01-01-12 If It’s Good Enough For Peter...

The problem with the Gospel

is that it’s simply too good to be true...

or at least that’s the way it seems

when we hear what our God is really saying to us.

The Gospel of God,

the Good News of God

just simply doesn’t make any sense to the mind of man.

It makes no sense to our minds

that our God could really love us.

It makes no sense to us

that He would really love us...

I mean, REALLY love us.

Some time ago I was in a conversation with a friend of mine

who had made some choices that were...

well, even by his own evaluation,

choices that were stupid.

They were choices that, as stupid choices always seem to do,

had resulted in some tremendous turmoil between himself and his family.

I certainly hurt for him and for the turmoil he was trying to work through,

but as he and I talked together

I realized that even though I hurt for him,

the choices he’d made had not affected my friendship with him in the least.

In fact, it actually had the opposite effect

because his inviting me into his life at that point

and his allowing me to help him think through the best approach to resolving the situation

actually deepened our friendship,

and our trust in one another.

And then, as I talked with him,

I wondered if he realized that his God was responding to him

exactly the same way that I was in this situation.

Not only had his God not turned away from him,

but He longed to reach into His hurting child’s life

and protect, and heal, and restore, and bring him into freedom.

And there was only one reason for that response from God -

it was because God truly, deeply, absolutely loves him.

Welcome to the amazing Gospel - the good news of God.

Welcome to a union between God and a human being

in which every stupid thing we’ve ever done,

every wrong choice we’ve ever made,

every sin, every offense, every wrong thought and wrong action

is forever removed from our account,

and our personal certificate of debt against God

is nailed to the cross of Christ

where it remains for all eternity,

and now our Creator lives with us,

dwells in us,

and daily seeks to pour out His love on us.

It’s no wonder Paul ran into some difficulty

as he set out to proclaim this Good News to the world.

It’s no wonder that, soon after he preached his Good News to the Gentile Christians,

when they then heard what sounded like reasonable, logical, persuasive voices telling them

that such a relationship between God and man could simply not exist,

and that certainly their performance,

their obedience,

their success in living lives of absolute submission to His commandments

was an essential prerequisite

to their receiving God’s love and acceptance,

they then believed the religious lies they were hearing,

and those lies

gained a powerful hold in their lives.

Funny how it is...

there really is no message more difficult for us to believe,

no words harder for us to trust

than the words, “I love you...not because of anything you’ve done or not done,

but simply because I love you.”

And when those words are spoken to us by our Creator,

that Creator we have hidden from,

and fought against,

and, through our actions, offended deeply,

our being able to believe those words

is in every way

the most difficult thing we will ever do.

Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians

because they had lost their faith

in that kind of love from their God,

and had exchanged their discovery of that love

for a more “reasonable” arrangement between themselves and their God

in which they would try to earn His acceptance

through their attempting to offer Him a quality of life

that they were told would then justify His acceptance.

But Paul knew what would happen

if this lie was not forever destroyed in their minds.

He knew what would happen

to any human being who attempted to live with God

on the basis of their performance.

He’d seen it in his own life.

He’d seen the hideous, ugly, judgmental pride in created within him.

He saw the hatred and disgust it gave him

for any who failed to meet his standards.

He saw the way it actually drove him to seek to destroy th people of God

and believe he was doing the will of God when he did so.

And he’d seen the results of a law-based walk with God

throughout the entire history of the Jewish people.

He saw the way it drove people away from God

rather than drawing them to Him

making it impossible for them to discover His love

and respond to it.

And so Paul wrote to his fellow Christians

with the hope of restoring their confidence in the Good News of God,

knowing that nothing but their trust in that Good News

could bring them into the discovery of His love

and through that discovery break the bondage of their sin.

As we’ve studied this letter during the past month

we’ve seen Paul begin with a clear presentation of this Gospel of God,

and then confront his readers

with their return to religion.

And then two weeks ago, in our study of the final verses of chapter one,

Paul offered his readers

the first of 9 reasons why they should return to their trust

in the Good News he’d preached to them.

He told them that the message he’d preached to them

did not come from the mind of man,

it came from God Himself.

In fact he went into some considerable detail

sharing with us how God set Paul apart from before he was born

and then carefully isolated him in the years immediately following his submission to Christ

to insure that the amazing message God would proclaim through Paul

was not corrupted by any other human influence.

Simply put,

Paul begins his defense of the Good News he was preaching

by telling his readers that they can trust the source absolutely

because the source is God Himself.

Now, from there Paul then moves into his second defense of his message in 2:1-10

by once again sharing with us some of his own personal history.

He begins by saying,

Gal 2:1 Then after an interval of fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along also.

Gal 2:2 It was because of a revelation that I went up; and I submitted to them the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but I did so in private to those who were of reputation, for fear that I might be running, or had run, in vain.

And to appreciate what’s going on here

we need to keep in mind

that Paul’s entrance into the family of God

and the role he played in the development of the Church

was very much of a sovereign work of God

separate from anything that we have recorded in the Gospels.

When we read through the first 4 books of the New Testament

we have given to us

a clear, beautiful, detailed picture

of the Man, Jesus, and the work He did among the Jews,

and especially among His chosen disciples.

Put Paul was not a part of that group.

In fact we know that he never had any contact whatsoever

with Christ or with any of the disciples

during the time Christ was on this earth in a human body.

Following the resurrection of Christ

His disciples,

with Peter at the head of the group,

began to present to their fellow Jews

the message of this amazing Messiah,

the Messiah who came to offer them

not just a few years of political freedom from Rome,

but an eternity of absolute freedom of spirit in the presence of God.

But their focus,

their message was clearly, specifically targeted to the Nation of Israel.

Jesus was a Jew,

the fulfillment of God’s promise to send them a Messiah,

a promise that He had made specifically, exclusively to the Jewish people.

It’s no wonder that the Apostles

and other disciples of Jesus

targeted their message exclusively to their fellow Israelites.

If we took the time

we could trace through the early chapters of the book of Acts

and see the way in which the Spirit of God

nudged those Jewish believers

into the discovery that this message of freedom was not just for the Jews

but for the entire human race.

But for our purposes this morning

I’ll just say that it was slow going,

and extremely hard for those first disciples

to break free from their Jewish roots

and strong National orientation.

But then, just a few years following the resurrection of Christ

God barged into Paul’s life

and in what will forever be one of His greatest sovereign works,

or at the very least a work that has had a greater impact on the human race

than anything else He has done,

God prepared and then sent Paul out to preach this same message of redemption through Christ

not to the Jews, but to the entire pagan non-Jewish world

that knew nothing whatsoever about the Jews or their heritage with God.

But I share this with you this morning

because I want us to see

that during more than the first decade of the Church

these two separate outreaches - the disciples going to the Jews, and Paul going to the non-Jews -

existed in almost complete isolation from one another.

Certainly there were some, like Barnabas, who crossed from one group to the other,

but to a great degree they were separate, isolated works of God.

The original band of disciples

were traveling and preaching throughout the Nation of Israel,

and Paul was traveling and preaching

throughout the non-Jewish regions of the Roman Empire.

And remarkably, none of the original remaining 11 disciples of Christ

made any effort to involve themselves in what Paul was doing

or tried to offer him any instruction or exercise any kind of oversight or leadership over him.

And as far as we know,

most of them spent most of their lives

focusing most of their efforts into a nearly exclusive outreach to their fellow Jews.

OK, now in this passage here in Galatians 2:1-10

we have Paul’s description of the first time he officially presented the message he was preaching

to Peter and the other Apostles of Jesus who were still home-based in Jerusalem.

He tells us that he did so

not because he felt like he needed their approval,

but rather because his Lord told him to go and do it.

He says it was “because of a revelation” that he went up - a direct intervention of God into his life

telling him to do it.

And he also tells us that it was 14 years following his own conversion.

And as we’ll see here,

it wasn’t because Paul felt any need for their stamp of approval

or for their affirmation or validation.

But rather it was, I think, most of all

simply to provide some of his concerned converts

with clear confirmation of the absolute unity between what the original disciples of Jesus were preaching

and what Paul was preaching.

It’s one thing to proclaim that the message you’re preaching

is directly given to you by God,

but it also sometimes helps to know

that this same God has been saying the same thing to someone else.

I know what that feels like, by the way.

For most of my adult life

it has served my Lord’s purposes

to keep me tucked away in a small town in Alaska.

It happens to be a small town I’m very fond of,

a small town that has provided me with the perfect place

in which to grow in my own understanding of my God

and at the same time to give what I have to give to my fellow Christians

without being destroyed in the process.

But it has also meant

that I’ve had very little exposure

to what has been going on in the rest of the Christian community in our nation.

I don’t hear much of what they’re saying,

and they don’t even know I exist.

From the earliest days of my teaching

the only real concern I’ve ever had

has never been trying to find out what other people are saying,

but rather seeking to correctly understand

what the passage I’m teaching is saying.

And if I believe I have handled a passage correctly, in context I’m fine with it,

even if there are other voices around me

who seem to be saying something different.

But having said that,

there is something tremendously encouraging

when I discover

that the Lord has said the same thing to someone else I respect

that He’s said to me.

The truth is,

if we really are the only one saying whatever it is we’re saying

we shouldn’t be too surprised

if our listeners have some questions about our message,

questions we need to be able to answer clearly and simply

through what our Lord has given us in His Word.

Well, Paul went up to Jerusalem

to put an end to any doubts that may have existed

about the message he was preaching to the non-Jewish world.

And that visit more than served it’s purpose.

He goes on in this passage to say,

Gal 2:3 But not even Titus, who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised.

Gal 2:4 But it was because of the false brethren secretly brought in, who had sneaked in to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, in order to bring us into bondage.

Gal 2:5 But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

Gal 2:6 But from those who were of high reputation (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)--well, those who were of reputation contributed nothing to me.

Gal 2:7 But on the contrary, seeing that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised

Gal 2:8 (for He who effectually worked for Peter in his apostleship to the circumcised effectually worked for me also to the Gentiles),

Gal 2:9 and recognizing the grace that had been given to me, James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, so that we might go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.

Gal 2:10 They only asked us to remember the poor--the very thing I also was eager to do.

In this passage

Paul describes for us

what must have at first been a tense confrontation

between Paul and some of those within the Jerusalem church community

who refused to let go of their deep conviction

that all true access to God, and to His Messiah,

had to be exclusively through the Nation of Israel.

One of Paul’s comrades and traveling companions

was a Greek by the name of Titus.

This is the same Titus to whom Paul later wrote a letter

that has been preserved for us as the New Testament book of Titus.

Titus, being a Greek, was not circumcised,

something that to us today would not even be an issue,

but to the Jews was huge.

Circumcision in the nation of Israel traced all the way back to Abraham,

given by God to Abraham and his descendants

at the time of the Covenant that God established between Himself and Abraham,

a Covenant in which He promised to make Abraham the father of a special and chosen nation of God.

To the Jew is was the beginning of obedience,

an inseparable part of the history of their nation and of their relationship with God.

It was certainly not surprising

that for those 1^st century Jews who believed access to the Messiah

was possible only through the Nation of Israel,

circumcision was viewed as an essential first step of obedience to the Jewish Law.

And Paul’s comments here in this section of Galatians

tells us that there were those who, when Titus entered the Jerusalem Church,

demanded that he be circumcised.

It was certainly a crucial confrontation in the young Church,

one that would have significant implications forever.

But Paul tells us that, when he and Barnabas met with Peter and John,

the leaders of the original band of 12 disciples,

and with James, the half brother of Jesus and head of the local body there in Jerusalem,

they unanimously sided with Paul and Barnabas,

declaring that Titus did not have to be circumcised.

And with that decision

they all understood what the real issue was.

The real question wasn’t about circumcision,

the real question was about what God was really offering the world through Christ.

Was He offering us an arrangement in which the death of Christ

would remove our sins prior to our coming to Him,

but an arrangement in which we would then need to maintain that relationship

through faithful obedience to the Jewish legal system,

or any system of laws?

Was He offering us a new beginning on the basis of grace,

but a daily life with God that was based on our works?

Or was this Good News of God

really as good as Paul said it was?

If we brought the one thing we could bring to God,

our simple faith in the death of Christ

as full payment for all our sins,

did that simple trust in our God’s promise to us

result in our receiving eternal peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ

and our entrance into this grace in which we stand?

And in that crucial meeting between Paul, Barnabas, Peter, James, and John,

the issue was resolved forever,

or at least it should have been.

Of course, the lie is so powerful

that Satan has made certain it didn’t die in the first century

and hasn’t died ever since.

There are more than a few of you here this morning

who still fight it frequently in your own life.

In fact, it is a lie that, in one way or another,

will attack every Christian at certain times in our lives.

We look at our own lives,

we see within ourselves a longing to be so much better than we are,

and to do so much more than we think we have done,

and we automatically assume that our God must view us with the same disappointment that we view ourselves.

We assume there is still a list under His arm,

a moral measuring stick in His hand,

and we are forever being measured and found wanting.

Does our God seek to break our bondage to sin?

Absolutely!

But He does it

not because that sin has any power to ever again separate us from Him,

but rather simply because He wants us free.

And the beginning of that freeing process

is our coming to understand with absolute certainty

that we stand before Him forever loved, accepted, treasured, and absolutely righteous

solely on the basis of our simple trust

in the death of Christ as payment for our sins...all sins...forever.