Galatians Part 1: Jesus Means Freedom

The book of Galatians. As we start this book, you heard the passage that Gibson just read for us: the first five verses of the book. That's where we're going to be today.

But before we even get to those first five verses, I think it's really important that we see one of the things I learned when I was in college—learning how to not just read the Bible, but study the Bible. A couple of my professors were known to say this: context, context, context. Simply meaning, when we're reading the Bible, we have to understand.

For example, when I read Louis L'Amour, like anybody? Yeah, a couple? All right. When I read Louis L'Amour, he's a novelist who wrote a million of the same book. There's a good guy, he has a horse, and we spend two chapters describing what kind of horse it is and what kind of gun he shoots. There's a girl that needs help, and he saves her, and they fall in love—every single L'Amour book ever written. There we go! Just a different part of the American West.

So when he writes a book, the reason he was so successful was because he knew who he was writing to. Ladies, most of you at least, he wasn't writing to you. He was writing to me and a bunch of other men. He was writing to someone, he was writing for a specific purpose, and he was writing to a specific place.

When we read that, now that's just a novel that anybody can pick up and kind of go, "Ooh, this is great!" When we're reading the Scriptures, when we're reading the Word of God, we have to understand, first and foremost, this is the Word of God. This is God speaking to us through this letter.

But it's also incredibly imperative that we understand who's writing it, who they're writing it to, and why they're writing it. Those are really, really important things because the Bible can never mean for us what it did not mean for them. This is a huge problem in biblical interpretation today. Well, it always has been, but it's a huge problem today. When we open our Bibles and our Bible studies, we read a passage, and then somebody asks the question, "What did it mean to you?" I don't care what it meant to you! Do we understand this? This is an unbelievably important part of biblical interpretation. What did it mean to them? What was the author trying to communicate? The author being God, through the Holy Spirit and through this person writing on a page that we are now reading, 2,000 years later—sometimes more, but 2,000 years later in the case of the New Testament. What did it mean to them?

So, as we start the book of Galatians, we're going to do a little bit of context work because, number one, it gives a little flavor. Sometimes when we read the Bible, we're just reading these words, and we don't really understand or attempt to understand what was going on. These are real people receiving a real letter in real time.

In the same way that, you know, what would happen in the early church is they would write letters, and these letters would get passed around, and they would get read on a Sunday morning to the body—kind of like a sermon. So it's happening in real time, just like this.

Here we go. The book of Galatians was written probably around the year 48 AD. Okay? So if we think that if Jesus was born around 0 AD, he died around 38 AD—this is like 15, maybe 20 years after Jesus was crucified. So this is, hear me, this is the infant Church.

We did this last week, but raise your hand if you were here when we were figuring this whole thing out. Yeah, a few of us! Okay, a few of us were here when we were just kind of—we actually were meeting over in one of the mobile classrooms at the middle school, and then we met in a few people's homes along the way. But this thing that we now call Grace, 13 years later, started with like a half a dozen people in a room. It was the infant Church. It actually wasn't a church yet; it was just a small group of Jefferson Baptists, and then it turned into a church.

So, what we have here, 15 years after Jesus died, was raised again, ascended into heaven, and commissioned the apostles—15 to 20 years later—is this book. Okay? So I want you to keep that in mind.

Paul, the author of the book of Galatians, here's his story: he was raised as a devout, devout Jew. When I say devout Jew, I mean he was super Jewish. He talks in one of his letters about how he was blameless in respect to the Torah, the law. That's insane! So you want to talk about devout—this is a person that has actually, literally, wholeheartedly committed every part of himself to his faith, and that faith was the Jewish faith.

Then this guy Jesus comes along, saying all this stuff—this rocky stuff in Paul's eyes. Then he is crucified. His followers start claiming that he was risen from the dead, and they start preaching this new good news called the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So Paul, what he did was go around, and he was very central and instrumental. Number one, if we read in the book of Acts, he was very instrumental in martyring Christians. He was that guy that was like, "Here, I'll hold your guys' coats while you stone that dude." That's Paul, fully approving of it.

Then he was traveling all over the nation of Israel, arresting Christians, murdering Christians, throwing Christians in jail until, in Acts chapter 9, Jesus himself appears to Paul and goes, "Bro, what are you doing? Why are you persecuting me?" He actually says he appears to him, knocks him off his horse, and he’s blinded by the experience—literally blinded by the experience—which he is healed of later.

But Paul does a complete 180. He goes from hating Christians, persecuting them, to the devout nature of all that he was getting turned on its head. So this is Paul in Acts chapter 9. He becomes saved, and then he is commissioned by the Holy Spirit to preach to the Gentiles in Acts chapter 10.

Now, I'm doing this as a timeline because this is really important for us. In Acts chapter 10, Peter is at somebody's house. He goes upstairs to take a nap, and he has a dream. In this dream, a sheet comes down out of heaven, and on this sheet are all the unclean animals that the Old Testament law, the Torah, says that Jewish people can't eat—unclean. And God says to him, "It's my favorite phrase in the entire Bible, by the way: kill and eat."

Peter's response is, "What? I would never eat pig! I would never!" And then God's response to him is to basically explain to him, "Everything that I have created—nothing that I've created is unclean."

So there's a dual meaning here. He is freeing him from an aspect of Old Testament law through the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and he's also explaining to him that some guys are going to come to the door, and they're going to ask you to go with them. "I want you to go with them, and here's what you're going to do: you're going to preach this Jewish faith to Gentiles." Because up until that point, it was just the Jews. He’s saying Jesus died for everyone.

Then, Peter goes with them. He preaches the gospel to this group of Gentiles, baptizes them, and watches the Holy Spirit fall on them and goes, "It's true!" So then, in chapter 11, Peter gets in trouble. Some Jews come in, like, "Hey, bro, you can't be doing that! You can't be preaching to Gentiles. This is our thing!" And he goes, "No, no, no, dude, listen! I preached the gospel to them, I baptized them, and I watched the Holy Spirit fill them! I watched it with my own eyes!"

These other believing Jews go, "Oh man, I mean, Peter's an apostle, so if he's doing this and God's doing this, then this must be a part of what God is doing." So I want you to understand what's happening in these verses—they're figuring it out. They're stumbling over themselves. It's the infant Church.

Okay? We're 13 years in, and we're still stumbling over ourselves. Amen? Not just to the church; some of us have been Christians for a long time, and we're still stumbling over ourselves. This is the Church of Jesus Christ being born, stumbling over itself as it figures out what the Holy Spirit is doing and what Jesus was talking about so many times throughout.

I can't help but imagine that they were going like, "Oh!" as Jesus's words came back to their brains, right? And then they would write it down as part of their Epistles. We see it all the time. This is the infant Church.

Now, in Acts 13 and 14, we have Paul's first missionary journey. In Paul's first missionary journey, they sail from Antioch, which is in Syria. So, right? You have Israel here on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean or the western coast of the Mediterranean, right? And then Antioch is up here in Syria. You guys know your geography. You know where Syria is in relation to Israel—just a little bit north.

So they sail, they travel from Jerusalem up to Antioch, and then they sail from Antioch to Cyprus, and they go all the way to Asia Minor, which is present-day Turkey, right? They start preaching to all of these places, planting all these churches. They’re like, "Whoa!" And they start sharing the gospel, and people are coming to Christ, and they're going nuts!

Then Paul and Barnabas get back to Antioch, and they start sharing their experience. This is Acts 14, and all of a sudden, they find out that these Gentiles—who just received the good news of Jesus Christ—are being told by other Jewish Christians, "Wait, wait, wait! If you want to be a Christian, you've got to get circumcised, and you have to follow the law."

So they go, "Whoa! Wait a minute! We need to go have a discussion about this." So they go back to Jerusalem. They call the council of Jerusalem, which you can read in Acts 15. This council is the first gathering of the Church, and they're trying to decide: "Do Gentiles need to follow the law of Moses?" The answer is no. They should have faith in Jesus Christ alone.

This is super important for us, especially as we move into the book of Galatians, because this is the central argument of the book of Galatians. Paul is going to spend the next six chapters arguing that Jesus and Jesus alone is enough.

So he gets back to Galatia and starts preaching this gospel. These churches are popping up all over, and Paul is like, "This is amazing!" And he sees what God is doing, and then he leaves, and people come in behind him. These are called the Judaizers—Jewish Christians who believed that you needed to follow the law and the good news of Jesus Christ. So they're coming in behind him saying, "Wait a minute! You can't just do this Jesus thing. You have to follow the law as well."

Paul gets wind of this, and he’s like, "Oh, no, no, no! You don't get to do that." So this letter of Galatians is Paul writing back to the church in Galatia saying, "No! You cannot add to the gospel!" So when we read those first five verses, I want you to remember that. Paul is passionate, and he’s a little mad. He’s a little fiery when he writes this letter, and he’s trying to help them understand that the gospel of Jesus Christ is pure. It is untainted. It is enough.

What’s Paul doing? He’s saying, “I was sent by God.” Those guys might say they were sent by James; I’m sent by Jesus. He’s not trying to one-up; he is trying to firmly reestablish the authority through which he taught them what he taught them.

“I’m not sent from men.” The authority that I have is a divine authority. He asserts his identity as a capital-A apostle. Sometimes in your Bibles, they will differentiate because when they're referring to capital-A Apostles, they’re referring to the 12 plus Paul. That’s it.

Okay, so if you hear somebody referred to as an apostle these days, that’s lowercase-a. It’s a way of differentiating the men who were initially sent by Jesus—witnesses of Jesus’s work and life—and those who were descendants taught by them. Does that make sense?

So Paul says, “An apostle,” he’s equating himself with the 12 witnesses of Jesus’s grace and transformative power personally, and then assigned to teach on his behalf. Not from men, nor through men, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead.

So here’s what he’s doing: two things. Number one, saying, “I’m sent by divine authority, not by human authority.” And number two, he’s reminding them of the identity of the person who sent him—Jesus, equal with God the Father who raised him from the dead.

So all of this is in the context of the Gospel. This is what’s happening in the letter to the Galatians, which by the way, after writing this letter, do you know what Paul’s going to do? This timeline's not quite as fixed, and scholars disagree on this, but my position is that after writing the book of Galatians, if you read in Acts chapter 15, you know what happens in Acts 15? Paul leaves Antioch, goes back to Jerusalem, and has a great big council with the apostles.

At the end of that council, all the apostles agree that what Paul says is true: we are not going to enforce Torah law on Gentile Christians. It becomes the official position of the church at that point. Again, I want you to see what’s happening here: the tension there—it’s a baby, infant Church—they're figuring it out. They’re figuring it out, but Paul is firm: “I’m sent by Jesus to preach the Gospel of Jesus.” Period.

Verses three and four: “Grace and peace to you 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.” Now, these two words—this is all just kind of like a greeting to us, and most of the time when we read the epistles, we just scoot through all this stuff to get to the theological meat.

Right? Where’s the good stuff? This is the good stuff. Okay, now, grace and peace—it’s kind of a greeting. Paul used it here, and it’s a Jewish greeting. I want you to understand what’s happening here: “Grace and peace to you.”

What’s grace? It’s the name of our church; we should probably know what it means. The word grace in the New Testament actually just means “unmerited favor.” I have favor with God, and it’s unmerited. I didn’t do anything to deserve it.

Now, that’s not typically how it works in human circles. This tends to be something that we have a hard time with because most of the time when we interact with people, we like them and they like us because of stuff that we do. Right? We tend to not like really mean people. I don’t like them; they don’t have my favor.

But this idea of grace—favor that I don’t earn—God likes me, and it’s not because of anything I did. Our brains glitch, don’t they? Our hearts are like, “No, that can’t be true; I have to do something.”

“Grace and peace to you.” Let’s pause. Let’s rewind. Do we remember what happened in these towns to Paul? He went in just to preach the Gospel to them, and every single one of these cities, they were either booted, persecuted, or killed.

I still contend that Paul was actually dead when he was stoned, and that God raised him back to life because it says they thought he was dead. Then it says the apostles gathered around him. I assume that they prayed, and he stood up and walked back in.

Even if he wasn’t dead when you’re stoned to the point where the people stoning you think you’re dead, you don’t get up and walk back into the city. You call the ambulance; you get LifeFlight. Right? That’s not how it works. I think he was dead, and the other Christians gathered around him, prayed for him, he was raised from the dead, and kept moving because God’s like, “This guy’s not done yet; get up.”

And this is what he’s writing to them: “Grace and peace to you.” Paul has been so changed, so infused with, and so transformed by the love and the grace of Jesus that it now flows out of him toward those who commit heinous acts against him. “Grace and peace to you.”

Where does the grace and peace come from? From God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Why do we need grace? Because we are enslaved to our own sin; we do not have the ability to free ourselves.

Our theme for this sermon series is “Jesus means freedom.” Why didn’t you say “Jesus means grace?” Because what grace does is set us free. Right? We have this saying that there are three things that the grace of Jesus does in our lives, and we call it three different things: justification, sanctification, and glorification.

In justification, we are saved from the penalty of our sin. The penalty of our sin is death; the Bible is very clear about that, specifically in the book of Romans: death—that’s what we deserve. So the grace of Jesus removes the penalty of that sin and puts it on Jesus on the cross so we no longer have to pay the penalty of our sin.

In our sanctification, we are saved progressively through other Christians and through the word of God and through the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We are saved from the power of sin. That’s why we see growth in our lives—not just behavior, but real growth where our hearts love new things that they didn’t love before and love other things less that we shouldn’t love. That’s called sanctification; we’re being progressively sanctified and set free from the power of sin.

And then, when Jesus comes back or we go to be with him, we will be glorified, which means we will be saved from the presence of sin. Can you imagine what that would be like? I will never be in the presence of sin again! You talk about a brain glitch; I don’t really think I can fathom that.

That’s why we need grace. We are enslaved. So he says, “Grace to you,” because they have believed. Ephesians 1:7 and 8: “In him”—that’s Jesus—“we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to what? My church attendance? According to the riches of his grace, which he gave to us as we needed it. Right here it goes! He’s like a parent who just doles it out whenever we need it.”

Is that how it works? What does it say? “Which he lavished on us.” The grace of God has been poured out on us in extravagant means, in an extravagant manner—ten times more than we could possibly need or ever comprehend. It’s been lavished on us. That’s the grace of God! He lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight.

John 1:16: “For from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace.” And you could actually multiply that times infinity: grace upon grace upon grace upon grace upon grace. Right?

But then he gives something else: grace and what? Peace. The Hebrew word is “shalom,” and that word is central—unbelievably central—to the entire biblical story. What did Adam and Eve have in the garden with God? Shalom.

It’s mostly a relational term, but some scholars have actually argued that it’s the building block for the entire Hebrew language—is this word “shalom.” Peace appears over 200 times in the Bible.

But here’s what—first of all, we have the grace of God that gives us peace. Primarily, what peace is that? Peace between us and God. The chasm that appeared in Genesis chapter 3 between humans and God through the sin of Adam and Eve has been filled. The relationship that was broken has been renewed: peace.

The peace that we have from God now—peace is an idea that we know well. Peace in the Middle East—you know, some of you that are older than me think of this when you see peace. Right? It’s not shalom. Peace does not mean simply a lack of conflict.

Like the things that we seek in life, everything that we seek in life, we seek because we think it will bring us shalom. We think, “If we just had—if I just got that raise, right? I would have less stress about money, and I would have shalom.”

You may not think of that word, but that’s the core of every heart in the human race—this is what we’re seeking. And all of our dark secrets and vices—what we’re seeking is shalom.

The secret things we do on the internet—you know what we’re looking for? Shalom. Everything that we do—there’s a massive amount of what we see in the political divide and all the fighting, right? A lot of it boils down to—not all of it, but a lot of it boils down to two different ways of seeking shalom.

And this is one of the reasons why as the church we say, “Don’t put your hope there or there.” We don’t put our hope in the right or the left because their promises are empty. Now, that doesn’t mean that we don’t take part in our democratic system because we believe that there are ways in which our country can get better, lives can get saved, lives can get improved. Right? Those are all good things that we pursue.

We don’t put our hope in them because our peace can only be found in one place: grace and peace from our God and Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Period.

Now, I don’t know if I’m ahead of my notes or behind my notes. What did Jesus say about this peace? John 14: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you—not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”

Can you imagine what it would be like to live life as Jesus just described it? No troubled hearts and no fear? That sounds awesome. And what he’s saying is, “You can’t find it out there, but I’m here, and I want to give it to you. I’m just waiting.”

Philippians chapter 4, Paul describes it this way: “Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses understanding”—when I said, “Can you imagine?”—no, we can’t. Why? Because Paul says it’s beyond our understanding, which surpasses all understanding—will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

So peace—grace. Through grace, we are given peace with God. Now listen to this, okay? I came up with this, and I don’t even know if it makes sense, but it sounded good. I think it makes sense.

Once peace with God is established through the grace of God, the grace of God gives us the power of God to have peace. So this idea of shalom, first and foremost, is right standing with God—peace with God. There was conflict, and now there isn’t.

But it goes beyond that because we have that peace. Now we can experience what Jesus and Paul were talking about: “Don’t let your hearts be troubled; don’t be afraid.” Paul says, “Don’t be anxious.”

We can experience shalom because we possess shalom through the grace of God. We can’t earn it; we can’t work for it; we can’t find it. It’s given to us.

This is what Paul starts with: “This is the message that Jesus gave to me: grace and peace to you.” Period. He rescues us from the control of sin, sets us free, equipped with the power to do two things: live differently and make disciples.

We see what Paul’s doing, right? He was once living one way; now he’s living a different way. And what’s he doing with his new life? He’s making disciples. And that has been given to you and me and every Christian since Paul, since Jesus ascended into heaven.

Every single Christian on the face of the planet has been tasked with this: through the grace of God and the peace of God, we now can live differently and we can spread this good news to other people so that they can live differently and make disciples. This is what families do—they multiply.

This is what you and I have been given the privilege of taking part in. But there’s a catch, right? There’s a catch because we’re in this middle portion that we just talked about—the sanctification part, where we’ve been saved from the penalty of our sin, but we still have these dark areas of our lives that just seem to hold on and won’t let go.

We believe that we progressively are being set free from the power of sin, and the New Testament talks a lot about this. James, the book we just finished, what did he say in chapter 4:7? “Submit yourselves to God.” Through the grace and peace of God, and then what? Resist the devil.

What do we have to do first? Submit to God. Then we do what? Resist the devil, and what will he do? It doesn’t say he just goes away; it says he will flee from us. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

What is the main weapon that Satan has against us as believers? Accusation. He is the accuser. That’s what the name Satan means—it’s actually not a name; it’s a title: the accuser. That’s what it means.

He comes to you and me all the time, every single day: “You know you’re the worst. God doesn’t really love you.” I could go on and on and on about the things that he whispers to me. What does he whisper to you? What does he accuse you of?

There’s a song—one of my favorite songs in the history of the world—by a group named Shane and Shane called “Embracing Accusation.” And I want to read you a quote from Martin Luther that sums up that song.

He, Martin Luther, wrote this: “When Satan accuses you, you tell Satan no, for I go to Christ who gave himself for my sins.” Whatever the accusation is that’s in your mind, I want you to think about this: “I go to Christ who gave himself for my sins.”

So, Satan, when you accuse me, you are cutting your own throat because you have reminded me of God’s goodness towards me—how he so loved me that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

By calling me a sinner, Satan, you have comforted me beyond measure. That’s the grace and the peace of Jesus. When it takes heart and continues to deepen its roots in our hearts, we more and more and more—not walk in sinlessness, that’s part of it—but where it comes from, where that new life comes from, the roots of the tree that grows in our hearts and produces the fruit of the Spirit starts here: this deepening belief in the love of God and the refusal to believe the lies of Satan.

Right? That’s true: Satan, I am a wretched sinner; thank you for reminding me how much God loves me. And the power of Satan is neutered. Most of us know what that word means—it loses all of its power, its reproductive power in our lives—it’s done.

But it starts here, with the grace and the peace of God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Corinthians chapter 10: “For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power.”

To do what? What does it say in 2 Corinthians? “Destroy strongholds.” What strongholds? The strongholds in our lives—the places in our lives where we have believed Satan’s lies so deeply. It’s so ingrained in part of our identity, who we are, and Paul says that we have divine power to destroy those in ourselves and in others through the grace and the peace of Jesus.

1 John chapter 5: “For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world.” This is the theme of the book of Revelation, by the way—overcoming. “And this is the victory that has overcome the world: our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”

Let’s go back to Galatians, verses 4 and 5: “According to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.” We overcome because of what? Because of grace and peace. Whose grace and peace? He gives it according to his will, and he gets the glory forever and ever.

Amen. Not “amen” like it’s done because this is the first five verses of the book; we got six more chapters to look at. The word “amen” just means “so be it.” That is a declaration.

So as we leave here today, I would encourage you to change your hellos, your “what’s ups,” and your whatever your greeting is to “grace and peace.” May we forever remind ourselves and remind each other that this is where it starts, and that this is where it ends: grace and peace.