Sunday Sermon: Introduction to Galatians (Galatians 1:1-2)

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February 2, 2019

Opening a new series in the book of Galatians, starting with the first two verses, talking about the main theme, and doing an overview of the material to come. Visit fsbcjc.org for more info about our church.

00:18: You are listening to the teaching ministry of Gabrielle Hughes, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas.
00:25: Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on this podcast, we feature 20 minutes of Bible study through a New Testament book.
00:32: On Thursday is our Old Testament study, and then we answer questions from listeners on Friday. Each Sunday we are pleased to share our sermon series.
00:40: This is the sermon that was preached last week from our pulpit. Here's Pastor Gabe. Galatians chapter 1, verses 1 through 10.
00:50: Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the
00:56: Father who raised him from the dead and all the brothers who are with me. To the churches of Galatia, grace to you and peace from God our
01:06: Father and the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our
01:14: God and Father to whom be the glory forever and ever, amen. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.
01:28: Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.
01:34: But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one that we preached to you, let him be accursed.
01:43: As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one that you received, let him be accursed.
01:55: For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am I trying to please man?
02:01: If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.
02:08: Let us pray. Our wonderful God, we come before you today and open up your word and desire to have you speak to us that our hearts would be convicted and we would turn all the more to the gospel so that we may know our only hope and deliverance from the grave, the wages of sin which is death, is by faith in Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and rose again from the grave conquering death so that all who believe in him will not perish, but will have everlasting life.
02:43: Teach us these things and how this should look in our lives. What does it mean to believe the gospel and how does it change the believer as we live in this world?
02:55: Guide us in your truth everlasting. In the name of Christ we pray and all God's people said, amen.
03:01: Thank you. You may be seated. In 2015 and 2016, we were studying through the book of Romans.
03:11: Took us almost two years to get all the way through Romans. And then when we finished that up and in 2017, we were going through 1
03:19: Corinthians. In the month of October, we put a pause on our study of 1
03:24: Corinthians that we would come back to some doctrinal truths that we had been looking at as we had gone through Romans.
03:31: Specifically, what are called the five solas of the Protestant Reformation. It was in October of 1517,
03:40: October 31st of 1517, that's the date that we consider to be the start of the Protestant Reformation.
03:46: For it was on that day that Martin Luther took his 95 theses and nailed them to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany.
03:55: These theses were a protest against Roman Catholicism and how the gospel had become corrupted under the
04:03: Roman Catholic Church. We don't think about it much today because there's a church on every corner and you have options of not just Protestant churches, but even the
04:13: Roman Catholic Church and some communities will have an Orthodox Church. But those were the two churches that existed in the world at that time.
04:20: It was either Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. If you lived in the Eastern part of the world, the
04:27: Orthodox Church was the dominant church. And if you lived in the Western part of the world, particularly in Europe, then it was the
04:34: Roman Catholic Church that was the dominant church. There wasn't a Protestant Church. There had been no protest against Roman Catholicism yet.
04:42: And the gospel had become so corrupted by Roman Catholicism that the gospel itself, the true gospel was hardly existent anywhere in the world at that time.
04:52: With the exception of small factions of people that had broken away to have a church that would be apart from Roman Catholicism.
05:01: But if the Catholic Church, which dominated government at that time, found you having a church separated from Roman Catholic Church, they'd have you burned at the stake for heresy.
05:11: This was the kind of oppression that was going on in the world at that time. And the
05:16: Protestant Reformation was the recovery of the gospel. I told you about Jeffrey Rice's ministry this morning, post -Tenebrous
05:24: Lukes. That was a motto that came out of the Protestant Reformation. In Latin, it is translated in English, out of darkness, light.
05:34: Out of the darkness that had hidden the gospel, the light of the gospel broke forth, giving truth to what
05:40: Christ had said in Matthew 16, 18, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
05:51: And these men were passionate for the gospel, fought against Roman Catholicism, and brought to light once again, the doctrinal truth that was proclaimed by the apostles.
06:02: That it is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, that we have salvation.
06:09: Not by any works, not because the Pope has said something, not by any of these other doctrines that the
06:14: Catholics were teaching, adding to the gospel of grace. It is by the gospel alone that we are saved.
06:23: Those five foundational doctrines in the Protestant Reformation we talked about when we were in Romans and came back to them again in October of 2017.
06:30: There were five Sundays in that particular month as we came up on the 500th anniversary of the
06:35: Protestant Reformation, so we committed every one of those Sundays to studying each one of these doctrines.
06:41: Those five doctrines were, it is according to the authority of Scripture alone that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone.
06:52: And this is not something that the Protestant Reformers came up with and imposed upon Scripture. We find it in Scripture.
06:58: In fact, our root Scripture that we use to study through these things was Romans chapter 3, verses 21 through 26, where those five doctrines are outlined.
07:07: And it is in Ephesians chapter 2, verses 8 and 9 that we read, it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of yourselves.
07:17: It is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one may boast.
07:24: When we were going through Romans, I mentioned that the theme of Romans was justification.
07:31: That was basically the doctrinal treatise that Paul was writing on justification.
07:38: It is the book of Romans. What you want to know about justification and in your study of that particular doctrine, you come to Romans as kind of your base point on understanding what it means to be justified.
07:50: That word itself means that before God, we are declared innocent. We are justified.
07:56: And this happens by what Christ has done, and by faith in Him are we justified.
08:05: We are cleansed of our sinfulness and we are declared innocent before a holy God before whom we have sinned and whose judgment we deserve.
08:15: Christ took our sins upon Himself when He died on the cross, and He's clothed us in His righteousness, all who have faith in Him, so that we may be justified.
08:29: Now, I mentioned that to you again because as we come to Galatians, justification is the theme here as well, but Paul gets a little more specific about the justification that he talks about with Galatians.
08:43: Specifically, we're talking about not a general overview of justification, but specifically justification by faith.
08:53: That is what Paul comes to over and over again. This is the repeated theme that you are going to see continually throughout the book of Galatians.
09:01: Namely, I think of Galatians 2, verse 16.
09:07: It's a pretty beefy verse here, but here you have a summary of the book of Galatians. We know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.
09:21: So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law, no one will be justified.
09:36: Chapter 3, verse 10. And for all who rely on works of the law are under a curse, for it is written, cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law and do them.
09:48: Now, it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for the righteous shall live by faith.
09:58: Where else did we see that said? Romans chapter 1, that the just shall live by faith.
10:05: We are justified by faith alone in Christ, and this is the point that Paul makes in Galatians.
10:11: Here's our general theme, and you may have gathered this even from what Paul addresses here in the first 10 verses that we have read this morning.
10:21: So we understand that we are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone, and no other way do we come to salvation.
10:32: It is not by works. We are commanded to do good works. In fact, as I quoted
10:37: Ephesians 2, 8, and 9, verse 10, then right after that says that we are created for good works, which
10:46: God has prepared for us beforehand that we should walk in them. So we are to do good works, but the works that we do are not the thing that saves us.
10:55: The works that we do are the evidence that we have come to this salvation in Christ, so that we might demonstrate with our lives that it is the righteousness of Christ that we have, not a righteousness of ourselves.
11:11: So we show the righteousness of Christ by doing the things that he has commanded. John 14, 15,
11:16: Jesus saying to his disciples, you will show me that you love me when you obey my commandments.
11:25: And so it is in obedience to Christ that we live in righteousness. This is not the thing that saves, but it is the evidence that we have been saved.
11:35: So by grace through faith alone in Christ alone. Here's what Paul addresses with the Galatians.
11:41: If your doctrine of justification is by grace through faith in Christ plus blank, the emphasis of your theology is going to be on the blank.
12:00: Whatever fills that blank, that's going to be the emphasis of what you believe salvation is.
12:07: So it is no longer by grace through faith in Christ alone, it's this other thing that fills this blank.
12:15: That's the thing that you have to have in order to think that you are saved and you have corrupted the gospel.
12:26: Immediately, Paul addresses at the start of this letter, I am astonished that you're so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.
12:37: What is the different gospel that the Galatians have turned to? Gnosticism?
12:43: No, hadn't come around yet. Is it
12:48: Catholicism? No, also did not exist yet. Not Mormonism, not
12:54: Buddhism, not Taoism, none of these other isms. This was not what it is that the
13:00: Galatians had turned to. Rather, it was a gospel of works. It was the belief, oh yeah,
13:06: I believe in Jesus, but I also have to do this. And until I do these things and boom, boom, boom, and I've checked all my boxes, only then can
13:15: I really be saved. And Paul says, that's a different gospel.
13:22: That is not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are saved by grace through faith and no other way, by faith in Jesus.
13:34: Now our God is a jealous God. And in Exodus chapter 20,
13:40: God lays that out when he gives the 10 commandments to the people of Israel. Now, contrary to what some teachers you may have heard have said, the 10 commandments have not been nullified even for the people of God.
13:52: There still are commandments that we must obey. As I've already quoted to you, Jesus saying, if you love me, you will obey my commandments.
14:00: So the Lord our God has said, and this is as true through Jesus Christ as it was when he spoke this to the children of Israel, that I will have no, that you, sorry, you will have no other gods before me.
14:16: For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, and he will not share us with anyone else.
14:26: So there cannot be faith plus something else. There cannot be this belief or this idea that I have to have this other thing in order to be saved, in order to find my justification, in order to believe that I have right standing with God.
14:44: You cannot find yourself unsatisfied with faith in Jesus Christ. Well, you know,
14:49: Christianity, sure, but let me shape it into something that's a little more palatable for me and goes together with all these other things that I want to do.
14:57: Well, then you've created a different gospel. And once again, you've established a blank that needs to be filled, and that's where your emphasis is.
15:05: Your emphasis is on whatever needs to go in that blank. And you've corrupted the gospel.
15:12: Our need and our desire needs to be fully Christ and nothing else. Well, I need to have this too.
15:20: Well, then Christ is not enough. That's essentially what you're saying. Can you do without any of those other things?
15:29: And if you were left with only Christ, you would still be satisfied and you would have assurance of your salvation. What sacrifices must be made in your life to be sure that this is gone and there's only
15:40: Christ? And I can live without this other thing in order to be sure that my mind and my heart are completely focused on Christ.
15:50: This is what Paul comes to with the Galatians. And let me tell you, this is a hard letter.
15:57: It's a harsh letter. It's probably Paul's harshest letter, even more so than 1 Corinthians.
16:03: Yeah, he called out specific sins with specific people in the church in Corinth, but Paul still had a much more praiseworthy greeting to the
16:13: Corinthians in both 1 and 2 Corinthians than he had here at the start of Galatia. Galatia is very, very light, and he does not even express thanks for them at the start of this letter.
16:27: To the churches of Galatia, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the
16:32: Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our
16:38: God and Father to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen. Paul basically gives them the gospel again in their greeting, but he expresses no thanks for them.
16:48: Every other letter that we have from Paul in the New Testament, he gives thanks to his hearers, to those who are reading the letter.
16:57: He doesn't say that to the Galatians. Does that mean that he's not thankful for them? Yeah, that is what that means.
17:05: What do I mean by that? Because they've turned to another gospel, and as he's going to say coming up here later on in the letter,
17:11: I feel like I'm having to go through labor again for you. I've done this once before, and now
17:19: I have to do it again because he's saying to them, when you heard the gospel the first time, it apparently didn't stick.
17:28: And now here we are again. Here I am again having to preach this to you again. Paul has no delight in his heart to have to do that again for these people.
17:38: So therefore, he has no gratitude to express for this church, that you are taking away from the mission that I should be focusing on, all these other areas who still need to hear the gospel, and now these folks who have heard the gospel before, and here
17:51: I am preaching it to you again, I have no grace or no appreciation for you.
17:57: I meant to say no gratefulness for you. Grace he certainly has, because that's what he expresses at the start of the letter.
18:04: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace he certainly has.
18:10: It is grace that has compelled him to write this letter to them and address these things with them again.
18:17: But it still vexes his heart that he has to address this, that this church has left the gospel.
18:25: So he has no thankfulness for them, but that they would repent and come to know the true gospel that has been preached to them again.
18:34: It is going to be vital for us as we embark on this study of Galatians to understand that God will share us with no one or no thing.
18:44: Do we understand that Christ is preeminent? As Paul said in Colossians 1 .18, that he reigns over all, and above him is top, and there is nothing to gain above Christ.
18:55: But when we have Christ, we have everything. And anything else would just be icing on the cake.
19:02: It's just blessing from God after that. But Paul said in Ephesians 1 .3,
19:08: we have been given all spiritual blessings in Christ in the heavenly places.
19:13: So there's nothing else you need after Christ. Christ is everything.
19:19: Now, as we come into this, we will start to get more specific about some of those things that maybe in our lives have become distractions, or they become the blank that we need to fill with something else, thinking that we also need this in order to believe that I'm satisfied, in order to believe
19:42: I have everything that I need. I have Christ plus blank. And as we address some of those kinds of things, as we go on with this letter, you may find yourself becoming offended, and you should, because there's something that you exalt in your flesh that you need to sacrifice and get rid of.
20:00: And those things hurt. They assault the conscience. They convict, is the word that we have.
20:07: When Jesus talked about sending the Holy Spirit in John 16, he said he will come to convict the world in terms of sin and judgment and righteousness.
20:18: So you may feel conviction over some of those things that we have to address. Now, I've gone through this before. 2019 is coming in on my ninth year of pastoring here at First Southern Baptist Church.
20:32: And something that I have heard in the nine years that I've been pastoring, and this is still as true now as it was when
20:39: I first started taking over the sermons in 2012, is that people will get offended by something that I have preached and that they'll leave.
20:48: And then when somebody finds them in the community and say, well, why did you leave First Southern Baptist Church? Well, because Gabe was talking about me.
20:57: And there was stuff that him and I had talked about that was supposed to be private, and here he is talking about me from the pulpit.
21:04: My friends, I've never brought those counseling sessions into the pulpit. If there was something that I said that you felt convicted over and you thought that I was speaking to you, it had nothing personally to do with you and I.
21:16: It was what the Bible said about you and your sin and the things of this world that you are clinging on to that you need to put to death.
21:24: And so if you so find yourself becoming convicted in that way as we go through this, and you think that I'm talking about you, please come and talk to me first before you resolve yourself to think that I'm sharing secrets that I should not be sharing.
21:41: This convicts me before I bring it to you. And there are things over the course of the week that have been slaying me as I've been reading them and finding in myself passions in my flesh that I've been clinging on to that now the
21:57: Bible and the Word of God is calling me to sacrifice, calling me to put to death.
22:04: And I've read Galatians I don't know how many times. And yet even over the course of this study
22:09: I'm going to find those convictions again because I'm still a human being walking in the flesh that is a forgetful person and sometimes
22:17: I will forget the way of righteousness that has been set before us by God. So may
22:23: I also find conviction in these words before I bring them to your hearts that we may together as the body of Christ encourage and admonish one another in love with Thanksgiving building up each other in the body of Christ which is the way the body is supposed to work according to Ephesians chapter 4 verses 11 through 16 that the body being knit together in love grows itself up with a love that comes from God.
22:51: So may we be that for each other as we go through Galatians. There is not
22:57: Christ plus blank. There's Christ. And may he be exalted in our hearts in our lives and in this church.
23:08: So as we bring this to a close this morning let me go through briefly Galatians chapter 1 verses 1 and 2 kind of lay this out a little bit the greeting that Paul has at the very beginning next week we'll look at this again focusing on verses 3, 4, and 5 as Paul summarizes the gospel.
23:25: This is before he confronts them in saying that you've left the gospel. So it is necessary for us to have an established foundation of the gospel before we get into the rebuke of you've come to believe a different gospel.
23:38: And then after we go through verses 1 and 2 here I'm going to give you an outline of the book of Galatians and I'll remind you of this outline again next week.
23:47: So first of all we have, excuse me, first of all we have at the very start Paul an apostle so we know that's the author.
23:53: There's not any dispute regarding that as to who wrote this particular letter. Even skeptics, though there are some out there that will try to contest that certain letters were written by Paul, this is not one of them.
24:07: Even critics will agree that Paul the apostle was the one that wrote the letter to the Galatians. Paul an apostle not from men nor through man but through Jesus Christ.
24:18: He is an apostle of Christ, meaning that he is sent out by Christ. Now what does it mean to be an apostle?
24:25: We talked about this a little bit when we were in 2 Corinthians for Paul talked about the signs of the apostle that he demonstrated among them.
24:36: He says in 2 Corinthians 12, verse 12, the signs of a true apostle were performed among you with utmost patience, with signs and wonders and mighty works.
24:49: So the qualifications of an apostle were these. An apostle had to personally see the risen
24:54: Christ. That was the first qualification. Secondly, they had to be appointed by Christ himself to be an apostle.
25:03: That's another qualification. And the third qualification is that you will know the genuineness of an apostle when they perform the signs of an apostle.
25:12: That way you know that they have been sent by God. And what are those signs? They were the miraculous healings.
25:20: Healing the sick, raising the dead, speaking in tongues, although that one in particular wasn't just limited to the apostles, but nonetheless that was a sign of apostolic ministry.
25:32: Being able to prophesy, announce things that were going to transpire, and then those things would happen, and there were no mistakes.
25:40: When an apostle said something was going to happen that was given to him by God, it would come to pass. There were no mistakes in those prophecies.
25:48: And so these were the signs of an apostle that were performed even in Galatia as Paul came to the
25:54: Galatians and brought to them the gospel. He affirmed before them that he was an apostle of Jesus Christ, not from men, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ, who appointed him to this task.
26:13: And as I said to you when we were in 2 Corinthians 12 and talking about the signs of an apostle, the office of apostleship is closed.
26:22: Thanks for applying. There will be no more apostles. If a person comes to you and says that they are an apostle of Jesus Christ, they are lying.
26:33: No one else has seen the risen Christ. Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 15, 8, he was the last one to see the risen
26:41: Christ, and no one would see him again until Christ comes in the clouds as he talked about in Matthew 24.
26:49: As lightning flashes from the east and is seen as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.
26:54: Everything that we have in the New Testament says to us that Christ's next appearance will be loud, and it will be seen by the whole world.
27:03: There will be no mistaking that he has come. Jesus even goes on to say in Matthew 24 that if anybody says to you, look, here he is in the inner rooms, don't go in.
27:14: Or someone says to you, here he is out in the wilderness, do not go out.
27:20: For false Christs and false prophets will arise, performing many signs and wonders so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.
27:30: See, I have told you beforehand. We will have false apostles that will come, and Paul confronted some of those false apostles in 2
27:40: Corinthians 10 -11. We talked about that there. So there are people that are going to come performing false signs and wonders so to lead astray people, and we must be wise to that.
27:54: But Jesus does not appear to a select group of people in secret. That's stated specifically when
28:00: Christ said, when they say to you, here he is in the inner rooms, don't go in.
28:07: Jesus did not appear to Joseph Smith. He did not appear to new apostles today who claim to be apostles of Jesus Christ.
28:14: He hadn't appeared to the Pope. Jesus does not appear to a select few people.
28:21: He won't appear again until his second coming. So the apostles that we have, whose authority we are still under, by the way, are the apostles that gave us the
28:31: New Testament, and there will be no other appointed apostles after them. And so Paul has verified his apostleship.
28:40: It has been seen by the world to whom the gospel was delivered at that time that the gospel was going out, and he was appointed by Christ.
28:50: This was not a man -made appointment. It was not an appointment that Paul gave himself, but it was an appointment that was given by Christ.
28:58: God the Father, who has ordained all, who raised him from the dead, and all the brothers who are with me to the churches of Galatia.
29:08: So we have who is writing this letter, and we have who the letter is being written to, and that is the churches of Galatia.
29:16: Galatia, by the way, was not a town. It was not a city. It was a region. So this letter is being written more generally than we would have considered 1st or 2nd
29:27: Corinthians. Those two letters were written to a specific church in Corinth, but the letter to the
29:33: Galatians was copied. So Paul wrote it, and then there were other scribes that copied the letter so that there were multiple copies of it that then went out to the churches in the region of Galatia.
29:47: This is the author and the recipients of this particular letter. When Paul wrote this is in dispute.
29:54: There's a lot of different opinions as to when Paul wrote it. Some will even say that it was his first letter predating 1st and 2nd
30:01: Thessalonians, which are generally held as the first letters that Paul wrote, but there are others that put Galatians a little bit later.
30:07: We don't have any sign or indication that Paul had written this while he was in prison, although this letter does often get pitted with the rest of the prison letters.
30:17: So you think of Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, those letters that Paul wrote while he was in prison,
30:26: Philemon being the other one. Galatians is not necessarily included among them, but because it appears next to them in canon, we think of this as being among the prison letters, but we don't know that Paul wrote this from prison.
30:36: So there's dispute as to when it was written, but there isn't any question that Paul was the one that was writing it and who the recipients were, those churches in the region of Galatia.
30:47: So here's our basic outline of the book of Galatians. This is what this is going to look like as we embark on this particular series over the next several months.
30:56: So I have five main points that I've kind of narrowed down the book of Galatians into this general outline.
31:03: First of all, we have our greeting, and we've looked at a portion of that today, and we'll continue to look at that next week as Paul offers a presentation of the gospel in verses 3, 4, and 5, and all of that being included in the greeting that he gives to the
31:16: Galatians. So that's the opening of the letter, five verses long. We've seen longer introductions from Paul.
31:22: You see a longer introduction in his letter to the Ephesians, but here is very short and concise, and then he gets right to the point.
31:31: The letter to the Galatians, by the way, is 2 ,200 words. His letter to the Ephesians, by comparable length, is about 2 ,400 words.
31:40: Try to think of how long that would be as you're talking it out. It's about half a sermon. So we could read through the book of Galatians twice on a
31:48: Sunday morning, and that would be your sermon for the day. You might be thinking, wait, wait,
31:54: Pastor Gabe. Is that half an average sermon, or is that half of your sermon? We'll just stick with half a sermon.
32:03: So the next thing that Paul addresses is the problem in Galatia. So first we have the greeting.
32:09: Second, we have the problem. And the problem is given to us very stately here in verses 6 through 9.
32:17: He summarizes it quite, and then everything that he's going to address from this point on will flow from this problem that has arisen in Galatia, and it is the problem of the false gospel that they've come to believe, that I need
32:31: Christ plus something else. And the emphasis is always going to be on the something else in those situations.
32:38: So this is why we find this particularly applicable to us, though in our world and in our culture we may not readily see the exact same things being done around us as we would see the
32:51: Galatians doing. Like we don't necessarily see people in the church next door adopting the works of the
33:00: Jews or going right back to the law in order to find their salvation. Maybe that's not the problem with our church or with another church, but we would certainly find in our culture, especially in America, that defines itself as a
33:15: Christian nation. You're going to find people that will say, yes, I believe in Jesus, but they also have some other kind of thing that they have in their life.
33:25: Either sharing that glory with God or believing that they need this thing in order to find satisfaction or happiness in life.
33:32: So this is where we will find these things, this problem in Galatia, applicable to things that are going on in our culture today.
33:40: The third point that we find in this letter to the Galatians is going to be a defense.
33:46: So first we have greeting, second addressing the problem, and third we have a defense. And the defense is going to go from chapter 1 verse 10 through chapter 5 verse 12, but it's broken in two parts.
33:57: First of all, we have Paul's defense of his apostleship, that he is an apostle of Jesus Christ, that he is not some guy who's just out there trying to make a name for himself, but he was given by Christ to preach the gospel to the nations.
34:14: So the defense of his apostleship will go from chapter 1 verse 10 through chapter 2 verse 14.
34:20: And then the next defense that he gives is going to be a defense of the gospel, and that will go from chapter 2 verse 15 through chapter 5 verse 12.
34:30: And that's where we have statements like what I've read to you this morning regarding salvation by faith alone in Christ.
34:40: So that's point number three, the defense of Paul's apostleship and the defense of the gospel. Point number four, the fourth point that we get to in the outline, is the result of the gospel.
34:50: So you come to believe this gospel. What does that now look like in the life of a believer?
34:57: If we're saved by grace through faith and not of works, does that mean we don't have to do works? No. There are still things that you must do.
35:05: And here is what that looks like in your life. And again, these things don't mean you will have salvation if you do them, but you should do them as a result of receiving the salvation that you have.
35:19: If you've been clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, then you will show his righteousness.
35:26: You've got a Super Bowl coming up in a week, and you've got bandwagon fans that are going to jump on respective teams for the
35:33: Super Bowl. I guarantee you, outside of New England, everybody's a Rams fan heading up into the
35:39: Super Bowl next week, right? Yeah, okay. But not everybody's really a
35:47: Rams fan, right? They just don't like the Patriots. So what is going to be the display that a person's really a
35:54: Rams fan? They probably have a jersey or two in their closet, right? Might even have a room decked out in Rams gear.
36:02: They talk the Rams. They walk the Rams. They wear the Rams. That's how you'll know the difference between a true fan from a guy who's just kind of a bandwagon fan, right?
36:12: That's how that goes in sports. So with Christianity, when it comes to following Jesus Christ, you'll know the difference between a person who is truly a follower of Christ and somebody who's just hopping on the bandwagon every once in a while.
36:26: What does our jersey look like? What does it look like when we live as Christ in this world?
36:34: That's what Paul addresses when we get to the result of the gospel in 5 -13 -6 -10.
36:41: That's going to be how it looks like for us as a believer, as individual believers, what it looks like in our families, what it looks like in this church, what it should look like for us as we go from here out into the world sharing the gospel.
36:56: We address some of those things as well in the result of the gospel. And then our final point is the conclusion, which covers 6 -11 -17.
37:07: Just as the greeting is short, so the conclusion is short. But it's in the conclusion that Paul reminds the
37:12: Galatians, do not abandon the gospel. And we have in the final two
37:20: Galatians, the benediction, where Paul says in 6 -18, Now there is the grace of God and appreciation for the
37:38: Galatians that Paul expresses at the end of the letter, that he would still call them brothers, even though they look as if they have abandoned the gospel.
37:50: Come back to the soundness of the gospel. Don't flee after any extra gospel. Don't look for something else to fill in the blank after Christ.
37:59: We are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone to the glory of God alone.
41:30: Thank you for listening to our weekly sermon presented by First Southern Baptist Church of Junction City, Kansas.
41:42: For more information visit us at www .firstsouthernbaptist .org. For more information about our church, visit www .fsbcjc .org.
41:48: On behalf of our church family, my name is Becky, inviting you to join us again this week, Growing Together in Christ, when we understand the text.