Grace Grabs the A-Lister

Alright, let me invite you to turn in your Bibles to Galatians chapter 1.

Galatians 1 · chapter mention

It's after the four gospels, it's after Romans, it's after 1st and 2nd Corinthians, and so you should be able to find it.

It's in the New Testament.

We're going to spend some time in here.

I don't know how long, and I don't know the name of the series.

So there you go.

We'll figure that out as we go along.

And uh to kind of help set up the uh why this is so important to us.

It's a message of grace, it's a message of grace to God's people, and that's extremely important because even Christians forget about the grace of God.

Even Christians who've been in churches their whole lives don't hear the grace of God the way that the Bible talks about it.

Several years ago, Rebecca and I were in a church and we were leading a Bible study, and there were two people that I'm going to contrast that were in the study.

One was uh a lady in the church.

She was a well-known doctor.

Uh she studied cancer.

She was the go-to person in the town for people to go to, and she was just very well known.

Uh she had been the church pianist for a long time.

She grew up playing piano in the church, and and uh she was in our Bible study.

And then there was a man that was in our Bible study, he was an older black man, uh, had a lot of wear and tear.

He was missing toes on his foot, he was missing teeth, he uh had scars on his face, he'd been an addict, he'd been an alcoholic, he'd been in jail, he uh had been in halfway houses, and they're both in our Bible study, which was pretty amazing that these two people from different, very different life circumstances were there.

And to hear this one man, Donald, talk, he knew the grace of God.

He knew God loved him.

And you could hear it when he prayed.

He prayed like a little kid who would climb up into the lap of his father and was held tightly.

It was beautiful.

Like we learned how to pray from listening to Donald.

We learned about the father who had grace of God from Donald.

And then here was this doctor.

She had been in the church her whole life.

She had played piano in the church.

She uh I mean her whole life, she's probably she was close to retirement age at this point.

And she was in our Bible study, and we were studying, and we were talking about the grace of God over the course of several weeks, and she said, I have I finally see it.

I've been in the church my whole life, and I've really never heard the message of grace, the grace of God.

This is an interesting contrast between the two of these people.

Which of those two do you think needed grace?

Both of them did, right?

We all do.

So we're gonna spend a little time in the book of Galatians, Paul's letter, and he's gonna help us explore the topic.

So, if you're willing and able, let me invite you to stand as I read for us Galatians chapter 1, verses 1 to 5.

Galatians 1:1–5

Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through men, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead, and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever.

Amen.

This is the uh beginning of Galatians.

Let me pray and ask God to bless us.

Our intent.

Our intent, Lord Jesus, is to spend some time here.

I need to hear it.

The people who are here need to hear it.

The people outside of this room need to hear it.

And so we pray that every week as we gather and hear you would minister to us in such a way that grace flows from our mouths, from our actions, from our attitudes, everything about us.

That as we encounter you in your grace, we would be transformed in our lives so that we would be uh conduits, mouthpieces, servants, hands and feet ministering to the people around us in in that same grace.

Would you bless us?

Would you be with us?

And would you bless us as we begin this conversation, we ask in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Please have a seat.

It may it's not overselling it to say that studying Galatians may be, for some of you, the most important Bible study sermon series you've ever been in.

Uh, because Galatians is unique in the intense focused meditation on the grace of God in the gospel that occupies every page, every letter, every sentence.

And there's a question that's coming here for the Galatian readers initially, but also for us.

And the question is: do you have the gospel right?

Do you really understand what the true gospel is?

I've been a Christian for over 40 years.

I've been a pastor for close to 30 years.

You're kind of like, you don't look that old.

Well, yes, I do.

Um I've been a pastor for about a time, and I'm convinced that the biggest struggle in the Christian life is not the struggle to be a better person, which is what many people think becoming a Christian is all about.

It's not about being a better person.

The struggle in the Christian life is the struggle to rest in Christ and to believe in the grace of God that is ours in Christ, and to rest in that and to stay there.

And this takes daily reminding and preaching and spending time with God and his word and say, I need you in my life.

And so let me ask you as we begin a question: are you an A-lister or a B-lister?

Now, an A-lister is it's a it's often used as a Hollywood term, as a person who belongs to the highest level of fame, social eminence, or star power.

People recognize the A-listers as the cream of the crop.

And for some of us, we think maybe there are some spiritual cream of the crop, some A-listers, and immediately you went in your mind to like the person you like to listen to the most or read their books the most.

Those are the A-listers that are out there.

So who needs the grace of God?

The A-listers or the B-listers?

The doctor or the person who's been in the halfway house?

Yes and yes.

Is it a super religious person or a person with no religion?

It's both.

A person who has it all together or a person who has it all falling apart.

A saint or a sinner, a cop or a convict, a priest or a prostitute.

And you know it's because somebody down here from I gave it away at the beginning.

It's both.

It's both sides of that.

All of us need the grace of God.

We've been taught to think people only need grace that are guilty or feel guilty.

They recognize they've done something wrong.

Those are the B listers.

Are you an A-lister or a B lister?

They must be doing something wrong, those B listers, but the A-listers are doing it right.

The A-lister's message is powerful because it says you have it in yourself to do it.

You just need to find the right tools, the right methods, the right mentor, something, and you can do it.

And that's why the book of Galatians is so important to us.

Because that's what Paul is dealing with.

Okay, as we get into the book, it's Paul, a trustworthy messenger in a world that says many things about what it means to be a Christian.

There are no doubts in the scholarship about whether Paul was the author of this.

Sometimes there's some doubts of people like, did Paul write this or did somebody else, is this somebody writing in Paul?

Across the board, everybody agrees Paul wrote Galatians.

And most commentators think that he wrote it in 48 A.D., which is about 15 years after the death, burial, resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So about 15 years after that.

So many people think this was the first New Testament document written.

And so this is the first New Testament document, and the thing that Paul does off the bat, coming in and writing to the church in Galatia, is he holds out his badge.

He holds out his credentials and he says, Paul an apostle, not from men, not from man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead.

And so what happens is these false teachers who are spreading false teaching about the gospel of Jesus Christ have encountered an apostle with a badge.

Okay, so what is an apostle?

I mean, some of us know what it's an apostle.

An apostle was kind of a common term back then.

It was basically a person who was a legal representative to speak on behalf of another.

So an emissary who was sent with the authority to speak fully on behalf of another person.

And so this is Paul.

He's an authoritative representative.

And the way a person became an apostle is one, they saw the resurrected Jesus.

They were chosen by the resurrected Jesus.

They were called to be an apostle.

You don't wake up one morning and say, I think I might be an apostle.

You are called to be an apostle by Jesus.

And then the way that this is shown that you are a representative of the kingdom of God, writing holy scripture and speaking in God's name on his behalf is you carry around a badge.

Now it's not just the title.

Not through Christians, through the apostles.

They carried around authentication to say, I am speaking for God.

So what that means is Paul is saying he's not sent from men, he's not by man.

He's explaining that he is not representing a faction in the church.

Instead, Paul is representing the kingdom of Christ and has been called, recruited, and he is authenticated to speak.

So what we have here is a person we can listen to because he speaks with authority from the king himself.

And then in verse 2, Paul also makes clear that even on a human level, he's not acting on his own accord.

These are other brothers with him and the brothers with me.

And what he says is he gave, they agree with what he's saying.

So this is the testimony of the church, not one group, not one faction, the church.

In other words, this is not Paul's hot take on the gospel.

This is not his opinion on the gospel.

This is the gospel of God's grace that is being talked about, taught, and unfolded for us.

He's an authoritative apostle with a binding message inspired by God's Holy Spirit.

And so these are his are his credentials.

Now, oftentimes, if there's a speaker who's coming, they will give the speaker's credentials to say, here's why you should listen to this person.

And so Paul often usually it's some sort of successful thing, like this person has this doctorate here, this person has served on this board for such and such time period, shows why they're why they are successful.

And it's the same with our keynote speaker, he's the Apostle Paul.

And everybody knew the name of Paul.

Paul in his time period was the Jewish Jew of his day.

He was a Jewish scholar, admirable for his spiritual discipline and understanding.

He was a formidable debater.

You would never win against Paul in a debate.

He was a person you couldn't find any reason to criticize, and whatever you were doing, he was going to do it better.

He was squeaky, clean, successful, religious, moral, smart, educated, from an important family.

He was a rising star, respectable, dependable.

He was the A-lister among A-listers.

He's the cream of the crop.

And this is why our author, Paul, is such a good tutor on grace.

Because Paul's the perfect person to listen to because he knew what he knew that getting the gospel right matters.

He was an A-lister.

And as an A-lister, he had lived the A-lister false gospel.

He saw what it did to him, how it distorted his thinking about God, about himself and other people.

He saw how it led him to treat other people.

He saw the lifestyle trajectory that a wrong understanding of the gospel created.

He saw the pride and arrogance of his own heart.

He saw the distorted thinking.

He saw the religious treadmill.

He saw the divisiveness.

He saw the corruption, the power idolatry, the constant comparisons between you and other people.

He saw the guilt it produced, the discouragement, the self-loathing, the hopelessness, the despair.

He saw the hypocrisy and hierarchies and social games it created between you and other people, jostling to see who's going to be the A-lister among A-listers.

And it took a supernatural encounter with Jesus for that to change for him.

So Paul is uniquely qualified because he can talk about the complete failure of human attempts at proving ourselves worthy of God's acceptance.

Paul is uniquely qualified because he can talk about the true meaning of God's grace and the identity of Jesus.

He is uniquely qualified because he can talk about the true means by which we actually enter into a relationship with God.

And this is why he wrote his letter to the Galatians to say this is the true gospel.

This is the true gospel.

And what you've been hearing is a false gospel.

It's not true, it's not real.

So that's the problem that he's dealing with in Galatia.

And we need to hear a true gospel.

And he knew they needed to hear a true gospel.

Now, where is Galatian?

Where's Galatia?

That is a modern map.

It came from the ESV website.

So just to make sure you, you know, I didn't draw that by hand.

And uh where is Galatia on the map?

There's Turkey, which I've learned that's the way you pronounce it during the World Cup.

Turkey is right beneath the Black Sea at the top.

And if you kind of like wrote over Turkey, Galatia, that's kind of where Paul was writing to.

Just so you know, that's where he's writing.

That's the map.

And why was the letter written?

We didn't read it, but in chapter 2, verse 4, Paul tells us what the problem is in Galatia.

He says, yet because of false brothers secretly brought in.

False brothers.

Did they know they were false brothers?

I don't think so.

They probably thought they were just had the truth.

Who were they?

They were Jews from Jerusalem.

This is who most people think they are.

They were Jews from Jerusalem who claimed to believe in Jesus, but who taught that Jesus plus the Old Testament law is what saved you.

Particularly the issue of circumcision.

So ask your parents about that one.

Circumcision and the gospel is not Jesus plus anything saves you, but Jesus alone saves and saves completely.

So these were people who were false brothers.

They're saying, we're brothers, we're Christians, but their message is completely different than what's on their external label.

They're saying something different.

A few years ago, I came across a story, it was on uh, I think it was Conan O'Brien's podcast, and he had the Beastie Boys on his podcast.

Do you all remember the beast?

Any of you, some of you are like, you know, Stephen Brooks knows the Beastie Boys.

The Beastie Boys.

And they were a kind of like early 90s, late 80s rock, pop, rap kind of band, and uh not really my cup of tea, but I had friends who listened to them.

And they were on Conan O'Brien, and uh they were in a sho they had gotten a gold record for one called, I think, Paul's Boutique.

Uh Zarella's Boutique.

Um, just again, and uh Paul's boutique, and they were in a shop and they found a copy of their gold record with the label on it, and they thought, this is fantastic.

And they were really excited, like this is our gold record that's right here on the wall of this shop.

And as they looked at it closely, they said, wait a second, our album had nine tracks on it.

This one only has four.

So they were confused and they took it down and smashed the glass and got out the record and actually put it on a turntable to play it.

And it wasn't their music.

Apparently, it was a guy playing piano versions of Barry Manilo songs.

And they're so it was completely like it had the label, but when you listen, it's saying something different, it sounds very different than what they're saying.

And this is what Paul is dealing with with these false brothers is they're saying, we follow Jesus, but it's not the Jesus as he taught or as apostles taught that they're teaching.

When you listen, they're saying something different.

Now, why these men came from Jerusalem to Galatia, why did they think they had the gospel right?

It's because one is that's what they grew up with in Judaism, but it's also because they thought this is what A-listers do.

We do the work.

It's all it's on us.

That's how you're right with God, is by the things that you do.

And so these overconfident Jewish preachers claimed they knew the gospel but had it all wrong.

They made it about what we do for God instead of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

They had it completely backwards.

So it's easy to fall into that.

We can understand why they do that, because we fall into that.

We do.

I was uh this is a while back, I was looking online and I came across uh a list.

It says ten questions to ask yourself before you go to bed tonight.

That should be very helpful.

Ten questions to ask myself before I go to bed tonight.

These are the ten questions.

Did I begin today in prayer?

Have I read my Bible today?

Did I give today my best efforts?

Did I make someone's life a little better today?

Did I take steps towards the dreams I have and God has for my life today?

How did I add value to the world around me today?

Was my attitude ever in the way of me or others having a productive, happy day?

Can I put today behind me, go to sleep, and give tomorrow another chance?

How can I improve my answers tomorrow night?

Am I ending today in prayer?

And I read that and I thought, yeah, I would never get to sleep after those questions.

I'm not sleeping tonight.

I'm thinking about how am I going to implement these things the next day?

And I started thinking about that, and in my notes I wrote, instead of 10 questions to ask yourself before you go to bed tonight, I wrote down 10 legalistic questions to ask yourself before you go to bed tonight.

And you know, as I was thinking about, it's like, where's Jesus in these questions?

A Muslim could ask these questions, uh, somebody who's Jewish could ask and answer these questions.

Pretty much anybody who's religious could answer something like these questions.

And so religion to most people is about what we are doing for God.

And this is the way many of us have been taught to approach God is what am I doing for God?

What have I done for God today?

And you know, is there a place for self-reflection about obedience to what God says in the scripture?

Absolutely.

But what generally happens is those things that start off that we think are going to benefit us in the Christian life become the basis of our Christian life.

And my acceptance is based on not Jesus, but whether or not I did the ten things today.

Oh, I didn't do number eight.

Oh, that's the thing I'm gonna focus on.

So I'm gonna feel far from God.

God must be displeased with me because I feel embarrassed about myself.

And so the gospel is not if you do, then God will.

The gospel is God has done, so now you can.

That's the gospel.

God has done, so we can.

Our obedience is a response to that.

So the gospel is we need a savior.

We need a savior who gave himself for us.

Now, the word gospel is gonna show up a lot in the book of the letter that Paul wrote.

Uh this is, and the word gospel simply means good news.

Now, this is not like water cooler news, like gossip at the you know, at workplace or at school or wherever.

This is like a royal decree.

Hear ye, hear you.

This is a divine decree.

It has it has weight and bearing.

That's the gospel.

The gospel is a royal, divine proclamation about the Savior who gave himself for.

Us.

And here in the salutation, even though Paul doesn't spell it out, it's just rolling out of his soul.

Rolls off his tongue because it's become such is so dear to him and such a part of his life.

Galatians chapter 1, verses 3 to 4.

Galatians 1:3–4

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age.

Jesus dying on a cross.

People hear that story.

And there are a lot of people who ask the question did that really happen?

And was Jesus really a real person?

Was Jesus real or was he just mythological?

Some of you may have seen on social media over the past couple of months there's this video that keeps making the rounds, and it pops up in my feed every once in a while.

And it's of Gillian Michaels, who is a social media influencer.

She was sort of with like health stuff, and now I think she does a little bit more than that.

And she had a Christian apologist and scholar on her show, and she's sitting with the camera on her and on him, and she makes this comment about whether or not Jesus was mythological.

She said, I didn't think that we knew that Jesus was real, like a real person.

I thought he might have just been kind of made up.

And he said, No.

And he started going through the historical accounts outside of the Bible about the reality of who Jesus was.

And she's flabbergasted online in front of millions of people because she's hearing for the first time Jesus was a real person who lived.

And the claims that we make about his life were real claims that made it into Roman Greek kind of writings that were secular at that time.

He was a real person.

We have the historical records from people who are not Christians attesting to the historical reality of the life and the claims made about him.

And Paul says not simply that Jesus lived, he died and was raised.

This is in verse 2.

Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.

Do we have evidence for that?

Well, using those same kinds of historical methods to kind of look outside of the Bible and say, there are things outside of the Bible who attest to this.

And personally, for me as a Christian, I just need the Bible, but I know other people want to see as their verification outside.

So these are this is what Gary Habermas calls his five minimal facts that even non-believing secular historians have to admit.

Number one, Jesus died by crucifixion.

That's in the Bible, and the external historical records.

Two, Jesus' disciples believed that he rose from the dead and appeared to them.

That's in the Bible and in the historical records.

Three, the church persecutor Paul, who wrote Galatians, was suddenly changed by what he claimed was a post-resurrection appearance of Jesus.

So Paul was suddenly changed.

He talks about it through his letters, this letter, and he talks about it throughout.

And people say there's no reason for him to change unless he really encountered Jesus.

Number four, the skeptic James, who was Jesus' biological brother, was suddenly changed by what he claimed was a post-resurrection appearance of Jesus.

And number five, the tomb was empty.

Otherwise, they would have simply just produced a body and said, Here he is.

Five external reasons.

Did Jesus come back?

Yes.

Now the people often respond and say, people don't come back.

People don't come back, and we'd say, absolutely.

That's not, that doesn't disprove Jesus, that's part of the claim about Jesus.

Because Jesus is unique in all the history of the world.

He came back.

So why did he come back when nobody else comes back?

The reason he comes back, the reason he came back is one, is because of what death is.

We believe, as a culture, that death is the end of the life cycle.

You're a pupa, then you're a moth, and then you die.

That's why we die, is because it's just the end of the life cycle.

The Bible says something different.

Death is not just the end of the life cycle.

Death is a penalty.

It is incarceration.

It's going to prison.

It's being banished.

It's saying you can't be here anymore.

That happens if you cut up, if you cause a brawl at a at a in a sports stadium or at a mall or a theme park, you get kicked out.

You're removed.

It's part of the sentence for the crime you've committed.

And the Bible says that's true of us.

The wages of sin is death.

So when God, the Father, raised Jesus from the dead, it's not simply a victory, as if Jesus is a very, very strong person who just muscled his way out.

What it's saying is Jesus was vindicated.

It wasn't just a victory, it's a vindication.

As God says he deserves to live.

Now the the thing that's we have to go to with this is to say, why did Jesus die?

That wasn't a mistake.

It was a mission.

When Jesus died, he tells us right here that the reason Jesus died is verse 4, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age.

So the reason that Jesus died is because he gave himself for our sins.

And when Jesus was vindicated and raised up, Jesus is worthy to live.

You are now worthy to live forever.

We may not come back just a few days after we die, as did Jesus.

But the Bible says we will come back.

We will have resurrection.

Resurrection in times body, and that's what we're going to have.

And so when Jesus came forth, it showed that the debt of all who believe in him has been paid.

He's rescued us and saved us from the present evil age, so that we can enter into what's coming.

So when God raised Jesus from the dead, it showed all who believe in him will be raised from the dead too.

So what is the gospel?

The gospel is not what we do for God, but what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

In Jesus, we see that we're not saved by what we do, but by what God has done, completely and wholly and fully, by what God has done.

We don't contribute to our salvation at all, but Jesus is the one who secures it.

Number one, when he lived on earth, he lived the life that we should have lived.

He's the only one who ever did.

He lived a perfect life.

And then the second thing he did is when he died on the cross, he wasn't dying for his sins because he didn't have it and he died for our sins.

And what that means is when you become a Christian and you accept the gospel of Jesus Christ, it means two things.

It means one, that when you accept Jesus, all of your sins are placed upon Jesus at the cross, and he died for your sins.

There's some timing things in that I know, but that's weird.

But when you come to faith in Jesus Christ, you receive full forgiveness of your sins.

Jesus paid for those at the cross.

So all of your sins are forgiven.

When you were 15, and that thing you never told anybody.

When you were 32, when you were 44, the things you've done in your life that you wouldn't talk about with your friends, your spouse, or anybody, Jesus says, I knew about that, and that went with me to the cross.

It's paid for and forgiven in the courts of heaven.

One.

Number two, it also means that when you come to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, his perfect life is now counted as yours.

So that when God sees you, he doesn't see you as a B lister.

He sees you as the A lister.

Not because you've done anything, but because Jesus did.

So you can be broken, you can be messed up, you can know how messed up you are.

You may not even know how messed up you are.

And God says, I love you, messed up person though you are, with the same love with which I love Jesus Christ.

And that creates an incredible freedom for us in life.

God, there's somebody in the cosmos who knows all your brokenness, from whom you don't have to hide, from whom you cannot hide.

And he loves you as if you are absolutely, completely perfect.

He's not going anywhere, and he's not gonna send you away.

And there's incredible freedom in that.

Rebecca asked me, she said, What do you want people to get out of this first lesson in uh on Galatians?

And you know, if I'm being honest, for people to come back and hear more.

But what do I want people to get out?

Um I want you not just to know that when you die you get to go to heaven.

I want you to know that the reality of the grace of God in Jesus Christ has power for today and tomorrow, for all the broken things that you're dealing with.

It creates this freedom.

And it creates this freedom from things you have never been able to escape.

It creates a freedom from that sour anger that we feel that somebody somewhere is going to get away with something.

You see this when you talk about the fruit of the Spirit, as we get to that later.

Freedom from the habit of lying in bed at night and rehearsing all of your mistakes from the previous day and going into a shame spiral.

Freedom from that sense of insecurity you feel because your life doesn't measure up with it compared with other people because you're not an A-lister.

Freedom from those grievances from your younger years that you can't forgive, those people who hurt you.

Freedom to say no when people make demands upon you that are not right.

Freedom from having to hold yourself to a higher standard than other people because you have an ego to protect.

Freedom from always criticizing other people to compare yourself and say, I'm I think I'm better, I'm a little bit ahead of that person.

Freedom from always criticizing yourself.

Stupid, stupid.

Why did I do that?

Why did I say that?

God says, I love you.

In Christ, I love you.

I have blessed you, and even though you're not good, I love you as if you are completely good.

I love you.

And that is changing you.

Can you hear God saying to you?

It doesn't matter what you've done, it doesn't matter what you've said, it doesn't matter the desert that you've walked in spiritually for a while.

You're my son, you're my daughter, and I love you.

I loved you even in the midst of your wandering.

I loved you in the midst of your failure, and I've redeemed you and brought you back.

I loved you first, and in Christ I have redeemed you so that you will not be apart from me for eternity.

You're my child, and I am transforming you to become more in lifestyle who you are in my sight because he loves you.

And that's why getting the gospel matters.

And that's why I don't think it's overselling it to say that studying Galatians may be the single most important study for some of you in your whole life.

Let me pray for us.