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Rev. Res Spears
Galatians: Be FREE! • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Last week, I told you how much I enjoy taking unplanned detours on road trips. Twenty years ago, Annette and I took a six-week tour of the United States where that was our whole strategy. Well, it was MY whole strategy, at least, and I was the one driving.
What I might have whitewashed a bit in my account, however, was Annette’s limited patience with this strategy. She likes to know where we’re going, how we’re getting there, and when we’re expecting to arrive.
As I mentioned last week, one of the only things we’d planned on that trip was to follow the old Route 66 as closely as we could from St. Louis, west.
We had an early GPS (our flip phones didn’t have Google Maps). We had a book describing the route. And we had a road atlas.
So, somehow, we found ourselves one afternoon on an unmarked two-lane road that looked like a farm road. It WAS paved, but , judging from how broken the pavement was, probably not since 1930.
And Annette was getting antsy.
“This is the road,” I said. “This is where the map says to go.” And then, we saw a faded Route 66 badge painted on the road in front of us. “See, honey?” I said. “Right where we’re supposed to be.”
But as the road narrowed and the pavement was replaced by gravel, she’d finally had enough.
“Let’s turn around and get back on the main road,” she said. It wasn’t a request.
So, we did. And so, we shall today, leave all the detours and rabbit trails of the past eight or nine weeks and return to the main road through Paul’s letter to the Galatian church.
You’ve been gracious about the detour, but it’s time to get back on the road before someone reports an unknown church wandering around in their back 40.
When we paused this study, we’d just completed chapter 4, which concluded the doctrinal section of this letter.
In the last couple of chapters, Paul gives some practical applications about how to live as followers of Jesus in light of the freedom we have in Him.
Jesus-followers, he’ll tell us, must learn to live in our freedom without using liberty as an excuse to live without license.
But first, he spends a few transitional verses giving a review of what he’s said in the doctrinal part of this letter. Which is good for us, as it’s been a while since we paused our study of Galatians.
Let’s read today’s passage together. We’ll begin with verse 1 of chapter 5.
1 It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.
2 Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you.
3 And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the whole Law.
4 You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.
5 For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness.
6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love.
Now, remember that the main point of this letter from Paul to the Galatian churches was to remind them of the freedom we have in Christ Jesus. We’ve been set free, first and foremost, from the shackles of sin.
And, though it’s often overlooked, we’ve also been freed from the burden of trying to justify ourselves before God. The impossible burden of self-righteousness, of relying on our own goodness for salvation, has been lifted from us.
That’s what circumcision and the rest of the Mosaic Law had become for the Jews of Jesus’ time, especially for the religious leaders. They saw the Law as a way to prove to God that they were worthy of His kingdom and His love.
Even the Law, which God had given the people of Israel in His grace and mercy, had become something of a prison to them because of their wrong attitudes about it. Jesus had said the same thing about the Pharisees during His ministry on earth.
So, when Paul talks about the “yoke of slavery” in verse 1, he’s primarily talking about slavery to the Mosaic Law.
Remember, the Mosaic Law wasn’t given as a means to salvation. Rather, God gave the people of Israel the Law to them to help them understand how to live holy lives in response to His having chosen them as His people.
The Law would teach them to live lives set apart for service to the God who is HIMSELF set apart from all the earthly systems and priorities and yet dwelt among them in the tabernacle and then in Jerusalem’s temple.
The Mosaic Law also served to show the people their great lack of righteousness compared to the righteousness of the God who’d made them in His own image. Compared to the God who’d made them to reflect His perfect righteousness, His perfect holiness, His perfect justice, His perfect truth.
But the Mosaic Law couldn’t save anyone. It had only the power to condemn, to remind the people that their unrighteousness — their sin — had separated them from the fellowship with God for which they’d been created.
In that sense, the people were slaves to the law — prisoners of it. The Law held them in condemnation without offering any means of escape, without offering redemption and salvation.
Even the sacrifices the Law required provided only temporary atonement for sins. Each new sin required a new sacrifice.
This was a heavy burden for the people, a yoke of slavery. And the point they were intended to understand was that their works — their obedience to the Law in this case — shouldn’t be seen as a means to salvation.
Rather, obedience should be the loving response of a people who’d been saved through faith in the God who’d saved them and loved them.
Saved by their trust in God and His promises — including the promise of a Savior-Messiah who would redeem them and release them from their slavery to sin and the Law.
Now, remember what was going on in Galatia at the time that caused Paul to write this letter to the churches he’d planted there.
Soon after he and Barnabas had left this region of what’s now western Turkey, a group of Jews from Jerusalem had visited those mostly Gentile churches. These so-called Judaizers had challenged the one true gospel that Paul had preached.
They claimed that Christianity was simply a new flavor of Judaism.
Faith in Jesus was good, they said. But that faith wasn’t sufficient to bring salvation unless it was accompanied by obedience to the Mosaic Law, especially as it pertained to circumcision, dietary restrictions, and the Jewish feasts.
But the Law was never intended as a means of earning God’s favor. Grace isn’t earned; wages are earned. And Paul tells us elsewhere that the wage we earn as sinners is death — physical and spiritual.
Grace, however, is freely given to those who don’t deserve it by the one who freely and sovereignly chooses to bestow it.
Grace steps in and says, “You can’t do anything to save yourself; you can’t do anything to bring life out of your spiritual deadness. So, I have done the work for you through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. HE will make you righteous. HE will give you salvation. HE will bring life to your dry bones. HE will take your unresponsive heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh that can now respond to Me in faith, in love, and in obedience.”
Furthermore, the Law was never meant to be the permanent state for the Jewish people. It was like a pedagogue.
It was a harsh schoolmaster charged with keeping the people of Israel out of trouble. But also charged with pointing them to the freedom available through faith in God and preparing them to live in that freedom.
So, for the Galatians to fall prey to the Judaizers’ false gospel — that they needed to follow the Mosaic Law to be truly saved — was something Paul couldn’t understand and wouldn’t allow to go uncorrected.
It would put them right back into the shackles that had been removed when they’d turned to Jesus in faith that He is the Son of God and that He alone brings reconciliation with God.
Indeed, Paul makes the point in the next couple of verses that turning back to self-righteousness — the attempt to justify ourSELVES before God — doesn’t just keep people from being saved by the one, true gospel of salvation by grace through faith.
It also keeps those who’ve already accepted the good news of Jesus Christ from God’s purpose for us, which is to conform us to the image of Jesus — to make us more like Him in our values, our priorities, and our actions.
Look at verse 2:
2 Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you.
The point here isn’t that circumcised people can’t be saved. What Paul’s saying here is that we choose to put our faith in salvation either in Jesus or anything else.
Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, but by Me.” That’s exclusive language.
And what it means is this: Your good works won’t save you. Your bank account won’t save you. Your church attendance won’t save you. Only your trust that Jesus is who He said He is and will do what He said He will do can save you.
And if you’re splitting your faith between Jesus and something else, then you’re not really trusting in HIM.
From a larger perspective, Paul’s argument here means that we’ve got to stop trying to get God to love us more. He loves you just the way He’s always loved you, just the way He WILL always love you.
There’s nothing you can do to make God love you any less. And there’s nothing you can do to make Him love you any more.
I’d like to think that all followers of Jesus desire a greater and more intimate experience of His love each day. But must be vigilant not to allow that appropriate desire to make us think we can somehow earn His love. Or lose it, for that matter.
“We are always in danger of thinking we ought to be doing something, instead of going to Christ, in faith, and saying, I can do nothing, work Thou in me.” [Andrew Murray, The Spiritual Life (Chicago: Tupper & Robertson, 1896), 111.]
And the way God works in us is through Word and Spirit. “Draw near to God, and He’ll draw near to you,” James, the half-brother of Jesus, says in his New Testament letter.
In other words, as believers embrace God’s Word and submit to His Spirit within us, we experience His love in an increasingly greater way.
And that changes us, making us more righteous, making us more compassionate, making us more loving and kind, making us more and more like Jesus.
But this doesn’t happen because we buckle down and do hard work. It happens because of the Spirit’s transformational work within us. Look at verse 3.
3 And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the whole Law.
Don’t forget, Paul says here, the people of Israel weren’t given the latitude to choose which of the 600-plus commands of the Mosaic Law they kept. Breaking one of the commandments was tantamount to breaking them all. They’d come as a package deal.
Otherwise, people could say, “Well, I murdered that guy that one time, but I’ve kept all the other laws, so I’m good.”
Or, as King David might’ve been thinking one evening, “I know God commanded us not to covet and not to commit adultery, but Bathsheba’s looking mighty fine down there on her rooftop, and Uriah’s off at war. I’ve written lots of psalms praising God, so I’m sure He’ll look the other way.”
No, that’s the same mistake Adam and Eve made in the Garden of Eden. They wanted to be able to decide for themselves what was good and what was evil. And they believed the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would give them the right to do so.
But that’s a right that only God has, because He alone has perfect wisdom, perfect righteousness, perfect wisdom, and perfect love.
He created us, and therefore, we belong to Him. He alone has the right to set the conditions for our relationship with Him.
And the sole condition He gives is this: That we trust Him. That we trust that He’s good, that He desires fellowship with us and that the things He’s withheld from us are things He knows would destroy us — temporally and in eternity.
And that’s what’s at stake in Galatia. Look at verse 4.
4 You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.
By seeking to be justified — to be declared righteous — before God through obedience to the Law, rather than by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, some of the Galatians had become “severed from Christ,” as the NASB puts it.
Now, the Greek word that’s translated as “severed” here is katargeō. It means “to cause a person or thing to have no further efficiency.” And the word translated as “fallen” means to drift off course.
Paul’s not saying that the believers who’ve submitted to circumcision because of the Judaizers’ false teaching have lost their salvation.
What he’s saying is that as long as they continue to place their faith in anything but Jesus, they won’t experience the fullness of fellowship with Him.
They won’t reap the full benefits of the Holy Spirit’s work to make them more like Jesus. They’ll never become what God made them to be.
That’s what I’ve been getting at during the past few weeks as we’ve talked about surrendering our hearts and our lives completely to Jesus.
Divided loyalties don’t make us more like Jesus. Being devoted to Him above all other things and submitting ourselves to the work of the Holy Spirit within us causes us to become more like Jesus.
“One of the tragedies of legalism is that it gives the appearance of spiritual maturity when, in reality, it leads the believer back into a ‘second childhood’ of Christian experience.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Ga 5:1.]
But Paul wanted the Galatians to be mature believers, so he gives them an example of how that looks in verse 5.
5 For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness.
The Galatians who’d been led astray by the Judaizers were essentially working for their salvation. They were taking upon themselves the yoke of the Mosaic Law in an attempt to earn God’s favor.
By contrast, Paul says in verse 5, we who’ve placed our trust for salvation completely in Jesus understand that we bring nothing to the table of righteousness.
Even our obedience is only ever partial, it’s often delayed, and sometimes it’s given for all the wrong reasons. That’s why Paul, quoting King David, could say elsewhere, “There is none righteous, no not one.”
We’re all sinners. Each one of us has failed, in small ways and large ways, to reflect the righteous character of the God who made us in His image.
Each one of us has, at some point in life, been selfish, uncompassionate, self-involved, or unforgiving. That’s sin.
Sin has put us in a box, and the Law simply shows us we’re condemned inside that box. It doesn’t offer a way out.
But when Jesus came, He lived the sinless life of perfect obedience to God that we’ve been unable to live. And then, at the cross, He took upon Himself your sins and mine — as well as the just punishment for these acts of rebellion against God.
And He did this so that all who place their faith for salvation in Him alone can be saved and have eternal life — everlasting life in the presence of and in fellowship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And so, Christ-followers no longer try to work for their salvation. All the work that was needed was done by Jesus at the cross and the empty tomb.
Instead, we wait. As Paul says it here, through the work of the indwelling Holy Spirit, our Comforter and our Peace, we wait in faith — in trust — for the hope — for the confident assurance — of righteousness.
We eagerly and confidently wait for the perfect righteousness of Jesus to be manifest throughout the earth in His righteous reign from His throne in Jerusalem.
And we eagerly await our own perfect righteousness. You see, if you’ve followed Jesus in faith, then God has declared you righteous because of your faith, just as He did with Abraham. He’s imputed the righteousness of Christ to you.
But friends, none of us IS righteous, at least not yet. Every one of us here is still a sinner; we all continue to sin, even me. We all revert to selfishness and lust and anger and covetousness and so many others.
If you’re following Jesus, then the Holy Spirit is working to conform you to His sinless image. But His work will only be complete in heaven, when even the temptation of these things is finally taken away.
Meanwhile, we wait in hope, by faith. Which is what Paul wanted the Galatian Gentiles to do, instead of trying to earn God’s favor by taking on the self-righteousness that Jesus had cursed the Pharisees for.
Remember that the Pharisees were telling people all the things they had to DO to earn God’s favor. And then Jesus comes along and says, “Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”
He’s already done the work; and He says, “Come and rest in Me while you wait for My return. There’s no more need for all that pointless striving to justify yourself. I know who you are, and I died for you, anyway.”
And we can eagerly await the righteousness of Christ with absolute confidence because faith in God as a keeper of promises has always been the way to salvation, all the way back to Abraham. All the way, in fact, back to Adam and Eve.
Look at verse 6.
6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love.
In the end, circumcision or uncircumcision doesn’t matter. Your goodness doesn’t matter Because it can never be good enough to justify you — to make you acceptable — in the eyes of a perfectly holy and perfectly righteous God.
And that’s our problem. We’re all sinners, cut off from who we were made to be because of our rebellion against our Creator, the God of the universe.
And there’s nothing any of us can do — no amount of good deeds, no amount of effort, however well-intentioned — that can restore the relationship that we broke with our sins.
But God loves us. God wants us to have a relationship of complete trust in Him. And He wants to be in fellowship with us.
In the Garden of Eden. In the tabernacle and then the temple in Jerusalem. In the person of His incarnate Son, Jesus. Through the indwelling Holy Spirit. From the beginning, He’s made it clear that He desires to be with us.
So, knowing we couldn’t save ourselves from the just penalty for our rebellion against Him, He sent Jesus to live the life we would not, to pay the price for our sins that we could not. He accepted death on a cross so we could have LIFE.
In His great love for mankind, God gave us His unique and eternal Son so that all who turn to Him in faith can be saved.
We’ll see it more clearly in a couple of weeks, but this transitional passage begins to reveal the application of Paul’s doctrine of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
We’re saved by God’s grace, through faith, working, as Paul says here, through love. Because of God’s love for us, He graciously gave us a way out of the box our sin has trapped us in.
And the way out is through faith in Jesus. Faith that He is who He said He is, the unique and eternal Son of God. Faith that He suffered the penalty for your sins and mine when He took the just punishment each of us deserves for our sins at Calvary.
Faith that God has accepted His Son’s atoning sacrifice at the cross as full payment for the debt our sins created.
And faith that Jesus’ resurrection from the dead proves God can and will keep His promise to likewise raise Jesus’ followers into everlasting fellowship with Him.
In the end, salvation isn’t about what we do. Neither circumcision or uncircumcison matters, as Paul put it in the Galatian context. Salvation is all about what JESUS did by His amazing grace and through His boundless love.
But what He did demands a response from each of us.
For we who’ve already made a profession of faith in Jesus, the question is whether we’ll allow His love, which now dwells within us, to bless the world around us.
Will we, in turn, love the unlovable, just as He loves WE who are unlovable? Will we have compassion for the outcasts, just as He had compassion for we who were outcasts from His kingdom?
Will we show grace to those who don’t deserve it, just as we who don’t deserve it have benefitted from HIS grace?
These aren’t simply rhetorical questions. Look at the headlines of the past week or two for one obvious example.
We’re called to love the foreigners in our midst, whether they’re here legally or illegally. We’re called to love the federal agents who are arresting many of them. We’re called to love the president who’s called for their deportation. And we’re called to love even the deportees who’ve committed even the most terrible crimes here.
Can you do that? How would it look if you did? What prejudices would you have to set aside to do so? What values would need to change in your life for it to happen? What attitudes and priorities would have to change in your life for you to become more like Jesus?
But if you’ve never trusted in Jesus for your salvation, you have a more basic question to answer: Will you trust Him today?
Will you come to the foot of the cross, confess that you’re a sinner and unable to do anything to save yourself, and place your faith in Him and Him alone?
He is ready to pour out His grace and love upon you. He’s waiting to make you the person you were always meant to be, to fill the emptiness that nothing else can fill, to welcome you into the family of God as adopted sons and daughters of the creator of the universe.
What will you do now?
