language and talk about loving God and trusting Christ. They say they are preaching the gospel. However, they change the gospel in serious ways by either adding to it or taking away from it or replacing the gospel with some other topic or issue as the central concern of the church. In 1 Timothy 5 and 1 John 4 we find out that all false teaching is directly prompted by Satan himself. Satan’s goal is to destroy the church, to bring dishonor and disrepute to Christ. It is his goal to obscure the glory of Christ’s work on behalf of sinners and tear the church apart. There are many ways for Satan to destroy the church and false teaching stands at the head of his preferred methods. Now if you will look at v. 5 you will see in action God’s response to false teachers. God opposes false teaching through the true teaching of his apostles, pastors and teachers. This is why one of the primary characteristics of elders is that they know the gospel well and are able to teach it to others. Paul tells this same Titus whom was eventually the lead pastor of the church in Crete that when he selected elders for the church that an elder “must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it.” When the false teachers showed up in Antioch that is exactly what Paul and Barnabas did. Listen to how Luke records this same event in Acts 15:1-2, “Some men came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the brothers: ‘Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.’ This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them.” They refuted those who opposed the gospel of grace by showing from the OT scriptures that salvation can be had only through faith in Christ alone. There is a place for sharp dispute and debate in the church. However, that dispute is to be over the gospel, not about the color of the carpet. But it’s not only through the biblical teaching of elders that the church is protected from false teaching. It is also through a congregation in which each individual and each family is growing in their understanding of the gospel. This letter to the Galatians ought to terrify all of us. Here are a group of churches that were founded by the apostle Paul and yet, shortly after he left they are in danger of abandoning the law free gospel he preached for the bondage of legalism and a gospel that requires an obedience that humans cannot perform. Doctrine matters. You must be reading your Bibles and you must be reading books or listening to tapes that discuss the doctrines that are central to the gospel. Learn the catechism. You cannot afford to be ignorant. When you stand before God on the Day of Judgment it will do you know good to tell Jesus that I just did what my pastor said. You can be certain that every false teacher will experience greater torture in hell than those he misled but those who are misled are accountable for being misled. I urge you, for the sake of your own souls to study and to ask questions. If you don’t think what I am saying is quite right, then come talk to me. Submit a question for next week. I promise you that I will by God’s grace and to the best of my ability not just get defensive or use my authority or training to belittle you or to disrespect you. I will do my best to take your question serious and to answer it according to Scripture. Our homes and our social gatherings ought to be full of discussion of the doctrines of grace and of the glory of Christ in his saving power and its application to our lives. In the church the best defense is a good offense. We are to learn the true gospel so well that we can spot a false gospel a mile away. We do this by study and discussion and by asking questions. We must fight to be a church united by the one gospel and not by anything else because…
III. God gives different people different gifts and different ministries to accomplish the same mission (vv. 6-10) In verse 6 Paul returns to telling the story of his private interview with James, Peter and John in Jerusalem. He is not being disrespectful in v. 6. The false teachers were saying about Paul that he was not a real apostle because he did not know Jesus when he was on earth. They were claiming that Paul had less authority and that James, Peter and John had more authority because they lived with Jesus on earth, in fact, James grew up in the same house as Jesus! The false teachers were trying to win the argument by appealing to a very common human tendency. We humans tend to give more credence to what people say because of their “popularity status” rather than because of the merit of their argument. This happens all the time. Why is it that advertisers hire celebrities as their chief spokespersons? What does Katherine Zeta-Jones know about cell phone technology or George Foreman about propane stoves? The church is not immune to this sort of pandering. Why is it that we get so excited when we hear that some celebrity might be a Christian? Why is it that at our evangelistic meetings we regularly have famous people share their testimonies? Paul, in v. 6 tells us that just because people have celebrity status does not mean they have a more accurate or powerful message or greater authority. You shouldn’t listen to people just because of some human characteristic. James, Peter and John do not have more authority than Paul because they knew Jesus on earth or were apostles before him. What happened at this private meeting is that James, Peter and John came to see firsthand that the same God who was at work in them was also at work in and through Paul. God entrusted both Peter and Paul with the same gospel but to different primary audiences. Peter’s primary audience was Jewish and Paul’s primary audience was Gentile. God was working through Peter to the Jews and he was working through Paul to the Gentiles. The three Jerusalem apostles, without reservation, accepted Paul’s apostleship and gospel as being the same as theirs and embraced him as a brother in Christ and a fellow worker in the gospel. They recognized that they were all on the same team but with different assignments. They were all working to the same end with the same message but in different contexts. There would have been very significant differences between how Peter and Paul conducted themselves and what they said in their respective ministries. Peter, while living among Jewish people would have lived like a Jew and kept the food laws. On the other hand, Paul, living among Gentiles ate unclean food, didn’t worry about Sabbath regulations, etc. Peter’s sermons were full of OT quotations and discussions of the history of Israel. Paul, while using the OT, could not simply quote it without going into long explanations about the history and setting of what he was saying. Their method and their words differed widely while their message was exactly the same. Isn’t this the cause of much division in the church? We have the same doctrine, we trust in the same Christ but we are given different ministries, different responsibilities and rather than viewing ourselves as working on the same team we are suspicious or jealous. We wonder why others don’t do things just like us. We judge others, not on whether or not they believe the same gospel but on whether or not they are going to use the same method as we or speak the gospel in the exact same words. I’m not saying that we just blindly accept anyone or any ministry just because they say they love Jesus. We have the right and the responsibility to question everyone who claims to speak the gospel on exactly what they mean by the gospel. However, most of the time our judgment of others working in other churches and ministries has nothing to do with the content of what they are saying but merely with the form they have adopted. Even within the same church we often criticize what others are doing just because we don’t like the method or the form. The thing that strikes me the most in vv. 6-10 is the repeated phrase that they recognized the grace given to each one. James, Peter, John and Paul saw in each other’s message and motives and ministries the evidences of the grace of God. They knew that in spite of the differences in method and emphases that they were all the recipients of God’s unmerited favor and the work they were doing was the work of God, not the work of humans because the aim of each was the deriding of human ability and goodness and the promotion of Jesus Christ in all of his saving glory. The primary evidence was their common allegiance to the law free gospel of Christ. They did not talk about what man does but about what Christ has done and is doing. What these four men recognized is that what they shared in common was infinitely greater than what divided them. They are all sinners who deserve hell but who have been rescued from hell, made sons of God, promised eternal life not because of anything they have done but because of what Jesus Christ has done. The unity of our church will grow only to the degree that each of us recognize the grace that has been given to each other. In the fellowship of the cross there is no place for pride. We are nothing. Christ is everything. We are hell-deserving sinners whom Christ has rescued and made his very own. When others accuse us of sinning we don’t become defensive because we know we are sinners and we still sin. We are to invite others to evaluate us. On the other hand, we know our brothers and sisters are not perfect people and so we should not expect them to be perfect. We aren’t sin police. Our brothers and sisters have Christ living in them and therefore they want to love and serve Christ better. We are not enemies, no matter that we have different gifts and different responsibilities in our calling before God. We are on the same team but with different assignments and so we must always recognize the grace that has been given to each of us. There is a tension in the church. In the church there is this incredible narrowness. There is only one gospel that can save and all other messages are false. We will enter into sharp dispute and criticism of all who seek to change this gospel in the name of God. Yet, in the church, because we are all recipients of such great grace there is an incredible broadness and generosity of spirit and warmness towards others. We are open to the criticism of others and we are accepting of others in spite of their faults. We believe the best about one another and refuse to judge each other’s motives. Our fellowship is rooted in the fact that we are all recipients of the same grace, not because we all have exactly the same work to do or because we all live the same kinds of lives. There is only one way to God but there is an enormous variety of expression of that one gospel, in culture, in music, in liturgy, in personality, in language, in ministry. The variety is to be not merely tolerated but celebrated. James, Peter, John and Paul did not merely tolerate each other but they “fellowshipped” together. They celebrated this great Christ who was equally their savior. They fixed their attention on this enormous reality they shared in common and they talked with each other in order to come to this place of fellowship. We must fight to be a church united by the one gospel and not by anything else because…
© Copyright
2005 John Swanson.
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