WWUTT 1738 Christ Gave Himself for Our Sins, Part 1 (Galatians 1:3-5)

The Galatian Crisis and the Gospel of Grace

Paul had some pretty tough stuff that he had to deal with going on in the churches in Galatia. But even though he had to confront those churches for their false teaching, he begins his letter by extending the grace of God when we understand the text.

This is When We Understand The Text, a daily Bible study in the Word of Christ. For he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Tell your friends about our ministry at www .wutt .com.

Once again, it's Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. And greetings, everyone. We come back to our study of the book of Galatians. And this is going into the archives as I'm drawing from a sermon series that I did in Galatians a few years ago.

I played the introduction to Galatians, an overview of the book on Monday and Tuesday. Today we get into our text with Galatians chapter one, verses one through five. Now, on the podcast, I've been teaching over the last year from the Legacy Standard Bible.

But in this series, I was preaching from the English Standard Version. You're welcome to use whatever translation you like to follow along. And so here we go with Galatians chapter one, verses one through five.

Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ. And God the 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 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 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. Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

But even if we are an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one that we preach to you, let him be accursed. 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.

Paul’s Apostolic Authority and the True Gospel

Let's pray again. God, as we come to your word today, I pray that it would speak loudly to us and that we would rejoice to hear your gospel. The good news, as that word gospel means. And as we are told in Romans 1 16, it has the power of God to save souls from death for all who believe to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

So I pray that we rejoice to hear this once again, for we know it is our hope and our peace as we've sung about this morning. The gospel that has redeemed us from sin and delivered us into a kingdom, an inheritance that is rich and great for it is the kingdom that the father has given to the son and we are fellow inheritors of that place.

I pray that you give strength to my voice today, that I am able to endure to get through to proclaim the joy and the wonder of your gospel, that we as the people of God may rejoice in it together. And we pray these things in Jesus name and all God's people said, amen.

Thank you. You may be seated. My voice is, though you may not be able to tell, is actually barely hanging on. And I can tell where it's starting to fade, almost in the back. I'm using diaphragm and trying to push this out right now.

So my voice may go over the course of this and I may have to cut this short. Praise God for those of you who like to get the buffet lines early. But Galatians chapter one, verses three, four, and five are primarily going to be our focus.

And you can see where we're going in what Paul has said here in verses six through nine. Like right at the beginning of the letter, he's rebuking the Galatians for believing a different gospel. We're going to be talking about that more next week.

But for the most part this morning, we're seeing the brief gospel that Paul opens his letter with. Since he's about to tell the Galatians you're following a different gospel, how did you so easily fall into this?

As he says later on in the letter, you foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? You were doing so well. Now you've come into believing this thing that is a corruption of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Remember I said to you that our theme of this letter, as I mentioned last week, is that Paul is confronting the Galatians with this, that we are justified by faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

That is the gospel. That's the good news. By faith in Christ, you're saved. There's nothing you have to do because you can't do it anyway. You can't get there by your works. You will never be justified before God.

So the gospel that I say to you is that faith in Jesus Christ and what he's done on the cross, his resurrection from the grave, his ascension into heaven, seated at the right hand of the throne of God where he is presently our mediator.

By faith in this, we're saved before God. That is good news. And yet you believe now something that is Christ plus blank. Like whatever goes into that blank becomes the focus of the person. When a person believes, I have Jesus, but I also need this, Christ is not your emphasis anymore.

Your emphasis is on whatever would fill that blank. For the Galatians, it's going to be works. We'll talk about that some more as we go into this letter. As Paul starts to confront the specifics of the things that they have fallen into and their disbelief, their unbelief, believing in a false gospel is not actually belief in a different thing.

It's unbelief. It's not believing that Christ is sufficient, that he saves. And so I must do something else in order to find myself saved. So we'll put a blank next to Christ, Christ plus blank. And again, for the Galatians, that's works, but for us, it may be anything.

It could be some desire that you have. It may not even be a religious or a spiritual thing. It's just a thing that you think that you need to have in order to get by with life, and Christ is not enough.

Then, therefore, what we believe is a corruption of the gospel. We don't believe in the true gospel, for we do not think that Christ was enough to save. We do not think that Christ is enough to even satisfy.

So we must have something else in order to think that there's meaning and purpose in something other than Christ, but there is not. He who has made us is he who saves us, and he who will deliver us from the day of judgment.

And so Paul means for the Galatians to understand once again the goodness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So very briefly at the very beginning, oftentimes Paul's greetings are longer than this, but he's very brief with the way that he starts identifying himself as an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead.

And then Paul is going to come back to talking about that yet again in the next few verses. God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins and delivers us from the present evil age.

So this very brief introduction that he offers of himself is going to come up later in the letter for what he is going to do in his own defense as proclaiming his apostleship, and that comes up as we go through chapter one.

Maybe the Galatians just do not believe that Paul is that messenger who's been sent by Christ to proclaim the word of Christ. Maybe they think the guys that bummed around with Jesus, they're the more sound apostles.

They're the guys that we need to be listening to, and indeed they should be listening to them. But Paul who has come delivering the gospel to the churches in Galatia, not the other apostles, he has come to them, and he has proclaimed this word, and he is every bit as authoritative as the other apostles.

His role as an apostle is not something that he gave to himself, and it's not something that was given to him by men, but it was given through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead.

And with this greeting that Paul gives to the Galatians, he also says, All the brothers who are with me to the churches of Galatia, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So our first point as we come into this is understanding the gospel that has been given from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Let's look at these first two words that we have in Galatians 1 -3.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father. Let's understand once again what we're talking about with the word grace, because this is a necessity of the gospel. I talked to you last week of those five solas of the Protestant Reformation, and one of them being by grace alone.

We are saved by grace alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, it is by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

So what is grace? Grace is unmerited favor. That's your two-word definition of grace. Unmerited favor. What does unmerited mean? It means that you did not do anything to earn it. And you can't do anything to earn it.

It is by God's grace. It is by His love as a gift that He has given to us the salvation that we have in Christ. Romans 5, 8. Love that God our Father has demonstrated to us is this, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

There's your definition of grace in one verse. Romans 5, 8. That God demonstrated His love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. We did not do anything to earn this grace. In fact, we were sinners and enemies of God, as it's said there in the context of Romans 5 as well.

What we deserved was judgment. And what God has shown to us is favor. Unmerited favor. Unmerited. We did not do anything to earn it. You can do nothing to earn it. Favor. Favor as in how? My goodness, my brothers and sisters, where do I begin and where do I end?

Favor as in, as I'd already said, we were enemies. We had committed treason against the throne of the High King of Heaven. The Creator God. And yet we blasphemed Him to such a degree that we proclaimed that our ways were better than God's ways.

Our ways were higher than God's ways. The Creator of time and space, and we said that we knew better than God. How absurd. Right? Whenever I encounter those arguments from persons who want to believe that they're better than they actually are, and will say something like, why would God condemn to hell a person who has just committed one little measly little sin?

Why would that be the thing that would condemn a person to hell for all eternity? There's a thousand different things that I want to say to that. First of all, you did not commit one simple little measly little sin.

No matter how much you want to think of your own goodness. But generally, what I follow that up with is this. The question should not be, why would God send anybody to hell? The question should be, why would God bother to save anyone at all?

Right? Because He's holy. We're not. He's deserving of all honor and glory and praise. We're not deserving of anything. But are sure ready at the drop of a hat to give honor and glory and praise to ourselves.

We're all ready to boast our own goodness and gloriousness and greatness. And roll out our resume for everybody else. Like, here's who I am. This is what my character is like. I'm this kind of person.

How glorious am I? Here's what my morals are. Here's what my morality is. Look at how fabulous this is. You're wrong and you need to listen to me. I'm right. Here's my morality. You need to follow it.

You know, we talk about moral relativism. That idea that there is no truth. And that everybody can make up their own truth. Which, by itself, is a self-defeating argument. Because once you have said there's no such thing as truth, you've just asserted truth.

So you've defeated your own argument. But the fact of the matter is, another way that that contradicts itself is when a person starts saying that my truth is what is important. And you should not impose your truth upon me.

Or rather, we should all just tolerate each other and get along. The thing about it is, they've actually just asserted absolute truth. And that they are the bringer of morality. And you have to follow their moral pattern that they have laid before you.

I say that this is what we should do. And so that is what you should follow. And they think that they've just asserted some sort of spirit of tolerance. But actually, what they've just said is extremely intolerant.

They're intolerant of anybody else's view but their own. And my morality is the morality that you must follow. There is objective truth. Everybody inherently understands this. But to understand that it is objective, it means that it comes from something that is outside of yourself.

Not something that is inside of yourself. When you become the meter, the standard of all morality, then it's subjective truth. It's not objective truth. Objective is outside of ourselves. So where does that objective truth come from?

It comes from God. God's Word, the Bible, is our standard of morality. It is our guide for every matter of faith and practice. We find it in the scriptures, in the Bible. And somebody might say, but I have the Holy Spirit.

Of course you do. You have the Holy Spirit of God. If you are a follower of Christ, you have the Holy Spirit. According to Paul in Romans chapter 8, if you do not have the Spirit of Christ, you do not belong to him.

And you cannot please God without the Spirit. So if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you have been given his Holy Spirit. Absolutely you have. But you're still a human being. And just because you thought a thought, does not mean it came from the Holy Spirit of God.

It may have come from your flesh. And so how do we continually take those thoughts that may pop into our head from our flesh and subject them to the power of the Spirit? The answer to that, my friends, is the Word of God.

We submit ourselves to this Word. And our thoughts and our ways are conformed to this. God's thoughts and God's ways. Which, again, are much higher than ours. In Romans 12, too, where it says, Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Meaning that we must be renewed day by day. We must continually be subjecting our thoughts and our mind unto God and what he has said in his Word. We've got 775 ,000 words right here. We've got enough to work with.

There's plenty of things said that you do not yet understand and you've not even begun to comb the mysteries of. It is our daily reading of this Word and our daily subjection to it that our thoughts and our minds be conformed to the will and the thoughts of God.

And then, as it goes on in Romans 12, too, to say,. Then you may test and approve what is his good, pleasing, and perfect will. So as I said, God's will is good and perfect. And he, being the creator of all things, has even established time and space.

And yet we, in our blasphemy, have proclaimed that our thoughts are higher than the ways of the God of the universe. Whenever you know that the Bible has said one thing about something and you do the opposite of it, then you have proclaimed that your ways are better than God's.

And it is a serious sin for which the Bible says we will be judged for such things. Because we assert that we're greater than God. That we would try to take him off his throne and put ourselves there.

And say that we know the way that we should go. And, God, you must give me this because I know what it would take for me to be happy. So, therefore, you must give me this thing if I'm going to think of you as a good God.

All that you've done is you've created your own God, and that God being yourself. A God of your own imagination rather than the God of glory that we have given for us in the scriptures. How will God not judge those who blaspheme so seriously?

That we puny little humans who have been made by God would say that we know better than the creator. Why would we ever think that God would not judge that in his holiness and his goodness? And this is where grace comes in.

This is how we understand grace to be grace. Because you realize what you've done and what you actually deserve. But instead, in Christ, God gives you something different. You are an enemy of the kingdom.

You have committed treason against the throne of God. You deserve to be destroyed. Executed. As one who has committed treason against the kingdom of God. And yet, what does God do for us instead? He sends his son to die for our sins.

And all who believe in him will not perish, but have everlasting life. Those who are not in Christ, my friends, understand, are still enemies of God. Not every single person on the planet is inherently a child of God.

Jesus made that clear. In John chapter 8, when the Jews were saying, We're children of God? And what was Jesus' reply to them? You're of your father, the devil. And your will is to do your father's desires.

Those who are in Christ will do the works of Christ. Those who have God as their father will do what Jesus did. But those who do not know Jesus Christ, his son, whom God, by his will, would say that we must believe in in order to be saved, those who try to go their own way and establish their own God and find their own path of righteousness, they're children of the devil.

And Revelation chapter 21 is clear. That those who do not repent of this way are under the wrath of God and will be judged in his wrath and will be cast into eternal fire with the devil and his angels because his way was the way that they followed instead of the way of Christ.

It is only through Christ that we're adopted into the family of God and then we are the children of God. Not before.

Adoption into the Family of God Through Christ

You've been listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Gabe will be going through a New Testament study. Then on Thursday, we look at an Old Testament book.

On Friday, we take questions from the listeners and viewers. Tomorrow, we'll pick up on an Old Testament study, When We Understand the Text.