WWUTT 1796 Large Letters, Part 1 (Galatians 6:11-18)

Galatians 6:11-18 and Paul’s Final Appeal Against a Different Gospel

When the Apostle Paul concluded his letter to the Galatians, he said, See what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. He passionately wanted them to understand the true gospel when we understand the text.

This is When We Understand the Text, a daily study in the Word of Christ, for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness. Find all our videos and other ministry resources at www .utt .com.

Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. Well, we are closing in on the end of our study of the book of Galatians. I've got one more sermon to play for you, and I'm going to break it up between today and tomorrow and Wednesday.

However, the sermon is laid out a little bit strange. It wasn't easy for me to break it up into equal parts, so today's lesson is going to be a little bit shorter, just about 12 or 13 minutes or something like that.

Tomorrow will be a full length. It'll be 20 minutes. And then the very tail end of the sermon is just about 9 or 10 minutes, which I'll play on Wednesday, but I'll use the remaining time to do a review of everything that we've studied over the last couple of months as we've been going through Galatians together.

So we're at the tail end of this letter, Galatians 6, verses 11 through 18. If you want to open up your Bible and join with me there, I'm going to begin with the reading of this lesson from the English Standard Version.

This is part one of a sermon entitled Large Letters. Galatians 6 beginning in verse 11. See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ.

For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh. But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.

Neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God. From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen. Let us pray. Our Heavenly Father, as we come to Your Word today, I pray that we hear once again loud and clear from Your Holy Spirit, the truth of Your Gospel, that we are justified by grace through faith in Christ alone and no other way.

And this is the Gospel. This is the Gospel that was taught to us by that apostolic ministry that was appointed by Christ 2 ,000 years ago. It is the Gospel that we first heard and turned from our sin and believed in the Lord Jesus Christ and so were saved.

And it is that same Gospel that we are now to take to the world so that others may hear the truth of the resurrection of Jesus, His atoning blood as a sacrifice for sins. And by faith in Jesus, we will be forgiven our sins and have right standing with God.

On the day of judgment, we will not be condemned, but we will be received as sons and daughters, fellow heirs of the kingdom of Christ. May we not forget this Gospel. May it not be corrupted in our midst, but may we preserve the truth that was once for all delivered to the saints according to Your Word.

And it's this in the name of Jesus that we pray and all God's people said, Amen. The letters of 1st and 2nd Corinthians and Galatians, these three letters which we've been in for the last two and a half years, are the most confrontational of Paul's letters in dealing with sin in the body.

Galatians is undoubtedly the most scathing of the three. The Corinthians were failing to live up to the implications of the Gospel for which Paul issued serious rebuke and called for deep repentance and searching.

At the close of 2nd Corinthians, he said, Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves or do you not realize this about yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you, unless you fail to meet the test.

But unlike the church in Corinth, the churches in Galatia were accepting a different gospel altogether, which has damnable consequences. At the very opening of this letter, Paul said, 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. He then sternly warned, But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one 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. What was this different gospel that had so easily wooed the Galatians?

It was a gospel of works. A corruption of the gospel of justification by faith in Christ alone. Instead believing that we can be justified by our works. At the beginning of this series, I gave you this equation.

Christ plus blank equals salvation. And whatever goes in the blank has your worship. That's the thing that you think that you need in order to be saved. Christ plus this thing I need in order to be satisfied.

Christ is not sufficient. Christ is not enough. I need this in order to be happy. It doesn't matter if you give 99 of yourself to Christ and 1 of yourself to this other thing. Your life is incomplete without that other thing filling in the blank.

And that is the meaning of your life. And so bringing this letter to a close, Paul says, see with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. All caps, bold print, underlined, extra exclamation points.

Do not believe another gospel. For another gospel is no gospel at all. Now, of course, we know that the other gospel the Galatians believed was the message of the Judaizers, specifically that they had to be circumcised in order to be saved.

Excuse me. We don't have a lot of problems with Judaizers coming in here and telling us to be circumcised. I highly doubt any of this flock would even believe such a false teacher if someone came in here claiming such a thing.

But this false doctrine of faith and works is still rampant in the world today in many other forms. The entire Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox religions are built upon a foundation of faith and works.

Islam and Mormonism are faith in a false version of the God of Abraham plus works. Hinduism, Buddhism, shamanism, and other folk religions and pantheism are faiths in other gods plus works. Atheism, agnosticism, and secular humanism are faith in the God of self plus works, a doubling down on justification by works.

The further you get away from the belief in the one true God who has spoken, the more you believe anything I say goes. Proverbs 21 .2 says, Every way of a man is right in his own eyes. Proverbs 16 .25 says, There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.

Every group that I just mentioned needs the gospel. They need the truth that Christ came to save sinners and He gave His life as a ransom for many. Whoever believes in Him will not perish under the majesty of Almighty God who is storing up wrath until the appointed day set by His own authority.

And He will pour out His righteous judgment on all flesh, every man and woman who rebelled against God. It is only belief in the gospel, the true gospel, the pure gospel, Christ's gospel, the unblemished, untainted, uncorrupted good news of Jesus that will save a person from death and raise them up to eternal life with God in heaven.

My brothers and sisters, we have that gospel and we must proclaim it. Now, lest any of us think that we are safe from gospel corruption, anyone here is just as vulnerable as any one of the Galatians and any church is just as susceptible as the churches in Galatia to hear and receive a false gospel of faith and works.

Regarding your own weakness, there have likely been times even in your Christian walk when you did not feel Christ was sufficient for your every need and you became weak to the passions of your own flesh.

You felt unsatisfied, incomplete, so you turned to some other appeasement and it probably looked like one of the works of the flesh that we've been talking about in Galatians 5 the last couple of weeks.

Perhaps you strayed into some kind of sexual immorality. Maybe you became at odds with another person and you refused to forgive them. You felt better about your grudge than you felt about grace. Maybe you envied someone else or you were jealous of them for something or an opportunity that you did not have.

They had this opportunity, you didn't have it, maybe you thought, I could do it better if I just had the opportunities they had. Maybe you turned to substance abuse, intoxication, or drunkenness. And when this is the direction that we go, what we are saying to Christ is, the life that you have purchased for me by your blood is not enough for me.

I must have this in order to have comfort. And my friends, when we do that, that's idol worship. But these kinds of behaviors that I just talked about here, these are supposed to exemplify your previous way of life, not your present walk as a Christian.

You are to walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh, for the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh. Galatians 5, 16 and 17.

And so, as we read last week, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. And so, just as you are vulnerable to being tempted by the ways of this world, so is the church, which is full of people, in case you didn't notice.

The church is also vulnerable to temptation. Any Protestant, Bible-believing church is just as susceptible as the churches in Galatia. Look, they had an actual apostle of Jesus Christ come to them and preach the gospel to them and even confirm that message through miraculous signs and wonders.

And yet, even the churches in Galatia fell away when the Judaizers came in saying, you know what? Faith isn't enough. You also have to do this in order to be saved. And the Galatians fell into believing a false gospel.

Do not be so proud as to sit in your Southern Baptist pew looking out at the rest of the world and saying, if only they were as enlightened as we are. For I tell you that false gospel rhetoric has even slithered its way into our own denomination.

Now, this sermon I preached, this series I did back in 2019, and it was in that year that the Southern Baptist Convention met and debated over critical race theory and intersectionality, even passing a resolution in which they accepted those two worldly and godless philosophies as philosophical tools.

So tomorrow, in the portion of the sermon that you will hear, I use the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the world, as an example of how easy it is to go from preaching the sound words of the gospel of Jesus Christ to now thinking, you know what?

We actually need these worldly ideas to help us out here. The gospel is not enough. We need this stuff in order to be effective in the world. And in so doing, a church can very, very easily lose the gospel.

So I hope you'll come back for that portion of the sermon tomorrow. Let me conclude here with prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the goodness that you have shown to us in Jesus Christ, our Lord.

And I pray that we remember the true gospel that had been proclaimed to us. Jesus who died on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for sins, who rose again from the dead, who ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of God, is interceding for us on our behalf.

He who is going to return again to judge the living and the dead. All who believe in him will not perish, but have everlasting life. This gospel was proclaimed to us and we have come to believe it by your grace.

May we recognize and understand that nothing can replace it or we lose the whole foundation of the church. If anyone comes proclaiming a different gospel, Paul has warned, let him be accursed. We are justified by grace through faith alone, not of works.

And if anyone starts saying that we are justified by grace and works, they are preaching a different gospel. May we not lose the soundness of the words that we have considered as we have read through Galatians and elsewhere that is proclaimed to us in the Bible.

The just shall live by faith. May we continue by faith in the son of God who loved us and died for us that we may live forever with him. It's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to.

When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website www .tt .com and click on the Give tab in the top right corner of the page. Join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study When We Understand the Text.