Please turn with me if you would to Galatians 4 as we consider today verses 8-20. This passage warns us of the dangers of going backwards in our pursuit of the Gospel, of regressing away from Christ and returning to old sinful paths, paths of faithlessness. Paul describes it as idolatry, deceptive, destructive, enslaving idolatry. And so our text today is a call for us to stop flirting with alternate Gospels as if they are harmless and inconsequential and to run hard after Christ. So let's read God's Word together and then receive its instruction for us today. Galatians 4 verses 8-20. How can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world whose slaves you want to be once more?
You observe days and months and seasons and years. I'm afraid I may have labored over you in vain. Brothers, I entreat you, become as I am, for I also have become as you are.
You did me no wrong. You know it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the Gospel to you at first, and though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus. What then has become of your blessedness? For I testify to you that if possible you would have gouged out your eyes and given them to me. Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth? They make much of you, but for no good purpose.
They want to shut you out that you may make much of them. It is always good to be made much of for a good purpose, and not only when I am present with you, my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you. I wish I could be present with you now and change my tone, for I am perplexed about you. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Lord, would you please take the word before us today and use it to inoculate us against our tendency to go backwards, to believe today what just yesterday we admitted was a lie? Lord, may we see the idols of our heart for what they are and run from them, and may we see you for what you are, a gracious Father who has taken slaves to sin and made them sons of the Most High. Join heirs with Christ. Holy Spirit, help us to never turn back to our former life of sin and self-sufficiency, but to press ever onward toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Lord, please take your word now and use it to shape your body, the church, into what you would have us be. I pray in Jesus' name.
Amen. Are you moving backward in your Christian life or are you moving forward? How do you even know if you're moving backward or forward?
The answer is quite simple. If you're running away from idols and pressing on toward Christ, you're moving forward. If you are toying with idols and drifting away from Christ, you're moving backward. Christ is the goal. He's the climax. He's the prize.
He's the destination. And so anything that hinders our progress in knowing and loving Him is an idol and it ought to be rejected. Anything that increases our knowledge of and love for Christ ought to be pursued and pursued zealously. The Galatians had come to know Christ and love Christ, but they were beginning to entertain thoughts of adding something to their faith in Christ, something that could not coexist with faith in Christ, and that something was a false confidence in their ability to obey their way to heaven, to save themselves essentially, to earn a righteous standing before God by keeping a list of rules. It felt to them like spiritual progress, but it was quite the opposite.
It was regression. It was backsliding. It was moving away from salvation because it was a moving away from Christ. Now Paul in his letter has been up to this point making the theological case for why the Galatians were in error, but in our text today he begins to appeal to the Galatians directly and very personally. He appeals to their experience of God's grace. He appeals to the relationship that he's established with them as a fatherly apostle to this childlike congregation.
He exposes the self-centered motives of the false teachers who are deceiving them. And in all of this Paul hopes to convince the Galatians, and we should say the Holy Spirit hopes to convince us this morning, that idolatry is not worth it. False hope in a false gospel will at first deceive, and then it will destroy any and all who trust in a false gospel.
But Christ on the other hand will save to the uttermost. So to avoid going backward in your faith you must keep yourself from idols, and you must keep on pressing on toward Christ. Well Paul begins his appeal to the Galatians by first exposing the deception of idolatry in verses 8 through 11. Idolatry is a very serious thing.
It's a soul killing thing, but its deceptive nature lies in the fact that it hardly ever seems to be as serious or destructive as it really is. Idolatry deceives us I think because we don't recognize the foolishness of turning back to idols. We begin to get a sense of this deceptive foolish nature of idols in verse 8 when Paul says, formerly when you did not know God you were enslaved to those who by nature are not gods.
Anything that presents itself as God and isn't God is an idol. And idols, Paul says, are enslaving by nature. They grab hold of your heart and mind and body and they don't let go.
They own you. They enslave you. The starting place of every son or daughter of Adam is one of enslavement to idols. And everyone's idolatry looks a little bit different. For some their idol, the false god to whom they're enslaved might be pleasure, living for the enjoyment of the moment. For others it might be pain, living for the self-glory of hardship. Some people worship the idol of aloofness.
Stoics who love the reputation of being unaffected by the drama of life. We invent all sorts of idols and our starting point in life is one of enslavement to these false gods. But the gospel comes in and it frees us from that enslavement. Jesus came to deliver us from the bondage of idols. Look at verse 9, but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world whose slaves you want to be once more? God in Christ has delivered us from being slaves to idols.
From these weak and worthless and elementary principles of the world. Why then would we ever want to go back to being slaves? We want to go back to being slaves when we don't recognize the foolishness of turning back to idols. We forget how bad it was when we were outside of Christ, or we fail to realize how wonderful our new life in Christ is. How is it that we could possibly forget the misery of being slaves to sin?
How is it possible that we would ever underestimate the grace of God that has been shown to us by plucking us out of the mud of our own sin and making us His own children? I think the answer to that lies in the reality that we really, really love ourselves. And we are impressed with self and we want to preserve self and glory in self.
We are incredibly enamored with us. The real idol of my heart, you see, is me. I worship me. I'm enslaved to me because I want to be God.
I want to be my own Savior, my own law keeper, my own sovereign. And even Christians, this side of glory, are not immune to such idolatry. There's an interesting statement that Paul makes in verse 9, and if we're not paying close attention we can easily miss it, and yet it's central to Paul's entire letter to the Galatians. He says in verse 9, you have come to know God, but then he qualifies that statement with this, or rather to be known by God. And in that little qualifier, Paul raises the question, who knew who first?
Who sought who? Is salvation primarily a matter of man seeking and finding and coming to know God? Or is it a matter of God seeking and saving man? Paul says it's the latter.
You, sinner, have come to be known by God. It's an acknowledgement of God's divine initiative in salvation. It's a recognition of God's sovereignty in conversion.
And we might ask, why does Paul bring up God's sovereignty in conversion now? That subject seems unrelated. It seems irrelevant.
Well, it's actually very relevant to the matter at hand. You see, the very nature of the Galatians turning back to their old idolatrous ways had to do with taking credit for that which God should have been credited with. They were trying to work for their salvation, which means they were failing to recognize that salvation is God's work, not ours. Our saving knowledge of God is merely the consequence, the result, the fruit of God having known us before the foundation of the world. And if we're not careful, we could adopt the same attitude as the Galatians.
If we think that we are saved because we have found God or that we have a relationship with God because we have accepted him or that God should save us because he somehow has an obligation to, then our theology of conversion, our theology of salvation contains a very subtle works-based orientation, just like the Galatian Christians. Do you realize that the doctrine of God's sovereignty, both in choosing to save sinners and in carrying out that salvation, is not some sort of Presbyterian appendix to the gospel? No, Paul brings it up here in his letter to Galatia. He brings it up at length in his letter to the Romans. He writes about it in his correspondence with Corinth. He begins his letters to Ephesus, Philippi, Thessalonica, and Titus with this doctrine. He alludes to it in Colossians and in both of his letters to Timothy. The apostle Peter's epistle to the saints in the very first paragraph of his first epistle begins by acknowledging the doctrine of election and the fact that God is the first cause of salvation.
John's beloved gospel does not begin in a manger in Bethlehem. It begins at the dawn of time and with an assertion that salvation is not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man but of God. Church, the doctrine of God's sovereignty in election and conversion and salvation is not some sort of incidental addendum to the gospel that, I don't know, John Calvin invented or the Westminster Divines like to talk about.
No, it is front and center in the Bible's presentation of the gospel. And so if we perceive the doctrine of God's sovereignty and salvation to be some sort of assault on human freedom rather than an acknowledgement of the graciousness of God, we are demonstrating that we have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of salvation and the nature of sin and the nature of man and the nature of God himself. To think that we initiate or complete salvation is to assert that God is subordinate to man, that man is morally self-sufficient and that salvation is primarily something that man does for himself rather than something that God does for sinners. And this is contrary to the gospel as we find it in Scripture. If salvation rests in a self-sufficient individual choosing whatever he perceives to be in his best interests on any given day, option A today, option B tomorrow, then his choices are free to fluctuate and even reverse direction so long as he truly believes what he says he believes.
The only thing at stake then is his trueness to himself. But listen, if our salvation is initiated, maintained, and completed by a transcendent God reaching down and actually rescuing us from ourselves and if we are entirely helpless to assist him in that rescue, then the rescue we have experienced is not something to be casually cast aside. That would be like the abused woman running away from the police and back to the arms of her abuser. It would be like the pardoned criminal running away from a life of freedom and back into his prison cell.
It would be, as Paul says, like a freed slave running back to his harsh taskmaster. If salvation is something we can just do for ourselves, then it is our prerogative to forfeit that salvation if and when we like. But if God must do and has done the saving, then turning back again to a life in which I'm trying to save myself is spurning real grace. I'm provoking divine omnipotence. I'm forfeiting actual salvation in favor of weak, worthless, enslaving idols. I'm walking away from the beautiful princess so that I can have the ugly old hag.
I'm rejecting the attention and affection of the noble prince so that I can remain a mistreated servant girl in the mean stepmother's house. Do you see how foolish we are when we begin to miss our old life of enslavement to sin and bondage and guilt and condemnation to the law? Our idols make fools of us by making us believe that we're better off trying to find God and please God on our own rather than being found by Him and being made pleasing to Him by His grace alone. I think sometimes we don't recognize the foolishness of turning back to idols because we don't recognize the seriousness of turning back to idols. Maybe we think that our idolatry is not so bad.
At least it's not as bad as that person over there. Let me just point out that in verse 9, Paul equates the pleasure-seeking variety of turning back with the law-abiding variety of turning back and he describes them both as enslaving idols. Before they knew God and the gospel, the Galatians were not living under the strict law code of Israel.
They were licentious Gentiles. The idolatry they are now toying with, as Paul is writing them, is the idolatry of Jewish legalism and yet Paul equates the two, both their former lawlessness and now their current legalism by referring to both of them as weak, worthless elementary principles of the world. You see, a Jew who is trying to keep the Torah in order to earn merit with God is not doing a noble thing.
He's going backwards in the path of redemption, just like the hedonist is when he returns to his life of pleasure-seeking indulgence. Legalism is just as wicked as lawlessness. Rebuilding modern-day temples in the Middle East as an act of piety and living like Sodom and Gomorrah in San Francisco are just two sides of the same coin. Both are enslaving.
Both are turning back to worthless, outdated things that cannot save. Both are a rejection of God's gospel of grace. And yet maybe somehow to us, the legalism version seems less bad, doesn't it? And so in verses 10 and 11, Paul makes it abundantly clear that what may seem like a small sin to us is really not small at all. First he points to the evidence that the Galatians were turning back to old idols. Verse 10, you observe days and months and seasons and years. Now we need to understand what Paul is and is not condemning in that sentence. He is not condemning the use of a calendar.
He's not saying a weekly schedule is a bad thing. He's certainly not saying that observing the Christian Sabbath is evil because God himself commands it and Jesus acknowledges it. I don't think Paul is even saying here that commemorating momentous things on specific days is sinful. The unspoken implication of verse 10, given the context of the letter to Galatia, is that they were observing days and months and seasons and years as a means of earning saving favor with God through religious duty.
And that is always wrong. Even the Lord's day worship observed in a legalistic, meritorious sort of way is sinful. So don't use Galatians 4 to justify not coming to corporate worship on Sunday but don't come to corporate worship on Sunday thinking that you're impressing God or obligating him to save you because of your attendance. That's what the Galatians were doing. We can also probably assume in light of the references to Moses and to the ceremonial law which appear throughout this letter from Paul that the Galatians were not just observing the Christian Sabbath in the wrong way but they were making Old Testament feasts and festivals mandatory. Festivals that were no longer in effect since Christ had come.
But here's what I want us to notice. The evidence of idolatry to which Paul points seems like such a small thing, doesn't it? They were simply observing religious days.
What harm could come of that? I mean if I were to pick an example of enslaving idolatry I would pick something much more jaw-dropping and threatening and dangerous than merely observing religious days. But that's just the point. We are susceptible to turning away from the Gospel and back to idols precisely because we don't perceive the seriousness of it. We're easily deceived into thinking that our idolatries are not that big of a deal. That is in fact why we allow ourselves to be enslaved to idols. Because the truly deceptive nature of idolatry is not perceived by the idolater.
And yet turning back to idols is a devastatingly serious offense. Verse 11 makes the seriousness of it perfectly clear. I'm afraid, Paul says, I may have labored over you in vain.
What is he saying? He's saying I don't know Galatians if you're truly saved. I'm not sure you even know Christ. I'm beginning to have my suspicions that your conversion to Christianity ever happened. If Paul's labor as an apostle was in vain it means it did not result in genuine conversion of the Galatians which means their profession of faith is not real.
They're still in their sins. And this suspicion on Paul's part is grounded in the seemingly harmless practice of observing religious days with an intent to impress God. But it wasn't a harmless practice. It was a denial of the Gospel. It was heretical. And if Galatia continued in this trajectory they would be forever lost. Church, turning away from Christ because we love alternative Gospels is deceptively foolish and deceptively serious because it ends in a place of horrific irreversible destruction. Don't go there. Keep pressing on toward the upward call of God in Christ Jesus and let go of your enslaving love of false faith in false gods.
They cannot save you. Well how do we defeat this tendency that we all have of turning back to weak worthless idols? It begins by knowing and understanding the true Gospel and Paul has been proclaiming that Gospel for several chapters now. But in verses 12 through 20 Paul takes a new tactic. He's made the theological case for the Gospel.
Now he begins appealing to the Galatians on a very personal level. We do this with people we love, don't we? Think about the last time that someone you truly loved was doing something destructive to themselves. You probably challenged them first on the stupidity or ignorance of what they were doing. But if they remained unmoved, unconvinced, unrepentant then probably there came a point when you appealed to the sheer love you have for them. It's like a parent who gives their child all the reasons why they should not continue down a certain path. But then the parent adds, and I love you.
I don't want you to be hurt. It's an appeal to the relationship, to the absolute love that a parent has for their child. And this is what Paul does with the Galatians. In an effort to remind them of his great love for them Paul describes the deference he showed them when they first met. Verse 12, brothers, I entreat you.
Become as I am, for I also have become as you are. So Paul, a Jewish man, had come to this Gentile group of people and was able to rub shoulders with them in spite of their vast differences. He was able to be all things to all people precisely because his security as a Christian was in Christ and not in his abstaining from interaction with pagan Gentiles. The Gentiles' knowledge of the Gospel was the direct result of Paul not being a slave to the law. So he reminds them of this and he calls upon them to become as he is, to begin viewing themselves as not under the law but under grace. He's essentially saying, I, a Jew, was able to defer to you Gentiles because salvation is not an ethnic thing.
It's a faith thing. But not only had Paul shown deference to the Galatians when they first met, the Galatians themselves had warmly received Paul at one point and demonstrated acceptance of him in concrete, visible ways. He says at the end of verse 12, you did me no wrong. You know it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the Gospel to you at first, and though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me but received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus. Now we don't know what this ailment was, but it imposed an inconvenience, a hardship, a trial on the Galatians. Nevertheless, they welcomed Paul.
Such was the love that they had for him at one point. But all of that has changed ever since the arrival of these false teachers in Galatians. So Paul warmly says, what then has become of your blessedness, your affection toward me?
For I testify to you that if possible, you would have gouged out your eyes and given them to me. Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth? It's an appeal to what was once a sincere, mutual love between apostle and church.
What has happened to that love? Well, false teachers with impure motives has happened. Verse 17, they, these false teachers, make much of you but for no good purpose.
They want to shut you out that you may make much of them. So these false teachers, unlike Paul, were driven by a love for themselves. They wanted a loyal following. They wanted to be heroes.
They wanted fame. They wanted the admiration of those they taught more than the eternal salvation of those they taught. Verse 18 is a little bit awkward in the ESV. The statement to be made much of is translating a Greek word for zealous. And so we could translate verses 17 and 18 like this. The false teachers are zealous but for no good purpose.
They want to shut you out. In other words, they want to put a wedge between Galatia and Paul to alienate this congregation from the apostle so that you will be zealous for them. Verse 18, it is always good to be zealous for a good purpose and not only when an apostle is present. Zealous enthusiasm is good if it's directed at that which is good.
Zeal is bad when it is directed at that which is impure and distorted and untrue. It seems then that the Galatians were acting zealous for the right things only when Paul was around but then changed their tune when the false teachers were around. And so by pointing out the self-centered motive of this false teachers, Paul is appealing to the Galatians' zeal for goodness and truth. Finally, Paul makes a personal appeal on the basis of the effect that the Galatians' backsliding has had on him as an apostle. Paul describes the effect of the Galatians' backsliding in terms of anguish, deep longing, and perplexity. Their sin is causing Paul great distress. Look at verse 19. My little children, a term of endearment, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you. So here we find Paul's motive in instructing them.
He wants to see Christ formed in them, unlike the false teachers who simply wanted to see themselves replicated in their followers. Verse 20, I wish I could be present with you now and change my tone, for I am perplexed about you. If only I could be physically with you, Paul says, then I could better understand what's going on in your hearts and minds. But since I can't, I'm perplexed. I'm at a loss.
I'm confused and distressed for you. If the Galatians truly loved Paul, then to discover the effect that their backsliding, their regression in the faith was having on Paul, it would have heightened their sense of personal guilt and perhaps motivated them to repent of turning back to idols and to instead press on toward Christ. So I want to ask you this morning, in what ways have you turned back to old paths of sin? Are you engaging in gospel-denying behavior? And perhaps it's so subtle that you didn't even notice it until just now, and so you're tempted to think maybe it's not that big of a deal. If we take just a moment as we close and compare ourselves to the Galatians of the first century, I think we'll find that our susceptibility to going backwards in the faith stems from a few factors. If we're going backwards, it's likely because we've been duped by the idols of our own hearts into preferring the message of false teachers rather than the gospel.
And what, according to this passage of Scripture, is the telltale sign of a false teacher? They make a big deal about you. They make much of you.
Why? Because they know that you like to be made much of. And so they capitalize on that sinful tendency in order to gain a following. A beloved self-centered religion, works-based salvation, is always a dead-end street. And so any teacher or preacher or Bible study group or author or friend who makes his appeal to you on the basis of your worth, your value to God, your innate purity of heart, your ability to try harder and do better in your own strength, to essentially save yourself, is actually promoting himself and not the glory of God in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
What are we to do then? Well, we're to reject false teaching that contradicts Christ and the gospel. We are to be suspicious of ourselves, especially when we find ourselves relying on ourselves for peace of conscience. Aesop wrote a fable about a dog that went something like this. A dog to whom the butcher had thrown a bone was hurrying home with his prize as fast as he could go. As he crossed a narrow footbridge, he happened to look down and saw himself reflected in the quiet water as if in a mirror. But the greedy dog thought he saw a real dog carrying a bone much bigger and better than his own. If he had stopped to think, he would have known better. But instead of thinking, he dropped his bone and sprang at the dog in the river, only to find himself swimming for dear life to reach the shore.
At last, he managed to scramble out, and as he stood sadly thinking about the good bone he had lost, he realized what a foolish dog he had been. If you are in Christ, you are in possession of the greatest gift imaginable. And yet, oh, how often we are like the dog in Aesop's fable.
Something captures our attention, something that we think is better and bigger and more valuable, but it's really just a figment of our imagination. And so we cast aside that which is an eternal treasure in order to run after a weak and worthless shadow. The solution is to treasure the salvation of God and to love the God of salvation so much that nothing, nothing on earth or in heaven or in hell, nothing in the mouths of flattering teachers, nothing in my own self-absorbed heart can deter me from running hard only and forever after Christ. He is the only Savior of sinners' souls. He is the one who knows me better than I know myself.
He is the God who loves me and gave himself for me. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for so great a salvation. May the magnitude of your grace captivate our minds and affections with such fervor that none of the shadowy substitute Gospels that this world and that even our own hearts invent will ever tempt us away from the one who truly saves. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.
