Supporting the weak. That, my friends, is the key to the unity of the church. Instead of the more mature, spiritually-minded believers standing in pride over the sinning ones who've fallen, we have to help them. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Today John turns to the book of Galatians to unpack some critical instructions on how to restore a sinning brother or sister to Christ, specifically how the principle of the strong, taking care of the weak, should play itself out in the church. It's part of John's practical study called My Brother's Keeper. If you've never really thought about how to address sin in a fellow believer's life, I encourage you to stay here for some clear instructions from God's Word. And now here's John with a lesson. As you know, we've been studying the wonderful 18th chapter of Matthew, and we saw how the Lord instructs His disciples in regard to the disciplining of those who sin. And then we saw how the Lord instructs regarding the forgiving of those who sin and then turn from that sin. And so we've discussed the whole matter of discipline, reproving, rebuking sin, being ministers of holiness, seeking to go after that sinning Christian and bring them back to the place of obedience. I thought so much about the area of discipline, and we've clearly delineated that, and I thought about the area of forgiveness, and that's so wonderfully presented in this 18th chapter.
But there was one other area that we hadn't really discussed in detail, and the chapter that is the 18th chapter of Matthew doesn't discuss it in detail either, and that is the ministry of restoration. What do you do when someone sins? You discipline them. What do you do when they repent and turn from that sin? You forgive them in the fullest sense. Then what do you do after they are forgiven? You restore them.
You take them all the way back to the place where they were before they fell in the beginning. And the ministry of restoration seems to me to be a vital and final link in the process of our thinking. Now with that in mind, I want to draw you to Galatians chapter 5 and 6 and take you out, if I may, of the book of Matthew and yet keep you in the same subject as we've treated in Matthew's gospel. I suppose it would be sufficient for me to say again in reviewing your thinking that dealing with sin in the church is of great consequence. The Lord has so designed His church that the purity of the church is His great concern.
The Apostle Paul talks about wanting to espouse to Christ a chaste virgin. He writes to the Ephesians about the importance of having no fellowship with those who work the works of darkness. He says to the Corinthians, when you find somebody in your assembly who's in sin, put them out. It is a very, very high priority to deal with sin within the family of God.
As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 5, a little leaven will leaven the whole lump. And so a pure church is the great concern of God. And we've been seeing how because of that it is essential that we deal with sin by discipline and then by forgiveness and now by restoration.
Now this is an essential thing. There has to be discipline, there has to be forgiveness, and there has to be full restoration. I believe that is the intent of the heart of Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 2 when he says if you don't do that, you give Satan an advantage.
And it's an open invitation for Satan to come in and tear up the church. So we ask this question as we approach Galatians. What do you do with the sinning Christian who has responded to discipline, who has repented of sin, who has been forgiven and brought back into the fellowship? What do you do to restore them to that place of spiritual strength they had before they fell in the first place? And the answer comes in this passage.
This is the ministry of restoration. Now by the time we come to chapter 6, these foolish Galatians who were now sort of embroiled in this freedom legalism battle, this law grace battle, by the time we get to chapter 6, they've pretty well heard Paul. They've been told again in very strong terms in chapters 1 and 2 that he was in fact the apostle of God. And they've also been told in chapters 3 and 4 that salvation is by grace plus nothing through faith. And they've also been told very well in chapter 5 that the Christian life is a life of liberty, not legalism.
And so it may be at this particular time that some of the light is starting to dawn and the fog is clearing a little bit. But Paul is a very, very astute instrument for the Spirit of God to use. And he is very much aware of the fact that there will be in that Galatian assembly as a result of the ministry that he had and the ministry that Judaizers had, there will be a division. There will be those who are the spiritual ones, the mature ones, the ones walking in the Spirit.
And then there will be the legalists who try by the energy of the flesh to crank out all the things they're supposed to do as listed in the Mosaic economy. And he sees in that a potential for just shattering the assemblies in Galatia. He can see a warfare coming and division and discord and separation and he knows he has to deal with it.
And so he does. And in effect what he says is this, you that are spiritual, who are on target, who've got it right and who've got it together and are walking in the power of the Spirit, your responsibility is to pick up the ones that are not. And he establishes for us a principle of life for the church of God until Jesus comes. The strong take care of the weak. The spiritual take care of the fleshly.
The ones who are standing lift up the ones that are fallen. The church is never designed to be a place where you go and spectate. It's not a place where you're supposed to come and stare at the back of someone's head and just go away and say, God, aren't you thrilled that I came? I did my religious duty. The church is a place where you mutually minister together. And you know, it would be very easy for the spiritual Galatians who really bought into Paul's doctrine of grace and now were reaffirmed by reading this wonderful letter to really understand they were free in grace, not free to do wrong but for the first time free to do right, empowered by the Holy Spirit. And understand the liberty that is theirs in Christ and they really were spiritual and they are in terms of verse 16 of chapter 5, walking in the Spirit and in terms of verse 22, manifesting the fruit of the Spirit. And they're the spiritual ones to sort of look at these other ones in a condemning way.
And that is a tendency, you know. Spiritual people, the more mature people, the people who maybe have had the benefit of good teaching, who maybe have had the benefit of good modeling and good examples and good heritage spiritually and who have been obedient and in the past have walked with the Lord, sometimes can get to the point where they look down on all those who don't live at their level spiritually. And instead of seeing that as an opportunity for ministry, it becomes an opportunity for spiritual pride and an occasion of self-conceit where you sort of congratulate yourself for your spirituality and so he senses that. And there's also that potential too that those who are weak and those who stumble and those who fall kind of look at the spiritual ones and they envy them and envy turns to bitterness and jealousy and you have just a rift running right down the middle of the church.
And so he knows there must be a coming together of these two groups. He does not want the spiritual ones lording it over the fleshly ones. He doesn't want the strong taking advantage of the weak or disdaining them. And he doesn't want the weak resenting the strong. He doesn't want to see a spiritual fleshly split. And so he anticipates this in this section of Galatians. Look at verse 26 of chapter 5. He's just concluded the statement that if we live in the Spirit, and we do if we're Christians, we ought to walk in the Spirit.
In other words, if our life in fact is in the Spirit positionally, then we ought to walk in the Spirit practically and live it out. And then he says this, Let us not be desirous of vain glory, kenedaxas. It means that you feel you have a right to claim glory. You feel you have a right to honor, thinking you have some reason for your conceit. What he's really saying is don't get conceited. Let us not be desiring glory. Let us not be desiring honor.
And this is always the problem that you get pushed into by the enemy. When you get to the point of certain spiritual maturity and certain spiritual growth, you begin to perceive yourself as somebody worthy of special honor. And then you look down on those who aren't quite at your level of maturity and you begin to look on them with disdain. And then the fracture comes between the spiritual and the non-spiritual, the strong and the weak. And instead of the one helping the other, the one sort of gloats over the other.
And I think that's what he has in mind when he says provoking one another, provoking them, irritating them. And the converse of it at the end of verse 26 is the other is going to envy the one who appears to be more spiritual. And this is not what Paul wants in any church, is this kind of break between those who are strong and those who are weak.
There's no place for that. It's on his heart, not only here in Galatians, but let me draw you back to Romans chapter 15 because I want you to see that this is not something unique to the Galatian churches but was a common concern in Paul's heart. In Romans chapter 14 you have just a tremendous section on how the strong are not to offend the weak. And we're not to cause him to stumble, not to destroy him in any way, but to build up that weak person. And it all comes into summation in chapter 15 verses 1 to 3. We then, based on all that he said in chapter 14, we then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak and not to please ourselves. Let every one of us please his neighbor for his good to edification or building up for even Christ pleased not himself.
And you can stop there. And he establishes that incomparable model. And the model is none other than Jesus Christ himself who didn't lord it over us and had every reason to do so, right? But stooped to bear the infirmities of the weak. And believe me, if ever there was a weak and a strong dichotomy, it was between Jesus Christ and us, wasn't it? And so Christ is the model, he says, and the attitude is that we want to bear the infirmities of the weak. We want to find those believers who are weaker. We want to find those believers who struggle greatly with the flesh and not look down on them in vain glory and provoke them, but minister to them, bear their infirmities, thus preventing them from looking up at us and envying us and becoming jealous and bitter. And then I draw you to one other passage in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 verse 14. Paul gives this instruction to the Thessalonian church. Now we exhort you brethren, warn them that are unruly, encourage the faint-hearted, support the weak, be patient toward all. Whether you're dealing with the unruly, the faint-hearted or the weak, you have to be patient.
But you have to go after them, supporting the weak. That, my friends, is the key to the unity of the church. Instead of the more mature, spiritually-minded believers standing in pride over the sinning ones who've fallen, we have to help them. I received about an 18- or 20-page letter this week. I can honestly say in all my ministry I've never received a letter quite like it. A lady in that letter went on and on sharing about her spiritual pilgrimage. And toward the end she said that she went one morning into her bathroom. She was a mother of several children, very active in a church in the Midwest.
She got a razor blade and prepared to slice her face up. She said, I am unworthy, I am useless, I am meaningless. This is a lady who was a Christian, spent all her years in the church.
And she explained to me in the letter why she had come to that point. She said, because the people in the church felt that I didn't live up to the standard that they had set. And so the pastor told everyone in the whole church to shun me. And so they shunned me. And every time I saw one of them, they would turn their back on me.
And no one would speak. And I was to be shunned. And I decided that if I wasn't even worthy enough to be cared for by the people of God, that I wasn't worth anything and I would just slice up my face and then take my life. Then she went on to say I couldn't do it, however, because my mind kept going to my children. And how my children would have to answer so many questions about what their mother had done.
And I was restrained from doing it because of my concern for my children. And she went on to say that she turned her radio dial along and found our radio program. And in the midst of the horror of trying to live according to the legalistic code of this church, we were teaching a series on law and grace. And she said, thank God I'm free. And went on to share what the Lord was beginning to do in her life. The letter was so moving that we called her on the phone and offered personal help in any way we could to her. What a horrible thing that a church thinking it was doing the will of God would shun a person who didn't come up to their standard.
By the way, one of the issues was that she wore slacks to the point where she was going to slice up her face. That's the very antithesis of the ministry of the church to its own, isn't it? Support the weak. Support the weak.
Bear their burden. And so we are called to discipline, yes, and we're called to forgiveness, yes, but we're also called to restoration. Now what do we do to restore?
Let's go back to Galatians. Three things Paul mentions in this text. Three things.
First one, very simple points. Pick them up. Pick them up. Verse 1, Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye who are spiritual restore such in one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself lest thou also be tempted. Now the term brethren indicates that we're talking in the family, folks.
This is how the church takes care of itself. If a man be overtaken in a fault. The word fault here is the word paraptema.
It means a stumbling, a blunder, a fall. And some people think it to be something less than a sin. I don't think so at all. I don't think it's less than a sin. I think it is a sin. And people say, well, why didn't he use the word hamartia, a sin? Or why didn't he use the word anamia, a trespass? Why does he use the word fall here? Well, I don't think it has anything to do with theology.
I think it has to do with the literary approach. He is talking about walking in the Spirit. Verse 16 of 5, walk in the Spirit. Verse 25 of 5, walk in the Spirit. And in the process of your walking, if you happen to what?
To fall. He's not giving us a theological definition of sin as if it were something less than serious. He is simply staying with his metaphor. And so he says, if a man be overtaken, now let me talk about the word overtaken a minute because I think it's been misunderstood as well. I don't think it's a guy walking along who gets overtaken by a sin and says, oh, this sin is overtaking me.
I don't think that's the idea. I think the idea is that when a believer is walking along and overtakes someone who has fallen into a sin, see the difference? It isn't that the sin overtakes him, it's that you overtake the person who's fallen into the sin.
If a man is overtaken, and the word is a very interesting word, prolambano, to take unawares. I don't really think sin can take us unawares. I think we have the faculties if we're walking in the Spirit to discern that. So what I'm saying is there's no such thing as unwilling sin. I think what you have here, and the best rendering of the text, and I can't be absolutely dogmatic, but this is a preference, is that it refers to the act of detecting another Christian in the process of sin. You come across someone in sin, and he becomes the whole point of the verse.
Then you restore such and one. Now you couldn't be involved in the restoration if you hadn't taken him or overtaken him in the sin, right? I mean, you've seen it. You know it's there. You've come across it. And so you find someone in the sin, and the situation is established. You know someone in sin. You come across someone in sin. And the thing that I think it's trying to say is that you're not going through life sniffing around everybody. It's that as you walk in the Spirit, you come across that. It's not that you belong to the spiritual SS, and you're nosing into everybody's affairs all over the world. It's that you, as you walk in the Spirit, as you move along, you that are spiritual, you come across someone overtaken in a fall.
To me, that's a preferred rendering. It is not necessarily wrong to say that it refers to someone who is overtaken by some sin, but I prefer the one that I suggested. Now notice further in the verse, if you come across this, you who are spiritual.
Now that's very important. Now who are the spiritual people? What does it mean to be spiritual?
We talk about that. We say someone's spiritual or someone's fleshly. Let me show you what it means to be spiritual. Go back to 1 Corinthians chapter 2, verse 15, and this is just a very brief definition here. But he that is spiritual discerns all things, or judges all things, yet he himself is judged by no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?
But we have...what? The mind of Christ. What does it mean to be spiritual? To be spiritual in verse 15 is the same as having what in verse 16? The mind of Christ. The one who is spiritual is the one who has the mind of Christ. To look at another way, in Ephesians 5 it says, Be filled with the...what?
Spirit, and all these things will happen. And then in Colossians 3 it says, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, and the same things will happen. Therefore we conclude that being filled with the Spirit is the same as letting the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Therefore being spiritual, that's what it means to be filled with the Spirit, is the same as having the mind of Christ. So, the spiritual person is the person with the mind of Christ. The person with the mind of Christ is the person who is under the control of the Holy Spirit. To have the mind of Christ means you know, because the mind of Christ is revealed here, right? You know the word of God and you are walking in obedience to it.
See, when you learn the word of God, the Spirit energizes the obedient response. So a spiritual person is one walking in the Spirit. What does it mean to walk in the Spirit? It means to have the mind of Christ. What does it mean to have the mind of Christ? To know the word of God and obey it. And so that's a spiritual person. One walking in obedience to God's will, revealed to him through the word of God, energized by the Spirit of God. That's the spiritual one. So you've got one person, two people here walking in the Spirit.
One falls into the fleshly activity. The one who is still walking in the Spirit has a responsibility to pick the other one up. It's not that profound folks, it's obvious. The strong take care of bearing the infirmities of the weak. That's the basic concept. And Paul goes on to illustrate that immediately in 1 Corinthians chapter 3 as he goes and approaches the Corinthians and calls them fleshly and does everything he can in that entire letter to pick them up again.
By giving them instruction. And the instruction is the mind of Christ. He tries to pump into them the reality of the mind of Christ and call them to a walk in the Spirit.
You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. John calls this study, My Brother's Keeper. Well, today John talked about how Christ is the ultimate example of one who restores others.
And that echoes a key theme of this study. The idea that we are never more like God than when we forgive. So John, if the blessing of forgiveness is that amazing, if we are so obviously living in step with the Lord by demonstrating forgiveness, why then can forgiving others still seem so hard? Why do we sometimes struggle to forgive even the smallest offense? Well, I think it's pride. I think it's an overestimation of your value as if you were a person who should never be offended.
I think the right approach is to say, I thank you that I'm not offended more often than I am because I'm unworthy. If we offend God so consistently with every misdeed, with every evil thought, we shouldn't be surprised that we offend others as well and that they offend us. We live in a world of sinners. And this all leads up to the fact that our lives are going to require us if we want to be whole, joyful Christians. Our lives are going to require that we forgive.
And that's exactly what you said. You're never more like God than when you forgive. This is how you behave like your Father who is in heaven.
That's what Jesus said. And that's why this book is so important. I want to mention it again today. The title of the book is The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness. It takes you into the emotionally charged issue of forgiveness.
And we understand that when we are wounded and hurt and when we do the same to others, obviously it's hard for us to bear. It's a challenging thing to overcome sins going back and forth with other sinners, sometimes in our own family. Learning to forgive is freeing.
It is empowering in a spiritual sense. So we want you to get a hold of this book, The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness. And it answers questions like, should the forgiveness we extend to others be unconditional? Or how should we individually and as a part of a church respond when someone who claims to be a Christian gets involved in sin? Or how do the modern ways of handling guilt and blame line up with what the Bible teaches?
Or is it ever appropriate to withhold forgiveness from someone for a wrong commitment? Really vital questions for your own spiritual well-being. You need to know the answer that scripture gives. There also is a helpful discussion of both the atonement and the unpardonable sin and a Q&A section to guide you through the tough questions on the issue of forgiveness. Again, the title of the book, The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness, full length softcover book available from Grace to You.
Thanks, Jon. Friend, forgiveness is crucial to every relationship you have, whether that's in your marriage or with your children or with your co-workers. To make sure you understand the tremendous blessings and benefits of forgiveness, pick up a copy of Jon's book, The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness, when you get in touch with us today. Call us weekdays from 730 a.m. to 4 o'clock p.m. Pacific time at 800-55 GRACE or you can go to our website, gty.org. The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness costs $13 and shipping is free.
This is a great resource for couples and families in conflict. Again, to order The Freedom and Power of Forgiveness, you can call us at 800-55 GRACE or go to gty.org. There are also a number of sermons on forgiveness available for free at our website. You can log on to gty.org and just search our sermon archive. It has over 3,600 messages from nearly 56 years of Jon's pulpit ministry. You'll also find blog articles, daily devotionals, the Grace to You television program, and much more.
All of it free at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and our entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson, with a thought that you may have never considered. You may not work for an insurance company and yet you are called to help others get back on their feet after a disaster, specifically when a brother or sister in Christ wrecks his life with sin. You'll see that tomorrow when John returns with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.
