Galatians - No Other Gospel

God Centered Theology

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A well -known preacher in the United States was asked to say a few words to a gathering in an open -air meeting.

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At the close of his address, an atheist stepped up to him and challenged him to a debate. And this atheist assured him that he would bear all the expense of renting the hall and advertising and everything that might come up.

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And the preacher said to him, I accept on one condition. When you can bring 50 people who have been helped by your philosophy,

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I will be ready to debate you because I will bring hundreds upon hundreds who will testify to the transformation this gospel has wrought in their lives.

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Needless to say, the atheistic challenger departed and never returned.

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You see, because there is only one life -changing, life -transforming gospel.

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There is only one gospel that brings life and peace to the center.

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If you have your Bibles open, we're going to do things a little backwards. We're going to read the second half of the text first, and do the first half second, but you'll see why in a minute.

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But we're going to look at Galatians chapter 1. Let's look at verses 6 -9 as we begin.

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Paul says, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting

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Him who called you in the grace of Christ, and are turning to a different gospel.

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Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

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But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed.

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As we have said before, so I say now again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you receive, let him be accursed.

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So Paul says, even if I myself, the one writing this letter to you, preach another gospel to you, let me be accursed.

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Paul was astonished. Almost in the original words, almost understanding that he was sort of out of his senses, flabbergasted if you will.

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How in the world could people, I just helped you find your church,

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I've taught you correct doctrine, I've taught you the gospel, it's the very gospel that saved you.

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I go away what's seen but for a moment, and you're already deserting it, and going to things that are not the gospel.

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Because my friends, what the world doesn't want to hear and what is sad, a lot of people even sitting in churches don't want to hear is this, if you were saved by a false gospel, you're not saved.

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If you were saved by anything else other than the gospel that is clearly articulated in Scripture, you're not saved.

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There are a lot of false gospels. Quite frankly, in my nerdy selfishness,

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I would love to preach a sermon on every one of these, but I think the room would be empty by the time

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I finish. So I'm going to give you the Cliff Notes version. One of them is a works -based gospel, this certainly shows up.

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And many preachers will say this, and I say this as well, if you look at the difference between Christianity and every single other religion that has ever existed, one is by grace, and everything else is by works.

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Some form, some fashion, you look hard enough and long enough, get past all that surface stuff where they make it sound so good, you'll find it.

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The works -based gospel says, you can earn your way to Heaven. Suffice it to say,

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I've said this many times before, and I'll say it very quickly here, works -based salvation to me is the most idiotic thing in the world, because how would you know when you've done enough?

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And if you've done enough and then sin again, do you have to make up for that, and then plus some? And do you need to do enough, plus some to kind of make up for, you know if I happen to sin tomorrow?

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Can you imagine how long the Bible would have to be to cover every single conceivable sin, in every single decade that has ever transpired in human history, taken into context that at one point in time they didn't have airplanes and cars, and as much as this kills my millennial soul, they did not have one of these.

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Trust me, there was a time, I was watching a movie the other day, and they had a corded phone in the movie, and I was like, what is that?

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What is that? There of course is a self -improvement gospel, five steps to a better you.

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There's not anything really wrong with you, that whole sin thing, that's just mythological. You know the gospel is really just to help you improve a little bit, shine you up real nice, and then you'll be fit for Heaven.

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There's a prosperity gospel that tells you God saved you to make you rich. Yeah, tell that to Paul, who was beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, poverty stricken, went days without food.

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Tell that to all the Christians living today, that despite all they do, they live and suffer through persecution.

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Tell that to the ones that were bombed. What was it this morning, Ed? Was it Syria? That was bombed this morning, is that correct?

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Trilanka, excuse me, Trilanka. What is the death toll, over 100? 207. 207?

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Yeah, tell that to them. God saved you to make you rich. Yeah.

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No. Gina, can you check your purse again? Now look,

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I'm not going to preach on this today, sermon for another day, it doesn't mean Christians won't be wealthy. And in fact, I would make the argument that the poorest among us is more wealthy than a lot of the poor in the world.

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Sermon for another day. There's also the social justice gospel, and this is one of the more far -reaching and probably one of the most dangerous ones we're encountering today.

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It creates unbiblical categories and classes among God's people, and places secular progressive politics over and on top of scriptural authority.

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There's no black Christians, there's no white Christians, there's no poor Christians, there's no rich Christians. There's no intersectionality, there's no levels of victimhood.

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Galatians 3 .28 is clear, there's no Jew, no Greek, no bondman, no free man, no male, no female.

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There are Christians. You're either in Adam or you're in Christ. The social justice gospel is straight from the pit of hell.

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The perverted grace gospel, this is the get out of jail free card. You get saved, walk an aisle, say a little prayer, and then do anything you want.

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It doesn't matter how you live. That whole 1 John deal about, you know, you've been saved and you so ought also to walk as Christ walked.

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That whole Colossians 2 .6 thing about, therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the

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Lord, so walk in Him. You know, 1 John 2, I think it's 3 -6 where it says, this is how you know that you have come to know

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Him, that you obey His commandments. All that stuff. Mark and Deuteronomy where it says, love the

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Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. That might be in there, but it really doesn't matter.

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Just do whatever you want. We have a chapter for that and it's called Romans 6. And Paul says, why do you keep on sinning so that grace may abound?

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Forbid it. May it never be. An interfaith gospel.

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Every religion, you know, they basically all get it right. We just need to take a piece of this one, a piece of that one, a piece of this over here, put it in a pot, mix it all together, and what comes out will be so beautiful and good.

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Because after all, there's not any of that evil objective truth thing.

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It's always funny to me when someone says, I am convinced that there is no objective truth. Well, you just made an objective truth claim, so I'm just going to assume you're being facetious.

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And lastly, and there's far more, I just covered seven here, but there's the universal gospel that basically says, well, it really doesn't matter because in the end

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God is going to save everybody. Well, good luck with that, because the Bible doesn't teach it. In all of these false gospels, and even the ones

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I didn't cover, here's what they deny. Original sin, man's utter sinfulness, the holiness of God, the righteous judgment of God against sin, the right of God to demand payment for sin, the authority of Scripture.

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They go with what man thinks rather than what God has said. All men born in Adam under the condemnation of sin, the work of Christ as atonement for sin, the power of resurrection, one

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Savior, the peace that comes from having salvation in Christ, free justification, sanctification, glorification, just to name a few.

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You know we largely, I've used this example before in sermons.

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I don't know if this is still the way they do it, because I don't even know if we write checks anymore. We write a couple, but the old thing was when you would learn how to investigate check fraud.

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You wouldn't spend all your time looking at fake checks. You would spend all your time looking at what the real thing is, because if you know what a real check is, you'll immediately spot the error.

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If you know what the real gospel is, you'll immediately spot error. One of my favorite people to read about and study,

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Martin Luther, one of the great Reformers, in his commentary on the book of Galatians says the following, that St.

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Paul wrote this epistle because after his departure from the Galatian churches, Jewish Christian fanatics, or the

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Judaizers, moved in, perverted Paul's gospel of man's free, just free, just of a free justification by faith in Christ Jesus.

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The world bears the gospel a grudge because the gospel condemns the religious wisdom of this world.

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How smart man thinks he is, jealous for its own religious views. The world in turn charges the gospel with being a subversive and licentious doctrine, offensive to God and man.

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A doctrine to be persecuted as the worst plague on earth. Imagine that, that someone would think the gospel, the good news of salvation, of the grace of Almighty God would be the worst plague on earth.

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That's what they think. As a result, Luther says we have this paradoxical situation.

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The gospel supplies the world with the salvation of Jesus Christ, peace of conscience, and every blessing.

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And just for that and that alone, Luther says the world abhors it. This world is fueled by Satan, and under his system it hates the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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It hates Christ, and it hates all of his followers. Jesus Christ said, the world hates you, know that it hated me first.

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Martin Luther is a true story, one that could have been one of the hundreds that the preacher in the story at the beginning that I shared with you could have brought to the forefront, that is an example of this gospel transformation.

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I want to read something else for you, a short e -book that I have on my computer called,

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The Life of Martin Luther by Deanna Klein and Joel Beek. They said,

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Luther tried to win God's favor by praying and fasting often. He whipped himself, lived in a cell that had no heat.

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God bless him in the winter. Of course for me, the antithesis that would be worse, they would be in the summer with no

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A .C. He slept very little and recited many prayers. He tried to think of every sin he had ever committed, so that he could then do penance for all of it.

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But that did not make him feel any better. He did not know about the love of God.

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Rather, whenever he heard about God, Luther was afraid. His trust was not in the

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Savior, but in saints and angels, good works, doing penance, praying for his own sins.

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Luther, along with many other Roman Catholics, had been taught that God was so holy that He could only be approached through the saints.

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No one told him that the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ alone can satisfy

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God's justice. Most monks and other clergy members like Luther of the

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Roman Catholic Church did not think much about their souls. They obeyed the rules because it was required of them by the

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Church. But most often their obedience was done out of a sense of duty. In addition, it is sad that most of the clergy at this time actually lived a very wicked life, even though they professed to serve

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God. They seemed pious during religious ceremonies, but their lifestyle was full of sin and injustice.

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As I say with the Israelites a lot, we like to pile on them, so we tend to look at people from history and want to say, ha, look at what they did.

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Are we so different? We dress up really nice, we externally conform, we go through the motions, but where's your heart?

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How could this be? It is because religion does not save.

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Religion cannot transform the human heart. It just can't do it. The greatest need of man is exactly what

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Jesus told His disciples in John chapter 3. You need to be born again, literally meaning being born from above.

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You need to be born of water and of Spirit. Water meaning your physical birth. But unless you're born again, born above from the

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Spirit of God, you will not see the Kingdom of God.

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You just won't. Religion won't save you. Your favorite politician, whether he be

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Trump or someone else, will not save you. Your church attendance will not save you.

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How many committees you're on, how many Sunday school classes you teach, none of it will save you.

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You'll be like the man that stands before God Almighty and says, Lord, Lord, did I not prophesy in your name?

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Did I not teach people your good deeds and live them? But the book of Ezekiel says, without taking out that heart of stone and putting in a heart of flesh and God putting

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His Spirit in you to love God with all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength and to live and obey

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Him, you will not see the Kingdom of God. It is not our works that save us, but our faith will produce works.

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The book of James says, you say you have faith and no works? Can that faith save him? Meaning, can that type of faith save you?

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And he says, if you have faith and no works, you have a dead faith. Why? Because your faith is dead by its own standards.

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Many people in John's day and Paul's day and in our day profess to be Christian. Yeah, we believe

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Christ. Well, sure, we believe He rose again. Well, are you going to live like Him?

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Oh, no. Come on, man. Live like Christ? Do you know how much I'd have to give up? Do you know how much sin

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I'd have to stop doing? Well, then your faith by its own standards is a dead faith.

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You don't have true saving faith. Because true saving faith is a transformation. It's taking someone that is completely and utterly spiritually dead and raising them to spiritual life,

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God putting His Holy Spirit in you. So, how do you know you're a Christian? Because the Spirit testifies with my spirit that I am a child of God, and I've been adopted into His family.

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Any good deeds, any works, things I do is not out of duty than because I love my

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Savior. God does not desire a religious or ritualistic heart, but a broken and a repentant heart that comes from one who knows how truly sinful they are, and how desperately they need a

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Savior. I told you earlier if you were saved by a false gospel, you're not actually saved.

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Let me go a step further. If you pursue ritual and tradition, if you break the second commandment and have idols other than God, your salvation will only go as far as what they can take you.

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So, if you want to stand before the God of the universe, the eternal being that created you, and take anything to Him other than the shed blood of Jesus Christ, good luck.

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Because my friend, Scripture says there's only one destination for that person, and it's an eternal flame. Martin Luther himself is quoted as saying,

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God has surely promised His grace to the humbled. That is to those who mourn over and despair of themselves.

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I've been there. My prayer is that you've been there too. If you've never gotten to the point that you literally shed tears and mourn and despair over your own sin, not that you've committed against me or your friends or your family or whoever you want to fill in that blank with, but because you've sinned against an almighty

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God, my friend, you need to get to that place. Because as we looked at last week in Psalm 51,

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God desires not tradition or ritual, but a broken and contrite heart.

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One that is so aware of its sin, so aware of how much sin it has, and the fact that you could never, ever erase it.

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All of humanity, every single human being that has ever lived could intentionally and in unity work together just to atone for one sin of one person, and they wouldn't accomplish it.

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The reason so many churches and so many Christians aren't living by the very faith they espouse because they haven't first realized just how utterly sinful they are.

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One of the quickest ways to get kicked out of a church is to preach against sin, whether it's coming from the pastor or people in the pews as you live your life.

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Because the world doesn't want to hear it. You know what they want to hear? God's favor,

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God's this, and He's going to bless you and make you rich, and you're never going to have any problems, and you're going to be perfectly healthy.

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There's really nothing wrong with you. You just go out there and find the champion inside yourself. The Bible says the champion that is inside of you is an enemy of God and deserves hell.

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Without the grace and mercy of God, every single human being that has ever lived would spend eternity in hell.

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Period. It may not sound good. It may not tickle the ears of someone sitting in pews, and it certainly won't make the world happy.

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But God didn't say, preach what you think. He said, preach what I've said. My friends, it troubles me to hear so many

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Christians say, well I don't really know about that inerrancy thing. I don't really know about that authority of Scripture thing.

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My friends, that's one of the definitional aspects to our faith. If you're not submitted to the authority of Scripture, you better check up on your heart, because you're probably not saved.

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Authority of Scripture is not something like an end times view, or you know my Presbyterian friends that would baptize infants and we would have minor disagreements over that, and little things, intramural things every good

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Christian can debate, and you don't split or divide over it. You shake hands, you move on with your life.

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There's things like that. But there are things that are definitional, that when you say this is what a

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Christian is, authority of Scripture, deity of Christ, justification by faith, the

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Trinity, you can't change them, you can't add to them, you can't take away from them.

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Because if you do, if you add to what Christ did on the cross, you don't have grace anymore.

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If something is in me, has to be added in order for me to be saved, it's no longer

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God's grace. It's no longer a merit or favor, because God needed me to make it happen.

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That's not what Scripture says. It says, if it was left up to me, there would be flame, and fire, and gnashing of teeth, and an eternity paying for my sin.

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So if you want to pursue false gospel, you'll only go as far as what it can take you.

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Another paragraph or two that I want to share with you from this book that I've been reading, it goes on to say this, because I don't want to stop here in the middle,

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I want to take you full to the end of what happened to Luther. Unlike the religious monks and clergy of Luther's day, the

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Holy Spirit would not allow him to be like the others. For that reason, he could find no peace in the monastery and its rituals.

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When Luther went to Rome in 1510, his eyes were open. There's this chapel connected to one of the main churches there, and there's this flight of white marble stairs, and they're referred to as the

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Holy Stairs. And at this time, as tradition had it, and as the priest would teach the people, you know, if you climb those stairs on your knees and pray over your sins, you'll be forgiven everything.

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And so Luther, in his search for peace, as tradition has it, they say he did this.

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He went up those stairs on his knees, praying and kissing each step.

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How Luther hoped to find peace for his troubled soul. But his hopes were cruelly dashed.

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He did not understand why he could not find peace. But the Lord had a reason for all of his unrest.

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He was showing Luther his own sin, the wickedness of the church, and the necessity of finding salvation only in Christ.

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And then finally, when studying Romans, Luther read that the just shall live by faith.

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And it changed everything for Luther. He no longer tried to pay for his own sins, but he trusted in his

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Savior. And now he wanted to... Martin Luther had found the true gospel.

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He found the gospel that saves. Look at verse 1 in Galatians chapter 1, it says, "...Paul

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an apostle, not from man, nor through man." Not only is the gospel not through man,

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Paul's calling is not by man or through man. I can say the same thing about my calling as pastor.

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It has nothing to do with man, it's not through man, it's of God. Your giftings as Christians to be served in a local church for the edification of the body of believers is not by man or through man, but by the

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Holy Spirit. So notice he says, "...an apostle, not from man, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ, and God the

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Father, who raised him from the dead. And all the brethren who are with me, to the churches of Galatia, grace to you, and peace from God."

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John MacArthur talks about these two words, grace and peace. And he points out that grace is the source of our salvation, and peace is the result of it.

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You ever stop to think about that? Without grace you have no source or origin point for your salvation.

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And without peace we'd be right where Luther was. But grace and peace he says from God our

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Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins. I'm the kind of person that I don't believe in what you think of when you hear the word meditation like we see on TV all the time.

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Yeah, not what I do. But I'd like to meditate on Scripture. I might just sit there and stare out the window and think.

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Or I may be watching Hannah do something, and be thinking or chewing. I told Gina last night I laid down for bed, had to get up and run back into the kitchen and write something on the end of my notes, because I was like the best stuff comes to me while I'm sleeping.

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I don't know why this is. I need to start keeping a notepad by the table. I don't know why that is, it's just me.

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Not everybody is like that, but it's just me. But I meditate on things. And I was thinking about this. It says,

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Jesus Christ who gave Himself for our sins.

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And this is what I meditated on and thought about. Maybe you've thought about this, maybe you haven't.

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How bad does my sin have to be for the very

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God who created me to after enter His own creation to die for me?

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Jesus Himself said, Lord if there is any way let this cup pass from me. As much as I appreciate the

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Passion of the Christ, good movie, God bless them, they did the best they could. I'm not saying it was a bad movie.

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My friends it doesn't even come close to the amount of pain, and suffering, and spiritual anguish your

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Savior and my Savior went through just so He could save you. How bad does our sin have to be that God would actually have to get up off of His throne and condescend and empty

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Himself down to the point of taking on human flesh? Who does that?

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A God that loves you. A God that loves you so much that even while you were yet sinners,

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He died for you. Wake up Carl, everybody sitting in this room was not alive at the time

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Christ died on the cross. So that means even before you were born and had ever committed the first sin,

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He died for you. Y 'all know what's coming right? Y 'all the regulars? Wrap your head around that.

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Gave Himself, nobody forced Him. Voluntary submission to God the

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Father in perfect obedience. And notice it says, to deliver us from this present evil age according to the will of our

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God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen. Christ gave

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Himself for us. He died for our sins. God raised

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Him from the dead. That means that all the bondage of sin, all that dominating control over our thinking and over our life, the very thing that condemns us to hell,

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Christ died for it and He set us free. We're going to look at this my friends as we move through the book of Galatians.

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So I'm not going to preach this sermon today, but I'm just going to touch on this. But that's the whole essence of why legalism and fundamentalism and rules and rules and rules and rules and rituals and tradition and all these things we put so much stock in are so dangerous and sinful because it doesn't save.

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It was for freedom that Christ saved you, Galatians 5 .1. He didn't save you from bondage to walk in the freedom of Christ, as my pastor,

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Dr. R .J. Wagner, has said recently, is actually much harder. You know why?

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I grew up a fundamentalist. Oh, I follow this rule. I do this, I do that, I do that. And then

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I just rest on the rules. I think, oh, that's my righteousness. I can rest in knowing that I dress a certain way.

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I talk a certain way. I eat a certain way. Oh, I bless God. I go to church every, it was three to five,

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Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. That's my righteousness. Those things are all good. It's harder to wake up every single day, humble yourself, submit yourself to the authority of Scripture, submit yourself to God and say,

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Lord, what would you have your servant do today? I want to know you desperately.

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I need you in my life. I need more of Jesus. I need to be more like Jesus. I need to walk more like Jesus.

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It's harder, but it's freedom, because we not only have the capacity through the

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Holy Spirit, but we have the power to do it. Church, if we focus on Christ, if we obey

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God's Word and what He has said, if we refuse, move away from and put away trivial and petty things and focus on Jesus and having more

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Jesus, living like Jesus, evangelizing for Jesus, worshiping

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Jesus, discipling and making disciples of Jesus, you're going to stand back one day and say, whoa, look at what

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He did! Why?

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Because the message of the true gospel, the true gospel points to the cross and says, look at what