Let's pray. Lord God, open up our hearts and minds to understand this picture of grace that has been presented in the Gospel, in the Word of God, and to know it so well that no one could come and present a counterfeit Gospel and deceive us into believing and receiving it.
And I pray in Jesus' name, Amen. I'm sure many of you have seen a photo or perhaps even the actual painting of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Now I imagine if I were to ask you to give me a description of the painting without looking at it, you could at least tell me that it's a painting of a woman seated facing the viewer with a faint smile.
But can you tell me any other details about the painting? She is indeed seated and she's facing the viewer. Her hands are folded. Her right hand is on top of her left hand.
Behind her is an icy landscape with mountains and a winding path and a bridge in the distance. Paul has presented the picture of the Gospel of grace to the Galatian churches. He didn't paint the picture. God did. Paul is simply presenting it to the Galatian church as he received it.
That's why he says, Paul, an apostle, a messenger. He had only one purpose, to present the message in its exact form. Don't change it.
Don't embellish it. Just present it as it was given to you. He introduces this glorious painting by saying, Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. His Gospel is a picture of grace. In all of Paul's letters to the churches, he begins with grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
And he ends his letters with the grace of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ be with you. Paul begins and ends his letters with grace and everything in the middle is focusing on that grace. And here is how God demonstrated his grace in verse 4. Our Lord Jesus Christ gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father.
Indeed, in Acts chapter 2 it says, Jesus was delivered up by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God. Isaiah 53, we esteemed him stricken smitten by God. It was the will of the Lord to bruise him.
He has put him to grief. Second Corinthians 521, God made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Acts chapter 4, in a prayer that the disciples were praying, they said, Truly in this city they were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. God takes the initiative by providing the means by which his judgment and wrath against sin toward you is averted. The cross was not an accident. It was a deliberate act of God.
It all happened according to the predetermined counsel and foreknowledge of God. Since no one is righteous, no not one, no one here can justify himself or herself before God. We do not deserve this salvation, but God saves us because it pleases him to do it. The reason you're sitting here tonight seeking to know the Lord and to worship him is because God was pleased to call you out of darkness to light and to redeem you by the blood of Jesus and to cause you to be born again to a living hope, putting your faith and trust in him, which that faith itself was a gift by the pleasure of God to you. Ephesians 2, For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one in this room may boast. So Paul gives his personal response in verse 5 when he says, To whom be glory forever and ever.
He's not talking to you. He's talking to God. To whom be glory forever and ever.
Amen. The Gospel is a picture of grace, God's riches at Christ's expense. And it's a picture with Jesus Christ in the center with his hands stretched out on the cross and the glory of God the Father surrounding the whole scene. The question for you tonight is what if this picture were stolen? What if every Bible in the world was confiscated and all you were left with were the memories of what you had received and believed and someone came along and gave you what he says is a copy of the Gospel of the Word of God? Would you be able to tell if it was authentic? Would you be able to recognize the Gospel in Isaiah, in Malachi, in Ephesians, in Titus? When you lose something and it's taken to the lost and found, they will ask you some questions to see if you can identify it just to make sure it belongs to you. Can you identify the Gospel of grace?
Does it belong to you? Many came to Galatia after they had received the Gospel from Paul and they were sharing a counterfeit Gospel. Some people had arrived in Galatia who were distorting the picture of grace that Paul had presented from God. It's like painting a smile on Mona Lisa to improve her appearance or changing the icy background to a green valley landscape or perhaps putting a bouquet of flowers in her hand so as to make her look more attractive.
By adding one stroke of your brush or taking away one hair of her head, you have distorted a painting that was priceless and have made it worthless. There is a copyright notice in the Bible. It's Revelation 22 verse 18. I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book.
And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city which are described in this book. These Jews were introducing a concept that Satan still uses today because it's so effective, the concept that man is the center of the Gospel of salvation rather than God. But friends, salvation is not all about you. It's all about God, God's love, God's forgiveness, God's sovereignty, God's mercy, God's grace, God's pleasure, God's will. When man believes that he is the center and that everything revolves around him, then he misinterprets and perverts the Gospel of grace. If Christ is not the center of the Gospel and we do not understand that we are saved by grace through faith in him alone, then we pursue the gift of salvation by works rather than by grace, thinking that it is somehow in part earned or deserved or that everyone has a free will and can choose God or reject him prior to any divine intervention of regeneration or sovereign grace or that everyone eventually gains salvation regardless of whether they have faith or not. These people were throwing the Galatians into confusion by perverting the Gospel.
They made it a Gospel with man as the center. If you remember your studies in high school, perhaps in college you studied about Aristotle and Ptolemy, and they believed that the earth was the center of the universe and all the planets and the suns and stars revolved around the earth. And so they, along with all the astronomers, were trying to make sense of the orbits of the planets and the things that they were observing in space. And things weren't falling into place the way they should have based on the presupposition that the earth is the center. Well then in the 1500s, Copernicus came along and he said perhaps that the earth isn't the center. Maybe it's the sun and the planets are revolving around the sun. Well, a hundred years later, Galileo confirmed this when he invented the telescope and he saw for himself.
Indeed, yes, you're right. The sun is the center and the planets are revolving around the sun. Kepler was able to demonstrate this with mathematical formulas and Newton, in the 1700s, put his field of approval on it when he discovered the law of gravity. And they started explaining things in reference to the heliocentric view that the sun was the center. And then things started to make sense. It's the same with the Bible. When man believes that he is the center and that everything revolves around him, then he misinterprets and distorts the gospel of grace.
The Bible doesn't make sense and life doesn't make sense. And when that starts to happen, you start blaming God. Only when the Son of God is the center do we truly understand the gospel and receive its life-giving benefits. So it is extremely important that we have an accurate understanding of the gospel. This is why Paul says in verses 8 and 9, even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preach to you, let him be accursed.
Let him be eternally condemned. And I can imagine the response, but Paul, they sounded so convincing. They knew the scripture inside and out.
Let them be accursed. But Paul, you should have heard him preach. He was preaching fire and brimstone. He had the people up on their feet praising God. He had the pews being filled up.
Let him be accursed. But Paul, what if an angel from heaven should come down and let him be accursed? Why is Paul so harsh in his response to anyone who changes this gospel of grace? Because anyone who receives any other gospel is eternally condemned. Acts 4 says, There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.
There is no one else you can go to. Polls have shown that over 50 percent of those who say they're Christians don't believe the gospel. They believe that works as part of the gospel. Satan hates the gospel because the gospel is the power of God to cause people to be born again by the power of a spirit, to turn hearts of stone to hearts of flesh, to regenerate the dead soul, to raise up a person from bondage to sin and release him into the freedom of fellowship with Christ Jesus. Satan hates it when a man has always taken pride and put his trust in how he loved his wife or raised his children or refrained from smoking and drinking and cussing would somehow merit favor with God and suddenly realizes that all of that falls short of the perfect holiness of God. That the only way he is saved is by repenting of his sin and putting his faith and trust in Jesus.
Satan despises that gospel. It is a humbling thing when you realize that your salvation is all by God's grace. And when you really understand it, you can't help but fall before him and bow down and worship Jesus and give him all praise and honor and glory and say, Jesus, teach me more.
I want to know you more. And to serve the church and building up the church in that love, the love that Jesus has for you, the love that you have for him and for his people. This is what happened to Paul. Grace takes a murderer of Christians and turns him into an apostle of Christ Jesus. It causes a person who is dead in sin to be alive.
It replaces a life of fear and anger and resentment with a life of hope and assurance and peace. Satan is a defeated enemy because of the gospel of grace. No other gospel is able to do that. Paul says, I'm not like other men trying to win your approval. I'm trying to win your salvation.
I'm not trying to please you. I'm trying to please God who came to seek and to save the lost by his grace through faith in Jesus Christ. If anyone preaches to you a gospel contrary to the one that you have received, would you know it? If someone stood here at this pulpit and shared a counterfeit gospel, would you recognize that it's counterfeit?
How well do you know the picture of grace? The American Banking Association once sponsored a two-week training program to help tellers identify the counterfeit bills. And those whole two weeks, they never looked at a counterfeit bill.
For two weeks, they spent hours and days looking at genuine authentic bills so that they could not possibly be fooled by a counterfeit. As followers of Christ, we must handle God's authentic, authoritative, inerrant, infallible inspired word daily and should become so familiar with the gospel of grace that we could not possibly be deceived by a false gospel. As we're reading the Bible, we might not understand something. We might go to commentary or commentaries. We might find that some of these commentaries don't agree with these other ones. Which one do we listen to?
Well, perhaps the one that's more popular, that has more commentaries written. Or perhaps the one that has more seminary degrees or perhaps the one that's pastor of the largest church. Well, what did the Bereans do? In Acts 17, these Bereans were more noble than those in Thessalonica. They received the word with all eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see if these things were so. If you're not sure what one part of the scripture means, go to another part of scripture and ask the Holy Spirit to teach you and guide you into the truth.
I don't know if I could identify a counterfeit Mona Lisa or a counterfeit bill if the similarities were close, but as a follower of Christ, a disciple of Jesus, I should be able to identify a counterfeit gospel and so should you. Let us hold fast to the gospel of grace as God's people and never let it go. This requires a commitment to study the scriptures intently, deliberately, devotionally with a Christ-centered perspective of grace because it's not just Paul's letters that begin and end with grace. It's the whole Bible that presents salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. As disciples of Christ Jesus, we must become so familiar with the gospel of grace that we could not possibly be deceived by a false gospel. I'll close with one of my favorite hymns, Come Thou Fount, and I love that verse that is, O to grace, how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be. Let that grace, now like a fetter, a chain, a shackle, bind my wandering heart to thee. Let us pray. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Thank you that you are our Savior and that the Father so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. May we keep that gospel in our hearts and on our lips to the glory of God. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
