Podcasts about Galatian

In this portion of the letter Paul wants these Galatian believers to once more see Christ clearly. He wants them to focus their attention back on Christ. He wants them to look again over and over and over focusing on the Gospel. They had become deceived by another Gospel. This is what we need as well if we are going to grow in Christ and not be entangled with the lies of legalism.

What does the Apostle Paul mean when he tells the Galatian readers that they have "fallen from grace"? Some think he is saying they fall short of the grace of salvation. Others say that he is telling them they have lost their salvation. Neither of these interpretations considers the context. As shown, Paul is writing to believers--they had received the gospel of grace from him. However, there were false teachers who were turning the Galatians away from the grace of Christ to the Law. Paul is saying that if they go back under the Law, then they will not benefit from the blessings of grace that are in Christ. They are "estranged" or severed from that grace because they have turned to their own fleshly efforts to be acceptable to God in justification and sanctification. The Law does not bless believers; it condemns them because no one can keep the Law. For believers, the key to living under grace is to walk in the Spirit, not the flesh. Then they will be blessed with all the benefits of Christ's grace. #grace #podcast #christiantheology #bible #Galatians #faith

"Labor of Love” (Galatians 4:12-20)In this heartfelt message from Galatians 4:12–20, Pastor Daniel unpacks the Apostle Paul's deep, almost parental love for the Galatian believers—likening his concern to the agony of laboring for them all over again. Paul urges them to return to the freedom and consistency they first saw in his life, and to reject the burdens of legalism. This message explores how a believer can live with spiritual consistency and freedom, how truth-telling sometimes wounds before it heals, and how gospel ministry often flows through weakness, not strength.Whether you're a mom, a student, or someone wrestling with spiritual performance, this message is a reminder: you are no longer a slave—but a beloved child of God.Need Prayer? Email us at roseburgfcc@gmail.comConnect with us on social at www.facebook.com/roseburgfccTo support the ministry of First Christian Church go to www.roseburgfcc.org/giving

Acts 16 speaks of a disciple named Timothy – meaning “of value to God”. He was well recommended by the brethren. Timothy's mother, Lois, was a Jewess, but more importantly a faithful believer. Likewise, Timothy's – grandmother, Eunice, was also faithful – 2 Timothy 1 verse 5. As Timothy's father was a Greek Paul thought that it would be best for Timothy to be circumcised before travelling with himself and Silas. They visit the Galatian believers to strengthen their faith. Whilst attempting to preach the gospel in the province of Asia they were prevented from doing so. God had urgent work for the missionaries to do in Macedonia. They were given a vision of a man from Macedonia asking them for help. Many believe that the man in the vision was doctor Luke, since the pronouns in the chapter change when Luke joined them- see chapter 16:11. It is also interesting to think that Alexander the Great was a Macedonian who claimed to have a vision of the high priest of Israel and the 24 elders coming to meet him (see Zechariah 9). In Philippi, the capital of Macedonia, there were so few Jews that the city had no synagogue. It was by the riverside that Lydia, a lady from Thyatira, believed and was baptised. She was the first convert from that city. “Whose heart the Lord opened” describes the timeless operation of the spirit of God. It's a lovely description. Verses 16-24 describe a demented girl, said to be possessed by the python of Delphi, who follows Paul and Silas and claims that they are the servants of the most high God. After the girl was healed her owners, losing their source of income, had Paul and Silas arrested, beaten, placed in most uncomfortable stocks and cast into prison. Paul and Silas sang hymns of praise to the amazement of the prisoners and their jailor. The response of the Almighty was to a produce a strong earthquake that was felt throughout the city. It also released all the chains of the prisoners. The jailor fearing his prisoners had fled was about to take his own life. Paul called upon him to stop. He took Paul and Silas to his home and bathed their wounds (with their stripes he was healed – see Isaiah 53). The jailor and the believing adults of his household were baptised – the ecclesia was growing. In the morning the worried magistrates tell Paul and Silas to go. Paul says they have beaten the Apostles who are uncondemned Roman citizens. This made the magistrates even more fearful; but must have provided the ecclesia with a measure of protection. Acts 17 tells of Paul, Silas coming to Thessalonica (Luke seems to have stayed in Philippi for the next 7 years), where the preaching had some measure of success until the jealous Jews stirred up the rabble of the city and attacked the house of Jason where Paul and his companions were lodged. Jason is beaten, but the multitude want Paul's blood. The enraged mob claim that Paul has turned the Roman world upside down with his preaching – and indeed he had done that. After taking money for security Paul and his company are allowed to depart. In verses 10-12 we hear that they next come to Berea where the people of that city are more noble of heart as they daily search the Scriptures to see whether what the Apostles claimed was in fact what the Scriptures taught. But sadly, true to form, the unbelieving Jews from Thessalonica come and bring persecution with them. Paul is hurried away from the hostile Jews and brought by sea to Athens. Whilst waiting for Timothy and Silas Paul is stirred by the extent of the idolatry of the city. Paul speaks to the philosophers of the Epicurean and Stoic persuasions about Jesus and the resurrection – the Greeks supposed he was talking of Jesus (a male god) and Anastasis (a female god). Paul is taken to Areopagus (also called Mars Hill) and placed on trial for blasphemy (a charge that carried the death sentence if he is found guilty). Paul commences to preach to them based on an altar that he finds with the inscription “to the unknown god”. He says that they are ignorantly worshipping this god. From the Greek poets Paul tells them that this God made the world and everything in it. He quotes from several of their poets – including the well known Hymn to Zeus (their chief god). But his primary appeal was for them to forsake idolatry and polytheism and embrace the One True God by believing that this God will judge those who do not repent and turn to Him. The majority response is to dismiss Paul's claims as they compare the Apostle to a seed picking bird, which gathers bits and pieces from everywhere. Nonetheless one Dionysius, an Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and a few others become believers. Some said they would listen to Paul another time – but they missed the opportunity for Paul never returned to Athens: compare Ephesians 5 verse 16.

Are we saved by faith or by works? After appealing to both his and the Galatian's personal testimony to prove the necessity of faith, the apostle Paul turns to the Old Testament Scriptures to prove his point. Abraham, the father of the nation of Israel is the prime example of a man justified by faith. Pastor Doug Horner preaches from Galatians 3:6-9 in a message titled, "By Faith, Abraham..."

Galatians 4:12-20 This week we return to our No Other Gospel series and learn from Paul about how the Galatian church was called to return to their freedom in Christ from sins and false gospel teachings. Austin Damron // Student Pastor

Paul continues to help the Galatian church understand and apply the gospel. He reminds them of their former lives as spiritual slaves and how Jesus redeems them into God's family. In this sermon, we look at the benefits of our adoption and how that reality changes the way we experience God our Father.

Today Rick and Svea look at the allure of certainty instead of clarity, creating environments where litmus tests are the norm vs being in Christ. Topics Discussed in this Episode:00:00 Intro01:46 Crawford Loritts was at Autumn Ridge Church.03:31 Back into Galatians. Svea says it's a difficult book.05:06 Gravitating toward environments and activities where we feel significant.08:34 Getting into the shoes of a typical Galatian man.11:29 Giving in to the allure of certainty instead of clarity.13:25 Putting so much emphasis on circumcision.15:55 Modern-day litmus tests to see if we're in the "in crowd."16:43 We are people of the Gospel; being in Christ.18:02 Being in Christ - can you lose your salvation?22:06 Deconstruction.31:08 Bad news. Good news.

Today pastor John Randall opens Galatians chapter three and uncovers important instruction about the grace of God that we can all benefit from! Paul the apostle is about to pose a series of thought provoking questions taking these Galatian believers back to their experience when they were first saved. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/1368/29

The artist Degas suffered retina disease for the last fifty years of his life, switching from paint to pastel because the chalk lines were easier to see. Renoir had to have brushes placed between his fingers when arthritis made them clench like claws; and when surgery left Matisse immobile, he turned to collage, directing assistants to attach colored pieces of paper to a larger sheet on the wall. What followed in each case was a creative breakthrough: Degas’s Blue Dancers, Renoir’s Girls at the Piano, Matisse’s The Sorrows of the King, and other masterpieces. By adapting to their trial, beauty emerged from their infirmity. In a similar way, Paul wasn’t planning to visit Galatia during his early missionary journeys. An illness forced him there (Galatians 4:13). Whether it was the illness he mentions in 2 Corinthians 12:7, an eye problem (Galatians 4:15), or something else, we don’t know. But Paul sought a different climate, wound up in Galatia and, even though he was ill, started preaching. Ironically, the Holy Spirit performed miracles through him (3:2–5) and the Galatian church was born. This surprising outcome may never have happened without Paul’s illness. What trial have you faced, and how did it change the direction of your life? By refocusing your gifts, you too may see God bring beauty out of your infirmity.

In this sermon, we delve into Galatians 4:8-20, where the Apostle Paul expresses deep concern for the Galatian believers who are reverting to legalistic practices after embracing the freedom found in Christ. Paul reminds them of their past enslavement to false gods and questions their desire to return to “weak and worthless elementary principles” (Galatians 4:9). He appeals to their shared history, recalling how they once welcomed him despite his physical ailments, and expresses his perplexity over their shift in allegiance. This message emphasizes the importance of remaining steadfast in the liberty granted through faith in Jesus, cautioning against the allure of legalism and highlighting the transformative power of divine grace.

Join us in this insightful episode as we delve into Galatians 5, exploring the key theme of liberty in Christ. Our discussion focuses on the issue of "falling from grace," a much-debated passage, and examines the teachings of Paul on freedom from the law and reliance on faith. We reflect on the challenges faced by the Galatian church when confronted with false teachings that urged adherence to certain laws, and we uncover the true meaning and power of living by faith through the Spirit. This episode serves to remind us that, through Christ, we are set free from the yoke of bondage that the law imposes, and we are called to walk in the Spirit, expressing our faith through love. Embrace the teachings of the Apostle Paul as we discuss how the Spirit empowers believers to live a life defined by the fruits of the Spirit.

In this session, biblical scholar Dominic Crossan examines the fundamental conflict between two visions of peace in the ancient world. He contrasts Augustus' Res Gestae (carved imperial boasts of achievements) with Paul's letters, revealing how Rome established "peace through victory" while Paul offered an alternative vision based on justice and non-violence. Crossan traces this tension back to Genesis, where human civilization begins with Cain's fratricide and escalates through generations of violence, contrasting sharply with the divine vision of creation centered on Sabbath justice. Through archaeological evidence from Galatian sites where Paul traveled, Crossan demonstrates how these competing worldviews physically manifested in the landscape, ultimately challenging us to consider whether humanity's inherent tendency toward escalating violence makes us a sustainable species or whether we must embrace Paul's alternative vision of peace through justice. To access all 5 of Crossan's lectures, submit questions, and join future live streams, head here to join the class. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida. Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts Paul & Thecla Ask JC Anything Diana Butler Bass & John Dominic Crossan: The Resurrection of Jesus Brian McLaren & John Dominic Crossan: The Message of Jesus & the Judgement of Civilization Brian Zahnd & John Dominic Crossan: God, Violence, Empire, & Salvation Why the Biblical Paul is Awesome Christian Resurrection & Human Evolution The Cross & the Crisis of Civilization The Coming Kingdom & the Risen Christ The Parables of Jesus & the Parable of God How to think about Jesus like a Historian the Last Week of Jesus' Life Jesus, Paul, & Bible Questions Saving the Biblical Christmas Stories the most important discovery for understanding Jesus The Bible, Violence, & Our Future Resurrecting Easter on the First Christmas   From Jesus' Parables to Parables of God  Render Unto Caesar on God & Empire Join Dom Crossan at ...Theology Beer Camp | St. Paul, MN | October 16-18, 2025 3 Days of Craft Nerdiness with 50+ Theologians & God-Pods and 600 new friends. A Five-Week Online Lenten Class w/ John Dominic Crossan Join us for a transformative 5-week Lenten journey on "Paul the Pharisee: Faith and Politics in a Divided World."This course examines the Apostle Paul as a Pharisee deeply engaged with the turbulent political and religious landscape of his time. For details and to sign-up for any donation, including 0, head over here. _____________________ Hang with 40+ Scholars & Podcasts and 600 people at Theology Beer Camp 2025 (Oct. 16-18) in St. Paul, MN. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 80,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 45 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello Friends! I love to hear from you! Please send me a text message by clicking on this link! Blessings to You!In this episode, Jori discusses with her listeners Paul's explanation to the Galatian churches that before faith came, we were held in custody under the Law, being shut up for the coming faith to be revealed.Scripture References: Isaiah, 26:3; Galatians 1:1-5; Acts 9, 22, 26; Acts 13-14; Galatians 1:6-10; Romans 7:7; Romans 3:23; Romans 6:23; Romans 10:4; John 1:29; Galatians 3:15-26; Isaiah 53:3-11; Jeremiah 31:31-34 Scripture translation used is the Legacy Standard Bible.  “Scripture quotations taken from the (LSB®) Legacy Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2021 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Managed in partnership with Three Sixteen Publishing Inc. LSBible.org and 316publishing.comFIND DR. JORI ON OTHER PLATFORMS https://linktr.ee/drjorishafferCHECK OUT THE DWELL AUDIO BIBLE APP:Click this link for my unique referral code.  I use this frequently. Such a wonderful audio bible app. https://dwellapp.io/aff?ref=jorishafferBIBLE STUDY TOOLS DR. JORI USES:Note: These contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links.LSB Single Column Biblehttps://amzn.to/4g9C47oESV MacArthur Study Biblehttps://amzn.to/3C1cpQwInk Joy Penshttps://amzn.to/3EaZ8oRMr. Pen HighLightershttps://amzn.to/3PE20x8Mr. Pen Bible Journaling Kithttps://amzn.to/40pib6o  JOIN DR. JORI IN DEVOTIONAL JOURNALING IN 2025Check out this 9 min YouTube Video outlining her journaling strategy! Don't Forget to subscribe to the YouTube Channel! https://youtu.be/lqe9TO7RSz4 BOOKS OF BIBLE COLOR CHARTI made this chart as a helpful tool for grouping the collections of books or letters  in the Holy Bible.  The colors in the different sections are the ones that I use in my journals.  Books of Bible Chart (color) (4).pdf - Google Drive    LOOKING TO RETAIN MORE OF WHAT YOUR PASTOR IS TEACHING?              CHECK OUT DR. JORI'S SERMON REFLECTION JOURNALS! Sermon Notes, Reflections and Applications Journal/Notebooks by Dr. Jori. Click the links below to be directed to amazon.com for purchase. Or search “Dr. Jori Shaffer” on Amazon to bring these up.  https://amzn.to/418LfRshttps://amzn.to/41862EyHere is a brief YouTube video that tells about the Journal/Notebooks as well:https://youtu.be/aXpQNYUEzds   Email: awordforthisday@gmail.comPodcast website:  https://awordforthisday.buzzsprout.com Support the show

Metacognition is what sets human brains apart from all other created beings'. It's the ability to think about what we're thinking about. Meta. When was the last time you remember actively aware and thinking about what you were thinking in the moment when your emotional brain was spinning out of control? When we're thinking about what we're thinking about, we're able to make adaptive changes that make our lives enriched and feel more abundant and purposeful. Today we talk about actively engaging in this beautiful God-given gift – metacognition. Resources Mentioned:·       For more tools, questions for reflection, and resources to help you on your journey, download the Listener's Guide for this episode: Scriptures Mentioned:·       Proverbs 16:18, John 10:10, 1 Corinthians 11:28, 2 Corinthians 13:5, Galatian 6:4, Hebrews 12:1, Psalm 42:11Are you wondering how Life Coaching works? Would you like a free, 30-minute session? Click this link to set up a Consult Call. Connect:Website: www.triciazody.comFollow on Facebook  and Instagram

The Galatian church had forgotten who Jesus Christ was and they were trying to earn their salvation but it is only by faith in Jesus Christ that we are justified. The Galatian church was allowing the doctrine of doing good works to earn salvation. Paul corrected them and he reminded them that salvation comes from the work Jesus did on the cross and only Jesus can produce the fruit of the Spirit.

Click here for the DRB Daily Sign Up form! TODAY'S SCRIPTURE: Deuteronomy 16-18; Psalm 38; Galatians 2 Click HERE to give! Get Free App Here! One Year Bible Podcast: Join Hunter and Heather Barnes on 'The Daily Radio Bible' for a daily 20-minute spiritual journey. Engage with scripture readings, heartfelt devotionals, and collective prayers that draw you into the heart of God's love. Embark on this year-long voyage through the Bible, and let each day's passage uplift and inspire you. TODAY'S EPISODE: Welcome dear ones to the Daily Radio Bible. Today marks day 71 in our immersive journey through the Bible as your host, Hunter, guides you with warmth and wisdom. In this episode, we're delving into Deuteronomy chapters 16 through 18, exploring the significance of Passover and the essence of justice, moving to the heartfelt plea for mercy in Psalm 38, and finally reflecting on Paul's letter to the Galatians in chapter 2. Hunter reminds us of the profound influence of grace over the constraints of the law and how fear-based religion is not the path to live. With heartfelt prayers and insights, today's episode invites you to experience the profound love and grace of God, anchoring your spirit in the gospel truth. So, come along as we read, reflect, and pray in pursuit of the divine. You are loved, and let us always remember the joyous strength that this love brings. Alrighty, let's dive in! TODAY'S DEVOTION: The law can't save us, but the law will humble us. The law instructs us. It teaches us our need for God's grace. That is its purpose. It was never meant to save us. Peter would lose sight of this. He was swayed by James's friends. They were people who trafficked in fear and legalism, control. Peter was generous hearted toward these new Gentile believers in Antioch. He was eating with them, sharing his life with them until this group shows up. They tapped into the fear-based brain that tries to pacify God with piety and performance by pretending. They conjured up a storm of fear that grabbed hold of Peter's heart and spread out into Barnabas's heart. Thankfully, Paul is relentless with the gospel, and he verbally slapped some grace into Peter even though this was no doubt an embarrassing rebuke for Peter. I'm sure in the end, he was glad for it. Living in fear is no way to live. Fear is infectious. It's like a virus. It spreads. And in this case, it spread even to Barnabas, who is known as the son of encouragement. But God's grace is infectious too, and this is an infection we don't want to cure. We need to recognize our need to be renewed in the message of the gospel all the time. If Peter and Barnabas needed to be renewed in the message of God's grace, how much more do you and I need to be renewed in it? That old religion of fear shows up all the time in our lives. So we need to be ready with the gospel, ready to remind ourselves that the gospel is not about fear, condemnation, performance. It's not about any of that. Galatians 2:20 tells us what the gospel is. "My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." See, there's grace and there is the gospel. The Son of God loves us and gives himself for us. And not just us, but for the whole world. Christ undid what Adam had done. He assumed humanity on his shoulders on the cross, and there we find ourselves in him. Because of the vicarious life of Christ, Paul says we are in him on the cross. He says it plainly here. "I have been crucified with Christ. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ, all shall be made alive." Paul holds to this gospel truth. In Christ, Paul sees the completed work of God on behalf of all. And that, my friend, is such good news. It is the antidote to fear-based religion. It is the pathway to freedom, generosity, and love. So let's live in that truth today, what Christ has done for you, what he's done for Gentiles and Jews, what he's done for the world. That's the prayer that I have for my own soul today, that I will see the immense magnitude of the love of God for all. That I'll rest in that, and that I will know its joy. That's a prayer that I have for my family, for my wife, and my daughters, and my son, and that's the prayer that I have for you. May it be so. TODAY'S PRAYERS: Lord God Almighty and everlasting father you have brought us in safety to this new day preserve us with your Mighty power that we might not fall into sin or be overcome by adversity. And in all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose  through Jesus Christ Our Lord amen.   Oh God you have made of one blood all the peoples of the earth and sent your blessed son to preach peace to those who are far and those who are near. Grant that people everywhere may seek after you, and find you. Bring the nations into your fold, pour out your Spirit on all flesh, and hasten the coming of your kingdom through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.   And now Lord,  make me an instrument of your peace.  Where there is hatred let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon.  Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope.  Where there is darkness, light.  And where there is sadness,  Joy.  Oh Lord grant that I might not seek to be consoled as to console. To be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.  For it is in the giving that we receive, in the pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in the dying that we are born unto eternal life.  Amen And now as our Lord has taught us we are bold to pray... Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our tresspasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not unto temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. Loving God, we give you thanks for restoring us in your image. And nourishing us with spiritual food, now send us forth as forgiven people, healed and renewed, that we may proclaim your love to the world, and continue in the risen life of Christ.  Amen.  OUR WEBSITE: www.dailyradiobible.com We are reading through the New Living Translation.   Leave us a voicemail HERE: https://www.speakpipe.com/dailyradiobible Subscribe to us at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Dailyradiobible/featured OTHER PODCASTS: Listen with Apple Podcast DAILY BIBLE FOR KIDS DAILY PSALMS DAILY PROVERBS DAILY LECTIONARY DAILY CHRONOLOGICAL  

Isaiah 27:2-6 | Psalm 80:8-15 | Galatian 5:19-23 | John 15:1-17

TEXT: GALATIANS 6:9-10 | DON'T QUIT INTRO ILLUSTRATION : The pancake breakfast at the first Saturday basketball practice of the year. As a first timer on the junior varsity squad, I was ready to quit! EXPLANATION : Paul is coming to the end of his letter to the Galatian churches. Following these two…

As we kick of our new series on the book of Galatians, Rick and Svea discuss false gospels and answer a listener question.Topics Discussed in this Episode:00:00 Intro03:23 Whose approval are you seeking?06:37 An example of appropriate and missing the gospel.10:03 The specific problems the Galatian church faced - adding to the gospel.14:10 We're all trying to reflect Jesus, not each other.17:41 How do we discern legalistic practices vs healthy practices in our own life?22:03 The progressive gospel and the regressive gospel: current, deadly false gospels.28:06 Listener question: How do we balance loving people without accepting all the choices people make?34:43 Upcoming themes in Galatians.

In this sermon, we explore the concept of Christian freedom and how it connects to the message of the Gospel. We examine Galatians 5, where Paul addresses the Galatian church's confusion regarding the practice of Jewish law. Paul emphasizes that true freedom comes from faith in Christ alone and warns against using this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. Instead, he calls for believers to serve one another through love, which is the fulfillment of the law. The sermon also highlights the opposing forces of the flesh and the Spirit, encouraging believers to walk by the Spirit and bear the fruit of the Spirit in their lives.          

Text: Galatians 4:12-31How does what Jesus is doing seep into our every day lived experience? Galatian's uncomfortable allegory opens our eyes to the reality of our life with God, even in this present chaos.

Does God bless us because of how we live our lives? Who should we bless in return? Join us as we explore Paul's passionate letter to the Galatian church. Learn how a promise given to Abraham hundreds of years earlier connects to Jesus and how it impacts our lives today. We'll unpack the timeless truth that we are blessed to be a blessing. Speaker: Angela Beise

Does God bless us because of how we live our lives? Who should we bless in return? Join us as we explore Paul's passionate letter to the Galatian church. Learn how a promise given to Abraham hundreds of years earlier connects to Jesus and how it impacts our lives today. We'll unpack the timeless truth that we are blessed to be a blessing. Speaker: Angela Beise

Paul reminds and reveals to the Galatian believers again the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  

In this episode, Rob and Vinnie continue their overview of the book of Galatians by looking at Paul's response to his opponents in Galatia. Paul explains that membership into the community of God's people is not through the "works of the Law" but by Faith in Christ. He then notes that this is what was preached to Abraham! Paul even says that "the Gospel" was preached to Abraham (Gal 3:8).  Rob and Vinnie then discuss what this means for the Jewish people today. And what about Muslims and Hindus who come to faith in Christ.  Please "follow" this podcast and give a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your review will go a long way toward helping others find this podcast. Then share it with others so that we can get the word of the Gospel of the Kingdom to more people!   We continue to refuse to hide these podcasts behind a paywall. We can only do this if those of you who have been blessed by them and can afford to give ($5, $10, $25, or $1million or more/month) do so. You can give a tax-deductible contribution by following this link.     Good news: the determinetruth App: If you wish to view these podcasts on your smartphone through the Determinetruth app simply download the “tithe.ly church” app on your smartphone. As it downloads you will be asked “What church do you want to connect with”—insert “determinetruth” as the church name you wish to follow (and Mesa as the city if needed). Then you will be asked if you want the tithe.ly logo or the Determinetruth logo—choose the Determinetruth logo. Once it finishes installing, you will be good to go.   Finally, we just want to say thank you for listening in and supporting the work of determinetruth. If you have any questions that you would like us to address, we would love to hear them. Use the contact page on Determinetruth.com If you have been blessed by these episodes, we want to encourage you to make sure you follow this podcast, share it with others, and post a review. By posting a review you make it easier for others to find the podcast on Google searches. If you would like to have Rob and/or Vinnie speak at your church or organization in person or via Zoom, please let us know by filling out the contact info on the Contact me tab on the determinetruth.com site. If you have questions that you would like addressed in future episodes, you may submit them in the Contact me tab on this site.

Welcome! We Are Glad You Are Here!Today we are in Romans 14:1-23The Law of Liberty....LoveFollow along in the following verses in order of presentationRomans 14:1-23, Romans 13:10, Romans 1:1-4, Colossians 2:16-17, Matthew 12:18-21, Romans 14:5-6a, Hebrews 10:19-25, Romans 14:6b, Colossians 2:18, Romans 14:7-8, Colossians 3:23-24, Colossians 2:13-15, Romans 14:10-12, 1 Corinthians 4:5, Proverbs 15:3; 16:2, Romans 14:13-14, Genesis 9:1-4, Acts 10:9-16, Romans 14:15-23, Hebrews 11:6; 10:22, Colossians 2:20-23, James 3:13-18, Matthew 5:9, 2 Corinthians 2:14-15, Galatian 1:10

Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, EphesiansRomans ·      Written by Paul before he ever visited Rome. ·      Written to generate support for his desire to carry the Gospel to Spain. ·      Written as a more detailed (more detailed than Galatians) explanation of the gospel and of his theology·      Texts to Consider: Rom 1:8–17; Rom 3:21–26; Rom 15:17–291 Corinthians·      Written by Paul from Ephesus after he had visited Corinth.·      Written to correct and rebuke the Corinthians over division, toleration of sin, eating food sacrificed to idols, abuse of the Lords Supper, asking for financial support for church in Jerusalem, and other factors.·      Texts to Consider: 1 Cor 1:10–31; 1 Cor 13:1–132 Corinthians·      Written by Paul following the reception of his first letter and a “painful visit.” ·      Written to defend his own ministry in light of the disparagement from the Corinthians and the “Super-Apostles”·      Written to press the importance of completing the offering for the hurting church in Jerusalem·      Texts to Consider: 2 Cor 2:1–4; 2 Cor 2:12–3:3; 2 Cor 10:7–18; 2 Cor 11:4–6Galatians·      Written by Paul after his first missionary journey, but before the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) in 48 AD. This, if accurate, would make Galatians Paul's earliest letter.·      Written to rebuke the Galatian churches (probably the churches of Lystra, Derbe, etc.) for their forsaking the true gospel of justification by faith alone in Christ alone to try to live out the faith by adherence to the law. ·      Paul's shared some details of his first meetings with Peter and James. He makes the point strongly that the gospel that saved them is the same gospel that kept them saved.·      Texts to Consider: Gal 1:6–10; Gal 2:15–3:6Ephesians·      Written by Paul from Roman imprisonment (the one described at the end of Acts) in 60–62 AD. Along with Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon called the Prison Epistles.·      Possibly a circular letter, meaning it went to more than just one church or one region. Some manuscripts don't include “in Ephesus” (Eph 1:1), and this book does not have many personal references. ·      Written to encourage believers to remember who they are positionally in Christ, and live that out practically in a broken world.·      Texts to Consider: Eph 1:19–2:10; Eph 2:11–22; 4:1–7; Eph 4:22–5:2; Eph 5:31–33

Send us a comment or question!Scripture: Matthew 24:4-5, 11, Jude 3-4, 1 Timothy 4:1, 16, 2 Timothy 4:1-5, John 14:6, Galatian 1:6-9Calvary Chapel Franklin: http://calvarychapelfranklin.com/  Email: info@calvarychapelfranklin.com  The Parsons Pad Website: https://parsonspad.com/ Telegram: https://t.me/parsonspadpodcastRumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-1006557?date=this-year Twitter: https://twitter.com/ccfranklintn Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CalvaryChapelFranklin/  Subscribe to the audio podcast: https://parsonspad.buzzsprout.com/  Calvary Chapel Franklin meets at: Sunday mornings: 1724 General George Patton Drive, Brentwood TN 37027 Wednesday evenings: 274 Mallory Station Rd, Franklin TN 37967 (Aspen Grove Christian Church)Mail: PO Box 1993 Spring Hill TN 37174 If you need a Bible, please download the free Gideon's app for iPhone or Android: https://gideons.org/  Calvary Chapel Franklin is a 501c3 tax exempt religious organization. If you would like to donate to support this ministry, please click here: https://calvarychapelfranklin.churchcenter.com/giving 

The Galatian church has strayed from the gospel. Paul tries to bring them back. What's the issue? Let's find out together as we read Galatians 1-3.

Walk by the Spirit Galatians 5:13-26 by William Klock Freedom is a funny thing.  We often think of freedom as being able to do whatever we want, but people who find themselves free to do whatever they want—and who follow through on it—pretty universally end up being the most miserable people on the planet—because that kind of selfish freedom is nothing more than the sinful human heart gone wild.  It's rebellion unchained.  Think of the tycoon or movie stars who look like they've got everything, but end up miserable, friendless, and addicted to drugs having found out their freedom has only made them and the people and world around them worse.  The sinful human heart, the flesh as Paul puts it, can simply never be truly free on its own. Paul understood this all too well himself.  The Lord had delivered his people from slavery and set them free, but he also gave them his law in order to guard that freedom.  Even then, they became enslaved all over again and were no better off than the pagans enslaved to idols and evil powers.  And that's because, as Paul has said, the law was given by God to magnify sin—to concentrate it, to pile it up all in one place so that God, in Jesus the Messiah, could deal with it once and for all.  But that's just it.  Jesus has dealt with sin.  So Paul's been warning the Galatian believers: You can't go back to the law.  You've got to keep moving forward in the Messiah towards God's new world.  To do anything else—even to go back to the good, God-given law—to do anything else is to abandon the new life of the Spirit and to go back to the flesh.  This is where Paul starts in the second half of Galatians 5.  Look with me at Chapter 5, verse 13: When you were called, Brothers [and Sisters], you were called to freedom.   You were called to freedom.  Paul's deliberate evoking the memory of Israel being called by the Lord out of Egypt—taken from “slavery” to the “free slavery” of the gospel as he puts it in Romans 6.  Because, he goes on: You mustn't use that freedom as an opportunity for the flesh.  Rather, you must become each other's servants through love.   As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians, “all things are lawful, but not all things are helpful”.  At the heart of the human problem are idolatry and selfishness.  We've become enslaved to them and Jesus has set us free.  In fact, Jesus has come to set creation itself free from its slavery to our idolatry and selfishness.  That's where God's plan has been headed from the beginning.  What does God's new world look like when everything has been set to rights?  Well, it looks like the cross of Jesus.  It looks like this Messiah-shaped love that gives of itself for the sake of others.  The Galatian believers knew this once.  It's what drew them to the gospel in the first place, but now they're starting to turn on each other, so Paul reminds them: “you've got to become each other's servants through love.”  They're thinking about going back to torah, to the law, so Paul reminds them in verse 14: For the whole law is summed up in one word, namely this: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”   Israel longed for the day when the covenant curses of Deuteronomy would be lifted and the promise would be fulfilled—that day when God's people would finally be able to really and truly “do the law”.  Think of that rabbinic saying that if all Israel would keep the law in full for just a single day the Messiah would come and set everything right.  Think of Paul and the Pharisees trying and trying and trying so hard to keep the law and no matter how hard they tried, they failed.  Now, in Jesus and the Spirit it's finally happened.  In Jesus and the Spirit the Lord has renewed his covenant with his people.  The Spirit has transformed their hearts, causing love for God and for each other to well up like it never had before.  Paradoxically, as they've been set free from the law, they're suddenly finding that they're keeping it.  Or they were until this controversy over circumcision came up.  In turning back to the law, all the old evils of the flesh were coming back.  So verse 15 comes like a slap in the face: But if you bite each other and devour each other, watch out!  You may end up being destroyed by each other.   Paul knew that the divisions making their way into the Galatian churches as a result of these false teachers, weren't just leading to anger and resentment.  It was going to—if it hadn't already—turn into actual violence.  We don't know exactly what was going on in these churches, but for Paul to talk about them biting and devouring each other means that this had escalated way beyond these folks just giving each other angry looks when they passed in the street.  It makes sense.  We who have never faced persecution and who live two thousand years distant from the pagan world of the Greeks and Romans and of Caesar's “Jewish exemption”—we don't really have any idea how high the stakes were for these people.  The Jews and the circumcision folks could very well have been on the verge of bringing it to blows if they thought the gentile believers were going to bring the Roman officials down on them.  The danger was real.  When you consider the things that cause church fights and even splits today, it's hard to blame the Galatians.  I've seen church fights and people leave over really petty things like the colour of the carpet, chairs versus pews, hymns versus choruses, modern language versus traditional language, masks versus no masks.  They were facing real, actual danger. It happens.  Some pressure is applied to the church and we forget the Spirit and let the flesh take control and pretty soon we're biting and devouring each other.  Brothers and Sisters, when we do that we destroy our unified, Messiah-shaped gospel witness to the watching world.  Instead of displaying the sacrificing and reconciling love of Jesus, we simply hold up a mirror and show the world it's fallen, sinful, selfish self—and why would anyone be attracted to that?  Remember what we're about.  The church is called to live the gospel, to live the life of the Spirit so that the watching world can see God's glory and his new creation in us. But how do we do it?  We fail often enough that we have to ask.  How do we live this Messiah-shaped love, because it obviously takes more than just a head knowledge of the gospel.  Paul is clear that we can't go back to the law.  Going back to living by rules might seem like the easy answer, but as he's been saying, that's just another form of slavery.  It was good for the old evil age, but Jesus has inaugurated the age to come and everything has changed.  And we know that freedom isn't just doing whatever we want or whatever feels good, because that just makes us slaves to the very flesh that has corrupted creation.  Here's what Paul writes in verse 16: Let me say this to you: Walk by the Spirit, and you won't do what the flesh wants you to.  For the flesh wants to go against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.  They are opposed to each other, so that you can't do what you want.  But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.   You can almost hear Paul taking a deep breath as he gets ready to give us this fresh imperative.  This is what he's been building towards: Walk by the Spirit.  Don't just live by the Spirit.  That kind of sounds like something you could do by osmosis.  No, walk by the Spirit.  Make a choice with every step you take, with every distraction, with every possible turn that presents itself to you, make the choice to walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh.  At this point we might get into trouble if we misunderstand and think that by “flesh” Paul is talking about the material world or our physical bodies and that by “Spirit” he means our “souls” or some kind of “spiritual” existence apart from the flesh.  The Greeks thought this way.  The material world and the physical body, they thought, were evil—dead weight keeping us down—and so they aspired to a spiritual existence free from the material world and the physical body.  Brothers and Sisters, that's pagan thinking, not Christian (or, for that matter, Jewish) thinking.  God created the world and our bodies and he called them good.  They don't need to be done away with.  In our rebellion against God, we have corrupted ourselves and the world.  What the world and our selves need is his redemption, his renewal.  That's what this biblical language of new creation and resurrection look forward to.  What God has done for Jesus in raising him from the dead, he will one day do for us—and for the whole world.  The gift of his Spirit is the down payment on that hope.  One day God will raise us as he raised Jesus, to the kind of life he intended for us in the beginning, but in the meantime, he's poured out his Spirit on us and his Spirit “fixes”—at least in part—what our rebellion once broke.  And so, Paul would say, on the one hand is our flesh, which represents our rebellion against God, our sin, our self-centred and dehumanising way of life, and on the other stands the Spirit who, if we will only walk with him, will lead us into God's new creation. I think Paul had in mind Moses' exhortation to Israel as they were ready to enter the promised land: I set before you death and life; choose life!  But that's impossible to do, Paul warns, if you turn back to the law.  To turn back to the law is to turn aside from the gospel, to turn aside from the crucified and risen Messiah, and that means that to turn back to the law is to reject the very Spirit given to lead us into God's new creation.  You can't walk backwards into the kingdom of God, Brothers and Sisters.  But, he says, if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.  I think Paul's being deliberately provocative, because he's using the imagery of the Israelites being led through the wilderness by the pillar of cloud and fire—what many would say was a manifestation of God's Spirit all the way back in the exodus.  And here he says, if you are led by that same Spirit who led Israel back then—remember how Jesus has changed everything—if you are led by that Spirit today, he will not lead you back to the law. At this point Paul contrasts what these two sorts of lives look like, the flesh on the one hand and the Spirit on the other.  Look at verses 19-21: Now the works of the flesh are obvious.   In other words, everyone knows these things—not just Jews, who have the law as a standard of good behaviour—but even the pagans know these things aren't good.  Everyone knows the world is not the way it should be and everyone knows that these are the sorts of “works” that have made it the way it is, the sorts of “works” that hurt others, that destroy our relationships—even that destroy ourselves.  And so Paul launches into a litany of human evils: They are such things as fornication, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, bursts of rage, selfish ambition, factiousness, divisions, moods of envy, drunkenness, wild partying, and similar things.   Paul starts with a trio of words for sexual sins, maybe because sexual sins are so often the worst when it comes to the selfish use and harm of others for our own pleasure or maybe because they're so often bound up with idolatry, which is what he mentions next: idolatry—the root of all of our sin—and sorcery—which is often the way pagans try to set the world to rights by the invocation of false gods and powers instead of turning to the living God.  From there, Paul gives us a list of eight words that pretty well cover the whole gamut of antisocial behaviour and they do it so densely that it's actually hard to differentiate between some of them: hostilities, strife, jealousy, bursts of rage, selfish ambition, factiousness, divisions, and moods of envy.  Paul could easily have summed it all up in two or three, but he wanted to emphasise just how wrong the situation in Galatia was.  They'd become focused on the flesh and it was playing out in a whole host of fleshly evils that were threatening to tear the churches apart as they demonised each other. And then there are two final fleshy works.  There's drunkenness, to which today we could easily add all sorts of drug use—both legal and illegal—that deaden our senses, dull our intellect, and that make it impossible to follow the leading of the Spirit.  And, finally, wild partying—orgies—that were common throughout the pagan world and were often the places where the other works of the flesh were celebrated and cultivated.  And Paul says in verse 21: I told you before and I tell you again: people who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.   “People who do such things” is in the present tense, which is Paul's way of stressing that he's talking about people who make these things a way of life, not necessarily people who occasionally lapse into sin and repent.  His point is that if these are the things that characterise your life, if you make a habit of selfishness, of idolatry, and of using and abusing others for your own pleasure or ambition, you will not inherit the kingdom of God.  Why?  Because these are the sorts of behaviours, the sorts of sins, that have made the world the mess it is.  The gospel is about God, through Jesus, setting this broken world to rights and about his people having a part in that setting to rights.  It's simply impossible for those who are set on defacing God's creation to have a place in the age to come.  When the day comes for God to finally bring to completion what Jesus has begun, to finally bring that life of which the Spirit is the down-payment and foretaste, the works of the flesh and all those who practise them will be destroyed, will be purged from creation as part of its finally being set to rights.  That doesn't mean there's no chance for repentance in the meantime.  That, of course, is a major part of the good news about Jesus.  Trust in him and your past is forgiven and his Spirit is poured into you so that you can bear his fruit and be part of God's new creation, which Paul describes in verses 22-23: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.  There is no law that opposes things like that!   The two lists speak for themselves.  Imagine two communities, one characterized by the works of the flesh and the other by the fruit of the Spirit and you know right away which one you want to live in.  Where the works of the flesh are all about “me”, the fruit of the Spirit are all about others.  Most of these virtues require another person as an object in order for them to be lived out.  And that's the way of the kingdom.  To love others is the way of a Messiah-shaped people.  And he writes: Against such things there is no law.   Whether it's the people wanting to go back to torah or the local Roman officials or pagan neighbours angry that these new believers in Jesus have abandoned the pagan temples and rites, Paul's saying: If you walk by the Spirit and bear this kind of fruit, no one's going to be able to complain about you.  In fact, you might just make them constructively curious about the gospel!  But now, in verse 24, here's the really crucial point: And those who belong to the Messiah, Jesus, crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.   Through faith and baptism into the Messiah, the flesh—and all its disordered passions and desires—has been crucified.  As surely as Jesus was dead and buried, so has your old self and my old self.  And as surely as Jesus was raised to new life, God has poured his Spirit into us and set us walking straight into his new creation.  The factionalism and divisions, the biting and devouring had no place in those Galatian churches.  It was nailed to the cross with Jesus.  The same goes for any works of the flesh that threaten the witness and unity of the church today.  If we belong to the Messiah, we have crucified the flesh—past tense, done deal—and we're now filled with God's own Spirit.  So…verse 25: If we live by the Spirit, let's line up with the Spirit.  We shouldn't be conceited, vying with one another, and jealous of each other.   Back in Chapter 3 Paul asked, “Are you who began with the Spirit going to end with the flesh?”  No.  If we live by the Spirit, we need to line up with the Spirit.  When he says “live”, Paul doesn't just mean to go on existing; he means that through the Spirit, we who were dead in sin are now alive to God.  Again, the life of the Spirit is the anticipation of the day when God will raise us to new life as he did Jesus.  Brothers and Sisters, God has given us his Spirit to lead us through the wilderness and into the promised land, into God's new world set to rights.  That's why Paul says that to live by the Spirit is to line-up with the Spirit—like using your compass to draw a line on a map to your destination.  Follow the line—follow the Spirit, and he will see you through to God's future.  Don't stray into conceit or jealousy or factions, just make the conscious decision to follow the Spirit. What does that mean for us?  Well, I think in our highly individualistic culture we tend to read this as little more than pursuing personal holiness.  But when I read this familiar passage in context, what really jumps out at me is that Paul's main focus here is on the unity of the church and the witness to Jesus and the gospel that grow out of that loving unity.  The fruit of the Spirit, again, are virtues that shape a whole community into the image of Jesus and that show the world what God's new age is going to look like.  Paul's overarching theme in Galatians is the unity of the church as a witness to the power of the gospel and the age to come.  Even if the specifics have changed, the problems remain.  I think, actually, that the Jew-gentile problem of the Galatian churches pales in comparison to the failures of the modern church.  There have been times in history when Christians have been forced to separate from one another over serious matters of doctrine and practice—following Paul when he says to cast out the false teachers.  But in the last couple of hundred years we've begun to divide over increasingly trivial issues.  And then, for the last fifty or sixty years, as our culture has become obsessed with commercialism, we've carried that same consumer mindset into the church.  Pair that with our tendency to separate over trivialities and it's been a disaster.  Christians flit from place to place, hardly ever thinking of what they bring or what they might contribute, but always looking for what they can take or what new experience they can have and, in return, churches have begun treating not only our fellowship and worship, but even the gospel itself as a commodity to be marketed, not to family members, not to brothers and sisters, but to religious and spiritual consumers—churches competing with each other for members who are themselves self-absorbed—the very opposite of the sort of communities Paul envisioned being shaped by the Spirit. A Spirit-filled church is made up of brothers and sisters who give and who forgive.  It's a church full of diversity as people who ordinarily would have nothing in common are drawn together by the good news about Jesus, people who have made Jesus—not their interests or ethnicities or social class—their identity.  A Spirit-filled church is a community that models not the old age of every man for himself, not the old age of divisions and factions, but that models God's new creation in the midst of and for the sake of the old.  A Spirit-filled church, bearing fruit, will offend as in its light the works of the flesh—idolatry, sexual immorality, drunkenness, and strife—are exposed for what they are, but at the same time a Spirit-fill church, bearing fruit, is the community of light and love everyone in this dark world is looking for.  They ought to see it in us.  Our life together ought to make the world constructively curious.  People ought to be asking what makes us different.  And then, Brothers and Sisters, we have our chance to tell them about Jesus and about the love of God for sinners.  But we don't have this community—not the way we should.  So what do we do instead?  We market our programs or the production values of our worship experience or our preaching or our politics.  One church advertises, “We ain't your grandma's church!” and on the other side we traditionalists advertise, “We are literally your grandma's church”.  And, Brothers and Sisters, all the world sees are factions and divisions.  Thanks be to God that in his grace, that's not entirely true.  Even with our failures and disunity, the world still sees the gospel in us—but not the way it should. Think again of those Christians in Galatia.  Their trust in Jesus and the gospel brought them into this new community of the Spirit and they turned away from, they withdrew from the pagan rituals and the false gods that permeated their society.  Their neighbours, their families, the officials—Caesar—didn't like it.  Suspicion turned to opposition turned to persecution and eventually martyrdom.  And yet little communities like this conquered that pagan empire with the gospel even as that empire did its best to stomp them out.  Why?  Because they lined up with the Spirit and bore his fruit, because that loving, self-giving fruit—particularly as it came under fire—bore witness to the glory of the cross and the love of a God unlike any god the pagans had ever known.  Because those little Spirit-filled communities were full of a gospel hope in the world set to rights by a God who loves so much that he will give his own life.  That hope drew them close together, it concentrated the light they bore, and that lit up the darkness.  I pray, Brothers and Sisters, that that same light would shine from us to lighten the darkness as we, by God's grace, walk by his Spirit. Let's pray: Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people; that we may produce abundantly the fruit of good works, and receive your abundant reward, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Saturday, 23 November 2024   For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Matthew 5:18   “Amen! For I say to you, until if it shall pass – the heaven and the earth – jot one or one stroke, no, not shall pass from the law until all should become” (CG).   In the previous verse, Jesus said He did not come to disintegrate the law but to fulfill it. Now, He continues that thought with, “Amen!”   It is the customary Hebrew word for “truly” or “sure.” As HELPS Word Studies notes, “...an ‘emphasis marker,' introduces a statement of pivotal importance.” After preparing their ears, He continues with, “For I say to you, until if it shall pass – the heaven and the earth.”   It is a way of saying that the statement He will make is as binding at the time He speaks it as it will be at the end of the known world itself. It is thus an eternal truth that stands before God. That truth is, “jot one or one stroke.”   The Greek word translated as jot is found only here, ióta. One can see the etymological root of our modern word iota. The jot equates to the Hebrew yod (י), the tenth and smallest letter of the aleph-beth. It would be easy to miss a jot when transcribing a document. The stroke equates to a dash used to make a letter. Some letters are so close in appearance, that the smallest mark can make them appear differently –   כ ב – beth and kaph ר ך – daleth and resh תחה – he, kheth, tav   The slightest change in these and other letters can change the entire meaning of what is being said. Understanding this, Jesus continues with, “no, not shall pass from the law until all should become.”   The meaning is that there can be no change in the word of the Lord. It is fixed, it is unchanging, it is binding, and all who are under the law will be judged by every precept set forth in it... until all is fulfilled. Nobody under the law can get around the law. All under law are obligated to every jot and every stroke.   Why anyone who was never under the law would want to be put under that burden is very hard to understand. As Paul says concerning circumcision, which is the benchmark that represents the law –   “Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage. 2 Indeed I, Paul, say to you that if you become circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing. 3 And I testify again to every man who becomes circumcised that he is a debtor to keep the whole law. 4 You have become estranged from Christ, you who attempt to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.” Galatian 5:1-4   Life application: As the law is binding upon Israel, what does that mean for them? Christ has come. And so, what is their state?   The answer is that in failing to come to Christ, they forsook the grace of God and remain under the law, a law that is impossible for fallen man to fulfill. In this, only condemnation remains. Any individual Jew who comes to Christ is freed from the law. But for the nation as a whole and all individual Jews who reject Jesus, there can be no salvation.   This is also true with those who reject Christ's grace and voluntarily place themselves under the law (as Paul notes above). For those who were saved and later do this, his salvation remains, but any hope of rewards will be lost for their faithlessness.   However, someday, Israel will come to Christ. This is noted explicitly in Zechariah and elsewhere. It is also clearly noted in the typology of Joshua 3 and 4, the sermons of which can be found at the Superior Word.   For maximum happiness, come to Jesus by faith, accepting His full, final, finished, and forever work. In this, you will be in the sweet spot. Grace, grace! Marvelous grace bestowed upon us through the precious blood of Christ.   Glorious God, help us to trust in You and not in our own pitiful deeds of righteousness. It is Jesus who makes us righteous. What can we add to that? And so, Lord, may our deeds be in gratitude for the salvation You have provided, not in attempts to merit it in the first place. Amen.  

In this Bible Story, we are able to read the letter Paul wrote to the Galatian church. Paul, with the love and wisdom of Jesus, implores the Galatian church to stop binding themselves to the law. He encourages them to live under grace and live in the Spirit. This story is inspired by Galatians. Go to BibleinaYear.com and learn the Bible in a Year.Today's Bible verse is Galatians 1:10 from the King James Version.Episode 231: During his travels, Paul heard about the lies that were being spread in Galatia. He heard about how this false teaching was impacting the church that he loved, so he wrote them a letter. In this letter, he called out the foolishness of this new teaching and reminded them of his own past experiences with the law. He reminded them that it is in Christ that we find our righteousness, not the law. And he shared his heart for them, reminding both them and us the importance of walking according to The Holy Spirit, not the flesh.Hear the Bible come to life as Pastor Jack Graham leads you through the official BibleinaYear.com podcast. This Biblical Audio Experience will help you master wisdom from the world's greatest book. In each episode, you will learn to apply Biblical principles to everyday life. Now understanding the Bible is easier than ever before; enjoy a cinematic audio experience full of inspirational storytelling, orchestral music, and profound commentary from world-renowned Pastor Jack Graham.Also, you can download the Pray.com app for more Christian content, including, Daily Prayers, Inspirational Testimonies, and Bedtime Bible Stories.Visit JackGraham.org for more resources on how to tap into God's power for successful Christian living.Pray.com is the digital destination of faith. With over 5,000 daily prayers, meditations, bedtime stories, and cinematic stories inspired by the Bible, the Pray.com app has everything you need to keep your focus on the Lord. Make Prayer a priority and download the #1 App for Prayer and Sleep today in the Apple app store or Google Play store.Executive Producers: Steve Gatena & Max BardProducer: Ben GammonHosted by: Pastor Jack GrahamMusic by: Andrew Morgan SmithBible Story narration by: Todd HaberkornSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cut! Galatians 5:2-12 by William Klock Back in 1998, just after we were married, Veronica and I travelled to Montreal for her interview with the US immigration folks.  While we were there, we took a day to drive to Ottawa to do some sight-seeing.  It was March and still very much winter in Montreal and as we left the island, driving over the bridge on the Trans-Canada Highway where the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers converge, we were surprised to see a Jeep speeding across the frozen river, going in the opposite direction back towards Montreal, driving on the ice.  Having lived my whole life on the West Coast I'd never seen anything like that myself.  I have no idea about the history of bridges to and from Montreal Island, but I would guess that at one point riding a horse or driving a wagon across the frozen river was the usual way to get across during Winter.  But then Spring would come, the ice would melt, and all that would change.  I expect there were ferries that carried people across the rest of the year, until the river froze again. Now, for Paul writing to the Galatians, Jesus is like that spring thaw.  Ever since they'd left Egypt, the identity of the people of God had been tied up in their observance of the law.  Circumcision was the beginning of it—eight days after a boy was born.  That marked him out as one of God's people, as a member of God's covenant and an heir of his promises.  But through life, that identity was lived out by keeping the law: by celebrating the Passover every year, by keeping the Sabbath, by offering sacrifices at the temple, by eating only clean foods and by avoiding unclean things and people.  The law was the way to righteousness, the way to fellowship with God.  But that was like driving across the river on the ice.  It was all right and good—and in the case of torah it was God-given—but it was for a time.  Things changed.  Jesus changed them.  Jesus changed everything.  In Jesus Spring has sprung.  God's new creation has begun.  The old world is starting to thaw.  Think of the wonderful image that Lewis used in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with Narnia frozen by the witch—always winter, but never Christmas.  But when Aslan arrived, the whole country began to thaw and the new life of Spring began break through the snow and the ice.  Jesus has changed everything and in Jesus' new world, the law no longer counts—it'll no longer get you across the river, because the river's thawed.  Try to get across with the law now and you'll just be caught up in the current and lost downstream.  In Galatians 5:2 Paul puts it this way: Look here: I, Paul, am telling you that if you get circumcised, the Messiah will be of no use to you.   So over the last four chapters Paul has made his argument to the Galatians and, we saw last week, he's finished it with the command to cast out the false teachers—to cast them out the way Sarah cast out Hagar and Ishmael—because there's only one family that has inherited God's promises.  Cast them out.  They're undermining the gospel.  Don't let their heresy fester; cast them out.  But I expect Paul knew they would need more to persuade them to do that, so now he turns back to the circumcision issue.  Actually, this is the first time that he mentions circumcision outright in the letter.  So he sort of pulls himself up to his full height and says, “Look here!  I, Paul—you know, the apostle who met Jesus personally and who told you the good news about Jesus in the first place—I want to be very clear that if you follow the advice of these circumcision folks, if you get circumcised, Jesus the Messiah will be of no use to you.” Those are some powerful words.  These pagan gentiles had been completely captivated by the good news about Jesus: this man in whom God became incarnate, who died for the sake of his people, who rose from death and then ascended to his throne.  They were captivated by the good news about this Lord who was unlike any lord or god they'd ever known.  And they believed, they'd been baptised, and God had plunged them into his Spirit and they'd been transformed.  They knew the power of the gospel.  They knew the power of Jesus and the Spirit.  And Paul's saying, “If you get circumcised, all of that is gone.   The good news here is that if Paul's putting this way, it means the Galatian believers haven't yet caved into the pressure from the circumcision agitators.  Reading between the lines, it sounds like the agitators have split up the church with the ethnic Jews—the circumcised—on the inside, while the gentile believers are being forced to sort of participate or to watch from the sidelines—just as things were in the temple in Jerusalem with Jews in the inner court making their offerings and sacrifices at the altar while the gentiles were stuck in the outer court imagining what was going on inside.  Maybe the agitators had got them eating kosher and observing the Jewish calendar, but none of the gentiles had actually gone all the way to circumcision yet.  And Paul's trying to get to them, to persuade them before they do.  Because if they do, it's like driving your car onto that thin, melting ice.  Jesus has made a better way.  So he goes on in verse 3: I testify once more, against every person who gets circumcised, that he is thereby under obligation to perform the entire law.   Paul reminds them what it really means to be under the law.  Even the agitators seem to have forgotten that.  They wanted these gentile believers to do just enough so that they could pass for Jews with the authorities: get circumcised, stop buying pork in the market, observe the Sabbath and other Jewish holy days.  They were motivated by fear.  These new gentile believers were abandoning the gods and the religious customs of the Greeks and Romans and to avoid getting into trouble they were claiming the Jewish exemption—except they weren't Jews—and if the authorities caught on, it might bring persecution on the whole Jewish community.  So the agitators wanted these gentile believers to take on some of the obvious Jewish externals.  And Paul reminds them of what they should have known already: that's not how the law works.  The law is all or nothing.  They've accused Paul of only teaching part of the gospel and now Paul turns around and accuses them of teaching only part of the law.  If the gentile believers go the way of circumcision, they'll end up neither genuine Messiah people nor genuine torah-observing Jews. Back in 2:15-21 Paul said that “through the law [I] died to the law” and that “if righteousness is through the law, the Messiah died to no purpose.”  Now in verse 4 he says the same thing another way: You are split off from the Messiah, you people who want to be justified by the law.  You have dropped out of grace.   To look for justification—which means to show you're a member of God's covenant people—to look for that through torah, is to reject the grace of the gospel.  He's been stressing that God's covenant people are now those marked out by baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.  That faith in Jesus—and nothing else—is what marks us out as God's people.  The moment you add to that—whether torah or anything else—you lose the gospel and when you lose the gospel you lose God's grace.  In this case, if circumcision is what marks out God's people, then there was no reason for the Messiah to die and to take that old mark in your flesh as a means of justifying your place in the covenant is to reject Jesus and the gospel. But why?  Well, Paul explains in verses 5 and 6: For we are waiting eagerly, by the Spirit and by faith, for the hope of righteousness.  For in the Messiah, Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any power.  What matters is faith, working through love.   Do you remember last week when I was closing and talked about how seriously Paul took false gospels?  We tend to dither around and make excuses when it comes to false teaching.  We often struggle to know where to draw the line.  It's not always easy to tell where the line is—where something that's just poor teaching crosses into bona fide heresy.  In contrast, Paul was really clear: Cast them out.  Get rid of them.  Don't let the false teachers influence the church.  And the way to tell when something crossed the line was to ask if this teaching was still pointing forward into the age to come or if it was something that would drag us back into the old evil age.  Paul gets at that again here when he says that we're waiting eagerly, by the Spirit and by faith, for the hope of righteousness.  In other words, true Christians will always be looking forward in hope to the day when God will vindicate our faith in Jesus, that day when he will finally judge sin and evil and wipe it all from his creation, when death will be no more, when everything will finally be set to rights, and we—his people through faith in Jesus—will live in his presence forever.  Does our theology, does our practise honour the saving work of Jesus and the Spirit and does it look forward to the day when the work of Jesus and the Spirit will finally be fulfilled—or—is our theology or our practise dragging us back into the old age, into the things that once held us captive—whether the law for Jews or the powers of this evil age for the gentiles.  In this case, in terms of practical outworking, does our theology and practise bring us together as one people in Jesus, or does it separate us.  Again, think of the temple with Jews on the inside and gentiles on the out—and how these circumcision folks were trying to impose that kind of template on the Galatian churches all over again. In contrast, in Jesus it no longer matters whether you're circumcised or not.  That was part of the old covenant, the old way, but the ice has melted and that old way won't get you anywhere anymore.  No, someday, before the watching eyes of the whole world, God will call us his own and it won't because of any marks we bear in our flesh or because of anything we've done, it will because we have been baptised into, because by faith we have put on the Messiah as our identity and because God has poured his Spirit into us.  Jesus and the Spirit are the ticket that will give us passage on the ferry across the river.  What matters, he says, is faith working through love.  Faith is the only way to get the ticket—and here Paul hints at what he'll have to say later in the chapter—faith is more than just a thinking thing; it's more than just giving our intellectual assent to the propositions of the creed.  Faith means trust.  Faith means loyalty.  Faith means allegiance.  Faith means committing ourselves to God's new creation made manifest in the risen Jesus and the gift of the Spirit—a new creation made possible by love—and so faith, true, real faith in God's love and that returns God's love and that manifests God's love to the world, that kind of faith is what matters.  That kind of faith is what marks out the people of God and that kind of faith is what will see us through—through hardships and opposition and persecution and maybe even martyrdom—that is the faith that will bring us through to the day when all God's promises will finally be fulfilled. And Paul thought they knew all this, which is why he's so shocked and frustrated with them.  It's why he wants to know how they could have gone so wrong so quickly.  See how he continues in verse 7: You were running so well.  Who cut in on you and stopped you being persuaded by the truth?  This persuasion didn't come from the one who called you.    When Paul left them they were well on their way, running for the prize—running into God's new creation—but now they've gone off course.  “Who's cut in on you?” Paul asks.  It's not the normal word we might expect him to use for someone interrupting the runners, slowing them down or setting them on the wrong course, but Paul is making a harsh accusation here and so he tempers it with some wordplay.  They want to be circumcised, they want to be cut in their flesh.  That was never part of the plan for this race, so he asks, “You who want to be cut, who's cut in on you?”  They were set on the truth of the gospel, but these other folks showed up and have cut in on all that with a false gospel.  He reminds them that it was God who called them to this in the beginning—through the good news about Jesus—but this new persuasion, this new “truth” they're going after, that came from somewhere else—not from God.  They're playing a dangerous game and Paul reminds them of an old Jewish proverb in verse 9: A little yeast works its way through the whole lump.   I think what he's trying to say is that once you start going astray from the gospel, it's not long before you've lost the gospel entirely.  We see this a lot down through church history.  Add something to Jesus as a marker of covenant membership and pretty soon you've lost the whole gospel.  Paul might also be warning them that once you start listening to one false teacher, pretty soon you start listening to anyone.  That happens a lot too.  And so Paul exhorts them: I am persuaded in the Lord that you won't differ from me on this.  But the one who is troubling you will bear the blame, whoever he may be.   They were originally persuaded by God to pursue the truth of the gospel, but these other folks have persuaded them to pursue something else, so Paul stresses that the Lord has persuaded him.  Persuaded him of what?  That, in the end, they'll come back to the gospel truth.  He says literally “you will think nothing else”.  When Paul says that he is “persuaded in the Lord”—something he doesn't say often—it means that he's been praying about something and that the Lord has given him a clear conviction.  It would be dangerous for us talk this way, but Paul was in that unique position of having the authority of an apostle.  The point seems to be that the Lord has revealed to Paul that the Galatians will come back to the truth, but that it will be Paul's Spirit-inspired words that will be the means of bringing them back. By the same token, this false teacher who has been trying to lead them astray will “bear the blame”.  Paul might be referring to the way that the Galatians will cast him out—as he told them to do at the end of Chapter 4 or it might even be more serious than that.  He might be talking about God's judgement and condemnation of this false teacher.  Paul just calls him “whoever he may be” and I don't think that's because Paul didn't know who this man was.  The church in those first decades was small and everyone knew everyone.  Whoever it was, Paul's point is that they can't dither on this false teaching.  They can't treat it as something of secondary importance.  There are lots of things on which Christians can differ.  Someone's wrong and someone's right, but there are some issues on which we can disagree while still holding tightly to the truth of the gospel.  This was not one of those things.  This was one of those things on which the gospel stands or falls and Paul wants them to know—it's a bit of a threat—that this false teacher will without a doubt be held accountable—and the quiet part he doesn't say out loud is that anyone who goes along with him will also go down with him.  He's headed out onto thin ice with his car and anyone who goes along for the ride will end up at the bottom of the river with him.  Brothers and Sisters, false teaching is no joke. Then verse 11.  Paul seems to be addressing an accusation against him. As for me, my dear brothers [and sisters], if I am still announcing circumcision, why are people still persecuting me?  If I were, the scandal of the cross would have been neutralised.   It sounds like these agitators, knowing Paul's history as a Pharisee, back in the days before Jesus met him on the road to Damascus, it sounds like they've been telling the Galatians that Paul was still preaching circumcision—just not to them.  Saying that Paul's a hypocrite.  And so Paul appeals to his own suffering and persecution.  They knew what had happened to him.  It sounds like when he first showed up in Galatia, he was beaten and bloody and weak because of persecution in some nearby town or city.  Paul appeals to that.  This is a strand that runs all through Galatians that I'd never noticed until I started this series of sermons, but it's there.  For Paul, suffering for the sake of the gospel was often proof of its truth.  It goes back to the cross.  Jesus' crucifixion set the pattern so that to follow him wasn't just a new way to be religious—as so many people treat it today: it's good for me, but if you don't like it that's okay too.  The gospel isn't just another option on the religious smorgasbord.  For Paul, the good news about Jesus is the truth that had already begun to change the world.  It is the truth that Jesus has already overthrown the powers and kings of the present age and inaugurated the age to come.  And, in light of that, Paul didn't see the churches as little religious clubs, but as a network of communities where people, filled with God's own Spirit, were living out God's new creation in the midst of the old, declaring that Jesus is Lord right under the nose of Caesar, who made that claim for himself—for example.  Living as one people in the midst of ferocious ethnic and religious divides.  Living as a people of grace and mercy in the midst of a dog-eat-dog world.  As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, this made the gospel a scandal and a stumbling block.  Even this early in his career as an apostle and mission Paul can say it.  His calling is to proclaim the good news of Jesus, crucified and risen and the world's true Lord.  The Spirit works in the hearts of those who hear that good news.  In some the Spirit uses that message to bring about faith, hope, and love, but for others the scandal of the crucified God causes them to cast stones at the messenger who dares announce this anti-religious, anti-social, and unpatriotic message.  If all Paul had been announcing was that pagans could get circumcised and join the Jews in their synagogues in order to become exempt from pagan worship, why no one would have been persecuting him. No, if Paul had been doing that, the scandal of the cross would have been neutralised—something I think every generation finds its own way of doing as we trim the culturally offensive bits of the gospel.  And so Paul says, closing off the paragraph in verse 12: I wish those who are making trouble for you would cut the whole lot off.   Paul comes back to his wordplay with circumcision and cutting off.  Don't stop at circumcision, just cut the whole thing off.  Of course, under torah, that sort of mutilation would have cut them off from covenant.  But, too, the goddess Cybele was popular in Galatia and it wasn't uncommon for her devotees to work themselves up in a manic ritual that ended with them castrating themselves.  I suspect Paul has that in mind, because as he's said, whether it was the Jews under the law or the gentiles under their pagan powers, humanity before Jesus was enslaved and to undermine the cross through circumcision, going back to the law, well, these gentiles might as well just go back to their old pagan gods and their old pagan worship.  Either way, they'll end up “cut off” from God and from his people. That's as far as we'll go this week.  As much as the Galatian problem may seem distant and irrelevant to us, since circumcision and keeping the Jewish law aren't likely to be our problem, what I hope you can see is the underlying issue.  There are things in every age that we do, by which we undercut the good news of Jesus' death and resurrection.  The Galatians were motivated by fear of persecution—and that's often the driver.  We're afraid, whether it's that we might lose our lives or just offend friends or family, for the sake of the gospel and so we compromise, we water things down, we shave the sharp corners off the message where it confronts our culture and the powers of our day.  We end up with a false gospel powerless to save and we run the risk ourselves of losing our way—of running off the race course, of trying to cross the river on the melting spring ice…and putting ourselves in a position where we have forsaken God's grace and made the Messiah of no use to us.  Paul reminds us here that suffering, that persecution for the sake of gospel truth is part of the formula, because we trust in and follow and proclaim the crucified and risen Messiah—a stumbling block to Jews and a scandal to gentiles.  Brothers and Sisters, take hold of that gospel truth and run—run the course that leads straight to God's new age, straight to his new creation and let no one cut in on you, take no short cut.  There is only one way.  It begins with trusting Jesus and the Spirit, but it also means continuing to trust Jesus and the Spirit along the way, trusting that God will bring us through suffering—just as he did Jesus—to that day when we ourselves will be raised from death and everything is made new. Let's pray: O God, you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright: grant to us such strength and protection as may support us in all dangers and carry us through all temptations; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Cast Out the Slave-girl and her Son Galatians 4:12-5:1 by William Klock I have a non-Christian—or it would be better to say, anti-Christian—relative who, I've observed, is very uncomfortable with me being a preacher.  At one point she just came out and said it: As far as she's concerned, preachers are just moralising, kill-joy demagogues who glory in lording their authority over people and pontificating to them what they can and cannot do.  People like this think of God as a kill-joy in the sky and the preacher as his sour and spiteful earthly representative.  She has no clue that the preacher is the intermediary between the loving God who has given his word to make himself known and his people, filled with his Spirit, who desire to hear his word that they might know him and love him in return.  They have no idea that both the Bible and preaching sit at the intersection of God's love for his people and his people's love for him.  But it's not just non-Christians.  Even people in the church forget that God speaks—and he tells us what he expects of us—out of love and they forget that the preacher preaches that word out of love, too.  And so they get angry when they hear things they don't like.  Sometimes they get angry with God and leave the church entirely.  Sometimes they just shoot the messenger—the preacher.  And that's where Paul is at as we come to the middle of Galatians 4.  Paul knew the people in the Galatian churches well.  He loved them as brothers and sisters in the Lord.  And he's deeply troubled by what he's heard has been going on there ever since these agitators had arrived.  This is why he's writing to them.  And so far he's mostly been talking theology—explaining why these people urging them back into torah are undermining the gospel, the good news about Jesus.  And he's been building this argument as he's walked them through the biblical story, walked them through God's covenants with his people, walked them through the significance of what Jesus did when he died and rose again.  And he's about to finally make the point he's been working toward.  He's about to tell them what they need to do in light of all this.  But in verses 11-20 he pauses and he takes a breath and he reminds them who he is.  He reminds that he's not only their friend, but that he's their brother in the Lord who loves them—and that that's why he's taking the trouble to say all of this.  Look at Chapter 4, beginning at verse 12. Brothers [and Sisters], become like me!  Because I became like you.  You did me no wrong.  No, you know that it was through bodily weakness that I announced the gospel to you in the first place.  You didn't despise or scorn me, even though my condition was quite a test for you, but you welcomed me as if I were God's angel, as if I were Messiah Jesus!  What's happened to the blessing you had then?  Yes, I can testify that you would have torn out your eyes, if you'd been able to, and given them to me.  So have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?   Become like me, because I became like you.  These Christians were mostly gentiles.  Paul was a Jew.  But as he would later write to the Corinthians, he has become like all things to everyone.  Knowing that the gospel unified them as one in Jesus and the Spirit, Paul came and fellowshipped with them—he prayed and sang and worshipped and ate with them, despite their ethnic differences—which is something that can't be said of these false teachers.  And Paul reminds them of when he first arrived.  We don't know exactly what the problem was, but it sounds very much like he arrived in Galatia bloody and beaten after preaching the good news in some neighbouring city.  This might be what he was referring to when he said the brutality of the cross had been shown to them.  He'd stumbled into their fellowship having very nearly shared Jesus' crucifixion—and they welcomed him.  That would have been a dangerous thing to do.  Harbouring a man who had been in trouble another town over could have brought the local authorities down on them.  It sure wouldn't have looked good to the community around them.  But they welcomed Paul and took care of him as he regained his strength.  In the meantime, he proclaimed Jesus and the good news in his weakness.  And they received Paul and his message as if he were an angel, a messenger from God—practically as if he'd been Jesus himself. “So now,” Paul asks, “what's happened to that welcome?  Back then you knew my love for you and you would have plucked out your own eyes and given them to me if you'd thought it would help.  But now I've told you the truth—because I love you—and you're treating me like an enemy.”  Now he goes on in verse 17: Those other folks are zealous for you, but it's not in a good cause. False teachers are often full of zeal.  Enough so that they con good Christians into thinking that they've got the truth.  And then those conned Christians lash out when the pastor who loves them comes along to show them how the false teachers are wrong.  It happens over and over and over.  Paul says: They want to shut you out, so that you will then be zealous for them. Paul has the temple in mind, with its segregated courts.  Jews could go into the temple court, but gentiles were stuck outside.  They couldn't go in.  And these agitators, these false teachers are trying to make the Galatian churches like that.  The Jewish believers can come into church, they can eat at the Lord's Table, but the gentiles are stuck outside until they get circumcised and start living according to torah.  So Paul says, Well, it's always good to be zealous in a good cause, and not only when I'm there with you.  My children, I seem to be in labour with you all over again, until the Messiah is fully formed in you.  I wish I were there with you right now, and could change me tone of voice.  I really am at a loss about you.   Paul knew all about being zealous.  He'd been zealous for torah and he'd been zealous for persecuting Christians.  And then he'd met the risen Jesus and now he's zealous for the gospel.  Zeal isn't the point.  You can be zealous for anything.  So don't be taken in by the zealousness of false teachers and a false gospel.  And we get a sense of how Paul loves these people and, because of that, how he's so exasperated.  He thought they knew all of this.  He'd laboured over the gospel with them before, but now it feels like he's got to labour with them over the gospel all over again, because it's obvious they weren't as mature in the gospel—in the Messiah—as he had thought. It happens.  Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses knock on the door and they've got carefully worked out arguments that fool far too many Christians.  Prosperity hucksters will tell you they've got the “full gospel” and they'll back it up with great zeal.  In our own day we've got various Messianic groups or the Adventists with a false gospel rooted in the same errors Paul confronted in Galatia.  They dupe Christians into their false teaching and, apart from praying for such people, all we can really do is confront false teaching with gospel truth.  That's what Paul does here.  Look at verse 21: So you want to live under the law, do you?  All right, tell me this: are you prepared to hear what the law says?  For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave-girl and one by the free woman.  Now the child of the slave-girl was born according to the flesh, while the child of the free woman was born according to promise.   Do you recognise the story Paul's talking about?  He's going back to Genesis 16.  This is after God's promise to Abraham, but before the birth of Isaac.  Abraham and Sarah trusted the Lord.  They believed he would provide a son to inherit the promise, but from their perspective a natural heir was impossible.  Sarah was an elderly woman and elderly women past their child-bearing years don't bear children.  So they followed the custom of the day.  Abraham took Sarah's slave-girl, Hagar, as his concubine and had a child by her.  Because she was Sarah's slave, the child was legally hers. But, if you know the story, you know the plan backfired.  When Hagar became pregnant, she lorded it over Sarah.  In their culture, for a woman to be barren was a great shame and Hagar made sure that Sarah felt that shame.  Sarah, of course, wasn't going to stand for that, so she mistreated Hagar.  Hagar ran away, but in the wilderness the Lord met her and sent her back and she gave birth to Ishmael.  Years later—as if the Lord was really, really wanting to make a point to Abraham and Sarah that with him anything was possible—years later, when Sarah was even more elderly, she became pregnant and gave birth to Isaac.  Sarah became jealous of Ishmael and we have a cryptic text about Ishmael abusing Isaac, so Sarah banished Hagar and her son from the camp.  Ishmael would become the father of the Arabian tribes and Isaac would became the father of Jacob, who became the father of the Hebrew tribes—of Israel. It's possible Paul brings this up because the false teachers might have been telling this story in their own way, as if to say, “See…Abraham has two families.  You gentiles might have believed the gospel, but since the Jews are the free children of Abraham, you're like Ishmael and his sons.  If you want to really be part of Abraham's family, you're going to have to get circumcised and become a Jew.  Paul has heard this before and says, “No.  You've got it backwards and here's why.  Let's suppose that Abraham does have two families.  How can you tell which one is the slave family and which one is the free family?  Well, look at the story.  Ishmael was born according to the flesh.  He was the result of Abraham taking matters into his own hands.  Isacc, on the other hand, was born miraculously and in fulfilment of the Lord's promise. And now we see why Paul has been talking so much about covenants and inheritances and heirs all this time.  This is where he's been going with it.  In verse 24 he goes on: Think of this allegorically—as picture-language.  These two women stand for two covenants: one comes from Mount Sinai and gives birth to slave children—that's Hagar.  (Sinai, you see, is a mountain in Arabia, and it corresponds, in the picture, to the present Jerusalem, since she is in slavery with her children.)  But the Jerusalem which is above is free—and she is our mother.   All you have to do is follow the theme of promise through the story.  Well, that and you have to recognise that the story is ongoing.  The false teachers were telling the story as if it stopped with Abraham—or maybe with Moses—but Paul has been showing how the Abraham story, the story of a promise and a family and an inheritance that encompasses the whole world—Paul has been showing how that story is still going on.  So they were right to see the promise back in the story of the birth of Isaac, but now Paul's sort of urging them on: Yes, yes.  You've got that part right, but keep following the promise through the rest of the story.  Because Jesus changes everything.  And so, sure, Isaac was the child of God's promise and so were his children and their children and eventually the whole people of Israel.  But before his little break to remind them that he's not their enemy, Paul was also pointing out how the law, how torah was only meant to serve the promise family for a time—between Moses and the Messiah.  Remember, the human race is sick.  Israel had the same sickness, but the law held the sickness at bay until the promise could be fulfilled.  Or, Paul used the illustration of a babysitter, keeping the promise family out of trouble until the promise to them could be fulfilled.  And, that means, Paul has said, that as much as the law was a good thing given by God for a time, it kept the Israelites as slaves until the Messiah came.  So the law, he's saying here, the law if left to itself can never set people free.  The law, ironically, makes Ishmael children, not Isaac children. And then Paul adds this sort of parenthetical statement: For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia.  And his point is that—using this allegorical or picture language—the law of Moses, which was given on Mount Sinai, now represents the people, the family on the outside in the original picture.  As much as the Lord's promise once led his people to Mount Sinai where he gave them his law, the story has moved on in Jesus the Messiah and so Hagar—the mother of Abraham's son according to the flesh—Hagar now corresponds to Mount Sinai and Mount Sinai represents the law, torah, that the false teachers are saying the gentile believers have to keep. So Isaac represents the promise and freedom.  Ishmael represents the flesh, slavery…none of which would have been controversial, but now Paul has also shown that Ishmael also represents Mount Sinai and the law.  Again, we've got to follow the promise all the way through the story to Jesus and then to the present.  The law was part of God's provision for his people during the present evil age, but the Messiah has inaugurated the age to come.  So Paul's now ready to bring the false teachers into this.  They've been appealing to some authority figures in Jerusalem—maybe James, but we really don't know—just that they're in Jerusalem.  And Paul, in verses 25 and 26 is saying, “Okay, but they're talking about the present Jerusalem, not the heavenly Jerusalem, not the “Jerusalem above”, which is the home of all real believers and the true people of the promise.  To make his point he quotes Isaiah 54:1 which is addressed to Jerusalem herself: For it is written: Celebrate, childless one, who never gave birth! Go wild and shout, girl that never had pains! The barren woman has many more children Than the one who has a husband!   In Isaiah's day, Jerusalem was laid waste, but through the prophet the Lord gave hope to his people.  One day Jerusalem would be restored.  He put it in terms of a barren woman—like Sarah—finally knowing the joy of bearing children and having a family.  By Paul's day this had become an image of the age to come, when the Lord would return to his people and the heavenly city would come with him, heaven and earth would be rejoined, and his new age would dawn.  So the Jerusalem above—the promise of God's new age—it was barren, but now through the Messiah it's bearing children.  The promises are being fulfilled.  In contrast, the present Jerusalem—the city the false teachers are appealing to as their authority—it's got children, yes, but they're in slavery.  In fact, the earthly Jerusalem is slated for judgement and destruction.  So now Paul goes on in verse 28: Now you, my brothers [and sisters], are children of promise, in the line of Isaac. Follow the promise.  It has passed from Isaac to Jesus and now to these people—even though they're gentiles—because they have trusted in the Messiah.  Jesus-believers, uncircumcised as they may be, are Sarah-children, new-Jerusalem people, Isaac-people, promise-people.  But, Paul goes on: But things now are like they were then.  The one who was born according to the flesh persecuted the one born according to the spirit.   Genesis doesn't elaborate on what Ishmael did to Isaac, only that he abused him in some way, and Paul's point here is that this is how the children of the flesh are always liable to treat the children of the promise.  It sounds as though the unbelieving Jews were actively persecuting the Christians in Galatia—angry at them because they claimed the “Jewish exemption” from pagan worship, but didn't live as Jews.  But Paul lumps the false teachers, these people who say they believe in Jesus the Messiah, but also insist on the gentiles being circumcised—Paul lumps that in with the abuse of the unbelieving Jewish community.  The false teachers stand in sharp contrast to Paul.  Even though Paul has had some sometimes harsh words for the Galatians, he loves them like a father.  He's speaking gospel truth.  The false teachers, for all their zeal, don't really love the Galatians—not if they're trying to drag them back into slavery under the law.  And with that, Paul's ready to drive his point home, he's ready to tell them what they have to do.  Look at verse 30: But what does scripture say?  “Throw out the slave-girl and her son!  For the son of the slave-girl will not inherit with the son of the free.”  So my brothers [and sisters], we are not children of the slave-girl, but of the free.   Do what Sarah did: cast out the slave girl and her son.  In other words, cast out the false teachers before they drag you away from Jesus and the promise and back into slavery.  At this point there's a chapter break, but I really think Paul meant for verse 1 of Chapter 5 to be the close of this paragraph, because it's not easy to cast out false teachers.  And so Paul continues there: The Messiah set us free so that we could enjoy freedom!  So stand firm, and don't get yourselves tied down by the chains of slavery.   Stand firm and don't let anyone take you back into slavery with a false gospel, because Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has set us free.  Paul doesn't mess around with false teachers.  Jesus died and he rose again, he is Lord, and he has fulfilled all of God's promises.  Paul saw the promise fulfilled as the gentiles were forgiven, filled with the Spirit, and swept up into this great story of God and his people and he was outraged at the idea that anyone might come along and drag these people back into slavery. In contrast, how often is our tendency to be wishy-washing about false teaching.  People come in the name of Jesus, but end up proclaiming false gospels—or things that undermine the gospel.  They'll say, for example, that there are other ways to God and other ways to be good and other ways to enter the age to come and in doing that they undermine the work of Jesus and the Spirit no less than the false teaching in Galatia did by trying to add torah to the gospel.  Others come into the church and tell us that Jesus isn't enough and that we've got to do something extra to receive the Spirit.  Others these days come preaching post-modern ideas of identity that undermine our identity in the Messiah and our unity in him.  And we equivocate on what to do about them.  Instead of dealing with the false teachers we quibble with each other over whether or not the false teachers are truly believers or not—as if we need to treat them differently if the false teaching isn't so bad as to rule them out as real Christians.  Paul does the opposite here.  The false teachers in Galatia believed in Jesus.  They believed in his death and resurrection.  But they added something that ultimately undermined that good news.  And so Paul says to cast them out.  Get them out of the church.  Just as he did with the man sleeping with his step-mother in Corinth.  Get them out.  Maybe that will get them thinking hard about what they've done or what they're teaching and they'll repent and come back, but that's not the first priority.  Get them out, because their teaching undermines the gospel itself and if it's allowed to fester, the church will cease to be the church.  The promise will be lost.  The false teaching will make us slaves again.  If the Anglican Communion had cast out the false teachers a hundred years ago, our generation wouldn't have had to face the difficulties we have.  The church can't fool around with false teachers and false gospel.  But the flip side of this imperative is that we as Jesus' people need to work hard for unity with our brothers and sisters who do believe the good news about Jesus.  This was the vision of Bp. Cummins when he called together the men and women who would found the Reformed Episcopal Church.  All baptised and believing Jesus-followers are, in fact, one family and we need to do our best, despite our various differences on other things, to live as the one family that Jesus has made us.  I think Galatians has something to say about how we distinguish which of our differences are demand separation and which don't.  Does the message being preaching point forward to the age to come, or like the Galatian heresy, does it drag us back to the darkness of the old evil age?  If it undermines or undoes what has been accomplished by God in Jesus and the Spirit, we must cast it out.  Standing firm against false gospels while standing just as firm for the unity of God's gospel people is no easy task—especially as things are today—but Brothers and Sisters it is our calling.  It is what honours God, it is what honours Jesus and the Spirit, and it is what witnesses to the world the new creation that has been born in us. Let's pray: Heavenly Father, make us mature in the Messiah so that we will be able to discern truth from error, and fill us with zeal for your gospel truth, so that we will stand firm—not afraid to cast out false teachers and false teaching, but also zealous for the unity that Jesus and the Spirit bring to your church, that we might be effective witnesses of the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen, and of his kingdom, the new Jerusalem.  Through him we pray.  Amen.

WEEK 10: GOSPEL SONSHIP Galatians 4:21-31 This section of Galatians might seem complex to modern readers, but for the Galatian believers steeped in the Old Testament, Paul's analogy of two covenants, two sons, and two wives of Abraham would have been clear. His ultimate message? The Old Testament Law served a purpose, but it wasn't meant to be permanent. True freedom from slavery and true sonship, he argues, comes only through the promise of Christ.

A Key answer that every Christian needs to know and understand is our relationship to the Old Testament law. Do we still follow the Old Testament? Why or why not? We'll tackle this challenging question as we study Paul's teachings to the Galatian churches on this very issue. Please join us as we study Galatians 3!  Check out our Bible Study Guide on the Key Chapters of Genesis! Available on Amazon! To see our dedicated podcast website with access to all our episodes and other resources, visit us at: www.keychapters.org. Find us on all major platforms, or use these direct links: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6OqbnDRrfuyHRmkpUSyoHv Itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/366-key-chapters-in-the-bible/id1493571819 YouTube: Key Chapters of the Bible on YouTube. As always, we are grateful to be included in the "Top 100 Bible Podcasts to Follow" from Feedspot.com. Also for regularly being awarded "Podcast of the Day" from PlayerFM. Special thanks to Joseph McDade for providing our theme music.   

No Longer a Slave Galatians 4.1-11 by William Klock We didn't go to the theatre to see very many movies when I was a kid, so when Star Wars came out, it seemed like all my friends saw it before I did.  I had Luke Skywalker and C3PO action figures before I'd even seen the movie.  My best friend, Derigan, tried to fill me in and gave me a sort of point by point run-down of the plot leading up to Luke shooting his torpedo into the thermal exhaust port and blowing up the Death Star.  He got all excited at that point, jumping up, throwing up his hands, and making a big explosion sound.  His plot summary didn't really do anything to get me excited—probably because he was five and it wasn't a very good plot summary.  I was just excited to see Star Wars because everyone who saw it was so excited about it.  But when I finally did get to see it, oh wow!  People in the theatre cheered when the Death Star blew up.  Actually watching the story unfold was thrilling in a way a point-by-point plot summary never could be. The creed we just recited is—a bit—like my friend Derigan's point by point plot summary of Star Wars.  The bishops and other important people of the church got together in AD 325 and hammered out these key points.  They obviously did a better job than a council of five-year-olds could ever have done and it has served the church well for seventeen hundred years as a statement of biblical faith and a bulwark against heresy.  But it's not very exciting.  I've never heard of anyone hearing the Creed and getting so excited about it that they decided then and there to become a Christian.  And that's because the story has been filtered out of it.  The really exciting part is there: The son of God became man, was crucified for our sake, rose again on the third day, and ascended into heaven.  Those words “in accordance with the scriptures” hint that there's more to the story.  But boy, “I believe in the Holy Spirit…who proceeds from the Father and Son…who spoke through the prophets”.  As much as all the points are true, it's not even a plot summary—they stripped the story right out.  It's all true, but it's not like seeing the actual movie—or in this case hearing that great, ages-spanning story hinted at by those five little words “in accordance with the scriptures”.  Because we've often left the creed to stand by itself, some people have even got the idea that these key plot points, like the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and the sending of the Holy Spirit, were all later doctrines made up by the church fathers. We'll be looking at the first half of Galatians 4 this morning, and Brothers and Sisters, it's all here—in the first of Paul's letters, which makes it very likely the very earliest part of the New Testament to be written.  And it's all here: God's son, born of Mary who died and rose again and the Holy Spirit, too.  It's stated just as clearly as it was by later men like Athanasius or Basil the Great.  But here it's part of the great story Paul is always telling, always drawing on, that's always there underlying, supporting, and giving shape to his arguments.  The story that makes sense of it all.  Without it Jesus' death and resurrection are an awesome special effect like the Death Star exploding, but we won't know why it's important.  Without the story there's no reason to stand up and cheer. So Paul closed Galatians 3, telling us that if we've been baptised into the Messiah, we've put him on.  He's now our identity.  There's no longer Jew or Greek or slave or free or man or woman—God, through Jesus the Messiah, has just one and only one people.  And he said, “If you belong to the Messiah, you are Abraham's family.  You stand to inherit the promise.”  These agitators who had infiltrated the Galatian churches were saying that you basically had to first become a Jew to become a Christian and Paul's saying, “No.  Jesus has fulfilled the promises made to Abraham and to his family.  If, by faith, you belong to him you are part of that family and an heir of God's promise.  There's nothing you can add to it.”  So now Paul continues in Chapter 4 running along with this metaphor of the heir and the inheritance: Let me put it like this.  As long as the heir—remember how Paul's been talking about promises and wills and inheritances—As long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave—even if, in fact, he is master of everything.  He is kept under guardians and stewards until the time set by his father.   “As long as the heir is a slave…”  That's the cue—especially that word “slave”—that's the cue that Paul is telling an exodus story.  We might miss it, but people in Paul's world were shaped by Passover and the other Jewish festivals that came out of their exodus from Egypt.  And hearing Paul talk of slaves, they knew he was now moving from the story of Abraham to the story of Israel's exodus and exile and their hope of rescue. It's really important that we understand the story the Jews of Paul's day saw themselves in.  In Deuteronomy—the last book of the torah—the Lord had promise that if his people were unfaithful, that if they worshipped other gods, he would exile them—that they would find themselves slaves—as they had been in Egypt—slaves to the pagans and their gods of wood and stone.  And that's just what happened.  The people were unfaithful, they were idolatrous, their kings were evil and the Lord raised up Babylon to conquer them and to carry them off into exile.  Eventually the Babylonians were, in turn, conquered by the Persians and the Persians allowed the Jews to return to Judea, but nothing was ever the same as it had been.  They rebuilt the temple, but the Lord's presence never returned to it.  They continued to live under the rule of foreign pagans and their gods.  In Paul's day Rome just the latest in that long line.  And so, they concluded, the exile had never really ended.  Israel was still living under the curses of Deuteronomy 27.  But that also meant they had hope, because Deuteronomy 30—and the prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel—promised a new exodus, a return from exile—when God would set everything to rights.  This is what inspired the zeal of the Pharisees.  They tried to bring the holiness of the temple and priesthood into the home and into everyday life.  If all Israel would keep the law in full for just a single day, one later rabbi wrote, the Lord would finally come to deliver his people. Paul puts this story of exile and exodus in terms of a child with a great promised inheritance.  His father has appointed a time when his son will receive his inheritance, but until then he lives under guardians and stewards—remember the “babysitter” in Chapter 3?—which leaves him no better off than a slave—even though he is, as Paul puts it, “master of everything”.  This is exactly how many of Paul's fellow Jews saw things.  It's how the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, it's how the Jewish philosopher Philo saw Israel's situation in their own day.  Abraham's children had been promised the world, but they were slaves of Caesar and it was Caesar who was instead and to their great consternations “master of everything”.  They awaited their inheritance. So Paul goes on in verse 3: It's like this with us.  When we were children, we were kept in “slavery” under the “elements of the world”.   Paul says “we”—that means he and his fellow Jews—were promised the world, but they were still children.  Paul set this up in Chapter 3 when he wrote about torah being like a babysitter given to keep Israel out of trouble until God was ready to reveal his faithfulness in the Messiah.  Paul now takes that metaphor and turns it into another.  Being a child under torah is like being a slave.  The Jews knew what that meant all too well.  Paul says, slaves “under the elements of the world”. Now this phrase “under the elements of the world” is really difficult to parse out if we aren't familiar with how people thought in Paul's day.  I think Paul is deliberately using language that works on two levels at the same time.  First, the Greek word Paul uses for “elements” usually refers to the elements that make up creation.  Think of the periodic table we learned in chemistry.  Everything in creation is made up, in one way or another, of those 103 elements.  For the ancients it was much simpler, albeit a bit more mystical.  They had four elements: earth, air, water, and fire.  The Jews knew that these elements were created by God and subject to him, but the pagans worshipped them and made idols out of them and Deuteronomy had promised that if Israel were unfaithful they would be scattered amongst the people and forced to serve those gods of wood and stone.  That's exactly what had happened and it was exactly what was still happening.  The covenant curses of torah had subjected them to “the elements of the world”. But I think Paul is also comparing Israel's situation under torah—under the law—to a sort of medical diagnosis.  People, too, were thought to be composed of these elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and if you were sick—and that could be physically or morally sick—it was because these elements were out of balance.  You'd see a doctor, he'd determine how your elements were out of balance, and he'd give you some course of treatment.  Interestingly enough, the Greek word for that treatment is the same as the word for law—nomos—and this law would then serve as a paidagogos—the “babysitter” Paul mentioned in Chapter 3—to lead you back to health.  So disordered elements are treated by a law that takes on the role of a babysitter.  In other words, what Paul is saying is that people—the whole human race—is sick, morally sick.  These false teachers that showed up in Galatia have been acting like quack doctors, telling the people that to get themselves in order they need to follow the Jewish law and, like a babysitter it will nurse them back to health.  And Paul's saying that, no, it won't work.  It never did.  We've been trying it for centuries and the best the law, the best that torah can do is hold the sickness at bay.  Becuase, in fact, that's all it was ever intended to do. Even then—like a virus slipping through the masks and social distancing—Israel was still sick, incurred the curses of the covenant, and found herself subject to the pagans and their gods of wood and stone.  And the gentiles, those pagans, they didn't even have the law.  They openly and shamelessly worshipped the elements and in abusing the stuff of creation they threw creation out of whack.  Torah promised life, but it could not bring it on its own and these false teachers were wrong to turn back to it.  Paul's been stressing: God has done what torah never could.  He's given his Son and sent his Spirit.  Torah, the law, was a thing of the old evil age—a good thing given by God for that time, but still something for the old evil age—but in Jesus and the Spirit God has inaugurated the age to come.  Look at verse 4: But when the fullness of time arrived, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that he might redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.   Paul's been reminding us of the original exodus from Egypt, when God rescued his people from a land full of idols so that they could live with him in their midst, so that they could worship and serve him.  And he's been telling that story so that here, as he tells us about the new exodus, we hear the old one echoing behind it.  When the fullness of time arrived, he writes.  It's a reminder that Jesus is part of this bigger story—as the creed reminds us when it says “in accordance with the scriptures”.  God was moving history and the world and his people to this one point in time.  We saw last time, this is what the law, torah, was meant to do: to bring Israel to the point where the Messiah could do his work.  But now that that work is done, we have to move forward into the messianic age.  There's no going back. And so, Paul says, God sent his Son.  In the Jewish thought world the king—especially the promised and long-awaited Davidic king—was the son of God.  In the Wisdom of Solomon, which Paul probably would have been familiar with, King Solomon uses this kind of language to pray for God to send forth his wisdom “that she may labour at my side, and that I may learn what is pleasing to you”.  The idea was that the king wasn't just working using God's instructions, but that the King actually embodied, in his thought and action, the personal presence and power of the creator God—like David, a man after God's own heart.  For Paul to refer to the Messiah as the Son of God is to declare him to be both the promised King—that's what “Messiah” means—and the embodiment of God's wisdom—sort of God's second self through whom the world was made.  In other words two things are happening in Jesus.  First, he is the prophecy-fulfilling King and, second, in him the God of Israel has finally returned to rescue his people. Too, in saying that God's sent his Son, Paul wants to underscore that Jesus is God himself.  He wasn't simply a Jew born to Mary whom God adopted and called his son.  That's a perennial heresy as old as the creed that was written to combat it.  No, the Son was sent and that means he existed before he took on human flesh to be born of Mary. And God did all this so that he might redeem—deliver, rescue—his people living under the law.  In other words, to give them the divine medicine for the disease the law had been holding at bay and, in doing so, to fulfil his promises and show his faithfulness and to shine forth his glory—so that—we might receive adoption as sons.  Paul's been talking about “we” and “us” so far meaning “we Jews”, but here I think he now opens it up.  “We” is now the whole church, Jewish and gentiles believers united as one people in the Messiah. Here's how it works.  God's Son is born under the law, in solidarity with and as the representative of his people so that he can give his life, dying the death that they deserved, in order to fulfil the covenant promises that God had made to them.  So that God's sons can truly be God's sons.  The cross and the empty tomb are the supreme display of the faithfulness and glory of the God of Israel and it happens before the eyes of the watching gentiles who have never seen anything like it.  They worship gods of wood and stone, gods who are deaf and dumb, and then in the gospel they are confronted with the living God who not only hears and speaks, but loves, and who fulfils his promises—even going so far as to take on our flesh and to die.  And the gentiles hear this gospel and fall to their knees in faith before the Son, before the Messiah, and the unbelievable happens: God adopts them, and welcomes them into his presence, calls them his sons and daughters, and makes them full members of this royal priesthood.  And even in that he shines forth his glory again as his promise to Abraham to make the nations his inheritance is fulfilled. But it doesn't stop there.  Look at verses 6 and 7: And because you are sons, God sent out the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, calling out “Abba, Father!”  So you are no longer a slave, but a son!  And, if you are a son, you are an heir, through God.   The point of the exodus was always for God to live in the midst of his people.  He did that in the tabernacle and then the temple under the old covenant, but that was just a signpost pointing to how he would fulfil his promises in the new covenant.  Our being sons of God isn't just a legal status.  It's real.  Just as God sent his Son to lead us, like a new Moses, in this new exodus, he's also sent his Spirit into our hearts and his Spirit now cries out from within us, “Abba—Papa—Father!”  The church as a whole and every individual Christian is made a tabernacle, a temple in which God himself has come to dwell.  Paul's been using the plural “you” so far, but here he drives his point home switching to the singular “you”.  If you are a son, if you are a daughter, you are an heir.  This is the new life to which all of God's promises to Israel and to which the whole story was working.  It can be tempting to think of the Trinity as some dry and technical doctrine, but Paul shows us the Trinity here in three dimensions, in Technicolor, with THX surround sound as he tells the great story.  What that thrilling explosion of the Death Star is to the Star War story when everyone in the theatre cheers, God's sending of his Son and Spirit to make us his sons and daughters is to the great story of God and his people.  It's the climax of the story when everything finally pays off.  The old evil age is finished and God's new creation is born.  We might forget all this when we recite the creed.  I'm not suggesting you all cheer in the middle of the creed, but maybe in your head.  The Trinity, the Incarnation, the Spirit, they're not just dry technical doctrines, they're the culmination of this amazing story of God's love and of his faithfulness and they show forth his great glory.  And they're all right here in Paul's letter, in the very earliest part of the New Testament. We've been set free.  The Spirit, says Paul, crying out in our hearts to God as Father, is the proof that we are no longer slaves to the elements of the world.  This is the medicine that he's given to finally set us to rights.  It's the proof that we are his sons and daughters and heirs of his promise—because in Jesus and the Spirit the inheritance has been dumped right in our laps by God himself.  And yet, somehow, bewilderingly, we forget all of this.  That's what was happening in Galatia.  Paul goes on in verses 8-11: However, at that stage you didn't know God, and so you were enslaved to beings that, in their proper nature, are not gods.  But now that you've come to know God—or, better, to be known by God—how can you turn your back again to that weak and poverty-stricken line-up of elements that you want to serve all over again?  You are observing days, and months, and seasons, and years!  I am afraid for you.  Maybe my hard work with you is going to be wasted.   They're like the Israelites in the wilderness, grumbling to Moses and complaining that they want to go back to Egypt.  Well, sort of.  It's actually worse than that, because to demand the gentile believers be circumcised and start observing the old calendar of the torah—well—that's not so much wanting to go back to Egypt, it's like denying they'd ever been delivered from Egypt in the first place.  Do that, and you're turning away from the living God who gave his Son and sent his Spirit so that you can go back to the “elements”—to the false gods of wood and stone, back into slavery. “No,” he says, “you've come to know God.”  And then Paul pauses and says, “No, better—more accurate—to say ‘to be known by God'.”  To know God is the desire of people everywhere.  To hear God cut through the silence to speak, even if it's just to tell us what he wants of us.  There's a prayer from ancient pagan Sumer that was written on a clay tablet and survived the millennia.  In it a man cried out to the gods to speak.  He was miserable.  Everything in his life was going wrong.  And so he cried out in desperation.  He didn't know what he'd done to offend the gods.  The poor man didn't even know which god he'd offended, which god to cry out to.  His pitiful prayer is the cry of every human heart.  To know God and to find mercy.  And so we do everything we can think of from ascetic disciplines to mystical practises.  We study sacred texts and we pray long and desperate prayers.  And Paul reminds us that none of this leads us to God.  Instead, God has taken the initiative sending his Son and his Spirit.  This is the gospel, this is the good news about Jesus, crucified and risen.  In believing this good news and in knowing the presence and power of God's Spirit, Paul is saying that they (and we) can now say for certain that God knows us and that we know God.  There is no desperate cry to unknown gods.  God's own Spirit cries out within us to our loving and merciful Father.  Just as the nations watched in awe as God delivered Israel from Egypt in the original exodus, so in this new exodus as God sends his Son and his Spirit, the living God has—to quote Isaiah—“bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations.”  He has made himself known in all his great glory. Brothers and Sisters, trust in this good news.  Don't try to add anything to it.  To add anything to it is to deny its power and to go back to the slavery of the old gods.  Trust in Jesus.  Know the Spirit.  And know you are God's son, you are God's daughter, his new creation is born in you, and as we live this life he's given by faith, we witness and proclaim his glory—the power of his holy arm—to the watching world around us. Let us pray: Almighty God, you have fulfilled your promises in knitting your people together into one communion through the death and resurrection of your Son and the gift of your Spirit.  Give us grace that we might be faithful stewards of this good news, holding fast to you by faith alone and showing forth your glory as we live the life of your Spirit.  Amen.

NOTE: Our building lost power with about five minutes remaining in the message. For that reason, the recording stops just shy of the end. This week, Pastor Matt kicks off our series walking through the letter to the Galatians by looking at the problem Paul is addressing within the Galatian house churches.

Drew Balch - A disagreement between two apostles, two thousand years ago, over where one sat at a Sunday lunch...it's not exactly the stuff to get our pulses racing! However, these verses begin to show us that Galatians is not an irrelevant book for just the original audience, but a book which is relevant to every Christian in every generation. We could all so easily fall into a Galatian mistake!

Phil Hudson - Why would the apostle Paul record the details of the time he opposed the apostle Peter in public, and write about it to the Galatian church? As we see the passion of Paul's defence of the truth of the gospel, we have even more confidence that Jesus' work alone is sufficient for us to be right with God.

Phil Hudson - What if you had just one letter to save the gospel? As Paul wrote to the Galatian church the message of the gospel of grace seemed in jeopardy, so he gets on the front foot to show that the gospel he preached was God's gospel–we must listen to it!

In some of the final verses of his letter to them, the Apostle Paul explained to the Galatian believers that the promise of victory and peace doesn't apply to everyone, even if they're believers.  It only applies to those who walk according to a certain scriptural guideline.  In other words, Pastor Ford will ask us—if we don't implement what Christ has given us for victory, then why are we expecting to have victory in the Christian life? Learn more about this important concept when you join us for today's Treasured Truth.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On today's Treasured Truth, as we continue our study in Galatians, Pastor Ford will remind us about what the Apostle Paul was trying to teach the Galatian believers—that we as believers need to understand the more human effort we bring to the table when it comes to the process of our salvation, the more we end up nullifying God's grace. Find out more about the “no strings attached” gospel on today's Treasured Truth.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On today's Treasured Truth, Pastor Ford will explain how the Apostle Paul described the situation of the Galatian believers. They had heard and received the clear and simple message of salvation, but they let the those who were stuck on earning their salvation by keeping the law come along and add stuff to the gospel. So, they had a saving message, but they let others take the truth away from them, making the message of no effect. To learn more join us for today's Treasured Truth.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Law and Grace don't mix. But the Apostle Paul was having a hard time communicating that fact to the Galatian believers and convincing them it was the truth. So, he took a story from the Old Testament and allegorized it, giving it a new twist that helped them to understand. To hear Pastor Ford explain how Paul used an old story with a new meaning in his letter to the Galatians, join us for today's Treasured Truth.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When you join us for today's Treasured Truth, Pastor Ford will explain how the Apostle Paul set an example for us when he was addressing the Galatian believers about the errors of their doctrine. Paul equated the process to the “travails of childbirth” as he struggled to help them understand. His ultimate goal was for them to see the likeness of Christ formed in them. So, following his example, we can learn from Paul as we seek to assist our own fellow believers who may have accepted false doctrines that don't line up with the truth found in God's Word.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.