Freed to Love

Galatians 5 and verses 1 to 15. You may not have sensed it during the reading, but it

is an absolutely seismic chapter or passage-ness. It's almost like Paul is dealing with splitting

the atom, splitting the spiritual atom, as it were. He gets to the very core, the very

heart of believing and living as Christians and is defending it to absolutely His life.

It's so important to Him, and you'll see that in the language that He uses as we go through

it. It's not just an incidental matter He's dealing with, it's something of great significance

in this young, fledgling church, and He wants to nail it, and He wants to remind them of

how important Jesus is and the gospel is at this stage in their lives. And I'm going to

start by just taking the two major principles that underlie this section and talking about

them briefly first before looking at the actual situation, which I'm just going to briefly

mention. Because it's so important to recognize the principles here are principles that apply

absolutely to today and to your Christian life and to my Christian life. The two things

are, verses 1 to 12, He's basically dealing with the idea that rules for many people appear

easier than relationship, in spiritual terms, that rules appear easier than relationship.

And then in verses 13 to 15 as He's working it out, He's talking about that sinning appears

easier than serving. So as these two things that apply very much to ourselves, you might

not get the context and the circumcision and all that stuff, but you get these principles,

don't you, that rules appear easier than relationship and that sinning appears easier than serving.

Because there's that reality deep within each of us that we want things black and white,

we want things absolutely clean cut, we want a relationship with God and a relationship

with other people to be clean cut and absolute, because relationships with others just seem

with God and with others just seem so messy and they seem so complicated. So we'd much

rather if it just came to church and you told me what to do and told me what I had to do,

then I could judge myself and I could judge other people by these standards and it would

be much easier. All that stuff about joy and patience and gentleness, it's so unspecific,

it's so nebulous, it's so imprecise, just give me some rules to follow and that's much easier.

Much easier isn't it than the mess of relationships. And part of the reason that that's the case

is because deep down when we have rules to follow or to break, it means we can be, it's

much easier to be in control and it's much easier to seem like we can earn some favour

with God if we're obeying the rules. We are hardwired at the very deepest level, we're

hardwired, just you think about this, we're hardwired to reject anything good that we

don't earn. Deep down we need to earn goodness that's given to us. We constantly are asking

about whether we're good enough, whether we're doing enough, whether we're loved enough,

what more can we do? We're always deep down trying to justify ourselves, we do it all

the time, all the time. You just think about yourself in a new situation, a new job or

a new community or a different church, a new situation, what am I going to do with a question

subconsciously, maybe I ask you, what am I going to do to be accepted? How can I be

accepted? What will I do? How can I act in such a way that will make me accepted? We

work to be popular, we want to be liked, we want to be loved, we want to be accepted,

and we want to know the rules of the game that will enable us to be accepted. And we

can bring that very easily and quickly into our Christian lives. It's so hard for us to

accept grace and to accept something that we haven't earned, something that we don't

deserve. It goes against every ounce of our innate being from within us. So rules are

easier than relationship because they help us to feel that we're earning some kind of

favor with God or with one another. And also I think sinning appears easier than serving,

doesn't it? Because when we're sinning, we're kind of fitting in with the majority, and

it appeals to the natural desires, the selfish desires we have within us. It can be very

satisfying, we can focus on ourselves. And there's much less stress, isn't there? We're

avoiding a spiritual battle. We're avoiding the eye of God and the disapproval of others,

and we can just close the Bible and stop praying and stop serving and just live for

ourselves. It appears much easier, especially the whole concept that the Bible seems to

always be driving about serving, serving others. But Christians are so hard work. It's much

easier to just sit back and find fault with them and there's plenty to find fault with.

And that makes me feel better about myself. The church is so demanding and it doesn't

understand. It's a failed institution. The walk of Christ, the walk of faith, even with

Christ is demanding. I can't cope with the battle. It's much easier to give in. And in

reality, that's the two issues that Paul is dealing with in this church in Galatia, in

a specific context that doesn't mean a great deal to us at its fundamental level. But you'll

have seen from the other sermons that Paul was dealing with an issue of adding to the

gospel. And it was adding to the gospel with works of the law, so that you were saved by

Jesus but you also had to obey the law. Particularly, it was speaking about the need for circumcision

and all that went with that in terms of the law. And so these false teachers were coming

in and they were saying, you need to obey the Old Testament and trust Jesus. Jesus isn't

enough on his own. You need these rules. You need these regulations. You need these things

in black and white. And once you tick all them, then you can have Jesus as well. Christ

and faith in Christ wasn't enough. You needed the rules. You needed the regulations. You

needed the things that were black and white, in this case circumcision. But the result

of that was that they weren't loving one another. They were divided. They were treating one

another sinfully. And Paul talks about that. You're evoking, sorry, you're abiding and

devouring one another and you will consume one another because there was factions. We

know about that. Well, some of us know about that. We've been a bit longer in the tooth

and others in the church. Divisions, different theological positions that didn't bring people

together but dragged them powerfully apart. And because they had these wrong gospel understandings

and were adding to Christ in Galatia, then they were divided and being loveless. Well,

how does Paul respond to this major issue within the church in Galatia? Well, under

the inspiration of God, he responds with urgent passion. That's what he responds with. He

responds very powerfully with blunt and brutal language because he sees that the very heart

of the gospel is at stake. It's not just a minor fracas. It's not just a difference of

opinion. The very, the heart of the gospel, the person of Christ and the truth. And your

understanding and my understanding of what it means to be a Christian is subsumed within

this whole understanding that Paul deals with. Think, look at the imagery that he uses in

this particular section. He talks about knowing Christ being freedom and anything else is

slavery. He says you stand up tall. You're standing upright when you're following Jesus

Christ. You're not weighed down. He says you're going back to imprisonment, submitting to

darkness if you move away from the gospel. Severed from Christ, from Christ is the life.

Now recently someone that I know was shaving and they were shaving, listening to their

phone with earphones on as they were shaving. And they severed the wire as they were shaving,

which meant of course that it was useless, the earphone. Severed, completely useless.

And that's exactly the picture that Paul is using here. You're being severed from Jesus

Christ. You're being cut off from Jesus. What's left is completely rendered useless.

Then he goes on to say you're falling off a cliff. You're falling away from Jesus Christ.

He uses this strong language in these different verses. And he then says it's like falling

off a cliff. It's almost suicidal, he's saying. And he talks about the race. You were running

well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This race of your life, someone significant

cut in in front of you and tripped you up and stopped you finishing in this incredibly

significant race, a malevolent influence of others. And he uses the whole idea of yeast

in dough, which means that it was going to affect everyone else negatively. Then he uses

castration. It's getting stronger and stronger all the way through. He says to the people

that have done that, he said, I wish I'd go the whole hog. Not just circumcision but castration.

It's so significant that it will involve disempowering. It will involve fruitlessness and death and

the end of anything significant and life-giving. So it's very powerful, very brutal, very strong

language that he uses as he goes on to explain why Jesus is... cannot be Jesus plus and it

cannot be loveless Christianity. So he does two things. He stresses the crucial truth

of God's grace in verses 1 to 12. Now Alistair was preaching about grace this morning and

I don't intend to say much more. I know he'll have explained it powerfully and clearly.

But here Paul is, again, it's great that it's dovetailing because he's saying that God's

grace is absolutely all we need. It's not Christ plus. So you know he's saying if you're

trying verse 4, you know, it's a very strong verse, he says, you're severed from Christ,

you who would be justified by the law. You've fallen away from grace. If you're... if we're

trying to earn God's favour by our works, then we're alienated, severed, fallen away

from grace. It's all about grace. It's the simplest truth, isn't it? Grace, mercy, that

as undeserved people we get what we don't deserve and we get what we don't deserve and

we forget, I can't remember the other side of that. But it's the simplest truth, it's

so simple I can't get it. It's hard to accept mercy. Mercy's the hardest thing. It's getting

something for nothing. It's reminding ourselves we can't do anything to earn our favour with

God and heaven. Nothing. There's nothing that we can do to earn our place in God's kingdom.

He loves you as a Christian tonight because He loves you. He's chosen you because you're

chosen. We are saved because of what Jesus earned for us on His death and resurrection

2,000 years ago. There's no greater love than that. There's no greater gift than that.

I've got nothing that I can compare it to. It is a free gift of His grace. He's taken

our sin. He's dealt with it. It's punished. It's finished. We are free. And the freedom

that's been spoken of here is a freedom of conscience, that we are not guilty anymore

before God. We are innocent before God as believers. That's why we are free. And He will

always love us. He will never leave us. And there's nothing that we can do, nothing that

we can do that can add to what He has done on our behalf. We have simply to accept that.

And Paul so powerfully speaks about that. He says that there's absolutely nothing else

for us. For in Christ Jesus, verse 6, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for

anything, but it counts for nothing except faith working through love. And nothing, in

other words, he says, nothing is any power. There's no power. There's no gospel power

unless it's faith working through love, unless we accept what Jesus has done for us. And

that our faith is in what Jesus Christ has gifted to us. And we build that relationship

of trust with Him, listening to Him, going to Him, talking to Him, trusting in His promises,

believing what He says. We don't need to do anything to be accepted by Jesus Christ.

He's done it all on our behalf. And He says to us this evening, like the prodigal Father

with His arms open wide, I love you. I've already done it for you. You are free. Your

conscience is being dealt with. You are innocent because Jesus Christ has paid the price for

your sins, and He has taken your guilt. Because Jesus says, if that's not the case, Christ

is of no value. He's of no value to us. So we've fallen from grace, in other words, and

Christ is worthless to us. We've returned to slavery. We're out of the race. It's the

only foundation. And we've been rescued from that whole way, and it's very hard. It's part

of what the battle is that we always have right through our lives. But we've been freed

from that whole way of living where we wake up in the morning and say, if I do this and

I do that for God, He'll love me more. If I read my Bible today, then He'll accept me.

If I pray, then I'll be clean. And if I try harder, He'll love me more. And that is the

antithesis of the gospel, because the gospel says, no, grace is His gift. We can't do anything

to be made more loved or more righteous or closer to God legislatively, legally, before

the throne of heaven, because it's all been done for us. But when we understand that,

then we understand verses 13 to 15, because there's the link word there, isn't there?

Where you were called to freedom, and that links us to the earlier part. And He therefore

goes on and says, only use your freedom as an opportunity, not for the flesh, but through

love to serve one another. For the whole, the whole law is fulfilled in one word, you

shall love your neighbour as yourself, but you bite and devour one another. Therefore,

we've got this truth that we recognize the crucial centrality of grace and the way of

living grace. Therefore, as we understand that, it's only then can we serve others in

love as we love ourselves. Recognize that you shall love your neighbour as yourself.

I'm going to define the terms here briefly. We can only serve others in love when we love

ourselves, and when we understand the gospel of grace. Now usually when we think of loving

ourselves, we think that, well, that's not a very Christian concept, loving ourselves.

It seems a bit selfish putting ourselves first, looking out for number one. That seems to

be the way of the world. But it's a Christ-like love of ourselves. In other words, it's only

as we understand grace and as we understand the love of Christ for us, can we truly love

ourselves in the right way? So that we can say, in other words, I am unworthy, but I'm

not worthless. A lot of Christians think they're worthless. That's not biblical, it's not

right. You're not a worm. We are unworthy, but we are not worthless. We love ourselves

because Christ loves us. We love ourselves because we are made and redeemed in God's

image. Grace has rescued me to be a child of the Father, to have, to belong, to be in

His home, and therefore we can love ourselves in a different way. It sees myself differently,

and it sees God differently, and then it will see others differently because we have that

sense of self-love that comes from understanding grace. And that self-love enables us to accept

who we are without constantly seeking God or other people's approval, and it helps us

to live without hypocrisy. So as we love ourselves with a Christ-like love, then we are also

able to serve with a Christ-like service. We are to be those who love one another and

through love serve one another. See, very often our service, Christian service, is a

work we do to impress. We do it to impress ourselves. We do it to impress the minister.

We do it to impress other people in the church. We do it to find favor with God, or as probably

more importantly as a religious chore or a duty. But Christ-like serving is different

because we've begun to see others and ourselves as Christ sees us. There's a joy in our rescue

and a wholeness in our love that can put other people first in a beautiful way. But there's

a great battle for us to overcome in so doing because we so often find ourselves being sinfully

self-indulgent and judging others and being divisive and wanting the praise of people

and serving with a grimace. Because we have... it's difficult for us to understand grace

and Christ. So we can only truly love ourselves and we can only truly serve others in the

church when we understand grace. And Paul sees that as utterly and completely crucial

to the health and well-being of the church. So much so that he says without that we have...

we're severed from Christ. We've fallen off the edge of the cliff. And therefore I want

to finish just by posing a couple of questions for you to consider as you sit at the Lord's

table. And the first is, as a Christian, are you standing firm? You see, for freedom, verse

1, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore. It could be translated stand upright, not

bowed over and burdened. Don't submit again to a yoke of slavery. Are you standing straight

with confidence, spiritually visualizing it in your relationship with Jesus and His saving

grace? That's why communion is about the death and the hope that resurrection of Jesus brings

for us until He returns. It's because the crucifixion speaks of God's grace and of Christ's

sufficiency. And when Jesus of the cross said, it's finished, He wasn't just talking about

Himself being done. He was speaking about His work of salvation. It's done. He's faced

the darkness, the wrath, the hell that is due to all of us. And it's complete. And He

gifts us life. And He gifts us His grace and His forgiveness. Because if you're not standing

firm in Jesus Christ, that you're falling off a cliff. And Christ is of no value. Christ

is of no value to you. He kind of speaks in these terms that Christ is of no value when

we have fallen away from Him. Are you standing firm? And if you're not a Christian this evening,

then I can only assume that Christ is actually isn't of any value to you. And I want to challenge

you with that because that's hugely significant. And if you're spending your life as a Christian

waking up and saying, I wonder if Christ will accept me this morning. I wonder how I can

obey Him better to gain more favour from Him. I wonder how I can impress Him. I wonder I

had better do more things and different things. Then can I ask you just to meditate? And I

have to do it absolutely, crucially, all the time. Because there's that reality within

my soul and it will be within yours that we can't, we don't get anything for nothing.

And we can't accept something that we haven't earned ourselves or added to to make it important.

Meditate on the supremacy and the finished work of Christ that we're asked to accept

by faith working itself through love. So are you standing firm and then do I truly

love myself as Christ loves me? I think that's a very important question. I think it's a

very important question for us all because I think part of loving yourself means that

you're willing to be loved by others. It means within the kingdom of God and within the community

of believers, you're willing to be helped, you're willing to rest, you're willing to

have others carry your burden, you're willing to step back, you're willing to accept who

you are as you are in Christ and that you don't wish you were someone else because Christ

doesn't wish that for you. And there's a huge amount of identity crisis among Christians.

A huge amount of lack of self-confidence in a godly self-confidence and a wishing we were

somewhere else or was somebody else and we don't truly love ourselves in Christ. But

it's a hugely significant reality because it's a place of peace and it's a place of

recognition that God has gifted us to be who we are by His grace and to progress through

that. And then do I love myself so that I can love others well? Love others well. And

that's a huge, again, a massive challenge for us. Not hating people, not fighting with

them, not being bitter or jealous. Within the church context, not biting and destroying,

but loving because it's of the essence of the gospel. It's not the icing on the cake,

it's the essence of the gospel. It's the essence of what we believe that we are to love others

well because that is how Paul finishes his statement. He reminds us that the whole law

is fulfilled in this one word, this one statement, you shall love your neighbor as yourself because

that subsumes the knowledge of loving God, it subsumes the first table of the law and

therefore the outworking of our love for God is loving one another as we love ourselves.

So our services becomes and ought to be a gift, not a grind, and it is freedom for us.

And I think therefore the Christian community is a unique community of people and we are

called to be very different from any other community in this universe because we can

love ourselves and have a right opinion of ourselves in Christ and we can rest and we

can be looked after and we can look after and we can serve and we can be served and

we can love because we are loved. We are able to love others well and that is the only thing

that counts. So if I repeat that, in the 19 years that I've been here, it's because I

forget it so easily and it's easy to try and move beyond that, he's always on about that.

Without it you're alienated from Jesus, you're falling off a cliff, severed, there's nothing,

there's nothing there, he's fulfilled the law for us, we can't add anything to it and

unless we recognize that we'll never be able to love others as we love ourselves because

of what Christ has done for us. So please meditate on these things as we celebrate the

Lord's Supper together. Amen.

Okay, so in just a moment we're going to celebrate the Lord's Supper and before we do so, I'll

explain a little bit of what we do and also welcome a new member to us. We, a number of

times a year, we welcome new members into the congregation, either at transfer from

other places or by profession of faith and we ask them a couple of questions which just

help to explain a little bit about what membership is about and the biblical principle, the outworking

of biblical principles of being a people together with leaders appointed to be under shepherds

to care for, to encourage, to love, to pray, to serve, to be honest and to disciple the

community. And so this evening we're welcoming Ken Dawson who is with us for a period of

time. Ken is a retired surgeon from North of Sydney. He's decided to use some of his

retirement time to study a ETS as you do in your retirement. And we're delighted to have

Ken worshiping with us and among us and hope that we welcome him into our homes and into

our hearts as he is away from his own home and from his wife who he doesn't get to see

at term times and we remember him during that time. So Ken is here somewhere, I think. Ken,

you're there. Ken, I'm just going to ask you these questions which you can stand because

then people will see you and know you then to welcome you next time. We've got four

questions that just highlight membership and then I've got a question that the congregation

respond to as well in recognition. So Ken, you believe that Jesus is the Son of God,

the only Savior of sinners in whom you have put your personal hope and trust as a sinner,

ooh, needing grace, forgiveness, spirit, life and light? Do you resolve in prayerful reliance

on the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit to continue to live as a disciple of

Christ? Do you promise to support this church, family and its worship and work with your gifts

and graces to the best of your ability? And do you submit yourself to the pastoral care,

teaching and discipline of the spiritual leaders of the church, seek its peace and prosperity

as we promise to love and care for you? Thanks, Ken. And the congregation, do you promise

to pray for Ken? Welcome him warmly, love him as part of this church family and together

help him grow in grace as we all seek to do ourselves. We do. Okay, thanks, Ken. I'm

going to pray. Lord God, we give thanks for this day. We give thanks for this opportunity

to participate in the sacrament. And we thank you for the bread and the wine, symbols of

your body and blood, taking us to Calvary Institute and these dark, that dark night before the

crucifixion, but given for the church of Christ for all time. So we thank you for the Lord's

Supper. We thank you for all it reminds us of in its physicality and individuality of

it and yet in the corporate nature of doing it together. We thank you for Ken. We pray

for him. Bless him in his studies, bless him in his life here in Edinburgh and also remember

his wife and family back home in Australia. Bless them as they're apart. Bless them when

they're together and we pray for his protection and his growth in grace as we pray for each

of us and that we would use this time of communion to consider our growth in grace and our need

for constantly finding ourselves at the foot of the cross. So bless as we pray and help

us as we come to you with thanksgiving and grace to remember your death. Amen.