God is Glorified - Galatians 1:15-23 Part 1

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God is Glorified - Galatians 1:15-23 Part 2

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But let's look at Galatians. We read already, Jim read for us Acts, and we're gonna be going back and forth a little bit between that chapter and this first chapter of Galatians this morning.

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So let's just read first. Galatians 1, Galatians chapter 1, verses 11, verses 11 down to the end of the passage to verse 24.

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And he says this, he says, For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man.

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For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

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For you've heard of my former manner of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it.

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And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions.

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But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother's womb and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his son in me so that I might preach him among the

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Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh or blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me.

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But I went away to Arabia and returned once more to Damascus. That's a long sentence, okay, to go on.

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And then three years later, I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas, or Peter, and stayed with him 15 days.

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But I did not see any of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother. Now in what I'm writing to you,

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I assure you before God that I'm not lying. Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, and I was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea, which were in Christ, but only they kept hearing he who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith which he once tried to destroy.

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And they were glorifying God because of me. Let's just ask the

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Lord to guide us here this morning. Lord, thank you so much for this passage. Thank you for Paul and how he spent so much time writing these books that we have today to enjoy, to get a picture of you and what happened.

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And we thank you, Lord, that it was not all about Paul. It was about yourself. We pray, too, that as we read this, we'll see that you are the one to be glorified always.

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Thank you so much in your name, amen. Do you ever pick up a book and begin to read it and then you flip over to the end of it?

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You gotta read the end of the book because you gotta find out, is this really worth reading this book? And so you go there and you read the end first before you go back.

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Well, my wife loves to do this. Nancy loves to read a book at the end and then go in and read it to see if she really wants to read it.

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And I can understand that a little bit. Or have you ever started watching a movie and you decide to watch the very end first to see if you wanna watch the entire movie?

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Well, I think some of us do that as well. And this morning, I'd like to do that as well with our passage this morning.

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I'd like to go to the very end of what we've read. This is verse 24. And make some comments there first before we dive into the rest of this.

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Paul states there in verse 24 as we just read, and they were glorifying God because of me.

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And I believe that Paul was kind of summarizing what had been happened, what had happened, everything up to that point in his life, that only

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God gets the glory for everything that was happening. God should always get the glory, isn't it?

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For whatever we do. In the context of this verse, we find that the

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Judean Christians all over Judea had heard about Paul and they were giving

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God the glory for what had happened, not Paul, they weren't praising Paul, they were praising the Lord. So God was getting the glory.

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And the reason I wanted to start there was because it kind of reminds me of myself and my wife and our work down in Paraguay, but it was what

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God accomplished, all those years that we spent there in our work and ministry, it wasn't us.

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And it's not that I can say I'm like Paul, because believe me, I'm not. I would never be able to have kept up with him, the extremely hard life that he lived.

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We've had it easy compared to that. But I do know this, that the Monholy believers continually praise

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God and give him the glory for the things that have happened there because of what

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Nancy and I and our teammates accomplished in their lives. And there's many believers also in churches around the world, around the

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United States, including this one here. When they heard of what God had done, they also have praised

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God and they continue to do so. So God is honored and God is glorified. We're not, God is. Because of this small community of Monholy people there in Paraguay, in this tiny little corner of this world, a very small group of people in a tiny corner of the world have heard the gospel, there's believers, there's a church established, there's the

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New Testament and many of the Old Testament passages translated into their language. They can hear, read it from themselves in their own language and understand it.

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And the church is growing. In fact, just as a side issue, I just got word a couple days ago from our son who's back down there, the church that we had built years ago for these people, the building, not the people, but the building, we built that and they helped us build it and it kind of fell down because it wasn't very strong.

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And so some folk around the United States have offered money to rebuild that, at least provide the materials and the

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Monholy themselves will build it. So we just got the word that they've gotten the money now and they're going ahead and starting to lay the bricks for that building.

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So God continues to get the glory. He's the one that provided it. So anyway, this people have the light and Satan's darkness has been pushed back out of that corner just a little bit.

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And like I said, it wasn't us. It wasn't, it's not about us, it never was. We absolutely cannot take the credit for that.

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It was God who did it only as us acting as his servants and his messengers. And I'm just thankful for what we were able to do, but to let

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God get the glory for that. And the Monholy people like Paul and can say they're glorifying

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God because of us. So that's the end of the story. So let's go now to where we are.

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I'm gonna kind of do some review because it's been since August since I spoke. So I'm just gonna do a few things.

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There was, the last time I spoke, it was in August, so it's been quite a while. And we were talking about two different things. We're talking about Paul's defense of a pure and simple gospel.

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And that gospel was the fact that it's by faith, by grace through faith in God alone.

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And Paul was defending that because there were some problems with the Galatians and their understanding.

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So we looked at that and we also saw that Paul defended himself as well, his apostleship.

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And we'll find out why. I mentioned before that it was, I've read and I've reread these first two chapters of Galatians.

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And I often wonder why did Paul go into so much detail about his apostleship?

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Why did he do that? And as we think about the background of this book, we have to go back to the book of Acts.

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And that's why we read in Acts this morning. In the book of Acts, we're told by Luke how these legalistic

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Jews that knew of Paul, they detested him.

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And they, even to the point of following right behind him into the churches that he had established in Galatia. The churches in Galatia were also where they went and their purpose was to stir up the new believers and cause them to question whether Paul was really authentic or not.

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And they also wanted to try and convince the believers that there was more to it. It wasn't just faith. Paul had corrupted it by just saying it was faith.

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He'd thrown out all the rules and all the laws. And they didn't like that at all. And so they said that Paul's message was corrupted and it was his own invention.

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And it appears that some of these believers in Galatia had actually begun to believe that, what they were saying.

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And this is why we can see this, we conclude this because of what Paul says to the believers there in verse six of this first chapter.

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He says, I am amazed, he said, that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, because they were listening to this gospel of works.

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So this is why Paul was going into so much detail and so much of his defense, especially to show these believers that the gospel was not according to man's logic, as we looked at last time

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I spoke. Because if his gospel had been according to man and according to man's reasoning and logic, then it would have included works because that's, we saw that for the last time

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I spoke, Paul would have to have preached that a man needs to conform at least to circumcision, at least in the

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Mosaic traditions, and to keep the Ten Commandments, as well as believe in Jesus Christ in order for God to save him.

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And that has carried on all down through the generations and years, because even today there's many churches that say that it's not, that it's our works, what we do, that shows our faith.

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And so they're depending on works rather than faith, and rather than the grace of God. So this is why

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Paul had to go into so much detail. We're told in Galatians verses 11 and 12 that Jesus alone had given him the message.

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That was where we were also. And we noted that this wasn't Paul's creation. He doesn't state in those verses what the gospel message is.

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We have to go all the way to chapter two in verse 16. But we do find there that Paul does say that it's all about what

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Christ has done. Man is not made righteous, he says, before God by works, but simply by faith alone, in the finished work of Christ.

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It's the finished work of Christ. And we'll get to that eventually down the road. We're not gonna actually go into that today any more than that.

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But I just wanted to just remind us that this is what the true gospel message is. It's not about works at all.

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And it was not Paul's idea either. We also looked last time from verses 13 to 15.

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We saw how Paul gave this detailed account of his being a legalistic

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Pharisee, one who was very zealous, and one who was, it was all about the traditions of the

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Jews. And because of this, he'd been doing a tremendous amount of work, eradicating as many of the

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Christians, those that followed the way of Jesus of Nazareth, because this was what

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Paul, I thought, was corruption at first. And we noted how he gave this account, also, this whole account of his past to show that he couldn't have been converted on his own.

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He had heard the gospel, many times probably, from these Christians, and that's why he was executing them, because it was against what he believed was true.

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And so then this complete about -face, he says, was, where he says they're in verse, they start in verse 15, but, he says, but when

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God, when God did, and that's where we left off in the last time we spoke. This was

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Paul's best defense of being a true apostle, because it was God that had done it. It was nothing about what he had done, or had decided to believe in.

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God was responsible for it. So now let's go forward today. There's three, these are more details, by the way, of Paul's defense, and we're gonna look at three different things this morning.

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We're gonna look at God's work, what God did. We're gonna look at Paul's travels, where he went.

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And we're gonna look at the Jewish community's reaction. It's a long section, but I think we're gonna get through it okay this morning.

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So let's look at it a little bit. First, we're gonna look at God's work. What did God do? That is, what was

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God's work in Paul's life? Here in verses 15, it's actually part of 15 and part of 16.

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Remember, Paul already started the comment. He says, but God. The contrast that everything that he had been doing, and now what

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God's gonna be doing. And so we're gonna look at that here. So he gives these two verses, and he gives three different things in these two verses.

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He gives three things that show what God did in his life. So let's look at those. He says the first thing here in verse 15, it says, but when

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God, who had set me apart, even from my mother's womb. Okay, we're gonna stop right there.

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So first off, God's set him apart. If we paraphrase that just a little bit, it would be something like this.

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Oh yeah, by the way, because this is kind of a parenthetical thought. He says, by the way, first of all,

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I truly believe that God in his sovereign plan had set me apart before I was born, before I was born.

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So what's it mean to be set apart? What's this idea of setting apart? The Greek word here is, let me see if I can pronounce this.

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It's aphorizo. Okay, and literally means to be like a boundary being set somewhere, where we separated out for something.

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And Paul used it figuratively, meaning destined for a purpose, a specific purpose.

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And this is quite the statement he's making because he sincerely believes in the, or believed in the sovereignty of God in his life, that God had destined him.

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He had picked him out to use him to accomplish his purpose even before he was born, while he was still in his mother's womb.

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Wow, that's quite the picture of the sovereignty of God. And it does raise some questions.

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I once in a while have to question myself as well and ask myself, and you can ask these same questions.

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How do I view the sovereignty of God? How do I see it? Do I see

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God in complete control of my life and having picked me out as well? Or do we sometimes think that our lives are simply accidents?

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Things just go on and they just kind of happen. They take God by surprise. I think that sometimes, maybe we do think sometimes that we are in complete control of what we do.

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God has nothing to do with it. He's just sitting up there in heaven, watching it all kind of out of the picture.

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I've heard somebody say this to me recently, that that's how they view God. And it's kind of like, hey, when years ago when

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I decided to become a missionary, God sat up there and he saw that and he said, well,

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I didn't see that coming. Do you think he did that? Not in your life, no.

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And if you think this way, again, on that one, because that isn't the God that we find in the scriptures, is it?

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God is sovereign over everything. For example, if we read in the Psalms, we find that King David also believed this when he wrote

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Psalm 71. And he says in Psalm 71, six, he said, you are my hope,

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O Lord God, my confidence from my youth. By you, I have been sustained from birth.

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You are he who took me from my mother's womb. There it is, right there. My praise, he said, is continually of you.

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And Jeremiah also wrote a very similar passage. He's actually, I'm not gonna read it. I'll just tell you what it said in Jeremiah chapter one.

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He was listening as God was giving him a commission. And he told him that he commissioned him and appointed him before his birth.

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God is sovereign, isn't he, over our lives. And many scriptures make this very plain. All right, back to Galatians.

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So Paul first states here, the first thing he said was that God set him apart. God was sovereign and God set him apart before birth to be his messenger.

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Then Paul adds a second thing here that God did as well, second part of this work. In verse 15, he says, and he called me through his grace.

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So he set him apart. Secondly, he called him through his grace. And I believe he was referring here, partially anyway, to the call on the

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Damascus Road. He said he was called by God through his grace or because of his grace.

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And so Paul saw this calling as grace, as a true free gift of God that he didn't deserve at all.

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And obviously, Paul recognized this, that he didn't deserve it. So let's think about that just for a second.

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What Paul was doing before his conversion. Remember we read there in Acts 9, Luke tells us that he was breathing out threats or threatenings and murder against the disciples of Christ.

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He wanted to kill them. That was his life before that. And he'd even obtained these letters from the high priest of Jerusalem to capture and to bind anyone that was following that way, the way of Jesus that lived in Damascus.

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So Paul realized this. It was all about God and all about grace. God graciously intervened because he had already set him apart before he was born.

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And now he called him to be his servant. So we have those two things. We read there in Acts where God told

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Ananias to go and lay his hands on Paul so he'd regain his sight. And this was three days after Jesus had spoken to him there on the road.

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And it's pretty clear that Ananias was a little bit fearful to go and talk to this man.

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He says, man, he says, this guy, we've heard about him. He's gonna throw us in jail. He might even kill us.

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He knew that Paul's reputation as a hater of the believers. And so God then said, no, he says, go.

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For he's a chosen instrument of mine to bear my name before the Gentiles and the kings and the sons of Israel.

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So we see that Luke records it as well that God had already set Paul apart and chosen him to be his servant.

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Then we come to, so those are the first things. Set apart, called, and now we have a third thing.

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At the end of verse 15, it says this. Called me through his grace and was pleased.

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We need to go on here, verse 16. He was pleased to reveal his son in me so that I might preach him among the

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Gentiles. Okay, so let's think about that statement for just a minute. Paul was pleased to reveal his son, or excuse me,

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God was pleased to reveal his son in Paul. And if we were, again, to paraphrase, I like to paraphrase things because it does make us understand him a little bit better.

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So let's paraphrase this one. He said, it pleased God or it made God happy to be able to reveal to me,

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Paul, who his son really was. Now I changed the wording a little bit, didn't I? He said in me and I said to me.

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And I think we can do both of those. I think because the Greek has this thing where it makes things a little bit different when you think about it.

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This preposition, you know what a prepositional phrase is? That's grammar. I don't know if any of you teach grammar, but I love grammar.

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The prepositional phrase in me can also be to me.

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And the reason for that is the little preposition, n -e -n in Greek, which we've translated in often, can also be in or to or by or with.

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It can be all the prepositions. It always is according to the context here.

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And so we have to understand the context. And so it makes sense to hear Paul say that on the road, while he was going to Damascus, it pleased

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God to reveal his son to Paul as the one all the

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Jews had been waiting for. So Paul saw Jesus Christ as the son of God that day on the road, the true

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Messiah, he saw him. And it's no wonder there was such a blinding light to see

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God. None of us have experienced that other than what we see in the scriptures.

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But Paul saw something there. And it's no wonder he fell face down in the dirt. He couldn't take it.

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And it's no wonder he was blinded that day. But also what an awesome, awesome privilege when

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Paul recognized Jesus, instantly recognized, oh, he is who he said he was.

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He is the son of God. That's awesome. And then included in those three things.

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So let's go back over it. He said he was set apart. He was called.

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And here he says, it was revealed to him who Jesus really was.

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God revealed to him this. And then there's a purpose statement here. Again, at verse 16, look at it again.

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He says, to reveal his son in me, so that I might preach him among the

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Gentiles. So that I might preach him among the Gentiles. So he's explaining to these Galatian readers here that God was pleased to reveal his son to him so that they were in order that he could turn around and then share him with the

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Gentiles, the Gentile world, the non -Jewish people of the world, which are most of us, if not all of us. Thank you,

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Lord. I see here a bit of application too for us.

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I truly believe that it also pleases God to reveal himself to us as well through his scriptures in the person of his son,

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Jesus Christ. So that, okay, we have to carry it on. We can turn around and share him with others.

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Or so that we can glorify him, either one. But if we share him with others, I think that's part of it.

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That's what Paul did. What else would please God more than for us to get to know him better so that we could share him with others who he is?

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And that, friends, is something that pleases God. I really truly believe that. And I'll, so I'll repeat it. It pleases

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God to reveal himself to us in the scriptures so that we, in turn, can share him with others.

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This is why it's so important that we spend time in God's word.

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Because that's where we see God. That's where we understand to get to know him. God has given us his word that reveals to us who he is and what he has done.

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So that's awesome. That's why his word is awesome. And that's why I believe God had us translate that for the

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Monhoe people. That's what God likes. That's what pleases God.

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All right, so that was what God did. Now let's look a little bit about what Paul did.

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His next verse is 16, the end of 16, right, verse 21.

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We see Paul's travels. Where did Paul go after his conversion? I'd like to read verses 15 and 16 together now, but I'd like to drop out the little parentheses so that we can understand the context a little better.

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It says, Paul said, part of 15 and part of 16, but when God was pleased to reveal his son in me,

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I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood. So I skipped some of that other stuff in there. When God was pleased to reveal his son in me,

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I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood. So Paul's saying here that he didn't go to anyone else, okay?

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He didn't go to anyone else for counsel after he was converted. He didn't, you could picture it.

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He would have gone to Ananias. Ananias was the one that laid his hand on him and brought his sight back.

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So he would have gone to Ananias for counsel, for wisdom, for, okay, what's the gospel here, Ananias? But he didn't.

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He didn't sit down at his feet and learn. He didn't go to the Christians there in Damascus and start a Bible study and begin to study to see what he should preach on.

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He didn't go to anyone to get further teaching from them so that he could better understand the gospel because when he, when

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God opens his eyes, he saw immediately. No man had to explain it to him. So this was just another way of reminding these believers in Galatia of what he had said all the way back in verse 12 where he had said, for you have heard of my former, excuse me, it wasn't verse 12.

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I lost my point there, but what he says, the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man.

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It was according to Jesus Christ through his time spent with Jesus. Now look at verse 17 here, first part.

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He said more. He went on. He said, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me.

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He's telling these Christians here that in Galatia that he had made no contact with the other apostles in Jerusalem.

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He wasn't taught by them. It's what, you would think logically that that's where Paul would have gone because these were apostles and they had the gospel message and he could have gone to them, but he didn't.

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So it's interesting, he says here also that they were apostles before me and as he mentions this,

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I realize that Paul was implying something here that he was also one of them. He was an apostle. It's just that he became one later.

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So we conclude that Paul definitely considered himself an apostle. We see this often in his writings and if we think back again, back there to Acts again, we'll go back to Acts 9.

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It tells us when the Lord told Ananias in a vision to go and lay his hands on Paul after this experience, we hear that the

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Lord said, go, he says, for he is a chosen instrument of mine, a chosen instrument to bear my name before the

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Gentiles and kings and sons of Israel. So in Paul's own testimony of what Ananias said, he was chosen by God to be an instrument.

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That's a funny word, actually. Kind of interesting, the word he uses there that we get in English. The word instrument is translated from the

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Greek skios, I believe it's pronounced, which metaphorically means a man of quality and it was used here to mean an assistant, an assistant to accomplish something.

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So this is an ideal synonym for the word apostle, a delegate of someone. So one who has been chosen, sent, and this is what

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Paul was. He was God's chosen delegate or Jesus Christ's chosen delegate. And now in thinking about this word apostle, it's quite interesting because I had a hard time how do you say that in a different language when people haven't had a background, a

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Bible background, they don't know any of these fancy words. They didn't even know Spanish, so I couldn't say apostole in Spanish.

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It had to be something that we had to come up with that meant in their own language. So as I translated that, going back to Acts 9 first,

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I said it this way. Now, you get that, right?