01-15-12 To Be Honest...

We are going to return to our study of Paul’s letter to the Galatians this morning,

picking up our study with the first 5 verses of the 3^rd chapter.

If you’ve been involved in this study with us during the past few weeks

you know already

that we are seeing Paul speaking with an intensity

that rivals anything else he ever wrote.

This is Paul expressing both a deep concern

and an intense frustration with what he sees happening

in the lives of his Galatian brothers and sisters.

As we have already seen,

he is writing because, in a matter of just a few months following their discovery

of the grace and freedom freely offered to them by God

simply because they believed Christ’s death had removed their sins from them forever,

these young Christians

had returned to a belief system

in which they once again believed that their relationship with God

and their acceptance by Him

depended upon their ability to perform for God

at a level that then made them acceptable to Him.

If you’re sufficiently good

God will accept and love you,

and if you’re not

He’ll toss you aside and kick you out of His family.

And the underlying message in this twisted thinking

was first of all the utterly absurd assumption

that any human being could ever offer God a level of performance

that would allow that person to stand accepted before God on the basis of that performance,

and second, the assumption that what God was really after,

what He was trying to accomplish in their lives

was to shape them up,

to get them to behave better.

It’s so very hard, sometimes,

for our Lord to find ways around

the lies we believe about Him.

I have been fascinated to see the skill with which

He has sometimes accomplished this in my life.

Frequently He needs to find a back door to my mind,

some way of sneaking the truth in

when I’m not expecting it,

when the protective layers of lies I believe about Him

are not on guard

because I don’t recognize that I’m actually discovering something about Him

until the truth has already made it inside.

Some time ago I was in a conversation with a person I’ve known for many years.

During the past 7 or 8 years

we have faced and fought some huge battles together,

battles that involved a significant amount of trust and courage with both of us.

For much of my adult life

I have been a pastor.

And as a pastor

I’ve come to realize

that there are times when people invite me into their lives,

and their turmoil,

and their pain,

and their struggles at crisis times in their lives.

If I fulfill my calling correctly

they know that I’m a truly safe person,

one who will treat them with kindness, and compassion,

and hopefully be able to help them to better understand their God

and to reach out to Him in trust during their times of turmoil.

Because of the nature of those interactions

we frequently enter into a very deep level of communication almost instantly,

but once the crisis has resolved itself

they move out of my life

and I move out of theirs.

That’s as it should be.

I entered their life as their pastor

and remain in their life as their pastor.

But something fascinating happened

in this one particular relationship recently.

We’d met for lunch

and were busy talking over some of the issues of life,

and when there was a little lull in the conversation

I looked at him and said, “I’ve just realized something recently...you and I are friends.”

His expression when I said that

made it clear he couldn’t even begin to understand

why I viewed this as some sort of huge revelation,

so I said a little more.

I told him that I’d come to realize

that he didn’t just view me as “his pastor”,

he viewed me as his friend,

and I viewed him as my friend...and I liked that very much.

Real friendships in our world,

in our society are few and far between.

They take years to build,

and a whole lot of time, and trust, and honesty, and communication,

and they rarely happen in most of our lives.

Well, I thought that was the end of my big discovery,

but when I got home that night

a verse came to mind that made me suddenly realize

that, when I wasn’t looking,

my Lord had broken through my defenses

and allowed me to discover the most amazing truth about Him.

It’s a verse I mentioned to you several weeks ago.

The verse is from John 15:15,

or actually just a phrase out of that verse.

It’s from Jesus’ final conversation with His disciples,

a conversation that took place just a few hours before His crucifixion.

In that verse He said, “...I have called you friends...”.

And I suddenly realized that this was not just a passing comment,

it was a glorious statement of victory and success.

This was what He had been working for

from the very beginning.

This was what He came for,

this is why He clothed Himself in human flesh and bone

and lived with these men and women for all that time.

For the first time in the history of creation

God had friends,

and that’s just what He wanted.

He didn’t just want to be our God,

He wanted to be our friend,

and He wanted us to see Him as our friend,

to relate to Him as our friend.

I remembered how good it felt

when I sat there at that lunch

and realized I wasn’t just this person’s pastor,

I was his friend, and he was mine.

And then I realized

that when we finally get past all of the God-games,

and the God-lies,

and the fear and blindness and ignorance

that corrupts our perception of our Creator

and see Him not just as our God,

but as our friend

it feels really good to Him too.

And what got me going on all of this

was my pointing out the danger Paul knew the Galatians faced

if the lie they were believing was not corrected.

It was the danger of returning to their pagan belief,

the assumption that what God was really after,

what He was trying to accomplish in their lives

was to shape them up,

to get them to behave better.

It is absolutely true

that, if we enter into the discovery of the love of Jesus Christ for us,

it will have a major impact on the way we live.

Nothing changes us more profoundly

than the discovery of God’s love for us.

But God’s goal for us

never has been His wanting to change us.

His goal has been to bring us to Himself as friends.

And Paul knew that would simply never happen

if the Galatians returned in their thinking

to a performance-based interaction with their God.

And so he wrote a short, powerful letter

in which he offered the Galatians

nine reasons why they should return to the true grace-based walk with God

that Christ died to give them.

We’ve seen the first 3 of those nine reasons so far.

The first reason Paul offered them

as proof of the truth of the message of grace he’d preached to them

was that the message itself did not originate in any human mind.

It was given to man directly by God Himself

and as such they could trust it absolutely.

The second reason Paul offered

was his assurance that the message he’d preached to them

had been examined closely

and approved absolutely by Peter and the other Apostles of Christ.

And the third reason,

the one we looked at last week,

was that Paul’s message of grace

overcame Peter’s error when he slipped back into a law-based approach to God himself.

And now, in the first five verses of chapter 3,

Paul offers his readers his 4^th proof of the truth of the message of Grace.

And with this one

he calls his Galatian brothers and sisters

to look honestly at their own brief history with the King.

I’ll read the passage for us

and then we’ll see what he does here.

Gal 3:1 You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?

Gal 3:2 This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?

Gal 3:3 Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

Gal 3:4 Did you suffer so many things in vain--if indeed it was in vain?

Gal 3:5 So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?

And I have to admit

I do love the way he begins...You foolish Galatians!

That one phrase captures so well

the intensity and passion of Paul’s communication in this letter.

If he’d written it today

I think he would have said, “What! Are you brain-dead!?”

It would have been impossible for his readers to have read this letter

without taking Paul’s comments very personally.

And that, of course, is exactly what Paul wanted.

He continues with the same intensely personal attack as he says,

who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?

The reference to the public portrayal of the crucifixion of Christ

has to be reference to the message Paul preached to them when he was with them.

Everything he’d offered them,

everything he’d told them about the Good News of God

was built upon their clear understanding

of what happened to God-in-a-human-body on that bloody Roman cross.

That was God changing the rules between Himself and His creation.

Or more correctly,

that was God revealing to us

the rules that had always been,

the rules of mercy, and compassion, and grace and kindness, and love,

but rules we could never have understood

until we saw Him in our place dying for our offenses against Him.

It’s no wonder Paul asked them who had bewitched them -

who had tricked them?

Who had stripped them of their knowledge of the simple yet remarkable truth

of their God pouring out His love to them

and replaced that truth with some pathetic little do-good-and-maybe-God-will-love-you substitute?

And then, to help jolt them back into the truth,

he asks them the crucial question.

And he does get rather parental in the way he asks it,

but then he has a right to

because they were his spiritual children, his offspring.

He says, This is the only thing I want to find out from you...

doesn’t that sound like a concerned parent?

And then he asks them the question, “... did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?”

You see what he’s doing, of course.

He’s taking them back to that point at which they entered the family of God,

that point at which God lifted the weight of their guilt and shame and sin from them forever

and placed His Spirit within them.

And then He asks them, “What did you have to offer your God

at that point when He stepped into your life,

flooding you with His grace,

allowing you to enter into His riches for all eternity?”

It’s one of those Paul-questions, of course,

that has the answer imbedded in the question.

They had nothing to offer.

In fact, they had less than nothing.

They had a whole lifetime of failure,

and shame,

and rebellion,

and hostility against their God.

And then Paul continues

with a question I hope each one of you

will memorize

and remind yourself of daily.

Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

If He allowed you to begin this amazing life in the presence of God

as the result of nothing other than your willingness to reach out to him as your God

and your decision to choose to believe He paid your debt

simply because He loves you,

do you really believe that once you came to Him

He would then change all the rules,

putting you back under a law system you could never keep,

stripping you of His love, His grace, and His mercy?

Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

What kind of a God do you think you have?

And then Paul brings them into the present,

asking them to look not just at the grace given to them at the time they entered the family of God,

but at the grace their God continues to pour out on them

every single day of their lives.

So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?

When you got out of bed this morning,

and you discovered that His Spirit was still there,

still calling you to your God,

still giving you a hunger and thirst for a life this day that honors Him,

did you really believe that He was there,

still with you,

still loving you,

still keeping His almighty arms around you

because yesterday you lived a life sufficiently good,

sufficiently holy,

sufficiently righteous

to justify His staying with you?

You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you...?

There is only one way a lie like this works, of course.

There is only one way

any human being can ever enter into the illusion

that they are living a life that qualifies them to stand before God.

It only happens if they have exchanged reason and logic for religion,

allowing their religious system

to then write for them a list of rules they feel they can keep.

Do this and this and this,

and don’t do this and this and this,

and follow these dietary restrictions,

and celebrate these special days,

and perform these acts of penance and contrition and good deeds

and you will then be acceptable to your God and accepted by Him.

And it’s all smoke and mirrors.

It’s all looking at the external

while carefully avoiding the real issues of the soul -

the bitterness,

or the greed,

or the lust,

or the idolatry,

or the competitiveness that will use anyone or anything for your own advancement.

And that’s just what the Galatians had been given -

a very neat, very clearly defined religious system,

a religious system that just a few years earlier

made the execution of the only righteous man who had ever lived seem reasonable and right,

and drove Saul of Tarsus to seek the destruction

of all who disagreed with his doctrinal beliefs.

How quickly and how deeply they had been deceived.

Paul had offered them a living God

who took them just as the were, right where they were

and then poured out His Spirit and His love on them,

promising to teach them how to love -

how to truly love the people He placed into their lives.

And all of it,

from the very beginning

came to them through simple faith, trust in their God.

And Paul now forces them

to bring that truth back into focus -

to remember how it all began,

and to recognize that nothing has ever changed.

When we see it in the lives of the Galatians

the lie is easier to see.

But when we find the same lie in ourselves

it’s every bit as destructive

but much more difficult to recognize.

And for the lie to gain power in our own lives

Satan so skillfully takes the creative work of God within us

and tries to turn it against us.

He takes that amazing hunger for righteousness

that God Himself has created within us

and he then tries to use it as proof of our own failure,

telling us that we will never be what we long to be,

telling us that we are forever falling short of what God expects.

The answer to those lies in ourselves

is the same answer Paul offered the Galatians.

Return to our roots.

Return to the beginning of our walk with God

and ask ourselves the same question Paul asked the Galatians.

“What did we bring to God at the time we met Him

that gave us a right to His forgiveness, His grace?”

The answer, of course, is nothing.

And what can we bring this day

that justifies His kindness to us this day?

And again the answer is the same.

But underlying that question

is one that’s even more important.

What is it that our God requires us to bring to Him this day?

And by His grace

the answer to that question

is the same as what He required from us

the first day we entered His family -

our willingness to believe

His grace is sufficient for us,

His Son has paid our debt,

and His love for us is more than sufficient to bring us through

one day at a time,

one confusing struggle at a time,

from now until we meet Him face-to-face.

He never has expected us to do it for Him.

He knows better than we ever will

that we are utterly incapable of pulling it off.

And all He wants,

all He hopes for from us

is our willingness to rest in His grace,

and reach out to Him as our God,

trusting Him to reshape us from the inside out.