03-11-12 It Was For Freedom

For the past several months we have been listening to Paul

as he attempts to call his Galatian brothers and sisters

back into a walk with God

that rests not upon their ability to measure up to a certain standard of religious performance

but rather upon their simple trust in Christ -

His death as payment for their sins

and then His life being lived out through them each day.

In the course of our study of Paul’s letter to the Galatians

he has taken us through 9 proofs,

nine arguments,

nine attacks against the lie that was corrupting their Christian lives.

And now, as we begin our study of the 5^th chapter,

Paul has two more things he wants to do for his readers

before he ends this letter.

The first he does for us in the first 12 verses of chapter 5,

a powerful section of the letter

in which he pulls together the heart of everything he’s been trying to say up to this point.

This is the section we’ll look at this morning,

a section in which he says in effect,

“If you’ve gotten confused with all my words up to this point

let me give it to you as simply and clearly as I can.”

And then, beginning with 5:13 and continuing through chapter 6

Paul does one more thing for us.

After spending five and a half chapters

blasting his readers for their attempting to build their relationship with God

on the foundation of their performance for God,

he then comes back to this whole issue of our performance,

our behavior,

and reveals to us exactly where and how it does fit in our Christian walk.

You see, Paul understands the flesh perfectly.

He understands the way the flesh will seek to find

anything that allows it to take control,

to dominate and rule our lives.

And Paul understands the risks that come

from the true, clear presentation of the Good News of God.

He knows that, when we truly do hear and understand

the incredible, glorious truth

that our union with our God

will never again rest upon our performance,

the truth that all failure,

all immorality,

all sin,

every thought, word, action, and attitude

that was in any way inconsistent with God Himself,

that all of it has been removed from our account forever

and transferred to the account of Christ

who then wrote upon that account with His own blood, “DEBT PAID IN FULL”,

Paul knows that there is within everyone of us

a flesh response that will proclaim,

“Then it doesn’t matter what I do. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want.”

And if that lie is given free reign in our lives

the consequences will be tragic to the extreme.

It will corrupt every significant relationship in our life

and keep us locked in a tragic life of bondage, fear, and emotional and physical addictions.

And so, in order to keep the truth clear,

after shattering the lie of a law-based union with God

and pointing his readers back to the sacrifice of Christ

as the only sure and adequate foundation for our union with God,

he then spends the final chapter and a half

talking with us about how this truth will play out in our daily lives

if we have understood it correctly.

And what he shows us

is a daily walk driven by our longing to love and protect and care for

all those that our God has placed into our lives.

He shows us what the life of Christ will look like

when it is being lived out through us.

But everything he does throughout the remainder of this letter

keys off of and is simply an expansion of the first verse of Galatians 5.

We ended three weeks ago with our 9^th attack against the lies,

a section that took us through the end of chapter 4.

Now, listen to the next thing Paul says.

This is where he has been leading his readers since his opening words.

This is his trump card,

his clear, simple, powerful affirmation

of what this God of ours is really after in our lives.

This is what He wants for us,

what He died to give us.

When we think about everything our Creator has been trying to accomplish in our lives

with everything He’s said,

everything He’s done,

everything He’s given us,

and everything He’s sought to remove from our lives,

this one statement reveals to us

the underlying motivation behind it all.

In Galatians 5:1 he says,

It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.

Now isn’t that exactly opposite

from nearly everything we’ve ever been told by the religious world around us,

and exactly opposite from everything our flesh screams at us?

And I do love the way Paul phrased that.

It was for freedom that Christ set us free!!!

He set us free because He wants us free!!!

What do you have in your life right now

that keeps your spirit from soaring?

What do you have that strips you of the freedom

to love each additional day your Lord has given you?

What things keep you feeling caged,

and helpless,

and confined?

What fear,

what addiction,

what anxiety,

what turmoil leaves you feeling anything but free?

Did you know that your God grieves over those things that rob you of your freedom

just as you do?

Do you know that right now

He is fighting for you,

seeking to bring true freedom to your spirit?

Because, you see, it was for freedom that Christ set you free.

And I can’t let that pass

without pointing out the stupidity

of the great lie that Satan has so effectively imbedded deep within the human race,

the lie that submission to God

and trust in His instructions to us

will cage us, and confine us, and strip us of our ability to be free.

Right now, this morning, in the lives of some of you listening to my voice

there is a tremendous battle taking place within you,

a battle between you and your God

because there’s something He’s said to you,

something He’s seeking to bring into you life or remove from it,

some place within you that He’s touched.

And you know it’s Him.

But when you look at what He’s saying,

or what He’s seeking to do,

you just know that to submit to Him at this point

will be the death of freedom in your life.

You may even believe

that you have to choose between submission to your God

and meeting some deep need within you.

And this battle has created within your mind

the image of a God who seeks obedience...demands obedience above all else,

a God who cares little about your fulfillment in life

so long as He can demand and receive from you your submission and obedience.

You’re finding it very hard to trust Him right now

or to trust what He’s saying to you

because you see only the great loss of everything you feel you most need in life.

If that kind of battle is going on within you right now

there is one thing at least that I can do for you.

I can show why He is asking from you what He’s asked.

I can at least destroy the lie that is intensifying this battle within you.

And I can do that

by showing you His heart desire for you,

what He truly wants,

and why He wants it.

It’s right here, in this one clear, remarkable statement.

It was for freedom that Christ set you free.

He’s already freed your spirit forever

from everything that could ever bring it into bondage.

He did that the day you came to Him,

He did that when He took your certificate of debt

consisting of decrees against you and which was hostile to you

and He took it out of the way and nailed it to the cross of Christ (Col. 2:14).

And now, having set your spirit free,

He seeks to set your soul free.

And He does it

not so that He can then use you,

or hold you up as some sort of trophy.

He does it because He could not love you the way He does

and not hate everything that robs you

of the freedom to be exactly who He designed you to be.

It was for freedom that Christ set you free.

Trust what He’s saying,

don’t fear what He’s asking.

He’s not asking you to do it for Him,

He’s simply asking that you’ll trust Him

to do it in you, through you, for you one day at a time.

But Paul knows all too well

that true freedom never just happens in our lives.

In fact most of the time we must fight to gain it

and fight to keep it

because Satan will fight against it in every way possible.

He will use all of His lies,

all of His emotional hooks in our lives

to keep us in bondage.

Because there simply is nothing more attractive

and therefore nothing more powerful in life

than a person who is truly free.

And so Paul goes on to prepare us for this warfare.

After telling us that it was for freedom that Christ set us free,

he then goes on to give us our battle cry when he says,

therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.

And with that statement

he makes it clear that our freedom as God’s people

is in no way passive.

It isn’t something that just happens.

It is something that we must choose to receive

and then fight to maintain.

There is within the human religious spirit

an ever present pull back into legalism,

back into religious form and system.

Paul tells the Colossians that it has, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but is of no value against fleshly indulgence. (Col. 2:23).

It seems so reasonable,

so logical,

so right that rules will change human behavior.

But there is only one thing that truly has the power to transform a person -

the personal discovery of our Creator’s love for us.

And any law-based religious system

will always ultimately war against our discovery of that love

because it keeps God forever locked in the role of our Judge,

demanding performance

and condemning us when we fall short.

Paul calls his Galatian brothers and sisters to stand firm in the truth

and to fight the lie at all costs.

Then he goes on to offer

what is among the strongest passages in this entire letter.

He says, Gal 5:2-4 Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you. And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the whole Law. You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.

He singles out circumcision

because this was being pushed by the Jewish false teachers

as the great proof of a person’s commitment to seeking God’s favor through the law.

And Paul’s point here

is simply to clearly clarify the choice they face.

He wants them to know

that there is no such thing as a blending of law and grace

in a person’s foundation with God.

It is either/or,

not a little of both.

And Paul tells his Galatian brothers and sisters

that, if they choose the law as their security

then their only option is to keep that law fully, completely, perfectly.

If you choose a law-based relationship with God then you are under obligation to keep the whole Law.

Just trying hard

and moving the right direction

and doing better this year than last year doesn’t cut it.

Sin of any kind cannot exist in the presence of God.

The only thing that equips a person to live in the presence of God,

to be joined to Him in an eternal love union

is absolute, total, sinlessness - absolute holiness, righteousness.

And the only way for a person to achieve such a thing

is to have all of our sins completely removed from our account forever...

which is exactly what happens in each of our lives when we reach out to Christ.

Our sins become His sins

and He pays the debt for those sins with His own death.

And then,

to impress on his readers

the significance of this attempt on the part of religion

to blend grace and legalism,

in a single verse Paul uses two powerful phrases

designed to jolt his readers into the recognition

of the utter stupidity of this kind of an approach.

He says, You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.

You have been severed from Christ...you have fallen from grace.

In our media obsessed world of today

we’d call those “sound bites”...two powerful phrases

that capture the devastating consequences

of what happens if this lie is to continue unchecked.

I think Paul used those two phrases

because he wanted to arm his people

with two verbal spears with which they could attack the lies.

When those false teachers visited their homes

or turned up at their gatherings,

Paul wanted his precious brothers and sisters to be able to respond

to their offer of improved standing with God

through submission to the Jewish law system by saying,

“NO! I will NOT be severed from my Lord Jesus Christ!

I will NOT fall from His grace!

If His death for my sins is not enough,

if my debt has not been paid in full by His blood,

then there is no hope, and nothing I could ever try to do can help.”

I find it fascinating that,

when I remember the way that phrase “fallen from grace” was used

by those in my childhood church settings

it was used to describe someone who had gotten involved in some act of immorality.

A person who had “fallen from grace”

was a person who’d plunged into some sinful behavior.

But in context falling from grace has nothing whatsoever to do with sin.

It has everything to do with the destructive power of religious systems

that slip in next to us

and offer us a performance pathway into peace with God.

And before we move on to Paul’s next comment

I can’t let this pass without pointing out

what so many of us have discovered through our own past religious experience -

the Christian church world

simply loves to do the very thing Paul so strongly attacks in this passage -

it loves to attempt to blend legalism and grace.

And so often the proclamation of Christ’s love and grace

is followed by a “but”,

“but God will not be pleased with you if you fail to clean up your life...”

“but grace does not mean that your behavior will not have a powerful impact on your relationship with God...”.

The intent of all such blending, of course,

is to try to prod the listeners into improved conduct and performance.

But the result is frequently exactly the opposite

because it blinds those who hear this message

to the amazing love of God

who takes us right where we are, just as we are

and then seeks to hug us and love us into a transformed life.

And just so that we don’t miss the contrast between the lie and the truth,

the next thing Paul does is to remind us of the way things really are for the people of God.

He says, Gal 5:5-6 For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love.

And there it is, in a single sentence -

the changing process designed by God just for His people,

the process that stands in sharp contrast to the legalism being shoved down the throats of the Galatians.

...through the Spirit, by faith...

He’s talking about that partnership we establish between ourselves and our God,

a partnership in which He literally places His spirit within us,

giving us a hunger and thirst for true righteousness,

and we reach out to Him by faith,

asking Him, trusting Him to work within us

whatever must be done

to bring about the changes we long for.

And in the process we keep trusting, and keep waiting for the hope of righteousness.

You see, one of the major reasons why legalism can never bring about true transformation in our lives

is because legalism always targets the external actions,

trying to get us to alter what are really only the symptoms of the true corruption within our souls.

But when our God begins His healing process within us

He begins by addressing the lies deep within us

that are producing the corrupted behavior.

Often they are lies about ourselves

that find their roots in our earliest childhood messages,

lies about who we are and what we need.

And those changes sometimes take years of careful rebuilding

before we can find freedom.

But through the Spirit, by faith He can do what needs to be done.

And faith working through love...His love for us,

and then His teaching us how to love one another,

can do what no external religious system can ever do.

And then, once again we hear Paul’s deep heart of love and compassion for his Galatian friends.

Gal 5:7-10 You were running well; who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion did not come from Him who calls you. A little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough. I have confidence in you in the Lord that you will adopt no other view; but the one who is disturbing you will bear his judgment, whoever he is.

He then ends this section

with a one additional blast

aimed at those who are troubling his brothers and sisters.

In verse 12 he says,

I wish that those who are troubling you would even mutilate themselves.

And in the context of this passage

he looks at those who are seeking to force the Galatians into circumcision

as proof of their submission to their false teaching

and he responds to them by saying, “Rather than performing circumcision on you, I wish they would castrate themselves.”

Nothing in all the world

provoked more anger,

and a more intense response from Paul

than did those who in any way compromised the pure message of the grace of God

and through it robbed the people of God

of the hope and healing that comes with that grace.

And nowhere do we see Paul’s rage against those who spread the lies more clearly

than in this book of Galatians.