Serve One Another (Galatians 5:13-15)

Hello, I'm Pastor Creighton, and thank you for tuning in to New Sun Churches Podcast.

We're a gospel centered church in Port Perry, Ontario, proclaiming the true and life-giving word of Jesus as we love and serve our neighbors.

May God bless you today through his life-giving word.

The second lesson is from the book of Galatians, chapter 5, verses 13 to 15.

Galatians 5:13–15

For you were called to be free, brothers and sisters.

Only don't use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love.

For the whole law is fulfilled in one statement: love your neighbor as yourself.

But if you bite and devour one another, watch out, or you will be consumed by one another.

The word of the Lord.

Serve one another through love.

Let's pray.

Gracious Lord, by your word and Holy Spirit, you promise to dwell with us where two or three are gathered in your name.

And so we pray that as we gather our hearts and open ourselves to your word, we would know that the kingdom of heaven has come near us.

Lord, let us not miss your goodness and grace.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Please be seated.

So beginning last Sunday, we've begun a series looking at the one another imperatives or commands in the New Testament.

We find something like 60 one-another commands or uh imperatives that are related to how the church is supposed to treat one another, that are connected to this phrase one another.

And of the important commands, or at least the well-repeated commands, we generally find three or four repeated at a time.

And of course, last Sunday we looked at what is arguably the most foundational command repeated 16 times through the New Testament, and that is, what was that?

Oh, I'm so glad you said it.

Good.

Love one another.

Now, I hope last week at least something was relatively coherent.

I realized I was coming off of considerable jet leg coming back from the UK, and I think I went home after service and slept for 14 hours or something like that.

So I said to Rachel, I said, I hope something made sense in what I said.

And she said two things to me.

She said, number one, no, you did a good job.

And then number two, she said, mind you, I was just as jet legged as you were, so who really knows?

If we took away love one another, then that was what we needed to take away from last week.

The church, when the church puts the gospel into action, when it does the gospel, it looks like loving one another.

And I gotta say, this week, as we look in the in Paul's letter to the Galatians, we see a second and just closely related command.

Serve one another.

That's the command for us today.

Paul's writing this letter to the Galatians.

In fact, last summer we went through the whole letter of the Galatians, didn't we?

So if you're interested in going a little bit deeper, you can always go into a back catalog of sermons on our website or on uh on our podcast and uh listen through the uh series we did on the sermon uh sermons through the book of Galatians here.

But Paul's writing this letter to a church that is experiencing considerable division and uh tensions.

Tensions between uh you might call them um uh folks of of a sort of religiosity persuasion, who would say that uh, you know, in order to please God, you need to do all the things that God commands.

I mean, that's pretty intuitive.

And then others who are coming in who uh don't have a Jewish background and don't have a background in the Old Testament, uh, who are being told it's it's uh required of you to conform yourself in every way to all the practices of the Old Testament if you're going to be a Christian.

And so now you have this tension between uh religiosity and what you might call irreligion, this sort of sensed freedom that I don't have to conform to uh any of the commands of Scripture.

So, in the midst of this conflict and tensions and divisions within the life of this particular church, what is it that Paul uh wants this church to understand as he begins to conclude his letter?

He wants this church to understand that when a church does the gospel, when this Galatian church does the gospel, when new song does the gospel, it looks like serving one another.

And why do we serve one another?

In this short section, we see three important qualifications why it's so important that we endeavor committedly to serve one another.

Verse 13, when we serve one another, we find true liberty.

When we serve one another, we find active love, verse 14 and verse 15.

When we serve one another, it protects us and it protects the church from being laid waste.

Liberty loved and protects against being laid waste.

And friends, I'm, you know, this is not just a first century problem, is it?

Some of us know the ugliness of a church that's divided and factionalized and all these sorts of things.

And so I can't help but think that this word to us here at New Song is just as important, just as powerful as it was to the Galatian church that was first reading it.

So let's understand what it means to do the gospel?

It looks like serving one another, because serving is true liberty.

Pull out your Bibles if you were, pull out your order of service, and let's go through these three verses together.

Serving is true liberty.

Verse 13, you, that's plural, church, were called to be free, brothers and sisters.

Only don't use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love.

You are called to be free, brothers and sisters, is what Paul is saying.

Free from what is the question.

And what Paul is writing in his letter to the Galatians, of course, is that we are free from religiosity.

We're free from uh this sensed obligation that to please God or to be in a right standing with God, I have to fulfill uh all of the requirements of God's law.

Let me put it this way: we are freed from self-righteousness, that sense that I have to do everything it takes to merit my own salvation.

Because when I adopt that mindset, I start expecting it of others, don't I?

And I start looking around at others and judging them accordingly.

That's what ends up happening, isn't it?

We're freed from that sort of thinking by the gospel.

The gospel is this that Christ set us free.

That's chapter 5, verse 1.

In Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision accomplishes anything.

What matters is faith working through love.

That's what Paul writes in chapter 5, verse 6.

He uses this word circumcision as a kind of synectity to this small thing that indicates the whole law of God.

It's like an indicator, it points past itself.

So we're freed from this religiosity sensed thinking, this drive towards self-righteousness of earning it before God.

And why is that?

Pardon me, we're freed from religiosity only, Paul warns us, don't use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh.

And we've got to be very mindful what Paul is talking about when he talks about the flesh here.

He's not talking about, you know, body and bone here.

The Bible affirms that our bodies are a very good thing created by God and will be raised in the last day to everlasting life.

Paul is using this word flesh as more of a theological term.

He's indicating that corrupted sin nature that resides in us like a cancer and eats away at our humanity and eats away at the image of God that we bear.

The flesh is all of our sinful desires that contradict God's best will for us.

So you're free from religiosity, Paul says, but you're not free to indulge all of your sinful desires that run contrary to God's will.

Rather, you are set free to serve your neighbor in love.

Did you see that at the end of verse 13?

But serve one another through love.

This word serve, you could other English translations might say something like, be a slave to one another.

Like it's extreme language.

Compete for the lowest job and support one another, come under one another for the sake of each other.

That's what Paul is saying here.

It's a bit of a paradox, isn't it?

Serving is the way to true liberty.

And it sort of turns on its head that maybe modern assumption that freedom looks like more and more autonomy.

Freedom looks like more and more a sense of self-determination.

And I get to decide what I'm going to do for my life, and I'm going to decide what's right and wrong for me.

And the more constrictions I experience, the less freedom I experience.

So if I can shuck all of those external circumstances or expectations or obligations away from me, then I'm going to increase my freedom more and more and more.

And Paul says, in fact, the opposite is true.

In fact, the more we're willing to come under one another, serve one another, be slaves for one another's sake, the more freedom in Christ we experience because we are being set free from the corruption of sin at work within us.

Let me give you one example of this.

I was been reading on and off Augustine's Confessions.

Maybe some of you guys have read that very classic work of our Christian heritage here.

Augustine was, if you know Augustine, you know he's one of the most significant, influential thinkers in the church in its history.

He lived and was a bishop in probably the early 5th century or something like that in Northern Africa.

And Augustine is basically writing his spiritual autobiography.

How is it that he came from this life of just absolute licentiousness and debauchery all the way to being a minister and a Christian?

And so Augustine is reflecting on his young adulthood as he's wrestling with the faith.

He's not quite a Christian yet, but he knows that Christianity makes a considerable claim on one's life.

It claims everything for Christ.

And so if he's going to become a Christian, he has to lay everything down.

But Augustine has, well, in Augustine's life, let's say, an idol is the idol of lust.

Right?

Augustine lives a life of self-indulgence and gratification.

And he knows that to become a Christian, it means I have to give that up and I have to live a chaste life in the way that God would expect of me.

And so this is Augustine reflecting on this whole situation.

He says, I thought I would be excessively miserable if I couldn't have a woman's arms around me.

I insisted that there was no possible way I could lead a life of celibacy.

For me, the major factor was a relationship as a habit, the habit of temporarily satiating and in the long term insatiable lasciviousness.

Now that's a$5 word there, so.

A habit of satiating, an excessive, inordinate focus on sexual desires, something like that.

And he says, the habit held me violently captive and tortured me.

I had the deadly sweet disease of carnality fastened on me, he says, and kept dragging my chain along.

I was afraid to have it unlocked.

Now, do you see Augustine's language here?

It's so intentional.

Augustine, on the one hand, is afraid to give up this sensed freedom he has to indulge all of his desires.

And yet, reflecting back on that, he's recognizing the desires he has and the pursuit of lust that he has does not deliver on what it's promising.

It's not delivering on a greater freedom.

It's not delivering on an enhanced life.

Instead, it feels like it's something that chains him down.

He feels like he's held captive to it.

Have you ever felt that?

I mean, I don't mean to pick on sex in particular.

It could be greed or it could be ambition, it could be whatever it is, but those, that area of life that we we prize so highly, we pursue it with all we have, and we find it just doesn't deliver.

But we find ourselves in this endless cycle of pursuit and not being satisfied.

This is the cycle that Augustine is caught in.

And that's when he reflects, that's how it was until you, the highest, addressing the Lord, had mercy on our misery, my misery, and came to my aid in marvelous and mysterious ways.

He says, Look, you're here freeing us from our unhappy wandering, setting us firmly on your track, comforting us, and saying, Run the race, I'll carry you.

I'll carry you clear to the end, and even at the end, I'll carry you.

See, reflecting back on this conflicting time in his life, Augustine realizes this whole time I thought this was the path to freedom.

It was a path of self-determination and autonomy, of indulging all my desires, when really the true path of freedom was giving myself over and discovering that God is the one who does the carrying.

He's the one who does the freedom or freeing.

He's the one in whom true liberty is found.

See, the Christian insight is that the path to true liberty, the path to true freedom is not through autonomy, but it's through service.

It's through submission, first and foremost to the Lord, and then to those that the Lord loves.

So the question we might want to ask ourselves is what are we captive to?

We've got to be captive to something.

I think it was the great philosopher Bob Dylan who says, You've got to serve somebody.

It might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.

There is something in our life that is more important than anything else, is it?

And whatever that is, we are held captive to.

And the question is, is that thing delivering on what it promises or not?

The invitation to be a Christian is not to lessen our freedom, but to enhance our freedom through serving.

That's why Paul writes in 1 Corinthians chapter 9, another church in Corinth, the same Apostle Paul writes, Though I am free and belong to no one, I'm not held, I'm not obliged to do anything towards anyone in particular.

1 Corinthians 9 · chapter mention

He says, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible.

And he goes on to say, I have become all things to all people, so that by all possible means I might save some.

I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

See, when we get the gospel, we get that greater freedom comes through service.

Greater freedom comes through serving one another.

And we find that principle that a prayer book talks about that God's service is perfect freedom.

We discover that to be true because God is the one source of service that will truly deliver on what He promises.

Serving becomes the way of true liberty, and when we serve one another, we discover true freedom together.

It frees us from our the shackles of our sin nature.

Okay, I don't mean to belabor that point, but you're following me here, right?

Serving is true liberty.

Serve one another, Paul says, through love.

Did you catch that?

I mean, right there, that locks into what we were talking about last week, and it comes to the next point.

Serving is an active love.

Why do we serve one another?

It is love in action.

This word love we looked at last week, didn't we?

We talked about how this uh love can be conceived as sort of a feeling of intense affection, and that might be true to some degree, but a biblical definition of love, a fuller, deeper biblical definition of love, is something like a commitment to will one another's good in thick and thin, regardless if I feel it or not.

True love is that commitment one to another.

And that's why loving one another is so essential to the gospel.

God is committed to us in Christ.

Therefore, we commit to one another's good, right?

Serving is like putting that principle into action, giving it feet and hands, one towards one another.

It's a commitment toward one another, towards one another's good.

And Paul says verse 13, pardon me, verse 14, the whole law, in fact, is fulfilled in this one statement: love your neighbor as yourself.

When we put love into action, we fulfill the purpose of God's moral standard, of God's commandments for us.

When we love one another, we are performing that thing that is most essential to what it means to be God's people.

We love our neighbor as ourselves.

Love curves us out of ourselves, as it were, and towards one another.

Love says to our neighbor, you matter.

You're worth my time, you're worth my energy, you're worth my effort, you're worth my resources.

Serving is that love put into action.

And so one commentator writes this.

He writes, Paul's main purpose in this verse is clear enough to encourage the kind of selfless, loving service to others that he's already called for in verse 13.

One of the lessons I've learned in my relatively short ministry career so far is never underestimate the significance of a well-timed casserole.

Have you ever received a well-timed casserole?

I can think of one example, and the truth is my memory kind of fails me.

I don't know if I was there exactly for this moment, but I just maybe I just heard the story so many times, so vivid.

I remember when my father-in-law passed and the family was gathered in Ottawa, you know, grieving this loss, there was a knock on the door, and someone was delivering a fruit basket from the church that we were serving at in Texas.

And a fruit basket's just a fruit basket, right?

Except when it's not just a fruit basket.

In that moment, if it's a fruit basket, if it's a casserole, that gesture says, You matter.

I'm in it says, I'm here for you, and I'm here to support you.

Never underestimate the importance of a well-timed casserole.

Whatever that looks like, when we first moved down to here to Port Perry, we had any number of things to sort out.

This is our first time, you know, taking care of a lawn or uh, you know, having a driveway to handle.

So, you know, first winter, we're like, what do we do when we get 40 centimeters of snow?

And more than once did we wake up, and if you know where we live, you know we had some great neighbors.

And more than once did we wake up and discover our driveway was already freshly snowblown.

Stuff like that says to Rachel and I, you matter and you're loved.

Do you see what I mean?

When we serve, we are putting love into action.

And when I look at our ministry schedule here, on the one hand, I know this goes out every couple of months, and yeah, these jobs need to get done, and it's easy to just feel like, well, this is just another box to check a little bit.

Really, when we look at this, we see the story of those of us who are willing to say, this church matters, my church family matters.

It's worth my time, it's worth my energy, it's worth my effort.

And your name doesn't have to be on this ministry schedule to be saying that.

There are any number of ways that folks are serving, folding bulletins and taking care of the property, and just so many parts of being a church family that we handle together.

But when we serve one another in whatever way we serve one another, we are saying you matter and you're loved.

And that's the commitment, isn't it?

To love through serving on Sunday morning and beyond.

I mean, I was amazed by the success we had at the farmer's market last summer, and we're planning to go back to the farmer's market with our little news song table and be able to say to our community, here's the things that we're up to to try and bless and provide for those in need.

And it's amazing to see the response.

Folks who are heartened by a church that takes seriously that call to love and serve our neighbor, when we take these actions, we are concretely saying that our community matters.

And when we take these actions one towards one another, we say, you matter.

Serving is not an option for us Christians, is it?

It's the most concrete way we can show love one towards another.

Serving is active love.

It's true liberty, it's love in action.

Tracking with me so far?

Paul also makes a third and really important point, and it's a point by contrast.

Serving does these two positive things.

We experience a true freedom from our corruption of sin.

We experience an act of love one towards one another, but it also protects us.

Serving protects us and our church family against that state of being laid.

Waste, being laid waste.

It protects us against being laid waste.

Did you notice that in verse 15?

But if you bite and devour one another, watch out, or you will be consumed by one another.

Bite and devour is like animal language.

It's predatory language.

It's usually connected with a snake in Scripture.

To bite and devour one another is it's like a base nature, a dehumanization.

And biting and devouring one another, at least in this context in Galatians, I suspect, is that insistence on getting my way, on seeing my agenda move forward at the expense of yours.

We bite and devour one another when we see each other not so much as someone to be loved and served, but someone to be competed with.

That happens in the church sometimes, doesn't it?

If we're not careful, Paul says, we can be consumed, or other translations might say destroyed.

We can be laid waste.

And the good thing that the church could have been gets completely disintegrated.

There's any number of tragic stories I could tell, and those I've done my best to walk with at a distance through some version of church collapse because some agenda is just so important that we can't let go of it.

The church factionalizes and competes one with one another.

And I gotta say, new song, I'm not saying this because I'm worried about us.

I am so thankful for our church family.

I'm so thankful that I see us showing up for each other and being present with one another and walking with one another through the hard times.

It heartens me to see as a pastor.

And Rachel and I have experienced that as well, and we're so thankful for it.

My point is not I'm worried about us.

My point is we are not immune from this.

And we always need to bear that in mind.

Serving in the good times cultivates and practices that attitude of you matter.

You matter for Christ's sake.

And it cultivates an attitude not of what can does the church need to do for me, but what do I need to do for the church?

What ought I do for the church for Christ's sake?

And if we can cultivate that attitude in the good times, it will serve to integrate us in the hard times.

Do you see how that works?

Be careful.

If you bite and devour one another, you can be consumed by one another.

Serving protects us against a church being laid waste because serving is greater liberty, true liberty, and serving is an active sort of love.

So you can see how serving one towards one another, putting love into action this way, guards against all sorts of dangers.

Guards against a self-righteous attitude because really we're saying you matter, not me.

It guards against irreligion as if we don't, we're not obliged one towards one another to serve one another.

It guards us against all sorts of gutters and dangers.

But serving reminds us of the most essential part of the gospel, and the gospel is this that Christ came not to be served, but to serve.

Let me just land here for a moment in Mark chapter 10.

Mark 10 · chapter mention

Jesus is describing the sort of leadership he expects from his disciples, but the sort of leadership that he models, he says, Whoever wants to become great among you will be your servant.

You won't compete for the number one job, you'll compete to serve one another.

And whoever wants to be first among you will be slave to all.

Why?

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Friends, what a wonderful thing, what an amazing thing it is to be a Christian.

Because to be a Christian is to recognize that God's heart of hearts does not look at us and say, Well, how have they loved and served me lately?

But his heart of hearts looks at us and says, How can I love and serve them?

That's the cross, isn't it?

Doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

That's the promise of the resurrection and Christ's return.

God delights to love and serve us.

That's who He is.

What an amazing thing it is to be a Christian.

Does that not inspire us, therefore, to love and serve one another?

Those that God deems worthy of his love and service?

Look around, and you're looking at folks who God designs to love and serve.

That's our opportunity when we gather on Sundays, when we gather during the week, when we show up with a well-timed casserole, we are saying, you matter.

And we endeavor to put that love into practice.

So, New Song, if we desire true liberty, if we desire to put love into action, if we desire to be protected against being laid waste by the insistence of our own agendas or factionalism, then we serve one another.

Because a church that puts the gospel into practice serves one another.

Amen.

We hope that you've been blessed by God's Word today.

If you live in the Port Perry area, we hope that you'll come and worship with us in person on Sunday at 10 a.m.

If you'd like to learn more about Newsong Church, we'd love to connect with you.

Please find our contact information at newsongportperry.ca and reach out to us.

Newsong's ministry is entirely funded by the generous giving of those who worship and journey with us.

If you feel called to support our ministry with a financial gift, please go to newsongportperry.ca slash giving to make your contribution.

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.