Preach-A-Thon 2017 - Wesley Blackstone

So, what's in a name? Some people have been born with ordinary names, and I ran across some names that apparently they didn't like the names their parents gave them and wanted to legally change it to things that were, oh, I think they went a little overboard.

A man named Steve Bolton changed his name to Buzz Lightyear. He figured his girlfriend would think it's cool. I think he's probably single. Someone else named himself Optimus Prime. He probably hangs around with Steve Bolton.

I did run across the name. I left it out, but just for Andrew, there was a guy in the UK who legally changed his name to Tyrannosaurus Rex. So, there we go. And this guy, he went really overboard. George Garrett changed his name to Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, Hulk, and The Flash combined.

Please sign your full name on the line. And then a man named Andrew Wilson went exactly the opposite direction. He changed his name to They. And when asked why, he said, just to mess up people's grammar.

Well, as funny as these names are, you know, one thing about those name changes, they didn't actually change who the person was. The people themselves weren't any different. And today, we're going to learn about a real change, a change in position that we have in Christ.

And we're going to see it in the book of Galatians. So, I invite you to open your Bibles to the book of Galatians, chapter 4, verses 1 -7. Galatians 4, verses 1 -7. Now, Galatians, Paul actually came to the Roman province of Galatia during his first missionary journey.

We can read about that in Acts 13 -14. While he was there, he had quite a lot of resistance. The Jews in there would incite the people. They incited them in Pisidia. They incited them in Iconia and chased him out of the cities.

But he wasn't dissuaded. He came to Lystra. The Jews actually got so angry at him, they tried to kill him by stoning him to death. But still, Paul was faithful to the text. And Paul was faithful to the mission he was given, to preach the gospel.

Now, when he got back, he got word from the Galatians that false teachers had come in and were now teaching the people that they needed to become Jews in order to be saved. They needed to follow the Jewish customs, be circumcised, follow dietary laws, follow the Jewish customs and rituals in order to be saved.

And Paul wrote Galatians in response to this. They also were claiming that Paul was not actually a real apostle. So Paul in Galatians has two main thrusts. First, he defends his apostleship. And second, he defends justification by faith alone.

Now, in chapter 4, where we're going to jump in, he is going to give a very special section. We're going to be able to pull three points from this section about who we are in Christ. So let's start by reading Galatians 4, verses 1 through 7.

I mean that an heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is owner of everything. But he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.

So you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. So the first point that Paul is going to remind us of, the first of our three reminders, is to remember who you were before Christ.

Paul is going to use the analogy of a child who is an heir. Now, back in chapter 3, just to give a little background for his analogy here, he tells the Galatians in verse 23, now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming of faith would be revealed.

So he explains to them that before faith came, that they were imprisoned under the law. But at the end of the chapter, he reminds them that they are heirs according to promise. So what he's going to do is, he's already now explained to them that you were imprisoned and that you are now heirs through faith.

And he's going to kind of bring them back and give them a summary statement, kind of a recap of what it means, who they were before Christ and who they are in Christ. So he starts off by saying, I mean that an heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is owner of everything.

But he is under guardians and managers until the date set by the father. So back then, if a land owner had a son, many times the son would be under, as it says, guardians and managers to tutor him, train him, teach him whatever skills were necessary.

And during that time, he had to do what he was told. He did what he was told, how he was told, when he was told to do it, which is really no different than a slave who is told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

So Paul's point here is, yes, you were an heir. Yes, you're an heir. But before that, you were a child, which means you were no different than a slave. All right, so what's the point? The point is, he wants to bring them back to understand that they were slaves to the law.

That's what he wants to do. He wants to bring them back to say, you were slaves to the law. And he wants to bring this point back, bring them back to this point, so that he can show them what they have now become in Christ.

So, the position of them as slaves. Now, it says, the next verse, verse 3, in the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. Now, this term, elementary principles, has a lot of debate in the various commentaries what exactly this means.

But one thing seems to be common in all of them. It seems to be that, whatever, the elementary principles seems to be what we need to do to be right with God. Now, I think Paul kind of leaves that a little more open-ended, be it a pagan god, even the pagans had to do things to make themselves right with their gods.

The Mosaic Law, whatever it was, we had to be right with God. And we are, as people, we have, man here is born a creature of worship. We were created with the knowledge of God in our heart. And because of that, man will strive to be right with that God.

Now, because of man's sin, we do pervert who that God is, and we pervert what the requirements are. And we try to make the requirements for what we need to be right with God kind of easier on our level.

But still, it's something that we strive to do. And every man does it. And every man knows it. So, these people are now enslaved to this striving for something that they really cannot accomplish. And that's what Paul is going to point out to them.

That the God of the universe, the creator of the universe, has set up laws, explained in the Mosaic Law, that we can never accomplish. We can never be successful with. And as much as we strive, and as hard as we work, we'll never be able to do it.

But yet, we are required to do it. And therein lies the slavery. When you are required to do something, you cannot actually accomplish. But yet, without accomplishing it, the consequences are dire. And that is just a picture of hopelessness.

And then he goes on, and now he's going to bring us to the hope. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son. So, when the fullness of time has come, this is really talking about God's perfect timing.

And we could go into all sorts of details about his timing, but the bottom line here is, God is perfectly sovereign in every aspect of human history. And because he is sovereign, his timing is perfect in every area.

And when God's perfect timing to his sovereignty, God sent forth Christ into the world. It says, God sent forth his son. Christ wasn't born. Christ was sent. He was born of woman, yes, but he was sent.

He was always there. He was eternally God. It says he was born of woman. So, the eternal God took on flesh and became both fully God and fully man. He was born under the law. Now, this was a big deal.

Because as people, we are all born under law. But we are failures. To be right before God, we had to perfectly obey the law, which is, for us, because of our sin nature, hopeless. But Christ, he was born under the law.

And unlike every other person that failed, Adam was born. He failed. Abraham failed. Moses failed. Joshua failed. David failed. Christ perfectly obeyed the law. Why? Why did he go through the process of perfectly obeying the law?

To redeem those who were under the law. To redeem us. On the cross, Jesus took the sins of those he came to redeem. It says in Romans 4 .25, Christ was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

He died for our sins and was raised from the dead so the redeemed would be declared righteous in God's sight. That's what we were missing. All of our striving, it was just for failure. But Christ was able to obey the law perfectly.

And his righteousness, accounted to us, is the way we can be right with God. It is not by all of our works. It is not by all of our actions. All of our actions led to failure. But it is Christ's work that leads to our justification.

So that leads us to reminder number three. Reminder number one, remember who you were before Christ, how we were slaves to sin, to law. Remember who Christ is, that he was born of the woman, he was still fully God, that he came to redeem us by living a perfect life.

And remember who you are now in Christ. So what is the result of redemption and justification? Well, it says, so that we might receive the adoption as sons. Now this is a great word, adoption. You can't imagine I might actually have something to say about that.

Well, Roman adoptions were a little bit different than modern adoptions. The point of a Roman adoption was primarily to bring in an heir for a particular father. A father didn't have a son, he would adopt a son in order to have an heir to pass on his position and his property.

Now, modern adoptions are a little bit different. We tend to, the primary purpose of modern adoption is usually to bring children into the home. But one thing is the same between them. One thing hasn't really changed in all the adoptions in history, and that is that the position of whoever it is, the adult in the Roman adoption or the child in our modern adoption, our position changes.

We go from being part of one family to part of another. When my daughter was three years old, Kaylee was three, we adopted her. And one of the things before her adoption that she always noticed was that her friends called her Kaylee Blackstone, the church called her Kaylee Blackstone, but the doctor always called her Kaylee DeMello.

And that always bothered her because it was always this reminder that she was different, that something wasn't complete. So after their adoption day, she went there and she watched a judge declare her to be Kaylee Blackstone and now part of our family.

At that point, she knew she was now a Blackstone. And within the next month, my wife had to bring them all to the doctors and of course she has to show up an hour early with the paperwork, the cards, the adoption certificate to make sure all these names are changed because that doctor needed to call her Kaylee Blackstone.

And the nurse came out and did not see the little sticky note and called for Kaylee DeMello. And if you've ever seen a feisty little three-year-old with the force of a district judge that says that she, that is wrong.

And she was ready to declare to her what that judge declared to her. And fortunately, my wife went over and looked at the note and they called her Kaylee Blackstone. And then she calmed down and everything was fine.

And really, we can learn two very important lessons about our position in Christ from this three-year-old. First off, when we're adopted by God, when we're redeemed by Christ and we're in Christ now, our position is different.

We are no longer under the law. We are now under grace. And we'll go into that a little deeper later. But our position has changed in Christ. We're God's son now. We're not just, as Ephesians 2 says, children of wrath.

The other thing that our little three-year-old can teach us is the security that we have from this change of position. It was when her name changed and it was declared by the judge that she was able to be secure with being in our family.

The concept of things being unstable was gone. It was stable now. It was real now. It was permanent now. And really, that's no different than our time when we're adopted by God in Christ. It's permanent.

It's secure. And which leads to verse 6. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Now, this is kind of the third point. God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts.

Now, that was very interesting because many of you actually have heard the term Abba, Father. And a lot of people, it's an Aramaic term. Abba is an Aramaic term that had no direct translation. So Paul actually threw in the Greek father, too, to make sure it was clear.

And it really is kind of an intimate term. Most people consider it equivalent to something like daddy. I read one commentator who said, you know, that over-sentimentality, what was that word? It's over-sentimentalized.

Well, he might have a point, actually. Because we think of the word Abba, Father, and we think, oh, great, God's our dad. Well, that's true. But again, let's, I'm going to take one more lesson from these adopted kids.

You know, when you go through adoption training, one of the things they warn you about is that depending on the age of the child and how much trauma they've been through, they may not call you dad and mom.

They may not. Sometimes it'll take time. Sometimes they may never do it. And I got to thinking, especially when it talks about God sending the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, that this Abba, Father, is not to just necessarily be sweet.

This is our confirmation. A child calls their parents mommy and daddy because they know what their place is. This is actually their confirmation, their assurance in who they are. That's why they call us that.

And our assurance, our guarantee of salvation is confirmed by our calling God, Abba, Father. And that's what this is about. This is about being confirmed and being assured of our position in Christ. So Paul is now going to summarize it.

So you are no longer a slave but a son. So under the law, all right, just to summarize, under the law, we had to obey the law perfectly without necessarily the ability. That's slavery. Because our entire ability to be right with God is going to be dependent on our ability to obey the law, which is an endless battle and destined for failure.

And that's slavery. Can you imagine just trying to strive to do something that you have no ability to do? I could no more obey the law. Actually, I would have a better chance of beating Usain Bolt in a hundred meter dash today than I would to be able to obey God's law perfectly.

But under grace as a son, we look to Christ through faith, to His perfect obedience, accounted to us as the basis for our position in Christ, as our position to be right with God. It's no longer about what we do.

It's about what Christ has done. Nothing we do can add to it. Nothing we do can take away from it. Now, it says at the end, and if a son than an heir through God, we are now made an heir with Christ to inherit everything that is Christ, which is everything.

So what does this mean for us? Well, for the Galatians, he asked them back down in verse nine, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world whose slaves you want to be once more?

How can you add things? You can't add anything to it, because what you do is not what your position is based on. Your position in Christ, whether you're right in God's sight or not, is not dependent on what you do.

So what about us? When we strive, when we work, does that add? No. Does God love us more if we read our Bible? No. Does God love us more if we pray more? No. Does God love us more if we volunteer and serve at the nursing home ministry?

No. Does God love us less if we're caught in sin? No. Because our position in Christ doesn't change with any of those. None of those things change. So, well then, does that mean I don't have to do it?

Well, you think about this. Why does a child obey their parents? Why do they obey their parents? Because they love them, and because really that security, that security of calling them daddy, means they know that their parents are trying to do what's best for them.

And us knowing that God's rules are doing what's best for us is the motivation that we have to obey. Because we love God, but it's not to change our position. Well, finally, what about, is anyone here who hasn't bowed their knee to Christ?

Who hasn't accepted what Christ has done? Who's still trying to work their way and try to earn their favor with God? It can't be done. We need to put our faith in Christ, the one who did obey the law perfectly.

We need to repent of our sins and put our faith in the one who was successful. We need to obey the Lord. Don't you want that? Don't you want your sins forgiven? To be right with God? To be adopted into God's family?

Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you so much for this time, for our position in Christ, that it doesn't depend on us, but through your wonderful grace. Thank you for your blessings to us, and this time, bless the men following to preach.

In Jesus' name, amen.