Getting Your Priorities Straight

All right, turn with me please to the book of Galatians, the book of Galatians, a week from this evening, Lord willing. Well, let's see, really a week from now would be about, what, about four o 'clock in the morning or I'll be, so a little less than a week from now, I'll already have been engaged in at least one debate, Lord willing, in South Africa, in the Johannesburg area, and so it's good every once in a while to remind ourselves of some of the basics, some of the things that brought us to this place, that excited us, that gave us a commitment to certain things, and so I want to remind us of the centrality of the gospel this evening by looking again at this signal passage in Galatians chapter two, and remind you of what happened here and the fact that in each and every generation we are called as individuals to be committed to the centrality and importance of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

You know that this epistle begins with some of the harshest language in the New Testament. In Galatians chapter one, the apostle speaks of pseudodelphoi, false brethren, and he speaks of people who have preached another gospel, which is not really another gospel, and he places these individuals under the anathema of God, the very curse of God.

He behaves in an extremely politically incorrect fashion, and given that clearly the apostle could speak with great grace and great tenderness of the love of God and the grace of God, some people are tempted to look at this epistle and especially how it ends, I think there's even more harsh language in Galatians chapter five and say, Paul was just having a bad day, but the reality is that when you think about when the apostle was incredibly strict and harsh and when the apostle was incredibly gracious, as we've read in the Old Testament poetry, there is a time for each of these things and much of it has to do with what the subject is, and I think very often when Christians are harsh, think that we are standing for God's truth, very often we're talking about the very things that we should be the most gracious about, and then for some reason when we should be taking a stand, that's when we tend to become somewhat inordinately soft and fluffy.

When you look at Galatians, why is Paul so upset? Why does he so very clearly skip over the niceties of so many of his other letters? Compare Galatians and Philippians. Compare the introductions, and Paul will talk about, you know, I rejoice upon my every remembrance of you, remembering you always in my prayers, thinking about your faithfulness and your growth in the gospel and your fellowship in the gospel and all these wonderful things.

Not in Galatians. It's not there. You read it and you realize he gets past the introduction and I am amazed that you are so quickly being moved away from him who called you by the grace of Christ into another gospel, which is really not another.

He gets right to it and stays on that subject all the way through the epistle and says strong and difficult things, and he knew when he wrote this that these words were going to be read in the congregation and the very people, everybody in that congregation knew exactly who he was talking about.

And they knew when he started talking about them, he was pointing them out right there in the fellowship. Can you imagine if they had a fellowship meal after that service where Paul's letter was read?

Wow, that was a bummer. I mean, talk about letting all the air out. Paul, you just destroyed our joy. I'm not going to for a moment say that it's not important to take into consideration what's going on in the church, but I think Paul did.

And all this is to say obviously whatever it was that had him so upset was central, and if it was central to him, the question for us is should it not be central for us today? Now for many people, what calls itself evangelicalism today, that's not really a question we can answer, and they're really not overly concerned about these things, but what was Paul so focused upon?

It was, of course, the gospel. Because without the gospel we have nothing. We have no church, we have no purpose, we are nothing but a religious social club. If we no longer have absolute confidence that the truth of the gospel is still knowable, and friends, I hate to tell you this, but there's a bunch of people out there who call themselves Christians that don't really think that the truth of the gospel is any longer knowable.

It's all a matter of opinion, it's predilection, it's taste, and some of these folks have big platforms and big ministries and sell lots of books and are on TV and everything else, but they really don't have any confidence that we still can know the truth of the gospel.

If we could not look someone in the eye and say, yes, we know what the gospel is, what can we do for them? That the government can't do for them. That the government's not already taking our tax money to do for them anyway.

Because when you think about it, everything we do is all wrapped up in the gospel. And so look at Galatians chapter 2, beginning of verse 4, "...yet because of Pseudo-Delphoi, false brethren, secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery, to them we did not yield in submission even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might remain or abide with you.".

Did you see that? There's something rather important to be seen in how Paul expresses this situation that took place. We know what the situation was. We know what happened. And we know that it must have been a rather challenging thing for Paul to do what he did.

I mean, to be the one who causes all the problems. I have a feeling, there is more than once, that someone sort of saw Paul coming and said, oh man, everybody had been getting along just fine, here comes Paul.

I know that feeling. But you see, Paul sees the situation here. In fact, if you look down just a little bit, he gives you an example of this. Look at verse 11,. "...but when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.".

This is beer. This is eyewitness of the resurrection Peter. This is the Roman Catholics think to have the church Peter. He stood condemned for prior to the coming of certain men from James. He used to eat with the Gentiles.

But when they came, he began to withdraw and hold himself aloof, fearing the party of the circumcision. So we know what had been going on. Peter is up on Simon's roof, and three times the sheet comes down.

It says, rise Peter, kill and eat, and don't call that which I've said is clean, unclean. And it's slowly getting through to Peter, and okay. And so he's starting to get into this idea that there's only one body of Christ.

You have the Jewish church and the Gentile church, and so he's having table fellowship with the Gentiles. He's sort of seeing this, but then when certain people come from James, and evidently they weren't doing that down in Jerusalem yet, he starts sitting over with them, and he won't sit with the Gentiles anymore.

And so he began to withdraw and hold himself aloof, fearing the party of the circumcision. The rest of the Jews joined him in hypocrisy with the result that even Barnabas, Barnabas the son of encouragement, was carried away by their hypocrisy.

And then look at verse 14. But when I saw that they were not, and then different translations run this differently, but the Greek term is ortho-podeo, to walk straight in accordance with a rule. You know what an orthopedic surgeon is, orthopedic doctor.

Young Mr. Callahan, you know something about orthopedics. Oh yeah. What does that mean? Ortho, orthopraxy, orthodoxy, and then podeo means to walk. So to walk straight in accordance with a rule, not varying from side to side.

But what is Paul saying? I saw Peter, and he's starting to vary. The gospel says he's to walk this straight line, and he's starting to go over this direction. They're going off into hypocrisy. They're not walking straight in accordance with the truth of the gospel.

Well what does that mean? They knew what the truth of the gospel was. And every generation, even Peter and Barnabas, every generation of Christians is called to know and embrace the truth of the gospel, and really the entirety of the Christian life is applying that truth of the gospel to whatever life it is that God calls us to live.

And to walk straight in accordance with it, even when that straight line, it's going to take us through some really tough, we've still got to go there. And so, stands up to Peter because he sees that Peter's taking the easy way around the tough question.

He's not walking straight in accordance with the truth of the gospel. And that takes us back to, there's a good illustration of what he's saying, that when the church got together, when they discussed the gospel, it was because of false brethren secretly brought in who had sneaked out to aspire liberty, which we have in Jesus, in order to bring us into bondage.

But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that, and there's the other appearance of the phrase, the truth of the gospel would abide, remain with you. So Paul's saying, you know what?

Those men who came in to the fellowship, they looked like us, they talked like us, they dressed like us, of the hymn, you know that, right? I mean, really. They didn't come in wearing pink and purple polka dots, sporting Rob Bell glasses and passing out copies of Love Wins, you know?

That's pretty rare. That's not normally where the problems come in the fellowship when it comes to doctrine and teaching. They looked like us, they talked like us, they came up to us, and I can guarantee you, when the church met together to hear this letter read for the first time, and Churches, because this is actually an epistle to Churches in Galatia, it's a region, instead of just a particular city.

But that morning, when the church came together, before the letter was read, these men, that Paul puts under the anathema, walked in, and they walked up to you, and they, uh, put their hands real firm like, you know, slapped you on the back, about your mom, see how she's doing, because, you know, I've been praying for you.

I've been praying for you. Then they read the letter. One of the things, one of the most important and central things that defines why we do what we do the way we do it, is illustrated right here. Because, if you think of this situation, you think what happened, you think about the results of Paul writing this letter, and the bomb that went off in that fellowship that day.

The disruption, the hurt feeling. Many Churches today, in all honesty, and certainly in practice, the idea would be, he didn't handle this right. He didn't handle this. You just, the love of Jesus would never let somebody do this.

You hear that a lot. One of our commitments flows right from this, and that is this. What Paul did, he had to do, because of the ultimate value of the last portion of verse 5. Paul said, what I'm saying is, the men and the women who have walked this path before you and I, believe that their very lives were not as important as the last portion of Galatians 2 .5.

He did not yield in subjection to them, even for an hour. Why? So that the truth of the gospel would remain with you. If the truth of the gospel, the proclamation of it, the protection of it, the promulgation of it, the passing of it on inside the Church, and proclamation of it outside the Church, if that is not at the top of the priority list, you're not going to be around here very long.

Because there's all sorts of other things that can get people all excited, that require us to drop that way down the list. I'll be honest with you, when you think about it, it's either at the top of the list, or it's not on the list.

There is no middle ground. There is no second, third, fourth, fifth, tenth place. Think about it. Think of the churches that have just galloped off into apostasy over the past number of decades. Where was the maintenance of the truth of the gospel?

They didn't even believe you could know what the gospel was anymore. That's why they've galloped off into apostasy. It also determines how we do things. We just have the Lord's Supper, right? And one of the things we do is we recognize baptism and the Lord's Supper, ordinances of the Church, give them to the Church.

I remember the first time I came here, I was telling my dad about stuff, and he's like, you ask people before they partake of the Supper? That's weird. And I'm like, you know, I had never heard it before either, but then I started thinking about it.

Do you ask someone if they're actually a Christian before you baptize them? Yeah? So why wouldn't you do that with the Lord's Supper? It was just a tradition, you know? But why would we care about any of that?

Why do we meet with people before they join the Church, meet with people before they're baptized, talk to people before they partake of the Lord's Supper? It's all about the gospel. It's all about the purity of the gospel, knowledge of the gospel, maintaining the gospel.

Pastor Fry and I aren't going to be around here forever. He's got a few years on me, but you know, just a few. And we're not going to be around here forever. And as you look down the road, you go, you know what?

This needs to be passed on. This needs to be impressed upon people that the gospel, the purity of the gospel, must be maintained. The truth of the gospel. Now, we have a promise. Look, it's not up to us, thankfully.

I'm not sitting here going, oh, man, if we don't work harder, it's all going to fall apart and the kingdom's going to fail. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. Because we have promises in the scripture that God is going to make sure His people have His truth, no question about that.

I see that. So I'm not sitting here going, you know, oh, boy, this next generation, we're in deep trouble. Look at the row right here. Not doing that. Because God is going to continue to build His kingdom.

But He does so by means. And one of the means He does that by is by placing a passion in the heart of His people for what's really important. You know one of the reasons why we don't have a bunch of church splits around here?

It's because we've got our priorities straight and the gospel's at the top. Now, we're not perfect. And you might say, well, you know, the application of the gospel might indicate, you might want to think about this here.

Hey, semper reformanda, all is reforming. But if the gospel's not at the top, you're never going to have any meaningful way of prioritizing everything else a church is supposed to be doing. And so much of the stuff that churches do that results in their splitting, results in the divisions, is because the number one thing is not this.

And you know how you can tell it's not this? Because you can talk to most of their people and ask them some meaningful questions about the nature of the gospel and they'll go, well, we don't really talk much about that.

You know what these false teachers are doing? They're adding one little thing to the gospel. Just one little thing. And boy, they add their biblical arguments, too. Paul says they're anathema. They're under a curse.

And we have to fight them. We will not yield and subjection them for even an hour because if we do, we are betraying the truth of the gospel itself. And that means not only for us, but for every generation thereafter.

We are betraying them, too. We are betraying them, too. So it's not just about us. This is so counter-cultural. It's like being an orthodox believer in the Bible. You're going to be really counter-cultural if you are.

And you're especially going to be counter-cultural because right now the culture says, look at you, look at you, look at you, it's all about you. This is, look at what God's doing and look down the road, the future generations.

It's not all about you. The gospel isn't all about you. It's all about Him. So much of the gospel preaching today is, what can God do for you? The central aspect of the gospel is, what has God done to glorify Himself?

That's the central aspect of the gospel. If you don't see that, the rest of it is just going to be fluff. It really is. And so, here's the question for you. We've got a few more days before the Lord's Day.

A few more days of slogging it out. Man, I have got so much stuff between now, my flight leaves Monday afternoon, 28 hours. That's just the trip out. 56 round trip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a long ways.

I've got a lot to do. Lectures and, oh, it's just, going down to Durban and all the rest of this. I've got millions of things to do and you do too. And what I've got to do is no more important than what you've got to do.

You've got to go to South Africa. Yeah, so what? If you haven't been called to go to South Africa, it would be bad if you went. Are you going to orthopodeo, walk straight in accordance with the gospel the next couple of days before the Lord's Day?

Chance that you might see something coming in your path and you're sort of trying to find a way to sort of get over it. Can we move the path over again? It's not quite so straight. How are you going to walk straight in accordance with the gospel?

The real question is, is it a passion that you do so? Or is it just something that, well, you know, at our church we say we should do this, so. Because if you really, really are, if you're really focused upon the truth of the gospel, man, it prioritizes everything else.

It doesn't mean that there's nothing else that's important. There's all sorts of other things that are important, but it becomes the light that allows us to prioritize in the proper way and not divide over little things.

So often I hear people just getting so focused upon this little thing and that little thing and this little movement comes along and that movement comes along and if you're not doing this, then your church ain't very good and if you're not doing this, your church ain't very good.

And most of the time, it's easy for me because I sit back and go, you know, I'm going to be standing in rooms full of Muslims and they're not a one of them is going to care less about what you all are arguing about, but they are going to care a lot about what I'm saying about the gospel.

Maybe that's, if we were all focused upon that, we wouldn't fight with each other quite so much. Yeah, maybe. So it's easier for me, I think, because of what I get to do, but the reality is if we have that focus, if we have that commitment, it prioritizes everything else and oh my, the peace that it can bring when you've got a bunch of people who all agree, you know what, the truth of the gospel.

God's preserved it, we've got to live it. Basic stuff, yeah, it's good to be reminded.