This is the Truth Network. Forever, thy word is settled in heaven. Psalm one, nineteen, verse eighty-nine. I'm Stu Epperston. Welcome to the special Wednesday in the Word Leader podcast, where we prepare to equip our leaders of this special Bible study outreach breakfast.
Every week to teach through the scriptures. 13 Dario locations. There's a men's group meeting, and several of the locations host the women on Thursday morning. Stay tuned. Be encouraged as we jump into this week's Wednesday in the Word.
So what do Steve Jobs, Nancy Reagan, Babe Ruth, Nelson Mandela have in common? They were all adopted. There's some powerful stories. My buddy Paul wrote a book about the power, the transforming power of adoption. He's an adopted father, Paul Baturra.
But let me tell you, if you are a born-again Christian, Dr. Sam Horn, you have been adopted. In fact, you can't become a Christian, a part of God's family. He can't become your father unless you're adopted. This isn't a biological adoption or a foreign adoption.
This is a supernatural transformation, spiritual adoption, and we talk about that as we turn the page in the doctrinal section of Galatians, in chapter four, seven key verses to start off chapter four, where we get into slavery versus sons, adoption versus bondage, and the blessing of the promise versus the curse of the law. And Paul keeps us in that that line of thought, doesn't he, Dr. Horne? As we get into Chapter Four here of Galatians, yeah, you know that's what I do, and we're in that part of Galatians, you know, we're in Chapter Three and Chapter Four, where he's digging deep into the soil of the Old Testament, and he's also bringing illustrations from the world of his day that everybody would have been familiar with to make a very important. Point and and and and then an application and the important important point is that something monumental has happened when the promised son.
That God made these promises to to Eve, and then later to David, and ultimately to the world that He would send a son that who would come and redeem an ancient race. He would reverse an ancient curse. He would restore an ancient creation to its former glory. And now that that son has come in the person of Jesus Christ, everything is. Changed and he's he's laying the theological groundwork for that, and the message of that change is the gospel, right?
So that's the the theological point. The application is the gospel has brought you into a freedom.
So grow in that freedom. Don't don't diminish that freedom. You've got to live in the freedom that God has given you, and so. I think that as we come to you know these verses, there's there's a clarification that he makes, and then there are three big ideas that he he lays out. And the clarification is around the idea of adoption, and I think it's really important that we catch.
Paul's usage of this term, because we have an idea of adoption in our mind as Americans living in the 21st century, and that is that adoption is how you get into a family. You know, you you might have been born, and your parents died, or they abandoned you, or they gave you up, and the way you got into a new family was through adoption. And we already know from John chapter four, and we know clearly from things that Paul has said in the book of Romans that you don't get into the family of God by adoption. You are not adopted into the family of God. You are born into that family by a new birth.
There is a new birth, being born again by the Spirit from above, is how you get into the family of God.
So what then is adoption? Because if adoption isn't how you get into the family of God, if the only way into the family of God is through birth, being born again, what is he talking about with adoption? And so that's the first thing we've got to clear up because adoption is a major, major image that he's using here. And so in the ancient world, in Paul's day. Adoption was not how you got into the family.
It is how you got into the full use of your rights. It's how you became a fully vested person in the family and could use all of the authority and the rights and privileges that were yours. And there was typically a time when this happened, and then there was an announcement about this. There was there was a a ceremony that took place, announcing to everybody that you were now fully vested as a son, and you had all the rights and the privileges to sonhood and all the responsibilities in the Jewish world. That happened at your bar mitzvah.
When when there was a bar mitzvah, there was a great celebration, and it was the recognition by the entire community that this son was now a full son under the law. That there was the weight of responsibility and the glory of privilege that rested on him. Officially, before he had been a son under the law, he had enjoyed the privileges of being an Israelite. But the full weight of his responsibility, his full sonship, had not come into full enjoyment until his bar mitzvah.
So there was that celebration in the Roman world. There was a celebration called adoption, and that was when a son received formally. His citizenship. As a Roman citizen, as an independent citizen with all of its rights and privileges, it was when he became fully vested as a member of his father's household with all the authority that went with that. We we have something similar to that in our day and age.
You know, if you think of the princes and princesses of England, they are royal sons under the king or. The Queen, and they have certain honor and certain things that are accorded to them in that status. They're addressed as royalty. They're recognized as royalty, but they cannot exercise the authority of their position until they are. There's an investiture of that.
And and that's a public ceremony where they are granted rights and privileges commensurate to their position as full sons, as full princes of the realm, and that's the idea here. Paul is talking about people who have come fully into something that God had promised them. That prior to that, it was their possession, but they had not fully entered into its enjoyment. And now we're going to find out what that is. I love it, and you know the the word I believe Bar Mitzvah means son of Bar being son of, and then Mitzvah law, right, Doc?
Right, correct.
So it's a significant thing. You know, the interesting the Jewish Jewish culture, Hebrew culture, never recognized this myth of adolescence. Right, the kids, you know, the kids twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen they're not really a kid anymore. They're not really an adult.
So just let them. Live and let live, and we'll just kind of you know that's what we have in Western culture, sadly. But it was all game, game on. You become a man at this bar mitzvah. Modern bar mitzvahs are like parties.
Everyone brings the kid presents. Let's go to my nephew's bar mitzvah and let's celebrate. And not not to you know downgrade that, but. The the Jewish Marvitzo is like this young man now is accountable. Like he's accountable for his life, for his decisions.
He's got to get married. He's got to get a job. He's got to contribute to culture, and then he's no longer under the complete tutelage of a tutor. He doesn't have this little guardian, this pedagogy that we talked about in chapter three. That spills over into the first three verses of chapter one.
The guardians and the tutors are out the door, and now he's no longer in the adolescence or the the youth, the innocence, and the protection of of being under the law.
Now he's coming into this inheritance, and I guess Dr. Horne, these first three verses—you know, there's seven verses. It's a short passage, but it's so important, man. I can't wait till we get the last half. But these first three verses are are critical because they they transition us from chapter three.
This this idea of the law not being able the law can't give us the inheritance. The law can't give us the adoption of saints. The law can't give us the new birth and the new life in Christ. It can't. But but the son.
But we're we're we're we're sons, and the son when he steps into the gospel, he suddenly. We become heirs of all things through Christ, right?
So, take us through the take us through the structure of these seven verses for our teachers, and how this is an important setup. Again, salvation is one way by through Christ by faith alone, grace alone, through Christ alone, and that's true in the Old and the New Testament. One group is looking forward to that, and the law pointed to that to to point to Christ, our Redeemer. And then, who redeemed us from the curse of the law? You know, three thirteen.
And then, in the New Testament, looking back at His finished work, Doctor Horn.
So, yeah, how do you structure these verses?
So, so very important, and the beautiful language of heirs, of adoption, of promise. It's all in here. Yeah, I think first thing we got to do before we we do structures, we got to remind ourselves of context because context always sets the framework for how we understand what what the scripture says. In the context, if you remember, Paul is in a Galatian community and a community in the region of Galatia, and he's talking to Gentiles, not Jews, who have become Christians. And they have entered into an immense freedom that has come because of Christ, and they are part of a promise that God had given to Abraham that formerly they had no right to, and now because of their relationship to Jesus, they are full members of that community and full inheritors of that promise.
But they are Gentiles, all right.
So that's the thing. There are a group of Jewish Judaizers who are coming into their midst and saying, "So glad you're you have this relationship with our Jewish Messiah, and so glad you know you met our good brother Paul." But you got you got one more thing you got to do. You got to come to Moses. I'm so glad you came to the Messiah, but now you got to meet Moses. And Paul is going to say to them.
You you need to respect Moses because he was a great servant of God and he had an important task to do, which we're going to find out a little bit about here. But if you go back to Moses, you're going to lose everything Messiah brought you. And so to help him understand that, he's going to do three things in these seven verses. Number one, he's going to give him a really powerful illustration in verses one through three. Number two, he's gonna he's gonna talk to them about an incredible consummation.
Something has been accomplished. It has been fully accomplished.
So there is a consummation in verses four through five, and then there is a confirmation that this actually has happened, and and it has happened with regard to them, and that's in verses six and seven.
So illustration one through three consummation. Four through five and confirmation six and seven. I like how you've structured it, and I, you know, it's funny as I'm scrolling through these verses and I'm listening to powerful messages by powerful pastors like yourself. It seems like I landed on a bunch of Christmas messages. Yeah.
Yeah. That's right. You know, it's interesting. It's it's either look, it's either Matthew one and two, it's either Luke two, or or the beginning of the other Gospels, you know, or even John. But but or it's all of a sudden it's like someone's preaching out of Galatians four, and there's the Christmas lights, and there's all the the church regaled with the the wreaths and the lights and the choir and the the bells, right, and all that.
Well, because you know this is. This is the heart of the gospel, you know. This idea of incarnation, the virgin birth, and all that, which happens on the latter half of this.
So I'll let you keep keep keep on going with this thought. I love it. All right.
So the illustration in verses two three is that Paul says, "All right, I want you to think about an heir. Here's a man, and he has a child, and the child is an heir. But while he is a child," He's no different than the slaves or the servants in the household, and what he means by that is this: even though he owns everything, he has no authority to exercise his ownership over what is his. Right? He's under guardians and managers.
Until a particular date set by his father.
So everybody understood this, right? If you were a Roman. And you had a large household, and you had a son. Everybody knew that that son was the heir, and all of this belonged to him. But he had no authority to do anything in that household.
He was under instructors and guardians and managers until a particular date was set by his father, when that authority was fully vested in him. In the Jewish world, you had the same idea, right? A Jewish boy. Was not recognized as a fully vested son of the law until he had come to a certain age, and before that, he was under instructors and rabbinical teachers and guides, and then he reached the age where he became a full son of the law.
So everybody understood the illustration. The question is, who are the heirs, and what are what is the inheritance they're waiting to receive? And in this passage, the heirs. Are the Gentiles, the people Paul is writing to, are Gentiles, and they have become true sons of Abraham. They have become true Jews.
If you go back to Romans chapter two, Paul talks about this at the end of that chapter when he rebukes Israelites. He rebukes Israel because of their arrogance. He says circumcision is a value only if you obey the law. But if you disobey the law, like you guys have been doing, your circumcision becomes to you like uncircumcision. But if a man who is uncircumcised, if a gentile keeps the precepts of the law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision by God?
Right.
So in verse 28, he says, "For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly. In other words, no one is a true Jew just because they're circumcised and they have the law and they keep the food laws and the dietary laws and they show up at the temple and they do the sacrifice. No one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, but a Jew is someone who is inward." True Jews are inward, and circumcision is a matter of the heart by the spirit and not by the letter. This one's praise is not from man but from God.
So Paul has already told the Romans, "Look, let me tell you something. There are Gentiles who are better Jews than you, because they're true Jews, right?" And so now he's writing to some of those true Jews, and he's saying to them, "Before you became." Introduced to Christ, you were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. If you were a Gentile, you you were enslaved to how you thought God wanted to be worshipped. You worship idols. You went to temples.
You you made these sacrifices. You had these ways of appeasing your gods. If you were a Jew, you thought the way to appease God was by keeping the law, and you work really hard at that. You were enslaved to the elementary things, but now Messiah has come and freed all of you from those things. And the problem is, there's a group of people who want to bring you back to their slavery.
They're not trying to get you to go back to your idols and your temples. They are trying to get you to come back to their slavery, just like you used to be enslaved to a way of trying to please your gods and and avoid any displeasure on their parts. The Jews also were really working hard to earn a righteousness with their God that would bring His blessing, and they want to bring you back to that slavery.
So don't go back to that slavery. Does that make sense? In other words, if you read this text carefully, Paul is not worried that they're going to go back to their old paganism. That's not what he's worried about. He's worried about the Judaizers who are trying to get them to go back to their old ways.
Yes, yes. That Messiah had liberated them from, right? It's that same Galatian heresy we've been dealing with this whole book. That's right. They're trying to sprinkle in law.
With faith to corrupt the faith, and Paul had to jump on him, and he had to even he had to even go after Peter in chapter two because Peter was succumbing to this same stuff, and thankfully he corrected.
So, yes, sir, very good. This whole idea of being blurred, and this, this, you know, I mean, this is. And I don't want to deviate too much, Doctor Horn. I know we're on a time crunch here, but look for Pete's sake, this is the nature of the battle that so many believers. I mean, I just left breakfast talking to a young man about his identity in Christ, and the enemy keeps trying to to speak this false identity.
Saying we're defined by this, that, and another, and by our performance, and and and you blew it, so God can't love you. You can't be effective for God. And when in fact, you know, the the Galatians were right in the crosshairs of this thing. Who who am I in Christ? Am I truly a son, or am I still a slave?
I can't. I can't. You know, today I feel like a slave. Tomorrow maybe I'll feel like a son. It's the Lord's day.
But there there should that you know this is Paul's getting us to a a really clarified position that has everything to do with our standing before. God and that's very you know practical how we live each day, right? Absolutely, we could say it this way, and I know this is probably going to be shocking to some of the people in our Bible studies, and maybe even to some of our leaders. But you can take every religious system or approach and divide it into one of two categories. Category number one.
Is a category that says I'm going to have to do something, or I'm going to have to be something, or I'm going to have to join something in order to please God, whoever that is. You know whether whether I am a Buddhist trying to please who I think God is, or I am a Muslim trying to please Allah, or I'm a Roman Catholic trying to please the God of the Bible. You could take anybody—a Mormon, you could take a Jehovah's Witness, a Roman Catholic, a Greek Orthodox—you could take all of them—and at the end of the day, they are they are peddling an approach to God that says you have to do something to earn favor. And then there's Paul, and Paul says you can't do anything to earn favor. Christ earned that favor for you, and you access it through faith alone.
And and people might take offense when you lump Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy in the same bucket with Muslims and Jehovah's Witnesses. And Mormons and Buddhists and whatever other religion you want to put in play, but the common theme that all of them have is that their approach to pleasing God and being safe from His wrath is doing something. I've got to be baptized. I've got to do good works. I've got to take communion.
Well, you you might as well lump in some Presbyterians and some Baptists too, because for in Pentecostals, because if you keep thinking that if I don't get this breakthrough, I'm not accepted by God, I'm not worthy, you know.
So, so you can, you know, any time you add my performance to God's work, it's real, it's real trouble, Doctor Horn.
So I'm tracking with you, yes, sir. Yeah. So, so the consummation that comes in verse four. Is that all of that has been put to bed, finally and fully? Notice what he says: "In the fullness of time, when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons." All right.
So now he's going to narrow down to one side of the equation: the illustration. Was talking to a group of people, Gentiles, who in their past life had a particular set of tutors and guardians that were teaching them how to get favor from their gods. They were liberated from that, and now there was a group of people from the other side who were trying to bring them back under a different tutor or guardian. That they wanted them to embrace as a way of pleasing God, and and when Messiah had come, he freed him. He freed he freed both sides from their, you know, from their enslaved from their being enslaved to those things.
And so, let's talk about the fullness of time, because that is an important word. It's an important phrase in the prophets of Israel. We were constantly being told about a coming time, a coming day, when the day of the Lord arrives in the fullness of time. When when Messiah's day comes, so the prophets were constantly pointing to a particular time in the future when God would bring forth the one who would fulfill His promise, and and that's what Paul is talking about in the book of Ephesians, chapter two. There's a real, or chapter one rather.
There's a really interesting. Statement and and and let me just read it to you. In verse in verse nine, we are told God made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His purpose, which He set forth in Christ.
So here's Christ, just like we see in Galatians four, as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things under earth.
So. God is accomplishing a plan through Christ, and He's going to accomplish that plan at a particular moment in time. And the moment in time that initiates the plan is the is the birth of Messiah through the Virgin Mary. And that's what we're reading about here. When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His His Son.
How did He send forth His Son? Like we know that the second coming. God is going to send that son back, and we know how he's going to do it. He's going to come on a white horse. He's going to come with legions of armies of angels.
He's going to come with the glorified bodies of his people. We know how he's going to come the second time, but how did he come the first time? And Paul says, when God sent His son, He was born of a woman. He sent His son as an incarnated baby, right? Born of a woman, born under the law.
So here's how and when. When when God sent forth this son, He sent him to be born through a woman, and to be born in a nation that lived under Moses. That's exactly what we read here, right? Why? Because He's going to bring an end to something.
And what he's going to bring an end to is the law. He he is he did this to redeem, to deliver. The word redeem there means to rescue or to deliver. To redeem those who were under the law. There were people who were living under the law, and God sent His Son to be born in their midst through one of their women, Mary.
To deliver them from the law they lived under, so that here's the positive side: they could come into their full adoption as sons. They could they could become full heirs of the promise.
So there is a consummation that has happened, and it didn't happen through Moses. Moses was the guardian. Moses was the tutor. Moses was the one who enslaved them until the time of the promise being fulfilled, and when God sent forth His Son to fulfill that promise, He did it this way: He made that Son. Take on an incarnation through birth by by the Virgin Mary, right?
And and when that son was born, he was born under the very law that the Judaizers are trying to get people to come back to. And the reason God did it this way was so that that Messiah, who was born under that law, could liberate. People from that law, just like Moses liberated Israel from the tyranny and slavery of Pharaoh, Jesus is going to lead his people on a second exodus. He's going to liberate them from the law, which is a really striking metaphor. And all of that has happened.
There has been a consummation. All of that has happened, and Paul is saying, "So why in the world are you listening for one second to people who want to bring you back to that old slavery of the law that they couldn't even live under?" Does that make sense? It makes a lot of sense, and I've got an outline with all S's that I'm going to send to all the leaders, Dr. Horn, that matches up with each of these beautiful aspects. There's so much Christology.
There's so much of God's work and God's will and God's way in all this. These verses, it's just rich. It's tremendous. And you know, I've got basically God's sovereignty, God's Son, God's seed, God's solution. God's salvation, and then God's spirit, and I mean it's all in there, Doc.
I just don't. I mean, there's just so much, you know, theologians. Have said multiple theologians have said this idea that God sent forth His Son. Just those words, you know, we we always quote John three sixteen, but Galatians four seven and four six and four seven. Oh my!
And and verse four and five. I mean, they all just have a a they resonate, don't they, sir? And it's just it's rich and it's it's really ground zero for everything. What set what was set in motion Genesis three fifteen. You know the the beautiful picture of redemption, the seed of the woman, the the serpent crusher, all the way through what God did as we studied in Ruth to preserve.
Ruth just happened in the field of Boaz. Ruth chapter two, verse four. All these things God sovereignly doing and working to preserve His seed, to preserve His people, and then the fullness of time, and here we are. The beneficiaries, man! What a what a we walked right in this wealth, man!
How did we? How did two sinners like you and me end up in this thing, man? What's going on? God has sense of humor, doesn't he?
Well, that's the last thing. That's the last thing we want to talk about because that is a great segue. How did how did this happen to us? There is a confirmation, right? There's a confirmation.
There's an illustration in verses one, two, and three. There's this glorious consummation that God did for the world, for His own people, the Jews, and for Gentiles, and that is He sent His Son. Born of a woman, made under the law, to redeem everybody from whatever it was that was enslaving them, to redeem Gentiles from the futility of the religious enslavement they were under to their idols, and to deliver Israel from the guardianship of the law. And how do we know that that's really happened to us?
So it gets really personal here. It's one thing theologically to affirm that it happened at the incarnation two thousand years ago, but Stu, how do you know that it happened to you? And how do you know that it happened to Julie? And how do I know that it happened to me? And Paul says there is a confirmation.
Look at the confirmation in verse six here in the text. And because you are sons. Right, you when Messiah came, you went from being, you know, in essence, a son under tutelage to being a full son. And because you were sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son—that's the Holy Spirit—into our hearts. And when that Spirit arrived, He did something.
He gave you the right to look at God and say Abba. This this is a stunning statement. If you were a Jew, this almost bordered on blasphemy. I mean, think about how the Jews in Paul's day handled the name of God. Think about how they how they treated that name.
If if you were a scribe and you were writing a copy down of the Old Testament when you came to the name Yahweh. You didn't write it down like you wrote everything else down. You got a brand new pen, a brand new quill. You would ritually go to a ritual bath, and you would bathe seven times, and then you would come back and write that word down, because that word was so holy. You didn't speak that name.
I mean, even today, if you talk to very, very religious Jews, they will not say the name God. They they will they will use like they won't write that. They'll they'll put G with a dash and D because that name is so sacred to them.
So, for somebody, particularly a Gentile, but even a Jew, for somebody to just look at God and and be so familiar with Him. And so intimate with him, and just say Abba. I mean, if if you talk that way to God or about God in the presence of a really righteous Jew, you would get a rebuke. You that Jew would look at you and would rebuke you. Don't blaspheme.
You don't get to call the God of heaven Abba. And the Holy Spirit, who has come into us, affirms. First of all, that He is our Abba, and confirms and affirms when we say that. In other words, the Holy Spirit is the very one who's prompting us to look at God and say Abba. It's an incredible confirmation.
And because of that, we are no longer in the role of a slave. Right? We're no longer functional slaves. Remember what he said in the illustration: a child is no different than a slave before his adoption. We're no longer functioning as slaves, but as sons.
And as sons, then we are also heirs of a great promise—the promise of Abraham—and this comes through God.
So this is an incredible, incredible truth. Let's not lose it because of carelessness, or let's not lose it because of of a lack of understanding. There is this illustration, then there is this incredible confirmation. That comes because of the consummation that's in the middle, and that consummation is God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, made under the law, to redeem us from under the law.
So let's not go back to a law system. Let's not go back to Judaism. Let's not go to Mormonism. Let's not go to Greek Orthodoxy. Let's not go to Roman Catholicism.
Those systems are going to bring you back to bondage. The very bondage that God sent His Son to deliver you from.
So hold on to your freedom. Again, back to the freedom fighter Paul is, and we're encouraging everyone that day. Look, every word of God is pure. Proverbs thirty verse five tells us: make sure you take time with each of these aspects. Make sure you study, linger on that.
Ask these questions: Who is Jesus in this passage? What has He done for me? What does this say about me and my identity as an adopted child of God? Make sure you park or camp out some in Romans eight verses fourteen through seventeen. Same passage, just rich parallel to this passage.
Doctor Horne, I know you want to pray us out here, but thank you. And this is this is rich. This is ground zero for the Christian faith, and it's Christmas time every day for the believer. You know, for the for a Christmas day is the end. You know, for the consumer, but it's only the beginning for the believer.
Well, Sue, let me let me just say this, and I want to say this to all of our Bible study leaders, and I hope that we would say this to ourselves: we have to do something really bold here with this text, and that is, we have to look at religious systems, including Roman Catholicism, what they are. And that's really, really hard when we have friends that are Roman Catholics, or we have family members, or we work in a place where there's a lot of Roman Catholics. It's very, very easy to kind of back away from this. And I don't think we can be obnoxious. I'm not talking about that.
I don't think we can be rude. I don't think this needs to be our hobby horse. But when we come to a text like this, we've got to be really straight. It's real easy to talk about Mormonism, or to warn people about Buddhism, or Confucianism, or Judaism, even going back to those things. But we actually, in our day, the battle for most evangelicals is not going to Judaism, and it's not going to Mormonism, or Jehovah's Witnessism, or you know, Muslimism.
Although certainly those are dangers, and there are people that are doing that. The great danger that we are facing right now is that. Evangelicals are going back to Roman Catholicism, or they're going back to the Church of England, High Anglicanism, or they're going back to Greek Orthodoxy. And Paul is actually saying here in this text, you can't do that. That system has been put to bed by Messiah, and if you go back to that system, you're going to go back to something that is going to damn you.
That's really, really hard to say. Because the minute you say that, people are going to start looking at you and saying, "Are you trying to tell me that Pope Leo, who just found out he has lung cancer, is a false teacher?" Are you trying to tell me that all of these people who I work with, who who love Jesus and talk about him all the time, what are you saying? And I'm saying, listen, it is possible, just like in any circumstance, that there are true believers in a false system. But the fact that there might be true believers in a false system does not make the system true. The system and its doctrine are false.
And we have to be really bold about that, Stu. And our leaders have to be really bold about that. Otherwise, we're just having a fun conversation about Galatians that really doesn't matter, right? What's the point of having these incredible conversations that you are you and I are having if we're not really going to do what Paul did with with the Judaizers of our own day? In this case, the Roman Catholics and the Greek Orthodox.
What's the point? You know, we're just having a nice conversation in the safety of our theological bubble, but we're not going to really say anything bold. And and Paul is actually saying something really bold in Galatians. And if we're going to study Galatians, we can't water that down. We we actually have to say that.
And so I'm going to pray that God will give our leaders that kind of boldness. Mingled with a whole boatload of grace. You know, you can say the right thing in a horrible way, and that's on you. But if you don't say the right thing, then then that's on you too.
So let me pray for us, Lord. Thank you that we could read and study and talk together. Lord, this is a very sober way to end this time together. And Lord, we don't end our times together on a sober note like this very often. And so I pray that you would help every one of our leaders to know this: that we're not angry, or we're not in any way full of hatred toward people who are caught up in systems that are false.
But Lord, we do want to speak truth boldly about those systems, the way Paul speaks truth here about Judaism. And I pray that Lord, you would give us wisdom. Go before us. Give us that freedom fighter spirit that was so present in Paul's life, in Jesus' name we pray, Amen. Thank you, Doctor Horne, and thank you for joining us for this Wednesday in the Word podcast.
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He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him. Proverbs thirty verse five.
