PAUL S LETTER TO THE CHURCHES IN GALATIA THE GOOD NEWS OF GRACE One Gospel Galatians 1:1-10 Layne Lebo April 3, 2016

Transcription

1 PAUL S LETTER TO THE CHURCHES IN GALATIA THE GOOD NEWS OF GRACE One Gospel Galatians 1:1-10 Layne Lebo April 3, 2016 If I asked you to pick 1 word that sums up the message of Christianity as it s described in the Bible what would your word be? The word GRACE would be an excellent choice. GRACE is at the core of our faith. Most of us are very familiar with grace, and I suspect it s our familiarity with it that actually gets in the way of our understanding. That s true for me. I ve heard about grace my whole life. The word is prominent in the New Testament and I can quote Scriptures about grace, but it s only in the last few years that I feel like I m beginning to scratch the surface of understanding grace and its implications for me. Understanding grace has been a long journey for me for a number of reasons starting with the fact that like most of us I naturally gravitate toward believing I have to earn whatever I get that tendency is built into all of us at birth. I ve also been raised in this Central Pennsylvania/German culture where we re encouraged to embrace a solid work ethic, and I grew up a farm where hard work is expected of everyone. Relaxing and taking it easy were foreign concepts, which still don t come easily to me. And, like many of you, I grew up in a church where great emphasis was placed on doing right things and steering clear of wrong things. I ve heard someone summarize what they were taught in the church as a child as, Don t drink, smoke or chew or date girls who do. That s pretty accurate, except the don t list I learned was a good bit longer. I m grateful for the values and Christian morality I was taught and that was modelled for me by my parents and other adults in the church, but along the way I kind of mixed things up I came to believe that right behavior earned me God s love; failing to understand that it was actually God s love and grace that enables me to live rightly. It s safe to say that I m grace-challenged and only recently am starting to understand grace and hopefully beginning to live more of a grace-filled life. I m focusing on this concept of grace today as we re starting a sermon series on the Apostle Paul s New Testament letter to the churches in Galatia, called the Book of Galatians. I ve titled this series, The Good News of Grace, because the theme of Galatians is the 1

2 supremacy of God s grace over anything and everything else we try to grab hold of to make ourselves right before God. A formal definition for grace is, The unmerited and undeserving favor of God given to sinful human beings. But I think we can get an even clearer understanding of grace by reading some of the verses about grace in the New Testament. John 1:17 says, For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Romans 11:6, then it is no longer by works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace. Both of those verses contrast grace with works. Ephesians 2 verses 4 & 5 gives us a broad picture of grace. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions it is by grace you have been saved. Hebrews 4:16 encourages us to come to our Heavenly Father as a God of grace, Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. And 1 Corinthians 15:10 is a verse I like a lot, because I relate to the Apostle Paul s struggle to reconcile God s grace with his own actions: But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. This small book of Galatians has been instrumental in the faith journeys of many wellknown Christians including the great 16 th Century reformer Martin Luther and John Wesley, an 18 th Century Englishman who is a prominent figure in our denomination s theology. Studying Galatians helped Luther and Wesley move from a legalistic/works-based religion to faith built on an understanding of God s unconditional love and grace. My hope for each of us is that as we study this book over the next 4 weeks, we too will come to a fuller understanding of our Heavenly Father s grace, made real to us through his Son, Jesus Christ. Today we ll be looking at the Apostle Paul s introduction to this letter in verses 1-10 of chapter 1. I ll begin by reading verses 1-5 Paul, an apostle sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead and all the brothers with me, To the churches in Galatia: Grace and peace to you 2

3 from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. Map of Middle East Paul wrote the letter called Galatians to a group of people living in Asia Minor the center of modern day Turkey. Galatia was named after a group of Gauls (a name for ethnic French people) who migrated from central Europe as far south as Italy and eventually went into Asia Minor in the 3 rd Century B.C. Map of Galatia Galatia was a small Roman province, whose people spoke a Celtic dialect, and were known by neighboring countries as fearsome warriors. During his 1 st missionary journey the Apostle Paul along with Barnabas visited Asia Minor. (Paul and his team made three trips to Galatia). On that first trip Paul became sick and ended up staying in Galatia longer than he had planned while he recovered. His extended stay gave him more of an opportunity to preach in Galatia and while he was there he helped plant 4 churches in the province: Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe. The Galatian churches appear to have been made up mostly of converts from paganism. And as was often the case in the New Testament era, after Paul left these recently planted churches, the churches encountered serious problems. A number of Paul s New Testament letters Corinthians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians were written in the midst of a similar pattern: Paul and his team would plant a church. After they d leave the church would encounter problems. Word of those difficulties would come to Paul. Paul would write a letter to the church addressing the issues they were facing. And then sometime in the future he would return to visit that church. The decades immediately following Jesus death were an extremely volatile time for the Church. The truth of Jesus resurrection was being debated. Heresies that had bits of truth from Christianity were prevalent. And within the Church the big point of conflict was the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Christianity came out of the Jewish faith and the Old Testament Law Jesus was the Promised Messiah that Jews had been awaiting for centuries. So it was natural that the Jews who recognized Jesus as the Messiah continued to follow the Jewish Law. But through the Apostle Peter s ministry and later the Apostle Paul and others, non-jews, known as Gentiles, also began to come to faith in Christ. This was a fulfillment of promises that had been made to Abraham and other prominent Jewish leaders throughout the Old Testament. A big question the early Church grappled with was, Do Gentiles who place 3

4 their faith in Christ, need to follow the Old Testament Jewish Law? We read about the conflict surrounding this question in the Book of Acts and in Acts chapter 15 key leaders of the early Church, including Peter, Paul and Jesus brother, James, met in what is known today as the Jerusalem Council to solve this question. Their bottom line decision was that they shouldn t make it difficult for Gentiles to be followers of Jesus. There were some moral guidelines related to sexuality and idolatry that they established, but they emphasized that it was faith in Jesus, not following the Jewish Law, that brought people into a relationship with Jesus. It s hard to be certain of the timing of some of the events in the New Testament, but it appears that Paul s letter to the churches at Galatia may have been written after his 1 st missionary journey, when he planted the churches in Galatia, and before the Council Meeting in Jerusalem which established more clear guidelines for Gentiles. After Paul and Barnabas left Galatia some teachers probably traditional Jews, known as Judaizers came into these churches and threw them into turmoil by teaching that they had to be circumcised and follow the Jewish customs and laws to be followers of Jesus. Some of the Galatians consented to their teaching, while others resisted it, claiming that their faith in Jesus was enough without them having to follow the Jewish Law. Those who accepted the teaching of the Judaizers then questioned Paul s teaching and his legitimacy as an Apostle. With what I just shared as a backdrop, follow along as I read Galatians chapter 1 verses In verse 6 Paul jumps right into the dilemma I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel which is really no gospel at all. v. 6 This wasn t an ego thing for Paul even though the Galatians were deserting him and his teaching. He was upset, because he knew he was teaching them the truth about Jesus. He goes on in verse 7 to write, Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. v. 7 Paul highlights the confusion surrounding the teaching the Galatians were receiving. And he makes it clear that he viewed this teaching, not as simply a different point of view, but as a perversion of the truth. In verses 8 & 9 he demonstrates how seriously he takes this 4

5 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned! Vv. 8 & 9 Paul s concern is for the Gospel the Good News of Jesus not for his reputation or for the Galatian people s respect of him. He goes so far as to say that even if he comes back to them and teaches something that contradicts the Gospel he taught them they shouldn t listen to him and he should be condemned. And Paul concludes in verse 10 by saying Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ. v. 10 As we continue walking through this letter, we ll read more of the details surrounding Paul s argument about the relationship between God s grace given freely to us the responsibility the Jews had up to that point to faithfully keep the law. But even from the little I ve read today, you can see how important this issue was to Paul and to the New Testament Church. At stake was the essence of the Gospel. Was placing faith in God s grace revealed in Jesus Christ enough, or did Gentile believers also need to become Jews, go through the rite of circumcision and then attempt to follow the Jewish law? Someone has summarized Paul s message in Galatians as Jesus + anything = nothing. Paul s rallying cry throughout the New Testament and especially here in the Book of Galatians is summed up in a statement he wrote in a letter to the Church at Ephesus: For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God not by works so that no one can boast. Ephesians 2:8 Salvation comes to each of us as a gift from God, not by our works. The Apostle Paul wrote this letter to a rural church in central Turkey nearly 2,000 years ago. And while our context is very different and much time has passed, the message of the Gospel of God s grace is just as relevant and powerful for us today as it was when Paul wrote these words. We live in a culture that teaches us that we have to work for what we want there are no free lunches. And even in the church it s easy for us to focus so much on behaviors and on what we do and on how we look and on what others think about us that we lose sight of the message of grace. Listen to another statement of the Apostle Paul in Titus 3:4, 5 & 7: 5

6 But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life. Titus 3:4, 5 & 7 We can t lose sight of grace. Our works are a poor substitute. As our staff talked together about this series and I asked them for ideas about how we can make this series live for people, someone made the suggestion that we invite someone each week to share the story of their journey toward grace. We somewhat jokingly said we wanted to hear from recovering legalists. I can say that because I consider myself a recovering legalist. Today Doris Barr has agreed to share her journey as a recovering legalist with us DORIS BARR The main obstacle to love for God is service to God. Henri Nouwen 6