Attacking The Gospel of Justification

two people who actually care where I'm at, and if I start a series and then have a gap in it, they want to know why, so let me explain. I'm going to the Philippines in three weeks. I thought I would have no problem in getting everything prepared to go, but just because of a bunch of other things that have happened, I just need to focus on this, and so what I'm going to do on Sunday morning and Sunday evening is I'm going to cover the material in a slightly different way, but I'm going to be preaching on Sunday morning, teaching on Sunday night, for the book of Galatians. I'm going, my part in this pastor's conference is going to be on justification by faith, and I believe the best way to teach that is from the text of the New Testament, one of the text that deals with it so forcefully, and so I'm going to take these pastors in the Philippines through the book of Galatians, and we're going to look at Paul's teaching on justification, our acceptance with God by faith in Jesus Christ.

And so today I'd like to turn with me to Galatians chapter 1. Galatians chapter 1, let me read to you from the first few verses of Galatians just as an introduction, Paul and Apostle, not sent from men or through the agency of man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead, and all the brethren 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 our sins so that he might rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory for evermore, amen. I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is really not another of the same kind, only there are some who are disturbing 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 what we preach to you, he has to be accursed. As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he has to be accursed. What is statement? What an angry man. Who is this angry man that is writing this? Well of course it's the Apostle Paul, the key issues of the book of Galatians, in fact if you've got a pencil, you ought to mark this, turn over to chapter 5 and notice the comparison. This is kind of the tell us, this is where Paul is getting to in the lives of these believers. These are churches that were planted by the Apostle Paul when he took the gospel to Galatia.

And now he hears that there are those who have followed him up and are distorting the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so he writes to them, the ultimate goal of this letter is for them to come to experience instead of the works of the flesh as they begin to be described in verse 19. Instead of that, he wants them to experience in verse 22 the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit when the gospel of Jesus Christ is having its effect in our lives, we will be characterized by these things, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against such there is no law. And then if you look back at chapter 3, notice what he says. The first verse in chapter 3, listen to his heart, you foolish Galatians.

Now these were people he loved so much and who loved him. And so he could say this to them, he could be brutally honest with him. You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. This is the only thing I want to find out from you. Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by the hearing with faith? Are you so foolish having begun by the Spirit? Are you now being perfected by the flesh by your own efforts? And that's exactly what they were being told they ought to do. These are huge issues for the Apostle Paul. The Apostle Paul believed that the believer must come to grasp and embrace the truth of justification by faith alone and Christ alone as the basis of their acceptance with God or they would never grow like God wants them to grow in the Christian life until they embrace this truth.

That we are right with God because of Jesus Christ and not our own works. Jerome said, when I read Paul, I hear thunder and I do too. When you read the Apostle Paul and when he is preaching about the gospel and perversions of the gospel and attacks on the gospel, it's the most important thing to him. Christ is an angry book and it's an amazing thing because if you compare Galatians to First Corinthians, the church at Corinth was a church that was filled with sin, immorality of kinds that we wouldn't even mention in public. All kinds of sin riddle that church and yet he is more angry in the book of Galatians than he is in First Corinthians because it is a gospel issue. So we want to look this morning and kind of an overview of the book a little bit so you sit in its context.

I want you to, he's going to answer two questions in this opening of the book in the first five verses which is all we're going to look at this morning. He's going to answer two major questions. The first is, who is this angry man and why is he so furious? What is Paul so angry about? And then the second question these first verses are going to answer is, what makes a doctrinal dispute a burning issue? When should we take a stand and be immovable in regards to doctrinal truth? That is the teaching of Scripture. As you know today around the world there are demonstrations to speak out against the war that we made just about the entering into and then very near future. I thought of the pressure that it would be on the man on President Bush as he sees around the world people with this great outcry of disagreement about what he is doing and how he's going to have the courage to do what he believes is right.

This weight that is upon him. When is it right to take a stand and be immovable in regards to truth, to doctrine? The biblical doctrines concerning the gospel. We're going to see how he answers that question. First of all we want to look at the answer to this first thing and notice what happens here. He is a very angry man. He's furious. When we first meet him of course in the Bible, when you first meet the Apostle Paul, he's an angry man but he's angry at the followers of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. He's angry at Christians. In Acts 8 we first meet him and there he is angry at these Christians who are claiming that Jesus has been raised from the dead and that he is the Messiah that was promised in the Old Testament.

He is so violently angry that he is involved in the murder of a disciple of Jesus Christ to shut him up. In Acts 8 it says he was in a hearty agreement with putting Stephen to death. He was so angry about these Christians, this movement which he considered to be a great hoax in a front to Jehovah and a threat to the law of Moses. People could be saved simply by believing this foolishness that Jesus has been raised in the dead rather than entering into the covenant of the law and keeping the law derites us before God through their own efforts. Then what is going to happen to this movement that he believes is a true movement of God. And so he is in hearty agreement with putting Stephen to death.

He's on a mission. In Acts 9 the first few verses it says meanwhile Saul was still listening to these expressions. Listen to the way it describes Paul's attitude in his activity. Saul was still breeding out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. He went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the cigars and Damascus so that he found any there who belonged to the way. That is where followers of Jesus and were proclaiming that Jesus had been raised from the dead where the men or women he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. There are those today in the church. Churchmen, those who wear collars who say that the church is never going to make it in the 21st century. If we don't stop teaching this ridiculous teaching that Jesus has been physically raised in the dead, Paul thought the same thing.

He hated this claim and so he was out to get rid of this movement which is referred to as the way those who follow Jesus Christ but something happened to Paul. Something happened to Paul, this religious leader, on his way to Damascus, on the road to Damascus he is transformed. Now think about this. He is driven by anger as he heads towards Damascus to arrest Christians but he is gripped by sheer terror when he comes face to face with Jesus Christ and finally as a result of that he is captured by the love of Christ and his life was never the same again. It became the dominating motivation of his life, the love of Jesus Christ for him and for this world. He had almost an uncontrollable zeal for Jesus Christ.

In fact, turn with me to ask just a moment. I want to show you, think about this, this man who is so filled with zeal for the gospel of Jesus Christ, this one who was trying to wipe out Christianity at his very inception, now has been captured by Christ and as a result of this, notice the pattern of his life. Chapter 9 verse 22, but Saul kept increasing, this is right after his conversion in Damascus. He kept increasing in strength and confounding the Jews who lived at Damascus by proving that this Jesus is the Messiah that the Old Testament speaks of. When many days of the laughs of Jews plotted together to do away with him, this always happened with him. Notice in verse 28, he goes to Jerusalem.

He goes up to Jerusalem and it says he begins speaking out boldly in the name of the Lord and he was talking and arguing with the Hellenistic Jews, but they were attempting to put him to death. When the brethren learned of it, they brought him down the accessory and sent him away to Tarsus and it goes on to say, then the church has had peace. Get rid of Paul and then you'll have peace because this guy is so full of zeal for the gospel of Jesus Christ that he is unstoppable. The only way you could get rid of Paul was to put him to death, but the hand of Almighty God was upon him. And now, almost two decades later, when we read this book that when this book was written, the book to the Galatians, we find the church here receiving this letter from the Apostle Paul.

In the book of Acts, when Paul goes to Antioch, we see his ministry really beginning there. He had been on the back side of the desert with Jesus Christ face to face for almost two decades. And then he comes back, God brings him to the church at Antioch. And of course, this is after the Lord had personally led him through this, what they call the B.D. degree, the back of the desert degree, face to face training with Jesus Christ. And then notice in Acts chapter 14, here is Paul and Barnabas returning from their first missionary journey. God used Paul along with Barnabas and others in the church in Corinth and the gospel was powerfully preached and received and lives were transformed through believing in the gospel.

And this church then began to have as every church that grows in a healthy way, begins to have a desire to send the gospel out to other places. Every church that's healthy has a missionary zeal. If a church doesn't have a missionary zeal, then it's not a spiritually healthy church. In the back table, there's some copies of Miriam's latest epistle. And you might want to pick up a copy of and read it to your family. But one of the things that happened, when I got a letter from Emma, an email from Emma, the pastor that spoke to us a few weeks ago, he talked about how God, since the inception of that church, he has prayed that God would bring them to the place where they had a real missionary zeal as a local church, that they wouldn't just be a church that was always receiving help from outside of Uganda, but that they would begin to pour themselves out to see the gospel expand, and that has begun to happen.

And Miriam happened to be one of the emissaries that they spent out with a gift from the church. And she was so impressed with the way God moved on their hearts. You see, that's the work of the spirit to fill our hearts with zeal or the spread of the gospel, to support those in the work of the gospel in very hard places. And so the gospel continues to grow out. And notice, that's what happened in the church at Anyok, and they sent Paul and Barnabas out to two primary teachers, and they go out with the gospel, and they come back at the end of their first missionary journey. If you notice in Acts chapter 14, verse 25, when they had spoken the word in Perga, they went down to Talia, from there they sailed to Anyok, from which they had been commended to the grace of God for the work that they had accomplished, and when they had arrived and gathered the church together, they began to report all things that God had done with them, and now he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles, that the gospel was going out, that people were turning to Christ through the work of the spirit, and it says, and they spent a long time there with the disciples.

And so the gospel, Paul believed with all of his heart, because of his first hand experience, not only in his own life, but in the lives of many others, he believed with all of his heart that the gospel is the power of God to save any and every kind of sinner through faith in Jesus Christ, not just Hebrews, but Gentiles of every strife, pagans of every kind, returning to Jesus Christ, and receiving this transforming power of the gospel. And so now Anyok becomes the cradle of the gospel, the cradle of Gentile Christianity and the ongoing work of the mission, as it spreads out from first from Jerusalem and now from Anyok and outward to the whole world. The gospel is totally free from its straight jacket that it had suffered from among the Jews in Jerusalem.

They always had this pressure that we can't be too bold in the way we preach the gospel because we don't want to offend the Jews, but now the gospel goes out of its boldness to every kind of people. And this is where the disciples, the first call Christians. So if anything was to happen, in Paul's mind, if anything is to happen that would tend to impede the worldwide progress of the gospel, then Paul and these who are part of the church of Anyok could be counted on to do something about it. And that's what we have in the book of Galatians. The Paul is concerned, something did happen. In Acts 15, we see this. We see those, some Pharisees who had attached themselves to the church in Jerusalem and heard about the effects of the ministry of Paul and Barnabas and how the gospel was going out indiscriminately to every kind of people on the face of the earth.

And they were preaching that all a person had to do to be saved, was to repent and turn to Jesus Christ, believe on Him, believe the gospel and rest in Jesus Christ in His work and you will be saved. Not come under the law, not become a Jew, not become circumcised, but simply believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved. And at this point, they begin to be those who raised up among them and off to Anyok they went to the center of this missionary endeavor to straighten things out. They, one commentator says off to Anyok they went with a protest in their hearts and an ultimatum on their lips. They went to tell them we can't have this. We can't have this kind of thing going on. We can't simply take in any kind of person.

They have to be, they have to come under the law, they have to come under the law of Moses and live under the regulations of the law of God. About the same time, some of these Judaizers go to the churches where Paul had preached the gospel and plenty of these churches in Galatia to begin to work at winning these young believers. Such young believers who just come to faith in Jesus Christ and they begin to attack the teaching of Paul and tell them he has misled you. You can't be right with God simply by believing on the resurrection of Christ. There's more to it than that and when Paul gets worried about their assaults on the gospel he writes this letter to the Galatians and oh you see angry, he's angry with the Judaizers for their siege of the gospel and he is angry at the Galatians.

These believers because they've been so quickly persuaded to abandon the gospel that was preached to them so freely. Well, how do they attack? And how do people attack the gospel today in the very same way? And notice this, they first attack the messenger, basically they're condescending. They say he's a secondary apostle. He's not a apostle Jesus Christ. He wasn't even with the apostles when Jesus was here. He is an apostle of some apostle of the apostles. He didn't get his message from Jesus and he's got it all wrong. Now they are experts. We have that kind of thing going on in the church today. One of the great arguments against the simple proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and a standing of rightness before God based simply upon the work of Christ is being attacked by those who say we don't understand the nuances of the Bible.

We don't have a grasp on the gospel when we tell people that they must turn to Christ in faith and by faith alone they can be made right with God. These people are self-taught, they've never been trained. That's what he said about Spurgeon, you know. The Spurgeon had no formal education. He started preaching when he was 17 or 18 years old, preached the thousands, preached the gospel over and over. I've got 65 volumes of this sermon, imagine that. Those books would crush you to death if you put him on top of yourself. He preached the gospel. He had a passion for the gospel of Jesus Christ, but men always criticized him for his simplicity. And that's what they were doing to Paul. He's not a real apostle.

He never was with Jesus. He simply was sent out by someone. In fact, we don't even think he came from the 12. He didn't get his gospel directly from Jesus, but they had come from Jerusalem and they had come from the apostles and they came to straighten out this teaching of Paul. They also accused him of being a man-pleaser. The reason he's telling you that you don't have to come under the law and be circumcised and start living according to the law is because he's a man-pleaser and he knows that if he does that, you might reject him. And so he doesn't tell you the whole truth. His gospel is different from the gospel of the apostles. And so Paul answers this accusation in chapters 1 and 2. He tells him in these chapters where his gospel came from.

His reply is that my teaching is not dependent on any human authority. It came to me directly from Jesus Christ. He was with Christ, face-to-face being taught by him. And he says, my authority has been acknowledged by the other apostles. Every time I've been with them, they have acknowledged that I have been sent by Jesus Christ in this gospel I preach of salvation through faith in Christ alone is the gospel they preach. And so he says to them, he gives them history. He tells them about his life and about his interaction with the other apostles and how he had brought this message directly from Jesus Christ. Today we have a similar kind of thing. And when men are attacked, the real issue is, are they preaching the message that comes from the Word of God?

That's the measure. The measure is, is this biblical? Is this the message of Scripture? Is this gospel truly biblical? The second attack you see on them is they tried to replace the center. They say he preaches a deficient gospel, and so they wanted to change his gospel out of very center. He says the law can be set aside. But the gospel law, they said, is eternally, can never be set aside. Paul says you can be saved without keeping the law, and they said, but no one can be saved without keeping the law. Even Jesus kept the law. Paul's reply, we find in chapter 3 and 4, he answers this charge by pointing to the Galatians on experience, and he says, look at yourselves, look at the Old Testament, look at Abraham.

He was justified by faith before he was circumcised, before the law was given, 430 years before the law was given. He shows the issue is not, who does or doesn't keep the law, but rather what is the true basis of justification before God? Well, what basis can God declare you to be right when you're not right, and Him still be right? You ever thought about that? On what basis could a righteous God declare you to be right when you're not right, and Him still be right? Paul's going to explain that. God is right, and yet He declares you right, and you know you're not right, but you've believed on Jesus. You've rested your faith in Christ, and so He's going to answer this by giving them theology, doctrine.

That's going to be His response, theology. The third attack on Him is to distort the teaching that flows out of the gospel that He preaches. They say, He promotes sinful living. Paul is always the excuse of that, read the book of Romans, and He says, I'm always slanderously accused of teaching that we should just live in sin so that God would be glorified, because I teach that you've been saved by grace through faith, apart from works. And so what I'm teaching, they claim, is a promotion of sin. When you take away the law, they said you promote lawlessness and immorality. People will go crazy if you don't have a law to put upon them, to keep the rules. Isn't that true? You don't have a big hammer in the church to nail people when they sin.

How are you going to keep them in line? When Calvin was in a great debate with one of the Catholic theologians said a little, and they were arguing over this issue, and they were accusing Calvin of the same thing, you're promoting sin. When you teach this doctrine that people can be saved by grace, simply believing in Jesus Christ apart from works. And they won't do any works for God if you don't motivate them with fear. You don't motivate them with the fear that they can be damned if they don't do the works you tell them. They'll never do anything. You know what Calvin's reply was? His reply, just how the leader was, your religion is too lazy. It's too lazy. What in the world would motivate a person to go the other side of this globe and expend themselves for the gospel of Jesus Christ with the law, with thinking that if they did this they could earn some position before God would motivate them not for long.

Nobody stays on a mission field unless it is a push job, and I can tell you there are a few of those. There are a few of those where people go to the mission field, simply get away from the real world. But people who are out there slugging it out in the trenches, doing the work of the gospel, are not going to stay there except for one reason. The spread of the glory of Jesus Christ as the gospel advances. As they proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ and they see lives transformed through believing the gospel, that's what keeps them there. The glory of Jesus Christ. That's what energizes us. The thing that energizes people, in fact Paul is going to say in this letter, those who believe they are saved by works will always persecute those who teach your saved by grace because they are threatened by it.

They are threatened by this teaching that you are saved by the grace of God through the work of Christ by believing on Him alone. That threatens them because they are afraid, if I believe that, I wouldn't do anything. But then you are doing things for the wrong motive. But if you ever get this doctrine of justification by faith deep down in your hearts and when it becomes rooted in you, you can't help but pour yourself out for the gospel of Jesus Christ. It grips you like it did the Apostle Paul. It forever changed him and he poured out his life for it. Paul's reply is found in chapter 5 and 6. He proves it what they were saying was not true. He says it's not true because Christianity does not lead the believer away from the law into nothingness.

It leads them to Jesus Christ. It leads them to the law of Christ. It leads them to obedience to Christ. He comes to dwell within the first new beliefs on Him. He furnishes Him with a new nature that alone is capable of doing what God truly desires. He also said it is not true because the change is internal. So it is from within, rather than from without, that the Holy Spirit produces the fruit of love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, kindness, faithfulness, self-control. I could lay out those rules. We could put those up on the wall and say, everybody, if you are going to be a member of this church, you are going to be a member in bedstanding of this church. You must every day manifest love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, fitness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and anyone who turns in a member who is not doing that will receive a bonus.

You can get by with 5% instead of the time. We could do that, but you know as well as I do, every single one of you knows, as well as I do, that you can't produce that. You cannot produce that. You can try with all your might and you cannot produce those things. You cannot produce the fruit of the Spirit. It takes the Spirit of God to produce them. This is why Luther was set free. He was set free by the gospel because he worked so hard to please God, to measure up, to be right with God through his own efforts. He did things you wouldn't believe in order to be right with God and when he finally discovered that the just shall live by faith. It completely exploded his mind. It changed everything.

In fact, it changed the whole course of the world because that truth penetrated his heart. It's not true, Paul says, because life in the Spirit is free and from above. It's the kind of religion that would result in either anything that's not that would result in a religion that's either legalistic or licentious. There would either be legalists or those who practice license and debauchery. It says, the only thing that's going to change lives is the fruit of the gospel when the gospel comes. And so in the last two chapters of the book, he talks about ethics, gospel ethics. Gospel ethics is life in the Spirit. We recently changed some of our children's curriculum and the reason we did, and it's taking us a while to adapt to it, but the reason we did is we don't want to moralize.

We want to gospelize. We're not interested in simply teaching little boys and girls what's right and wrong. We want to teach them the truth about Jesus Christ who alone can change their hearts. It's an amazing phenomena, but little boys and girls can grow up in Sunday school and learn to do what's right and wrong and when they get to be teenagers somehow, it just all goes away if their hearts are not transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so what we're doing is we're teaching a curriculum that centers in the gospel of Christ and the glory of Christ. And it's a hard task. It's hard to get used to. It's hard for some Sunday school teachers to get used to this kind of thing. Teaching the gospel, sintering on the gospel, sintering on what Paul centers on here in Galatians chapter five, the glory of Christ.

That's going to transform a five year old. Yeah, transform me. When I was five years old, first memory I have in my head is a song that my mother taught me. Oh, how I love Jesus because he first loved me. That's the first time I ever remember her explaining the gospel to me. The gospel of Jesus Christ transforms people. Anybody who believes the gospel will be changed by it. You got to come to believe that. You don't believe that. You can waste your life trying to transform people through your will. Jack Miller was a professor at Westminster Seminary in the pastor in a, started a mission called World Harvest Mission. As a young man, he had just, he planted a church in the despo, in fact. And he had, when he came to faith, so I gave this book to some of you guys that you read, he came to faith as a young man and the gospel just exploded within him and it was just full of joy in the gospel.

But he said, by the time he got to this place in his life, he'd learned how to live the Christian life pretty well. And he was pretty good at this now and he was feeling pretty good about his own abilities. And yet he plants a church and he begins to experience the frustrations and the frustration he didn't realize what he had lost all his joy. He had lost all his joy. But he was working hard. He was a driven man and he was planting this church and he was trying to get things going and he was working hard and spinning all the plates. And he said, one day he was driving down on the streets of the despo and he noticed over this side of the road to the hamburger drive-in that there was an old lady walking down the sidewalk, pulling a little cart with her groceries in it and there were some teenage boys there yelling at her and making smart remarks and they were even throwing things at her.

And he became enraged and he flipped his car around and he drove up in there and he was going to get out and tell him off. He said, he got out of the car and he thought, maybe I should just get a hamburger, you know, because he'd begin, there was about 15 kids there. He was a little gang of kids but he was determined. He was so angry. He was going to tell them they were wrong. He was going to preach a lot of them. And so he said he got out of his car and he went over to them and he began to address them. He said, have you ever heard of the fourth commandment? And of course, none of them had heard of the fourth commandment. And he explained to them what the fourth commandment was and that they were to love their mother and father and they were the respect, their elders.

And so he begins to preach the law of them and they're kind of surprised by this adult man who comes back and begins to speak to them in forceful language about they were way where they were treating this elderly woman. And he says, and as I begin to preach to them the law, I didn't know how to stop. In fact, I was afraid to stop. I didn't know what they might do if I stopped. And he said, so I kept preaching and I finally, I looked down the street and I saw the steep on this old church building we were meeting in and so I said, and I'm the pastor of that church down there. I expect you to be there on Sunday morning and he turned around and went and got in scarred and drove off. Well that Sunday morning two of these guys showed up, the leader and another kid.

And he said for the life of me, I didn't know what to do with him. I didn't have any joy to get to them. You see what had happened to him was he forgot that the gospel, the powerful gospel of Jesus Christ that had transformed his life and filled his heart with joy was exactly what those boys needed. You know what difficult kids need? They need a real savior, just like every other real center. They need a real savior. And this is what the Apostle Paul is angry about. If we water down this gospel and change it into something else, if we change it into moralism, if we change it into teaching our particular take on the world, our particular take on politics, our particular set of presuppositions that have very little to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ, then we're going to end up doing what Paul is writing against.

What he hated was a distortion of the gospel of Christ. And so Paul begins to respond to this, these attacks by himself. He begins his response by appealing to two things, first of all to his apostleship. He said, I was sent by Jesus Christ. He gives them the basis of the authority with which he teaches the gospel. He reveals a glorious task. He had told a Corinthians, am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus or Lord? Are you not the result of my work in the Lord? The things that Mark and apostle he had, signs and wonders and miracles. He had done them with perseverance. And so he communicates to them. This message that I bring to you is from Jesus Christ. This is the authoritative gospel and teaching the resurrection, he says.

And last of all, he appeared to me also as one abnormally born. In other words, the gospel that Paul preached is the gospel that Jesus gave him. So it begins this letter this way. And then he appeals to his relationships. He mentions those that are with him, the brethren that are with me. You see, he had not only was he an apostle in Jesus Christ, but he was one of us. He was a brother in Christ. And he was a brother of these Galatians. He came to them as a brother in Christ. The second question, that is the answer to the first question, why is he so angry? What is he doing? But notice the second question. This is one I want to just take a few minutes to talk about. And that is what makes a doctrinal dispute a burning issue.

Is there anything in your theology, and you do have a theology? It may be weak, and theology is just the word doctrine. It just means what do you believe the Bible teaches? What are the authoritative teachings of Scripture that hold sway over your life? That are doctrines that we should take a stand on. Most people in our culture today, most people within the Christian culture today, in America and the Western world, believe that doctrine only divides. If we could get rid of all this doctrine, then we could have unity in the church. We need news we can use, not doctrine. People think like that. I don't want to study doctrine. I just want to love Jesus more. The only way you can love Jesus more is to find out who Jesus is, and that is doctrine.

That's theology. That's the teaching of Scripture. This is what Paul says, 2 Timothy 3, 16. The word of God is, the all Scriptures are God-greet and are profitable for doctrine, for doctrine. We have to know this body of truth that has been unveiled to us in the Scriptures. It is profitable for doctrine. Then he says, out of that flows these things, for reproof, the Bible will tell you when you're wrong. This is one of the major reasons people don't learn the doctrine of the Scriptures because it is painful. It tells you when you're wrong. It's a word picture. It means you're going along in a rut and the Bible slaps you down. It shows that you're wrong, but then it says, and for correction, it sets you up straight on the right path.

It gets you off the wrong path. It puts you on the right path. And then he says, and it is profitable for instruction and righteousness. It will instruct you on how to live fruitfully for Jesus Christ. The word of God, the teaching of Scripture, doctrine. Now not every doctrine in Scripture is worth fighting over. We don't fight over your view or my view of what it means for a woman to have her head covered in 1 Corinthians 11. It's pretty obvious what everybody here believes. You can go in some circles and that becomes the primary issue. That's just not a theological issue you should fight over. We don't fight over whether the sons of God and Genesis 6 are angels, set fights, or dynastic kings.

You probably don't even care. We don't fight over those kind of things. We don't fight over things like the exact chronology of the file event. Some people do. They love to fight over those things. I have to be pre-millennial pre-tribulational, but if I discover that Jesus doesn't come before the tribulation, but after it, I'm not going to be disappointed. I just changed my view. It's easy to change from a pre-millennialist to a mid-tribber to a post-tribber, you see, as time goes on. You know, if you're silly to fight over those things, what should we stand for though? What are the key doctrines of Scripture that we must take a stand for? What are the burning issues? The burning issues are gospel issues, gospel issues.

These things we must take a stand on. We must be immovable on. That's what the book of Galatians is about. It is Paul's immovability on the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The issue of Galatians is a burning issue because it is a gospel issue. He says in verse 6 of this first chapter we're looking at that they had deserted. They had deserted the gospel. They had deserted God. They had deserted the truth by bracing a different gospel than the gospel he had preached to them. He says those who preach it should be damned. It's a pretty strong language. Later on the book, he's going to say something even more horrific. The reason he has, he is angry at those who would try to destroy the faith of believers.

There are certain truths in the Scriptures, those possible truths that if we don't have those it will destroy your faith. So we need to stand on them. Paul regarded this doctrine as the indispensable foundation of the Christian life and conduct. What is that? Justification by faith in Christ alone. Paul says that is something we will not move on. We drive a stake in the ground here. We will not veer from this. That our right standing before God, our acceptance with God is based upon faith in Jesus Christ. It is based upon the merits, the righteousness of Christ, and it is received by faith alone. It's over how a person is made right with God. What's wrong if you wanted to attend a church that didn't teach justification by faith alone that taught a justification by a word?

What's wrong with that? It will destroy your faith. It will undermine your faith. Because justification by faith alone, Paul says is at the heart of the gospel. I want you to notice something here in the opening of this book, the last few minutes we have in Galatians chapter 1, turn back there again. Galatians chapter 1, notice in the verses 3 through 5 in this greeting what the Apostle Paul does for us, which is that he does this often. He gives us six facets of this treasure of the gospel that he's going to be speaking about in this book. Six particular vital realities of the gospel of Jesus Christ in this simple Greek. First of all, notice what he says, grace to you a piece from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins so that he might rescue us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father to whom be the glory forever more.

Notice the doctrinal implications of this simple greeting. First of all, grace at the heart of the gospel is grace. Grace, Paul says in Romans 116, if it is by grace is no longer on the basis of works otherwise grace is no longer grace. If we teach salvation by grace plus works faith plus works, it's no longer grace. Our acceptance with God must be based upon, if it's going to be grace, Paul says faith in Christ alone, it is a free gift. Salvation is a gift and if we make it into a merit system, if we make it into moralizing instead of proclaiming the truth, the freedom of the gospel of Jesus Christ, we will distort the gospel. We will take a major section of the gospel away, the heart of the gospel away.

Second is justification, peace, peace with God. This is a gospel of peace. Paul says in Romans chapter 5, verse 1, therefore since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God. You are at peace with God. You folks know what it's like to be on the outs with each other. You know what it's like when you've had a battle and you've got to go home and the battle hasn't been settled and you still are on the outs with each other and you walk in the room and you can feel what it's like to be at war with each other. Paul says because of justification, we have peace with God. We have been made right with God. You mean me as sinful as I am? The kind of heart I have, I can be right with God. You mean I can be permanently right with God?

I can be right with God every day even though I have so many faults and foibles, I can be right with God. That God doesn't want me to be on the edge worrying about losing my salvation and being cast away because of my weaknesses. Doesn't God want to scare me to death and motivate me by fear so that I will in fear hang on and do my best? No. You've got to be mixed up with the devil. That's the devil. That's how Satan motivates people by fear and manipulation. God motivates you by something that's so starling, some people can't take it. He says you are secure in your relationship with me because you are right with me based upon the righteousness of my son, the righteousness of my son, and you can't add anything to it.

Can you imagine Jesus hanging on the cross and you walking up to the foot of the cross and adding your puny little works and saying, here, let me complete the work for you? Wouldn't that be in the front to the living God? You see this salvation that we have received, this gospel that we preach is a gospel of justification by faith in Christ alone. It's what Christ has done for us, this piece that we have with God. And the inner piece we have, as Christ does within us, flows out of this through the ministry of the Spirit. It comes as always going to say in this book, in this very book, it comes as a result of justification by faith alone. If you don't grasp this truth, that you are right with God because of what Christ has done because you have believed upon Him, if you don't embrace this truth, that this doesn't settle down and feel at home in your brain and your heart, you'll never experience in the Christian life what God wants you to experience.

You have to begin with his acceptance of you. It's amazing when Jesus told you how to pray. He said, begin this way, our Father. My relationship with Him is secure. Oh, He's thanks as children. He disciplines us, but that's just a manifestation of His great commitment and love for us. One of the reasons I believe in the perseverance of the saints is because I believe in the perseverance of the Savior. I believe that God's a good and a father, unlike me, who can keep us right with Him whatever it takes. They take a trip to the wood shed, they take off the path into the woods, banging your head here and there, but if you're his child, he knows how to save you to the utter must because you are declared right, just based upon the righteousness of Christ alone.

That's why we can have a relational peace in the Church of Jesus Christ. We're not all alike. We don't all like the same things. Some of you actually use Windows computers. I don't like to joke with the Frank, but there's a lot of things we're different in. My house rules are not the same as your house rules. So what? As long as they somehow reflect the house rules of God, we can respect that. But the thing that brings us together gives us peace with each other is we stand accepted on the same basis. Not because I'm a better this or a better that than you are because both of us stand. At the foot of the cross, and it is level ground by the way, only sinners need apply. The only thing that will keep people from being justified by faith is them not believing that they are truly sinners who need a Savior, but when they understand that they stand there and that the only one who can save them is Jesus Christ, they embrace Him by faith, doesn't matter what you are.

You notice that the only people Jesus got angry with were religious people who tried to stop real sinners from getting to a real Savior. When these self-righteous Pharisees drug a woman who has gotten adultery and threw at his feet, he wasn't angry at her, surprisingly, he was angry at them. That's where she should be at the feet of Jesus. It's the only place a sinner like that can find forgiveness, right? How could a woman like that ever be declared righteous before a holy God? Same way you can, based upon the merits of Jesus Christ? You see why Paul is so angry about it. Third thing is atonement, who gave Himself for our sins, what a beautiful expression, who gave Himself for our sins. He handed Himself over for our sins.

That's stuff that would keep you from being right with God. He handed Himself over for your sins. He gave Himself for our sins. The Bible pictures sin as a debt, as enmity, and as a crime. And Jesus takes care of sin in the three ways. He pays the debt, He destroys the enemy, and He pays the penalty for crime. He's taken care of it. He's dealt with your sin. He gave Himself for our sins. That's why I believe in the perseverance of the Savior. Saints because I believe in the perseverance of the Savior. You think He can't save you to the utter most? Amen. And then deliverance. Notice this. That He might deliver us out. Quite literally. That He might deliver us out for Himself out of the present evil age.

It's unique words. It's not used. I don't even know if it's used anywhere else. I'm not really sure for this, but the normal words are deliverance in the New Testament. When it comes to the deliverance that Christ brings, the two words that are normally used, are not used here. It's a word. In fact, you could, the sound of the word, you might get the meaning. It's X-I-R-O. I-R-O is the word we get from, for our word, airplane, and air. I-R-O means to lift up. And He says, He's the one who came and He lifted us up out of this pit. There's a pocketful story about Augustine. It's probably been attributed to others too, but Augustine was speaking to a Catholic theologian about this whole thing of how we are made right with God.

And He says, Well, salvation is like this, the Catholic said. The salvation is like this. It's like a mother or a father who takes their little child and they're teaching them how to walk. And God is like that with us. He helps us with our first steps. We may start to fold up, but He catches this. And He helps us until pretty soon we can walk on our own. And Augustine said, No, that's not like it is at all. He said that salvation is like this. It's like a caterpillar in a ring of fire. And the fire is moving inward. As the fire burns towards the caterpillar, judgment is coming, destruction is coming. And somebody outside of this situation from above reaches down and gets the caterpillar and lifts them out.

That's what happened to you. He reached down and He delivered you out of this evil age and made you a child of God. Amen? Isn't that a wonderful truth? And then He says, not only that, but it is, the gospel is the message of God's faithfulness. Look at this. According to the will of our God and Father, that speaks of the faithfulness of God. According to the will of our God and Father, the word for will here is the word the lame, which means God's deep desire. It was the desire of God to send Jesus Christ to save you. You ever want something really bad that you don't want to pay the cost. And you know, we are incredible shoppers now with the Internet. I'm going to go about three minutes over, okay?

You go on the Internet, you check 15 places to get the best price. And for 15 cent discount, you'll buy a car at some other place rather than this place. Man, we want the best deal in the world. If we find out we bought something and we could have got it for $5 cheaper, it just drives us crazy. This verse says that God delighted in paying such a price for you because He wanted to demonstrate something to you. He's not cheap. Paul says He wanted to demonstrate to you that if He would deliver up His own son for you, then how will He with Him not also freely give you all things in Christ? He wants you to know He paid premium for you. He could have purchased a million worlds at the cost that He paid, but He wanted you.

And so He paid the price for you. You are valuable to God. That is amazing to me, this truth, that you are worth a son to God the Father. David Monroe book, worth a son. You're worth a son. Isn't that amazing that he would pay this kind of price for you to deliver you out of this present evil age? And then finally, the final facet of the gospel is God's glory, to whom be the glory forevermore. To whom be the glory forevermore. Who should get the glory for the gospel? God. God, if you ever tell the gospel in a way that gives you glory, then you're distorting it in some way. This gospel glorifies God. The gospel we preach does not give all the glory to God, then it's a different gospel than Paul preached.

This is the gospel of the glory of God. One of the greatest benefits of salvation is that God has given you the capacity to enter into the heavenly doxology, the heavenly worship, in a unique way even the angels can't enter into. You can say, you bought me with your blood. That's what the book of Revelation says. It says He is loving us and He purchased us with His own blood. Isn't that amazing? That He would give Himself. He has tarant says something I'm so afraid to say, but every time I read it, it shocks me. He says, on the cross, God proved that He loved you more than He loves Himself. Isn't that incredible? Isn't that what it says if a husband was to lay down his life or his wife wouldn't that say, I love her more than I love my own life?

He died for us. John Piper says, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. The implication that is this, if you have a simple shallow understanding of the gospel, and you don't, if the depths of the gospel, the depths of God's love in the gospel, doesn't keep seeping deeper and deeper and deeper into your heart, then you can't glorify God as well as you could if you would simply allow it to. Drink deeply from this gospel and let it seep deep down inside of you. Let it affect every issue of your life. When people wrong you and you want to nail them to the wall, apply the gospel to that situation. Let the truth of the gospel penetrate your heart so deeply that it affects the way that you responded.

You can glorify God in that way. In Acts 1352, after Paul peaches the gospel, it says the disciples were continually filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit. The mark of the Holy Spirit, and we have joy in the gospel of Jesus Christ. One of the questions, the main question of the book of Galatians found in Galatians 415, I'll leave you with this question. The question Paul asked him is, what happened to your joy? Paul first went to Galatians and preached the gospel. They were so full of joy at hearing the gospel and the truth about how they could be made right with God. They said, if we could, we would pick our eyes out and give them to you because he was having problems with his eyes. They were so full of joy they wanted to give themselves away and now they're angry at Paul.

They've turned away from beginning to buy into another gospel and Paul says, what happened to your joy? You need to preach the gospel to yourself, afresh, and do it. Get your joy back because that's what he wants us to do. They live our lives out of fullness of joy in the gospel of Christ. I'm sorry for keeping us so long. We just stand. Let's close in prayer. Our Father, as we come before you now, we go in our feeble, imperfect way. We get thanks to you for the glory of this gospel of Jesus Christ. We thank you, O Father, that the truth of the gospel, the depth and breadth and height and length of it, the more we dig into it, the more it changes our lives, the more we want to live for you, the more we want to walk in obedience to you and manifest the truth of the gospel in the way we live.

We pray as we leave this place. In the midst of all the burdens, you have allowed it. So be upon us today. I pray we would leave feeling light and full of joy because we know that in the midst of these troubles, we are right with you. And the God that we are right with has promised to bless us even in the midst of our troubles. So may we go, Father, with a walk of joy, I pray, in the gospel of Jesus Christ. We thank you for Christ. Help us to be as in the series. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Thank you.