Our sermon text this morning is Galatians 5 verses 13-15.
If you would turn there with me. These verses are a crucial hinge on which the book of Galatians turns. Almost everything prior to Galatians 5-13 has been focused on explaining and applying and defending the doctrine of justification by faith.
And from Galatians 5-13 onward much of what Paul writes is written to ensure that the church in Galatia doesn't misunderstand what he's been saying up to this point by taking it to an unhealthy extreme, unorthodox extreme. So let's hear now the word of the Lord from Galatians 5 verses 13-15. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. Let's pray. Father as we contemplate your word this morning and as we consider our own thought processes and reasoning, as we think about our own values and behavior in light of that word. Help us to know the truth, your truth and be set free by that truth.
Free from the condemnation of the law but also free from our enslavement to sin. Lord you have justified us by your grace. Now I ask that you would also perfect us by your grace. Thank you for the time that you give us on this earth and in these bodies. The time between our conversion and our glorification.
Lord help us to use that time wisely and profitably. Fit us for heaven. Fit us for an eternity spent in your presence with exceeding joy. So now Holy Spirit please open our eyes to behold wonderful things from your word. I pray in Jesus' name.
Amen. Well we're now 11 or 12 sermons into our journey through the book of Galatians and today's text is a turning point in Paul's letter. The focus has been on the doctrinal confusion in Galatia over justification. Right out of the gate, right at the very beginning of his letter, Paul strongly rebuked the church in Galatia for so quickly turning to a different gospel. A gospel of works rather than of faith. And after that opening rebuke, Paul immediately began to defend his apostolic authority. Since Paul was an apostle who had been converted and called and tested and vetted and confirmed by the other apostles, he held real authority over the church. And if he held real God-given authority, then the Galatian church had an obligation to listen to him and obey what he was telling them.
So having rebuked the Galatians and having established his credentials and authority, he begins a lengthy and thorough defense of the doctrine of justification by faith alone in Christ alone. He traced this doctrine theologically and rationally and historically and his argument culminated in that wonderful affirmation that we find there in chapter 5 verse 1 for freedom Christ has set us free, stand firm therefore and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. And Paul repeats that same thought in our text today verse 13, for you were called to freedom brothers. But Paul's focus is now going to shift somewhat as he addresses a different extreme that in one sense is at the other end of the moral spectrum, but in another sense is rooted in the very same heart problem that made legalism such an attractive teaching to the Galatians. Paul is going to begin addressing the danger of viewing this freedom that we have in Christ as a license to sin all we want to, as permission to do as we please.
The old translations used to call this the sin of licentiousness. It's the notion that we have a license to sin because Christ has already paid the punishment for our sins. Now Paul's going to tear down this notion by first addressing our tendency toward license. Then he will point us to the antidote, the fix, the solution for living as if we have license to sin. And then lastly he will give us a final warning with regard to the effect that unchecked license will have on us if we fail to heed the instruction of God's Word. And in all of this Paul is making the point that because we are susceptible to the lie of license, to the lie of licentiousness and we all are susceptible to that, Christians need to pursue servant-hearted love toward one another. Well let's consider then first the tendency toward license that is inherent in all sinners. And we see this in verse 13, For you were called to freedom, brothers, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. The gloriously good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that sinners are free from the condemnation of the law. We have sinned, we deserve eternal judgment, but because Christ has atoned for our sins we are free from the wrath of God that we justly deserve and that is good news. That's the gospel.
Now if we truly take that good news to heart and grasp its scope and magnitude we begin to realize that if I am truly in Christ, nothing, absolutely nothing can change the fact that I'm saved from eternal death. I will not go to hell when I die. Because the law's declaration of my guilt has been silenced forever.
I'm off the hook. The trial is over and I've been declared innocent. And nothing I say or do is ever going to reverse that declaration. In fact there is no one left to condemn me. I am free in Christ.
But there's a problem. You see although I am free in Christ from the condemnation of the law, my sin nature is still present within me. The gracious verdict of innocence has been given but I still think and act and reason like the guilty criminal that I have always been. It will take time for my thought processes and my habits to change. It will take time for my affections to stop being guided and directed by what I was and start being guided and directed by what I have become. This battle between old sinful self and my new justified self is intense and difficult.
At times it's discouraging and feels like a hopeless lost cause. Paul describes this very thing, this battle in the heart and mind of the justified sinner in great detail in Romans 7. He says I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil is close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inner being but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.
Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? So the fight is real for every Christian but the promise of victory is also real. We have to remind ourselves frequently that the same faith that was necessary for justification is also necessary for this battle that takes place in the heart of the justified sinner.
I have to continually believe what God says has happened has really happened because truth be told it doesn't always appear that way, does it? On our best days we hate those sinful dispositions that still reside in us but on many days we indulge them and we coddle them and we even defend them. That's what Paul is warning about here. That's what Paul knows is the tendency of even justified redeemed children of God. It's the rationale that says I'm free in Christ therefore I can do anything I want to. I can even commit sin without consequence, without judgment, without the disapproval of God.
And this tendency is nothing new. Paul addressed it in Romans. Romans 6, 1 and 2. What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?
God forbid. Peter addressed it in his epistle. 1 Peter 2, 16. Live as people who are free but then he adds not using your freedom as a cover up for evil but living as servants of God. Jude spoke of it in his letter.
Jude 4. Certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation. Ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only master and Lord Jesus Christ.
Former sons of Adam, now turned sons of God, have and have always had a lingering tendency to pervert the grace of God into a license to freely sin without consequence. And it's something we ought to resist and run from. It's something that one day we will be free of but for now it is our lingering tendency. Like the child who can't wait to become a parent because he thinks then he can do whatever he wants to do, right?
It's a misunderstanding of the privilege of freedom and it's something to which we are all prone. Well this brings us to Paul's second point which is the antidote to license. The antidote to selfish indulgence as Paul explains it is servant-hearted love. Servant-hearted love.
Look with me at the latter half of verse 13 and verse 14. But through love serve one another for the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Now it's interesting to me that of all the antidotes Paul could have identified, the one he mentions is love exhibited in service to others. If I were addressing the problem of Christians assuming that the grace of God meant they could sin all they wanted to without consequence, I think I would explain the importance of holy living. I might explain how Christians need to be different from the world, distinct and separate from any kind of association with immoral ungodly things. I might describe the ways in which indulgent living ruins people and ruins families and ruins churches. How living like the world is a bad witness to the world of the power of the gospel and so on.
Paul addresses none of that, at least not initially. Instead he tells Christians to focus their effort and energy on lovingly serving each other. Now why would servant-hearted love be the antidote to lawless godless living? Well if we thought about it for just a moment, we would realize that this tendency toward sinful license is rooted in a preoccupation with self. It's rooted in fact in the very same self-centeredness that legalism is rooted in. Paul is not suddenly addressing a different batch of Galatian Christians from this point forward in his letter.
No, he's still addressing the very same heart problem that he's been addressing all along which is the self-centeredness of the human heart. You see the self-oriented person who wants salvation tries to earn salvation through what he does or does not do because he selfishly wants the credit for that salvation. The self-oriented person who discovers that salvation is by grace and not works views grace as a license to sin freely because he wants autonomy or the pleasures of sin. In legalism, self wants the glory, the credit.
In lawlessness, self wants freedom, autonomy, to be the boss. But both extremes stem from a heart of selfishness, a heart that wants to be either its own savior or its own master and lord. And so if the Galatians are going to rid themselves of the tendency toward moral license and self-indulgence, they need to learn to be selfless.
Makes sense then, doesn't it? That Paul would say that the antidote to licentious living is love expressed through self-denying service towards others. Through love, serve one another. Paul goes so far as to say that the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. These Galatians were supposedly interested in keeping God's law as a means of salvation.
That's why they were so susceptible to the false teachers' influence. Well, if they really loved God's law, they would demonstrate that love by doing the one thing that Paul and Jesus before him and Moses before him acknowledges as being of utmost importance when it comes to obeying God and that one thing is love. When asked what the great commandment is, Jesus answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. That is the first and great commandment. And then Jesus added, and the second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself on these two commands, depend all the law and the prophet. So love of God expressed in a love for those made in God's image is the height of obedience. It is the purest expression of a holy life. It is the epitome of unselfishness.
It is the fulfillment of God's law. Now the word love is a tricky word, isn't it? As soon as the concept of love comes up in a conversation or in a sermon, I wonder if we don't just sort of glaze over because while we all acknowledge that love is important, it strikes us perhaps as such a nebulously broad quality that none of us really think we are lacking in love. If I were to say, Church, you need to fight your self-indulgence by fasting every Tuesday and Thursday for five years, I would likely have your attention because all of a sudden things just got very specific and measurable.
You might agree with it or disagree with it, but you can't ignore it or dismiss it because it's so objectively obvious who is fasting every Tuesday and Thursday. It's not so objectively obvious who is loving others. Love is to some extent a posture of the heart, a disposition of the mind, and so it's not very visible, which means it's easy to fake. It's easy to deceive others and to even deceive ourselves into thinking that we love others well.
But Paul doesn't let us get away with that. He qualifies this command to love by including two statements that make the quality of love very visible, very measurable even. First, he says that true love is the kind of love that serves others. It's not just a feeling or an attitude that you have toward another person.
No, it's actionable. It serves. It washes the other person's feet. It bears the brunt of someone else's hardship. It lightens the load for the other person. Love looks like selfless service.
Let me put it like this. If you're not serving others, you're not loving others. Certainly you can serve without loving, but you cannot love without serving. So the question is, do you serve others? Do you serve others? I'm sure you do on Sundays at church when everyone is looking, but what about at home when it's just you and your sibling or you and your spouse? Nobody's watching.
You're not going to get noticed or praised for it. Do you serve then? That's the real test of the genuineness of unselfish love. A friend once told me a story that I suspect we can all identify with and that illustrates this tendency of ours to pretend to love and serve, and we're really just tooting our own horn. He said it was Thanksgiving Day. The big meal had just ended, and the family and friends were gathered around the table staring at this insurmountable pile of dirty dishes and leftover food. Well, my friend graciously said to the group, I'll do the dishes. I'll clean up after the meal. And he dutifully began clearing the table, prepping the sink to wash this mountain of dishes, when to his surprise everyone moved into the living room and were in there visiting and enjoying each other, having a good time, leaving him to do the dishes in the kitchen. And my friend thought to himself, well, I know I said that I'd do the dishes, but I thought some people would help. And it occurred to him in that moment that he wanted the reputation of being a servant, but he didn't want to actually be treated like a servant.
And I think we're probably all that way at one time or another, aren't we? We want the credit for being selfless, but we don't want to actually have to be selfless. Church, that is fake love. That is pretend selflessness. Real love, real selflessness, is love that doesn't just talk about being a servant.
It actually serves. It actually loves in objective, concrete ways. And if we excuse away our selfishness behind a mask of pretend love, we're still being selfish, which means in the larger context of this passage, we're still vulnerable to the thought processes of moral license and sinfully indulgent behavior. We're using our liberty in Christ as an excuse to sin. But there's another point, another statement that Paul makes, which won't let us off the hook easily. It's actually a quote from Leviticus and from the Gospels that says, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
And it's those last two words that I want to draw your attention to, as yourself. You see, it's possible that we acknowledge that love through service is a great thing. It's possible that we even recognize that true servant-hearted love gets its hands dirty, not for personal credit, but for the sake of others. But then we excuse away our obligation to lovingly serve on the grounds that the person I'm being called to serve really doesn't deserve it, or want it, or need it. Maybe we tell ourselves, I would lay down my life for that person, but alleviating their difficulty might just get in the way of what God is doing in their hearts.
So I'll stay out of the way. Or maybe we say, I would help them, but I don't want to rob other people of the joy of serving, so I'll just let someone else have a turn. And just like that, we've spiritualized our selfishness and made it out to be some sort of virtuous deference, or a wise discerning of God's greater purposes. But to sort of counter all of those mental gymnastics that we go through, Paul describes very specifically how we can objectively measure when and where we ought to serve, and it doesn't require some sort of super sixth sense of God's will, or some mystical discernment of the hidden purposes of providence. It's really a rather simple rule that says, love other people in the same way that you love yourself.
Love other people with the same fervor and diligence with which you love you. When you're hungry, do you really have to stop and ask yourself, do I want to go to the trouble of making myself some food? When you desire some righteous pleasure or convenience, do you really have to deliberate all that much? No, we are quick to serve and meet our own needs and wants. Love is just as quick to serve and meet the needs and wants of others.
It's very measurable and visible and concrete. Martin Luther, a Protestant reformer, said this. He said, it is tersely spoken, love thy neighbor as thyself. But what more needs to be said?
You cannot find a better or nearer example than your own. If you want to know how you ought to love your neighbor, ask yourself how much you love yourself. If you were to get into trouble or danger, you would be glad to have the love and help of all men. You do not need any book of instructions to show you how to love your neighbor. All you have to do is to look into your own heart, and it will tell you how you ought to love your neighbor as yourself. So Paul has exposed our tendency to excuse away obedience under the banner of freedom in Christ. And Paul has shown us the means of avoiding that tendency, the antidote to selfishness, if you will, and that antidote is unselfish love expressed through serving others the way we love and serve ourselves.
The final point then Paul makes has to do with the effect of license, the effect of license. If we insist on using our freedom in Christ as a license to sin, there will be destructive consequences. Verse 15, but if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. So the opposite of serving one another through love, according to Paul, is biting and devouring one another. Our posture towards others is going to be either a posture of self-giving love, or it will be a posture of defending and serving myself at the expense of others. And again, it's helpful to see this effect in light of the main topic of the book of Galatians.
The Galatians are toying with the false gospel of salvation by works. And what do people who are trying to make a good showing in the flesh do in relation to others? Well, they compare themselves to others. They measure their virtue or their spirituality by seeing how they stack up to other virtuous spiritual people.
They rank themselves according to their works. And all of this comparison and competition and vying for spiritual superiority automatically creates division and strife and contention. It turns the body of Christ, the church, into a contentious mess in which brothers and sisters in Christ dare not lay down their lives for each other because they're too busy trying to compete with each other for spiritual clout or for preeminence. A works-oriented congregation is a divided congregation because everyone's trying to upstage everyone else.
And this works in both directions. On the one hand, we might be driven by the need to appear the most spiritually mature and holy person in the crowd. And so we virtue signal or we humble brag about all the good things we're doing. On the other hand, we might be driven more by the need to appear to be the most free in Christ. And so we belittle those legalists and we tout our freedom of conscience.
But in doing so, we're being just as self-oriented and merit-based as the strictest legalist. Salvation does not come by my ability to keep the law, but neither does salvation come by my ability to not care about the law. You see, both of those attitudes are oriented towards my ability and not God's grace and Christ's imputed righteousness. If we insist on living like this, Paul says, we will be consumed by one another. One pastor compared it to two snakes that grabbed each other by the tail and each swallowed the other. Christians competing against each other to be either the most obedient or the most free in Christ have missed the point of both obedience and freedom in Christ. And their insistence upon making much of themselves will end in the church turning in upon itself and consuming itself.
This is what happens when we neglect sincere love and instead use our freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. A church member once said that when preaching, I should not try to apply the Bible to people's lives. I should simply explain what the Bible means and then let people apply it to their own lives in whatever way they see fit. The problem with that notion oftentimes, if not all the time, is that the right application of a passage of Scripture is part of the interpretation of a passage of Scripture. I don't get to divorce Galatians 5, 13 from verses 14 and 15. If Paul says don't do that but instead do this, I don't get to determine for myself what this is because part and parcel to rightly understanding Paul's meaning here includes rightly understanding Paul's application. The way to not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, the way to not fall prey to licentiousness, to lawless living, the way to not be a self-indulgent antinomian who neglects the importance and the necessity of obedience in the Christian life is by lovingly serving others.
Do you love people? You say, well, what does love entail? Well, the Bible tells us that too. 1 Corinthians 13 defines it very specifically and practically. Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. Do you love people? Secondly, do you serve people? Do you look for ways to treat others the way you want to be treated?
And do you act on those thoughts? The choice before us, brothers and sisters, is love for others or love for self. It's freedom in Christ or enslavement to our flesh. It's salvation by grace or condemnation by works. Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh.
Instead, use that freedom as an opportunity to love and serve others like Christ has loved and served you. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your Word and the instruction it gives. Lord, help us now by the power of your Holy Spirit in us to obey what we've heard, not legalistically or licentiously, but in faith, always looking to Christ who is our righteousness. And it is in his name that I pray. Amen.
