Can We Truly Be Justified by Faith (Galatians 2:16-19)

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You're listening to the expository preaching ministry of Kootenai Community Church, located in Kootenai, Idaho.

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We pray that Christ is exalted and your spirit is blessed by the teaching of God's Word.

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For more information about Kootenai Church, please visit us online at kootenaichurch .org.

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Well, as I looked over this passage again and studied it and continued to look at it, there were several questions that came to my mind.

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And in each one of these verses that we've read this morning, there's a question that I wanted to ask.

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So, and this is going to kind of form an outline for where we're going to go here. So, question number one is from verse 16.

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This is the question, as a believer in Christ, what has caused my justification?

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Question two from verse 17. If I know I am justified by faith and am no longer under the restraints of the law, then is it possible that Jesus Christ could be a promoter of my sinful life since I still sin?

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That's a long question, but we'll get to that. Question three from verse 18. What would our lives as believers be like if we were to return to a dependency on the law, on the

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Ten Commandments and other Mosaic laws? And question four from verse 19. How can we live to God?

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That'll be the conclusion. So, let's look at this this morning. The first question that I just asked is, as a believer, what has caused my justification?

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Is justification caused by the Ten Commandments, by obeying the

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Mosaic laws, or is it something else? Now, I know the songs we sang this morning already answered that question, so it should be quite clear, but it never hurts to review it, does it?

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So just for a little bit of review, to put this verse, this idea, this whole idea into context, here's what's happened already in this book that Paul wrote to the

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Galatians. And we need to remember that Paul didn't write this as an encouragement.

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He didn't write this with happy feelings. He was correcting an error. In the book of Romans, and the book of Romans is teaching, and Philippians is very encouraging, and Colossians is also teaching, but this book is to correct an error.

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And we note that back in Galatians 1 verse 6, what did Paul say? He began his teaching with a rebuke, and it was saying this, brothers and sisters,

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I am so amazed that you have so quickly, you're so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, for a different gospel.

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But Paul doesn't exactly go into what this different gospel was yet in the very beginning, but we wait until he writes about a confrontation in chapter 2 with Peter, verses 11 through 15.

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However, even before this confrontation, and this is something that we've already covered and you'll have to read it again if you don't remember what

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I said, so just read back through it, but even before this confrontation, Paul does give us a glimpse of what this different gospel was, doesn't he?

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This would be adding circumcision, adding a legal thing, a requirement for believers, an inheritance to one of those more important Mosaic laws.

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This was what he was talking about. So he mentions it, how he made a special trip to Jerusalem to come together with the other apostles and discuss this issue, because Paul did not want any other thing to stand in the way of what the gospel is.

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They couldn't teach circumcision as a requirement. It was important that the gospel had to be all the same with all the apostles as well.

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And then he goes on into verses 11 through 15, as we see in the second chapter, where he confronted

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Peter for his hypocrisy. Paul uses this problem then to give us this idea of what this different gospel was.

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And here's what it looks like just for a bit more of a summary. Peter had been worshipping there with Paul and with the other

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Galatian believers, and he'd been eating together with them, possibly taking communion, spending time with them, and just, it was all one happy family at the beginning.

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And in doing this, he was showing them that he had laid aside all the legal requirements, the laws, because of grace.

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However, when some legalistic Jews came then down from Jerusalem and visited them, what did

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Paul do? He withdrew from them, from eating with the Gentile Christians.

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He withdrew because he was afraid of what they were going to think about him. So by his actions, what

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Peter was doing was agreeing with those legalistic Jews that there was something still that had to be done to maintain their salvation.

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It was no longer by grace. He was implying that a believer needed to conform to these laws, and specifically that particular one about not eating with a

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Gentile. A Jew could not eat with a Gentile. That was the old rules. So in a sense, he was implying that a man is justified in part by keeping some of these legalistic rules.

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So Peter and some of the others were being hypocrites, weren't they? Because at first they'd said, let's eat, let's all be one happy family, we're all equal, we're all the same, we're all to eat together.

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And then when these guys came in, he said, no, we can't do that anymore. We have to pull away. We have to withdraw. So he was being a hypocrite.

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And Paul knew that this idea would destroy the gospel message, the true gospel.

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Peter was promoting this different gospel, a false one, one of grace plus something of keeping the laws.

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So what does Paul tell these Galatian Christians here? In verse 16 he says, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.

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Even we have believed in Christ Jesus so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law.

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Since by the works of the law, no flesh will be justified. So thus we have the answer to our first question.

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What is brought about our justification? It's faith. And actually, you know what?

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It's not faith. Now I can contradict myself, but what it is, it's the work of Jesus Christ on the cross that justifies us, isn't it?

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But it's our faith to believe that. And so that's what Paul's focus was, was on the faith part.

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We are justified by faith alone, faith in Jesus Christ. Now, when I started studying this, this verse, it seemed to me that Paul was repeating himself here in this particular, in verse 16, because he says, first of all, this is a fact.

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Man is not justified by the law, but through faith. And then he repeats it. He says it twice. He says, even we have believed in Christ Jesus so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law.

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What's he doing here? Why is he repeating himself? Well, I believe he's saying it twice for a specific reason.

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It's because it's so unreasonable and so unnecessary to insist on any observance of the law.

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Now we have the Mosaic laws and we still study them today, but there's a difference. As a believer, we see them as something else.

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And we'll get into that in just a little bit here, but it's almost like Paul was finishing with his example of talking to Peter and his hypocrisy.

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And then he, it seems like he turns to the Galatian Christians now and he's applying it by saying, so guys, don't you see it?

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We have believed and we are justified before God, but it is by God alone.

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And it is only because we believe in Jesus Christ. It can never be about our own works of righteousness, can it?

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Or our inheritance to the Mosaic laws. It can't be about that. That's what

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Paul was saying. So if we make it something other than about faith, then it becomes a different gospel.

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I really appreciate how the Amplified version, I like versions, and when I was doing the translation into the

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Manui language years ago, I used the Amplified as one of my, not a base text, but one of my texts to study along with a number of other versions.

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So I like different versions. Some of them are good, some of them are rather poor, but they all help to understand what the author was saying.

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Listen to what the Amplified version says here. It says, a man is justified or reckoned righteous.

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Excuse me, let me start over. A man is justified or reckoned righteous and in right standing with God, not by works of the law, but only through faith and absolute reliance on and trust in Jesus Christ.

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Now, this particular version likes synonyms. And I like synonyms because it does give us a better understanding sometimes of what's being said.

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Actually, sometimes it's way too much. But this particular one gives us a good definition of what justification means, doesn't it?

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Let me read it again. Just this part. A man is justified, that is, he is reckoned righteous and is in right standing with God.

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So in other words, justification means that God reckons us as sinners as righteous before Him when we believe.

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That is, we are placed in a right standing with God because we believe. Another way of saying this is that God has credited the righteousness of Christ to us, hasn't

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He? And that's what it talks about there in Romans that Dave read here earlier. So let's just think just a little bit about what this means.

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Like I say, it's kind of like preaching to the choir because most of us are familiar with this, but it doesn't hurt to repeat it.

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Why do we need Christ's righteousness? What's wrong with my own goodness?

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Aren't I good? And when you ask a person out in the streets, if you're ever talking to a person, the first thing, it's good to ask them, do you think you're a good person?

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And all the time they'll say, well, yes, I am. I'm a good person. So what's wrong with our own goodness?

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Well, according to the Scriptures, before salvation, we had no goodness.

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Not really. We didn't desire to seek after God. In fact, we hated everything to do with righteousness, didn't we?

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And we call this total depravity. We were really depraved. We only deserve God's wrath and judgment because of our hopeless nature as depraved sinners.

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And when we were born into the human race, we were already born as sinful creatures and it didn't get any better because all we did was sin or do something with sinful motives.

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And over and over again, the Scriptures tell us this, doesn't it? If we read the Scriptures, this is what it says. Isaiah 53 says this, all of us like sheep.

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All of us like sheep have gone astray. Each one of us has turned to his own way.

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Isaiah 64 verse six says this, for all of us have become like one who is unclean and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment.

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And all of us wither like a leaf and our iniquities like the wind take us away.

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It's my emphasis on the all, but boy, I tell you, it sure says it, doesn't it? Pretty inclusive, all of us.

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And then Paul also writes as well about the depravity of humankind in Romans 3 verses 10 through 12.

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And what he does is he combines a number of Old Testament passages together, some of them from Psalm 14.

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And this is how he reads it. He says, as it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one.

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There is none who understands. There is none who seeks after God. All have turned aside. Together they have become useless.

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There is none who does good. There's not even one. Does that say all of us?

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Actually, it says none of us, doesn't it? But it means all of us, all of us have sinned. So each of these passages tell us that all of us are hopelessly unable to save ourselves and desperately lost.

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That's pretty bleak, isn't it? For someone who thinks that they have some idea, some way to get

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God's approval by something that they have done, right? So in legal terms, all of us have been found guilty.

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We've all been sentenced to death by the judge of the universe before we've even had a chance, because he,

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God alone, is righteous. We can't meet up to God's standards because they're so high.

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And so we're doomed because we're sinners. That's the bad news. And that's the first part of the gospel that anybody needs to hear, actually.

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The bad news first. And if we don't understand, we won't understand the rest of the story, will we?

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However, because of what Jesus has done on the cross, because of His work on the cross, and because of God's mercy and the grace from that same judge, we've been given a gift, haven't we?

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The gift of salvation. And Ephesians 2 .8 .9 makes this very clear in other passages.

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I won't quote them this morning because some of you know them by heart. But this isn't the only thing that's been done.

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It's not just the gift of salvation that's been given us. If we read through Ephesians chapter 1, there's a number of other things, other blessings that each believer has been given.

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We've been adopted, for instance, into His family, haven't we? There's complete forgiveness.

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There's a desire given to us by the Holy Spirit to please the Father. There's an understanding of some of the mysteries of God, aren't there?

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The Holy Spirit has been given to us as a guarantee of that salvation. And there's a peace that no unbeliever would ever have nor understand.

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And there's so many more things. It would be, it could take two mornings to enumerate on all those things, on all those blessings.

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But one of the more important things of having obtained this gift of salvation is that we're no longer seen as unrighteous.

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We're no longer seen by God, by that same judge. And what happens at salvation is that we've been saved from God's judgment from sin, but Christ's righteousness has been credited to us, is what the song said there this morning.

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And it's important to remember that it's still His righteousness, isn't it? It's not ours.

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It's His righteousness. We can do nothing to gain it. We can't come to church every

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Sunday and every Bible study and pray a lot and read His Bible. It's not how we get it, is it?

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It's already credited to us. It's Christ's righteousness and not ours. And so this is the issue that Paul was dealing with there as he explained it to Peter and the rest of the

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Galatian Christians. And earlier this morning we read there, Dave read in Romans 4, and Paul was talking about Abraham there, wasn't he?

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And he said, for what do the Scriptures say? Abraham believed God and it was credited or assigned to him.

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There's many other words we can use there. It was credited to him as righteousness. So in other simpler words, this means that Abraham was justified by faith.

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And Paul even repeats this himself in chapter 3.

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He goes right into that again. Isaiah 53 .6

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says this, the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him. I'm going to read that again.

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The Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him. So this is another aspect of that same idea of justification.

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And sometimes we call this imputation. I know Jim has preached on that. He's talked about it as well. So we should have heard this before.

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But what it is, it's just saying that that's another benefit of our salvation, that all our unrighteous acts, all our sin was placed on Him.

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So He not only credited us with His righteousness, but He also took our righteousness upon Himself.

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And what does God see? He sees when He looks at us, all He sees is His Son. All He sees is

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His righteousness. So this is both imputation and justification. Listen as I read 2

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Corinthians 5 .21 where Paul was explaining a little more what God did here.

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He says it this way, for our sake He made Him, Jesus, to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

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Recently I read an article by R .C. Sproul where he was explaining this verse and he said that what we have here could be called double imputation.

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Listen to R .C. Sproul as I quote him. At the heart of the gospel is a double imputation.

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My sin is imputed to Jesus and His righteousness is imputed to me.

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So in this two -fold transaction we see that God who does not negotiate sin, who doesn't compromise

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His own integrity with our salvation, but rather punishes sin fully and really after it has been imputed to Jesus and He retains

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His own righteousness. And so He is both just and the justifier as the

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Apostle Paul tells us here. So what he was saying was that there's two things that happen. He's taken our sin on Himself and thus

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He bore the punishment for us. And secondly His righteousness has been imputed to us or credited to us just like Abraham.

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So we're righteous in the sight of God, aren't we? That's amazing. It's just so amazing because we have believed what

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Jesus Christ has done on the cross. We are justified by believing that, by believing that.

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So in other words we're justified by faith. And as I mentioned it's not our everyday experience to be just, is it?

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To be righteous. We're still capable of sinning and often we do. But the righteousness we're talking about here is our standing, our position before God.

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We're forgiven, we're acquitted of the guilt of our sin, we're justified that it's not anything we could have done.

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So it's been credited to our account. All God sees is the righteousness of Christ and it's by faith alone.

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And Paul made faith a focus here because the Galatian Christians were being fooled by some of these Jewish heretical teachers who were thinking that, guys you gotta do something.

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And Peter was fooled into thinking oh I gotta go back to this legalism, I gotta go back to holding myself better than the

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Gentiles. We have to do something. We have to keep the Mosaic laws. And particularly separating from the

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Gentiles. And so this is why they were drawn away by Peter's hypocrisy. A number of years ago, when

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I was over on the east coast visiting my family that lives over there, I was asked by a friend of mine to teach in their

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Bible study. Now this friend was a Mennonite pastor. And some of you know what the Mennonites, how they understand things.

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And this friend asked me if I would teach in their Bible study and so without even thinking about any repercussions,

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I taught that morning on faith and on grace and the security of the believer.

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I mentioned that the Bible teaches us that a true Christian is still saved even if he does happen to sin.

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Because he's working on those areas. He's, by faith, dealing with his sinful nature all the time.

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He will sin because he's still human. This won't unsave him, I said in that study.

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Because salvation and justification are God's work. They're not our work. And we can't do anything to fix it or maintain it.

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All we do is believe. That's the faith part. That's how I went in my Bible study.

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Well, these ideas bothered my Mennonite friend. And he told me very plainly that if he started preaching about these ideas in his church, about grace, that many of his members would just start living in sin.

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And they would eventually, it would lead them to no longer being Christians. He couldn't afford to lose them. So he couldn't preach.

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He couldn't teach on grace. Now, he didn't tell me if he believed grace, but he couldn't preach on it. It was so sad.

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His idea communicated to me that sanctification was obedience to God's laws, the

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Mosaic laws. He had no idea about justification. It wasn't clear at all to him that we're declared righteous by faith.

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So he had a similar misunderstanding, didn't he, that the Galatians had and that Peter had. That we have to maintain the legalistic laws in order to maintain our salvation, to keep ourselves safe.

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Now, is that true? No, it's not. Not according to Paul here in Galatians. So no matter what

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I said that day, it didn't seem to make any difference because he was so afraid that he would fall away from God.

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He didn't understand the security of the believer. So much like the Galatian Christians, it was a sad situation.

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So as we read through this passage, we can see that it is by faith alone, isn't it?

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We are not maintaining our salvation. It's already finished, isn't it?

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Already finished. God has accepted us because of His Son. Let me give you another example.

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Some of the Monhue people that we worked with for many, many years also struggled with this idea as well.

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My son Jeff, who is currently doing the Old Testament translation, was teaching at the time, and he was teaching on Galatians chapter 2.

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And what happened among the Monhue people that as he was teaching or when he finished teaching this passage, a rumor began to circulate around in the villages while he was co -teaching this with another pastor.

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The rumor was that he was implying that it was okay to still sin.

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It was okay to get drunk. It was okay to run around with other women. It was okay to live in adultery.

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Now, Jeff didn't say this, okay, just to let you know. But the rumor said that he did.

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People were thinking that's what he said because of the way that the teaching goes on Galatians. And because the

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Monhue worldview is so tied to gossip and this kind of stuff anyway, it just naturally flowed.

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So after Jeff taught on this passage, there were two of the pastors, two of five, two of the pastors were really struggling with this idea.

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I don't think they misunderstood, but it was a deeper issue.

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It was that these pastors somehow came to think that a Christian had to keep the Ten Commandments or he would no longer be a

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Christian just like this Mennonite fellow did. So the issue was about the security of the believer. They were afraid that if they taught grace, their whole village would fall apart because people would start sinning all the time.

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So they got together. Jeff got together with all five of these pastors. The one pastor that was teaching on grace had understood it, said, okay,

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Jeff, read this passage, read this passage. And so Jeff read it. And this is what it actually sounds like.

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I'm going to read it in Monhue just so you hear the language. It says, Hey, Tala pay pull out in Caius, cause she not, he less wet some.

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We did Tala pay to Ola, the Jesus Christo. And so translating this back for you guys into the

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English, it was saying this, it doesn't come from the law that we are

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God's children. This is verse 16. Actually, it's just a part of it, but it says it doesn't come from the law that we are

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God's children, but instead it comes from believing in Jesus Christ. We know that no one can be stated as good by doing the laws.

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Now, I'm pretty sure these guys understood it, but they were so afraid that if they taught that there would be no longer any control in the village.

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So on a shallow surface level, it appeared to leave the church and the leaders powerless to keep their people good because that's what they wanted to hear.

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These two men wanted the promise of justification by faith to not be made clear, sadly.

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And so as he read and read this over and over again, this verse here in Monhue, finally, both of those pastors admitted that they were wrong in believing the rumor and it was about faith.

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And so truth, they said that truth wins over the law. Truth wins over the law.

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They knew that they didn't need the Ten Commandments to maintain their community. That wasn't the issue at all.

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It is by faith. And so that's where the churches today, they were struggling with this. And I can remember sometimes talking to some of them and it seemed to be they were already going that way.

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But now they've been corrected and all five pastors are teaching grace. All right, let's go on to verse 17.

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We come to the second question. The question is, if I recognize that I'm justified by faith, as it says here, and I'm no longer under the restraint of the law, then is it possible that Jesus Christ is helping me to sin?

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Because I still do. So let's look at this just a little bit deeper. First, he says of the phrase, but if here in this passage, but if, but if while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have been found to be sinners.

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Is Christ then a minister of sin? So Paul is asking a hypothetical question. He wants them to understand and paraphrase this would be since we're still finding ourselves sinning sometimes in our daily experience, even though we're believers who have been justified by Christ's work on the cross.

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Does this mean that Christ is a minister of sin? And the word minister there is the same word that we use for Diakono, the

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Greek word, it means a helper or a promoter. So the idea, is it possible that Jesus could be promoting me to sin?

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Now, if I didn't understand justification and sanctification comes by faith,

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I can just hear myself reasoning with Paul here in this message. Now look, Paul, what is wrong with me?

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I still find myself sinning. And I thought that when

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I got saved, this would stop, but it didn't. So maybe

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I could go back to depending on the laws because the laws have strength. But since I still sin, what's wrong?

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Maybe it's Christ's fault. Now, nobody actually said this.

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And so what Paul was talking about a possible situation here. And why, why might one of us ask this question?

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Because we still do sin, don't we? We have a problem. We all do because we're human. We still sin.

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So what's the answer? Oh, so we just go back to keeping the laws, right? We've got to try harder, try harder, try harder.

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This thing about faith and justification is just too weak. There's no strength in it.

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You see, Paul knew how easy it was that these people could be caught up in resorting back to the Mosaic laws instead of believing that they were already right in God's sight.

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So in a sense, they could believe that faith is too simple. It's too weak. But this is a real misunderstanding of grace, isn't it?

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Misunderstanding of grace. So what do we do? We have been justified in God's sight.

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We are righteous, but we still sin. So what do we do about it? Well, we can't blame it on our inabilities to keep the law, and we can't blame it on Jesus, as Paul says here.

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That's for sure. But we do have the answer. And I think Paul knew this, because this is where Paul was going.

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In 1 John 1 .9, we have a beautiful answer that John made very clear. He said, if we confess our sins,

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He, God, is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So what

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John is saying is, all we need to do is admit it. When we sin, we admit it before God.

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We humbly come to Him by faith. And why can we do this? Because Paul says,

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Christ never advocates us to sin. He liberated us from it. As a young person,

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I sometimes struggled with the same idea. And I thought, I just got to try harder, and work harder, and keep the laws, and do good, and be good, and then

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God will accept me. But it doesn't work that way, because God has already accepted us, hasn't

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He? By faith, God can and does that. When all

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I have to do is humbly admit that I've sinned, and then the Holy Spirit will work in my heart, and give me the strength to live a life pleasing to God.

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And it is by faith. Question 3, verse 18.

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What would happen if, as a believer, I were to return to a dependency on the laws? So Paul says in verse 18, for if I rebuild what

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I've once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor. And paraphrasing the first part of this, it says, how on earth would

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I ever go back to basing my justification on the Mosaic laws? I've already torn it down.

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I've already destroyed my dependency on this. So Paul knew there was no way he'd go back.

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He says, then I'd prove myself to be a transgressor if I did that. Another English translation says, then

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I would show myself to be someone who breaks the law. And so Paul's saying here that if he were to return to a dependency on the law, if he were to rebuild it, what he'd already laid aside, it would never be enough to justify him.

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It would only prove that he was a lawbreaker. Thus he would go on sinning. And he would actually have more understanding of sin, but it wouldn't help him.

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And not just that, he would be saying that the sacrifice of Christ on the cross was not enough.

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Was not enough. So that's the answer to the question. Should you or I return to a dependency on it for a justification?

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And what would happen? We would actually be saying, we would prove that the laws were only meant to show us that we're sinners.

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And we would be saying, it's not enough what Christ did. It would be a destruction of the pure gospel of grace.

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Question four. So then, how can I live to God?

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How can I live to God? Verse 19. In this verse, he says, through the law,

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I died to the law so that I might live to God. So what he's saying is simply, because as far as the law is concerned,

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I'm dead. And when he finally understood the law's true purpose, he realized he had to become dead.

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And we know about Paul in his early life. He was one who really worked hard, really worked hard to become, to be a good

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Pharisee with all his might, to be accepted by God. But when he realized that it didn't work, when

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Jesus met him on the road to Damascus, he realized that it wasn't about himself.

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And so his dependency had to die. He became dead to the law. But that wasn't the end of it.

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He goes on to say here, so then I can live to God. Listen to what

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Romans 7 .4 says, 7 .4 -6. Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined together to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God.

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For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death.

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But now we have been released from the law, having died to that which we were bound, so that we might serve in newness of the

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Spirit, and not in oldness of the life. So when a person is alive to God, he's walking by faith, and he's dealing with his sin, and he's applying 1

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John 1 .9, where it says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us. And we go on, we go on, we walk.

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So to ask the question again, how can I live to God? The answer is by reckoning ourselves dead to the laws and alive to God, and it's by faith.

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And in our everyday experience, as we apply these verses to our hearts, we're truly alive.

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And our relationship with the Mosaic law is dead. Now, as I said before, we still read them.

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David read them. Paul read them. All the laws were there to read, to see them as a mirror to show us our sinful nature and the holiness of God.

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Praise God. That justification, though, has nothing to do about us, does it? God has done everything through his

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Son's sacrifice on the cross, so that we can say, as Paul did here in the next verse, this last verse,

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I am crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which

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I now live in the flesh, I live by faith. Thank you for listening to the latest podcast from Kootenai Church.

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If you'd like to learn more about Kootenai Church, or to donate to our church ministry, you can do so online by visiting kootenaichurch .org.

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We hope you enjoyed this podcast, and pray you'll join us again next time. Once again, thank you for listening.