Grown by Grace

We're going to be looking at the book of Galatians, the letter to the Galatian churches this morning. And especially, we're going to be investigating this idea of what we do as Christians once we've been saved. What the Christian life is about once we have received the grace of God. We'll see that the gospel is not only the way that we enter the kingdom of God, but that the gospel is the very thing that empowers our life in the kingdom. We are not only saved by the gospel, we grow by the gospel.

We'll see Paul telling us that we don't begin with faith and then proceed to make our life grow by our own determination and strength. We are not only justified by faith in Christ, we are also sanctified by that very faith. The gospel, in other words, never leaves us. The gospel never loses its applicatory power. Let's open to Galatians 3, therefore, and we're going to read the first 14 verses of that chapter. Galatians 3:1.

Paul begins with these words: "Oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: did you receive the spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?"

"Did you suffer so many things in vain, if indeed it was in vain? Does he who supplies the spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Just as Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'In you shall all the nations be blessed.'"

"So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse. For it is written, 'Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law and do them.' Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law. For the righteous shall live by faith."

"But the law is not of faith. Rather, the one who does them shall live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.' So that in Christ Jesus, the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised spirit through faith." This is the word of the Lord.

I don't think it's a stretch for me to say, but I believe the letter to the Galatians is probably Paul's most focused letter. That focus is on explaining what the gospel is and what it isn't. We know that Paul wrote this letter not to an individual church, but to a group of churches in a region known as Galatia. And the reason for his writing is because the churches were starting to fall back into a belief that in order to know God, or at least in order to stay connected to God, you had to think and behave according to certain moral laws, specifically the Old Testament moral codes. In other words, you basically had to become Jewish.

Now, that's probably oversimplifying it a tad, but it's basically this. And for this reason, Galatians is a wonderfully simple expression of the glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ found in His astounding grace. Through Jesus Christ, who has saved us. But first, we see, as Paul has sort of introduced his frustrations, Paul gets to the chunky part of his letter and he identifies that the Galatian Christians have done this: they have misunderstood the enduring power of God's grace. We see that expressed largely in verses 1 through 2, and verse 5, verses 1 through to verse 6.

Before we get to this passage in the letter, in the last half of chapter 2, we see that Paul explains how we have been saved by ending our trust in our moral efforts, but instead having placed our trust in the perfect work of Christ. Paul actually says that when we trust in Jesus Christ's death and resurrection, we die to the moral law, and now we have the opportunity to live for God in a similar way that Christ lived. Then we get to chapter 3 and we see in verses 1 through to verse 3, Paul being absolutely flabbergasted. He expresses his consternation at what was happening with the Galatians' faith. He calls them fools.

Foolish Galatians. That they somehow must have been charmed by a powerful, mystical magic that could have caused them to live so irrationally. This faith of theirs that they, at one point, loved and received so dearly. And then Paul goes on to point out what this irrationality means. First, he reminds the Galatian Christians of how they came to Christ in the first place, that they left their previously unbelieving lives behind. He reminds them of that moment when Paul himself preached the gospel to them and how he says Christ was publicly, or as some translations say, clearly portrayed as crucified.

They received that news clearly. The news that the Galatians heard is not simply that a man named Jesus lived and taught some important things. No. The preaching that they heard was the preaching of the cross. And so Paul says, "This is where we begin."

You Galatians understand that you received ultimately salvation by a clear depiction and a heart-moving realisation of Christ's sacrifice on your behalf. That's where you started, Galatians. And then from this reminder in verse 1 of how the Galatians were initially saved through faith in what Jesus had done for them, Paul now goes on to prove in verse 2 how incongruent their Christian living has become. "Let me ask you one thing," he says. "Did you receive the spirit by works of the law or by the hearing of faith?"

Paul expects them to answer, "Of course, we believed what you told us about Jesus, and then, of course, when we believed, our lives were suddenly changed, impacted by the Holy Spirit that came into our lives." That's the right answer, of course. Paul expects that to be their answer. But then he says in verse 3, "How foolish you are to think that if you start the Christian life by the power of the spirit, that somehow now you can perfect that Christian life by your own determination and white-knuckled willpower." The Bible tells us that in order to first believe the gospel, the Holy Spirit has already started a regenerating work in you.

That's why we call it being born again. You are born anew. Verse 5. And for Paul, he makes it even clearer. He says the Holy Spirit working in our lives, convicting us of guilt, changing our attitudes towards our sin, making us in fact grieve over it, that is a sign and a seal of your faith. Paul links, in other words, the spirit and the gospel inseparably.

And it's the fact that the spirit is working in you that tells you that you are in Christ, that promises you that you will grow in grace. This week, I lost my wedding ring. I've placed it somewhere. I came in this morning looking upstairs and down, and if I've left it here, I cannot find it. Not only am I silly for taking it off when I wash the grill or have a shower or whatever, I've also now got a lightning quick toddler who just loves playing with it.

So it could be anywhere in any dark recess of our house. Does the fact that I have lost my wedding ring, as silly as I feel about it, mean that my marriage to Desiree is over? Of course not. That ring, as precious and as sentimental as it is, is an external representation of the invisible truth that we are in a marital relationship. That ring is a physical sign of our pledge.

But if I take it off in the shower, I don't cease to be married at that instance. In the same way, Paul says, your relationship to God is not determined by your external obedience, by how well you can hold on to that ring, how well you measure up to Christian morality. That does not signify your salvation, neither does your failure to do the right things signify your condemnation. And this is the truly radical news of the gospel. So think about it very carefully then: if we only come to God by the miraculous work of the spirit who breaks our hearts open to, in the first instance, feel the need for salvation.

Aren't you crazy to think that you stay close to God now because you've started swearing less? That you stay close to God now by having a better knowledge of the Bible? That is foolish, Paul says. Just like it's crazy to think that I'm relationally separated from Desiree because I've lost my ring. She's a little bit mad with me, but you know what I mean.

It's unfortunate though that many of us live our Christian lives like this. We happily accept that our salvation was by the amazing grace of God. "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me," we sing. But then we begin slowly but surely believing that our Christian walk depends on us. That at one time we may have needed God's sovereign, gracious intervention to save us, but now in order to stay in the good books with Him, we need to take that burden back.

Paul says, "Don't forget. Remember. Remember how before your eyes it was Christ crucified that was preached to you." But before you truly became a Christian, you simply trusted. Before you became a Christian, you simply trusted in all the projects of perfection.

You read all the self-leadership books, the self-improvement books. You strived against the image on Instagram of the perfect life in order to feel accepted by God or others. But when faith by hearing came, causing you to receive Christ, a revolution took place in you, and the staggering truth dawned on you that this salvation is a complete gift, that nothing you could do could ever warrant that gift. The way we progress as Christians, therefore, doesn't come from trying harder. Paul says it comes by remembering the cross, the clear portrayal of Christ crucified.

Why? Because the cross represents the gospel. And it is the way we grow as Christians by continually uprooting those systems of works righteousness in our hearts and by returning again and again and again to the gospel. So the Galatians misunderstood the enduring power of God's grace. Then secondly, they needed to be told that salvation by grace through faith was the way all along.

In verse 6, Paul begins to transition to the Old Testament character of Abraham. Why does Paul do this? Well, because the Galatian Christians were tempted to go back to the Jewish understanding of salvation, which said that you must keep the law of Moses to be saved. Paul goes to Abraham, the father of the Jews, however, to show that even Abraham was saved by faith, and that the promise of salvation through faith would not come only to the Jews through him, but through to the entire world, of which the Galatian churches were a major part. Abraham, who was the father of the Jewish nation, was a man that was considered by God to be righteous through faith.

But in verse 6, Paul explicitly quotes Genesis 15:6, which says that Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. New Testament commentator Douglas Moo makes the point that the crediting of Abraham's faith as righteousness means to account to him a righteousness that does not inherently belong to him. Abraham was a good guy. Abraham was a legend of a man. But there was nothing about Abraham inherently that warranted salvation.

Righteousness was credited to him from outside of himself. So that when God credits righteousness, He confers a legal status on Abraham. He treats Abraham as objectively right with Him in regards to the law and free from condemnation. And we know in the life of Abraham, this is true even though he makes some very unrighteous decisions at times. And from here, from the example of Abraham, Paul makes a penetrating claim that this is the same for everyone who places their trust in God and not in themselves anymore.

Paul points back to the Jews' founding father, Abraham, and says, "Look, he simply trusted God at His word, and God declared him perfect and complete." That's why Paul says in verse 9, "Those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith." The way of salvation all along has been a salvation by God's grace. So simply keep believing. Keep believing and you'll receive the same blessing of righteousness that Abraham received.

To a predominantly Gentile believing church, Paul says, "You want to be Jewish? You couldn't possibly be any more Jewish than Abraham, the father of the Jews. And you know what he did? He simply trusted God when God said, 'I'm going to save you.'" When God, Paul says, preached the gospel to him, and he believed.

But that leads us to the very important final question, doesn't it? What did Abraham really believe in for his righteousness? And by extension, what are we meant to believe in? Well, in verses 10 to 14, Paul magnificently outlines that it was Christ crucified that was the plan all along. In these five verses, Paul builds a very tight logical argument by absolutely bombarding these wannabe Jews with the very thing they're appealing to, the Old Testament.

Paul out-Jews them. He explains how Abraham's righteousness, and therefore our righteousness, could simply be bestowed, simply imputed by God on those who trust in Him simply. How? By quoting the Old Testament itself. Paul quotes from Deuteronomy 27:26, Habakkuk 2:4, Leviticus 18:5, and Deuteronomy 21:23.

In five verses, there are four quotations, direct quotations of the Old Testament. And his argument is basically this: everyone who hopes to be righteous with God through the law of God needs to keep it perfectly. Every aspect for your entire life perfectly. If you fail to keep God's law perfectly, you are under His curse. That curse is death, both physically and spiritually. But Christ has done the thing that you cannot do.

He lived out the requirements of the law perfectly, but then amazingly, he took on the curse that we were meant to be punished for, and in fact, imputed to us His perfect life. Think back to the Old Testament. When a person was executed in Old Testament times, they were executed not simply because they had disobeyed or broken the civil laws of the land. They were executing a lawbreaker because it was God's law that they broke. In some severe instances, the body of a person who had grievously broken God's laws would be hung from a tree to show that they had been rejected by God. It was a divine rejection.

Now, Paul draws that curse connection to Jesus, who was also hung from a tree, executed on the cross. That was his moment of divine rejection. Coming back to the question: how could Abraham be made righteous with God simply through faith? It wasn't that Abraham simply believed that God existed. No, Abraham's faith had an object.

It had a location, and that location was the cross. The gospel that the Galatians heard from Paul is the same gospel, Paul says, that was preached to Abraham. And the location between Abraham and the Galatians is the cross. This is what Paul explains in these final verses: that Jesus took on our punishment, that He was treated as the guilty one, that Jesus was treated as if He were the sinner, and we have been treated as though we are the righteous ones. A divine exchange happened.

Legally speaking, Paul will say in 2 Corinthians 5, Jesus became sin. "God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." The Christian life has this constant threat, doesn't it, of going down two equally false paths in regards to how we live the Christian life. On the one hand, you and I can be tempted to self-sufficient spirituality.

That is the danger of the Galatian church: believing that we are now saved, but we need to show that we warrant our position with God. Whether it be claiming impressive spiritual gifts, that you are the prophet in the church, that you are the one that supposedly speaks in tongues, that you have the gifts of healing, that you are the pastor or the elder. Whether it is claiming impressive gifts, whether it is claiming to have specialised knowledge, whether it's having the perfect Christian family, whether it's living the cleanest lifestyle. These are all good things to aspire to, but once you measure your success as a Christian along those lines, you've gone down the same road as the Galatians.

The Bible warns you today: having started with the spirit, do you believe you can perfect your salvation in the flesh? Alternatively, there's an equally false but opposite path that other Christians can go down, one of despair. You and I can be tempted to an insufficient spirituality. We either don't believe we can be saved, or we don't believe we will ever conquer our sin. Often, we think of ourselves as a second-class Christian, wracked with guilt and insecure about whether we are good enough.

That is a lie as well. The Bible warns you today from the same passage: "Those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith." Those of faith are blessed. If Abraham was counted righteous through faith alone, your simple trust in Jesus places you alongside Abraham the great. So that Abraham, the man who was known to be the friend of God, stands on equal footing to you.

Don't despair, says the Bible. Cling to Christ. So to the question: how do we grow as Christians? How do we resist and overcome the sin in our life? How do we live holy lives?

The answer keeps being the same, and yet the answer keeps being surprising. You achieve nothing by trying harder. You and I achieve simply by trusting more. We are already accepted. We are already righteous.

That truth will humble you in the deepest parts of your proud heart, and the truth of that strengthens the most insecure thoughts of your mind. You are already righteous because Christ has already been crucified. Don't begin with the spirit and then end with guilt. Don't go back to the thing to think that you must do it all again yourself. Say thank you with a sincere heart this morning.

Say thank you with a sincere heart this morning, and then love your Saviour who has loved you so much. Let's pray. Lord, we thank You for the simplicity of Paul's words, and we understand why our brothers and sisters in those churches wrestled with these things because we wrestle with the same things. Lord, where there is arrogance in our hearts, where we believe that some hidden, unique, special knowledge will improve our stance before You, will cause us to be elevated just that little bit more in Your church. That our efforts to look and appear to be holy, to have our ducks in a row, to be living the cleanest lifestyle, to have the most together family, that those things somehow constitute a closer walk with You.

Help us to know and understand the blessings of Your grace. Help us to be deeply thankful for the reversal that is taking shape in our hearts and our lives, to transform us as our brother prayed more and more into the image of the Son. But Lord, help us to have haughtiness and pride, self-righteousness so far from us because we know that every day is a drop of grace alone. Help us to know that our external trappings don't mark the true reality of our relationship with You, that You have made a promise, a covenant promise to be faithful. And then, for those of us who struggle with despair and doubt, who look at the seemingly common mistakes we make that just feel like we're not making progress in our resistance to sin and the striving against Satan and all his power.

Help us, Lord, to be girded with strength and hope. Help us to realise again that our failings don't mean that we cannot be saved, that we have not been saved, Lord. Our failings simply mean we needed a perfect Saviour, and we have one. Help us to know in the deepest parts of our hearts that nothing can separate us from the love of God through Jesus Christ. And so, Lord, we pray for Your continuing grace in our lives through the spirit who is with us, who ministers daily, continuously in our hearts.

Help us to grow in grace. We pray, Lord, that our church may be known as people marked by the supernatural power of new life, that we have our priorities so straight that we pursue the things that are truly life, and that we may experience the blessing, the security of Your presence with us, with sobriety in our minds and confidence in our hearts. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.