[Music]
Our scripture reading today is Galatians chapter 6, verses 1 through 18. If you’ll turn with me in your Bibles, Paul writes:
‘Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness; keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load. Let the one who is taught the word share all good things with the one who teaches. Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.’
See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand! It is to those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh. But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God. From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.
Amen. Lord, you have given us your word; you have preserved these words of your apostle for us to build us up in faith, to continue us in hope, and to increase our knowledge of you. Let us be mindful to all that Paul teaches us. Let us receive it with grateful hearts and let us remain confirmed in your grace, bearing the marks of your Son upon our bodies as well. It’s in his name that we pray. Amen.
So we now come to the close of Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, and he ends it the same as he began, by restating the problem which initially prompted the letter: the false teachings of the Judaizers, which were causing some of the Gentile Galatians to adopt Jewish practices because of the erroneous understanding that it was a further requirement for salvation in Christ Jesus.
Previously, Paul had expressed his confidence that the Galatians will return to and will remain faithful to the one true gospel. He’s made his opinion of those false teachers quite clear when he said, ‘I have confidence in the Lord that you will take no other view, and the one who is troubling you will bear the penalty, whoever he is. I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves.’
Now he suggests that those Judaizers are numbered among those who still practice the works of the flesh, while implying that he is the teacher who is spiritual. ‘For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load.’
Paul knows who and what he is. He is an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father. He did not earn his status; he was given it by divine grace. He is something; he is someone, not by his own works, but by the word and the power and the calling of God. If he is wrong about who he is and his apostolic authority, then he is deceiving himself. Therefore, he calls for his ministerial work to be tested, as well as for the testing of the opposition party.
Paul expects a coming time of judgment. He expects that there will be a reckoning, so he reminds the Galatians, ‘Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.’
So, test number one: what does Paul boast in? What do the Judaizers boast in? Paul boasts in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. The Judaizers, they boast in the Galatians’ flesh by their submission to the right of circumcision. They boast in the Galatians’ obedience to their teachings and to the ritualistic law of Moses, while Paul boasts in the power of God in saving sinners.
The Judaizers boasted in their diligent obedience and adherence to Moses, and all those whom they were converting to their religion as the reason for their being justified before the Lord’s throne. They boasted in the false righteousness of their flesh, the flawed, imperfect, and ungodly unrighteousness which is the product of every sinful person. Paul boasted in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; the righteous work of someone else imputed to him by divine grace alone.
He boasted in the gospel of Christ, in the very good news that he shared with the Galatians and everyone else he met. He boasted in the simple fact that he was blessed, that he was fortunate enough to have received grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, that Jesus had given himself for his sins to deliver him from the present evil age. He offered to the Gentiles this very same opportunity for salvation by grace, believing that all those whom the Holy Spirit calls to believe would then possess the same assurance as he.
Test number two: what did Paul and the Judaizers sow? Were they sowing to their own flesh or were they sowing to the Spirit? Paul has been teaching them that justification is found in Jesus Christ alone. He’s been teaching them a better, kinder, and gentler way to live: a way of righteousness based upon faith in God instead of human works.
Nothing that Paul taught them served to advance his own personal benefit. He did not demand any continuing financial support; he did not require adulation or any particular honors from them. He did not brag about them as evidence of the success of his preaching, his rhetoric, or his powers of persuasion. He neither sought their personal favor, nor did he try to gain the favor of others by their conversion. Instead, he commended them to love their neighbor as themselves, to bear the burdens of others, to glorify God, and to trust Jesus Christ.
He did not give them teachings which were easy to follow and pleasing or affirming to their natural ears, but instead he gave them teachings that are hard and difficult for those without the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, he credited their faith and faithfulness only to the power of God and the movement of the Holy Spirit in their lives, and not having anything to do with himself.
Whereas the Judaizers desired all the credit for the Galatians’ obedience to the law and their works of religion, they demanded respect and honor—things which they believed were their due as rabbis. They taught pleasing lies to the Galatians, helping them to build up pride in themselves, a sense that they may receive salvation because of their efforts instead of by mere faith.
Paul freely offered them the assurance of a merit-less salvation and the forgiveness of their sins if they only possess the faith to believe. He offered them no fancy gimmicks to boast in, no spiritual birth certificates, and no altar calls, just the knowledge that they receive grace by faith in Jesus Christ alone, their crucified and risen Savior.
Test number two part B: how can we tell whether someone is sowing to their own flesh or sowing to the Spirit? By answering the question: who benefits from the sowing? Who benefited from Paul’s ministry and teaching? The Lord Jesus Christ alone.
All the glory and all the thanksgiving for Christ’s work was always directed to God. Who benefited from the teachings of the Judaizers? The Judaizers. They falsely lay claim to the glory which is due Jesus alone. They taught others to lay a false claim to the glory of Christ’s work by adding their own works of righteousness to the finished work of Jesus.
They taught others to reject the salvation by grace, the forgiveness of our sins through faith in the work of Christ alone, as taught by Paul, and replace it with the impossible meritorious righteousness earned by perfect adherence to the law of Moses.
It’s interesting to note that today, in the modern post-Second Temple period, Jewish teaching concerning the forgiveness of their sins has now become interpreted as being that on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, it is the Lord Himself who makes their atonement, which they then receive their forgiveness of sins for by grace through faith in the Lord instead of the sacrifices as described in Leviticus 16.
But unfortunately, like weeds popping up in the garden, the same kind of erroneous and heretical teachings of the Judaizers have survived into the modern day and are often reframed as semi-Pelagianism or Arminianism. Semi-Pelagianism teaches that people still possess an inherent and natural goodness after the fall in Eden, that everyone is naturally good until they choose not to be, and this inherent seed of goodness permits them to choose to be good and to choose the way of Christ, even as most of them will admit that most folks won’t. Yet they did have their chance.
One part of the Arminian teaching is regarding something they call preventive grace, an idea that Christ’s death on the cross grants us a kind of grace which restores everyone’s fallen soul up to enough of a degree where salvation and the free gift of eternal life is potentially ours if we want it. Making our personal salvation now entirely dependent upon our choice and desire and will instead of God’s sovereign choice and eternal decree.
Taking these theological errors to the logical extreme will lead people to say that Jesus has wiped our slate clean, removed the debt of sin from everyone, and that now it’s entirely up to us to decide if we want to go to heaven, that we can just walk right through the pearly gates as if we owned the place. Or they will consider that salvation is universally applied to all mankind, a heresy called universalism—an idea which ultimately breaks down because if everyone is saved, then neither the good nor the sinful things which we do matter since their false god, who is love, just forgives everyone without consequence, without judgment, and especially without any form of justice.
There becomes no point to life; it loses all meaning at that point. It’s very easy for us to see that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just as Koheleth said in Ecclesiastes, ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’
Back in 2020, there was a State of Theology survey done in partnership between Lifeway and Ligonier Ministries which shines a bright light onto the many false teachings that are received and believed in many American churches. Our modern culture has so propagated the myth that all people are generally good and that anyone can go to heaven if they do just enough good things. That 65% of Christian respondents affirmed this idea. Only 56% of the respondents agreed with the statement that God counts a person as righteous not because of one’s work but only because of one’s faith in Jesus Christ, which suggests that 44% of professing Christians are depending on their own goodness and righteousness to be justified before our Holy God.
While 66% of them disagreed with the statement that even the smallest sin deserves eternal damnation, clearly displaying our low cultural appreciation for the severity of sin. Sin, the reason for all of our divisions, our broken relationship with God, and our damaged relationships with others, the root cause of all our worldly ills and problems—the reason why we all die when we were clearly made for so much more.
Sin, that which R.C. Sproul so famously called cosmic treason, is not believed to be such a big deal by two-thirds of American Christians. But our sin is the problem for which Jesus died to fix and to rescue us from.
So, you see, the self-righteous, self-justifying, self-boasting teachings of the Judaizers are very much alive and well, which is why we need these gentle reminders from Paul. Being born natural men, as sinful people by nature, we do not actually like grace. We hate the idea of receiving something for nothing because then we feel indebted to the giver. We hate the idea that we contribute nothing to our salvation except for our need of it. We hate the idea that we cannot achieve righteousness on our own, which is why teachers like the Judaizers always thrive, because they reinforce our pride and give us a false sense of hope.
They teach us to boast in ourselves rather than the Cross, because then we will get what we’ve earned. But the only thing we can ever earn is death. Instead of following these false teachers and trusting in some other non-gospel, we should each live and act more like Paul, boasting in Christ crucified. A stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles—that is something which no natural or sinful man would ever consider for their source of righteousness, much less boast in a man who is condemned and executed like the worst sort of criminal.
Lest we deceive ourselves, we must remember just who and what we are. Remember that on our own we are nothing, but united in Christ Jesus we are the children of God and the brothers and sisters of the King of Kings, and that is a relationship worth boasting about. No effort on our part could possibly get us any higher in life or in eternity.
But if the secular worldview is correct and we only exist through some random happenstance—that life itself was first accidentally sparked by a lightning bolt zapping some kind of primordial ooze, which then began to rapidly evolve according to random chance into the diversity of life that we see all around us—then life itself has no meaning or purpose, and we truly are nothing at all.
If that were true, that we and everything around us exist by chance, then that should be easy to prove or disprove. If that were true, then new life should be sparking into being all around us all the time. Because what the secularists and the atheists are really saying whenever they affirm these sorts of theories is that there is a chance—anything which has a non-zero probability has a chance and will statistically occur at least once given enough opportunity, and which will also statistically occur an infinite number of times given infinite opportunity.
So mathematically, if something happens one time by chance, then in an infinite universe it can, should, and must happen again. However, we do not observe spontaneous generation or the random creation of life in the universe or world around us, because naturally and logically something cannot come from nothing. Life cannot naturally come from lifelessness. Even medical resuscitation holds this principle true; life cannot possibly come from lifelessness through random chance or through self-creation, but only through the external application of intention, will, and power.
Only the living can beget life, while the dead can only beget death. Physical life only exists because of this, and so reasonably, spiritual life can only exist and occur by the same principle. We are God’s very good creation made in His image, endowed with physical life and spiritual souls. We were created for His purposes out of His love, so our lives have both value and meaning—value and meaning which the Lord ascribes to us.
We are nothing in and of ourselves, but we are defined by our creator through our relationship as His creation. We are reflections of Him; we are made in His image, like Him, but still less than Him. This is why all life, all human life especially, is valuable and worthwhile, and why it is worth fighting to preserve and protect. But if we live according to mere chance, then what is the value of a human life? Absolutely none. No single life has any value at all.
And if the human life has no value, then justice is a myth. If the human life has no value, then there is no morality. All things are permissible because nothing can be or should be prohibited. If the human life has no value, then there are no human rights. If the human life has no value, then that is a hopeless existence.
But the Christian knows and believes differently. We have hope in Jesus Christ, and while the world may think that Christians are killjoys or have a negative outlook and perspective concerning humanity because of sin, we’re actually realistically optimistic because we look forward to the recreation and the new heavens and new earth.
They think we’re negative, believing that all our human efforts, that all our human power is what causes our condemnation to death because our first forebear’s sinful disobedience—Adam and Eve’s sin and our sins—are what justly condemns us to death, both physical and spiritual. But we’re optimistic and hopeful because we continue to be empowered and maintained by God’s will and strength through His mercy and grace.
We know that we can do nothing apart from God, and that without Him we can do nothing at all. Therefore, we have no reason to boast in ourselves or in our works. As Paul later told the church in Corinth, ‘What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?’
See, we cannot bear our own load, and we certainly cannot bear our burdens alone. So what do we have that we can possibly boast in? Only the Cross of Christ! Only the God-man Jesus Christ, the perfectly righteous man whose life was so valuable that by His death He gave value to all of our lives, justifying us in His righteousness and making us holy.
Both the wicked and the righteous through probate and the elect are physically empowered by God to work and sow things in the world around them. So then, we must choose what we shall sow: to our flesh or to the Spirit of God. Our choice will be governed by the Spirit which is within each of us.
Who do we work for? Who will benefit: our temporal and temporary pleasure, or the eternal kingdom of Christ? This is why Paul gives us this final emphasis on the Christian doing good works. He reminds us to bear the burdens of others on account of who we believe in for our salvation, Jesus Christ our Savior. He reminds us that bearing these burdens is our lived and loving response to Jesus’s grace and mercy.
Instead of a reason for us to have false confidence, Paul encourages us by saying, ‘And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap if we do not give up.’
So stay the course. Keep on doing the good things that you are doing and prove the condition of your soul. Trust that God will preserve you and persevere you in faith through all things. Do not give up, because Jesus does not give up on us.
To summarize what Paul says across this entire letter is that he and every other Christian, all the people of God across all time, are saved by a gracious God-given faith in the applied effectiveness of Christ’s sacrificial death of atonement that He suffered upon the cross on our behalf.
So now we get to do all those good and loving works of service which God has prepared for us to do here and now in the world—all for His glory, honor, and majesty alone. That is the ultimate message which Paul conveys in this early epistle, explained plainly according to this written piece of scripture. We Christians are saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone—all for God’s glory and not our own.
Isn’t God so good? As the prophet Isaiah wrote, ‘The grass withers, the flower fades, and the word of the Lord will stand forever.’ And Jesus affirmed for us, ‘For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law till all be fulfilled.’
So all of these God-breathed words of the evangelists and the apostles and the prophets are preserved for us here in scripture to build us up in our faith.
Paul finally concludes this letter with a last reminder for why he wrote it: ‘For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.’
Neither our adherence to the law nor our disobedience of it matters for our eternal salvation, but that it is our being transformed into a new creation.
It is not rote rituals or works of religion that get us into heaven, but it is our becoming a new and changed person—a regenerated, sanctified, born-again member of the Lord’s prehistoric, predestined elect Israel through the sole sovereign power of God the Father, the atoning work of God the Son Jesus Christ, and the continuing works of God the Holy Spirit within us.
That is what matters to God. That is how we are given eternal life and brought into heaven where we will await the restoration of all things and our future lives upon the new earth.
So trust God. Believe in Jesus. He’s done the hardest work for us while we get to enjoy all the benefits and the fruit of His perfect labor. All those who do so are part of God’s elect Israel, the Church, and they are the ones over whom Paul speaks a final blessing and benediction: ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.’
Simple, full of faith, trust and hope in the only source of our confidence—God’s grace alone. Amen.