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Reading Galatians 2:15-21 and picking up in the sermon series in Galatians with Pastor Gabe preaching about being crucified with Christ and living in holiness. Visit wwutt.com for all our videos!
Galatians 2 20 says, For I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God. When we understand the text.
This is When We Understand the Text, a daily study of God's Word, that we may be filled with the knowledge of His will. For questions and comments, send us an email to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.
Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. We come back to our study in the book of Galatians, and we're up to chapter two. I'm also returning to the recordings of the sermon series that I did in the book of Galatians a few years ago.
So we're picking up today in Galatians chapter two, verses 15 to 21. And let me read through that. And then we'll get to the sermon here. The Apostle Paul writing to the churches in Galatia. We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners.
Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. 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.
But if in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners. Is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not. For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor.
For through the law, I died to the law so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me and the life I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
I do not nullify the grace of God for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. Here is part one of the sermon entitled, Crucified with Christ. Many of you probably know my testimony and those of you who have listened to the podcast and even heard it recently, as Becky and I shared it, our own respective testimonies about a week ago.
I had a good reputation when I was in high school. One of those squeaky clean young men that you could look at my resume and I looked like the most upstanding Christian guy. Even when I got into college, everybody's moms wanted me to marry their daughters.
And if there was anything sinful that was in my life, it was hidden and it was secret. It was certainly out of the way, out of view from everybody else. And I did have some deep secrets that I was hiding in a closet, but nobody really knew or saw those things.
I lived in view of everybody else as a good Christian should. But the Lord really allowed me to fail when I got into college and into my twenties, though I had gone all the way through high school on my merit and probably even thumped my chest as to how good a person I was, yet it was not by my own merit that I was saved.
I still believe that I was a Christian even through that particular period, but I was getting a little too big on myself and taking too much credit for my own ability to be a great person instead of understanding that I am a wretched sinner who is deserving of death and it is only Christ who gives righteousness.
The righteousness that I had was not something that was mine, but it was something that was given to me by God through faith. I was forgetting that, though. I was getting too big for my britches. I was relying too much on my resume and not enough on Christ.
So God, in my arrogance, really allowed me to fail tremendously and fall into sin and fall into even a sense of hopelessness and weeping before God. I remember weeping on my bedroom floor on more than one occasion because I realized that I was powerless to conquer the sin that was in me.
I could not do it by my own ability. It was only by the power of God and His Holy Spirit that I was going to be able to overcome these things, these secret sins that I thought as long as no one else saw them, then they weren't a bad deal, but they were overtaking me and they were polluting and infecting my mind and my heart.
And so there was a point where this finally came to a head. I was about 27 years old and realizing how much I needed God more than I had ever needed Him before. Truly, I'd been a Christian and a follower of Jesus for most of my life, but had never really understood that the righteousness that I had came by faith and not of works.
All of my works were not good enough. When I tried to do it, I would fail at it. But relying upon Christ, who was sufficient for me, is where I came to understand the righteousness of God that is given by faith.
It was during that period of time trying to come out of the pit that I had dug for myself and God lifting me out of that pit that I was reminded of Psalm 119. And Psalm 119 verse 9 says, How can a young man keep his way pure?
By guarding it according to your word. With my whole heart, I seek you. Let me not wander from your commandments. I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Blessed are you, O Lord, teach me your statutes.
With my lips, I declare all the rules of your mouth. In the way of your testimonies, I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes.
I will not forget your word. So the question to me became in this moment of repentance in my life, do I delight in God's statutes or did I delight in my own righteousness? And delighting in my own righteousness, again, as I mentioned, I failed at every point.
But delighting in the righteousness of Christ, I have found the strength to live as Christ. For I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me. Galatians 2 .20.
The Apostle Paul reminds the Galatians here that we are justified by faith. We are not justified by works of the law. And certainly when Paul talks about works of the law here, he is referring very specifically to those works of the law that the Judaizers were coming into Galatia telling the Galatians that they had to abide by in order to be saved.
If you want to be a Christian, you have to be circumcised. That was exactly what they said in Acts 15 .1. But even more broadly speaking, not just about the works of the law, but any work that a man might do, thinking that it is by his works, we would gain justification and righteousness.
We would gain right standing before God. That God would look at us as a good person because we have merited goodness unto ourselves. But we can't do that. It is not by our works that we can do that. We might find ourselves to be declared righteous before God, but it is by the work of Christ.
Indeed, do not get me wrong. God demands righteousness. He demands it. The highest order of a Christian is Matthew 6 .33. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. Jesus said in the previous chapter, in Matthew 5, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.
But we understand that we cannot in our own ability achieve this goodness or perfection that God requires of us. It is by faith in Jesus Christ that we are given His righteousness. And God looks at us as righteous, not because of what we've done, but because of what Jesus has done for us.
So again, don't get me wrong. God does demand righteousness. But righteousness is not only His demand. It is His gift. He demands righteousness. Righteousness we can't even aspire to. And so He loved us by giving His Son for us, that it would be His righteousness we would receive since we couldn't achieve it on our own merit.
God demands righteousness. He has given His righteousness. And so the Apostle Paul reminds the Galatians that if they're going to go back to trying to merit righteousness by their own works, they are following after a false gospel.
And that's what he, that was what he came right into the letter saying. In Galatians 1 .6, 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.
Not that there is another one. Because there isn't. But there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. Paul goes on to say this, even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed.
As we have said before, so now I say again, so emphatically he repeats himself. If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you receive, let him be accursed. My friends, if our understanding of salvation is Christ plus something else, then we believe a different gospel.
It is by faith in Christ alone that my hope is found as we have sung today. It is by faith in Christ alone that we are justified. We are declared innocent before God and we are saved. Saved from what?
Saved from our sin? Saved from death, the wages of sin, Romans 6 .23. Saved from the wrath of God that is burning against all unrighteousness, Romans 1 .18. Wrath of God is coming against all the unrighteousness of man.
And it is only by faith in Christ that we are given a righteousness that puts us in the favor of God. And we are not the objects of his wrath, but we are the children of his love and his mercy. It is only by faith.
We distort the gospel when we think that our salvation is any other way. Christ plus something else. For the Galatians, it was works. Believing that they could be saved by their works. Now understand me, and as I said this to you before, we were in Galatians chapter 1, the Galatians surely still believed in Jesus.
It's not like they did not believe in this man named Jesus who died for our sins and rose again from the grave, but they were adding to that gospel. Christ plus something else. And changing it into a completely different gospel.
It was as though they believed in a different Christ, which was why Paul said, I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.
When we distort the gospel, we believe in a different Jesus. We have raised up a God of our own making and thinking this is the God I must please in order to be saved. And it's no longer the God of the Bible that we are following after, but the God of our own imagination.
So Paul calls the Galatians in love. He writes to them not to say I'm done with you, but to call them to repentance and to remember once again, the gospel that was proclaimed to them at first. Paul says in chapter 2 verse 15, we ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners.
What does he mean by bringing this up? Because he is one who has brought the gospel to the Galatians and one who is condemning those Judaizers who have come saying, you got to do all these Jewish works in order to be saved.
Paul is saying, well, I am that. I am a Jew. I had the law just as they had the law. I know it just as well as they do. But we ourselves being Jews by birth, we are not Gentile sinners. Gentile sinners referring to Gentiles who did not have the law.
They did not know the law of God. They did not know God's righteous standard. He goes on to say, yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. This is really a short version of something that Paul laid out in Romans chapter 1 verses 18 through chapter 3 verse 20.
And that was bringing all men into condemnation, whether Jew or Gentile, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The Jews had the law, but they transgressed it and they became sinners. The Gentiles did not have the law, but they went against their own consciences and violated the natural law that God has written on the heart of every man.
And therefore they became condemned by their sin. So whether a Jew or a Gentile all stand in condemnation before God, the Jew cannot say I am favored by God because I was born a Jew. The Gentile cannot say I am favored by God because I didn't even know what the law was to transgress it.
Everyone has sinned before God and all stand condemned. And so Paul is making that same argument here in much fewer words. He's saying we ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, but yet we know a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.
Jew or Gentile, you cannot claim righteousness before God because you were born one or the other. We are justified not by works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus.
We also have believed, again making reference to himself as being born as a Jew. He and his other missionary brethren, we ourselves are Jews by birth, but we also 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.
No one is going to find innocence before God in having done such meritorious, wonderful things in his presence. For as we read in Isaiah 64 6, even our best deeds are as a soiled garment before a holy God.
We can look around this world and we will judge a person's works by other people. And you might look at a person who is not a believer and find them doing great things. Indeed, I have known atheists that have done wonderful things.
There is an atheist that I know of who built an orphanage over in India. So even atheists are capable of kind and gracious acts. And we would judge those things based on what we do, what other people do.
Well, that person's good, that person's bad. And then we'll even declare our own righteousness because we're not as bad as the worst of the worst, right? Well, I'm a good person. I'm not Hitler, you know.
I still call my mom once a week. I still pay my tithes in church. I open the door for people. And we'll try to come up with works that we do to try to justify ourselves, try to make ourselves sound better than we really are.
But what we're essentially doing there is we're just judging our works by everyone else's works. Who we need to be judging our works by is God's works. And when we take our works and compare them with God's works, we find that we fall far short of that mark.
And even the person who does the greatest, kindest deed for someone else, if they are not a follower of Christ, it is done in vain because they do it to declare their own righteousness instead of giving praise and honor and glory to God.
Our best deeds do not win us approval before God. You will stand before God in judgment and be throwing out trash thinking that this is going to be good enough to get you into heaven. And most people do not understand this, what we're reading here, that it is by faith that a person is justified and not by works of the law.
Because most of my evangelism experiences, even here in Junction City, is encountering a person who says, yeah, I'm a good person. I'm not Hitler. Same sort of justification. Justifying ourselves according to other people and not according to what God has said.
But again, we read in Romans 3 .23 that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And we are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith.
Working on memorizing all of Romans, by the way. And if I do so, let me say, if I accomplish memorizing Romans 1 through 16, you know how righteous that makes me before God? Not at all. The ability to memorize the Bible does not merit your righteousness.
Christ is righteous. And it is by faith in Jesus that we are made righteous before God. That's the word that we use. That's the word that we find in the Bible, righteous. But righteous very simply means right.
We are wrong. We are sinners. We are worthy of condemnation and eternal destruction. For God is eternally holy. And if left to our own devices, we would be eternally sinful. But God, by His grace, didn't leave us dead in our sins.
He has rescued us by giving His Son Jesus to die for us. That all who believe in Him are justified, righteous, made right, declared innocent before God. And it's in knowing that, it's having received the gift of God's Son.
It's having been taken from being a child of Satan and a child of wrath in this world to being a child of God and a recipient of His love. Now having received these things, we desire to live as children of God.
No longer following after the ways of Satan, but desiring to live in the ways of Christ. And so when Paul talks about being justified, it's not merely that in a moment of time, we went from being dead to alive.
We went from hell bound to heaven bound. And then for the rest of our lives, we're hinging everything on that single moment. A moment that we believed and that carries us through the rest of our lives.
That's not enough. For being justified doesn't merely mean that in a moment you believe something or you prayed a certain prayer, but your entire life has changed. And while at one point you lived unto death, now you live unto life in Jesus Christ.
Your whole life becomes a reflection of Christ. Your whole life becomes about the pursuit of Christ. There are many whom I encounter. There was a drunk man that I witnessed to just about two years ago, as a matter of fact, who told me, yeah, I'm a Christian.
I prayed the prayer. I got baptized when I was 14 and believed that he was a Christian because of that. But showed no evidence in his life that that conversion he said that he experienced at the age of 14 was actually genuine.
It was a passing opinion. And my friends, praying a prayer of salvation are not magic words. When Paul says in Romans chapter 10, confess with your mouth and you will be made unto salvation. It means that what we say with our mouths becomes a reflection of our heart.
We don't just say it once, we continue to say it. And we continue to display that our lives have been transformed by the power of God. The power of God is not so weak to bring us into a moment of prayer in a single, solitary time in our lives, never to be reflected in our lives again.
Behold the power of God. But the power of God is transformative in the sense that we become a new person, a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. For I have been crucified with Christ.
Again, Paul says in verse 20, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me. So if Christ now lives in me, do you expect that that person would go back to living the sinful, depraved life that they were living before they profess faith in Christ?
Or would it become evident in that person's life that they're no longer living for themselves, but living for God? So being justified means more than just a single moment in the life of a person, but that their entire life reflects justification, the pursuit of justification, a desire for God and his righteousness.
Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Once again, Matthew 6 .33.
Thank you for listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website, www .wutt .com, and click on the Give tab in the top right corner of the page.
Join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study, When We Understand the Text.