Really? [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright Whether your conscience feels clean or not, the fact of the matter is the judge has announced over your life for those who are in Christ, not guilty, which means it's just as if I'd never sinned. 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.

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. More on this later in the program.

But now, let's get started with today's teaching. More than that, He loved you before you ever called upon Him. More than that, He loved you before you'd ever been obedient. More than that, He loved you while you were an enemy of God. He loved you so much that He sent His only begotten Son to die for you. He loves you. You can't add to His love or take away from His love.

There's nothing you can do to make Him love you more or make Him love you less. It's a reality, it's a fact, and it's the three most hopeful words I know. God loves you. Here are the second three most hopeful words I know of. You can change. You can change. The problems and the things that you're still stumbling into now, you don't have to always be stumbling in those things. The sins that so easily entangle you now, they don't always have to entangle you. The mentalities and strongholds that have built such bondage in your life, they don't have to bind you in the future.

The things that have so robbed you of joy, they don't have to continue in the future. You can change. You really can change. You can grow. You can change and you can grow. You can become more and more the image of Christ. You have so much in front of you. God loves you.

That's the most hopeful thing I can say. But a close second is you can change. God loves you, you can change.

Here's the key. The order of those two statements is essential. The God loves you comes first and you can change comes second. It is to say that you can change because God loves you. And when we get the order of that backwards, which most of us do to some extent or another, whether Christian or non-Christian, most of us get that backwards. And we begin to think that if we're obedient, then God will love us more.

At that point, we become bewitched, entranced, we become deceived, and we fall into what is ultimately starkly put, the scheme of hell. The truth of the gospel is that love produces obedience, but obedience does not produce love. Obedience is fueled by the love of God. Obedience never earns the love of God.

God loves you, you can change. And we must keep the order correct. This is a big part of what Paul is talking about throughout the entire epistle of Galatians. We join today in chapter 3, which is our seventh in this unhurried series through the epistle of Galatians. What we've called simply, that's the gospel.

Because that's how I end every message. And that's the gospel. The essence of the gospel.

God loves you, and therefore you can change. That God died for you in the person of Jesus Christ. When you could not pay for your own sin, God paid for your sin. When you could not reckon or make yourself righteous, God in Jesus Christ has reckoned you as righteous. This gospel is so important, it is so essential that we get it right, that we keep it pure, that we keep it simple, that you'll see Paul in Galatians at his most passionate, his most adamant. In chapter 1, he says if anybody preaches a gospel, that they start mixing the law into it. If they start mixing Old Testament ritual laws like circumcision into the gospel, saying that you need to do this, this, or this in order to really be redeemed, to really be saved, or really be justified.

If that starts getting mixed in. If you start hearing a message like that, he says in chapter 1, let him be, anybody who preaches that, let him be anathema, which is to say, let him be accursed. What he's saying is, let that message just stay in hell. It don't have anything to do with that message. That's how strong he's saying it.

There's something that's so very, very important to this. And what we've been learning is that one of the big issues in the churches in Galatia, was that some people that are called Judaizers, they were false teachers. They came into these Galatian Christians who had received the word of God so readily, so hungrily, so eagerly, and had received the purity of the gospel announcement. And now these false teachers were saying, yes, you need Jesus, but you also, you need to practice the Old Testament sign of inclusion in the covenant, which was circumcision. And what Paul is saying here and elsewhere in the New Testament is, he said, it doesn't matter whether you're circumcised or whether or not.

We don't have your children circumcised or not. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

This is not an issue. He said, but if you say you must keep this law, or these dietary laws, or certain Sabbath laws, if you say you must do that, or else you're not fully included in the family of God, if you say you must do that, or you aren't really totally forgiven, or you're not totally saved, or you're not totally redeemed, if you say that you must add something in like that, he said, at this point, he says, no, I'm going to stake everything right here. Even to the point we learned that he had to confront the apostle Peter himself over a matter of dietary laws where he saw hypocrisy in Peter. You look at this and you say, what is so important to Paul about this? It seems like these are small matters of the law.

How could that be so big? Then what we've been learning is that if you have a gospel that announces God's love for you unconditionally and the full redemptive work of Jesus Christ, but then you mix in even 1% of the requirement of your own righteousness to keep the law in order to be saved, then if you do that, that 1% introduces an unlimited capacity for fear, distorts the gospel, and what Paul is saying is that it makes the gospel poisonous, it makes it toxic, and no gospel at all. He said, therefore, there is no other gospel but this. And we learned last week what justification is.

Paul uses the word four times over about being justified. And what we learned is the extraordinary truth of the gospel is that when you accept what Christ has done for you, his grace towards you by dying on the cross, living for you, dying for you and living for you and being resurrected unto the right hand of the Father himself, when you accept the gospel, it's in God's eyes, he so fully forgives you, that he declares, as the righteous judge, he declares, you're not guilty. The problem is, of course, we know that we are guilty. We have sinned and all of us fall on shore with the glory of God. But if you want to understand what it really means to be a child of God, it begins at this point, is believe in him and take in him at his word that no matter how you feel, no matter whether your conscience feels clean or not, the fact of the matter is the judge has announced over your life, for those who are in Christ, not guilty, which means it's just as if I'd never sinned. Justification, justified, to be justified in the first place means, we learned, it's just as if I'd never sinned.

It's an extraordinary thought. How would you view your life differently? How would you approach the throne of God differently if you really could believe that? But what we saw was even more than that, that the gospel doesn't just declare that you're forgiven and therefore it's just as if you'd never sin, that would leave you in a state of moral neutrality.

It would say that you haven't done anything wrong, but you haven't necessarily done anything good. But the plan of God is not just to forgive you so that you don't have to be separated and lost in eternity. His plan is more than that. His plan is not just so that you can be reunited and reconciled to God and forgiven. His plan is that you can be fully a child of God and of a child, an heir.

That all the spiritual riches of God that he wants to pour out into your life and the fullness of the presence of the Holy Spirit in your life. And so what it means to be justified is in the first place, it's just as if I'd never sinned. But secondly, and this is the part that's almost harder to believe, it's just as if I'd lived a perfectly meritorious life like Jesus himself. That's incredible.

That's what I'm saying. Is that when you accept what God has done for you in Jesus Christ by faith, which is this is what it means to be a Christian, it's just as if I'd never sinned and it's just as if, as remarkable as it is, it's just as if I'd lived the obedient life that Jesus lived on my behalf. Christ is my righteousness.

Wow. That's the substance of what Paul has been laying out in the first two chapters of Galatians. And when we get to Galatians 3, what we're going to see today is that the same grace that justified you, the same grace that saved you, is the same grace that sanctifies you, that causes your Christian growth and the empowerment and the outworking of miraculous things in your life through the Holy Spirit. Because one of the things that happens for so many Christians is they might grasp it and say, okay, I couldn't save myself. God died for me in the person of Jesus Christ and so he took my sin and he paid the penalty. I know I'm saved by grace. But then we become Christians and we get so many different kinds of messages about all the things that therefore we're supposed to do and the things that we need to do and we ought to do. And next thing you know, we have mixed into our gospel that, yeah, I was saved by grace, but the holy life and the righteous life that I need to live, the life that's pleasing to God, that's going to be because of my obedience to God. But what we're going to see today is that in the same way that your obedience never justified you, your obedience doesn't sanctify you.

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 some of the preparation for Galatians came about a couple weeks ago. I was at the coast and I got away into a coffee shop, the Jumpin' Java in Shalote.

And I got the cappuccino and I sat down with my computer and the book of Galatians and a little bit of Martin Luther and started to study on Galatians chapter 2. And fortunately or unfortunately I was the only one in the coffee house that morning, plenty of people going through the drive-thru, but I was the only one actually in the little coffee shop. And so I could not help but overhear the conversation of the two workers, a young man, a young woman. I was not trying to hear their conversation. Believe me, I didn't want to hear their conversation, but they were loud and you couldn't help but overhear, especially as the young man began to talk about how he was dissatisfied with his beard. It was too sparse, it was scruffy, it was not a good beard. And he said, I hate my brother, I hate his beard, he's got an unbelievable beard.

And I'm trying not to listen to the beard conversation, I'm trying to think about Galatians. And then it caught my attention though when he said, yeah, he said, the girl said, when did he get such a good beard? And he said, well, he had to go to jail for a while, and that was the minor point for him, the jail thing, it was all about the beard. He said, when he got out of jail, man, he had like a castaway or something, he had this huge beard, it was unbelievable, I hate his beard. And he was talking about, the girl said, your brother went to jail? And she knew the brother, and he said, yeah, and she said, what was that all about? And he said, well, he said, by this time I just quit thinking about Galatians, I'm listening all out.

I was curious why you're going to jail also. He said, well, his girlfriend, she pushed him like over this ledge or something, and so really, you know, she was bad news. But he got, you know, I guess he hit her or something, he got on an assault charge, so he went to jail on assault.

And that's when he grew the great beard. But this was the part that really stopped me in my tracks here. Listen, she said, yeah, that's bad. And the guy said, yeah, of course, they're married now. She's like, really? Yeah, they came out and they got together, they got married. I wanted to go in and say, really?

That's the title of my message today, by the way. Really? Really? You really?

I mean, what, like she pushed you off some ledge or something, and you hit her, and you couldn't wait to get out of jail so you could get married? Really? Did you think that something changed and was going to work now that didn't work then? Really?

Who's bewitched you? Really? You've got to say it just like that in order to get today's, today's sermon title is not going to look as good just on paper when it just says really, because really can also mean really, or real for real, really. But no, today's title is really? I really was saddened to read this Associated Press story. It came out, it was kind of big news.

I guess people are interested in this kind of thing. A pastor, Mac Walford, the article says, was known all over Appalachia as a daring man of conviction. He believed the Bible mandates that Christians handle serpents to test their faith in God, and if they're bitten they trust in God to heal them. So he had a big revival planned at a state park, and he had put out flyers, praise the Lord and pass the rattlesnakes, brother, the flyers said. He invited his extended family, who had largely given up the practice of serpent handling, to come, his sister, Rob, but at one time or another we had all handled snakes, but she said, but we had back slid. Really?

She said his birthday was Saturday, and all he wanted to do was get his brother's and sister's church together. He's just like, that was just for my birthday, could we all just handle snakes just one more time? Really?

That's really what you want to do on your birthday? Really? And anyway, it becomes tragic because, and so the article says about 30 minutes into the service, Pastor Wilford passed a yellow timber rattlesnake around, and then he laid it on the ground, sat down next to the snake that bit him on the thigh, and the festivities came to a halt shortly thereafter. Wilford was taken back to his relatives house in Bluefield to recover.

I made the point at the early service, I should point this out again, that I think Bluefield's where Pastor Chris Lawson went to college, and that was just for that comment about an old man fall that he made a couple messages ago, but anyway, as he went back home, and he had recovered previously from some snake bites, but this time, no. Paramedics came and took him to the Bluefield Regional Medical Center, and he was pronounced dead. What was especially tragic about this article says Wilford was 15 when he saw his father die at age 39 of a rattlesnake bite in almost exactly the same circumstances. He lived 10 and a half hours, Wilford had told the Washington Post last fall. He said when he got bit, he said he wanted to die in the church. This is Wilford the son speaking. He said three hours after he was bitten, his kidneys shut down.

After a while, your heart stops. I hated to see him go, but he died for what he believed in. Really?

Really? I bring this as an illustration, not to make fun of this man, but just to say, this man, I'm convinced, he loved God. He wanted to please God. He wanted to be spiritual. He wanted to be anointed. He wanted to do what he thought he was supposed to be doing, to be obedient to God. He really thought like that. He really did. Don't you hear a story like that?

Don't you want to say, really? You think that by taking one verse of scripture at the end of Mark's gospel, misinterpreting it, by the way, that scripture's not about handling snakes. The serpents are a metaphor of demons. It's about your authority over demons.

It's about your place of spiritual authority. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?

You want to give your life for that? Are you really believing? You believe that somehow you're actually pleasing God by picking up snakes, getting bit, so that your wife and your family are going to be left without you on this earth? You think you've pleased God by doing that? Who has bewitched you? Don't you want to say something like that?

Allen Wright. And today's teaching, Breaking the Spell of Legalism, Embracing the Power of the Spirit, it's from our series on Galatians. Allen is in the studio back here in a moment with additional insight on this for your life and a final word.

Please stay with us. 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. Allen 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 Allen 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, pastorallen.org. Allens, we put a bookmark here in this series in Galatians.

What's our takeaway today? When Paul says, who has bewitched you, he is saying, you began in the power of the Spirit, in the freedom of the gospel, with the delight and exhilaration of living in that grace, and now you've gone back to saying things like, we need to make sure we're practicing circumcision, or we need to celebrate certain festivals in certain ways and eat this or not. And he sees these little smatterings of legalism, and he knew what had happened. He knew the authentic experience of God's grace that these people had had, and now they were moving backwards. And sometimes, Daniel, you just think, once we've tasted of the goodness of God, we can never fall into that type of legalistic living.

But what we learn is it is possible, and that's why Paul is saying, who's bewitched you? A veil's been pulled over your eyes, and he is awakening them to the power of the gospel once again. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at pastorallen.org, or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. If you only caught part of today's teaching, not only can you listen again online, but also get a daily email devotional that matches today's teaching, delivered right to your email inbox, free. Find out more about these and other resources at pastorallen.org. That's pastorallen.org. Today's good news message is a listener-supported production of Allen Wright Ministries.