Hypocrisy Exposed

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Sermon by Josh Rice from Galatians 2:11-14.

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This morning, if you will turn your Bibles to Galatians chapter 2, we're going to continue chipping away, and we come to one of the most well -known parts of Galatians, especially for us
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Reformed people. We like this story for some reason, and we're going to look into it.
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Verses 11 through 14, the Word of God says, But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.
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For prior to the coming of certain men from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they came, he began to shrink back and separate himself, fearing the party of the circumcision.
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And the rest of the Jews joined him in hypocrisy, with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy.
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But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before everyone,
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If you being a Jew live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how is it that you compel the
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Gentiles to live like Jews? Let's pray. Lord Jesus, your church is your bride, and your bride is an entity that was created by your divine power.
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And Lord, in glory she will be spotless and presented to you without any blemish.
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But as we sit down here, or too often, the fear and the weakness and the sin and the rebellion of man seems to blemish the garments of your bride.
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Lord, I pray this morning that you would convict our hearts of the sin of hypocrisy that we are so drawn to.
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Lord, from our fear of man and from our love of sin, Lord, I pray this morning that you would take that taste away from us,
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Lord, that we would understand that we are to fear only you and that we are to hate our sin. Lord, in fact, it is necessary for us to learn to hate sin in order to learn to better love you, because to love you is to keep your commandments.
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Lord, I pray that that would penetrate our hearts this morning, that we would learn from this incident that happened in the first century,
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Lord, this incident that caused no small stir. Lord, I pray that we would have ears to listen and hearts that comprehend and soak in and are not hardened.
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It's in your name, I pray. Amen. I'm going to try to set a world record for myself for shortest intro ever.
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I told Kelsey this week, it's about 30 seconds written, I'm already not doing well, but here's the idea.
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I think we all know this. There are two reasons given why people leave the church, and we know that they're leaving the church in droves in America.
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By the time people are 18, about 80 percent of 18 -year -olds who grew up in church leave the church.
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And sociologists and churchmen and Lifeway and Barna ask the question, why does this happen? And the same two answers always come back at the top of the list.
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The two main reasons that young people in America do not attend church are, number one, the church is irrelevant, and number two, the hypocrisy and moral failure of the leaders.
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I'm going to argue in this sermon that these two reasons are linked, and that this is not a new thing in the church, but this is a thing that the church has faced since the first century.
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Hypocrisy, moral failure. So this morning, like good Baptist, I have arranged a sermon in three
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C's. Three C's. I don't do this very often, I was so happy when it happened. We got three C's this morning.
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We got confrontation, we've got corrosion, and we've got correction. So let's get to it.
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As we start with confrontation, there is a public confrontation that happens in verse 11. It says,
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We learned last week and the week before that what was going on in Galatia was there was this party of Jews who called themselves the
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Circumcision Party, and that they were reputed to be pillars. And that's because they were in the most powerful and the most notable church of the first age, which was the church in Jerusalem that was pastored by James, the brother of Christ.
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These guys had their bona fides. They were involved with the most powerful church, and they seemingly had access to the inner circle, because they're at all the councils where these big powerful apostles are going.
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And what has happened in this scene as we swing in is that we've seen the theology of James and Peter last week, and that is that they have agreed circumcision is not necessary for salvation.
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And we saw that there was a distinction in the visions and the missions. What was going on was that Peter was on a mission to the circumcised, and that Paul was on a mission to the uncircumcised.
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And this makes people upset, because what we think is that everyone should have the exact same priorities and the exact same preferences that we have, because who knows better than me?
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That is the thought of the human heart, that we are proud, and we are puffed up with ourselves, and we think, if I think it, it must be true, and everyone must agree with me.
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So right away, right at the very beginning of the church, we get a separation.
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Peter is going to stay in Judea with James, and they're going to preach to the circumcised.
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Paul is going to go all across Asia Minor and a lot of Europe, and he's going to preach to the uncircumcised, who in this text, they would have had an office, and that office that the
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Jews would have called the Gentiles, that office they held was sinner. So in this text, when we talk about sinners, as we go through Galatians 2, sinners is not talking about the
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Jews didn't believe that they sinned. The Jews did believe that they sinned, but they believed that the Gentiles held the office of sinner.
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And so what had to happen was, in the Jewish mind, the Gentile who occupied the office of sinner had to leave that office and take on the office of chosen people of God.
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This was a stirring argument. We lose some of it in translation. I think I preached on that a couple of weeks ago.
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We lose in translation the difficulty of this argument for the first century church, because you have to understand that for thousands of years, the way
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God's people were God's people were to be melded into nation -state Israel, to be circumcised, and to eat the same foods that the
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Jews ate, and to do the same things that the Jews did, and to honor the same customs that the Jews honored.
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To stop this way of doing took a direct revelation from Christ, and that's what
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Peter had seen. So what happens is, we have a scene here where there's tables, and Peter has made it his practice in Antioch to eat with the sinners.
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He's eating with the Gentiles, and presumably he's eating the food that the Gentiles are eating, which would not be kosher.
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But then the robed men of the circumcision from the church of James come in, and Peter feels an intense pressure.
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This is a pressure cooker situation. It's easy for us as Gentiles to look at this text and go, man, what's wrong with you,
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Peter? What's your problem? But it's not that simple. Peter had all of the ecclesiastical authority of the church of Jerusalem and this party of people who were at these councils, and they had all joined as one to go put pressure on the
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Gentiles to get circumcised. And Paul sees the danger immediately. So before we get to the confrontation,
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I do want to talk a little bit about hypocrisy. Hypocrisy manifests itself in the church in two ways.
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The most common one that we're familiar with is when people live like vile rebels in their private life and then put on a false face of piety to the public.
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But that's not what Peter's doing here. Peter is engaging in a type of fear of man hypocrisy, where he lives the right beliefs in his private life and then softens them and gets along with the culture in his public life.
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All of us in the church face both of these different types of temptation to hypocrisy. But the one of the fear of man does the most damage when it's the leaders of the church who feel the pressure to live with their right beliefs at home and to soften those beliefs or outright go against them in their public ministry to be winsome and to get along with the culture.
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Winsomeness is not a bad thing until it leaches into hypocrisy. So Paul sees the danger.
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Peter now, it's not a simple matter of which table you sit at. Peter had a custom and now
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Peter feels the pressure of these men and he goes and he forsakes the Gentiles or the quote sinners to sit with the
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Jews and the circumcised so that this party comes in and sees it and this causes a big problem in the church of God in Antioch.
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And what Paul does is something that is so incredibly rare that none of us have probably ever seen in our life.
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He talks about it publicly. He asks Peter, what are you doing?
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Why are you doing this? Why are you putting this heavy burden on the Gentiles when you who are a
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Jew have lived like a Gentile? Why should the Gentiles live like Jews? It's a good question and it gets right to the heart of the matter and it cuts to an idea that goes throughout scripture.
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This idea of hypocrisy and people in power getting up their righteous robes to influence others.
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It made me think and study of the story in 1st Samuel 12 about when Nathan comes to David after David has been in the sin with Bathsheba and he's murdered
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Uriah and Nathan comes to him and he tells him a story. He tells him the story of a precious lamb and he talks about a rich man who took that lamb from the poor man and David bristles with anger.
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David bristles with anger and he says that rich man should have to pay you know seven times.
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He should have to pay so much more than what he's worth. And what Nathan does is he does just what
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Paul did, right? 1st Samuel 12 verse 7 says, Nathan said to David, you are the man.
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Thus says Yahweh the God of Israel. It is I who appointed you king over Israel and it is
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I who delivered you from the hand of Saul. It goes on verse 12, indeed you did it secretly but I will do this thing before all
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Israel and before the sun. Hypocrisy in leadership of the church is going to be dragged out in public.
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It's a matter of time and the reason why is because God is not going to allow his bride to be blemished and sullied by his people.
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He is going to drag it out in the public. He is going to condemn it. What was done in secret up to this point, look what we saw last week.
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There was these meetings, right? Paul went for a time and there was these meetings with the circumcision and with Cephas and with James and these councils and Paul said that he went to these meetings privately because he didn't want to have run the race in vain.
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In other words, he wanted this argument to be taken care of behind closed doors so that there would not be confusion and disrepute to the gospel and that would have been well and good if Peter had stuck to the plan because once Peter leaves the closed meeting, he starts acting like he was in the first place and this brings about the public refutation, which is really the power of this chapter, is what
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Paul has done and this is important. Why does public refutation, why does public confrontation have to happen when a leader of the church distorts the gospel?
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Well, church history didn't like Paul very much. In fact, if you read a lot of the church fathers, even the likes of Julian, Jerome, and Erasmus, if you've done any church history, these guys are big guys, right?
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Erasmus particularly gave us much of the translation that we enjoy of the Bible today.
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He was a great scholar, but those people, those church fathers looked at this story and they said, man, Paul must have been really puffed up with pride.
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Luther is very helpful though. In Luther's commentary, Luther shows us rightly that it's not the man that Paul is accosting, it is the object and the idea.
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The public confrontation is because Peter's position of authority gives greater danger to his actions because the gospel is overall.
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Remember back what we've looked at in chapter one. The gospel did not come from man. It was never devised by man.
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It was not a creation of man. The gospel was given to man directly by God, direct revelation.
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Paul was taken into Arabia and he learned the gospel. He was not taught it by the other apostles, and when
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Peter comes in as an apostle and acts this way, it brings great danger into the church.
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The position of Peter puts him in hierarchy, and Paul is in a difficult position here because all of the hierarchy in this story turns against Paul.
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Barnabas, who's Paul's right -hand man for the last 14 years at least, turns and he's wavering because Peter, you have to understand,
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Peter was the best friend of Christ. Peter walked with Jesus in his earthly ministry and Paul had all of the pieces seemingly against him because look at Paul, the
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Jew of Jews who sees Peter, the apostle of apostles, whose confession was the rock on which the existence of the church was built, comes in and he sits with the sinners, and what
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Paul is going to do is defend the sinners. That's what he's going to do.
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And for that, Paul gets looked at in an errant way by a lot of people, but what Paul does here is he shows his direct contradiction.
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You have to look at in the text. Remember what it said in the beginning of chapter two. It said that the enemy sneaks in and tries to work in secret to divide.
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They spy out your freedom that we have in Christ. What Paul does is the exact opposite of an agent of the enemy.
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What he does is he opposes Peter to his face. That's uncharacteristic.
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The agents of Satan in the church have a history of sneaking in, spying out, slandering, making factions, and working in secret to divide the body.
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That's what they do. Agents of Satan like to get in closed room meetings. They like to get in groups, and they always lead with gossip, and they lead with slander, and they try to make one
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Christian distrust the friendship of another Christian. And that's what's going on with the circumcision, and that's what's going on when
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Peter leaves his table from the Gentiles and goes to sit with the cool kids from Judea, is he causes division in the church.
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And the division is simply this. If you want to be one of the cool kids, you better hold to the
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Jewish holiness laws, even though Peter was expressly told opposite of this.
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Don't lose sight of what Paul's doing here. Paul is acting in accordance with what he's already professed.
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This is so linked. When Paul says that the gospel is not of man, that it was given to me by God, he acts in accordance because what
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Paul does here is he casts aside all possible fear of man, and he shows only the fear of God to expose those who would start to try to unravel the work of the church that's going on in Asia Minor.
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These were the Celtic people in Galatia. They were people who are known to be clannish.
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We know today where the Celts end up in Ireland, right? What are they known for? Getting drunk and fighting, right?
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That's what Celts are known for. That's what the Irish people are known for, having red hair and drinking beer and punching each other, okay?
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What's Paul doing here? Paul is trying to unite, and he's trying to unite by showing that there are no heavy burdens of law on those who are saved by Christ.
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It's really simple, and it's easy for us to look at here and go, well, Peter was just a little bit off.
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Why so bold, Paul? Well, here's why. Because Peter in this chapter is squishy, and he's man -fearing, and he puts the very essence of the gospel in danger that could shake the entire confession of the church.
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If you don't believe me, look at Acts 11. Here's what Peter says in verse 16.
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He says, And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he used to say, John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the
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Holy Spirit. Therefore, if God gave to them the same gift as he gave to us also, believing in the
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Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could prevent God's way? And when they heard this, they quieted down and glorified
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God, saying, Well then, God has granted to the Gentiles also the repentance that leads to life.
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That whole discourse in Acts 11 starts with Peter being asked by the circumcision, why are they not getting circumcised?
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And Peter goes into a revelation of God where God showed him a sheet with all of the unclean animals on it, direct revelation, where Peter is told explicitly,
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You can eat the unclean animals now. They've all been made clean in Christ. There is no separation between man and God through the
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God -man Jesus Christ. We no longer come to him by holiness practices because Jesus is our holiness.
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He has imputed all of the righteousness of the law onto us. Does that mean that the law is worthless? No. The law still shows us our need for a
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Savior. The law still restrains evil, and the law still instructs us as Christians in the way to live. But parts of the law have been abrogated, and we know now through Acts 11 that Peter was explicitly told on a difficult matter,
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Eat the pork, man. It's fine. Everybody can eat bacon. Everybody can come in, and it doesn't matter what you eat because what goes inside your body, your body just exits anyway.
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It's not of heavenly importance. This was a big deal to the Jews. A big deal.
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But what Peter does is when he gets this pressure, he sees, I was sitting with the sinners. I was eating their food.
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I was living in the freedom that Christ has given me explicitly by direct revelation. And now when I see this party of religious high rollers who come in with all the power of the church of Jerusalem behind them, and they come in and they say,
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Hmm, looks like Peter is forsaking all the way of his people and eating with these sinners.
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What does Peter do? He questions God, and he says, just like the serpent hath God really said.
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Don't miss the gravity of what's happened in this scenario. Peter is questioning and ultimately denying the very word of God given to him through direct revelation.
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This is no small matter. This is high -handed sin. Peter had already heard.
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He didn't need further revelation. These councils that were happening in Judea and Jerusalem, these councils about the
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Judaizers, God had already spoken. It was just about getting all the leadership on board to make it public so that we no longer had the dividing wall of hostility between the
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Jews and Gentiles. Do you know, do you know, oh man, that what God has torn down, we constantly try to build back up in our pride?
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Did you know that in Christ there is no separation between us? Did you know that?
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Did you know there is no wall of hostility between any of us because Christ is our righteousness?
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Because we all have the same spirit, we all have the same Bible, and we all have the same baptism. Just as David of old had applied unequal weights and unequal measures in Nathan's parable, so it is
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Peter has judged the Gentiles to be less holy in the presence of the circumcision party for his own selfish ends.
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This action is an abomination to the Lord. Deuteronomy 117, you shall not show partiality in judgment.
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You shall hear the small and the great alike. You shall not fear man, for the judgment is God's. The case that is too hard for you, you shall bring to me and I will hear it.
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Proverbs 20 10, differing weights and differing measures, both of them are an abomination to Yahweh. Galatians 2 6, but from those who are of high reputation, what they were makes no difference to me.
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God chose no partiality, while those who are of reputation contributed nothing to me. God is the same
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God in Deuteronomy and through the pen of Solomon and the Proverbs and through the pen of Paul and Galatians.
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God hates unequal weights and equal measures. God hates partiality. God hates us looking down on some in the body of Christ to not be cool enough for us to hang out with or for them to be a little rough around the edges and they make me feel a little bit uncomfortable because I've been in the church since I was born and my language can be really polished up and what
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I can do is I can give a really good impression of a really holy Christian while somebody else who maybe is new to the faith, they make me feel a little uncomfortable with the biblical things they say that are a little bit off and in my reformed fire
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I go, man, I don't want to sit at the table with you, you kind of annoy me. And what
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Paul says is, what are you doing? Stop it. It's interesting what he says. He says that Peter stood condemned.
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Why did Peter stand condemned? Well, it's because there were witnesses assembled against him already.
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There was the theology of James already fleshed out in the last week's sermon.
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There was the theology of Peter himself already fleshed out in last week's sermon. Peter knew this was wrong and he stood condemned because his actions were inexcusable.
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Peter stood condemned because he had forgotten the power of the very gospel that he was a preacher of.
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Peter stood condemned because he wanted to limit the gospel to the people that he thought were more worthy, which were the
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Jews who were the cool kids of first age Christianity and he didn't like the dirty
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Celts, the Galatians having the same message and eating their bacon. He didn't enjoy that or he didn't want to enjoy it publicly.
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Public confrontations have to come about when a person in authority errs publicly in such a way as to blur or pollute
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God's truth. They trouble the sheep with their error and their partiality. Today we have excesses all over the place that show this same need for public confrontation.
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There's the prosperity gospel, there's critical race theory, there's LGBT inclusiveness, there's fundamentalist legalism, there is publicly fractious and divisive behavior, there's false witness, and there's many more actions in the church that are on full display and in full view of the
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American church. Why is it any wonder when asked why 19 -year -olds say, it's because of hypocrisy, man.
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I don't want to go, they're all a bunch of hypocrites. Now look, they are talking about the bride of Christ and they will need to repent for their blasphemy.
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However, we within the church, we need to answer some not so difficult questions so that we would not be hypocrites in our world.
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Not difficult questions. Here's one. Can women be pastors? No. Can works save you?
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No. Is sexual immorality an acceptable part of Christianity? No. Is it acceptable to lie publicly?
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We act like we need to write a book to learn these simple truths. Is it okay for leaders to act like hypocrites in full view of the church?
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It's not. Are we okay with dividing the church of the living God like a pizza based on the racial makeup of our congregation?
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Can pastors heap heavy burdens on families and individuals based on their own preferences? We need people of courage, and I'm giving you as a congregation,
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I want to tell you this. We need to be a people here who hold those in authority to account using scripture as our guide.
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You're not going outside of your station if you see me acting like a hypocrite. You're not going outside of your station if you see me in sin.
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Take it to your brother. Take it to me. And if I'm rebellious in that, bring somebody else.
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And if it becomes high -handed sin, you need to bring it in front of the church, and that's going to be awkward. And you know what?
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If I won't repent publicly, then I need to be cast down out of this position of authority.
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We're not talking here about nuanced theological disagreements. Instead, we're talking about man -pleasing, or we're teaching about fearing the teaching that condemns the listener as well as the speaker.
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It's very easy for me to come in here and talk about the prosperity gospel. It's going to get a little bit more uncomfortable when we talk about our women gosping or our men looking at pornography.
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It gets a little more difficult. The pastor starts to make you a little bit angry, but you can see the pressure.
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It's a pressure that we fall into every day to know our people and to all get together and to knock down the idols that we all love to knock down, but never attack the ones that are running rampant within our own lives.
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And as pastors, we have to think about our own congregation, and that's what Peter was not doing in Antioch.
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He was furthering the divide by what he did, and he was causing trouble.
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So here we go. Point one. I always do that. Number one, confrontation. We knew that was going to get there, right?
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Point number two, corrosion. Hypocrisy corrodes the unity of the body. Look at it in verse 12 and 13.
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For prior to the coming of certain men from James, he used to eat with all the Gentiles, but when they came, he began to shrink back and separate himself, fearing the party of the circumcision.
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And the rest of the Jews joined him in hypocrisy, with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy.
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We've already talked about how hypocrisy can be driven by two instincts. The love of sin and wanting to keep it private so that we put a good public face on, or the love of man's approval so that we live with good beliefs and then we present more culturally acceptable beliefs in public.
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Either way, it's going to disrupt the fellowship, because what hypocrisy does is it corrodes the body of Christ.
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The reason people leave the church citing hypocrisy is because there is no unity when people are not being true.
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We have unity around truth. Unity does not mean we agree on every single thing. What unity does mean is that we agree wholeheartedly on the things that we must agree about.
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We must agree on the centrality of the gospel. We must agree on the inerrancy of the word.
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We must agree that the dividing walls of hostility have been torn down between us as brothers and sisters.
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We must agree that there is no partiality with God. We must agree on these things, and if we don't, there can be no unity.
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But when it comes down the trail, there's a lot of things that we can have disagreement about and be charitable with each other and still love each other and have disagreement.
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You do not have to accept my position on political action for what we should do with abortion in America.
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You don't have to. I would love to argue my case, I would love to hear yours, and I would love to shake your hand and hug and for us to still be brothers within the same congregation, because this is not an issue that we must agree on.
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I'll tell you what we must agree on, that abortion needs to be stopped. That's what we must agree on, but there's different tactics and there's different ideas for how we do things.
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Hypocrisy is always going to cause the corrosion. Peter here, look at what his hypocrisy was.
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This is why it's so high -handed. It's because Peter's hypocrisy was actually against what God had directly told him.
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But our hypocrisy, we don't have much excuse, because our hypocrisy is acting in a way that we know we should be doing something different based on what
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God has said. And these are generally not seventh -degree difficult NIDA MDiv to figure out kinds of things that we want to hide.
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Do you know that looking at pornography is sinful? Are you telling everybody that you're doing it?
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Then you're a hypocrite. See what I'm saying? Do you know that out of the same mouth should not come blessings and curses?
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And yet, if we curse when we're out with people that it's acceptable to curse with, and then we talk like the the silver tongue of Spurgeon himself whenever we're around people in the body, we are hypocrites.
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And we know we're hypocrites. He couldn't claim ignorance, and neither can you.
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Peter knew what he was doing. He had all the potential of tearing this church apart. And what he was doing was that he was siding with the powerful to throw a heavy burden on the weak.
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Isn't it so? That's what we always do. We like to side with the people that we think can give us accolades, and give us credit, and give us power, and give us praise.
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And we do that to the downtrodden, and we stomp them down, and we show partiality because they don't have the golden ring they can give us, and they don't have the degrees that they can give us.
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And we accept their sin while we go on with our own hypocrisy. I want to show you here the danger.
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Don't miss it with Barnabas. It would have been hard to choose between Peter and Paul here.
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We like to sit here, and we like to say, man, what was Peter thinking about?
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Why would Barnabas do that? But we don't understand the pressure. And friends, I'm going to tell you, when you're in a situation where the strong and the powerful have a unified message to you, you are going to feel tremendous pressure to go with them no matter what the truth is.
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You're going to feel it, and if you give in, you are a hypocrite.
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And it corrodes the body of Christ, and it corrodes unity. And that's what Barnabas did.
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Barnabas was Paul's right -hand man. Barnabas was there from the very start.
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When Ananias introduced Paul to the people that he was going to be in ministry with, you remember who
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Ananias introduced Paul to? Barnabas. Barnabas' name meant encouragement.
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But what Barnabas does here is he takes the wrong side, and the reason why is because he perceives the power to be greater on the side of the circumcision than on the side of sinners.
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And so he goes that way. Hypocrisy has long been used as a hammer by the lost against the gospel, because we in the church, we constantly try to overthrow
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Christian liberty. We think that, hey, God says don't commit adultery, so we want to build fences five degrees closer, and now it says
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God says you can't watch PG movies. We live in this world. That's an extreme example, but we see it all the time.
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We gossip under the guise of prayer requests, right? We slander under the guise of I'm really concerned about my brother here, and then we open our mouth and let loose the bilge of slander and gossip, and we try to destroy each other.
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And what's going on there? The reason we're doing that is so that we might increase while he fades away. Always.
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Look at the love that Paul had for Peter in this engagement. I want you to see it.
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If Paul had allowed this to slide, the false teachers would have been given a great gift in their mission to distort the gospel, and Peter would have been compromised and allowed to persist in an old way that had plagued him for many years.
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Let's pick it up in Luke 22 verse 54. It says,
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Now having arrested him, that means Jesus, they led him away and brought him to the house of the high priest, but Peter was following at a distance.
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And after they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and had sat down together, Peter was sitting among them. And a servant girl, seeing him as he sat in the firelight and looking intently at him, said,
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This man was with him too. But he denied it, saying, Woman, I do not know him. A little later another saw him and said,
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You are one of them too. But Peter said, Man, I am not. And after about an hour had passed, another man began to insist, saying,
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Certainly this man was with him too, for he also is a Galilean. But Peter said,
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Man, I do not know what you are talking about. Immediately, while he was still speaking, a rooster crowed.
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And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had told him,
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Before a rooster crows today, you will deny me three times. And he went out and cried bitterly. Do you see that Peter, when
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Jesus on the beach at the end of John, came to Peter and he said, Peter, do you love me?
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And Peter said, I love you. And he said, Feed my lambs. He said, Peter, do you love me?
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Peter said, I love you. Feed my sheep. He looked at him a third time.
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He said, Peter, do you love me? I think at that point, Peter was so hard -headed that he finally understood what was going on.
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And Peter said, Lord, you know that I love you. Do you see what
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Peter slid into here? It's the old pattern. I guarantee you that Peter left the beach that day with Christ, thinking,
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I will never deny him again. I will never. Can you imagine the conviction he felt that day?
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The Lord, when the Lord looked at him and pierced his heart. And yet, here we go.
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This is a pattern of sin. And what Paul does is Paul loves Peter enough to bring it out in the open and to bring it harshly.
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So that what happens is Peter gets to look one more time and he sees, I'm condemned.
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I've been a hypocrite. Is Peter removed from apostleship? No. Peter wrote the words that we read in the call to worship today.
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Peter wrote a treatise in first Peter about how we shouldn't worry about what evil men say of us. Because as long as we're beyond reproach with Christ, then it doesn't matter.
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And we have an example to look to because Christ suffered the reproach of evil men. And yet he did not sin.
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And not only did he not sin, he saved all of us. That's Peter who wrote that. Can we trust what
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Peter wrote? Yes. Because God uses imperfect people and weak people who are hypocrites and he still uses us to his glory.
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So we know now if hypocrisy causes corrosion, how do we avoid it? Well, I've got a few things here for us.
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Number one, we need to hold leaders accountable to the Word of God. Leaders have the most power to disrupt families and to harm the testimony of the church.
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Every time a leader goes down with an immoral failing, it shakes people's faith and people leave the church.
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It scatters. Jesus said, if you strike the shepherd, the sheep will gather and the wolf will devour them.
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Leaders are going to be tempted to try to please powerful factions. They're going to be tempted to love money.
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And we're going to be tempted to protect our own status as those in authority. We need to be held accountable by each other, but also by you.
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Number two, we need to keep our list short. We have to confess our sins constantly.
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We need to make war with sin and we build our relationships in honesty. If we are afraid to lose our friendships, then we will be open to hypocrisy.
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We cannot fake holiness while we watch pornography. We cannot sing praises to God while gosping and cursing our sisters.
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We cannot be a lion of the faith behind closed doors and a cultural chameleon in public.
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Third, our objective standard is the Word of God. Peter forgets direct revelation in his temptation to please man.
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We have to know our propensities and we have to surround ourselves with those who will call them out. One of my personal propensities is to please man with diplomacy so that I will not lose relationships.
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I value my relationships. I love my friends and they're important to me, but it's critical that I have people in my life who will constantly identify my fear of man in this way.
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I do not want to walk in the old paths to my ruin where I keep my mouth shut because I don't want to lose the friend.
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I've struggled with that my whole life and now you know. Now you know.
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So you can see it in me and call it out. Man, Paul had love for Peter.
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What Paul did was he carried out the admonition in Jude that we would snatch someone from the fire.
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What Paul does is he snatches Peter from the disastrous sinfulness that could cause Peter earlier to deny his
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Lord and would cause him now to break up the Lord's church. Number three, last one, correction.
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Seems like we've been there, but I think there's some things for us to see in this.
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Correction of bad leadership is vital to church health. Vital. Cannot have church health if you have sick elders.
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Verse 14, but when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of gospel, I said to Cephas before everyone, if you being a
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Jew live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? Leaders do not get the benefit of private correction when their actions are a threat to the church.
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We have a balancing principle here. First Timothy 5 19 and 20 says this, do not receive an accusation against an elder except on the basis of two or three witnesses.
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Those who continue in sin reprove in the presence of all so that the rest also will be fearful.
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This is clearly court language in first Timothy. This is not talking about the normal sins that affect all
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Christians. We have to have our category straight. If you see me sin, come and tell me.
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If I sin against you, come and tell me. And if I don't repent, then bring somebody else.
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That's Matthew 18. However, as officers of the church, if we sin in such a way that it's a court case sin, we know what those are.
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Adultery, malfeasance with money, bearing false witness, slandering others in the body, causing division, being bullheaded and proud, and doing the thing where we won't listen to anyone and we bulldoze over you.
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When you see that stuff happening, friends, you're going to have to find your courage and you're going to have to come into a meeting with the body and you're going to have to accuse us publicly.
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And you need to have your two or three, and we're going to have a trial. And if we stand condemned like Peter did, then we have one way, and that way is repentance and forgiveness.
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And depending on the sin, if the elder repents and asks forgiveness, they may not be disqualified.
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It depends on the crime. It depends on the crime. We do not get to solve our differences and pursue holiness behind closed doors with the body not knowing anything that's going on.
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That's a recipe for disaster. That's why Paul calls out Peter in front of the whole congregation. Paul spent the beginning of his letter laying out the witnesses for this event.
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They were Barnabas, Titus, James, John, and Peter himself. When Paul calls out
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Peter publicly, this is not a haphazard thing that he's done. He has established his case beforehand.
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Titus was not required to be circumcised. Barnabas has been there for the whole mission with Paul of the gospel.
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James and Cephas himself and John all agreed that circumcision was not necessary for the
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Gentiles to be saved. The witnesses are lined up. Paul had already assured. He said, I assure you before God that I'm not lying.
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And he says in Galatians 2 .9 that James, Cephas, and John had given the right hand of fellowship to him and Barnabas.
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So what Paul is preaching is something that they had agreed to. He's holding them to their own standard.
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We have to correct bad leadership because the fear of man leads leaders to be a twisted pretzel.
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And that makes people be silent about their convictions due to cowardice. And this has devastated the church in America.
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Devastated it. Is that we're afraid to use the word of God as our standard and to call out the bad behavior.
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See, Peter was afraid to stand up to those who destroyed the gospel. Not because Peter had wrong beliefs, but it's because he was coward in this instance.
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I don't think we have a lot of wrong beliefs. I've hopefully presented that to you that the standard is simple on most of these matters.
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We're not supposed to lie. We're not supposed to be arrogant. We're not supposed to steal money. We're not supposed to gossip and be sexually immoral.
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We're not to do these things. When you see it being done, we have to call it out. We are living in a delusional time.
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Delusional. And the church has not been resistant to the delusion. We have hypocrisy running amok.
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We have leaders who will nuance the social issues of the day publicly. Why do we have abortion in America?
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The reason is this office right here. The reason is this office.
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Pastors will call it murder while doing nothing out in the world.
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And I see the people who endure the insults of the world who go and stand for the pre -born, and it's to my shame.
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It's this office. Abortion ravages our land because we've lost the pulpit, and that's because we have hypocritical men who are afraid to have their examined by going out too far on a limb.
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We will acquiesce to love is love. We will be soft on fornication. When's the last time you heard a rip -roaring sermon about how you shouldn't shack up together because it's an abomination to living
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God? Why? Because in the typical church in America, there is a large amount of people who are fornicating, and pastors are afraid of losing their people.
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You don't hear it. We don't talk about covetousness. We don't talk about envy. We don't talk about worldliness and the things that we like to take in in our entertainment.
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We acquiesce to my truth in the name of being seeker -sensitive. What this does is obscure the need for a
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Savior who comforts those who are enslaved to these desires and loves.
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We also have many men in the pulpit who will drill deep into dividing the body on some of these issues.
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Listen to them. Here we go. Eschatology. Classical theology versus presuppositional apologetics.
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Calvinism versus Arminianism. Cessationism versus continuationism versus charismatic versus hypercharismatic.
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Dispensationalism versus covenant theology versus new covenant theology versus extreme two kingdoms, two kingdoms, one kingdom, radical two kingdoms.
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Christian nationalism versus liberal pluralism and on and on and on. And if you don't know what
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I'm talking about there, then welcome to the theological minefield of Reformed churches. We in this camp have no idea what time it is outside.
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Everyone who claims the name of Christ and holds to following his commands will find themselves in the bullseye of a culture who loves evil and hates good.
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We have to put theological disagreements in the right place. We've got to put them in a context while we work with believers who place their faith in Christ and love him and encourage each other in this work.
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I don't care if you're Thomist, and I don't think any of you even know what that means except Brady if he was listening to me.
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I'm not going to divide the body over that. We can sometimes swing the other way and minimize the importance of theology.
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Theology is important. Theology matters. But instead of loving our brothers enough to debate, listen, and correct them, we often just want to go straight away to separation, fundamentalism, get out of my church, get out of my camp.
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If you question me, you're gone. I don't want to hear it. I know it. You don't. Why don't you get the degree and read the big boy books so that you can come into my domain and sit at this holy table with me while we laugh at those
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Assembly of God sinners over there who believe that the Spirit can show them signed gifts while they probably haven't even read
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Bavick. It makes me sick. Look, I love theology, and I want to teach you guys theology, but at the same time we have to understand, did you know that the enemies of God are united and the enemies of God couldn't care less whether we're
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Calvinist or Arminian? They don't care. What they care is we have faith in Christ, and that exposes their sin because Jesus said himself in John 3 that those who are in the dark love the dark, but those who are in the light expose the deeds that are done in the dark, and that's why the world's going to hate us.
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We can't be hypocrites, and we have to have relationships that stand the scrutiny of holding each other to that task.
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If you see a sin, call it out gently, and if you're caught in your sin, repent.
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Did you know that repentance is sweet? Did you know that the water of forgiveness in Christ is some of the sweetest taste that he gives us?
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Because it doesn't depend on us. It's all been done in him. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, it's a heavy passage,
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Lord, where we can get distracted by the personalities, and we can think, who was right?
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Paul, Barnabas, Peter, but we know from your word, Lord, that you love your people, and that Peter, who denied you three times, and who then, through his fear of man, threatened to divide the church at Antioch, Lord, that you used him to write letters to the same people dispersed throughout
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Asia Minor, telling them to hold strong to the gospel, that they are priests, that they are living stones, that they should not fear reproach from sinful man.
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Lord, that man, Lord, we know that it's David, who although he sinned greatly,
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Lord, he had a heart that loved you, and he depended on you. And so, Lord, we know this morning that we come up with all kinds of schemes to make ourselves feel self -righteous, that we come up with all kinds of stories that minimize our sin and maximize our perceived holiness.
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Lord, would you cleanse us of that? Would you make us a lowly people who understand that all of the power that we might have is your power and yours alone?
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Lord, that we have no way to make atonement for sin, but that you made a way. And Lord, I would pray specifically that here at CBC that we would be a congregation that has no tolerance for hypocrisy,
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Lord, that we would be a bold people who love each other enough to not let each other walk in sin, but Lord, that you would use in us the means that you've given through your church, that you would sanctify us through the
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Holy Spirit and through the encouragement of the saints that we would be changed from one degree to another into the holiness of Christ.
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Lord, that sanctification is working out what you've already done. You've changed us. You've made us new men.