The Sweet Sound of Grace

Well, this morning we're continuing on our series and looking at the gospel. I wanna start this morning by telling a story of a man called John Newton. Does anyone know who I'm referring to? Yeah. Okay.

Well, don't spoil it. Let me build up the suspense a little bit. John Newton was a navy officer. He was a navy officer turned slave trader and eventually turned pastor during the eighteenth century. But his claim to fame was the writing of the hymn that is today the most well-known hymn of the English language.

The hymn is called Amazing Grace. Newton was a man who certainly lived a very complicated life. And he came to a very definitive conversion experience one night while he was caught in a storm in his ship. He knew in that moment that it was curtains for him and his crew. He knew that this was the last moment he would be alive and he muttered under his breath at that time, "Lord, have mercy on us."

The storm amazingly passed, and upon reflection on this surprising utterance that he had on his lips, why would he have said this sort of thing? Upon reflecting, he made the decision then and there to make Christ his Lord and his saviour. Now it would be still seven years until he matured and he grew to the stage where he would leave the slave trade, but he would eventually actually become a supporter to end or to abolish the slave trade of the United Kingdom. But his grace, his story of grace had begun. He later became a pastor and during the latter part of his life, he wrote down the words of the hymn we now know as Amazing Grace.

It was a personal account of a person who was set free from toils and snares, saved from the wretchedness of sin and given new life and new hope. It would gain massive popularity in the revivals of the nineteenth century in America, and it's been widely sung ever since. Now, if you listen or if you watch any sort of Hollywood movies or anything like that, where there's a funeral, where there's something deeply emotional or spiritual, you'll hear them play Amazing Grace. Whether that be on the bagpipes at a funeral or whatever. And I wonder why this hymn?

Why this particular hymn? What made it so popular? And the reason I think is because of its simplicity and its honesty. Its simplicity and its honesty. It's a personal story of someone for whom the penny has finally dropped and who finally realises their need of a saviour.

It's raw. It's raw. It's heartfelt. There's no room for pride in this song. There are no fancy theological words to hide behind.

"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me." You can't hide behind that. It doesn't get any more personal or honest than that. So this morning, we're going to continue our look at the gospel, and we're going to look at a part where Paul gives his testimony, his story of amazing grace. It's raw.

It's personal. It's honest. You'll remember that last time we spoke about the opening remarks of Paul's letter, we saw that he came with this uncompromising stance on the authenticity, the authority of this gospel message that he had brought to the Galatians. He said that deserting this gospel, choosing a different message, and reverting to a different gospel meant that it was reversed. Revising the gospel meant reversing it.

You got rid of its power. You became enslaved in the old problems that you used to belong to. So let's have a look this morning at where Paul goes from there. Have a turn with me to Galatians 1:10-24 till the end of the chapter. In this argument, Paul continues in verse 10.

"Am I now trying to win the approval of men or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I was still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ. I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man nor was I taught it.

Rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism. How intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by His grace, was pleased to reveal His son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles.

I did not consult any man nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was. But I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles, only James, the Lord's brother. I assure you before God that what I am writing to you is no lie.

Later, I went to Syria and Cilicia. I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only heard the report: 'The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy,' and they praised God because of me." So far the reading.

So we've just listened to the testimony of Tom, our sound man. And churches have been doing that for hundreds of years, having members, having individuals in the church share their stories. Well, here we find the apostle Paul sharing his. It's not a rare thing for Paul to have shared his story, to have shared his testimony. We see in Acts 22 and Acts 26 that in his preaching to the Gentiles, that he uses his story in some way. But again, like in Acts, here in Galatians 1, Paul shares his testimony to point not to himself, but to point to God, the God of amazing grace, and to refute the claims of people who want to undermine his message, the message of the gospel.

How does he do this? Why does he do this? Well, in retelling his story, Paul defends the message of the gospel he is preaching. In retelling his story, his testimony, Paul is refuting the people who are denying the authority or the authenticity based on three things. The first thing Paul says is that the truth of the gospel didn't come through his own intellect or his own reasoning or his own reflection.

He tells the Galatians in verse 13 that up until his conversion, he was in fact intensely persecuting the church. Up until his conversion, he wanted to destroy it, he says. This wasn't some sort of gradual consideration sitting on a rock somewhere in a grassy field reflecting and thinking and pondering. He was going a hundred and fifty miles an hour in the opposite direction of what the church's message was.

His message that he was proclaiming to the Galatians was not the product of his own thinking. It was in fact the exact polar opposite of where he had been going. Before his conversion, Paul, or as he was known, Saul, was so violently opposed to Christ that he could stand as Stephen, the first martyr of Christianity, was stoned to death at his feet. A man he saw and witnessed and condoned, a man pelted to death by stones, and yet he was unmoved by it. It wasn't until a shattering moment where he met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, that Paul would grasp that this message of Jesus is the real deal.

Paul never got there from his own reflection. Paul never got there from his own reasoning. It came from Jesus Christ Himself, and it turned his whole world, his whole theology upside down. C. S.

Lewis once wrote, "Christianity must be from God because who else could have thought it up?" Paul defends the message of the gospel based on the fact that he didn't get there by himself. He couldn't have. The second reason Paul points out in his testimony how this gospel message that he preaches is true is that he says this message wasn't even derived from the apostles or the leaders in Jerusalem. Paul refutes the claims in verses sixteen and seventeen of chapter one that his gospel message was not simply taught from or learnt from the other apostles.

There had been three years since Paul's conversion. There had been three years since his conversion and up until the time he met the apostles, where he was in a place called Arabia, which I guess we can assume is that area of Saudi Arabia, the wilderness of Saudi Arabia where Paul spent researching the Old Testament, trying to understand the power that he witnessed by seeing Jesus Christ and adding that to his theology. It seems that people have been claiming that Paul was perhaps simply a pawn of Peter or James or the other head apostles in Jerusalem and that he simply learnt from these guys, and now he was preaching their message. But as we'll see later in Galatians, Peter had started going back to some ceremonial laws, not being able to eat with Gentiles, and some personal cleanliness sort of laws. And these Galatians were saying, if Peter is going there, why isn't Paul following him?

Why is he still preaching this gospel of grace apart from law? Obviously, Paul must have it wrong. If he got taught by Peter, Paul says, "I've learnt the gospel from God Himself." And if Paul's opposition could say that Paul had learnt his gospel from Peter, they could have said, "Well, Paul should listen to Peter. He should go with Peter and keep those laws." But Paul makes it clear that he didn't receive the gospel from the other Christian leaders, even like Peter in Jerusalem.

The third reason is that while the gospel wasn't received from the apostles in Jerusalem, it did however square up with their teaching. So while he didn't go immediately to Jerusalem to learn the gospel message from Peter and James and the other apostles, and rather he went into the wilderness for three years to study, to reflect, to grow in this understanding, he did eventually go to Jerusalem and spent fifteen days with Peter. And sharing with Peter, Peter and the other apostles were overjoyed with seeing this man Paul who had persecuted them come to faith, and his understanding of the gospel message was true. It squared up with theirs. His message checked out with the other apostles.

Now this is all well and good to hear this from Paul. He makes a very good case that, okay, well maybe there is a bit of direct authority that he received from Christ. That he didn't get there by himself. He didn't get this from the other apostles, but it did square up with their teaching. So it wasn't heresy.

This is all good argumentative stuff, but the power for Paul, the power for Paul doesn't lie in this logic. The power lies in the story itself. The authority lies in a changed life. The story of God's amazing grace for a sinner like Paul really makes or breaks the claims of his gospel message. And that's why he tells his story.

What he tells us here in these verses is firstly who he was. Paul, really without any hypocrisy or hiding behind things, tells his story honestly and personally. Like the hymn of Amazing Grace, he says, "I am a man who have done some terrible things." Paul had intensely persecuted the church.

And by the time that Jesus came to Paul on the road to Damascus, he had caused the death of many innocent people. In fact, he was on his way to Damascus to go and arrest and imprison some more Christians. Paul had been filled with a zealous rage. He was a man of intense religiousness. He spent years seeking to live according to the Jewish customs and traditions.

He says that he had beaten, in fact, almost everyone of his own generation at being morally righteous. And before his conversion, Paul says that he was a great rule keeper. He was filled with pride. And yet despite all this, he says, he needed Jesus Christ to save him. There's no clearer example that Paul's story is a story of grace.

It's a salvation by grace alone. The free, unmerited favour of God. The story says it wasn't through moral performance because that moral performance was leading me down the wrong path. Paul says, "Though my sins were deep, though I was a murderer of my own brothers and sisters, God invited me in anyway." Paul wanted to stress that no one, no one is so good that they don't need the grace of the gospel.

Yet, no one is so bad that they can't receive the grace of the gospel. How does he know this? Because he was both. He was both. Paul was deeply flawed, yet he could be reached by the gospel.

And this, he wants to stress, is the amazingness, if that is a word, of the gospel. The second thing that Paul wants to tell with his story is not only who he was, like Tom said, who he was before, but Paul wants to stress what God was doing. What God was doing. It doesn't stop with Paul. Paul recognises God's sovereign grace working in his life even before his conversion.

God had set Paul apart from birth. Verse 15 says, "God had set Paul apart from birth." Isn't that amazing? God knew the plan for Paul. And while Paul was so strongly resisting God, his heavenly father would overrule all his intentions.

He would turn his motivations. He would redeem his experiences and his failures to prepare him to be a preacher to the Gentiles. Imagine that. All his Old Testament knowledge, his zeal, his passion, his desire for God's word, his training, all of it was now going to be used by God. God had to break him, but God was going to equip him to be an instrument in His church.

And the Bible, friends, is full of these stories. The Bible is absolutely full of them. Daniel, Joseph, Abraham, Moses. God makes everything work for His purposes. It's the gospel that not only puts us in line with God's will for our lives, but the gospel also gives us a bird's eye view of what was happening.

And that's why Tom could say, "I realised that I was never alone. I realised I was never alone. God was looking after me in those times where I didn't even think of him once." God was shaping them. God bestows His unmerited favour on Paul simply because God took delight in doing so.

Why? Verse 15 says, God simply was pleased to do so. God was simply pleased to save Paul. God does not love us because we are talented, because we are more skilled, because we are more intelligent, because we're better public communicators, whether we're great academics like Paul was. God doesn't love us because we are even more passionate for Him than other people are.

He loves us simply because He is pleased to do so. Simply because He delights in loving us. It is the only love, friends. It is the only love that you can ever be secure in. Because it's the only kind of love that you can never possibly lose.

Because it's not dependent on you. It's not dependent on how much you even love God. It's dependent on His decision, His delight to love you. That is grace. And this is the grace in Paul's testimony.

And this is why He wants us to understand it. This is why He wants the Galatians to understand his story, to see God's fingerprints in the story that is Paul. Everyone has a story. Everyone has a story. And every Christian's life has the markings of grace through it.

Do you know your story? Get to know it. Examine it. When you have seen God's hand at work, then retelling that story or that event is a testimony. It can be as simple as talking about what you've learnt from reading God's word, what you have learnt from a sermon, what you have learnt from Sunday school, those are all testimonies.

Testimonies are so important. It is the key. It is the binding nature of a church. And all Christians have a testimony to tell. Each one of us here has a story.

Whether you've been in church all your life or not, if a person has an identification with Christ, if they have a story of grace in their life, they have testimony to how God was at work in their lives. It's important to know your testimony. It's important to know your testimony because it shows us a critical difference. It shows us a critical difference between merely a religious person, someone who ticks the boxes, someone who is moral, and someone who is a Christian. Why?

Because a Christian has much more than an intellectual consent or an intellectual belief in Christ. A Christian is someone who has a personal relationship with the risen Saviour. A testimony is not a rational argument. Sorry to pick on Tom again, but he's not going to convince Richard Dawkins that he saw a blinding white light in his room. It is not a rational argument.

It is emotional. It shows our pain. It shows our struggles. It shows our victory. It shows our joy.

And more than ever, friends, more than ever, people need to hear our stories because they're not gonna be convinced of our arguments. They're not going to be convinced of our persuasive reasoning. Charles Spurgeon, that great preacher, once wrote, "We can learn nothing of the gospel except by feeling its truths. There are some sciences that may be learned by the head, but the science of Christ crucified can only be learned by the heart. You can learn nothing of the gospel except by feeling its truths."

What is your testimony? Would you be able to come up here and tell it? How would you tell someone about those feelings that happen, those changed mindsets? Some useful questions you can ask yourself, which we shared actually at our professional faith class not so long ago. What is your understanding of your need of salvation?

How do you understand your need for salvation? When did you first understand this need? What have you done in response to your understanding of this need of salvation? Do you believe that God is at work in your life today? How did this all make you feel?

We can learn nothing of the gospel except by feeling its truths. God was pleased to set you apart from birth. God was pleased. He took delight in doing it. Your victories, your losses, your mistakes, your good fortunes, your story has become God's amazing grace story.

A John Newton story. A Paul the Apostle story. "It was grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears relieved." Know it, love it, and live it.