Freed from the Law, for the Law

Today on Summit Life, Pastor JD Greer talks about the relationship between the law and grace. When you summarize the law as love God and love other people and then you'll obey all the commandments, what it's really required is to be free from the law. And when I realize that, I realize how much trouble I'm in because I don't love God and I don't love others like I love myself and I can't change my heart through simple obedience. What the law does as the mirror is it drives me to see how desperate my heart is, how sin-sick it is, and how badly I need a Savior. Welcome to Friday here on Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor, author, and theologian JD Greer.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovich. Let me ask you a question. Is Christianity a religion or is it a relationship? After all, religion is about what you do while the gospel is about what God did for you. And if that's the case, then why do Christians still feel like they have to follow a certain set of rules?

Why do we still go to church and read our Bibles and try to obey the 10 commandments? Pastor JD answers these questions today as he continues our series called Freedom in the In-Between. He titled this message, Freed from the Law for the Law. So grab your Bible and turn to Galatians 3 and let's hear from God today.

When you're reading through the book of Galatians, as I hope many of you are, I've read through it probably a dozen times now as we've been going through this series. And when you're reading through it, you can't help but ask yourself the question, where did Paul get this hatred of the law? I mean, Paul had grown up on the law, but in Galatians, Paul attacks the law mercilessly. He's gonna say things like in chapter three, for all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse. The law is not even based on faith.

No, the law is based on your own ability to do things. And it tells you that the one who does these things will live by them. In chapter five, Paul is gonna completely take the gloves off and say this about those who teach adherence to the law as a means of getting close to God.

I wish those who still preach circumcision might also let themselves be mutilated. Some of your translations say emasculated there, which is a much closer translation of what Paul was saying. This is honestly one of the most jarring statements in the Bible. Paul is literally saying, I would like to see those who insist on circumcision, let the knife drift up a little farther so that they can't reproduce their heresy anymore. And this is Paul speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Paul has made the case in the first half of chapter three, pretty convincingly, that the law plays absolutely no part in getting us declared righteous in God's sight, nor can obedience to the law produce the first tremor of spiritual life in our hearts. His biblical proof for this is Abraham. Abraham, who in his old age believed God's promise that he would have a child, even though for nearly a century, he and his wife had tried to have kids, but could not. Yet when Abraham believed God's promise, Genesis 15 tells us that two things happened to Abraham. Number one, he was judicially counted righteous before God, which meant that, you know, Genesis 15 six, he was declared righteous. His faith was credited to him as righteousness. The second thing that happened to him was new life flooded into his physically dead body so that he could reproduce. Paul asks, was this owing to any inner strength in Abraham? Was it a new technique that he learned or a new mental mindset that he had adopted that released this power in him?

No, of course not. The righteousness and power, Paul points out, were gifts from God. Abraham obtained them simply by believing the promise. In the same way, Paul says, we, you and me, are declared judicially righteous when we believe God's promise that Jesus died for our sin and rose again and we receive spiritual power through the Holy Spirit as we continue to believe that. By the way, it is amazing how unified the Bible is and what it teaches about salvation. From cover to cover in the Bible, there is one way of salvation and that is through faith in God's promise. In the Old Testament, they were saved by believing that God would keep his promise, that Jesus would come. In the New Testament, we're saved by looking backwards and saying God did keep his promise and Jesus came and died for our sin. And in both testaments, when you put faith in what God said he would do, righteousness is credited to your account and spiritual life is released into your heart.

Well, if all that is true, then here is the very natural question. Is there no purpose then for the law? Or here's how the apostle Paul would say it in verse 21, is the law therefore contrary? Does it somehow go against God's promises? After all, didn't the law originally come from God?

Didn't he inspire the law? Don't we still use laws in our society today to good effect? Don't we even use laws sometimes in church? I mean, think about how often we say things like, well, you should read the Bible and you should pray and you should come to church. Even when you don't feel like it, you should do those things. Or you should tithe, you should give your first fruits to God even when you don't feel like it. You should flee temptation even when you feel like indulging in those temptations.

Those are all statements of law. Is Paul telling us to reject all of that kind of talk? Or think about it this way, say some married man comes up to me after one of our services and he says, Pastor, I was walking through the mall the other day and I saw this really beautiful woman in front of me, not my wife.

She was dressed in really skimpy clothing. And Pastor, I knew what I was supposed to think. I knew what a truly righteous woman would think. A truly righteous heart would look at her and say, this woman, while beautiful, is not God's will for me. She is not just some object for my sexual pleasure and honoring my wife and honoring her and honoring the God who saved me are far more satisfying and important to me than indulgence and lust would be. Pastor, I knew that's what I was supposed to be thinking, but that is not what I actually was thinking. My thoughts toward her in that moment were entirely immoral and isn't forcing myself to do what's right, that is turning the other direction and going home to my wife, and not relying on the law. Well, I didn't want to be a Galatian heretic, so I acted on my heart's desires and I got the girl's number.

And then I went home and believed the gospel to get God's forgiveness. Now, do you think that I'm going to say that's great work? That's exactly how I was hoping you would understand and apply the book of Galatians. No, of course not.

But think about it. Isn't telling this guy to force himself to choose one thing even though his heart wants something else? Isn't that using the law in his life? Is Paul saying that is bad?

Well, obviously no. I will say, however, that the fact that you have that question is a good one and it shows that you're really starting to understand what Paul is teaching. Paul frequently in his teaching about the gospel has to stop and answer that question.

Does it in the middle of the book of Romans too. He's like, no, no, no, I'm not really saying that you just go out and sin whenever you want. One of the signs that you're starting to feel that the radical implications of the gospel is that you start to ask the question of whether or not Paul is telling you that you can go and do whatever you want. Now y'all, Paul's got a really good answer for that question.

But my point is that if you don't ever find yourself asking the question, you probably yet to grasp the truly radical things that the gospel is teaching. So here, Paul gives us answer starting in verse 19. Why then was the law given? It was added for the sake of transgressions until the seed to whom the promise was made would come. Is the law therefore contrary to God's promises?

Absolutely not. Verse 22, the scripture in prison through the law, everything under sin's power so that the promise might be given on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ to those who believe. The law then, here's your key word, was our guardian. It was our guardian until Christ so that we could be justified by faith. Verse 25, but since that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian for through faith you are all sons of God in Christ Jesus. The key word there is guardian.

Some translations will say tutor or schoolmaster. Paul is referring here to a school teacher or a nanny who oversees a child training them up in the ways of adulthood and making sure they don't kill themselves accidentally before they become adults. Three ways, Paul says, the law is like our guardian, our tutor, our nanny, our school teacher. And these are the three ways, by the way, the ongoing uses of the law and the life of a believer. Okay, three ongoing uses of the law. And by law, this means God's commands about what we should and shouldn't do, whether we're talking about 10 commandments or coming to church and doing your quiet time or something like that. Three ongoing uses of the law in our lives. First, give you three metaphors. First, the law is a curb.

It is a curb. Through threats of punishment or consequences, the law keeps our sinful natures in check. We obey sometimes simply because we're scared of the consequences. Forcing ourselves to obey the law does not erase the presence of sin in our hearts because sin consists primarily of corrupt desires, and these are gonna be present in us whether we act on our impulses or not. But obeying the law can keep us from the further damage that is caused by acting on sin.

To go back to our illustration of the man in the mall, it is true that the root of this man's sin is in his heart, and that is not going to be cured by the fact that he doesn't follow the impulse to flirt with this girl. But by obeying God's law is not to engage in adultery, even when he doesn't feel like obeying that law. He keeps himself from the further damage that sin would bring, like destroying his wife and family, like dishonoring this girl, like corrupting his own heart or displeasing God. So the law says to him, you may feel like committing adultery, but this is what it's gonna do to your marriage and your family and your heart and the glory of God. So this man obeys the law even when he doesn't feel like it because it curbs the effects, the harmful effects of his sin.

So that's the first thing it does is it curbs the effects of sin. Number two, the law serves for us as a mirror. The law reveals to us as if looking in a mirror how sinful our heart actually is. Because the law reveals to us what a righteous heart is supposed to look like. And when we look into the law, we see what our heart does look like, and it leads us to despair because we see how twisted our heart is and how desperate we are for a savior. Commandment number nine, for example, thou shalt not lie, tells me that I'm supposed to love honesty so much that I'm never even tempted to lie even when a little lie is gonna get me an advantage or it's gonna get me out of a bad situation. Commandment number seven, do not commit adultery, shows me that I'm supposed to love purity so much that any sexual desire I have for somebody else besides my spouse gets outweighed by my love of purity and doing things God's way. Commandment number six, thou shalt not kill, shows me that I am supposed to be so aware of God's kindness to me that I wouldn't dare think a harmful thought about something happening to somebody else. Commandment number 10, you shall not covet, shows me that I'm supposed to be so satisfied with God and so trusting of his plan for me that I don't get jealous even when somebody else gets something that I wanted. That's what I'm supposed to be like, but when I look into the mirror of those laws, I say I'm in deep trouble. Because those are the opposite of what my heart usually feels in those moments.

And merely forcing my heart to do the right thing is not going to change my heart. I've heard the law compared in this regard to a thermometer rather than a thermostat. A thermometer tells you the temperature and it can't change the temperature. You don't get sick and put a thermometer in and say just hold it in your mouth and you'll get better. It just tells you what the temperature is. A thermostat can change the temperature. The law is the thermometer that shows you how sin-sick your heart really is.

The gospel is gonna be the thermostat that's gonna change your spiritual temperature. When you force yourself to obey the law, when you force yourself to do it even when you don't want to do it, then a couple things happen. One, you really start to resent the law and your obedience becomes very short-lived. Either when the pressures of the law are there, you conform, but the moment those pressures are gone, you go back to the original state of your heart.

Here's how you hear that. You've got a high school student who when they're around the right influences, mom and dad or the law, they're acting one way, but when they're with their friends and their parents aren't around, they act a different way because their heart's in this shape up here. Or we put so much pressure on them to conform, you gotta do this, you gotta obey this, you gotta talk about Jesus, that when they finally leave high school and go to college, they feel like I am free.

I'm finally out from underneath that tyranny. I hated my parents' rules and I hated always being drugged at church and now I just throw off all my faith because I have snapped spiritually. Paul says that's what happens when we just try to change through the law.

We end up resenting God. It's like Martin Luther talked about the law. He said, the law made me hate God. The more the law showed me what I should be, the more I realized how much I wasn't. Luther talked about the dilemma of the great commandment. The great commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.

He said the dilemma of that is God is commanding us something that by definition can't really be commanded because if you don't love something, then no command's gonna make you love it. You know, I hate mayonnaise. I think mayonnaise is the nectar of the devil.

I don't think it's gonna be in heaven. I think God, as just early sanctification for me, has gotten rid of that taste out of my mouth. It's just disgusting.

Thank you. So I hate it, right? If you command me to eat mayonnaise, if you're strong enough, you might force me to eat it, but no command of yours is gonna make me love it, right?

The flip side of that is also true. If I already love something, I don't need to be commanded to love it or to do it. You never have to command me to eat a steak or kiss my wife or play with my kids.

I love those things. So I don't need to be commanded to do them. And Luther said, that's the dilemma is the law is commanding us to do something that if we don't love it, we can't be commanded to love it. And if we do love it, we don't need to be commanded.

He said, so when you think about it, look at this statement. What the law requires is freedom from the law. When you summarize the law as love God and love other people, and then you'll obey all the commandments, what it's really required is to be free from the law. And when I realize that, I realize how much trouble I'm in because I don't love God and I don't love others like I love myself. And I can't change my heart through simple obedience. What the law does as the mirror is it drives me to see how desperate my heart is, how sin sick it is, and how badly I need a savior.

Didn't know what Paul said, verse 19, why was the law given? It was our guardian. It was a tutor that brought me to Christ so that I could be justified by faith. So that the change that I'm looking for would not come from me. It would come from what he did.

And his life-giving resurrection with power would flow into me as I trusted in his work and not my own. So it's a mirror. It's a curb that keeps us from the further damage of sin. It's a mirror that shows us our need of a savior. Thirdly, it is, Paul says, a guide.

It is a guide or a compass or a map. After being saved, the law shows us the best way that we can please the God that we now love. You see, the law perfectly reveals God's character to us, and it shows us what a life that is pleasing to God would look like. The illustration I used for this one last week was that the law is like railroad tracks. Railroad tracks can point you the direction that you're supposed to go, but the railroad tracks are powerless to move the freight along the tracks, right?

You need an engine to move the freight along the tracks. The gospel is the locomotive that moves the freight of your obedience along the tracks. Even after you've got the engine, however, the tracks, the law can be helpful in showing us the direction that we need to go. You could say in that sense, by the way, that the law drives us to grace, but then our experience of grace drives us back to the law. The law drives us in desperation to grace, but then our experience of grace drives us in devotion and love back to the law. Having been justified by grace, we now desire to please the God who has saved us, and we learn how to do that from the law.

So let's go back to our married guy in the mall for a minute and try to pull all this together. What this guy should say in that moment when he is feeling those immoral, thinking those immoral thoughts about this woman is he should say this in his heart, God, I know that I should love faithfulness and purity more than I desire this woman, but I don't right now. And that desire reveals how sin sick my heart actually is. Now I'm not going to act on this impulse as I know that it would harm my marriage.

It would harm this woman. It would further entrench sense power in my own heart, and it would dishonor you. But I realize God, that my forced obedience here is not going to heal the distorted desires of my heart. Only you can do that through the power of the resurrection.

And that power flows only from the finished work of Christ. Therefore, while I force myself to do the thing, but I don't want to do right now, I am looking to you trusting in the power of the spirit on the basis of the finished work of Christ for you to change my heart so that one day I love purity more than I desire lust. That's what you should say.

You're like, I'm never going to remember all that when I'm in the mall. Yeah, I understand. Okay. In other words, just say this, God, I'm going to choose to do the right thing, but I really want to do the wrong thing. Please, because of Jesus, fix my broken water. That's basically what you're saying. Those are the three ongoing uses of the law for the Christian. You see, it's a curb. It's a curb that keeps us from the further damage that sin would cause in our lives. It is a mirror that shows us how sinful we are and how desperate we are for a savior, brings us to call out to Christ for mercy. And then it is a guide showing us how to act in order to please the God who has saved us and how to bless others. But the power to actually change the heart.

See, this is the key. The power to actually change the heart, the power to produce righteous desires in the heart is only found in the finished work of Christ. And only that, that can only come by the power of the resurrection that is released only by faith in God's promise, not by obedience or a resolution that you're going to do better.

In chapter four, Paul continues his thought, excuse me. Chapter four, verse one, he says, Now I say that as long as the heir is a child, he differs in no way from a slave, though he's the owner of everything. In other words, you've got a kid and a slave growing up in a house and one owns everything and one doesn't. But for the time being, when they're immature as kids, they're both under the law, even though one's in charge.

Instead, he's under guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. In the same way, we also, when we were children, were in slavery under the elements of the world. In other words, before we came to maturity in Christ, that is before righteous desires are fully formed in our hearts, we need the law.

Sometimes we have to be told what to do. And sometimes we got to force ourselves to do the right thing, even when we feel otherwise. That time of immaturity, listen to this, included Israel before Jesus came. They were under the Mosaic law. It also includes we as immature Christians, when we desire things that we know we should not desire, like the guy in my story or me every single day. But the law was totally insufficient to actually bring about change in our hearts, to actually put spiritual life into our hearts. So verse four, Paul goes on, when the time came to completion, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. God wanted to transform us into sons who wanted to obey. He did not want to want us to remain as slaves who were forced to obey, so he redeemed us.

Jesus was born under the law so he could live the life that we were supposed to live, the life that loved God and loved others like we were supposed to, and then died the death we were condemned to die. And in so doing, he bought us out of the orphanage of sin, where sin was our mother and Satan was our father, and he adopted us into the household of God. And because you are sons, Paul said, God sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Daddy, my father, my father.

After God cleared our sin debt through Christ, he put Christ, his son's spirit into you so that you would start to love and trust God, just like Jesus did. You see, every child who loves his daddy wants to be like him, right? Abba is the tender Aramaic word for daddy. That's literally what it means, daddy. And every child that loves his daddy wants to be like his daddy.

I see this now with my son. I have one son who's seven years old, and if you ask him now, somebody asked him the other day, what do you want to be when you grow up? He said, I either want to be a pastor or a spy.

Now, I know where he gets the pastor from, I'm not sure about the spy, but he wants to be a pastor because at least at the stage in his life, he looks up to me and he loves me, and he's like, I want to be like my daddy. I want to be like my daddy, and I want to be like him when he grows up, and obviously that honors me, and I don't know if that's what God has called him to do, but he wants to be like his daddy. Sometimes, I think I've told you, when I look into the mirror increasingly as I get older, and I'll be brushing my teeth, and I look up, suddenly I see my father, Lynn Greer, looking back at me in the mirror, and I think, where did he come from? And that's okay because I love my dad, and I've always wanted to become the man that my daddy is, and so I want to be like him.

That happens to us with God our father when the spirit of his son comes into our hearts. We're like, I want to be close to my daddy. I want to be like my daddy. I want to please my daddy. I love my daddy. Let me be close to my daddy.

Let me be like him. Verse seven, see, you are no longer a slave, he says. You are a son, and that makes you free.

No longer do we live under a law that forces us to do what you don't want to do. Christ's spirit comes into us and changes our desires so that obeying the law is what we desire to do. When you become a follower of Christ, you don't just immediately and instinctively know how to be a child of God. It takes getting to know him and getting to know his word, and that process helps us get to know him and desire to obey him more every day.

Freed from the law for the law. That's the title of our message today from Pastor JD Greer on Summit Life. To listen again or to catch up on previous messages in the study of Galatians, visit jdgreer.com. JD, we all know that it's important to read our Bibles, but what's the best approach to reading the Bible? How does it grow our relationship with God rather than just be a check mark to accomplish each day? All right, well, what you've got to begin to see is that the Bible is God's word, that he is living and active, and he is using it to speak into your life. So the promises you are unearthing are promises to you.

All the promises of God are yes in Christ Jesus. The warnings, some of them are going to apply to you at different times in your life more than others. My dad tells me for years, I always thought my dad was like the superhero Christian that never missed a day of quiet time. And when I was older, he said, no, no, no. He said, I really struggled at the beginning. He said, but what changed is he said, I realized that in the morning when I would get up and read the Bible, that God was more anxious to meet with me than I was to meet with him. And he said, when I got that understanding, he said it changed because I began to want to hear from God through his word. You know, what we want to do is provide you with resources here at Summit Life that will help facilitate that relationship. If Summit Life is about increasing your Bible knowledge, there's a lot of places that you can do that, a lot of books, but if we could help you know God better to serve him more faithfully and to love him and to know his love for you better, that's our heart here at Summit Life. And I think this resource is one of the best tools we've offered to help you do that. So you can reserve a copy today.

Just go to jdgrier.com. We would love to do this. And it would be our honor to be able to say that we helped you a little bit, not just know more about God, but actually know God better. We're so grateful for your support. This Summit Life Bible comes with our thanks when you donate today to support this ministry so that more people can dive into the message of the gospel with us on a daily basis. Give and request it when you call 866-335-5220. One more time, that's 866-335-5220. Or you can request this resource when you donate online at jdgrier.com.

I'm Molly Vitovich. Thank you for joining us this week. We'll see you again on Monday when Pastor JD tackles an issue that's critical to understanding the gospel, the relationship between grace and actions. Enjoy your weekend and join us Monday on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.