Freed to Change

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. The words, it is finished, you see. Listen, are not just words that we believe one time to find forgiveness. They are words we believe again and again to experience spiritual power. The first time we believe the words, it is finished, we were released from the penalty of sin. As we continue to believe them, we are released from the power of sin. Welcome to Summit Life with pastor and teacher J.D. Greer.

I'm your host, Molly Bidovitch. I think it's safe to say that our Western culture is highly individualistic. We all want to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make our own way in the world.

We don't want to be dependent on anyone. Well, today, Pastor J.D. is giving us a cautionary message because that self-made mindset doesn't work when it comes to holiness. We're getting an important and humbling reminder about our dependence on God as we continue our study in Galatians called Freedom in the In-Between.

Pastor J.D. titled this message, Freed to Change. Galatians chapter three, if you got your Bible, I am very excited about the message today.

This is one of my favorite short passages in all of the letters of the apostle Paul because Paul is going to get a little salty here with the Galatians and that's when I think Paul is at his best when he's getting a little frisky and he's a little irritated. So as you're turning to Galatians three, imagine with me for a minute that you are one of those consultants who gets hired by a company that is about to go under and you are brought in to turn that company around. And so you take on the case of a company that has just declared bankruptcy, but as you really get into the weeds and you start to look at their assets, you discover that they actually have a great product. The reason they're going bankrupt is not because of a deficiency in their product, it's because the CEO is corrupt and incompetent. Their ledger is a veritable litany of bad decisions and fiscal mismanagement and corruption and nepotism and discrimination and embezzlement and just about any other kind of bad business practice you can come up with. But all the CEO wants in your meetings with him, all he wants is for you to find a way to get the company back in the black so that he can carry on business as usual. Well, if you were to make a report to the board of directors, you would probably say something like this, listen, your debt is the least of your problems right now. You need to fire this corrupt CEO and you need to bring in a new one.

Simply throwing money at this problem is not going to fix it unless you change the corruption underneath this problem. Well, see that is very similar to the point that Paul begins to make in Galatians chapter three. Our salvation had to be more than simply having our sin debt removed and that is because our sin had done more than simply leave us guilty before God. It had also left us utterly unable to live the Christian life. That is why so many of us struggle to make relationships work even after we become Christians.

It's why many of us still cannot find that elusive peace and sense of happiness and calm or satisfaction that we have always yearned for. You see, we need not only to be given a clean record before God, we also need to be released from sin's power. And Paul says that this also is a gift of God that is accessed by faith alone in Christ.

And this is what many of you, if I could be so humble and bold at the same time, this is what many of you have yet to grasp. You have grasped Christ alone as your forgiveness provider, but you have not yet grasped Christ alone as your righteousness producer. You believe salvation is by faith alone, but you think sanctification or growth in Christ that that is all up to you. The essence of salvation, Paul says though, is you in Christ and Christ in you. You in Christ, where you stand in Christ's righteousness, his righteousness has been applied to your account, but also Christ in you where his resurrection power becomes the source of your spiritual life. Paul's summation of all of this is Galatians 2 20.

Here's what Paul says. Here's who I am in Christ. I've been crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, yet it's not I who lives anymore, it's Christ who lives in me. Now watch this, the life I now live in the body, the growth I have in Christ, the spiritual life I'm living, I'm living by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

And so now that leads us into chapter three, where we're gonna pick up and here's how Paul starts chapter three. You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. In other words, at one point you understood the gospel so clearly. It was like Jesus had died right in front of you. It's like you were there and you had seen his wounds and you'd heard him from the cross declare it is finished.

And at one point you understood it so clearly, but now it's like you've completely, it's like you've completely forgotten that. Verse two, I only wanna learn this from you. Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or did you receive the Spirit by believing what you have heard?

Now this is really important because this is the first time the apostle Paul mentions the Holy Spirit in Galatians and the Holy Spirit is going to become his primary theme for the next four chapters. And here is his question, listen, how did you first receive the Spirit? Did you first receive the Spirit because you did something?

Was it because you ate something or did not eat something? Was it because you went through some ritual? No, it happened because you put faith in the finished work of Christ. Well then he said, after beginning by the Spirit, do you now think you're gonna finish by the flesh? Does God give you the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law or is it by believing what you heard? Just like Abraham who believed God and it was credited to him for righteousness.

Here is the game changing question. If you initially received the Spirit by believing, why would you think growing in the Spirit would be achieved in any other way? Why would God start our salvation by faith in his provision but then expect us to grow by us grabbing a hold of our bootstraps and pulling ourselves up through obedience to the law?

No, he says, the way we grow in the Christian life is the same way we begin in the Christian life through faith in Christ finished work. The words it is finished, you see, listen, are not just words that we believe one time to find forgiveness. They are words we believe again and again to experience spiritual power. The first time we believe the words it is finished, we were released from the penalty of sin. As we continue to believe them, we are released from the power of sin. Now let's pause here for a moment because I've told you before, as Paul ties all this to the Holy Spirit, I told you that most Christians in churches like ours are not really exactly sure what to do with the Holy Spirit. On the one hand, we know Christians who seem obsessed with the Holy Spirit.

He is this mystical force that is always revealing himself through warm, fuzzy feelings and strange coincidences. Oh pastor, I was praying about whether or not to ask this girl out. And as I was driving home, I looked up and there was a billboard and the same color of the billboard was the same color as her eyes.

And the last two digits of the phone number on the billboard were the same as her age. And just at that minute, my favorite Christian song came on K-Love and Jehovah Jireh. I just knew the Holy Spirit was telling me to ask her out. And you're like, I'm not sure that was the Holy Spirit telling you to ask her out. It sounds to me like the preamble to a restraining order.

So I'd be really, really careful without it. Or, or you've heard Christians that received the Holy Spirit, encounters that just seemed kind of mystical and weird. Before I became a pastor, I was at a pastor's conference. It was with a world renowned, I guess you would call him a Pentecostal preacher, but everybody was very famous.

And I'm know about 150 of us there. And at the end of his talk, he said, Hey, if anybody wants to receive more of the Holy Spirit, would you come forward and I'll leave my hands on you and you can receive the Holy Spirit. Now I was like, you know, I'm always one for more of the Holy Spirit.

We didn't have a, you know, a class on this in seminary. So I thought, absolutely. So I come down there and there's a row of about 20 of us. And he starts on one end and he is praying for people to receive the Holy Spirit. And I noticed that as he does it, they, they fall backwards.

But I was like number 13 or 14 in line. I noticed that the closer he got to me, I was watching. I was like, it sure looks to me like he is pushing them down. And so I said to God, he's about two people ahead of me. I said, Lord, you can do whatever you want to me.

If you want to knock me down, that's fine. If you want to knock my shirt off and tattoo Jesus loves me to my chest, I will receive that in Jesus name, but I am not going to let that man push me down. And so he comes up to me and he puts his hand on my forehead and he starts to pray. And as he prays and it gets more intense, I can feel the pressure of his hand pushing me back. And I was like, bro, that is not the Holy Spirit.

That is you. And so he starts pushing me down. So I start pushing back.

Like, you know, we're having this moment here and eventually he muttered something, probably about me being stiff necked or whatever, and he moved on to the next person. But, but, but, but you think that that's really what it's like to have this encounter with the Holy Spirit. Well, there are other Christians in churches, probably like ours, who in reaction to that, we just kind of ignore the Holy Spirit altogether. And we believe that he exists, but we're not exactly sure what to do with him. A couple of years ago, I preached in the Holy Spirit and I explained to you that most Christians in churches like ours relate to the Holy Spirit, the same way that I relate to my pituitary gland, right? I know it's in there somewhere.

I'm not exactly sure where to point by the way. I know it's in there somewhere. I know it's really important for something.

I don't want to be without it, but I don't really know what it does and I don't really relate to it. In churches like ours, we say we believe in the Trinity, but actually the Trinity that we would believe in would be God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Bible. We're not sure what to do with the Holy Spirit.

The apostle Paul would point us away from both of those kinds of interpretations of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit for him is very real. He is the third person of the Godhead. He is the person who lives inside of you. He is absolutely essential to the Christian's life.

He is Christ in you, the way that you live the Christian life, yet he is not accessed, listen to this, through weird mystical ceremonies and he's not experienced primarily through a random confluence of circumstances. His ongoing power in us is released in us through renewed faith in the gospel. As we continue to put faith in the finished work of Christ, the power of the Spirit is continually released in us. Or think of it this way, by believing it is finished, we gain the power to continue.

By believing it's finished, you gain the power in the Christian life to continue. The fire to do in the Christian life comes from being soaked in the fuel of what has been done. That is why we so often say around here that the deeper you go into the gospel, the wider, the higher, and the farther you will go in obedience.

The way to progress in the Christian life, Martin Luther said, is always to begin again. If you want to grow in Christ, you don't go beyond the gospel, you go back to the beginning and you go deeper into the gospel. The deeper you go into the gospel, the farther and higher and wider you will go into obedience. You see this in one of the best pictures in the Bible of what salvation is.

In the book of Numbers, it talks about Israel sinning and as a consequence, God sent this fiery serpents in there which bit the Israelites and it was extremely painful and many began to die and so they cried out to God for mercy and God told Moses to take an image of a serpent, a bronze image, and put it up on a pole and put the pole up on top of a hill and to tell the Israelites that whoever would crawl to that hill and look upward in faith, believing that salvation and healing belong to God, that as they looked and as they believed, they would be healed. That is a picture, Jesus said, John 3, of how you and I obtain forgiveness as we look at Jesus on the cross and we say there is my salvation and when you believe that, His righteousness is imputed to you. But here's what Paul is saying in Galatians 3, as you continue to look at that, as you continue to believe it is finished, then the healing power of righteousness will begin to be infused into you. That is the way that you grow in the Christian life.

Think of it like one of those new cell phone batteries where it doesn't have a cord that connects it to the charger, it just charges when you place it on the charger. Christians receive spiritual life-changing power when they are resting on the cross. So when you want to grow spiritually, when you are frustrated at the lack of spiritual fruit in your life, you come back to the message that it is finished and you rest there and you thank God that His acceptance of you is not based on how much spiritual fruit you show. It's not based on how you feel, it's not based on what you've accomplished, it's based on Christ's finished work and then as you rest there, you will start to bear spiritual fruit. The irony of the Christian life is that the only ones who get better in the Christian life are those who recognize that their acceptance before God is not conditioned on their getting better. You believe it is finished once to escape the penalty of sin, now you believe it again and again and again and again to escape the power of sin. You don't escape it through the works of the law, you don't escape it by resolution, you don't escape it by learning doctrine, you don't escape it through anything except for resting in the finished work of Christ because that is where the power of healing flows from.

In the words of those modern day musical prophets, journey, don't stop believing, don't stop believing, hold on to that it is finished feeling or something like that, the lyrics will go whatever. In verse six Paul now compares it to the experience of one of the most famous Old Testament people, Abraham. He says just like Abraham, then he quotes Genesis 15, six, this is a quote here, like Abraham who believed God and it was credited to him for righteousness. All right, Genesis 15, God makes a promise to Abraham that from him would come a great nation that would provide forgiveness and salvation for the world. The problem when Abraham gets this story is that the problem with Abraham is that he gets this promise.