Sunday Sermon: I Say Again, No Other Gospel (Galatians 1:9)

You are listening to the teaching ministry of Gabriel Hughes, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas.

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on this podcast, we feature 20 minutes of Bible study through a New Testament book.

On Thursday is our Old Testament study, and then we answer questions from listeners on Friday. Each Sunday we are pleased to share our sermon series.

This is the sermon that was preached last week from our pulpit. Here's Pastor Gabe. Paul, an apostle, not from man nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the

Father who raised him from the dead. And all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia, grace to you and peace from God our

Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our

God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.

Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

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

As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

Let us pray. Our heavenly Father, as we come to your word today,

I pray that it speaks to us loud and clear and that it serves to us a warning that we would not be led astray by many strange and false teachings, but we would continue to cling to the true and awesome gospel of Jesus Christ.

May we understand its distinctions. What makes the gospel of Christ different from everything else that would try to present itself as gospel or as a gospel?

Trying to say you need this in order to get by, or you need to do these things in order to be saved, or you must do this in order to attain some sort of level of perfection.

All of these things are marked by works, but it is the gospel of Jesus Christ that is grace for salvation.

By faith in him have we been extended the blessings of God by grace through faith, and this is not our own doing.

It is the gift of God, not of works that no man may boast. Keep us steadfast in the truth and let us not be led astray by any plausible arguments.

It's in the name of Jesus Christ we pray and all God's people said, amen. Thank you.

You may be seated. I'm breaking from script for a moment just to make this particular observation, but any time that we have a weather of this kind that might keep people from coming to church, we have, you know, you can kind of see the whole empty section over here.

Nevertheless, the cold weather does not keep the islanders from coming to church. I always see many islanders even when we have ice and snow.

That's a blessing and a testament to me. Thank you guys. So here once again in Galatians chapter one,

Paul gives a stern warning to the church that they have been led astray by another gospel.

This is not warning them that there are false gospels in the world, so you need to watch out for those things.

They have already turned aside to a different word than that which was first preached to them by the apostles who came to Galatia.

I'm astonished, Paul says in verse six, that you are so quickly deserting him to follow a different gospel, to believe something other than justification by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, is to desert

Christ and go after another. Remember that I've said to you as we've embarked upon Galatians that any time that we might fall into a belief of something like Christ plus blank, that it's more than Christ, well,

I have Jesus but I also need this, whatever fills in the blank is where the emphasis is.

That's the thing that you worship. That's the thing that your heart yearns for and goes after. It may be an additional teaching, religion, philosophy.

It could be a thing in this world that you want or think that you need to have in order to find satisfaction, but whatever fills the blank gets the emphasis.

That's where your heart is. That's where your focus and your yearning is for.

You feel unsatisfied until that blank is filled. In the case of the

Galatians, this was a works righteousness. Perhaps the

Galatians still did indeed believe in Jesus Christ. There was nothing here that seems to indicate to us that they had abandoned an understanding of Christ altogether.

So it wasn't like we're no longer worshiping Jesus at all and now they've come into worship of these other gods.

It's not like that's what's happened to the Church of Galatia, but they've come to believe that they need something else other than Christ in order to be saved, some sort of work that needed to be done.

So I need to do this. I need to be circumcised. I need to recognize the

Sabbath. I need to keep all these laws of Moses. I need to keep the dietary laws.

All these other things that the Galatians believed that they had to do in order to attain salvation had warped the gospel of Jesus Christ into another gospel, and though they with their mouths may have continued to proclaim

Christ, Paul says to them plainly, you've deserted him because Christ is not enough for you anymore.

You have to have this. Did Christ die for nothing? If his death was not enough for you to believe that you're forgiven of your sins and you've been given eternal life with God, that you have to have this other thing or accomplish this other task in order to truly know that you have salvation, all of the work has been completed in Christ.

So once you think you have to do something and your works lead you to salvation, you've deserted

Christ and you've relied upon your own merit. And our merits do not save us.

There is nothing that we can do that earns us favor with God.

Paul spends the first three chapters of the book of Romans bringing all men into condemnation so that whether you are

Jew or Greek, none of you have right standing before God. You have no inherent favor before the

Lord. It is only by faith in what Christ has done for us that we have then been clothed in his righteousness and we are received by God as he would receive his own son.

Only by faith in Jesus. Once you think that you have to do something or it's dependent upon you to accomplish this, you've deserted

Christ, you've exalted yourself, and you worship the created thing rather than the creator.

As I said last week, we can whittle down all the religions in the world basically to two things.

You are either following God through Jesus Christ to eternal life, or you're following Satan through your own works and merits or deceptions in this world ultimately to your own destruction.

Everyone follows either God or Satan. That's it.

And it doesn't matter whether you think you've made a choice to follow God or Satan. You're following one or the other.

You are either worshiping the created things or you are worshiping the creator.

And even here in this particular instance with the Galatians, though again, they may still acknowledge

Christ with their mouths. They think they need to do this in order to have salvation.

And the created must merit the salvation of God, which is therefore worshiping the created things rather than the creator.

Worshiping created things doesn't necessarily mean that there is an idol that has been formed by a man sitting there in front of you and you're bowing down to it.

That's not necessarily what we mean by worshiping the created things, although it may manifest itself that way.

And don't think in our culture that those things are not done. That's a primitive thing that they do in another part of the world that an uneducated people do, that they fashion idols with their hands and bow down to those things.

It's going on this morning in our own community with people bowing down or kissing statues of Mary or the saints, and even relying upon apotropaics or holy relics that they believe gives them some sort of forgiveness or blessing or grace or asceticism of the body.

There are people that believe this as well, that they can afflict themselves with a punishment somehow and that will forgive their sins.

There are people that believe that. And of course, there are also those who believe that they can be saved by their works.

Some believe that they are worshiping Jesus, but the version of Jesus that they worship is their own God. It is not the

Christ that we see in the Bible. And so therefore, they likewise have deserted

Him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.

And again, Paul states plainly in verse 7, not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

So once again, they may still say that they believe the gospel. They may still have some remnant of what had been taught to them by the apostles, but it's become distorted into something else.

You want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one that we preach to you, let him be accursed.

My friends, the largest religion on earth came about exactly like this. A man believing that an angel spoke to him and gave him a new revelation.

That man's name was Muhammad. And the book that resulted from that was the Quran. He claimed that the angel

Gabriel gave it to him. And it's in the Quran as I quoted to you from it last week.

Far be it from God to have a son. So you are cursed if you think that God has a son,

Jesus Christ, whom we are to worship. The Muslims believe that Jesus was just some prophet, just like Muhammad is a prophet.

But he himself was not, as he claimed to be, the son of God. They do not believe that he was crucified on a cross and then rose again from the grave.

These things did not happen. And all of this came by, according to Muhammad, a revelation that was given to him by an angel.

Largest religion on planet earth, fastest growing religion on earth. And we find a stern warning against such things in Galatians 1 .8,

even if we are an angel from heaven. Whether or not

Muhammad actually saw an angel, some sort of being that appeared to him was actually a demonic presence but claimed to be an angel and Muhammad believed that presence, or Muhammad was just making that up to try to give validation or authority to this word that it was that he was saying.

Whether or not he was lying or some spirit appeared to him, it doesn't matter.

It's a different gospel. And if anyone preaches to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.

Now we consider today these words again, for Paul repeats it again in verse 9.

As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

Last week I said to you that we were going to look at the macro and go to the micro.

So we were going to consider the biggest religions and false teachings on earth first and whittle it down into smaller and smaller things, maybe even things that are more direct to your life or those specific things that you might put in a blank next to Jesus.

You think that you need in addition to Christ, Christ plus blank. But again, whatever you put in the blank becomes your focus, becomes your passion, and it has distorted the gospel.

Even if you think you're giving 51 % to Jesus and 49 % to this other thing, let's stretch the percentages out even more.

You're giving 99 % of yourself to Christ and 1 % to this other thing. It doesn't matter.

You feel incomplete without the other thing. And so it has become a distortion of the gospel of Christ.

So last week we started in the macro. We started getting smaller and smaller, but we never quite got to the micro.

So that's why we're coming back again to this today. Repeating again last week these major huge religions that we have on earth.

There are by some estimates 10 ,000 distinct religions on planet earth.

Now I would be willing to postulate it's not quite that high because I think some are probably the same religion, but it's slightly different, turned into something else.

Then of course there are religions that are practiced by very small primitive tribes.

And there are such tribes around. We even heard of one recently in the news in the last couple of months with a young man that had attempted to visit a very isolated tribe near to India on an island.

And in trying to witness to that tribe, they killed him on the spot. Once he made the beach and was trying to share the gospel with them, they killed him.

And that tribe is very isolated from the rest of the world. And because of their hostility have ensured that they will not be visited by anyone else, any other missionaries who would come preaching to them the gospel.

Though we would certainly hope the Holy Spirit would soften their hearts to receive another missionary should one come to them.

But this is an example of a primitive tribe separated and isolated from everyone else. So they probably have some form of religion that may not be practiced by any other tribe or any other people on earth.

When you think of those small isolated groups, then that number 10 ,000 doesn't seem so unreasonable.

But most of what people are calling their religion or their belief is really just a morphing of some other belief that exists.

85 % of planet earth follows one of the major five religions.

And that would be Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any one of the folk religions.

And by folk religions, I mean that it would be the popular religion of that particular area, but they may not necessarily be orthodox in that belief.

So they may claim to be a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu, but it's not exactly what it is that's being taught in those respective religions.

That's what we would refer to as a folk religion. So 85 % of the world would fall into those respective categories.

But whether or not we're looking at 10 ,000 religions or 2 ,000 religions, or just the five major religions, all of the religions on earth could be whittled down again into two categories, worshipping the created or worshipping the creator.

Now I would say to you that we can narrow it down even further than that. Because as Jesus said in Matthew 7, verse 21, that not everyone who says to me,

Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. So even those who claim to worship the creator might not actually be worshipping the creator.

They may be worshipping the created things, though they claim to have some form of Christianity.

It may not actually be Christianity, but exactly as Paul was rebuking the

Galatians of here in Galatians 1, it is instead a distortion of the truth. So how do we get more specific than worshipping the created things or worshipping the creator?

Here's the thing that separates out Christianity, true Christianity, from every other belief on earth.

Every other religion on the planet, even non -religion, like giving the benefit of the doubt to an atheist or an agnostic who says that they aren't religious, okay?

They are, but they claim they have no religion. But giving them the benefit of the doubt.

So whether or not we're talking about a religion or a non -religion, every other belief on earth falls into this category, justification by works.

Everyone who is not a follower of Christ believes that they can be justified by their own merit.

To put it more specifically, they think they can be good without God. They can be good on their own.

Remember, I mentioned to you last week that Hinduism actually does not require you to worship any kind of deity.

So you could actually be an atheist, even though there are deities, it's a polytheist religion, even though there are deities in Hinduism, you could still not worship those deities and still follow all of the things that you're supposed to do as a good

Hindu. Nevertheless, it's a religion of works.

All other beliefs other than Christianity on earth is about justification by works.

I can be a good person just by doing what I do. And all of that, when you get down to the nitty gritty of it, when you start evaluating it and getting into the micro details, it's all subjective morality.

There is not a standard set of rules that this is the morality that applies to every single person, but it's doing these things and doing these things, just being nice to people and considering others and so on and so forth.

And so it might be whatever you think is doing nice for another person. And as long as you do that, well, then you're going to be honored by the gods or by the spiritual realm or whatever it is and achieve the thing that it is that you're hoping to achieve.

So let's put it in this kind of exercise. This is something that I heard Paul Washer do when he was talking about there being only two religions on earth.

So let's put it into this exercise. Let's say that you were a reporter and you were asking people how to get to heaven.

People from different beliefs and different religions, how do you get to heaven? And you went up to a man who was a

Muslim and you asked of him, where do you think you will go when you die?

That Muslim might say to you, I believe that I'm going to paradise. And you ask him, why?

Why do you think that you're going to paradise? And he will say to you, because I read the

Quran, because I pay alms, because I pray five times a day, because I've made the pilgrimages to Mecca or wherever else.

So because I've done these things, I am a righteous man and Allah will give me paradise.

You go to a Jewish man, an Orthodox Jew, and you say to him, where do you think you will go when you die?

That Orthodox Jew is probably going to say to you, we really do not know where we're going to go when we die.

This is an exact quote, by the way. But if there is a life after this one and a reward for what we do, then surely it will be dependent upon the kind of life that we have lived.

That's Rabbi Howard Jaffe. So the Orthodox Jew doesn't even really know for sure if there's some kind of afterlife, but if there is one, we'll get there if we just do the right things.

If you went to a Buddhist and asked him, where do you think you will go when you die?

He might say to you that he will achieve nirvana or the end of suffering.

How will you achieve that, you ask him, and he will say, by following the noble eightfold path.

Or in other words, by just being a good person. You go to the

Hindu and you ask the Hindu where he believes he will go when he dies, and he will say to you he hopes that he will break free from the cycle of reincarnation and attain moksha and will return to the

Brahman. Okay, how will you do that, you ask him, by being a good person.

If you ask an atheist why he doesn't need God, why do you think that you don't need

God? The atheist is going to tell you, I can be a good person without God.

Like you ask the atheist where he's going to go when he dies, he's just going to tell you, same thing that happened to me before I was born.

I don't remember any sort of sense of consciousness before I came into existence. There was even a couple of years of my life

I don't remember at all, and then suddenly moments and things that I experienced. So I imagine death is going to be roughly the same way.

My mind might go first, I'll just forget that I'm alive, and eventually my body will die and I will be nothing.

There will be no consciousness, no existence of any kind. That's what the atheist believes. So the best that he can do in life is just be a good person.

I asked my brother this one time, one of my brothers who does not believe in God or any sort of deity of any kind, but he says, if such a deity does exist, he has to let me into heaven.

And I asked him why. He said, because I'm a good person. And if he doesn't let me into heaven, he's an evil

God. Proclaiming your own righteousness above God, that's really what every religion in the world does.

When you think that you can be good by your own merit, you're proclaiming your own righteousness above God.

But let's say you go to the Christian, the true Christian, again, mind you, because as we said,

Matthew 7, 21, Jesus says, not everyone who calls me Lord is going to enter the kingdom of heaven.

So you go to the true Christian and you ask him where he will go when he dies, and he will say to you,

I will go to heaven. And you ask him why. Why do you think you will go to heaven?

And the true believer will say, because in sin did my mother conceive me, and in sin was

I born. I have broken God's laws. I was an enemy of God.

I deserve to be destroyed for the rebellion that I had done against my

Lord. I deserve nothing but death.

And then you as a reporter, you are listening to this Christian say this, and you say, well, hang on a second.

So I'm asking all these other guys how they think they're going to attain their afterlife, how they're going to get to paradise, or get to this manner of perfection that they think that they can achieve, this level of goodness.

And all of them are saying that they're going to get there because of their own merit or by their own virtue.

This man says he's a righteous man. The Muslim says he's a righteous man because he did this, this, and this.

The Jew says he's a righteous man because he did this, this, and this. The Hindu, the Buddhist, even the atheist proclaimed their own righteousness.

You say you're not righteous. So what makes you think you're going to get into heaven?

And the Christian is going to answer, because I'm getting into heaven on someone's merit other than my own.

And that's Jesus Christ, the righteous one, the only good man there ever was, who never sinned, never did anything wrong, kept

God's law perfectly. God himself, who took on human flesh for me and died on a cross for me, that my sins would be upon him and satisfied by the shedding of his blood and his righteousness would be given to me so that I may enter into the place of God on his virtue and not my own.

That's how I know that I am going to heaven. And that, my friends, is why

Christianity is a religion of grace and no other religion is.

No other religion falls into that category but Christianity alone.

Everyone else is trying to attain goodness by their own merit and in so doing are proclaiming their goodness above the goodness of God.

I'm better than God. I don't need God. I can do this on my own. But only the

Christian, by a revelation of the Holy Spirit, has come to realize his sin and his disqualification before God.

And because of his sinfulness and his wickedness, there is nothing that he could do to be able to attain a right standing with God.

It is only by what Jesus has done for us and God in his grace to transmit to us all the reward and benefits that we get through Jesus Christ.

How do we get that? What do we have to do? Only this, my friends. Believe.

That's it. By grace are you saved through faith.

Faith is the mechanism that God has given to us that we might just believe in him who died for us and rose again and we would receive eternal life, forgiveness of sins, and becoming a fellow heir of the kingdom of God with Christ.

Once an enemy of that kingdom, we've been made fellow heirs with Christ and this is all by grace through faith in him and what he has done that we are saved.

Christianity is the religion of grace. Every other religion is a religion of works and as we come to know from the scriptures, you cannot be saved by your works.

So here the Galatians are thinking that, well, I believe in Christ but that isn't enough.

I also have to do this and they've shifted themselves over from the belief of justification by faith into justification by works.

And so now Paul is saying to them, you believe a different gospel. It doesn't save you.

Repent and return to the things that you were taught at first. That is the reason for this letter.

And it's necessary for us to be reminded of it, my friends, because we are still people in the flesh and we are weak and we're prone to forgetfulness and a day may come when upon you, and that day may be now for you, but a day may come when upon you, you just heap this guilt and this shame and you begin to lack an understanding of your own salvation and that has probably come to you because of sin.

As I've heard Alistair Begg say, that obedience and assurance do not share the same bed with one another.

You can either have obedience in God and therefore the assurance of salvation or you disobey

God and you're wandering in sin and now you've lost that assurance of salvation. And when that day comes for you, in order to try to get the assurance back, you will either morph or shift your understanding of Christianity to accommodate the sin that you are now in or you will believe that you have to do something in order to forgive yourself and re -merit the salvation that you once believed that you had.

And you must remember that forgiveness only comes in Christ. And we have this grace that is given to us in 1

John 1, 9. If we ask forgiveness for our sins, God is faithful and just to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

It is by faith in Christ that we're forgiven our sins and we have eternal life and no other way.

I was watching an interview with Dr. John MacArthur and Larry King and this was over a decade ago.

One of the things that attracted me to John MacArthur at a young age was seeing these kinds of interviews like he would do with Larry King.

These secular reporters would interview MacArthur and MacArthur would always come back to the Bible.

Like he was a guy that was not ashamed to say, because the Bible says so. That is an answer that is being looked down upon more and more in our modern times.

You can't say because the Bible says so. That answer isn't good enough. You have to do all these apologetics or gymnastics to help a person understand because they don't believe the

Bible. My friends, the Bible is the word of God and is authoritative upon every person whether they believe it or not.

So you speak the word of God and you let the Holy Spirit do his work. You remain obedient to this.

God will do the work of transformation on a person's heart. So here John MacArthur is having this conversation with Larry King and Larry King said to him, they were talking about the nature of evil.

Where evil comes from? Is evil really a thing? Why do people do evil things?

And there were several guests on the show, MacArthur being one of them. At one point, Larry King looks specifically at John MacArthur and he says to him, the golden rule is do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

If I'm doing the golden rule, I'm going to be a nice guy whether or not

I believe in the Lord. John MacArthur looked at him and said, yeah, if you follow the golden rule, you'll be right with man.

But the question is, how are you going to be right with God? My friends, we could be doing nice things for one another in good works to other people and following this love your neighbor mantra with no biblical explanation for what that means for the rest of our lives and never get any closer to God.

On the day of judgment, we will still stand before him and you would be condemned because you said that I didn't need you and I could be good on my own.

You had a nice, comfortable life getting along with men and women, but you never saw it important to be right with God.

And it will be there that you will hear Christ say, depart from me, you worker of iniquity.

I never knew you for all these good works that you claim that you did were all self -righteous works.

It was all to proclaim your own glory and goodness, not for the glory of God. Jesus warned us in Matthew 7 that there are many who were going to come in his name that were going to say that they spoke the truth, but he said they are wolves in sheep's clothing.

Beware false prophets, Jesus said. So we must be aware as such things exist in the world, lest we be led astray by them.

Not just the false major religions that exist, but even those who are going to say that they are from Christ and are not really of Christ.

Some of my ministry, not just in my teaching, you've heard it before in my sermons, but also in the videos that I produce that end up online, warn about false teachers.

Not just in the church, people who say that they are of Christ but are not, but even in the secular realm.

People who would claim that they are of, that they are Christians themselves, but in their lifestyle, they show no evidence of it whatsoever.

One such video that I did recently was regarding a claim that the pop star Lady Gaga made of herself.

It's really weird saying that she had this self -ascribed name of Lady Gaga. Stephanie is her real first name, but anyway.

She said that she is a Christian woman. So in the video evaluating, is that true?

How can we see in a person's life whether or not they are really a Christian? There's nothing in her life that displays that.

She lives an absolutely horrible, filthy life. Things that she does that are so bad, I wouldn't even dare to speak of them up here at the pulpit.

And when that video was produced and it ended up online, there was a woman that contacted me and she made the following comment.

Her name was Kelly. She said, who or what she believes has zero impact on you, your life, or your religion.

If everyone worried about themselves, just think how much better off everyone would be.

I responded to her and I said, all due respect, ma 'am, you don't believe what you just said.

Because if you believe that, you would not have even bothered to tell me that. You would have minded your own business and it wouldn't have mattered to you one bit, one way or the other.

This is what happens when we think that we can proclaim our own goodness. We fall into this self -defeating sense of belief and morality that doesn't serve anyone else and it won't save you.

The only truth that we have comes from God. And the reason why we get so offended whenever somebody starts calling out false teachers is because we've probably united ourselves with that particular teacher and an attack on them feels like an attack on me.

Martin Lloyd -Jones in his studies in the Sermon on the Mount said the following, we do not like this kind of teaching against false prophets today.

We are living in days when people say that as long as a man claims to be a Christian at all, we should regard him as a brother and go on together.

But the reply is that our Lord said, beware of false prophets.

They will come to you in sheep's clothing. They may acknowledge

God with their lips, but their hearts are far from him. And such teachers have come to the church in Galatia, leading them to believe that their faith in Christ was not enough and they needed to do all these works.

Jesus was a Jew, so you needed to do all these other Jewish works in order to be saved.

But Paul says, these people trouble you and they distort the gospel of Christ, and you have deserted him who called you in the grace of Christ and instead have turned to a different gospel.

Verse 9, once again, as we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one that you received, let him be accursed.

Why is it, I closed with this briefly last week, I want to reiterate this again with a little bit more clarity.

Why is it that God allows there to be so many, many lies?

Why are there so many false teachings in the world, false religions, like Islam with 2 billion people following after that religion?

Why would God allow that to exist? Why are there people that claim a new version of Jesus that is not like the

Jesus that we have in the Bible at all, like Joseph Smith with Mormonism, or Charles Taze Russell with the

Jehovah's Witnesses? Why does God allow the Catholic Church to exist?

And the Catholic Church, by the way, is kind of the quintessential example of this Christ plus something.

You have to do all of these works. You have to pay penance. You have to talk to the priest.

You have to get baptized. By the way, you have to do that in the Catholic Church or it's not a real baptism. All of these works and things that they tell you that you have to do in order, it's

Christ plus something else. Why would God allow that to exist? Why are there so many, many false teachings?

And the answer to that is two reasons. Number one, testing. And number two, judgment.

The passage that I read to you in closing last week was from Deuteronomy 13, where we are told, if a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and he says, let us go after other gods, you shall not listen to that false prophet for the

Lord your God is testing you to know whether you love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul.

And the second reason is judgment. 2 Thessalonians 2, 9 through 12, the coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing because they refuse to love the truth and so be saved.

Therefore, because they refuse to love the truth, God sends them a strong delusion so that they may believe what is false in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

As I've shared with many, whether they are a believer or an unbeliever, I have said, God will be glorified through you.

You exist for God's glory, and he will have it through you.

Whether that's through delivering you by his mercy or judging you in his wrath,

God will be glorified. My friends, I hope that you believe the truth and you have repented of sin and you follow in righteousness so that you experience the glory of God in his mercy and not the glory of God in his wrath.

To God be the glory in all things, but I pray that you are on the side of his mercy.

Let me conclude with this passage in 2 Timothy chapter 3. The apostle Paul said to Timothy, starting in verse 12,

Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and imposters will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.

Why are there false teachers in the world? Because the Bible says there will be. But as for you,

Paul says, and may this be the Holy Spirit speaking to each one of you as well, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, preach the word, be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching.

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.

They want their sin. And so that's why they go after the false teachers, because that teacher allows me to have the thing that I want in my flesh.

They will turn away from listening to the truth and they will wander off into myths as for you.

Now, in the section that I've read to you here, starting from chapter 3, verse 12, down here to chapter 4, verse 5, this is the third time now that Paul has made that contrast, false teachers, but as for you, here's what you need to do.

Always be sober -minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, sharing the truth with others that they may be won from the snare of the devil and delivered into the grace of God.

Fulfill your ministry. Thank you for listening to our weekly sermon presented by First Southern Baptist Church of Junction City, Kansas.

For more information about our church, visit fsbcjc .org.

On behalf of our church family, my name is Becky, inviting you to join us again this week, growing together in Christ, when we understand the text.