WWUTT 1737 Introduction to Galatians, Part 2 (Galatians 1:1-2)

To the churches in Galatia, Paul wrote, I marvel that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel.

What did that different gospel look like when we understand the text? This is

When We Understand the Text, a daily Bible study in the Word of Christ that men and women of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

Tell your friends about our ministry at www .utt .com. Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. I've gone back into the archives of my sermons, and I've pulled out the series that I did in Galatians in 2019, and that's what we're doing for our

New Testament study, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Right now, we're doing an introduction to the book of Galatians, and I'll pick up where I left off yesterday.

But first, let me read here from Galatians 1, verses 6 through 10. I marvel that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is really not another, only that there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to the one we have proclaimed to you, let him be accursed.

As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is proclaiming to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let him be accursed.

For am I now seeking the favor of men or of God, or am I striving to please men?

If I were trying to please men, I would not be a slave of Christ. Now, in the introduction yesterday,

I mentioned that one of the themes that we're looking at as we go through the book of Galatians is a tendency among all of us to try to add something to the gospel.

And when we do that, we actually make a different gospel. We think that there's something else that we need in addition to Christ.

So we will have Christ plus blank equals everything.

And if I can just fill in that blank, then I will have everything that I need. But the reality is that whatever we put in the blank is what we have made

God. And that's what we need desperately to avoid doing, to know that in Christ, we have everything.

We need nothing else. Christ is preeminent. He is above all things. And if we're adding something to Christ, then we're adding something to the gospel.

Picking up on that concept from yesterday, let's finish our introduction to the book of Galatians.

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

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.

And those things hurt. They assault the conscience. They convict, is the word that we have.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was what the Bible said about you and your sin and the things of this world that you are clinging onto that you need to put to death.

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.

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 onto that now the

Bible and the Word of God is calling me to sacrifice, calling me to put to death.

And I've read Galatians I don't know how many times, and yet even over the course of this study

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

I will forget the way of righteousness that has been set before us by God. So may

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.

So may we be that for each other as we go through Galatians. There is not

Christ plus blank. There's Christ. And may he be exalted in our hearts, in our lives, and in this church.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He is an apostle of Christ, meaning that he is sent out by Christ. Now what does it mean to be an apostle?

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.

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.

So the qualifications of an apostle were these. An apostle had to personally see the risen

Christ. That was the first qualification. Secondly, they had to be appointed by Christ himself to be an apostle.

That's another qualification. And a third qualification is that you will know the genuineness of an apostle when they perform the signs of an apostle.

That way you know that they have been sent by God. And what are those signs? They were the miraculous healings.

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.

Being able to prophesy, announce things that were going to transpire, and then those things would happen.

And there were no mistakes. 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. And so, these were the signs of an apostle that were performed even in Galatia as Paul came to the

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.

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.

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.

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 Christ and no one would see him again until Christ comes in the clouds as he talked about in Matthew chapter 24.

As lightning flashes from the east and is seen as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.

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.

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.

Or someone says to you, here he is out in the wilderness, do not go out.

For false Christs and false prophets will arise performing many signs and wonders so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.

See, I have told you beforehand. We will have false apostles that will come in and Paul confronted some of those false apostles in 2

Corinthians chapters 10 and 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.

But Jesus does not appear to a select group of people in secret. That's stated specifically when

Christ said, when they say to you, here he is in the inner rooms, don't go in.

Jesus did not appear to Joseph Smith. He did not appear to new apostles today who claim to be apostles of Jesus Christ.

He hadn't appeared to the Pope. Jesus does not appear to a select few people.

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

New Testament. And there will be no other appointed apostles after them. And so Paul has verified his apostleship.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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

Corinthians. Those two letters were written to a specific church in Corinth, but the letter to the

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.

This is the author and the recipients of this particular letter. When Paul wrote this is in dispute.

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

Thessalonians, which are generally held as the first letters that Paul wrote. But there are others that put Galatians a little bit later.

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.

So you think of Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, those letters that Paul wrote while he was in prison,

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. 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.

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.

So I have five main points that I've kind of narrowed down the book of Galatians into this general outline.

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 Galatians. So that's the opening of the letter, five verses long.

We've seen longer introductions from Paul. 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. 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.

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

Sunday morning, and that would be your sermon for the day. You might be thinking, wait, wait,

Pastor Gabe, is that half an average sermon or is that half of your sermon? We'll just stick with half a sermon.

So the next thing that Paul addresses is the problem in Galatia. So first, we have the greeting.

Second, we have the problem. And the problem is given to us very stately here in verses 6 through 9.

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 Christ plus something else.

And the emphasis is always going to be on the something else in those situations. 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

Galatians doing. Like we don't necessarily see people in the church next door adopting the works of the

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

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.

Either sharing that glory with God or believing that they need this thing in order to find satisfaction or happiness in life.

So this is where we will find these things, this problem in Galatia applicable to things that are going on in our culture today.

The third point that we find in this letter to the Galatians is going to be a defense.

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.

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.

So the defense of his apostleship will go from chapter 1 verse 10 through chapter 2 verse 14.

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.

And that's where we have statements like what I've read to you this morning regarding salvation by faith alone in Christ.

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. So you come to believe this gospel.

What does that now look like in the life of a believer? 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. 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. If you've been clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, then you will show his righteousness.

We'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

Super Bowl. I guarantee you, outside of New England, everybody's a Rams fan heading up into the

Super Bowl next week, right? Yeah, okay. But not everybody's really a

Rams fan, right? They just don't like the Patriots. So what is going to be the display that a person's really a

Rams fan? They probably have a jersey or two in their closet, right? Might even have a room decked out in Rams gear.

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?

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 that's just hopping on the bandwagon every once in a while.

What does our jersey look like? What does it look like when we live as Christ in this world?

That's what Paul addresses when we get to the result of the gospel in chapter 5, verse 13, through chapter 6, verse 10.

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.

We address some of those things as well in the result of the gospel. And then our final point is the conclusion, which covers chapter 6, verses 11 through 17.

Just as the greeting is short, so the conclusion is short. But it's in the conclusion that Paul reminds the

Galatians, do not abandon the gospel. And we have in the final two

Galatians, the benediction, where Paul says in chapter 6, verse 18, the grace of our

Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.

Now, there is the grace of God and appreciation for the 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.

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.

We are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone to the glory of God.

This is when we understand the text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. There are lots of great Bible teaching programs on the web, and we thank you for selecting ours.

But this is no replacement for regular fellowship with a church family. Find a good gospel teaching

Christ -centered church to worship with this weekend, and join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study when we understand the text.