Lord, if left to ourselves, we would never know or understand the truth of the Gospel, but you have not left us to ourselves. You've spoken through your written word, and you've spoken through the living Word in the person of your Son, Jesus Christ.
Help us to read this Word well today. Give us minds that understand, spirits that believe, wills that obey to the saving of our souls. I pray in Jesus' name, amen. Well, Paul is contending with false teachers in Galatia who are teaching that faith in Christ gets a person almost saved, or at least begins the process of getting a person saved, but a little something more is needed. To get completely saved or to remain saved, these false teachers asserted, requires obedience to the commands of God. Now, we ought to desire and pursue obedience to the commands of God.
That's a good thing. God's law is good, so we don't despise obedience, but we must always recognize that obedience is not the grounds of our salvation. It doesn't initiate salvation. It doesn't preserve salvation. It doesn't complete salvation. Obedience is merely the fruit of salvation, a salvation that is begun, maintained, and finished by one thing, and that one thing is the grace of God. The Galatian Christians were forgetting this cardinal truth of the gospel and were becoming enamored with the false gospel of working one's way to heaven, and perhaps we chuckle at such naivety and immaturity. Those silly Galatians, thinking they can earn God's favor through circumcision.
But church, if it's in the Bible, preserved for us by the very Holy Spirit of God, then evidently we need the same rebuke that Paul gave to those first century Galatians. You see, believing in the gospel of works is a perennial problem for the church, and it's a perennial problem in the church because we are a perennially proud people by nature. We want credit. We want to contribute.
We want to be the hero, the MVP, the superstar. The problem, however, is that we forfeited not only the privilege, but even the ability to play the starring role in our salvation a long, long time ago. Apart from grace, we are dead in our sins and trespasses. So the only hope of salvation for us is a gospel of grace, not of works. The message of the text before us then is this. Since we know from experience and theology that salvation is all of grace, we are fools if we submit to a gospel of works.
Since we know from experience and theology that salvation is all of grace, we are fools if we submit to a gospel of works. And I want us to notice that this proposition assumes a correct knowledge of the truth of the gospel. Paul assumed the Galatians understood the gospel.
In fact, he knew they understood it properly. He was the one who preached the gospel to them. So our problem is not an intellectual problem. It's not for lack of understanding that we need to hear Galatians 3, 1 through 9.
No, our problem is a moral problem. We like to be our own savior. And so we're glad to let someone be with us into believing that our measly efforts to be good and to do good and to think and feel good things are somehow going to contribute just a little bit of something to our salvation. To answer Paul's opening question there in verse one, oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? Well, the answer is we have bewitched ourselves if indeed we are bewitched.
We fool ourselves because we want to keep our pride intact. So brothers and sisters, let's subject ourselves joyfully to this scathing apostolic rebuke today because the salvation of our souls and the glory of Christ is at stake. Well, Paul begins by warning the church to have nothing to do with a gospel of works because first, our experience gives evidence that salvation is all of grace. Paul makes this point through a series of rhetorical questions that make it undeniably clear that salvation does not depend for a second on the obedience of the sinner. Rather, it depends from start to finish on the obedience of Christ. If you have started with Christ, then you know this to be true.
How does our conversion start? Look at verse two. Paul says, let me ask you only this. Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Now to understand what Paul is really asking, we need to understand how conversion works. When a person gets saved or becomes converted, is born again, the very first thing that happens to the person, the first step of that process experientially is that the Holy Spirit resurrects the soul of that person, a soul which scripture says is dead in sin. And when a sinner's soul is brought to life by the animating power of the Holy Spirit, that person has the new ability to repent of sin and exercise saving faith in Jesus Christ. When a sinner repents of sin and puts their faith in Christ, the Holy Spirit miraculously, mystically and eternally takes up residence in that person. To be a Christian, to be in Christ then is to have experienced this work of the Holy Spirit. Anyone who is a Christian has the Holy Spirit of God living in them.
Why? Because the very inception of the Christian life occurs when the Holy Spirit breaks into a sinner's dead soul and brings it to life and begins to indwell that person. So when Paul asks, did you receive the spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith, he is saying, did you get saved? Did you experience justification because you were obediently keeping the commands of God or because you were helplessly looking to Christ in faith?
And the answer to this rhetorical question ought to be obvious to anyone who is in Christ. The answer is a resounding no, I did not experience the Holy Spirit's initiation into grace because of my incredible acts of obedience to God. No Christian in this room today would begin their personal testimony of how they came to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ by saying, well, one day I was just obeying God really well when all of a sudden the Holy Spirit decided I was obedient enough for him to resurrect my soul and make his abode with me.
That sounds foolish because it is foolish. No Christian who is truly a Christian would think he's alive in Christ today because of how obedient he was prior to knowing Jesus Christ. No Galatian or Harris Bergean can say the Holy Spirit came into my life and saved me because I was good enough. We can only ever say the Holy Spirit has come into my life and saved me because Christ is good enough. And the vehicle by which I gain access to Christ's good enoughness is faith, trust in him, not in me. Paul goes on, not only does the origin of my conversion experience offer evidence that salvation is all of grace, but also the perfecting, the completing of conversion offers experiential evidence that salvation is all of grace. Verse three, are you so foolish?
Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? The rhetorical question of verse two makes it obvious that the beginning of salvation, that is justification, is by faith. The rhetorical question of verse three then makes it obvious that the perfecting or the completion of salvation, which is sanctification, is also by faith. In other words, whatever gets a sinner saved is what keeps the sinner saved. Paul's opponents were asserting that justification depended on circumcision, but Paul does his opponents one better. He says that not only does one's justification not depend on the ability in the flesh to keep God's law, but even one's sanctification, one's progress in the Christian life does not depend on a fleshly ability to keep God's law. Whatever causes the justification of a sinner, Paul says, also causes the sanctification of a sinner.
Salvation then is all of grace from start to finish. Now Paul's made his point, but he goes on with a couple of more questions for the Galatians in their foolishness to ponder. Verse four, did you suffer so many things in vain if indeed it was in vain? In other words, Galatia you went to all the trouble of hearing the gospel preached, of understanding what it meant, of making public profession of faith, of enduring whatever ridicule or persecution that came with that public identification with Christ only to be lured now into a false gospel that if embraced will nullify everything you claim to have previously accepted. And just in case their heads are not adequately hanging down in shame enough yet, Paul continues verse five, does he who supplies the spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by the works of the law or by hearing with faith? That's essentially the same question he asked in verse two. Is God giving his spirit and confirming that gift with miracles, which was a normal occurrence prior to the completion of the canon of scripture, is God doing these things in response to Galatia's amazing obedience to him or because of their faith in Christ's obedience? Paul answers the rhetorical question in verse six by pointing out that the Galatian Christians are saved in the same way and on the same grounds that Abraham, the great patriarch of the Christian faith was saved. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness and so from personal experience, every Christian's life along with Abraham's bears witness to the fact that salvation is all of grace.
To submit to a gospel of works then is utter foolishness. Vince Lombardi, the famously successful coach of the Green Bay Packers made a very famous statement. It was on the heels of a heartbreaking loss in the NFL championship game. Lombardi stood in front of his team of athletes, men who were professionals at the top of their game and he held up a football and said, gentlemen, this is a football. He proceeded to spend the Packers' entire training camp focusing on the fundamentals of the game of football, blocking, tackling, throwing, catching. This team would go on that next season to have an undefeated season and actually win the championship.
In fact, they would win five of the next seven championships and it all stemmed from a dogged determination to not forget or neglect the fundamentals of football. Now putting football aside, gentlemen and ladies, this is Christianity, salvation by grace through faith in Christ. And just as it's possible for professional athletes at the top of their game to forget and neglect the fundamentals of their sport, it is possible for Christians to forget and neglect the gospel, to be bewitched by a false, distorted gospel. And so we need frequently, and by frequently I mean every day, to come back to the foundation that salvation from start to finish is all of grace. Now let me tell you how good we are at forgetting that salvation is of grace. I've noticed that some Christians ironically in an attempt to never forget that salvation is of grace end up making remembering grace a work. If I'm not trusting in Christ enough, if I'm not acknowledging my own lack of deserving enough, then I won't be saved.
And suddenly we've turned our very resistance towards a work-based salvation into a work all its own. But don't miss how Paul addresses this tendency. Paul reminds us that whatever God has saved to begin with keeps us saved to the end. Having begun in the Spirit, we will finish in the Spirit. It's all of grace, past, present, and future. God isn't the kind of father who catches his children when they jump into the deep into the full pool, but then makes them swim back to safety on their own. No, God completes what he begins. He catches us, and then he carries us for all eternity.
And we need to never forget that. Well, not only does Paul give us some experiential evidence to confirm that salvation is all of grace, he also gives a theological explanation or defense of the doctrine of grace. Paul alludes to Abraham's faith as a point of comparison in verse 6. And so he discusses the faith of Abraham at length in verses 7 through 9. Abraham of course was the patriarch who received certain promises that would come to be the defining promises of every Christian, not the least of which was the promise of a seed through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed.
Paul, in just a few more verses, will identify that promised seed as Jesus Christ. And so Paul is using the paradigm of Abraham's faith to emphasize the point that as goes the root, so goes the fruit. If Abraham's experience of salvation is normative for all who are connected to him, then it is foolish to believe that our means of salvation is somehow different from our spiritual father's salvation. Theologically speaking, the way that God saved Abraham is going to be the same way that God saves us. How does a person become a son of Abraham?
This is the question that Paul's opponents were supposedly answering. These opponents were saying, if you want to be a son of Abraham, then you must be circumcised like Abraham was. The only problem with that is that Abraham's status as righteous was not predicated on his circumcision or any other act of obedience but on his faith. Yes, his obedience over the course of his life would demonstrate that faith as he left Ur, as he circumcised himself and his sons, as he laid Isaac on the altar. But Abraham's obedience did not cause his faith, nor did his faith cause God to count him as righteous.
His faith, his looking to Christ was what God counted to him as righteousness. And scripture makes this abundantly clear. Paul quotes Genesis 15, six, Abraham believed the Lord and the Lord counted that belief, that faith as righteousness. So faith then is the means of inclusion in the covenant of grace. It was true for Abraham and it's true for every child of Abraham. Verse seven, know then that it is those of faith who are sons of Abraham. This family grouping is not an ethnic thing.
It's not a religious ritual thing. It's a faith thing. All who share the faith of Abraham share in the family of Abraham, which is to say those whose faith is in Christ are together members of the covenant of grace.
And this is not something new. There are those who would like us to believe that Abraham and ethnic Jews who came after him were saved by keeping the law of God, but that that didn't work out so well. So God came up with a plan B by which sinners could be saved by grace. Old Testament believers saved by works, New Testament believers saved by grace.
So they say, brothers and sisters, that is not true. Righteousness comes by faith and it has always been this way. Look with me at verse eight, in the scripture for seeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preach the gospel beforehand to Abraham saying, and you shall all the nations be blessed.
You know, this is a very New Testament sounding verse, isn't it? Salvation of Gentiles by faith through the preaching of the gospel, and yet Paul says this was the means by which even Abraham came into the covenant of grace. So not only is salvation currently by grace through faith in Christ, it has always been a salvation that's by grace through faith in Christ.
In fact, there is not and has never been any other way to be saved. I think it would honor Christ and his gospel for us just to pause here and say explicitly that dispensationalism is wrong to assert that Old Testament Israelites were saved by their obedience to the law while New Testament Christians are saved by grace through Christ. I'm not trying to be mean-spirited here but it needs to be said that the paradigm that has largely shaped the evangelical world for decades now is rightly refuted in Galatians 3.8.
This distortion strikes at the gracious origin of the gospel, a gospel that is and has always been gracious in nature, both for Old Testament church as well as for the New Testament church. And so Paul concludes in verse 9 by saying, so then those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. A faith-based justification is a grace-based justification because it necessarily excludes a works-based justification. And anyone who wants the blessings that were promised to Abraham will only find those blessings in the same manner in which Abraham found them. He believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.
Now perhaps I need to clarify again something that some people sometimes misunderstand. Some people think that faith is the work that causes a person's salvation. They maybe rightly recognize that obedience to the law is not the cause because that would imply a merit-based system but then they turn around and make the exercise of faith essentially a work to be performed. But this misses the point and in fact isn't any better than a law-based ground for salvation. To say that faith is the cause of my righteousness as some do is like saying a string is what makes a kite fly.
That's absurd. The string does not possess any sort of flying quality that can make a kite fly. The string merely connects the person flying the kite to the kite. Faith is not the work we do to achieve justification before God any more than our obedience is the work we do to achieve justification. No, faith is merely the string that connects us to Christ. You see it's the object of our faith that makes us righteous which is to say it is Christ who makes us righteous before God. Now we can go even further and point out that even faith, even that string that unites us to Christ is part of the gift of salvation. Ephesians 2 8 9 says for by grace you have been saved through faith and this even the saving faith is not your own it is a gift of God not a result of works so that no one may boast. Our text this morning was written to make the foolishness of self-salvation abundantly plain.
It was written because we are prone to believing the notion that we can save ourselves through the works we perform. This is not just a Galatian problem, it's not just a Pharisee problem, it's a human problem and a tendency towards which we are all bent. Every day we are faced with countless opportunities to sin by doing what God forbids us to do or by not doing what God commands us to do or by doing right things for wrong reasons.
The opportunities to sin are endless. As Christians we have certain privileges given to us that help us avoid sin. We have the word of God. We have the Holy Spirit's illumination of that word. We have the indwelling Holy Spirit who convicts us of sin and works in us the desire and the ability to obey. We have the mind of Christ. We have the intercessory prayers of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. We have God's fatherly love and watch care over us.
We have access to our Heavenly Father in prayer through which we can come boldly into his throne room and find grace and mercy to help us in our time of need. And because of all these spiritual privileges there are days in which we succeed at navigating the pitfalls of sin. We succeed at fleeing temptation and resisting the devil and not caving to the pressures of worldliness or to the desires of our own sinful flesh. There are days when we live more righteously than other days. But the danger that Galatians 3 exposes, the warning that it gives, is that until these wretched bodies of death are glorified with Christ at his return we will have a strong desire to take credit for those spiritual successes that we enjoy. We want to be our own savior and so when we give evidence of being saved we like to think that we had something to do with it. When we should be giving thanks to God for his sanctifying work through the many means of grace that he has supplied us with instead we pause to admire our own virtue as if we scaled the mountain of salvation on our own.
Paul says it's foolishness. On the other hand there are days, are there not, when we don't navigate the pitfalls of sin very well. We cave to temptation. We stumble into that same old besetting sin for the umpteenth time. We get enamored with the world, with fame or wealth or the praise of men. We don't resist the devil.
Instead we open the door for him and take his coat and offer him a seat. Our tendency towards self-salvation in those moments of moral failure is no less dormant than it is in our moments of moral success. The right response, the Christian response when I stumble and fall into sin is to admit that I've sinned through confession, to believe that Christ's blood is adequate to cover the sins of even my most awful days and to return to God in obedience through the power of the Holy Spirit. But what do we do often in those moments of failure? We wallow in our guilt like pigs in the mud.
We stoke the fire of despondency and hopelessness like a beggar who is a perfectly able-bodied man but has convinced himself he'll never amount to anything. And we respond this way because to admit that we shouldn't have sinned or that in Christ we didn't have to sin is to admit that we are the problem. It's to admit that the reason we sinned was not because God was unfaithful but because in spite of God's faithfulness I wanted to sin anyway.
And to our proud hearts that admission is simply too much to bear. You see it all comes from the same self-righteous attitude that says I want to be my own savior. To be disappointed in myself is to have believed in myself. So really both the face in the dust hopelessness over moral failure and the high-flying peacock feathers over moral success are equally rooted in the foolishness of self-righteousness.
They're both futile attempts to save myself through the works that I perform. What we've seen in scripture today is that the remedy for both our proud self-righteousness and our joyless unbelief is the gospel of grace. I am saved from sin by grace through faith in Christ period. If you've sinned this week welcome to Abraham's club.
He was a big sinner and yet God made him the father of the faithful not because Abraham reached down to his bootstraps and pulled himself up but because God gave him a promise and he simply believed that promise. And here is that promise church which is also given to you. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved. If you've sinned this week believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. You'll be delivered from the guilt and the misery and the enslavement of sin. If you haven't sinned this week well yes you have.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. You will be saved from its guilt and its misery and its enslavement. Relying on your moral goodness is not a virtue.
It's foolishness. Paul says stop doing that and instead rely on the pristine unchanging righteousness of God. Let's pray. Father we are so easily fooled into thinking we can rescue ourselves so I pray that in this coming week we would begin to realize more and more how foolish that thought process is. Help us to recognize this foolishness when we're caught up in it but Lord don't leave us without hope.
Remind us every day that we have no hope in ourselves. We have every hope in Christ because he is not only the author of our faith. He is the finisher of that faith. Remind us that the same Spirit who started us on this path of redemption through his regenerative work in our souls will carry us and preserve us right to the very end. Oh God what a great salvation is ours through the work that you have done, our redeemer, our righteousness, our Lord. I pray in Jesus name. Amen.
