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THE GOOD NEWS OF GOD'S GRACE SETS US FREE AND KEEPS US FREEGalatians 5:1-6INTRODUCTION Three years ago the U.S. and its allies invaded Afghanistan to remove the Taliban from power and to disrupt the terrorist network that had flourished under their protection. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan with an iron fist under an extreme form of Islamic government. Girls were not permitted to go to school. Women could not hold jobs outside the home. The people had no say in the decisions of the government. There is now, after the liberation of Afghanistan, the beginning of a fledgling democracy. The U.S. and our allies spent lots of money and spilled the blood of over 1000 of our men to free Afghanistan. We did this so that Afghanistan would be free of the Taliban and its terrorist allies, free to govern itself. How would we feel if in the next national election in Afghanistan the people voted to reinstate the Taliban as the ruling party in Afghanistan, voted to provide money and other resources to support Osama bin Laden and his terrorist training camps and voted to expel all U.S. troops and other aid agencies? Especially, how do you think the families whose sons died liberating Afghanistan would feel? How would the men and women who were wounded and are now permanently disabled due to fighting to free Afghanistan feel? Especially those who suffered to free Afghanistan would feel a deep sense of betrayal. We would want to say to the people of Afghanistan something like this, “It was so that you could be free from the Taliban that we spent all this money and gave up these lives. Don’t let yourselves be slaves to them again.” The apostle Paul in the first verse of chapter 5 declares this same sentiment. He says that “At great cost to himself our Lord Christ conquered your oppressors, your slave masters. He did this so that you would live as free people. Therefore, remain free and do not willingly place yourselves under those old tyrants again.” Paul has used this metaphor of freedom throughout the first 4 chapters of his letter to express what Christ has done for all who trust in him. Prior to our conversion to Christ, whether Jew or Gentile, we were slaves with no hope and no ability to escape. We were ruled over by tyrants: our own sin and the law which condemns us for our sin and by Satan who deceives us with his propaganda to make us sin and by death, our executioner. All of our labor to make ourselves right with God by obedience to religious and moral and cultural laws yielded only more slavery and gained us no benefits. Just as we in the U.S. would be horrified if the Afghani people elected the Taliban back into power after we just set them free from their tyranny, so Paul is horrified that these professing Christians would even consider returning to the slavery of their former lives by seeking to be made right with God by their own efforts. Christ has set us free and Christ wants us to live as free men and women. What Paul begins to do in today’s passage is to tell us how free people live. MAIN POINT Christ has made us a free people therefore…I. We guard our freedom (vv. 1-4) The first thing that Paul says that free people do is they make sure they don’t take their freedom for granted but guard and defend their freedom from all who would seek to make them slaves again. The world is full of enemies who want to rob Christians of their freedom and return us to the slavery that we have only just escaped. In vv. 2-4 we discover that the false teachers were telling the non-Jewish Christians that they had to be circumcised. That is, they had to submit to the right of initiation into the Jewish religion if they were going to be accepted by God and welcomed into his eternal home as Christians. Paul says that they are taking on the yoke of their former slavery by being circumcised. However, it is not merely the act that brings them under their former slave masters but it is the motive behind the act. That’s what v. 4 makes plain. Those who want to be circumcised are seeking to be justified by the law. Let me make sure you remember what that word, “justified” means so you will not be confused. When I was a younger man and foolish I would tell my wife that I would be home from work or from playing basketball with my buddies at a certain time but then I would arrive home an hour or two after I said I would. This would make my wife very unhappy with me as she would be worrying about what happened to me or she would have dinner ready at a certain time and I wouldn’t be there. When I finally arrived home I would begin the process of justifying my late arrival. I would seek to set forth evidence that would prove that I wasn’t being an irresponsible, insensitive, uncaring, inconsiderate louse who deserved to sleep on the couch that night. My justification sometimes would be that I was having an intense conversation about Christ with a college student and couldn’t leave or our team kept winning and so I had to keep playing. What I was doing was seeking to prove my innocence, to remove the guilt and thus escape the just punishment due me for my sins . Justification is being declared innocent and therefore not liable to the punishment due for the transgressions that you have committed. Additionally, it is then being treated as if you have fulfilled your duty, performed the righteousness required of you. For me after arriving home late that would mean that Jane would forgive my tardiness and treat me as if I’d not sinned by being late but had in fact been a loving and considerate husband. The message of the false teachers agrees with the gospel at many points. They tell the Galatians that they are sinners who are in danger of being condemned by God to hell for their sins. They are in need of justification. They must have their sins forgiven and they must be righteous and therefore worthy of going to heaven. They are telling the churches of Galatia that Jesus is the Savior, the Son of God, the promised Messiah. They are telling these Christians that they must believe in Jesus or they can’t be forgiven. However, they are also saying that believing in Jesus is not enough. Yes, Abraham believed God and he was declared righteous by God but then God told him to be circumcised. Yes, God delivered the people of Israel out of their slavery in Egypt and then brought them safely through 40 years of nomadic wandering in the desert but then, just before he permitted them to enter into the promised he land he required that they all be circumcised. Therefore, you must believe in Jesus and be circumcised if you are going to belong to God’s people and go to heaven. The false teachers are not telling these Galatians that they can go to heaven without Christ. They must believe in Jesus and keep the law. Can you see how subtle and slippery is this way of reasoning? If you are taught in this way by people who say they love Jesus and who are living morally upright lives and who come to worship each Sunday and sing with their whole hearts and are really friendly and offer to help you with your children and your marriage, can you see how easy it would be to believe them? I want you to see Paul’s critique of this sort of reasoning. His point is that the message of these false teachers and the gospel of God’s free grace in Christ is like oil and water, they can never be mixed. He says there are four things that are true for everyone who lets himself be circumcised or does anything for the purpose of being justified before God. First, Christ is of no value or benefit to you. Paul has said that Christ bore the curse that is due to men who do not do everything that God commands in the law. So if you obey the law in the belief that your obedience earns God’s favor, then Christ did not bear the curses of any lawbreaking you do for you. You must bear the consequence of any lawbreaking. Christ, by his death, obtained the promised Holy Spirit. Therefore, if you insist on obeying the law then the Holy Spirit will not dwell in you or help you or be there to comfort you. He is absent from your life and you are entirely on your own. God made all the promises of eternal happiness to Abraham and his Seed, that is, to Christ. Only Jesus and all those who are related to him are heirs of God and of all the wealth that God possesses. Therefore, if you believe that your obedience is necessary for you to be justified before God, then you have been cut out of God’s will. You are not an heir of all the promises. The second thing he says that if you accept circumcision as necessary to be declared not guilty by God, then you have committed yourself to keeping the whole law. What Paul is aiming to demonstrate here is something that every man centered religious system neglects to tell you. The false teachers are not preaching that they must obey every law of God perfectly. They are concentrating on those duties easily performed and then reinterpreting the hard ones so they also can be easily performed. When you perform a religious duty expecting to receive the favor of God in return for your performance you have entered into an agreement with God that requires perfect obedience to every command of God. God doesn’t have just one law or just 6 laws. There are over 600 specific commands in the OT law. One of them is love your neighbor as yourself. That doesn’t mean that serving the Thanksgiving meal at the Salvation Army once a year means you’ve obeyed that law. You must love every person in your life, every moment of every day as much as you love yourself. You must think about their needs and treat them as you want to be treated 24/7. Everyone who tells you that obedience to God’s law is necessary if you are going to make it to heaven must reinterpret God’s law and make it doable. No legalist will ever tell you the truth about God’s law because it is as plain as the nose on your face that no one is able to keep God’s law. God’s law is a landslide of condemnation and destruction, not the means of climbing up to God. The last two things true of all who seek to enter God’s kingdom by obedience to law while also believing in Jesus are that you are cut off from Christ and fallen from grace. Jesus tells us that he is God’s true vine and that all who believe in him are the branches in that vine. If you aim to approach God on the basis of your own performance, then you have been cut off from the life that is in the vine. You are a broken off branch that will be gathered up and burned with fire at the end. Also, you are a person who is outside of the unmerited and unearned favor of God. Grace and works are incompatible realities. God is free and he alone is the one who determines who will go to heaven. He is out to glorify himself, not men. Those who claim that their obedience is necessary for going to heaven are planning on standing in front of God at the last judgment and telling God that he is obligated to let them into heaven because of what they have done. They plan on boasting in their own accomplishments, not in the grace of God. You cannot glorify yourself and glorify God at that same time. Either your salvation is due to your work, your wisdom, your will, your power or your salvation is due to the free, sovereign, unmerited favor of God. I need to note here that Paul is not saying in v. 4 that true Christians can lose their salvation. He is not teaching that it is possible for a person who is born again by the Spirit of God to become unborn. What he is saying is that being justified by God’s grace is completely incompatible with justification based upon God’s grace and upon your work. Grace, by its very definition, excludes all human activity. Justification and all its benefits are entirely a gift, apart from any human decision, work, feeling, etc. Grace does not respond to anything in any human but is freely bestowed through Christ upon undeserving sinners, not to those who have tried to clean up their act or set out to obey God’s law or prayed a sinner’s prayer. The warning of Paul in vv. 1-4 shows how fiercely our enemies are working to return us to the slavery we have escaped. We must be ever vigilant and discerning that we and our children are not led astray into the slavery of law keeping. Those who will mislead us sound reasonable. They appear like good and godly people. They love Jesus. But their doctrine is the doctrine of Satan and will destroy you if you believe them. Christ has made us a free people therefore…
II. We wait in hope (v. 5) Paul has been saying much the same thing in different ways for two and a half chapters. His aim has been to prove that salvation has always been by grace through faith in Christ and not due to any human work. He is now turning his attention from the foundational issue of how it is that guilty men and women are justified before God to how those who are justified live in this world. We cannot, as we begin to talk about the actual lives we live as Christians, forget what Paul has taken such great pains to drive home to us. How we live our lives is not the ground upon which God will decide whether or not he keeps us out of hell and brings us to heaven. The only reason anyone will go to heaven is because Jesus Christ perfectly obeyed God’s law in our place and he suffered the death we deserve for our lawbreaking ways. However, all those who are justified by God’s free grace also live different lives by that same grace. Here in v. 5 Paul gives us the first mark, the first description of the kind of life we life. He says it is a life of eagerly waiting for the hope of righteousness by the power of the Holy Spirit through faith. In v. 6 the second mark is that we are loving people. No one will go to heaven because they are hopeful, loving people. However, everyone who goes to heaven is growing to be a more hopeful, loving person. The first thing Paul says in v. 5 is that the life we live as Christians is a life that is lived in and by means of the Holy Spirit. The only reason I have any interest in Christ is because God, out of his free grace and due to nothing in me, no decision or act on my part, sent his Holy Spirit to convince me that I am a sinner and that Christ is a great Savior for sinners. By the Holy Spirit I have been given the very life of God. Just like God caused life to be given to Isaac out of the deadness of Sarah and Abraham’s body, so God gave life to me in the deadness of my sin and rebellion. The law did not give me this life; neither did my decision or my wisdom or my performance of some ritual or good deed. I have a new life. I am a new person. I live by and in the Spirit, not by and in the law or by or in my own sinful nature. The second thing Paul says is that this life I now live is a life of faith in Christ. Jesus Christ is the center of my life. I trust in him for all things. He is my life. He is my Savior. He is my righteousness. He is my sanctification. He is my joy. He is my king. He is my rock of refuge. He is everything to me and for me. All things come to me in him and through him. This is what I believe. Nothing good comes to me but by him. Outside of him I have nothing. I trust him to perform all that I cannot perform. I depend upon him to fulfill all of his promises to me. Now, what Paul says in v. 5 is this: the work of the Holy Spirit creating in me this faith in Christ always leads into a life of eager anticipation for “the hope of righteousness.” (Literal translation. NIV: the righteousness for which we hope) Paul is thinking of two things here in this phrase, “the hope of righteousness.” First, while we are trusting in Christ to be our righteousness we are not righteous. We are continually confronted with our sinfulness. We don’t read the Bible enough. We don’t pray as we ought. We get mad at the people we are supposed to love. We enjoy watching TV more than we enjoy coming to church. Other Christians, who are supposed to love me, ignore me and say bad things about me behind my back. I’ve been promised righteousness but I and those others who have been promised righteousness are not righteous. We continue to sin. Yet, because of Jesus Christ’s perfect obedience and his sacrificial death, I know, by faith, that one day I will be perfectly righteous. I know that when Jesus Christ returns and resurrects me that I will be just like him. I will want just one thing, to love God. This is perfect righteousness. I will be consumed with God and with being like God and I will never sin again in that day. By the Spirit and by faith in Christ I know that day is coming. Therefore, I wait in eager anticipation for that day. Therefore, I press on towards Christ in spite of the fact that I am beset by sin. I don’t quit. I don’t despair or lose heart. I believe Christ is my righteousness, which produces in me hope for what Christ has promised: perfect righteousness. The second thing that this phrase, “the hope of righteousness” indicates is the life of blessing that God has promised to all those who are righteous. I believe that God counts me as perfectly righteous through Christ by the Spirit. Therefore, the fruit of that faith is that I am full of hope that one day I will receive the reward that is due to those who perfectly obey his law, not because I have obeyed it but because Christ has obeyed it for me and born the curse for me. Now we are beset by all kinds of afflictions and losses. We lose our jobs and can barely make it from paycheck to paycheck. We are sick. Our loved ones die. We die. Our children are injured. We spend time and money fixing up houses that have to be fixed up again or get blown down by tornadoes or washed away by floods. We try to get close to one another, only to be rejected. Our friendships and our marriages are not what we hoped they would be. However, because I know that Christ is faithful to his promises I know that one day he will wipe away all the tears. He will heal all that is injured and sick and broken. He will eliminate all disease and will take away death, that greatest of all curses. We will live in perfect and unbroken fellowship with God and one another. Waiting with eagerness for the hope of righteousness keeps me from being destroyed by the disappointments of earth. I know that this is not heaven. This means that I don’t demand that you treat me like you will when we are in heaven. My dear friends, I don’t think it is an accident that Paul tells us that the first fruit of justification by grace, by the Spirit, through faith is hope. I can tell you without question that much of the misery in your life and in my life is due to the fact that we are not waiting in hope for the reward of righteousness but we are expecting, demanding that we have it right now. Most of the anger and sorrow in our lives is due to the disappointment we experience because we are not getting the joys and benefits of heaven right now. Through the Spirit by faith in Christ we are waiting in eager anticipation for the hope of righteousness. We are waiting in hope of heaven, of righteousness, we are not now living in heaven and we are not now righteous. So our faith holds fast to Christ who is our righteousness and thus we have hope that we will one day be perfectly righteous and experience the rewards of that perfect righteousness. Christ has made us a free people therefore…
III. We live in love (v. 6) In verse 6 he tells us what is true for everyone who is in Christ. This is a different way of saying the same thing he said in v. 5, all those who wait by the Spirit, through faith are all those who are in Christ. In other words, what he says in this verse is true for every justified person: everyone who has been declared not guilty but perfectly righteous because they are “in Christ”. What is true for all Christians? First he says, whether or not you are circumcised means nothing to whether or not you are in Christ and a beneficiary of all the promises. How can he say that when he has just said that anyone who lets himself be circumcised is cut off from Christ? What Paul wants to make very clear is that it is not the action that matters but the motive behind the action. If you get circumcised in order to be justified of your sins, then circumcision matters. However, no one who is in Christ has been circumcised for that reason because if you are circumcised in order to be justified then you are cut off from Christ, you are not in Christ. Therefore, whether or not you are circumcised means nothing to God. What matters to God and matters to Christian fellowship is, why are you circumcised? If you believe that God loves you and will welcome you into heaven because you are circumcised you are not in Christ and therefore v. 6 does not apply to you. However, if you are in Christ, then you may for other reasons be circumcised or you may remain uncircumcised. Paul, in Acts 16 illustrates the point he is making here. He is visiting the churches of Galatia some time after he has sent this letter. He wants to take a young man named Timothy along with him on his journey to preach the gospel. However, Timothy is the son of a Greek father and a Jewish mother. He is therefore, considered racially Jewish. But because he has a Greek father it is assumed, correctly so, that he is not circumcised. To the Jewish community an uncircumcised Jew is an affront, it is a cultural no-no of major proportions. Jewish people will not permit him into their synagogues and will not listen to Timothy knowing that he is Jewish and uncircumcised. Therefore, so that Paul and Timothy might have access to the Jewish synagogues to preach the gospel, Paul has Timothy circumcised. Remember, that when Paul visited Jerusalem to see Peter and James he brought Titus, a Gentile, along with him and he was not required by the apostles in Jerusalem to be circumcised before they would embrace him as a brother in Christ. Titus is not circumcised and fully acceptable to God and to the church and Timothy is circumcised and fully acceptable to God and the church because neither believes their performance or not performance of this OT ritual has anything to do with their standing with God. All who are in Christ view their religious performances in the right light. They do not make us more acceptable to God or more worthy of Christian fellowship. Now notice Paul says that what Christians are marked by is not performance or non performance of OT law but by faith in Christ that works through love. The second characteristic of everyone who is justified is that due to their faith in Christ, they actively love others. We know from v. 5 that no one sitting in this room will ever perfectly love every other person sitting in this room. We are waiting for the hope of perfect righteousness. However, every true Christian sitting in this room is growing in their active love for others. There is an infallible connection between faith in Christ and a life that works through love. We are going to talk more about this in a couple of weeks when we get to vv. 13-15 so now I just want to answer two questions about this phrase “faith working through love.” First, why is it that there is an infallible connection between faith in Christ to justify me and active love for others? There are many answers to that question, we will consider just one of them. We become like those whom we admire, love and respect. Millions of boys and girls participate in athletics because they want to be like their favorite star athlete. Advertisers understand this human urge. Why do they show great athletes wearing their clothes, drinking their soda or sports drink? They do it because they know that humans want to become like those whom they admire, love and respect. As we grow in our faith in Christ we become more and more amazed at his great love for sinners like us. We grow in our admiration for one so great, so perfect, so holy, so awesome who has brought himself so low as to take on human flesh and submit himself to all the miseries of this life and to willingly suffer that excruciating death in our place. As we grow to admire him and love him our desire to be like him grows. We want, along with Paul, to share in his sufferings, which are the sufferings of love. We seek to love our enemies because we admire how Christ loved us, his enemy. We seek to do good to those who hate us because we see how Christ has done good to us who hated him. We are patient with the shortcomings of others and forgive whatever grievances we have against others because we so admire Christ for his patience towards us and his forgiveness of our many sins. The second question I want us to consider is, why does Paul say “faith works through love?” Why doesn’t he say “faith works” or “faith loves”? The answer to this is that he is trying to hold together two things that humans are experts at separating. On the one hand, many talk of love for others as if it were merely sentiment, a feeling I have when I feel something I’ve never felt before. Tom Cruise is a perfect example of this sort of love as he publicly declares his love for a woman he has known and dated for about 2 months. This is the love our culture is addicted to, the good feelings and exciting passions of love. However, Paul says that love and work go hand in glove. Love is not merely sentiment, it is action that works for the good of the one who is loved. It is faithful to the one loved. However, love is not merely work. It is not simply the doing of one’s duty. That sort of love is hypocrisy. The husband that treats his wife to a dinner out, not because he is delighted to be with her but because he is trying to impress his friends or fulfill some obligation he was told about at a marriage conference does not love his wife. Acts of love must be motivated by true affection and delight in the beloved and in the good of the beloved in order for the acts to be considered love. Dutifully working for your family without any joy or delight in your family is mere hypocrisy. It is not love. Again, this life of work motivated by true love is the product of faith in Christ. Only when I am trusting in Christ’s work on my behalf can I work for the good of others with a heart of love for them. Without this faith in Christ my work and my love become manipulation. I am not working for the good of another but so that I can get some other good, besides the pleasure of love for them. Christ has made us a free people therefore…
© Copyright
2005 John Swanson.
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