- 00:00
- When you hear descendants of Abraham or children of Abraham, what do you think of? What people group do you think of?
- 00:07
- Yeah, okay, Jews or the Semitic people, they're the descendants of Abraham.
- 00:13
- Yeah, but spiritually, we are the descendants of Abraham. Paul says in Romans 4 .16,
- 00:20
- speaking to a predominantly Gentile church, most of these people were not Jewish. What does he say?
- 00:26
- He calls Abraham the father of us all. There's a children's song, right?
- 00:33
- Something about father Abraham, right? So maybe you sang that when you were young. He's your father, not according to a bloodline maybe, but spiritually, he is your father.
- 00:44
- Why? Because we are all people of faith. Anyone who is of faith, the true faith in the
- 00:50
- Lord Jesus Christ is a descendant, so to speak, of Abraham.
- 00:56
- And then later on in Galatians chapter 3, this is the basis for Christian unity.
- 01:03
- Jew, Gentile, you know, whatever family you came from, it doesn't matter because we're all united in faith through the
- 01:11
- Lord Jesus Christ. So this is the basis of unity in the church between Jew and Gentile.
- 01:18
- And this unity in Christ, unity in Christ in general is a glorious thing, is it not?
- 01:25
- You think about any local church, brings together all sorts of different people. If it wasn't for Christ, these people would not be brought together, right?
- 01:34
- We're all different, and that's good. We don't want to all be the same, but this unity we have is in Christ.
- 01:42
- What was the problem in the book of Galatians? The false teachers were creating, okay, Christ brings unity, false teachers were bringing disunity.
- 01:51
- Why? Because they were coming in and teaching law. They were teaching law that you needed to do works in order to be saved.
- 02:00
- And instead of God loving the Gentiles, no, you had to be circumcised and basically you had to become one of us.
- 02:07
- You had to be Jewish in order to be a child of God. And as we've said many times, for adult male converts, that was a massive stumbling block.
- 02:18
- They were not inclined to do that, obviously. Worse than that, just a stumbling block, it was a false gospel saying that you need to become
- 02:29
- Jewish or you need to be circumcised in order to be saved. That is a false gospel because anytime you add anything to the gospel, it corrupts it.
- 02:41
- The gospel is the gospel. You take anything away from it, you add anything to it, it becomes a different gospel.
- 02:50
- It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter how good that thing is. One of the things we've seen and heard the past few years that people want to add to the gospel, they want to add justice to the gospel.
- 03:03
- If you think of it, and that's very clever because, I mean, justice is part of the gospel in the sense of God's justice, but they want to attach a movement that, you know, you may think it's good or you may not think it's good.
- 03:18
- It doesn't matter. It's not part of the gospel. You could have the greatest thing in the world. If you try to add it to the gospel of Jesus Christ, it becomes bad.
- 03:27
- If you're teaching, you have to do this and this and this in order to be saved. You understand? The gospel, people's souls are at stake.
- 03:34
- And this is what false teachers do. They're very clever. They want to try to add something to the gospel of salvation by faith alone.
- 03:43
- That's the key word, alone. Paul says, not by the works of the law.
- 03:50
- Because as soon as you add works, the gospel is no longer of grace. And if it's not of grace, it's not the gospel of Christ.
