A Story of Faith

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Don Filcek; Galatians 4:21-31 A Story of Faith

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Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service.
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We're currently studying Galatians in a series called Off the Chain, Finding Freedom in Galatians.
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Here's Pastor Don Filcic. As we jump back into Galatians chapter 4 here, we're going to wrap up the end of this chapter.
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And again, on Sunday mornings, I like to talk through a little bit of the text, just kind of walk you through it and read it before we come to worship so that we can get our minds kind of settled down.
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How many of you had a pretty busy week? A lot of things going on. Some of you maybe don't raise your hand on this one.
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You don't have to. Some of you have had rough weeks, got some bad news, had some difficulties. So there's all kinds of things that swirl around in your mind when you sit there, right?
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Like right now, you've got things that have happened this week and things that happened in the car ride on the way here or out in the parking lot or whatever.
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And so you've got all of this. So I like to focus us in on God's word. What we're going to see here in our text this morning is
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Paul is going to tell us a story. He's going to basically appeal to one of the Old Testament stories. And in reality, how many of you would admit storytelling can be a powerful tool that God has used in your life or that teachers can use in your life, or they can paint a picture, a story picture.
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And sometimes that goes further than somebody just telling you to do something. Paul is going to employ the use of an
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Old Testament story in order to drive home his point. And his main point has been that God's grace comes to us through faith.
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It is not by works of the law. So he's used rational arguments. He's used a whole host of tools.
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A teacher has all kinds of tools in their tool belt. He's used rational argumentation. He's used some of the
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Old Testament text. He has appealed to their emotions ultimately to show that the life of a follower of Jesus Christ is not a life based on laws and rules and regulations, but it is based on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
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That the way we move forward in our walk with God is to keep the cross central in our life, to keep our eyes fixed on what
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Jesus Christ has done. And that's the pathway forward. Not to focus on our sin, not to focus on remedying ourselves or fixing ourselves, but to recognize what the remedy is.
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What is it that has fixed us? And it is the cross of Jesus Christ. And it is that that seals it. It is the cross that guarantees it.
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And then not only that, but Paul has talked about throughout the book of Galatians, the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit that lives within us.
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If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you have the power of God himself dwelling within you to help you along in this process of remembering the cross and living according to the grace and the awesome sacrifice that we've received.
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And so we've seen Paul use all of these different tools in order to try to communicate this primary point.
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And that's why often, has somebody felt like the point of most of these sermons have been kind of the same thing? Not laws, live by grace.
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Not laws, live by grace. And yet you're still here, so that means you're still taking some of this in. So I appreciate you guys hanging in there.
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Galatians is a book that is just Paul coming from all different kinds of angles trying to drive home this same point.
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Trying to bring home this one point that we are saved by grace and therefore we live by grace, not by laws and rules.
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But this week he turns to this story from the Old Testament. And although Paul uses what is a true historical account,
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I want to clarify that when I use the word story here, the story of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Ishmael, Hagar the slave, all of these are real people.
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This is a historical account. And so I use the word story loosely because sometimes story in your mind will conjure up images of something that's false or something that you just tell the children or whatever.
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These are true events. But he's going to identify in these Old Testament characters of Hagar and Sarah something fundamental about the way that faith works.
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Something about the way that faith operates in your life and in my life. There's some reality to the way that we ought to view faith and the way we ought to view faith in God differently as we encounter the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar.
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Now if we're honest, how many of you would raise your hand and be honest and say, I have a tendency to take things into my own hands?
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Like, I have a tendency to try to do things my own way. We are a self -sufficient people and we turn to God like faith is a plan
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B, often. Would you admit that in your life? That it's like, I got this one. I'll take care of this.
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I'll make this work. And then only if I fail, will I turn to God in this circumstance.
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Only if I'm not able to get it done, then I'll trust God. What it really amounts to is that we ascribe to the notion, the faulty notion, that God helps those who help themselves.
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Have any of you heard that phrase before? God helps those who help themselves. As if God comes along and gives the assist.
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Yeah, you're the point scorer. You're the champion on the team, but he's going to come in and just help.
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He's good at feeding the ball into the post. But you've got it. You've got this under control. As a matter of fact,
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I did some research this week. Have any of you heard of George Barna? George Barna is like a Christian poll.
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He gathers information, asks questions to large chunks of the population, and then gets results.
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He's like a Christian Gallup poll. George Barna did some research centered on this false phrase,
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God helps those who help themselves, which by the way, in my research, I couldn't quite figure out who said it. Now, Benjamin Franklin did say this phrase.
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So some of you are sitting there going, I think Ben Franklin said this. He did say it, but it didn't start with him. And so some people are saying it goes back all the way to ancient times.
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But God helps those who help themselves. 68 % of Americans who identify themselves as born again believers.
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Now, how many of you know, if you call yourself born again, and you're willing to identify yourself as born again in this culture, you probably are, right?
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I mean, would you agree with me on that? Like, I mean, the word born again is not necessarily a great term on the political scene and the way that, you know, our culture.
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Are you guys in agreement with that, for the most part? So if 68 % of those who identified themselves as born again in a recent poll thought that the statement,
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God helps those who help themselves, was a quotation from the Bible. They thought that it came straight from scripture.
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But what's more troubling is that 75 % in the same poll, 75 % of teenagers that were polled about this topic identified, choosing between multiple options, identified that God helps those who help themselves is the primary message of scripture.
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That's the primary thing that the Bible teaches. 75 % of children raised in the church thought that that was the primary message that we have to offer the world as Christians.
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God will help you if you help yourself. Something wrong with this message? Is there something counter to the book of Galatians that's in this message?
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God helps those who help themselves? You do it, and then God will come along and assist you. He'll shore up your plans and make you succeed because God will come along and help you, as long as you're helping yourself.
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I think there's something in my history, something in my past, that leads very counter to that. I was helpless.
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I was hopeless. I was lost, and I was condemned and bound for hell, and God rescued me.
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I didn't help myself. I did. I helped myself to a little sin here and a little sin there.
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That's the way I helped myself, right? I didn't pull myself up by the bootstraps and plunge my way into heaven and barge my way into the kingdom.
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It was God saving me. God helps those who help themselves. False. Untrue. In our text, we're going to see a couple in the
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Old Testament. Reflecting on the Old Testament, we're going to see a couple who try to help themselves. Literally, actually, try to help
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God fulfill a promise. God makes them a promise, and they're like, we'll get this one, God. You promise us something?
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We'll make it happen. You sit back, God, and watch. Be dazzled at our intellect and our ability to get this done.
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It's not going to go well for them, as you might imagine. But when God, in his great mercy, so he makes a promise to them.
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And when God is ready to fulfill the promise, he does it.
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Because he is the one who is faithful. And so despite their attempts, lack of faith, despite their paltry attempts at trying to fulfill this promise on their own,
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God says, no, I'm going to step back and watch what I'm going to accomplish. And the promise is going to look like a 99 -year -old woman giving birth.
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It's going to be a woman who you could just never in your mind, you just couldn't conceive of her conceiving.
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And she's going to have a baby. And the promise is fulfilled when
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God is ready. We come together this morning, and as we come to worship, we are worshiping the
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God who promises. And has promised things to humanity. And not only does he promise, but praise
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God, he is a God who fulfills his promises.
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Despite how impossible the situation might seem. And I recognize, as I'm looking out, there's some sense in which you feel like your situation, where you live right now, is impossible.
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God couldn't reconcile that relationship. God couldn't fix that. God couldn't heal that disease. God couldn't do this.
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And yet he proves that he is able. He is powerful. And I'm convinced that he often waits until all hope seems lost to prove that it is he who is fulfilling his promises.
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It is he who is accomplishing it. So I want you to open your Bibles, please, to Galatians 4. And we're going to be looking at 21 through 31.
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You're going to find that on page 834 in the Bible, in the seat back in front of you. So if you take that Bible out, you can turn to 834 and find it right there.
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Verse 21 of Galatians chapter 4, through the end of the chapter. If you don't own a Bible, take that one with you. By the way, we want everybody to have a copy of the
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Word of God. So take the one that's in the seat back. But follow along as I read God's Word for us this morning.
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Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman.
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But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise.
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Now, this may be interpreted allegorically. These women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery.
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She is Hagar. Now, Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia. She corresponds to the present
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Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.
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For it is written, Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear. Break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor.
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For the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband.
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Now you brothers, like Isaac, are children of the promise. But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the
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Spirit, so also it is now. And what does Scripture say? Cast out the slave woman and her son.
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For the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman. So brothers, we are not children of the slave, but of the free woman.
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Let's pray. Fathers, we have an opportunity to come and offer praise to you.
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I ask that you would allow our hearts to be transformed and changed as we hear your word, as we get an opportunity to interact with it.
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That we would recognize that we have an issue in our hearts and in our lives with self -sufficiency.
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We have an issue in our heart of trying to make things happen. I can't even do that here, standing up here and trying to preach for a result, trying to preach to really grab people's attention.
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Father, it's going to be your work or nothing is going to be accomplished here this morning. And so we ask that you would be honored and glorified and that you would be pleased by your
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Spirit to move among us this morning. Father, that as we sing these songs, we bring honor and glory to you because you are awesome and you are the great one, the holy one, who gives promises and then keeps those promises to your people.
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I praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. Hopefully you were able to praise
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God. And are you guys rejoicing that there's a remedy for us? Our sickness, our illness, our brokenness is ourselves and God has fixed it.
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He's taking care of it. And that's what we're going to be looking at. I mean, in essence, that's the message of the gospel.
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That's the message of the entire Bible. And it's just a matter of looking at this part of Scripture to get down to that point.
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I want to point out, we're in Galatians 4, 21 through 31. For those of you who maybe came in a little bit late after we saw that, page 834 in the
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Bible, that's the seat back in front of you. And it'd be great to have that open there so you can refer to it throughout the message.
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Right away in verse 21, you see the first two words there, tell me. I think Paul begins a bit sarcastic in verse 21.
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It's like, tell me, answer me. Give me a reply here, he says, you who claim to want to be under the law.
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He's speaking to the Galatians, a people who were a group of churches, a cluster of churches that he started in what's now modern day
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Turkey in the south central area, a Roman province. He had traveled through there planning churches. And some had embraced the gospel and churches were started there.
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But then some false teachers came in behind Paul and began to say, well, you started with this whole Jesus thing, but what you really need is you need the
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Old Testament law to be acceptable to God. You really need something else. You need something more to inform your life and something else to refine your life before God so that you'll really be acceptable to God.
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You need some laws, you need some rules, you need to follow the Old Testament. And so he says to them, do you really?
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Do you really want to be under the law? You who claim to want to be under the law, how well do you even know the
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Torah? How well do you even know the law? He's challenging them. He says, don't you even, do you listen to it?
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You see his audience in context is a bunch of Gentiles, people who were not raised under the law. They didn't understand it.
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They weren't raised to know the law. They were raised to worship idols and the Roman and Greek gods and goddesses.
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And so in context, you might understand how Paul would be letting them have it.
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Do you really even get what you're signing up for by suggesting that you want to come under the rules and regulations?
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People had come in and convinced them that they needed to keep the law of Moses in order to be acceptable, acceptable to God, but they didn't even know the law of Moses.
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And remember in context, Paul was an expert in the
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Old Testament. He had studied under one of the preeminent rabbis of the day, Gamaliel. We have records of this dude and how he was one of the highest standing rabbis of the era.
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Everybody wanted to study under Gamaliel. Paul himself studied under Gamaliel. He knew the law in and out.
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So he has the right to challenge these Gentiles understanding of the law and that's what he's going to do. And he's going to do so by telling a story.
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Now I can't help but apply this real quick to us. If you think about what he's challenging them, he's saying, you want to be under the law, but you don't even know it.
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Well, let me ask you here at Recast Church this morning. Tell me, all of you here at Recast who claim to love the
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Word of God, do you listen to it? Do you believe it? Do you take it in?
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Are you letting it saturate your life? Do you walk in it? Do you breathe it in? Is it your life source?
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Is it your source of power? Is it the place where you turn? The New Testament author
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James admonishes us, urges us, encourages us to not be hearers only, but to be doers of the
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Word. Not that we would, you know, not that I'm suggesting to you that you just go out and again, like based on rules and regulations that now you come up with a checklist of reading and how much and you're closer to God because you read it and you're, you know, on days that you forgot to read your
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Bible or you didn't get around to it, then God is further from you and doesn't like you that day or something like that.
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But are you understanding what I'm saying? This is the life source. This is the place where we go for relationship with God, to know
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Him, to understand how He moves and works and what He desires of us. Is that making sense? What about us?
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He's saying to the Gentiles who are coming under the law in Galatia, do you really even understand what you're saying you believe in?
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Are you even saying, well, what about us? Do we understand that? And now in verse 22, Paul launches into an
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Old Testament narrative about the life of Abraham, the father of the Jews and his wife, Sarah and their slave,
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Hagar. Now that history can be found in Genesis chapter 16 through 17 and chapter 21.
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I'd encourage you to read that sometime, maybe even the next week to go back and read that account, Genesis 16 and 17 and chapter 21, where you're going to get the gist of the stories that he is talking about here.
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But right off the bat, Paul is going to identify in verse 22 that Abraham had two sons.
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There's this contrast and he's going to draw it out between these two sons. Now, how many of you already knew that Abraham had two sons?
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Okay, he had Ishmael and Isaac, Ishmael being his firstborn. And he says the firstborn, Ishmael, was born of a slave woman named
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Hagar. And his second born son was born of a free woman, that is his wife, Sarah. Well, we already know there's some intrigue here.
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Something's going on in this family for him to have a child with their slave and a child with him. I don't even know, something's already messed up, right?
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Are you seeing where this is going? And some of you already know the story, but Paul here is not taking for granted that his original audience may well not have been very well informed about this story.
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They might have been hearing this for the first time. It's unclear what all they understood about Abraham.
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But to make sense of this, I feel compelled to kind of explain to you the Abrahamic covenant again, that God met with a guy named
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Abraham. And this is the centerpiece of the Old Testament, so bear with me. I think it's very important that we understand why
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Paul is bringing up Abraham in this context. Like, what's this got to do with anything? Well, God met with a dude named
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Abraham back in ancient times, even before Paul. Like, Paul was centuries ago, right? And centuries before Paul was a guy named
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Abraham who was a pagan idol worshiper who lived in ancient Babylon. And God met with him and made an agreement with him, made a covenant with him, basically agreed to a contract, made some promises.
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And have any of you ever thought about this? How many of you would take for granted, like, you believe that God met with Abraham? You believe that?
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Like, scripture says it, so you believe it. Have any of you thought about what that meeting looked like? No? What was that?
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Like, did God appear to him in a human form? Was there like a big bright light? Was there a cloud and like God speaking out of the cloud or whatever?
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God met with Abraham. Okay, we take that for granted. It's here. It's in the text. He met with him and he made a three -part promise.
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All of these promises are tied in and wrapped up into this one thing called covenant, but there's three distinct parts to it.
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The first part was God said, I'm going to make you into a great nation. In other words, you're going to have kids and your kids are going to have kids and your kids are going to have kids and it's going to just be this big nation and I'm going to bless them.
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Okay, this is going to be a good thing. And not only that, but in those ancient times, how many of you know that in order to be blessed, in order to survive, you needed a land.
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You need some property. If they become Bedouins and they're just wandering around battling and fighting against everybody that they encounter, which we saw in the wilderness, they're not going to last long in that culture and in that time and in that era.
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And so God actually says, I will establish a great land for you. And we studied that in the book of Joshua.
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But all of those promises, those two promises, I'm going to make you a great nation and I'm going to give you a great land to preserve you, are all driving towards the third promise.
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One is going to be born of Abraham's seed, an offspring, further down the road, who is going to be the one who blesses all nations.
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The Messiah, the chosen one, is going to come from the line of Abraham. And I'm preserving this people for the purpose of making my promise come true here on this planet.
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For the purpose of carrying forward a promise, I will bless all nations through one of your offspring, Abraham.
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So are you guys good with the covenant? You get that? I know I've said that multiple times, but that covenant is the centerpiece of the
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Old Testament. All other portions and parts of the Old Testament needed to be interpreted through the lens of the understanding of that covenant that God met with a real guy named
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Abraham and made some promises to him. So what we've often thought is that Moses is the center, the giving of the law,
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Mount Sinai is the center of the Old Testament. It is not. It is this promise. This promise is the centerpiece, maybe even the centerpiece of ancient human history up to the point where then
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Jesus Christ comes on the scene and fulfills it. But promise given, promise fulfilled, right? It's Old Covenant, New Covenant.
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In the Old Covenant, we have the seeds of the promise. In the New Covenant, we have the fulfillment of that promise that was made to Abraham.
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And that's the way that we're supposed to view this and think of it. Paul already went into great detail earlier in the book of Galatians, identifying that Jesus Christ himself is that seed, that offspring of Abraham.
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He is the Messiah. He is the chosen one. But here in this story, he kind of takes on a little bit more of the first part of the promise.
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What was the first part of the promise? Anybody? A great nation. He's going to make them into a great nation.
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He's going to give them, make of them, make of Abraham and Sarah a multitude. But in order to become a great nation, in order for your offspring to become a multitude, it seems like there might be one little thing that you would need to have happen.
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Like you would need to have a kid. Like at least one, right?
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I mean, isn't that kind of important? If you're going to have offspring, you need a child. And that's where this story gets interesting.
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I think that's where we begin to understand kind of the flourish and the flair of God, the way that he works and moves in human history.
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Because you see, Sarah and Abraham were barren. They had not conceived.
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They did not have children. They were getting up in years to compound the issue.
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And they had never given birth. As a matter of fact, Sarah was so certain that she was beyond childbearing years that when a few years down the road, some angels come to reaffirm the promise that God had given.
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And I want to make it clear that this promise given by these angels as they come to the tent of Abraham, and there we have a little bit more detail, like we know how the angels appeared to them.
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They appeared in flesh. I mean, they ate with them and talked with them. So that's kind of interesting. But they come, they meet with Abraham.
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Sarah is preparing the food in the tent, and she overhears the conversation that they're having out there. And he says, a year from now, your wife is going to be carrying a baby, her own baby that she's given birth to.
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And what does Sarah do? She laughs. I love it that Sarah laughs, because I think that she's a great image and model of what faith looks like for us often.
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Isn't faith often a laughable thing? Like really, God, you could fix that problem.
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God, you could reconcile that relationship. God, you could do this. You could heal that. You could,
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I mean, think about the way that faith operates. And how often have we been found guilty of laughter, a sarcastic, sometimes, laughter about what
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God can and cannot do or accomplish in our lives? Sarah is a great model of what human faith looks like.
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It's kind of messed up, right? Even our ability to express rock -solid faith is here one day and gone the next.
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And our faith wavers, and it's shifting, isn't it? It's like Peter walking on the water, and what does he immediately do?
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He takes his eyes off of Jesus Christ. He's standing on water, and he takes his eyes off of Jesus Christ and looks to the wind and the waves, and all of a sudden, he's down, right?
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Isn't that like us? And we see that in, I think Sarah just gives us a great example of human faith.
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She laughs when she hears the promise of God. Me, have a baby. And then we see something else about her faith as we see how she moves forward with her own plans, with putting together some plans to get to help
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God get the promise done. But it's in that context that verse 23, the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, but the son of the free woman was born through promise.
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This phrase, born of the flesh, is in contrast. Now, hear me. Born of the flesh is in contrast to being born through the promise.
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See, there is a way that lives life based on promise, and there is a way that lives life based on the flesh.
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And that's what Paul is driving home. There is a way of living life like a law abider that is appealing to the flesh, that is the way that we move and live and work and do things, and we can live according to law and live according to flesh.
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In other words, try to do our best to please God. Try to do our best to keep his laws or his rules, or there is a way that rests in the promise of God for salvation, that rests in his promise, that rests in his goodness, that rests in his power to accomplish, and not in ourselves.
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You're getting what I'm saying? There's a way that we can abide in the flesh, or there's a way that we can abide in the promise.
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And we're going to see that ultimately a child is going to be born according to the flesh, according to human attempts, and there's going to be a child born according to promise, a trusting and a resting in God.
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You see, I'm convinced that Sarah had good motives. She wanted to help God along, okay? So God's made this promise, this apparently impossible promise.
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Now, she's getting up in age. She's in her 90s now, and she's being told she's going to give birth to a son, and anybody think that's a little unreasonable?
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Okay, seem unreasonable? So she's kind of going, God, I'm not sure if what you meant was strong. I'm not sure, like, as I think it through, maybe what you meant is that I'm supposed to follow a tradition and a custom of my people here in order to procure a child for myself.
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And so she does what any one of us would do, right? Gives her slave to her husband.
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Okay, maybe not. She figured she needed to give
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God some help to make the promise come to pass. So she gives her slave to her husband so that she can have a baby and call it part of her family.
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And that's like just, I mean, somebody get on the phone and call Jerry Springer, because I think they would get a place on the show, okay?
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Like, it just, that's what that, but as crazy as it sounds, like, does that sound, seems somewhat offensive to you?
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Seems somewhat kind of, like, strange to your, maybe offensive is a strong word, but just seems like it just kind of abuses, like, something in our sensibilities about the way that relationships work in families, something like that.
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It ought to be a little bit weird to you. But as crazy as it sounds, this was not that uncommon in ancient
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Near Eastern culture. It wasn't uncommon for a wife who was unable to bear children to give her servant to her husband, which is creepy in and of itself, that that was common.
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Now, that's, that doesn't solve the problem, because that's even weird in and of itself, that that was a common practice.
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And I want to point out that often scripture is silent about things that are right and wrong.
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Like, I mean, you can read the text, you can read through the book of Genesis, and you're not going to find God condemn the behavior of Abraham and Sarah here.
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You know what I'm saying? Does that mean that it's acceptable? Does that mean that that's okay practice and you ought to do it? No, not at all.
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It's just, that's not the main point of the text is drawing out that sin. The scripture is unclear about the sinfulness of the behavior, but scripture is abundantly clear that the heart of Abraham and Sarah in this was to accomplish the promises of God through the flesh.
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That they were trying to accomplish the will of God, trying to make, kind of force his hand into the promise through dependence on their own plans, through dependence on their own scheming, their own intellect, through giving
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God a little bit of help. God, let us, let us do this for you,
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God. We'll get it done, we'll get, we'll get it done, and we'll make this promise come to pass. He's drawing an analogy between the way that we live when we live by law versus living by grace.
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When we live by law, God, I'm gonna, I'm gonna help you sanctify me. I'm gonna make sure, I'm gonna, I'm gonna secure the promises of God over my life by jumping through a bunch of hoops and making you like me more,
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God. Are you seeing the analogy? Are you seeing the analogy? Are you getting that? There's a connection here between this.
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Now, I, again, I think it's important because we could easily let Sarah off the hook a little bit here, but in reality,
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God had promised to Sarah that she would bear a son. It was a very clear promise, so she was not off the hook by trying to follow some cultural, culturally acceptable method to procure a child outside of what she had been promised.
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Are you getting what I'm saying? Now, I'm about to draw an analogy to our lives here, but first,
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I need to answer a simple question some of you are already formulating in your minds. You've already, maybe you've already thought this as I've been talking.
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If Abraham and Sarah were wrong for depending on their own plans and schemes for their own intellect, for depending upon their own way of thinking, then what about us and our plans?
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What about us and our intellect? Are we supposed to just throw our brains out the window and just everything's by faith and I just, you know,
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I don't do what my brain tells me. I do the exact opposite every time because that must be the right path.
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That must be the path of faith. I mean, there are some people out there who think that way though, right?
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Like the most extreme thing must be the will of God. The thing that's just the craziest. If it doesn't make sense to you, then you better do it because that's probably
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God telling you to do it. Be careful about that. I think you ought to study the
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Proverbs a little bit when it comes to thinking through plans. I mean, do the Proverbs talk about making some plans?
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Do they talk about looking at the ant, oh sluggard, and pay attention to the way the ants work and they store up and they are diligent?
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Think about your own life. Anybody in here have a career plan? Some place, you know, I mean, just being honest.
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I mean, you have some place you'd like to be five years from now. Six or seven of you have a plan.
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The rest of you are just kind of going with the flow like whatever happens, that's all good. Awesome. So those of you who raised your hand are just, no.
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How about a plan for your life? Like what you'd like your life to look like five years, ten years down the road. How about a plan for education?
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Some of you here are making decisions for what you're going to do career -wise or what you're going to study.
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A plan to get some stuff done around the house? Anybody, any of you have that list that just, it's like maybe once a year you tick something off the list and then you just put that, you know, it's summertime, it's time to have fun and then winter rolls around and all the holidays get in the way of that kind of stuff and oh, but next summer
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I'll do it or whatever. I mean, you have some plans. How about a plan to be closer to God at this time next year or at this time next month or at this time next week?
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I mean, do you have some plans? Is it acceptable for you to have some plans?
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Yes. I mean, Scripture seems to indicate that God is okay with us making some plans and yet it's very clear that in the book of James there's this one little phrase and I love it.
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Our plans need to always conclude with a simple statement and it doesn't, it's not a formula, it's not like magical or mystical or anything.
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It's just reality. If you are not making your plans with this phrase in mind, then you are going into the flesh.
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If the Lord wills. If the Lord wills, we will build bigger barns.
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If the Lord wills, we will have a better job next year.
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If the Lord wills, whatever your plan is. If the Lord wills, I will be closer to him at this time next year.
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Are you getting what I'm saying? Putting it back on God in dependence. Where is, where does your dependence lie is really the question.
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Is your dependence here on the flesh, on you? You're going to get it done and you're going to accomplish it and oh, I'm going to just, oh,
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I'm going to be awesome next year. Or is it a genuine recognition that God, if you are not in it, unless the
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Lord builds the house, I'm going to, this labor is in vain. It's futile. Unless you are in it, unless you bless this,
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I'm in trouble. Where's the dependence? Are you getting what I'm saying? I think often we make plans without God in it at all, right?
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And it is the flesh. It's us saying what we're going to accomplish. And to be quite honest, often it's for our own glory, right?
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We, there's a lot of us in the equation. Our plans need to be saturated with dependence upon God.
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And let me suggest to you that if God ever comes to you and promises something directly to you, like he promised to Abraham, you can bank on that, okay?
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Now, how does God promise you something like that? Like, I mean, have any of you had God appear to you in a cloud and tell you, you know, something's going to happen this year?
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You're going to get raised, you're going to get a promotion, something great's going to happen. Is that routine for you? Well, then we might call into question whether that ever happens in your life, right?
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Like, does God ever tell you? Does God ever make promises to you? Well, I would say absolutely. As a matter of fact, Paul is going to drive home a point here in the text, and that is that you are a child of the promise.
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If you are a child of the promise through Jesus Christ, then he has promised to perfect you, and you can bank on that.
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That if you are in Christ and the blood of Christ has covered you, then one day you will stand before the throne of God, righteous in his eyes, forgiven, not on your face, groveling before a holy
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God, but standing in the righteousness he has credited to you. Now, any of you in the battle in this life?
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Any of you kind of going, I long for that day, I want to be made righteous, but right now, this seems pretty far from reality in me.
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And so we're struggling, and we're striving, and we're fighting, and we're, it's like tooth and nail trying to figure out how we can walk closer to God day by day, and it's by dependence upon him.
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It's by keeping the cross in front of us, not by laws and rules and regulations, which are only diagnostic, which are only pointing to your failure.
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That's what laws do. They point out when you've crossed the line, which we do daily.
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It's by keeping the cross and dependence upon him. You see, even though Abraham and Sarah took matters into their own hands,
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God did that which seemed impossible to them and gave them Isaac in their very old age.
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They schemed, and plotted, and planned, and came up with Ishmael, who was not the child of the promise.
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But God, in the right timing, did what seemed impossible to them and gave them
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Isaac, gave them the child of the promise. And I believe he waited until Sarah was 99 years old to show that he was the one who gave them the child.
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He was the one in control, and he was going to accomplish it when he was ready to accomplish it. He was going to be the one to fulfill the promise in them.
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Him working by his power, his authority, his might, his control.
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And so Paul sees in the two women in illustration an allegory of two different covenants. He identifies
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Hagar representing the law that was given at Mount Sinai, and he talks about her children that were born into slavery.
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What this implies is that those who live under the law are born into slavery.
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You can go back and re -read the early part of Galatians chapter 4, the same chapter that we're concluding right here, where Paul just really dives into this contrast between slavery, being slaves under the law with God as our master, versus coming into a relationship through Jesus Christ where we are adopted into his family, and we are rightful heirs to the blessings of God through Jesus Christ, and we are basically included in his family from being slaves living outside to a room and a mansion in the mansion, and being inheritors of God's blessing.
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What's the difference? But Paul takes on his opponents directly here in the text.
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He's not pulling any punches. He says that Hagar in her slavery stands for Jerusalem, that is for Judaism, who is in slavery with her children.
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He says to practice Judaism in essence is to be a slave under the law. You Galatians, are you sure?
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Are you sure you really want to sign up for this whole law thing? Are you sure you want to go back to that relationship with God after having been sons and heirs to the promise?
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Do you want to go back to live like slaves? Do you want to reshackle yourself to the prison walls again after having been set free by Jesus Christ?
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And then he contrasts the Jerusalem below, the one that's focused on Judaism, to the Jerusalem that is above about relationship and promise.
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Paul introduces that new Jerusalem which is meant to correspond to Sarah who gave birth to the child of the promise, not by any effort of her own.
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She is our model and example as the one through whom the grace of God came to humanity by promise.
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She gave birth to the child, Isaac, not by human ingenuity, not by human planning, but strictly by the miraculous intervening of God in her old age.
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And now verse 27 seems strange because the conversation turns to a quotation from Isaiah 54, 1.
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Rejoice O barren one who does not bear, break forth and cry aloud you who are not in labor.
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You know that people who struggle with fertility don't tend to rejoice, don't tend to cry out loud.
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What is this that's going on? He's saying it's like an image of Sarah who was unable to bear children and now has borne many children.
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It is a multitude that she has now been accounted for and been accounted to her.
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And do you know that you and I are included in that multitude? You and I as children of the promise are also children of the promise of Abraham through faith in Jesus Christ by adoption into that promise.
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And so the results, I mean what you really have in verse 27 or Isaiah 54, 1 is a command to rejoice.
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In its original context, that verse is sandwiched between Isaiah 53, which is an awesome, amazing prediction of the
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Messiah, Jesus Christ. And then on the other side, 55 and 56 of Isaiah, awesome predictions of the
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Messiah, Jesus Christ. So that what you have here in the middle is a prediction of the Messiah promised through Abraham that he would be the one.
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So why quote this to the Galatians? Why command them to rejoice in all this talk about infertility and all of this stuff and barrenness?
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Because we need to rejoice. We need reminders. How many of you would admit you need reminders to rejoice during your week?
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Do you need that? And he is commanding us to rejoice.
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God promised that Abraham and Sarah would have a baby. They were barren, but God by his grace fulfilled his promise.
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And the true spiritual children of that promise are a vast multitude. Rejoice! God has made it come to pass.
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He has fulfilled his promise to humanity. And the Galatians, like Isaac, and like you and me, are children of the promise.
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We have not come into the line of promise by craftiness, by cunning, by grabbing
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God's attention, by being righteous in ourselves. We are not included in the promise by anything that we have done.
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We have come under the promise because a good and faithful God has acted.
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So Recast, let me encourage you. Rejoice! Break forth! Shout out this week!
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Sing praises before your God who has redeemed you by the promise and who has made it clear by overcoming insurmountable, impossible odds to bring you into the kingdom.
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All the way back to a 99 year old woman giving birth to a child of the promise.
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But there's another comparison that Paul wants to make between the children of the law and the children of the promise. Just like he says in the text, just like Ishmael persecuted
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Isaac, it's still that way today. Well, historically it's difficult to identify exactly what's meant by Ishmael persecuting
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Isaac. There's one single passage in the entire book of Genesis that gives some allusion to this.
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If you were to look at Genesis 21 .9, you don't need to turn there, but Genesis 29 implies that Ishmael mockingly laughed at Isaac.
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It doesn't use the word mockingly, it just says he laughed at Isaac. That seems a little bit sketchy, like somebody laughing at you, is that persecution?
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Barely, right? Getting punched in the face for talking about Jesus, that's a little bit more persecution.
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Routinely getting punched in the face for talking about Jesus, getting more like persecution, right? Is somebody laughing at you?
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I don't know. But I think that if we misunderstand this and we kind of go, well, did Ishmael ever mock
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Isaac? We're kind of missing something here and I think that's the relational side of the story. Like, have you ever put yourself into these
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Old Testament characters' lives for just a minute and thought about what life must have been like in the Abraham household?
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Okay, Abraham, Hagar, Sarah, Ishmael, Isaac, all one big happy family.
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You think? Probably not so much. The firstborn son, who was the firstborn?
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Ishmael. Who was the rightful heir to all that his father possessed, according to historical culture?
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Ishmael. Who was getting marginalized and sidelined at every turn because the secondborn is the child of the promise?
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Ishmael. Do you think maybe Ishmael had a little bit of psychological issues going on in his life?
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Do you think that maybe it would make sense that Ishmael would have a little animosity towards Isaac?
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I think so. And that's what he's getting at in the text is this was not a pretty picture. This was getting ugly.
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And I think it's reasonable to assume that, well, it's reasonable to say the text is right because it says it, but it also makes sense in an actual family setting.
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Even the story of the prodigal son illustrates that concept of the older son persecuting the younger or the one who has kept the law, the one who has obeyed the law and followed the law.
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We know that the first son in the story of the prodigal son that Jesus told, that parable, the first son follows the rules, stays close to home, honors the father, is out working in the fields, is doing what his father asks.
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But the second son who squandered his father's wealth, asked for the inheritance before dad was even dead, went out and went crazy with the money until the money all dried up, his friends all left him, and he's stuck.
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And he finally comes back home and receives forgiveness and the embrace of the father. And what is the point of the story?
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What's the older son's perspective on the whole thing? He's not ready to celebrate. He's angry.
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He's spitting angry because his little brother who's gotten all of this blessing from his father and squandered it, is now being blessed again.
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And he's like, I've done everything right. Self -righteousness. I've got it.
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I've been with you dad all along the way. I've done everything you've asked of me. Shouldn't you be treating me better than him?
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And we see that modeled time and time again in scripture. Those who live by law desire to draw others into a life of law.
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You guys agree with that statement? Those who love the law and want to live their lives based on law naturally draw others into that lifestyle.
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They desire everyone else to dance to their tune. And they eventually ostracize those who do not keep their own commandments.
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Right? We see that in our culture, don't we? As a matter of fact, isn't this the very reason that the scribes and Pharisees eventually crucified
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Jesus Christ himself? He didn't act like them. He didn't come under their authority. He hung around people that they didn't approve of.
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He didn't obey their man -made laws and rules and regulations. And so they eventually rose up and had him crucified.
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Scripture shows what happened to the slave woman eventually. The slave woman whose son was persecuting the child of the promise.
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I believe this is cautionary, what Paul is saying here in Genesis 21 .10
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where he's quoting it here in verse 30. But what does the scripture say?
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Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.
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Sarah eventually cast out Hagar. That's a quote from Sarah, by the way, talking to Abraham and saying, cast her out.
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She had Hagar and Ishmael cast out for the one born of the flesh will not inherit with the one born of grace.
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He's saying this ought to be cautionary to us about the way we live our lives and where we place our trust. Is our trust placed in the flesh, in ourselves, or is the trust placed in the promise of God?
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Being cast out and being in is in the balance of our understanding of the gospel of grace.
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Do you understand? Have you approached God based on his promise? And that's ultimately just approaching him based on humility and bowing the knee before him and saying,
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I can't do this. I can't do it on my own. I need a savior to save me.
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I can't accomplish this. I can't walk this way anymore. And so Paul concludes, we are children of the free woman, not children of the slave.
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We are children of the spirit, not children of the flesh.
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We are children of the spiritual Jerusalem that is above, not children of the Jewish Jerusalem that is below.
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We are children of God's effort, not children of human effort. So what is the point of this extended illustration?
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Quite simple. Nobody gets into the favor of God by their own flesh, by their own will, by accomplishing something for God, by attending church enough, by giving enough, by obeying enough.
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That's not how we get into the kingdom. You didn't scheme and plot and plan your way into the blessings of God.
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It isn't that God helps those who help themselves. Praise God that that's the case.
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Because I couldn't help myself. I couldn't accomplish it on my own. And neither could you.
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You didn't purchase your way into the promise. We are all inheritors of a promise that was contingent solely upon the grace and love and mercy of God.
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He even moved in my heart to provide faith. Like the birth of Isaac was a miraculous long shot.
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Would you call that a long shot? That a child would be born to a 99 -year -old woman? Long shot? I think so.
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And in the same way that that's a miraculous long shot, so was our salvation.
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And so is our improvement in this world. You encounter the word sanctification, the process by which
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God by His spirit is making you better. And that process sometimes looks like five steps forward, three steps back, ten steps forward, five steps back, five steps forward, ten steps back.
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Have you encountered that back and forth of walking with Christ? What is it that secures that in the end it's all going to work out?
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Faith in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. God is the one who is doing it.
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God is the one who is going to present you holy and blameless before Him on that day.
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Not you fixing yourself for Him, Him doing it in and through you.
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But I think each one of us needs to seriously consider our own dependence upon God. What does that look like in your life?
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Do you live a life of trust in Jesus Christ to change you? Are you open to His work in your heart?
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And in this process of growing in faith, some of you need to be open to the very first step. There may be somebody in this room who has yet to accept
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Jesus Christ as their Lord and King and has yet to acknowledge that He is worthy of your entire life.
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And then there may be some who have not done that, or have done that, but have not taken the next step, which is just humbling yourself before God and saying,
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I need Jesus to save me. Asking Him to save you. Recognizing your own despair, your own hopelessness to make it right.
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And coming before Him and saying, I need a Savior. I need Jesus to save me. That takes humility, right?
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But if you're here this morning and that's you, please come and talk with me. I would love to walk through what it looks like to start a relationship in the family of God by faith through Jesus Christ.
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But there's others here. Many of us who have asked Jesus to save us are still sitting in a mess of our lives saying, why isn't this working?
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Probably, don't raise your hand, but a variety of us have been there, right? And maybe are there now. And maybe it's many of us are there now.
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You're saying, I thought I was in with Christ and I thought that everything, you know, I've given my life over to Him.
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I've recognized that He's King. I've bowed the knee before Him and asked Him to save me, but my life just still is a mess.
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What's not right? But you never take a quiet moment in your busy life to reflect on the cross.
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You're not cracking the Bible to know your Savior better. You're not talking with Him throughout your day or the start of the day or at the end of the day, and you're not exercising dependence upon Him.
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And then you turn your angry face to heaven and ask, where are you, God? Why are you not fixing my situation?
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But others here have a very different experience. Maybe that's not you. Others here have the experience of getting up early in the morning to spend quiet hours with Jesus.
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As a matter of fact, you do so regularly that when you miss it, you feel a little discouraged and bad, right?
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Like maybe today's not going to go so well because I didn't meet with Jesus this morning. You're spending time in prayer.
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You have rituals and routines that you're going through to try to force God's hand into your life more, to try to bring
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Him closer to you as if somehow you could arrest His attention and bring the very
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God of heaven down off of His throne into your living room because of your piety, because of your
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Bible reading, because of your devotion and your commitment. And yet you turn your face to God and say, where are you and why are you not fixing my situation?
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Same result, very different lives. Do you agree with me that you can have that same result of feeling distant from God while devoted to laws and rules and regulations, while spending time in the
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Word of God, still feel distant from Him? Can that happen? And yet equally,
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I would expect that to be the same case if you're not spending time with Him, right? A sense of distance, a sense of something's been moved here and I don't feel that relationship anymore.
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And I point that out, I'm not going to resolve that for you. Probably what everybody would love at this point would be for five points for those of you who feel like you're far from God, five things you can do to bring
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God near to you, right? Or maybe it would be more like ten, but ten steps to a better life with God, ten steps to a better relationship with Him.
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I'm not going to resolve that. But I bring those two sides of the equation because I think I probably covered most of us, at least most of us, in what we struggle with, the direction we struggle.
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Maybe some of you are right in the middle right now when you're feeling close to God and you're in a good place and it feels healthy.
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And again, remember, this is dicey ground because I'm talking about how you feel and that's what we're going to get at here because there's a huge spectrum of spiritual experiences in this room, a big spectrum.
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But Paul cuts to the chase here. He says, regardless of how you feel, regardless of how you process this relationship with God, leaning towards laws, leaning towards no laws, leaning towards licentiousness, which is a big, fancy word for going out and doing your own thing and serving yourself and serving your flesh, regardless of which direction you lean, there is something that is true of you.
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Either you are a child of the slave or you are a child of the free.
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Either you are born of the promise or you are seeking to try to be born of the flesh.
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Either you are living your life based on laws and rules and regulations and trying to think that I can draw closer to God or you are depending on Him to bring you near to Him.
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If you're a child of the free woman, if you're here and you've entered through the narrow gate, you've entered through Jesus Christ.
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He is the way, the truth, and the life. And if you have come to God the Father through Jesus Christ, then you are a child of the free woman.
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You have the forgiveness of God and your response now is to rejoice, to break forth, to shout out, because God has saved you.
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He has done what seemed impossible. He has redeemed your life from the pit. He has nothing but love for you, regardless of how far you feel from Him.
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And although there are ways that we can yield our lives more and more to His work, like reading the word, not because it's a law, not because it's a rule, but there are ways that we can prepare our hearts to receive
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Him more. Does that make sense? It's not a guarantee. How many of you know that there is no promise that if you spend a quiet time with God tomorrow morning that you're going to feel better all day long?
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Is that the promise? No, there is no promise that that's the way that this is going to all factor out.
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As a matter of fact, there is only one thing that will guarantee the promise of God over your life.
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Are you ready for it? There is one thing. Only the atoning blood of Jesus Christ will guarantee the promise over your life.
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That is it. No amount of work that you can do, no amount of law abiding, no amount of hoop jumping.
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Nothing is going to draw you closer to God than you already are. He loves you dearly.
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And it's not going to be hoop jumping and law abiding that's going to do it. But one day
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God will bring you to Himself and you will be close with Him for eternity because of the blood of Jesus Christ.
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And that's it. This morning
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I want to remember the blood of Jesus Christ as we take communion. I hope that as we come to communion this isn't just some exercise and you know it can kind of get awkward trying to find you know get back to your seats and all this.
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I hope none of that interferes with the point of taking communion together and that is the remembrance of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
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He was the offspring of Abraham who came through the line of Isaac, the child of the promise, came through the line of King David and gave up his life for us.
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And if you believe truly that Jesus is Lord and King and you have asked Him to save you, then feel free to join in in communion with us this morning and remembering the awesome sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
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The only way that we can be made right with Him. The only way that the promises come to us.
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The only way that we have hope of eternal blessing is through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to cover our sins and to adopt us into the promise that was given to Abraham.
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Let's pray. Father I rejoice in your great and awesome promise that you are faithful to complete that which you started and Father I recognize that there might even be some confusion in people's minds about our role and your role and our sanctification and this text doesn't even get into the other half of what does it look like for us but Father I'm convinced that your desire is for us to walk out of here in gratitude and in thankfulness and in rejoicing about the cross and that we can't overdo that.
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We can't overemphasize the cross of Jesus Christ and its impact in our lives and so Father I pray that everybody would understand that fully in their mind that as we celebrate communion, communion is not just something that we tack on at the end of the service but it's the point, it's the power, it's the way that we move forward in remembrance that Father if we think about the cross and we think about your sacrifice day by day, moment by moment, hour by hour, month by month, if we keep the cross in front of us we will walk with you.
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Father that gratitude would flow to our hearts through the great sacrifice of Jesus Christ and as we take communion we would be moved in our spirit in genuine gratitude and thankfulness committing to walk with you in relationship this week not to walk with you in law but to walk with you in a relationship that you have established through your son
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Jesus Christ the great promise that has been fulfilled to us. I pray this in Jesus name.