WWUTT 1797 Large Letters, Part 2 (Galatians 6:11-18)

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We don't often consider how easy it is for a church to lose the true gospel.

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They could be faithful in the gospel for years, then false doctrine gets in and a downgrade begins.

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We'll consider an example today when we understand the text. This is

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When We Understand The Text, a daily Bible study in the Word of Christ. For he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

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Tell your friends about our ministry at www .wtt .com. Once again, it's Pastor Gabe.

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Thank you, Becky. We're at the tail end of our study of Galatians, looking at chapter 6, verses 11 through 18.

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Let me begin here by reading our text and we'll get back to the next part of the sermon.

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Paul says to the churches in Galatia, see what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.

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And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the

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Israel of God. From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.

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The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen. Now, yesterday

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I mentioned how easy it is for a church to lose the true gospel, which

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Paul has been contending for before the Galatians, this group of churches, the churches of Galatia that had left the sound gospel for a gospel of faith and works.

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Instead of justification by faith, they were pairing works into this, believing that they needed to do certain works in order to be saved.

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It is very, very easy for a church to do this, to lose the true gospel for a gospel of works.

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And I give an example today of the Southern Baptist Convention. This is part two of the sermon entitled

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Large Letters. This past week, the 162nd session of the

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Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting was held in Birmingham, Alabama. At the top of the agenda this year, and some of you knew all about this, was to discuss the sexual abuse crisis that had been uncovered by the

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Houston Chronicle this past February, and many other secular news sources reporting on this as well.

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How are we to care for victims? And how can we ensure that this will not happen again or will become more rare and more scarce than it has been?

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What we need to do first and foremost is hold fast to the gospel that we first believed and the church was built upon.

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And we need to encourage our churches to teach that which accords with sound doctrine.

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However, while addressing these matters in his presidential address to the convention, President J .D.

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Greer said the following, At its core, the gospel that you and I preach is about God's commitment to protect the vulnerable.

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Let me repeat that to you again. J .D. Greer said, quote,

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Brothers and sisters, no it's not. That is not the gospel that I preach about.

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That is not the gospel that we've embraced as a church. The core of the gospel is not

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God's commitment to protect the vulnerable. The core of the gospel is God's commitment to save the damnable.

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Protecting the vulnerable is certainly an important and loving work.

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But it's a work. And how many times have you heard me say this? Works are not the gospel.

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To say that the core, the center, the most important part, the thing that holds our faith together is the protection of the vulnerable.

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That's a false gospel. It's closer to what we've called or what we've termed the social gospel.

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The idea that the gospel is the good works that we do for others. That's not the gospel.

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The gospel is that we are justified by faith in Christ alone. And nothing else.

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Now I want to give our brother J .D. Greer the benefit of the doubt. I believe he made a mistake.

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And again, I believe the error he made was because he, like the rest of the

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Southern Baptist Convention, or like most of the convention, has been focusing on the problem more than the solution.

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In an effort to guard the SBC while at the same time ensuring those who have been hurt that we have not forgotten about them, he made a statement that conflated the gospel that we love with the work for those we love.

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That work is to be in light of the gospel, but it is not the gospel itself.

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Brother Greer has made several foolish statements, and you've heard me address some of them before in other contexts, but I don't believe that he's a heretic, and don't hear me saying that about him.

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Back in 2011, he wrote a book called Simply Enough Gospel. And I read that book.

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It was a terrific book. And in his book, Greer gave this definition of the gospel.

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He said, That's right.

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That's the gospel. The word gospel means good news.

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So as Brother Greer said, it's an announcement. It's the news that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

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He gave his life as a ransom for many. He has purchased us by the shedding of his blood. He conquered death for us by his resurrection, by faith in him.

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We are forgiven our sins, and we have eternal life with God. God has chosen faith as the mechanism to transmit his grace to us.

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We believe in Jesus. We have the grace of God. That is the gospel.

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That is the power of God for salvation. And we must preach that message to others.

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And my friends, we must also preach that message to ourselves every day, lest we forget it.

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That we may be reminded every day of how good God is and the precious promises that he has granted to us through his

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Son to be received by faith. In the same book, Greer also said,

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Unless we are actively preaching the gospel to ourselves daily, we fall back into works righteousness.

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Believing that we can be justified by our works. So in his own teaching, Greer has said that when we forget the work of Christ and what he has done to give us his righteousness, we go back to believing in the work that we must do in order to obtain our own righteousness.

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And this is what I believe is happening in our own denomination, in the Southern Baptist Convention. Over the last several years, the major news issues that have come out of the

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SBC look a lot more like we're trying to save face before the culture than it looks like we're trying to face the culture and preach the gospel.

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We have to show them that we're not abusers. We have to show them that we're not racists.

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We have to show them that we're not like Donald Trump. We have to show them that we're against white supremacy.

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We have to show that we don't like the Confederate flag. Some of those things are all well and good, but again, we're focusing on the works instead of the one who did the work in our place, and that is our

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Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. If we glory in our work over Christ's work, we will believe statements like, the core of the gospel is

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God's commitment to protect the vulnerable. So is our focus on Christ, submitting to Him while He deals with our sin issues, or are we focusing on the sin issue and talking about Christ at select points because we're

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Christians and that's what we're supposed to do? The latter method is a disaster, because as we read in Romans 7, pointing at the sin and saying, don't do that, actually awakens sin.

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Consider a resolution that passed on the last day of the convention, Resolution 9 on critical race theory and intersectionality.

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The purpose of this resolution was to implore critical race theory and intersectionality as,

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The resolution also stated, that critical race theory and intersectionality should only be employed as analytical tools subordinate to Scripture, not transcendent ideological frameworks.

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But here's the paradox of that resolution. I understand the intention of what the convention was trying to do or the resolution committee, but if critical race theory and intersectionality were truly regarded as subordinate to Scripture, the convention would have rejected the resolution outright.

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Critical race theory and intersectionality are completely incompatible with biblical

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Christianity. You may as well have been saying, Darwinism should have been employed as an analytical tool.

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Now, I wish that I could just hit this subject and get off of it and not have to explain all of these things and make it a point of understanding, but since this is the kind of language our convention is going to start using, even voting in it in our resolutions, it is necessary for me, as a pastor, to tell you what it is.

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One of the reasons I suspect the resolution passed is because the majority of our messengers really didn't understand what it was that they were voting on.

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In case you're unfamiliar with critical theory, it is by definition a neo -Marxist philosophy that drew on the critical methods of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

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According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, its purpose is, quote, to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them, unquote.

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Now, this is not a tangible slavery we're talking about. It's theoretical slavery.

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You can't point to it and say, look, slavery. You have to imagine that it's there.

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Critical theory is about its own message, not the interests of others. It's less about people, and it's more about propaganda.

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So bear with me as I explain this. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines critical race theory in particular, as, quote, the view that race, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is socially constructed, and that race, as a socially constructed concept, functions as a means to maintain the interests of the white population that constructed it.

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According to CRT, racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences that white people create between races to maintain elite white interest in labor markets and politics, and as such, create the circumstances that give rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities.

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Here's what this means in layman's terms. All of our social ills are white people's fault.

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All racial, social, gender, sexual, and religious constructs are under the control of specifically white men, and everyone else is being oppressed.

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That's critical race theory. Critical race theory is racist.

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When the messengers voted to implore such verbiage as, quote, a useful tool, what the convention was saying, unbeknownst to most of them,

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I believe, is that the gospel is insufficient to heal and unite us, and we need anti -gospel tools in order to recognize our sins and mend our differences.

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Now, this was not the resolution as it was first presented to the convention.

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The resolution was originally written to warn fellow

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Southern Baptists against embracing cultural trends. Resolution 9 was written to oppose what

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Resolution 9 proposed. The original author was

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Stephen Feinstein, a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a pastor in California, and a chaplain in the

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United States Army Reserves. Major Feinstein was, in his words, quote, alarmed at the proliferation of toxic, divisive, and satanic rhetoric designed to divide humanity and facilitate constant opposition in our society, unquote.

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So he drafted a resolution denouncing these toxic ideas, namely critical race theory and intersectionality.

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In the original resolution, Pastor Feinstein began, quote,

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He followed that with this statement, quote, founded upon unbiblical presuppositions, descended from Marxist theories and categories, and therefore are inherently opposed to the scriptures as the true center of Christian union, unquote.

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He went on to warn that critical race theory had infiltrated

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Southern Baptist churches and institutions, including our seminaries. CRT divides people into racial, social, gender, sexual, and religious categories, placing unequal value on one another and reducing us down to our differences rather than our commonalities.

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It promotes rage rather than grace. It breeds division rather than unity.

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While the Bible does acknowledge our differences, male and female, slave and free,

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Jew and Gentile, it does not begin with those differences. Instead, the Bible begins with what unites humanity.

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We are all made in the image of God. The new covenant purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ unites us further by creating a new humanity, one that will one day inhabit the new heavens and the new earth, a people descended from every tribe, tongue, and nation, from every ethnicity and race, every socioeconomic background and culture made one in Christ.

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This should be what unites us, not the rhetoric of critical race theory and intersectionality, which has been causing unnecessary and unbiblical division among the body of Christ and has invited charges of theological liberalism, egalitarianism, and Marxism.

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The Southern Baptist Convention is committed to racial reconciliation, but built upon the

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Bible, the Word of God, seeking biblical justices through biblical means, not according to the words and theories of men.

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Pastor Feinstein called on the convention to, quote, decry every philosophy or theology, including critical race theory and intersectionality, as antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ, since they divide the people of Christ by defining fundamental identity as something other than our identity in Christ, unquote.

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But the resolutions committee dropped the original language of Pastor Feinstein's proposal, and instead of rejecting critical race theory, they embraced it.

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When the new Resolution 9 came to the convention floor for a vote, Dr. Tom Buck, a friend to this church, called for its rejection, and he quoted

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Colossians 2 .8, which says, See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition and not according to Christ.

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Dr. Tom Askell of Founders Ministries proposed amendments to the resolutions that would have outright called critical race theory godless, but the convention voted down these amendments.

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From the 2019 Southern Baptist Convention, we had a statement about the gospel that was actually not the gospel, and we had a resolution promoting the effects of the gospel that would actually have the opposite effect of the gospel.

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One is the result of the other. If you have a wrong understanding of what the gospel is, you'll have a wrong understanding of what the gospel does.

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In 1 Timothy 6, 3 -5, we are warned, If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our

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Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, in other words, the gospel produces godliness in the people who believe it, and if that is rejected, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing.

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He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and quarrels about words which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth.

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That is exactly what Pastor Feinstein was warning us about in the resolution as he first presented it.

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Now, I have presented this to you today not just to inform you about our denomination, but in context, in context with what we're studying here in Galatians 6, this is an example of just how easy it is for us to lose the core of the gospel and everything else that grows from that, and yet, when we're making statements about the gospel that aren't true and passing things like critical race theory and intersectionality, that's exactly what we're doing.

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We're doing what is contrary to what our own statement of faith asserts. We must learn from these errors so that we will correct them and not repeat them.

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Pastor Gabe keeps a regular blog sharing personal thoughts, alerting readers to false teachers, and offering commentary on the church and social issues.

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You can find a link to the blog through our website www .utt .com.

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Thank you for listening and join us again tomorrow as we continue our study in God's Word when we understand the text.