The Horror of a "Different Truth"

This morning, I wanna start by asking you whether you've ever experienced or witnessed something like this, where you've seen someone have a horrifyingly close shave with something that could have been really, really bad. My youngest brother, Gerard, was one of the most absent-minded little fellas that you could have experienced or witnessed. Especially when it came to the car park, and just not looking at cars driving around. For some reason, he'd be always just looking elsewhere, and he'd be missing cars by inches. And I remember this one moment we were going out for fish and chips or something, and a car actually saw him walking across the road and skidded and just clipped him.

Like, the car stopped and it sort of just with the final lurch bumped him over. And I just remember the amazing and intense emotion of feeling so angry at his silliness, and at the same time, absolutely fearful of what could have happened. This intense mix, and I'm sure there are mothers here that have experienced that. Just this fear of, you're an absolute idiot, why did you do that?

To think I could have nearly lost you. And these emotions can happen within microseconds. This sort of transformation. Why this mixture of emotion? Because these kids, these loved ones were on the brink of being lost forever because of their silliness or their absent-mindedness.

Now this morning, we're going to look at Galatians 1, and we're going to see the same mixture of emotion from the apostle Paul as he speaks to this church, who were in the same sort of area of being lost forever and Paul being angry at the silliness of their decision making in that process. Let's have a read of Galatians 1:1-9. Galatians 1:1. Paul, an apostle not from men, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead, and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ who gave Himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father to whom be the glory forever and ever.

Amen. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. So far, our reading. Paul is angry.

Paul is upset, and it is this mixture of frustration and genuine fear for what may be lost that is causing him to write in this sort of way. What is it that caused Paul to feel like this? What is it that so shocks him? He says, I am astonished. What is it that causes him this astonishment?

Well, it's the fact that these Christians, these Galatian Christians are not taking hold of the gospel as it really is. They are in enormous danger. Paul is especially angry at those who are misleading these converts, but the people that are believing this teaching are not off the hook. It says that in verse seven, there are false teachers that were throwing them into confusion that were perverting or distorting the gospel of Christ. He calls down condemnation.

He calls down curses on those, in verse nine, that would preach any other gospel than the one originally preached to them. He accuses the Galatian Christians of deserting God. Deserting God, the one who loved them, the one who called them to be with Him. These are the charges that Paul is making against them. These are serious charges, and you can hear the emotion.

You can hear the frustration in his tone. But the question is, who is Paul to write like this? Who is Paul that he should be saying these sort of things, that he could be calling curses down upon anyone that will preach a gospel contrary to the one that he preached? Is he just another cult leader? Is he just another person that has another opinion among the plethora of opinions?

Who is Paul that he should write like this? Well, Paul makes a strong opening statement in verse one that he is what? An apostle. He is an apostle. A man sent with divine authority.

The Greek word apostolos literally means to be a sent one. A sent one. And he says that he was not simply sent by a church or a group of people. He was sent by who? Jesus Christ and God the Father.

Paul is claiming that he did not receive this command, this message, this gospel from anyone else. He didn't read it in some old dusty tome. He didn't discover it on the Internet somewhere. He was sent by God Himself to come and spread this message. He was commissioned by God.

This was no popular movement that put him in the spotlight. This authority was not given to him by a huge YouTube following that validated his claims. He was commissioned directly by the risen Christ Himself. You remember that story where that happened though, don't you? Acts 9, the road to Damascus.

Paul who was fervently, zealously persecuting the church sees Christ. Here's Christ say to him, Paul or Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting not the church, not Christians, not Stephen, the one that you saw being put to death and stoned. Why are you persecuting Me, Saul? You are to go and preach the gospel of Christ to the Gentiles. That is what happens in Acts 9.

Paul receives an authority to proclaim a message that he didn't believe in to the ends of the earth directly from Christ. Paul says, this gospel that I preached is worthy of believing because it has authority. Which leads us to the next question, what is this message of his teaching? The message was something Paul refers to as the gospel. Verse six, have a look.

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, verse seven, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. Now this word, gospel, in the original is a proclamation of good news. It was used in reference to a prince being born, a royal wedding taking place. It was used in the context of a nationwide celebration.

So if a royal baby was born, you wouldn't hear this proclamation from Karl Stefanovic on the Today Show. You would receive it from messengers. You wouldn't receive it from Lisa Wilkinson, you would get it from heralds who would say, here is the gospel, the good news of the emperor's son being born. The good news message being sent through the whole countryside and from the earliest moments in the Christian story. The message of Christ crucified and risen was considered the gospel, the good news.

In his opening, Paul gives a quick yet comprehensive outline of this gospel message in these few verses that we receive. Four aspects of this good news. Firstly, the good news is bad news before it is good news. The good news is firstly an indication of who we are and that we are helpless and that we are lost. In verse four, Paul uses the word deliver or to rescue when referring to our situations.

You see, other founders of religions came and taught and they came to instil wisdom, but the radical news of Christianity is that Jesus came to rescue. He didn't come with another message. He didn't come with a brand new interesting philosophy. He came to deliver us. Now if you've ever had a conversation on spiritual matters with anyone that is not a Christian in our day and age, more than likely, you would have heard someone say that a Christian, in their understanding, is someone that follows Christ's teachings.

A Christian is someone who follows Christ's teachings and His example. But the Bible actually says that this is impossible. The Bible indicates that to follow Jesus and His teachings is impossible, and you cannot receive eternal life that way. You don't rescue people unless they are lost. You don't save people unless they are in need of saving and are in a helpless condition.

Imagine seeing a drowning man in the deepest, darkest waters off the coast of Alaska somewhere. And this man is floundering about and he's about to drown. What happens in this helpless situation? You don't throw him a manual of fifty pages and say, learn how to swim. Here's some great tips on how you can get back to the boat. You throw the man a rope.

You throw him something to hold on to, something to rescue him. Jesus is not so much a teacher as He is a rescuer. Why? The first point is because we need it. We need to be rescued.

If you, Paul says, really understood the good news of Christianity, you have to understand that nothing in us, nothing in our environment or our world can and will save us. We are the ones who don't know how to swim. We fail at doing what is required by God's righteous requirements. We are unable to meet the requirements to stay afloat morally in God's world. And our situation is this, that we are helpless, and that we are lost, and that we require deliverance.

This is who we are in the gospel. The second thing, however, that Paul states about the good news is the need for Jesus. It was Jesus who had to rescue us. Again, it wasn't His teaching. It wasn't His wise words in Matthew 5:11 to 7, the Sermon on the Mount.

You've heard that it was said an eye for an eye, but I tell you, love your enemies. It wasn't saving by that because that condemned us even more. You've heard that you shall not murder, Jesus said, but those who harbour anger against their brother who call them a fool, they've committed murder already. That did not save us. That condemned us.

Jesus' teaching doesn't save us. It wasn't His wisdom that would rescue us. It was Him and His actions that would rescue us. And how? Well, Paul says that Jesus in verse four gave Himself for our sins.

This was the exchange. This was the saving moment for me, for you, for other brothers and sisters. It was a sacrifice of a substitutionary nature. Now the word for our sins means on behalf of. That word can be translated that way.

On behalf of, in place of. And on this, Tim Keller writes substitution, the swapping of me for Him is what is revolutionary about the gospel. Christ's death is not a general sacrifice. Christ's death is not something of, oh, what a shame. He so lived for God and so showed commitment to God's will that he died and we should be like him.

It is not representative in that way. It is not exemplary in that way. His substitution is real. He did not merely buy us a second chance either. In other words, giving us another opportunity to get our life right with God.

He did everything that was needed. He did everything that was needed and which we couldn't do. In this life, Jesus did everything that we morally needed to do to stay afloat in His life, through His life. But He drowned instead in our place when we should have drowned. And when we accept Him as our saviour, Paul is saying, when we accept Him as our saviour, we accept the life rope, the salvation, the deliverance that He offers us.

And how is this possible? Well, Paul goes on to the third point, because of God's love. Because of God's love. This was all done out of sheer grace, not because of anything we have done, but verse four, to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and our Father, according to God's desire, according to God's good pleasure, Ephesians 1 puts it. We didn't even ask for a rescue.

We didn't even know we were drowning. But God, in His radical love, planned that when we didn't even realise we needed it, Christ, by His grace, came to achieve the rescue that we could never have even planned for ourselves. There is no other motivation for Christ's work. There is no other motivation for Christ's work than God's good pleasure, to save, to deliver. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in us which convinced God that He should save us.

This is radical for us in our day and age to believe. And we may even, right here, right now, not truly grasp it and truly believe it, but there is nothing in you, friend, that makes you lovable to God. There is nothing in you that makes Him think you're the greatest. And in this millennial world where everyone gets participation certificates and everyone gets a nice little gold star for trying really hard, there is nothing in us that validates His love for us except that God loves, and God set His heart on us. Martin Lloyd-Jones, the great Welsh preacher said it this way, the gospel is therefore open to all.

The gospel is therefore open to all. The most respectable sinner has no more claim than the worst of sinners. Most respectable sinner has no more claim than the worst. And the last point, what is the result of God's grace? What is the end goal here?

What is it all working towards? Well, verse five, to Him be the glory forever and ever. Amen. God gets the glory. God gets that treasure chest of His bounty that we talked about last week.

If we could have contributed it in any way to our own rescue, if we could have splashed around in the water just long enough to get to the ship, then we would get some of that glory. Then we could deserve some of that praise for our own perseverance and our own hard work. But the true gospel, Paul says, makes it clear that salvation from first to last is God's doing. It is His call at the start. It is His decision in Christ to die.

It is His plan and His work. And so He deserves the glory for all time, eternally, forever and ever. Amen. There is no other way. There is no other glory.

Those four points, Paul says, this is what the gospel is. Guys, remember. Now the scary thing is, friends, Paul is writing to Christians. These Galatians are believers, so called. They are in the church.

They've heard this before. This is what they heard when they became Christians. And the reason Paul is so shocked and he is angry and he is fearful is that these Christians could understand all this and shrug their shoulders and go and believe and hold on to something else. This is what Paul doesn't understand. Now Paul spends the opening verses of the book of Galatians emphasising how precious God's grace is in the gospel.

But in verse seven, it says, people are deserting this message for something else, for another gospel. He says that though that this other gospel, which is supposed to be good news, is not good news. It is horrific news if you believe it. And Paul says, anything else will never be as good. Why?

Because something else was being added to this gospel. Something was being revised in this message. There were people who wanted to tinker with it. There were people that were wanting to add stuff to it, people that were wanting to subtract stuff to it. It could have been couched in words like, we're gonna contemporise it.

We're gonna make this message a little bit more relevant to our people. We're going to maybe not talk about the fact that we are so lost and helpless we can't save ourselves. Or we're gonna talk about that maybe some of this work is done by us instead. There is a subtraction or an addition, gospel mathematics taking place here. But Paul says that this is a distortion of the gospel that verse seven says.

A distortion of the gospel. This word literally means a reversion, to revert or to reverse the gospel. In other words, if anyone was to say, in order to be saved, we need grace plus something else, you are reversing the power of the gospel. It becomes null and void, Paul says. The gospel by its very nature cannot be changed even slightly because then it is lost.

It's like a vacuum, a perfect vacuum. I don't know if you've ever seen those science experiments where they suck out all the air, and it's an amazing thing. A bowling ball falls at the same rate as a feather in a vacuum. Did you know that? It's amazing.

Go and watch it on YouTube. But a vacuum has to be 100% free of air. You cannot have a vacuum that is 90% vacuum and 10% air. Just like you can't be half pregnant. You're pregnant or you're not?

It's a vacuum or it's not. And it's the same with the gospel of grace. The good news is that you are saved by God's sheer mercy and grace through Christ's work and nothing else. As soon as you add anything to it, you have lost it entirely. The moment you revise the gospel, you reverse it.

This is why Paul, in the strongest possible language, says, don't fall into the trap of giving up on this truth. This is it, guys. There is nothing else. You have to hold on to this. If anyone else, even an angel, was to preach another message, let them be damned to hell.

Even if we, Paul says, were to preach another gospel, if I was out of my mind and I preached another gospel, let me be damned to hell. And this morning, friends, I'm telling you, if pastor KJ Trump was to preach another gospel, let me be damned to hell. This is how strong the implications are and how horrifying the alternative is to the gospel. And this is so important for us to remember because we live in a world that is constantly seeking to skew and to change and to revise the gospel. We live in a city here on the Gold Coast with churches that preach different gospels.

And what's even more sobering is that we have hearts and minds ourselves that try to skew this gospel. There are people and there are churches that will teach you that you are saved by how much you surrender to Christ. They will tell you that you must have the right beliefs and the right behaviour. People might be told that you should give your life to Jesus or ask Him to come into your life. And while that sounds biblical and very, very close to truth, it can still be in danger of rejecting the grace first principle.

The grace first principle. These churches might think that we are saved by a strong belief in Jesus Christ. That I must fill myself with an unshakeable, undoubtable belief in Jesus, that He can do anything in my life. And that may sound so close to the truth, but it is not. That is my effort and my work and my striving.

These churches say that we must attain some spiritual high, that we must manifest some spiritual outworkings or physical attributes, but the gospel says that we are saved through faith. Saved through trust. This first approach makes our performance the saviour. Our performance the saviour. And can you see how close it is to the truth?

The gospel makes Christ's performance the saviour. It is not the level but the object of our faith that saves us. And the second teaching is another one but on the other side of the coin. It is to say that good people, regardless of religion, will find God. Good people, decent people, people that may seem even nicer than Christians, they may find God.

And this one is particularly cunning and perhaps even more prevalent than we might think. This false gospel teaches that how we think about God or what we do with this idea of God is what saves. It can be someone saying something like, well, I've come from a Christian family all my life. I'm South African. I'm Dutch.

And because my family were Christians and we went to church all the time, I'm a Christian. I'm a believer. I am saved. But at the end of the day, it's about who they are, isn't it? It is about what heritage they've come from.

It is about perhaps what facade they can put on. It's about who they are or what they are that saves them. But just to put another twist on it, it can be a young person saying, I'll put aside God's requirements for my life, but as long as I haven't done things that are too bad, as long as I have done things that aren't too shocking or have too much consequence to it, I should be fine. You can say with many people on this side of the coin, if I was to weigh up my life, I still would fall on the good side of the scale. But if people could get to God this way, if good people could get to God, if how we lived, if our family's heritage really mattered, then the death of Jesus was not necessary.

It was a pitiful end to a miserable life. God wouldn't get the glory, we would get the glory. My family would get the glory. And even though it sounds very open-minded to say that all religions and all world views are basically trying to achieve the same thing, you are in essence saying, only good people can be saved. Only good people can be saved.

Or what about the absent-minded husbands that don't love their wives very well all the time? What about the lousy parents? What about the silly teenagers that make those mistakes? They're all out, you're saying, because they've messed up. If you believe this, that only the good can get in, then I have to tell you friend, you are out.

But A. W. Tozer said, the glory of the gospel is in its freedom. No one can be excluded from the gospel out of hand. No one cannot receive the gospel for who they are as sinners. The gospel is both, therefore, comforting, so comforting, but confronting as well. Because it tells us that we are more sinful and broken than we ever dared to believe.

Yet we are more loved and valued than we ever dared to hope. Christian, never settle for a message different to this. Do not believe it when it comes to us in the media. Do not believe it when your unbelieving spouse says it to you. Don't try and rationalise it for the friend that doesn't know Jesus Christ right now and wants to live their life in their way.

Don't settle for anything less than the message of Christ crucified for you and for me, a free offering to us to receive so that all the glory may go to God. Let's pray. Father, we marvel and we thank you. At the end of the day, Lord, that is all we can do is to thank you for this wonderful gift that you have given us, Jesus Christ, that is ours forever and ever. Well, this inheritance, as the apostle Peter says, that is kept in heaven, safeguarded in heaven for us that can neither spoil nor fade.

And therefore, Father, we will never lose this salvation. We will never lose this deliverance no matter what. And so, Father, help us to love it. Help us to see it so precious that nothing would distort it. Nothing would reverse it.

Nothing in us would seek to revise it. Father, for the temptation that is there to condemn us, that the guilt and the shame that would seek us to throw this out, that would want us to leave it behind, that would want us to just try harder. Father, help us to get rid of that, to cling to the cross of Christ, to trust in His work. But then, Father, let this empowering realisation, this absolute freedom cast off the dross, the rubbish that would seek to ensnare us again. Give us the freedom to say no to these things that are so not of you, that are so troubling, that just lead to death, lead to emptiness, lead to pain, depression, and guilt.

Father, let us cast those things off and rest in the work and the love of our saviour Jesus. Oh God, all our thanks and all our praise and all the glory goes to you this morning. By Jesus' powerful name, amen.