Galatians: The Religion Shop Has Been Closed

What a wonderful chapter amidst this wonderful book.

Like we've talked about, this would have been a letter read in its entirety.

So that's why we're trying to read chunks at a time.

I don't think I'm going to be able to do this justice in terms of being able to talk about every single part of this.

And so that's why uh three weeks ago I said, I I would like for us to go through this book together on Sunday, but at the same time for you to do this on your own.

There's a great commentary, little book by Tim Keller called Galatians for You.

I've been reading it, and so maybe you want to get that because that would be something that you could read.

All these verses that I don't mention, you could dig in and get a lot out of that as well.

The question for this morning to start us out is if being good enough has never really been enough, if being good enough has never really been enough, why do we keep living that way of life?

And maybe that good enough has been for you in some faith context, or maybe that good enough for you has been in some morality context, maybe it's been in some performance context of school or life or career.

It's even possible that that good enough has been in you trying to be good enough at not being good, right?

And so it's like I'll be good enough at being rebellious, and then how's that working in the long run?

And none of this really works in the long run at all.

Comes back to if performing yourself into worthiness or justification before God or as a person, if performing yourself into that has never worked, why keep doing it?

Why return to it?

I had an English teacher in high school, her name was Miss Walker, and she was short, she had short gray hair.

She was ruthless.

I mean, she was a pretty ruthless teacher.

I mean, she was a really good English teacher in that there was right grammar and wrong grammar.

You couldn't sleep in class if you wanted to talk, you had to raise your hand.

So it was a tightly run class.

There was correct prose and incorrect prose.

There was a correct commentary on that Shakespeare.

There was an incorrect commentary on that Shakespeare.

And so it was a tightly run English class.

And yet the interesting thing about it is none of us wanted to hang out with Miss Walker in the hallway.

Right?

I mean, the football game, we were like, oh, Miss Walker, we're so excited.

And you wouldn't have been either.

And the reason why is because none of us want to be followed around by a schoolmaster who's waiting to pop us on the hand with a ruler.

Maybe you actually went to a school where you got popped on the hand with a ruler.

They did this.

And you're not going like at the end of the day, like, hey, let's let's hang out, let's be together.

I want to live with you.

I want to hang out.

I want you to walk with me.

Even though there might have been correct, right, and wrong.

That was clear.

Because you slowly start to feel a little condemned if that's the kingdom you live under.

You feel a little limited, a little bound.

And that's the point, right?

That's my point with Miss Walker, is that it's possible, it's possible for me, it's possible for you to start to have that feeling with the Christian faith.

But St.

Paul would say, uh it's not faith.

Maybe church, maybe religion, but it's not Christian faith.

It's something else.

Maybe you've heard stuff like this.

Uh, real Christians perform this well, and then you get that well, and then it's like, oh no, no, no, no, like that wasn't really good enough.

Like, oh, it's got to be this good, right?

And oh, real Christians uh they dress like this and not like this, and their children look like this and not like this.

So your child can't have that problem, they can only have this problem, and you can have this problem but not that problem, or you can be this messy in this area, but you can't be this messy over here in this area.

And so, what do we do?

What do we do as Christians in a faith context like that?

Well, we would pretend, or we would perform, or we just walk away.

You know, I'll do something else.

I'll go somewhere else.

But Paul says, and our church gets to proclaim that life in perform, then be accepted.

This occurred.

Paul calls it the law.

We love it at first.

We love it.

We love it in faith, we love it out in the world, we love it for our school, we love it for our career, perform to make myself feel justified or righteous or valuable.

We love it.

Why?

Because it gives us control.

We are our own saviors, and we actually end up loving that, but then slowly over time, we go, oh man, this is actually a curse.

I'm being crushed.

And so this is Galatians.

Let me reread a few verses that Charles read for us.

So Galatians 3, 1 through 6.

Paul's writing to a to a people group who have done this.

They've experienced the grace of God through faith in Christ alone, and then they said, Ah, I'm gonna start going back to living under rules to live and be accepted with God.

And he says, Foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?

It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.

Let me ask you only this.

Did you receive the Spirit by works of law or by hearing with faith?

Are you so foolish?

Having begun by the Spirit, or are you now being perfected by the flesh?

Did you offer so many things in vain?

If indeed it was in vain?

Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of law or by hearing with faith?

Just as Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.

So point number one is this a few points as we work our way through this.

There are shouldas, couldas, and musts.

There are shouldas, couldas, and must.

We all know them.

But they have nothing to do with your righteousness.

See, the Galatians were told, God loves you, but really, really, first you must do X, Y, and Z to really get that love or to stay loved.

Who's bewitched you?

Like who tricked you?

Right?

It's like by grace you get into the dance.

And then once you're in the dance, you know, the schoolmaster's coming around, circling around, and the schoolmaster says, Oh, yeah, yeah, it's an amazing dance.

Great band.

Cindy Lopper, Drake, the Beatles, Mike Libersmith, they're all one band.

So everybody, everybody is happy dancing, the drink, the food, everything's free.

And then the schoolmaster comes around and starts to go, oh, yeah, oh yeah.

By the way, by the way, to stay in the dance, you can't slow down.

Actually, you need to perpetually get better at dancing and perpetually be more passionate about your dancing.

And you need to dance this way, not that way.

And that's the curse.

To start off by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ alone, and then to revert back to that law as to feel like, oh, I am justified and righteous and valuable.

And what Paul would say is the law is good for us.

The law is so good for us to know right and wrong.

We need that.

It helps us see that we're imperfect, but it has no power.

It has no power to make you righteous or worthy.

When has it ever?

Two weeks ago, I walked into our bedroom and I could barely see Christy behind a mound of all of her clothes piled up on her bed.

A few of you have done this already.

There's a show out right now on Netflix, tidying up with Marie Kondo.

And I looked at Christie and said, What are you doing?

She said, I watched the show, it's unbelievable.

And so she pulled out every article of clothing she owned, Christy owned it, it's on this bed.

And what you do is you you hold, you get every article of clothing, and it's in order to get rid of all the extra that you don't care about.

Like you don't really care about it.

And so every article of clothing, you hold it to your chest, you take one moment and you say, Does it bring me joy?

Quick answer, yes or no.

Yes goes here, no goes here.

And I look at it, this is the dumbest, most absurd thing.

Our closet got a lot cleaner, so the next thing I watched an episode of tidying up with Mary Honda, and I was, I paused it halfway through the show, didn't finish, went into our bedroom, got all my clothes out.

I went through the same process.

I don't have a ton of clothes, and I had three trash bags full of clothes to get rid of.

It only took me about four days to start to compare my side of the closet to Christy's side of the closet.

Because both of our closets started really tidy.

And for the past two weeks, I was doing so good.

I mean, my closet was so amazing, it made me feel so good.

And I was doing so good about keeping it tidy and all those stacks and everything.

It looked so good.

I'd walk in, it made me feel so good as a person.

And then on Tuesday, Tuesday of this week, I walk into my closet.

Tragedy had struck.

A stack of t-shirts.

Up on the right, they had tipped over.

Like a little pile.

I think that morning when I had pulled one out, I pulled it out, and I didn't take the time to get it right back and tidy.

And the most amazing thing happened.

I felt guilty.

I actually felt guilty.

Like I stopped and I was like, I feel guilty about t-shirts.

It's crazy, right?

Right?

I hadn't used sweet little Marie Kondo, who's just the most gracious little sweet little angel who like just floats into these people's homes.

You can carry her around your pocket.

I mean, she's just the cutest little thing.

And I had, but I hadn't used her to help my closet, right?

It had passed that.

And I used her to help me feel like I was a good person.

And as soon as I did that, I was cursed.

Because as soon as I did that, I created a law in which I needed to live up to in order for me to feel like a good person.

And of course, I wasn't gonna live up to it.

So as soon as I failed before it, which is, by the way, perfect.

Her standard of tidiness is perfect.

And I wasn't gonna live up to that.

So as soon as I didn't live up to that, it crushed me.

I was doomed from the beginning.

And this is point number two.

The shouldas, kudda's, and musts will eventually condemn you.

And it's easy to live under law by performance and life, and it's easy to convert from irreligion to religion, but never really convert into the way of the grace of Christ.

In verses 23 and 24, Paul calls the law a guardian or a schoolmaster, Miss Walker, right?

And it's the image of the law as a disciplinary who follows you around everywhere you go and just points everything out constantly.

That second guesses everything you do and condemns you when you're not perfect.

And that's what the law does.

And in its role, it's a beautiful thing because it helps us see we're not perfect and we need the grace of Christ.

But without the grace of Christ, this is a horrible way of life.

Whether it's law inside of your religion out in the world, or whether it's law inside of faith.

Point number three.

In Jesus, we are free from performancism from governing our hearts.

In the grace of Christ, you are free from perform unto be accepted, or be righteous or justified.

You're free from that governing your heart.

Back in 2011, there's a podcast on This American Life.

This American Life started as a radio show.

It became, it's probably the number one podcast in the country in terms of listeners.

And they interviewed chef Dan Barber, is his name.

And this chef, the interview is about fugra, which is duck or goose liver, which has one main problem.

I guess two.

First is it's it is goose liver, which is kind of gross to me.

But people love it because it's so sweet and it's juicy.

People just love it.

The other is how it's actually produced.

It's horrible.

They bound the animal and then they shove a tube down the animal's throat into the stomach and they force feed the animal until the liver becomes huge.

But there's a farmer in Spain, his name is Edward Souza, and he was an anomaly.

Because he had a flock of geese.

They were not caged, there was no fences.

He didn't feed them.

So they lived in the wild, they ate in the wild, but they were his flock.

And he was raising these geese to have massive livers.

And it didn't make sense to anybody how this could possibly be.

So this chef goes and interviews this farmer out in the middle of Spain.

And when he gets there, the farmer's out in the middle of the grass, out in the middle of the field.

He's laying down in the grass, and he's saying to his geese, lovelies, lovelies, lovelies, over here, lovelies, come over here, lovelies.

And the geese are all around him.

I mean, it sounds a little radical, right?

That's a little crazy.

That's a little farmer crazy going on there.

Here's what he said.

You don't have to force feed geese to gorge them out on food because geese gorge themselves naturally in the wild.

But he says, here's the key.

Here's the key.

They'll only do it if they know they're free.

And isn't that an amazing, beautiful picture?

See, you'll only grow in the grace of God transformation from the heart outward if you really know you're free.

If the heart is finally free from the law and performance unto being accepted.

If you know you're accepted on the front side, all of a sudden everything changes.

And that freedom creates a heart that is secure and healed and deemed righteous and valuable and worthy, no matter what, all the time.

Because of Christ's work alone.

And now some change begins from the heart out.

Ran into a quote this week by Robert Farrer Capin.

I've quote him every once in a while.

He's a priest, an author.

He has a great book named Kingdom, Grace, and Judgment.

Everything religion tried and failed to do has been perfectly done once and for all by Jesus and his death and resurrection.

For Christians, therefore, the entire religion shop has been closed, boarded up, and forgotten.

The church is not in the religion business.

The church instead is in the gospel proclaiming business.

It is not here to bring the world the bad news that God will think kindly about us only after we have gone through certain creedal, liturgical, and ethical wickets.

It is here to bring the world the good news that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.

It is here, in short, for no religious purpose at all.

Only to announce the gospel of free grace.

Now, why does Capan and Paul sound so radical?

Because they realize this isn't an outside job behavior first.

It's an inside job.

The heart has to be set free first.

Then the change happens.

There's this great story in Genesis 15.

God says to Abraham, I will bless you.

Galatians 3 refers to the story.

God says to Abraham, I'll bless you.

Abraham says, How do I know that?

How can I know that?

How can I know that for sure?

Right?

You could imagine this conversation.

You think some truth, God wants to bless you.

And you go, how could I know that for sure?

I mean, you know my life at all.

And God says, here's what I want you to do, says it to Abraham.

Go find an animal and sacrifice the animal.

Cut the animal up into pieces.

Put the animal into two rows so there's an aisle in between.

So you can walk through it.

Now, this is the point, the story, where we think this is the oddest, strangest, most ancient, barbaric possible story in the world.

But at the time, Abraham would have been tracking.

Abraham would have gone, oh yeah, this is how covenants are made.

Because when a Lord was making a covenant with a peasant or a poor person, the Lord would say, Go get an animal, sacrifice the animal, cut them up into pieces, put them in two rows, make an aisle in between.

And the peasant, the one who was in need, would walk in between the cut animals, and would say, I swear loyalty to you, O Lord, and if I do not keep my promise, may I be cut into pieces like these.

So this is what Abraham is thinking.

This is what's happening with him and God.

All the animal pieces are out, and then the end of the day comes, the darkness falls, and then a fiery pillar comes, and we get this wonderful story, this wonderful picture that the fiery pillar, God, passes through the pieces, and then Abraham never has to.

And here's what the story's telling us.

The story's telling us it's as if God is saying, I will bless them if they obey.

And I will bless them if they don't obey.

And Abraham doesn't have to walk through the pieces because he's not the one who upholds this relationship.

I uphold it.

See, you don't uphold the relationship.

You're in the relationship with God by grace through faith.

You don't uphold it, he upholds it by his faithfulness, his covenant to you.

Now we can read Galatians 3, 12 through 14.

All that helps us see 12 through 14.

By the law, but the law is not of faith.

Rather, the one who does them shall live by them.

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

For it is written, curse is everyone who is hanged on a tree, so that in Jesus Christ the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.

Here's what this means: Jesus was cursed, so you don't have to live under the curse.

Your sin and shame has been put upon the cross, and his righteousness is given to you.

You're already perfectly loved.

You're already perfectly righteous.

You're perfectly worthy, perfectly lovely to God.

Right now, forevermore, won't change by grace through faith in Christ alone.

We are no longer sent on that mission by the law to validate or justify ourselves before Him and in this world.

You're free from that.

My brothers and sisters, may you enjoy your freedom and the grace of Christ and may change happen in your life from the inside out.

Let's pray together.

God thank you that you are a redeeming God.

That redeems us by your work and not our work.

May we know that we are free, completely free in the grace of Christ, so that our lives might honor you.

Help us to see there's nothing for us to add.

There's nothing for us to perform unto acceptance, but we are already accepted, therefore would our wants change.

May we want to dance in your grace and mercy.

Forgive us for all the ways that we are in love with performance and law.

Help us to see the ways that we revert back to it all the time.

May we be quick repenters in your grace.

That we might honor you and rest and enjoy the great freedom of Christ Jesus.

Amen.