Legalism Produces Hypocrisy, Not Righteousness - Galatians 2:11-14

I want you to imagine a fence around a home that's old and rotting in places.

Now, instead of repairing the wood, the owner just simply paints it bright white.

From the street, it looks strong and clean, but up close, the paint hides cracks, soft spots, and decay underneath.

Legalism works the same way in the church and in the Christian heart. It focuses on outward conformity, what people look like on the outside, without addressing the heart.

People learn how to look, or dress, or what to say, what not to say, how to act, what not to admit.

Because when standards are emphasized without grace, people learn how to look righteous rather than how to just simply be righteous.

And sin doesn't disappear under legalism, it gets covered. Struggles aren't confessed, they're concealed.

Repentance is replaced with performance. The result is hypocrisy.

Not because people go set out wanting to deceive anyone, but because they don't feel safe to tell the truth.

My friends, Jesus doesn't put a coat of paint on your outside.

He doesn't whitewash hearts. He restores them. And only where grace is present can integrity and righteousness replace hypocrisy.

This is what's in front of us this morning as we look at this section in Galatians. We see here it says that when

Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned.

Legalism can and only will produce hypocrisy, not righteousness.

Legalism always carries a fresh can of paint. No matter how much paint you've used to paint up and whitewash the outside, there's always more.

And it'll cover up anything that threatens to uncover what really lies beneath the surface.

Paul confronts Peter here, and this is one of the more, you know, most Christians that have been in church any amount of time, they can tell you, oh yeah,

I remember one old, Paul gave it to Peter good. Well, Paul's not doing this to humiliate

Peter. And just in passing, this whole sermon for another day, but when we deal with the actual subject of church discipline, it's not there for humiliation.

It's not there for dragging people in front of a church and humiliating them. It's there for pure, honorable, righteous, humble, and loving correction that largely is done privately.

Now here, Paul confronts Peter publicly because Peter's sin was public and causing a lot of public issues.

And of course, you're also dealing with an apostle here in Paul, and he deals with it publicly.

But he doesn't do this to humiliate him. His message to Peter, and the message we should have to anyone trapped in legalism or trapped in some level of hypocrisy, whether it stems from legalism or not, is that as a

Christian, you should know better. That's essentially what he tells him as we get down to the end of our text this morning.

He's like, what are you doing, Peter? You know better than this. This isn't who you are.

It's going to be really a great sense of enjoyment for me next week to look at the text that follows where we stop today that just hyper focuses on exactly that, who we are in Christ, and why we shouldn't have to live that way.

Now when it says here that he opposed him to his face, this is not because he was against Peter.

It's not because he saw Peter as a threat or someone that had to be taken down. No, this word in the original is a word that means hinder, to forbid or slow down the progress of something.

It's a word that was used when you would talk about defensive measures. So if any of you in here are football fans, you know you've got offense and defense, and you'll have defensive coordinators and a whole team of coaches, and you may have some players that play multiple positions, but for the most part you have players on your team that their sole purpose is defense.

And you even have people within football that are very, what they would say, defensive -minded.

They're thinking about how to slow down or forbid or hinder the other team's offense.

And that's the thing, if you're dealing with either yourself or someone else that you know that has gotten caught up and trapped in a legalistic or hypocritical mindset, the goal is not to go and confront them and stop them dead in their tracks.

You can't get it out of your system that way. I can speak from experience.

It took years to get a lot of that out of me.

Some of it goes faster than others, but the point here, he's saying, I'm looking to bring correction because,

Peter, the way in which you're going is not a good path here, sir. You need to slow that progress.

And if you think about a large ship out in the ocean, you think those things can turn on a dime?

You know, big boats like that. I mean, obviously the Titanic had immeasurable turning ability, right?

Because it's not sitting at the bottom of the ocean. It saw the iceberg, stopped, just simply flipped around and didn't have any problems.

And Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are still alive with us today.

Jack and Rose are still both living and breathing and everything's fine, right?

No. You think about big ships, they've got to start slowing down. They do very gradual turns.

It takes a long time. And depending on how much legalism, how much, and of course what we mean by legalism here is a strict or hyper focus on an adherence to rules and regulations and things of that nature.

So if you're caught up in sin, hypocrisy, depending on what it is, how long it's been in your life, how deeply rooted it is, it may take longer for you to get that ship turned around.

So there needs to be grace and love and patience and mercy with people and with yourselves.

And that's what Paul was looking to do here. Hinder what Peter was doing and say, hold on, pump the brakes,

Peter. Let's rein this back in. You should know better.

This is not who you are. You see, Christ doesn't command outward conformity.

Yes, the moral law of God never changes. When He said in Exodus, thou shall not steal, guess what?

Thou shall not steal! But much of the ceremonial and the

Mosaic law is fulfilled in Christ. And so He doesn't command outward conformity.

And if you ever notice, if you're in a situation where there's a lot of outward conformity, and you hear me say this a lot on Wednesday nights, when people say, well, you better, you go right back at them with, why?

Why? You can't get an answer. But if you press hard enough, what ends up happening is, well, because I said so.

They don't want to say that because they know if they say that, then somebody like me and then what

I'm trying to train y 'all to get to the point too in terms of how we deal with this is to be able to go right back at them and say, so you're the authority and not

Christ. Now look, if Scripture clearly and prescriptively instructs us to do something or to not do something, we don't question it.

But we don't do as Pharisees did and add and add and add and add on.

We covered this last week. Legalism does that. It takes the truth of Scripture and it keeps adding more weight and more weight and more weight and more weight, which pressures you and pushes you down to where you can never make any progress.

You never feel like you're good enough. And no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you accomplish, there's always some other rule or regulation waiting for you.

Christ didn't mean for you to live this way. This excessive adherence to rules is not the goal of Scripture and it's not the goal of Christ.

So this morning, I want to identify for you three different coats of paint that legalism wants to put on you and how we see the text of Scripture here dealing with it.

The first coat of paint that we see, if you would imagine, if you will, that your Christian life is one of those wood fences around the home that legalism just wants to put a fresh coat of paint on.

Oh, you know, never mind the cracks. Never mind the rot. Never mind the things that really need to be dealt with.

We'll just throw some paint on it. Make you look real nice and purdy. Nobody will know you've got all those skeletons or all those things you're dealing with.

That doesn't matter. All that matters is your appearance, what you look like to others.

My friends, that is a life of turmoil. Turmoil.

People that are putting on masks and putting on a certain appearance to look a certain way, hiding everything that's going on.

And we're not just talking about sin here, y 'all. True, genuine struggle.

Because legalism is going to teach you, hey, look, your problems, you need to keep that in your own home. We don't want to hear about that because if you start talking about things you're struggling with, that might upset our harmony and our peace and our alleged joy in how we appear to the world.

That's not authenticity. Authenticity is when you say, here's who

I am. Here's what I've got going on. And then other Christians say, hey, I know what that feels like.

I know what that's like. Let me come alongside you and help you through it.

Christianity isn't a suppression of problems. It's learning to live and walk through them with Christ, with other

Christians. Come out on the other side stronger so you can help. Remember from last week, who remembers at the end?

Others. Others. This first coat of paint that is put on is designed to rob you of your freedom and enslave you.

Some of this should sound familiar to last week. If you remember last week, we covered Galatians chapter 2.

And if you remember verse 4, it said, But this, and he's referencing the legalism here, this was because of false brothers secretly brought in who had sneaked in to spy out our freedom, which we have in Christ, in order to enslave us.

This coat of paint, it always follows the same trajectory. These three coats of paint, you'll see them, they're sequential.

And then they compound and overlap each other. But it always starts with legalism robbing you of your freedom in Christ and enslaving you to something that this book, this scripture never meant for you to walk under.

Now, verse 12, it says, Prior to the coming of certain men from James, he,

Peter, used to eat with the Gentiles. Now, don't... Yes, he was eating with people that actually were

Gentiles. But the point here is he had ceased from following Old Covenant dietary laws.

And now the legalists didn't like that because, if you remember, you can turn there with me or you can just simply listen to me read it.

But the cross -reference here in Acts 11. Acts 11, verse 1, it says,

Now the apostles and the brothers who were throughout Judea heard that the

Gentiles also had received the word of God. And when Peter came to Jerusalem, those who were circumcised took issue from him.

Let's stop there for a second. You see this terminology repeated several places in Scripture, both in a descriptive narrative book like Acts, and then

Paul utilizes this language in a lot of his epistles. Talk about, and we're going to see this in a minute when we go back to Galatians, the party of the circumcision.

Here it's referenced here as those who were circumcised. The Judaizers, we've been talking about them since day one.

The Judaizers were a sect of Jews that did not want to embrace Christ.

They did not want to embrace Christianity. They were okay with you being Christian as long as you still adhered or followed or obeyed the

Old Covenant, Old Testament system. So they said, unless you were circumcised, you weren't really saved.

We see this in Acts 15 with the Jerusalem Council. And men had came down and said, unless you're circumcised, like under the

Law of Moses, you can't be saved. And this is what we're dealing with with legalism, putting rules and expectations on a

Christian that says, you've got to be this or you're not accepted. You've got to be this or you're not justified.

You've got to be this or do this or look this way or you're not Christian. We are only to put those expectations on a person if Scripture does, meaning deity of Christ, justification by faith, the

Trinity, the inerrancy and authority of Scripture. Those are things that are definitional, that make a person definitionally a

Christian, not did you wear the right clothes? Do you look or speak a certain way?

Do you have the right kind of job? Do you do your home life exactly like we think you should? All these things that we throw in there.

So this party of the circumcision, these Jewish people, these Judaizers that were going around doing this, were a constant threat to the gospel.

And we're going to see that they're the ones that Peter is having an issue with when we go back to Galatians. But we're dealing here with Acts, Peter's dealing with them again.

So those that were circumcised were taking issue with Peter. What were they saying to him? They said, you,

Peter, went to the uncircumcised men and ate with them. What are they saying?

Peter, you're an old covenant Jew. You know the law. You know that what those

Gentiles are eating, we're not supposed to be eating. How dare you go eat with those sinners?

How dare you, Peter? That's what they're saying to him. Well, we won't take the time to read it now, but the rest of Acts 11 deals with the vision he had where God tells him directly,

Peter, four -footed beasts, cows, animals, eat them.

Don't say anything that I've made is unclean. In fact, he says in verse 8 of Acts 11,

Peter says, by no means, Lord, I haven't eaten those things. I would never let anything defiled come into my mouth.

And a voice from heaven answers Peter and says, what God has cleansed no longer consider to be defiled.

My friends, as a good Baptist who likes to eat, this is one of my favorite chapters in all the

Bible because now I can eat chicken and cow and pig.

And let me tell you something, they are good. Thank the good Lord above for Acts 11.

Oh man, we should spend a whole year just preaching Acts 11 over and over and then go out to our favorite restaurant and partake of four -footed beasts.

It's a wonderful thing. But the issue here is that Peter had been going on for some time, not following these restrictions anymore.

Living in freedom, enjoying that cow, enjoying that pig, eating with people that were non -Jewish that were now part of the new covenant.

United in Christ, not united in law. Our unity as Christians does not mean we look the same, we dress the same, or sound the same, or whatever.

Our unity is in Christ. And then through Christ and through the power of the Spirit that gifts us uniquely, we have a diversity of gifts, we have a diversity of backgrounds, diversity of talents and abilities and so on and so forth that all work in concert to make true unity.

And sometimes harmony has to be disrupted to maintain unity.

Nobody enjoys that. Nobody should be looking for that. But if there's a sin, if there's a struggle or an issue, ignoring it doesn't make it go away.

Legalists are famous for picking up that rug, taking a big ol' broom and sweeping the problem under the rug.

And he put the rug down and he said, Guess what? It's not there no more. Oh no, you can't see it.

See, I swept it under the rug. So it's not there no more. That's how their mindset...

And look, I used to be one, so trust me, I know what it's like to think that way. Oh, I don't have to deal with this anymore.

No, you do. You have to. That fresh coat of paint is not going to hide the cracks beneath.

But he says, Peter, you used to eat with Gentiles, meaning you were eating whatever. You know this.

Paul's probably... I mean, they didn't have this at the time, but I can just imagine in modern days it'd be like Paul saying, Peter, have you not read

Acts 11? What are you doing? Because what Peter did, it says he began to shrink back and separate himself.

So this word to shrink back means to withdraw.

So if any of you are fans of military theory or military politics or military engagements and stuff, this would be where, when we see in our government they talk about a military disengagement or we're pulling troops back.

And they may do it in stages. They may not just take everybody out at one time. You kind of dial back in stages.

That's what's in view here. Peter just didn't up one day and just stopped eating altogether. He saw these

Judaizers coming in. He's like, ooh, I remember Acts chapter 11 and how they gave me a lot of grief over this.

And I know they're not going to like what I'm doing here, so I'm just going to kind of withdraw.

And then when I see them, I'm like, oh, no, fellas, no. I haven't been eating with the Gentiles. No. And this word separate is a word of marking off boundaries.

So we say, no, no, there's a boundary there. Yeah, I'm trying to reach them, but trust me, fellas,

I'm trying to get them circumcised. I'm trying to bring them over to our team. I'm a team player. That's essentially what

Peter did here. Why would he do this? He was more concerned with being conformed to the demands of the legalists than he was concerned about embracing the freedom

Christ had given him. Legalism will rob you of your freedom each and every single time without fail.

Peter was fearful of rejection and did not want to be rejected by the legalists.

He had relationships with them. I have no doubt he was probably friends with some of them.

Maybe he had known some of them his whole life. But now Christ has called him to set a boundary which separates him from that, and he's doing it in reverse.

He's separating himself from freedom and going back into bondage. You know why it works so well?

Because rejection is a powerful tool of manipulation that can be used by legalists and cults to gain followers and to control them.

If you've ever watched, and if you live at my house, you have documentaries.

Look, I have to admit, many of them are really good. But Jim's like, let's watch this thing. Okay, and then you start watching.

Oh my goodness, that's a cult. Yeah, that's the whole point. We're watching to see what happened to them. But if you watch documentaries on cults, if you've ever been in one, you know how it is.

Manipulation, fear of rejection. Oh, if you don't step up, if you don't shape up, they may ask you to leave.

And in a lot of these cases, they tie your whole being up into it.

You become reliant upon them for money or food or whatever it is. So if you reject the system or the cult or whatever it is, you're out on your own.

Now this didn't apply to Peter here, but he's still got rejection that's manipulating him. You know,

I can remember being made to fear any association with compromisers. That's a big thing in the independent fundamentalist

Baptist world. You can still see it today on preaching clips from every week.

Compromisers, those dangerous compromisers. And in independent fundamentalism, you had what was called six degrees of separation.

So what does that mean? So let's say I'm standing here, and there's five or six people beside me.

And let's say down there on the end, like the sixth person, they're a compromiser.

They're not following the way. Well now, all those five people in between us that both myself and the compromiser have some level of relationship with,

I can't associate with any of them because as they'll say is you can't lock arms with someone who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone that's a compromiser.

Why? Not because scripture says anything about it, but because the fundamentalist legalist mindset fears that the outside world may see you associating with this person.

And they'll say, hey, doesn't they associate with that person down there? And now in their mind, oh, we can't be seen to be associated with any compromisers.

They're evil. I'm telling you, it was drilled in me that, oh man, if you read that book or if you start thinking like that, you wake up tomorrow and you're a compromiser and you're going to hell.

All the time. Sin in your life doesn't matter as long as you are conformed and have the right coat of paint on.

It's just that simple. How do I know this? All the pastors that have been put in jail for having sex with congregants, taking minors across state lines and having sex with them, rampant sexual immorality, embezzlement, all sorts of sins that we just lift the rug up, get our broom out, sweep it under the air because that's pastor so -and -so.

That's deacon so -and -so. That's Sunday school teacher. That's Christian or brother or sister. We can't dare say anything about it.

Real legitimate sin ignored as long as that coat of paint is fresh.

And we can say, oh, we go to church with so -and -so. My friends, that's not Christianity.

And if we have a Christian brother or sister in our midst that's dealing with some sin, we're not to look to bash their head with it.

We need to correct them. We need to lovingly bring them back into restoration, mostly with their father, not that their salvation is in question, but that relationship is hurting.

Galatians 4 .17, we'll get there eventually. But I'm just going to read it for you this morning.

Galatians 4 .17 says, They zealously seek you, not commendably, but they wish to shut you out so that you will zealously seek them.

The legalists are going to make it seem like they care about you. They want you.

They love you. We're just providing this great environment or opportunity for you.

My friends, it's just a form of manipulation. They want you to need them so badly that while they're treating you badly to where you naturally feel like,

I don't want to be around this, but they're designing it so that they manipulate you to where when you get out, what should be happening is us as Christ's people, we seek that wayward sheep or that wayward

Christian and go out and find them and bring them back and say, No, we love you. No, they want it to where when you try to leave and try to live in freedom, you keep wanting to seek them out.

I need them. I can't leave. I've got to have this. It's all I've ever known. It's a tool of manipulation.

That's why that first coat of paint robs you of your freedom. Now, these last two coats of paint are going to go very quickly.

The first one had a lot to cover. These last two are not going to take as much time because we're running up on the end of our hour here.

But I still want you to watch these last two coats of paint because there's two very important points to make here.

The second coat of paint, after they put the first coat on you, the second coat is designed to not just affect you, but everyone around you.

Notice here Galatians 2 and verse 13. It said the rest of the Jews joined him,

Peter, in hypocrisy. With the result that even

Barnabas, and now in passing here, Barnabas was one of the pastors here in Antioch.

Very important pastor. Very spiritual man. Very good man. And so even he was carried away by their hypocrisy.

Now, when it mentions here in verse 13 the rest of the Jews, it's not referencing the

Judaizers and the legalists here. What's being said here is that when Peter was dealing with the church in Antioch, there was a mixture of Jewish people and Gentile people.

So the Gentile people wouldn't have known any different anyway because they didn't grow up with the Old Testament system.

But these Jewish converts who were still susceptible to the

Judaizers because of what Peter did, who was their leader, now they're being carried away with him.

So much so that Barnabas, who's a pillar of the faith, gets caught up in it as well.

A hypocrite. And just let me say so none of y 'all will wonder, all of us have done it at some point.

You want to find hypocrites, you go to a church because we've all engaged in hypocrisy at some point. The key, yeah, it's funny, oh, we're a bunch of hypocrites.

That's great, fine, well, we need to stop it. I don't need to do it. You don't need to do it.

We need to make sure that we live truthfully because a hypocrite masks their true self.

They don't want you to know who they really are. It doesn't actually matter if you follow all the rules that they give you as long as everybody thinks you do.

I think I've mentioned this before. This is why I could never get my head wrapped around. It was a sin.

I'm talking about you are going to burn in hell and the fire is extra hot. If you dare enter a theater, go watch one of them

Hollywood movies. Y 'all, I love me some Superman. I love me some Spider -Man.

I love me some Hollywood. Now, look, I get it. Hollywood is like the best example of sin and destruction and all those things.

But enjoying some entertainment is not sinful. You need to be mindful of what's being presented to you and make decisions about certain content you want to consume based on how you feel the

Spirit would direct you. But it wasn't like that. It was you just can't go, period. But I never could figure out if that was sinful, why is it in my own home the movie

Air Force One with Harrison Ford was put into the

VHS player and you could watch it at home and it was perfectly okay.

Either it's wrong or it's not. But that's the thing, the hypocrisy.

It doesn't matter if you're actually following the rules. And that was one of the tent poles in my mind that God used to say,

Andy, there's something wrong with this. Because if it's wrong, it should be wrong.

And if it's not, it should be not. And if you're doing it in secret, but everybody else thinks, oh, they would never dare go watch that.

That's hypocrisy. That's not being your true self. And that's what happened here.

Peter's sin, it doesn't mean Peter's unsaved now or anything like that, but he's sinning and he needs to stop.

It didn't affect just him. It brought everybody with him. And that's that second coat of paint.

Lastly this morning, the third coat of paint. This is going to sound sort of similar to the first one, but notice the small shift here.

Because remember, the first coat was what? Designed to rob you of your freedom. Notice what this third coat is.

The third coat is designed to get you to rob others of their freedom and enslave them.

Notice verse 14. But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, and this word translated straightforward means in step, means you're walking in step or in pace with the truth of the gospel.

I said to Peter, before everyone, notice he says it to Peter, and it's public, before everyone here, he says, if you, being a

Jew, living like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, meaning you're not living under the

Old Covenant, you're not living under the Old Testament system, you're still Jewish ethnically, but spiritually you're not living as a

Jew did. You're living as Jew and Gentile together in the New Covenant in Christ's blood, and that's how you've been living, and that's good.

But if you're doing that, Peter, how is it that you compel the

Gentiles to live like Jews? Meaning, how is it that now you're shrinking back and compelling both

Jew and Gentile believers to now go along with the Judaizers and live that way? What are you doing?

I mean, this isn't you, this isn't what we preach, this isn't the true gospel, this isn't freedom.

You've gone from someone that's a pillar and stalwart of the faith preaching the true gospel, you had your freedom robbed, you've affected all those around you, and now you're compelling others to do it as well.

Paul's like, what are you doing, man? Legalism is not in step or straightforward with the gospel, and this word compel, when he says, how is it that you compel

Gentiles to live like Jews, this word compel means to necessitate.

You're literally, if you've seen those memes in social media, it talks about the difference between a boss and a leader, the leader's out front, working hard, leading everybody, and the boss is like the slave driver, beating everybody into submission to get them to go.

That's what legalism is. It drives you towards something. When I was in it, that's all you could think about.

I've got to do this, I've got to dress this way, I've got to make sure my belt's just, it's part of the reason I have so much issues with clothes now.

I can't wear ties anymore because I feel like I'm just being choked by it. My belt has to be perfect, shoes have to be tied a certain way.

I mean, it's a wonder my head never exploded. And bless her heart,

Hannah has to genetically take all that from me, and now she's like, gee, thanks, Dad. I'm like,

I'm sorry. But it's necessity. It drives you, it constrains you, it forces you.

Don't let them lie to you. Oh, no, we ain't really like that. I can't speak for other denominations.

There's fundamentalism and Pentecostalism, Methodists. It can be anywhere. I can only speak for Baptists.

Independent fundamentalist Baptists, they'll come off as like, oh, no, no, no, we're not really like that. I mean, that's how it was 50 years ago.

No, no. And then you get in there and you find out, hey, why are you doing that? No, we can't have that.

It's necessity. It's compulsion. You should never hear anything from this pulpit that says you better unless it can be specifically and consistently and contextually backed up with Scripture.

And anyone that would do this from this pulpit better make sure he's doing it too. Meaning me.

If I'm not living it, I have no business telling you to do it unless I'm living it too.

Because while I said we don't want hypocrites in the pews, my friends, you don't want a hypocrite in your pulpit.

And if I am one, I need to get out of it and go sit in a pew and learn until I can be restored.

That's essentially what Paul's telling Peter. It's not mean. It's not humiliation. It's, Peter, what are you doing, son?

What are you doing? You're messing up your life, and you're messing up the lives of so many other people.

So just in case you're not aware, legalism's bad. And I know this is heavy, and I know it's a little bit more negative the last two weeks, but my friends, you cannot miss next week because it's going to get really positive really fast because we're going to look at Paul's instruction about why we don't have to live that way.