You Got an A+ [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

To say that you are justified through faith by the grace of God in Jesus Christ is to say, metaphorically, God in Jesus Christ has said to you, you already got an A, so go ahead and live like an A student. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series Galatians as presented at Rinaldo Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month made to Alan Wright Ministries.

So as you listen to today's message, you can go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Or call 877-544-4860.

877-544-4860. More on this later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. Author and Pastor radio personality Steve Brown tells a wonderful story about his daughter. She had enrolled in an advanced English literature class and came home after the first day or two distraught, saying, Daddy, I'm not smart enough for this class.

I need to take a regular English class. And she was scared and she was in tears. And she said, Can you help? Can you please tell them to put me in a regular class?

And he said, Sure. So the next day he went with his daughter to the school and they met with the head of the English department, this very wise teacher, a Jewish lady, a very skilled teacher. And Steve Brown said to her, My daughter, the problem with her is she's too conscientious and she's worried about this class. And she wants to just take a regular English class.

Could you please just put her into a regular English class? All the while there were some other students that were standing around and Steve Brown's daughter was on the edge of tears. Seeing that the girl was about to burst into tears, the noble teacher asked all the other students to please step out of the room. She wanted to be alone with them. And then she turned to Pastor Brown and she said, Could I just speak to your daughter?

And Steve said, Yes. And what she said then was what nobody could have guessed she would have announced. She turned to the daughter and she said, How about this? You're worried about how you're going to do in this class. How about this? How about if I just announced to you now I'm going to give you an A in this course no matter what? I'll just give you an A before we even get started.

Would that be okay? And the girl suddenly didn't feel like crying anymore. And she kind of nodded her head. She said, Do you think if I give you an A right now that you'd be able to take this class? And the girl said, Well, I think I might be able to do that. And the teacher said, Okay.

Very well then. You have an A. I'll see you in class tomorrow. And you know what Steve Brown's daughter did? She went to class knowing that she already had an A. And she made A's on all her papers and exams throughout. Later the teacher just explained to Steve Brown, she said, I felt like your daughter could definitely excel in my class but she was so bent up with all her fear about it that that was her problem. I just wanted to take the fear of not doing well out of the picture and believe that she could excel after that. You ready for some good news today? To say that you are justified through faith by the grace of God in Jesus Christ is to say metaphorically God in Jesus Christ has said to you, You already got an A.

So go ahead and live like an A student. During Galatians chapter 2 verses 15 through 21. Galatians is the Magna Carta of the Christian faith. It is Paul's most vehement argument for the freedom and power of the Gospel in our lives. And this is our sixth message in what is an unhurried series through the book of Galatians. We are taking our time to savor verse by verse, paragraph by paragraph what Paul's message is here because it is so foundational to our lives. And what we have seen in the opening chapter in setting this context is that Paul is writing to basically a multi site church in the province of Galatia. And he is opening up this chapter with a sense of urgency and even with real anger. He is simply saying if anyone preaches a Gospel other than the true Gospel let them be anathema, let them be considered a curse.

In other words have nothing to do with it. There is something he is saying that is extremely toxic that was going on with some false teaching that had entered into the Galatian church. Paul had gone and preached the Gospel there with great passion and clarity and people had eagerly received the Gospel into their hearts. But no sooner had they received the Gospel message of salvation through faith by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ alone than some false teachers began to influence the Christians in Galatia.

They were teaching essentially that yes you need Jesus Christ as your Savior but you also need to keep certain Jewish laws like the ritual of circumcision which was the sign of inclusion in the old covenant. And you might think well this is just a small thing, one little matter of ceremonial law. And Paul says no it is not a small thing because if you take a pure Gospel of grace and you announce it 99% purity but then you just add 1% of law mixed into it. If you mix this Gospel of grace with law, if you mix it and say that yes mainly you are saved and you are made righteous because of what Jesus did for you but some of it does depend on you fulfilling certain ceremonial laws or anything that you want to put in that blank. If you mix that in what you have done is you have not only counteracted the Gospel but you have poisoned the Gospel such that now what is meant to be life giving can actually lead to destruction. In other words as soon as someone says that 1% of your salvation is up to you, you have just introduced an unlimited potential for fear because the accuser can always attack you on that 1%.

You hadn't quite done enough. And so what Paul does in Galatians chapter 2 verses 15-21 having built upon what he said about the freedom from ceremonial laws like circumcision and freedom from dietary laws and it described his encounter that he had where he had to confront Peter over this matter and you see that Paul is absolutely adamant about this and now in verses 15-21 in that context he begins to speak about what it means to be justified. This is so important. It is truly at the heart of all Christian faith of what it means to be justified. It is something that Martin Luther spent 80 pages talking about. It revolutionized his life, the simple affirmation of being justified by grace through faith. It changed his life. It brought about a reformation.

It changed the whole world. If you really get hold of what it means to be truly, fully justified in God's sight, it will change everything in your life. Galatians chapter 2 verses 15-21. We ourselves Paul writes are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners. Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law because by works of the law no one will be justified. But if in our endeavor to be justified in Christ we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin?

Certainly not. For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. For through the law I died to the law so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God for if justification were through the law then Christ died for no purpose. Sometimes when you study a passage of scripture in a section, maybe there's a place of scripture where it seems that this all fits together, these two paragraphs perhaps.

One of the first things you might want to do in studying that is just go through and see are there certain words or images that keep leaping out? And so it doesn't take but just a cursory reading of this to realize that the word that is repeated over and over in this text is justified. This word that appears in verse 16 is used three times in a repetitious way and yet speaking to the totality of the importance of this idea of being justified. We know that a person is not justified. That is in general that any person.

That's Alan Wright and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Imagine for 99 days in a row someone tells you I love you, I'll never forsake you. Wouldn't you feel cherished? But what would happen if on the hundredth day that same person said I'm not sure you're good enough for me. If you don't measure up I don't think I'll love you anymore.

Wouldn't that one day contaminate the meaning of the other 99 days? Wouldn't one percent of conditional love poison the other 99 percent? Well just one percent of law is enough to spoil grace. The tiniest bit of law can introduce an unlimited capacity for fear. What if I don't measure up?

When might I be rejected? When the Judaizers infiltrated the Galatian church, the Apostle Paul was outraged and wrote a letter that describes the essence of the gospel of grace and why it must not be mixed with any form of law. Alan Wright's 12 message audio series trumpets the power of the gospel in order to set you free and empower you with pure grace. It's called Galatians and that's the gospel. Discover the purity and power of the grace of God. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Call us at 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860 or come to our website PastorAlan.org.

Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. So we also probably referring to Paul and he's just been talking about an encounter with Peter, probably talking about the Apostle Peter as well. We are maybe talking about all of us as Jews, but he's saying we, now this is personal, have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and then thirdly, not by works of law because works of law, by works of law, no one will be justified.

Now he makes it universal. So he speaks generally, he speaks personally, he speaks universally. He's saying this is at the heart of it all. To be justified is maybe the most important thing that you could ever understand about what it is to be a Christian. And almost everything else he's going to say in Galatians is going to come back and relate to this.

And so while I would relish the opportunity to spend long hours on each one of these verses, I think the task for us today is to talk specifically about justification and what it means. It is something that you might think, well I understand that or I've heard of that before, but it is so at the heart of the Christian gospel and just spending a week just thinking and reading and meditating and seeing that it's better than I ever realize. We call it the series and that's the gospel because it's the way we end every message here. Someone asked me, well how would you define the gospel? If I were to give it a short definition, I'd say the gospel is the powerful message of good news declaring all that God has done for us in Christ Jesus.

It's powerful. The gospel is not, as Paul describes it, is not a collection of beliefs or doctrines that you give mental assent to. Instead he describes this gospel as something that is powerful even, it's the power of God unto salvation. The gospel has a vibrancy. In the gospel there is the capacity for changing our lives. The gospel is a message of good news.

It's powerful. It is always an announcement of good news because it's not an announcement about your failure or what you are to do. It is an announcement about God's faithfulness and what God has done and the gospel is an announcement about the whole work of Christ, not just some aspect of it, not just that you get to go to heaven one day, but all of the benefits of everything that Christ has done for us. This is the gospel that Paul is speaking about. Now in these verses in 15 through 21, Paul seems to be in addition to confronting the Judaizers that were espousing circumcision or the people that were the hypocrisy of Peter about the dietary laws, he now seems to also be addressing this idea that if you preach a gospel of such grace that people are justified by grace through faith alone, then you're just giving people license to sin. This is part of what Paul is addressing when he says, is Christ then a servant of sin? What he's essentially saying there is that if you want to make the claim against me, Paul speaking, if you want to make the claim against me that by proclaiming the gospel of grace that we're making it worse for people because they're going to be less obedient, then what you're saying is that Christ and what he did on the cross has actually become a servant of sin. It has enabled more people to sin and that's surely not what you're saying.

You see the way his logic is rolling out here. If you're going to say that you should tone down grace because people will see it as a license to sin and will live less godly lives, then what you're saying is you need to tone down the fullness, the finished nature and the glory of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul's saying, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to nullify the grace of God because some people are complaining that this is giving some others a sense of license to sin.

This is what he's laying out for us today. The contention of this that we'll see is that just like with Steve Brown's daughter, what he's saying with the gospel is that in that instance you said you're going to get an A automatically and that's what liberated her to be an A student. That's what you're saying about the gospel. To focus in on the idea of justification, it is so important it's mentioned over and over in just these couple verses.

John Stott says it would be hard to find a more forceful statement on the doctrine of justification than this. It is insisted upon by the two leading apostles we know, confirmed from their own experience in the text that says we have believed and endorsed by the sacred scripture of the Old Testament. I love what Martin Luther said. Martin Luther who just was riveted by verses 15 through 21. He said this, the law is divine and holy. Let the law have his glory, but yet let no law be it never so divine and holy that it ought to teach me that I'm justified and shall live through it. What Martin Luther was saying, there's the law is divine. The law is from God. The law is good. The law is holy. What the law never had was the ability to announce to you that you're justified.

The law never had the ability to impart life to you. So Martin Luther continued, the great reformer said, here I must take counsel of the gospel. I must hearken to the gospel, which teaches me not what I ought to do, for that's the proper office of the law.

Law teaches you what you ought to do, he's saying. But, he says, the gospel, but what Jesus Christ the son of God has done for me. To wit, that he suffered and died to deliver me from sin and death. The gospel wills me to receive this and to believe it.

And this is the truth of the gospel. It is also the principle article of all Christian doctrine wherein the knowledge of all godliness consists. What he's saying is that understanding justification is the root of all godliness in your life. Most necessary, he continues, most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and this is the part I love, and beat it into their heads continually. So that's our purpose in preaching Galatians, is to just beat it into your head continually, the gospel of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. And there is a sense, and which has got to get pounded into this, and we've got to preach the gospel to ourselves every day because the whole world and everybody else is telling us just the opposite.

What is this? Justification, by the definition of Wayne Grudem, whose incredible systematic theologian puts it very simply, justification is an instantaneous, legal act of God in which he thinks of our sins as forgiven and Christ's righteousness as belonging to us and declares us to be righteous in His sight. Justification, Grudem says, is an instantaneous, legal act of God in which He, one, thinks of our sins as forgiven and Christ's righteousness as belonging to us, and two, declares us to be righteous in His sight.

If you want to understand what it means to be justified, it is rooted in a legal judicial declaration of not guilty. It means just as if I'd never sinned, not guilty. Every right understanding of life and the gospel and justification begins with understanding that the problem, the human dilemma, is a problem of sin. The world today is, and the spirit of the age, has cried out against any form of religious hatred or bigotry. And so what we see in many of our conflicts, ideologically, in the world, has been partly a result of whenever people have seen that there's been hatred or bigotry or hypocrisy in any form of religion, whether it be Christian or some other form, they, instinctively, wonder whether or not there's been hatred or bigotry or hypocrisy in any form of religion, whether it be Christian or some other form.

They, instinctively, want to not have anything to do with that. And this is the problem, is that when we as Christians talk about sin, if we talk about sin from a self-righteous perspective, it's hypocritical. And if we talk about sin with the emphasis being on the sin rather than the grace of God to cure the sin, then people miss the gospel. And so what's happened is essentially we're in a culture where, even within the church, in an effort to distance ourselves from that image of being religious hypocrites and bigots that all we do is be self-righteous and talk about sin, we don't, we can, we won't talk about sin at all. But sin, it doesn't take away from the fact that sin is the problem. This is very clearly what the Bible describes is that when Adam and Eve sinned, we were all born in Adam and Eve, and so we were all born in sin. And all have fallen short of the glory of God. And what this means is that, therefore, no matter how good a life you live, because you were born in sin, you'll never live a perfect life.

And it's a little bit hard for us in a world that grades on a curve to understand how it could be that God doesn't look on this as a curve. The demand on our life, if we're going to live under the law, is you have to keep all the law. If you miss any point of the law, if you have any unrighteousness or any sin at any point in your life, you've missed it all. This is why when Jesus came, He spoke of an even higher righteousness. It's almost as if to say, well, if you think that you've kept all the law, then I'll tell you even a higher law.

You think that you're not to commit adultery. I say, no, you can't seem lost. Alan Wright. Today's teaching.

You got an A plus. It's part of our series Galatians and that's the gospel. And Alan is back in a moment with additional insight on this for your life and our final word today. Unlock the power of blessing your life. Discover God's grace filled vision for your life by signing up for Alan Wright's free daily blessing. If you want to fill your heart with grace and encouragement, get Alan Wright's daily blessing.

It's free and just a click away at pastor Alan.org. Imagine for 99 days in a row, someone tells you, I love you. I'll never forsake you when you feel cherished. But what would happen if on the hundredth day that same person said, I'm not sure you're good enough for me. If you don't measure up, I don't think I'll love you anymore.

Wouldn't that one day contaminate the meaning of the other 99 days? Wouldn't 1% of conditional love poison the other 99%? Well, just 1% of law is enough to spoil grace. The tiniest bit of law can introduce an unlimited capacity for fear. What if I don't measure up?

When might I be rejected? When the Judaizers infiltrated the Galatian church, the apostle Paul was outraged and wrote a letter that describes the essence of the gospel of grace and why it must not be mixed with any form of law. Alan Wright's 12 message audio series trumpets the power of the gospel in order to set you free and empower you with pure grace. It's called Galatians and that's the gospel. Discover the purity and power of the grace of God. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you pastor Alan's messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860 or come to our website pastoralan.org. Alan, hearing what we've just heard here in these last few moments of teaching sounds like it's really bad news. And to a degree, you got to understand the bad news before you can appreciate the good news, I suppose. Well, real freedom is what Paul is talking about in Galatians. And the this this we're learning about in this message about really what justification is. And there is no justification by the works of the law.

That's that no one is. And that's so much what Paul is making here. So the bad news side of it is that if you try to justify yourself, you'll never be able to do it.

But there is no possible way that you could ever justify yourself. So the good news of the gospel is better than what most people realize. And this is what Paul is trying to get across to the Galatians is that whatever good that you do in your life, whatever confidence you have, and whatever faith you have that causes you to move forward, God wants that to come not because you're striving to earn an A plus, but instead, because he's already said you've already got an A plus and therefore go and live with that type of confidence. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.