Galatians: Don't Settle for Less Than the Gospel (4:1-20)

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I mean that as long as you child is no different than the same.

But he is under guardians and managers until the days and his father.

In the same way we also children and enslaved elementary principles of the law.

But when the forest of the time had come, God sent forth his son, born, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts from Adam, God.

So you are no longer a slave or a son.

And if a son, then an heir to God.

For when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not God.

Now that you have come to know God, together, to be long by God, have to turn back again to the weak and worthless adamanting personnel such a world.

Today you want to be once more.

You observe days and months and seasons and years.

I am afraid I may have labored over you in vain.

Brothers, I entreat you, become as I am, for I also have become as you are.

You did me no wrong.

You know it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first.

And though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus.

What then has become of your blessedness?

For I testify to you that if possible, you would have gouged out your eyes and given them to me.

Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth?

They make much of you, but for no good purpose.

They want to shut you out.

That you may make much of them.

It is always good to be made much of for a good purpose.

And when I am present with you, my little child, for who I am again, in the anguish of a childhood, until Christ is born in you.

I wish I would be present with you now and change my tone.

For I am perplexed by you.

The word of the Lord.

So you are no longer a slave, but a son.

And if a son, then an heir through it in prayer.

Lord Jesus, our hearts are often fickle and burdened.

We are often tempted to choose to earn it and to respect it.

And so, Lord, I pray that you would speak to us through your word by your Holy Spirit, that you would once again introduce us to your unfathomably generous heart towards us.

It's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

I thought pretty ambitious, uh, with a quote from one of my favorite theology books that I thought I might do the same this week.

But I've got to say, as a pastor, I was so encouraged by how you tracked with it, you hung in there, and that that uh idea that we are made sons and daughters of God by grace just resonated.

So I want to share another quote that has that's had a real impact on me in my life of faith, in my education, something that's resonated through the church.

This is uh uh from a work called The Institutes of the Christian Divide, or church reformer in the 16th century named John Calvin, probably you know, second only to Martin Luther in terms of his importance to the Reformation.

And this is just volume one of two, by the way.

And Calvin wants to cover um wants to cover the whole of Christian doctrine and proclaim Christ.

Show us the gospel, Christians believe.

Here's how he introduces this enormous and enormously influential book.

Uh, this is quite a famous quote and cause for much meditation here, so I want to share it with you.

This is paragraph one of the Institutes of the Christian Religion.

What's this?

He writes Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts.

So anything he's got to share with us, any wisdom he's got to share, has two parts to it.

What do you think those two parts are?

What do you want to guess?

Here's what Captain says Number one, knowledge of God.

Number two, knowledge of ourselves.

All of wisdom boils down to those two things.

Knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves.

This is what he goes on to write.

But while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth from the other, it's not easy to discern.

For quite clearly, the mighty gifts of God with which we are endowed are hardly ourselves.

Indeed, our very being is nothing but subsistence in the body.

So, what's Kylan trying to say here?

All wisdom boils down to knowledge of God, but one depends upon the other.

Now, in our moment in culture, coming through the academic and intellectual trends of the last century, we would largely assume that our knowledge of God depends on our knowledge of self.

That one.

If we understand who we are, then we get to say with who God is.

Does that make sense?

Maybe some existentialists or whatever kind of come to mind, right?

Calvin wants to say, actually, what's been true for all of human history, what's been true for all of our wisdom, is if we understand who God is, then we come to a right understanding of who we are.

If I want to know who I am, I first need to inquire after who God is.

And that makes sense, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, I think.

If we hold, if the most basic fact that we hold to is that human beings are created in the image of God, then does it make sense that we need to understand the God who created us in his image to understand we are?

And this is why we have God's Word Sunday for Sunday.

Not just because we want to learn to rest in fact about the Bible.

We want to understand who we are by understanding who God is.

I think this is the point that Paul's trying to make.

In fact, I think Paul's trying to make the point that not only if we understand who God is, we'll understand who we are.

The opposite is also true.

If we misunderstand who God is, we're only going to misunderstand who we are.

You see how that works?

This is what he wants the Galatian Christians to understand.

Galatian Christians were pastored by Paul.

We read a little bit about his mystery in our text this morning.

He planted this church, and then off to the next missionary mission.

In the meantime, a bunch of self-born, self-appointed teachers came in and basically reset the Galatian church to their own spiritual intuitions, their best ideas about how to please God.

You know, believe in Jesus, that's a good thing.

Really you've got to earn it by doing all the right things, right?

We explored that a little bit last week.

To this situation, Paul wants to say, if we misunderstand who God is, what he requires of us, what he expects of us, then we will only misunderstand who we are.

We won't understand our identity right.

Do we have a God who demands or a God who supplies?

That's the question here.

Verse 17 uh God gave the inheritance to Abraham by promise.

That's what Paul says.

God's grace, we talked about last week, comes to us promised, not by our obedience to the law.

It's not something that we earn, it's something that we create or receive, which then inspires our obedience, right?

You see the order there?

Now in chapter 4, verses 1 and 20, Paul wants to explain this question.

If God's grace is supplied, it's not earned by the law, it's supplied us, then what does that mean for who we are?

And here's what Paul wants us to understand.

The gospel finds us as slaves and frees us to be sons.

The gospel finds us as slaves and frees us to be sons and daughters, children of the Most High God, the loving Heavenly Father.

So Paul's appeal, based on that point, is don't settle, Christians, for less than the gospel.

Because you'll only end up being slaves.

Don't settle for less.

Be children of God through the gospel.

That's what Paul wants us to understand.

And the importance of this, I don't think, you can understate.

One Bible teacher named C.

Our sonship to God is the apex of creation and the goal of redemption.

If we want to understand the goal of God's purposes in the world, we need to understand who we are by understanding who God is.

See how that works?

Let's see if we can do a little bit of that this morning.

The gospel finds us as slaves and frees us to be sons and daughters.

I want to back up just a little bit.

Let me invite you to open up your order of service, your Bible, to Galatians chapter 4, but I do want to just back up a little bit because we need to bear in mind that Paul is writing a letter here.

Galatians 4 · chapter mention

And I imagine none of us read a letter in that we read a portion of the text one week and then we get back to the letter the next week to read the next portion and then the next portion.

When we receive a letter from a loved one, we want to read that sucker from start to finish up, right?

Now, what we're doing here, I think, is very legitimate.

We want to get the most out of each and every portion, portion for portion.

But we should remember Paul is writing a letter.

He's got a main point.

His thought didn't discontinue last week when he's on the new thought this week.

We should track with the point that he's trying to make.

The point that he's trying to make is found in chapter 3, start in verse 24 here.

Once I get my uh I'll tell you what, while I'm a little Bible, does someone have Galatians 3, 24 to 29 open?

Can you read it for us?

24 to 29.

So then the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.

But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.

For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God.

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

And if Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.

So key, so, so key.

Might be the beaker of Paul's letter to the Galatians here.

In Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God through faith.

Who are we?

We've got to understand who God is in Christ, don't we?

Look at Paul's language here.

In Christ Jesus, baptized into Christ, put on Christ, one in Christ Jesus, you are Christ's.

All of this being true, you then are heirs to God's inheritance, his blessing, his grace, his salvation, everything that we could love and enjoy.

That belongs to us by virtue of Christ.

Not by virtue of our beings.

So key that we understand this.

And this is what Paul wants to develop in our past.

Paul's point is that the gospel makes the difference between slavery and sonship.

So let's look at the first three verses of chapter four here.

Paul wants to offer as an illustration from the idea of the adoption as a tongue of this Roman context, versus Roman Empire context.

But the point is that we're made the child.

So verses one and two here, Paul says, I mean that the heir, as he's a child, is no different from the slave, though he is the owner of everything.

But he is under guard as managers until the date set by his father.

So how do we understand the difference between identity in Christ and our identity found in the law?

Functionally, Paul says, slaves and sons, when they are not yet of age, are functionally the same.

They don't enjoy the inheritance, the treasure, the fortune that might belong to them one day.

They're both functionally, you know, on the same social status, let's put it that way.

So one example might be this.

If you've read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, you know Pip, the main character.

Raised in poverty, uh, you know, apprenticed to be a blacksmith, so not a lot of social mobility there, except that seemingly out of nowhere, he is made the beneficiary of this enormous fortune.

And the big plot twist is who exactly made him the beneficiary there.

This large fortune suddenly makes Pip, who comes of age, uh, you know, able to London to start living a gentlemanly life, to start working his way up the social chain and learn all these different moral lessons, etc., etc.

But the point is this Pip had this in his waiting for him until he came of age.

Until he came of age, it didn't, I mean, he was of the same social status as all of his blacksmith apprentices, right?

He comes of age, he gets the inheritance.

And Paul is saying that living under the like that, it's a lot like not yet being of age.

You're under a guardian, you're under a manager, you know, you're being supervised, so to speak.

But the fortune is not yet yours.

To come of age is to inherit the fortune, Paul says in chapter, or pardon me, verse 3.

Before the promise, early in salvation history, before Christ, we are children.

That is, we're enslaved to the elementary principles of this.

So Paul's saying, really, we're enslaved to the basics.

For Jewish Christians, that looked like obedience to God's law.

If I do the do's and don't the don'ts, then I'm gonna earn God.

For Gentile converts to Christianity in the Galatian Church, that looked like if I teach all the right principles of my religion of origin, then I'm gonna make it hurry the favor of the gods, etc., etc., right?

Or maybe it's a rejection of religion at all, I'm gonna be part of my own life, I'm gonna set my own throne, and dictate for myself, thank you very much, what's good for me and what's bad.

See what I mean?

All of that, though, we should notice, lends itself to identity.

This is what this means for identity.

Who we are is what we do.

In both of those cases, do you see that?

Who we are, whether we set ourselves on obeying God's law or any self-determined law, who we are is contingent on how well we perform, what we do.

That, Paul says, fundamentally, is the identity of a slave.

Who you are is what you do.

That's pretty inescapable.

And if we have a highest principle, an ultimate concern, something that is more important to us than anything else, then to that thing, we become a slave.

Some slavery is more self-destructive than others.

If that most important thing is life is narcotics, then we're gonna see life spiral out of control very, very quickly.

Sometimes those things are a little subtle.

Maybe it's our career, maybe it's money, maybe it's sex.

When we make these things the ultimate concern, we suddenly become the slave of them because we need more, we need better.

You see how that works?

Our God starts to make demands of us that we have to keep.

That can be true, even as Christians.

We can set ourselves to earn God's approval by, let's say, our commitment to Bible reading.

And if I miss my Bible reading on a given warning and I get hit by a bus, boy, iris, or something like that.

I don't know where I'm gonna end up.

Well, suddenly we've turned a good thing, spending time in God's words, into something that something into which we're enslaved.

Right?

Who I am is what I do.

That's the identity of a slave, Paul wants us to understand.

Apart from God's grace, we are slaves, whether that's religion or irology.

Only by God's grace do we become heirs.

Only by God's grace do we receive the benefits of Christ, not as something we've earned, as something we've received.

That's what Paul wants us to understand with this adoption, well, uh heritants kind of metaphor, right?

We need to come of age.

We need to receive the gift freely given to us.

And that is that we're gonna earn the gift by being slaves.

Right?

Okay, good.

Important, we're gonna carry it moving forward, right?

I'm glad we're together here.

Okay, how does that work?

We want to ask Paul.

How does this work that we receive this great benefit?

Well, Paul says two ways through the Son.

We receive God's grace, we receive the adoption, and it's an inheritance of God through Christ the Son.

And that's an objective, uh that's an objective uh thing that's been done to us by God in Christ.

Here's what I mean.

Verse 4.

When the fullness of time had come, writes, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeems who are under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

Fullness of time had come at God's right timing.

When he providentially worked all things in history to bring the world exactly in the right way in the right time, the maturing, the flowering of salvation for the fullness of time.

Right at the right time, this great exchange took place.

Paul wants us to understand the exchange that took place.

The Son of God became human under God's law, just like us.

So that we, who are subject to God's law, can by grace become sons of God.

See how that works?

Jesus took what's ours, can have what's his.

That's the gospel message here.

It's an exchange, not something we earn, something we receive.

Now, I suspect many of us are wondering a very little have a very legitimate question in mind, legitimate rejection.

What deal with sons?

Isn't that just too androcentric?

Isn't that just too patriarchal to have any real substance or meaning for our moment?

What's that about?

Well, again, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago.

What we see running through Galatians, what we see through the whole of Scripture, we see the elevation and dignity of women being upheld.

I think is doing the same here.

Before we, I mean, what we do is we run scripture through our knee rig, and we might include boy, this is just seems to be completely excluding women from the infant sort of benefits of Christ.

But actually, Paul's point is quite the opposite.

Let's remember in verse 28, Paul reminds us that there's neither male nor female.

We both are common inheritors of the gospel of race, right?

We both stand on level uh level, let's say, before the cross.

What Paul is trying to uh draw from is the context of the Roman inheritance system.

And we need to bear in mind that in Paul's day, only sons stood to inherit the fortune of the family.

Only sons did that.

Now, for complicated reasons, that was done for the good of the whole family, but only sons stood to inherit.

Daughters really didn't have a hope to inherit fortune.

So when Paul is describing us being adopted as sons, receiving the inheritance as sons, that's an inclusive idea.

That's saying men and women alike in Christ stand to receive the whole inheritance of Christ, grace and salvation and the kingdom.

Everything that belongs with Christ, that makes Christ lovely, makes God enjoyable, and makes us long for eternity with him, all of those things belong to us.

Because we are common inheritors of Christ.

Our inheritance system does not work that way, it doesn't discriminate in that way.

But Paul's does.

And what he wants men and women to understand is that we are both common inheritors of the gospel of grace.

So here's one story.

A preacher friend of mine was going through this exact text and was trying to make the right point that we men and women, like alike, stand to inherit the uh benefits of the gospel together.

The phrase he was using.

Sons and daughters, sons and daughters, sons and daughters.

And that's a very legitimate move and right or wrong way to preach the text.

But it was very interesting.

After the sermon, there was a new person who approached them after service and thanked the pastor for the message and had a very thick accent and says to the pastor, says, Pastor, why you said?

You know, we received the spirit of sons and daughters and etc.

But you need to understand that in my country of origin, Christianity is a minority religion.

And the majority religion takes a very low view of women.

And when I was getting to this, and I discovered in God's word that women stand to inherit the inheritance of men, that for me was a liberating thought.

So sometimes we be conscious of our own Canadian grid, don't we, when we read scripture.

This young woman's grid was a lot of Paul's own day.

And she recognized in this that's what we're supposed to recognize.

This is the end, this is elevate.

For men and women alike, we are caught up in this gospel mystery to inherit the kingdom together.

That's a bit of an aside here, but here's Paul's point.

Paul's point is that God fulfills what he require of human beings through Christ, who became a human being and therefore frees us to enjoy the benefits of being his children, to be God's beloved children.

This is not just being a son or a daughter in a general way.

You know, kind of the Acts 17, we are all offspring of God.

You know, we can talk that way.

This is a very particular kind of covenantal childhood, childlike relationship.

This is knowing God intimately as our heavenly Father, who loves us, who cares for us, who knows us.

This is the work of Christ.

Through the cross, through the resurrection, through his ascension, through his promise to come again, all of these things have been done to draw us into the life of God so that we can know the love of the Father through the Son as sons and daughters ourselves.

All of everything that Christ has done for us has been done to objectively bind us to God's promise.

It's something that's happened to us from without.

It's not something we've generated from within.

Do you see the difference?

So when we look at the cross, when we remember the resurrection, when we come to the Lord's table and we hear, this is my body given for you, my blood shed for you, these are objective reminders that God loves you.

These are objective reminders that this is what's been done for you in Christ.

That's what it's by grace that we are who we are.

We are not what we do, we are what God had for us in Christ.

That's grace.

What Christ is for us is objective.

There's a second work of God, and it's a subjective and experiential kind of work through the Spirit, verse 6.

Because you are sons, God has sent the Son into our hearts, crying, Adam, Father.

God sent the Son into the world, in a similar way, God sent the Spirit into our hearts.

This is the core of our being.

Infused with God's divine life, partakers of the divine nature is what Peter, uh how Peter puts it in 2 Peter.

The Holy Spirit infuses our being with the life and love of God, and from the depths of our being cries out, Abba, Father.

Nothing to do with the band, by the way, and who secretly love Abba, don't tell me.

Abba is an Aramaic term, which is our equivalent of daddy, right?

It's a term of child intimacy and dependence.

It's not a distant and disinterested Victorian father.

It's a loving and generous and gracious and delighted father who meets us.

That's what the Holy Spirit witnesses.

Christ's work is outside of us, the Spirit's work is within us, assuring us that we are children by grace.

So the gospel finds us as slaves and frees us, sons and daughters, and we look at the objective work of God in Christ and the subjective work of the Spirit, and we recognize this to be true.

We need both the objective and subjective to draw us into the life and love of God, don't we?

Sometimes we need objective minders.

When the feelings just won't come, because sometimes the feelings don't come, and we're trying to feel like we love God, and we're trying to feel the joy of the Lord.

Sometimes what we need is not to look for assurance of the gospel inside, we need to look outside.

We need to look at us and remember what God's done for us.

We need to come to the Lord's table and receive his gifts, and we need to be reminded that Christ's body was broken for me.

He does love me.

I am a child of God.

But if all we have is that intellectual understanding of ourselves as children of God, then we miss that inner joy and delight and comfort and assurance the Holy Spirit works within us.

I know for many of us the music here is that stirs our hearts and gives us a chance to express our joy, but sometimes it stirs joy within us.

I think the Holy Spirit is at work.

When we couple the objective work of God in Christ with the subjective work of the Spirit within us, right there is our identity as children of God, right?

We need both working together.

But the work of the Spirit is done internally to us and consists in us completely moved emotionally as well as intellectually by the love of the Father.

The work of the Son and the Spirit should never be divorced, not one made to obscure.

The gifts of the Son are enjoyed as we look to the Spirit to guide us.

So joy is experienced for the Spirit.

And something like the sacraments, the cross, the resurrection are our objective reminders that God has done for us that we could not do for ourselves.

We need both.

Is that gospel comfort?

If we understand this.

If we understand that what God has done for us in Christ, and there's witness to within us by his Holy Spirit, is that we are children of God by grace, then we can understand the appeal that Paul makes for the rest of the passage.

It's kind of a minor note, isn't it?

Paul is bearing.

He's kind of at wit's end, isn't he?

I just want to touch on this briefly.

If we can understand Paul's main point that the gospel finds us as slaves and only the gospel frees us to be sons and daughters, then we understand the anguish Paul feels after for this congregation that has substituted the good news of God's grace for this idea that he can earn it by trying hard enough.

Becoming slaves.

Paul says, how can you turn from sonship back to slaves?

Verses 8 to 11.

You'd rather endlessly work for God's approval than simply be known by God, your Heavenly Father.

If you've misunderstood God, Galatians, you've misunderstood yourselves.

The troubling things so often do the same, don't we?

So often we set our hearts on things which are not God, and we expect them to supply what only God does through his gospel.

And when we do, we can find ourselves prideful or we can find ourselves anxious, or some combination of the two, or much, much more.

But we don't have that gospel assurance.

We keep coming back to the simple reality that God has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves in Christ and has adopted us by grace.

Friends, I think this is what the general confession is all about.

This is something we do Sunday for Sunday for Sunday, isn't it?

We confess to God that we've sinned in thought, word, and deed, etc.

Sometimes that can feel like a slavish appeasement of a taskmaster of God.

Here's all the way I screwed up this week.

Boy, I hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive me.

I'll do better this week.

Sometimes that's what it can feel, can't it?

If we understand that our identity is not slaves but sons, suddenly the general confession becomes our opportunity to remind ourselves of God's love and generosity towards us.

And this is our opportunity to say to God, I have settled for so much less in all these ways, and I want to know your fatherly embrace once again.

And that's the generous heart of God in Christ.

He will always meet us with that grace and forgiveness.

And we know that comfortable words are meant to reinforce that reality.

That God's heart is for us and not against us.

This becomes an exercise, not in slavish appeasement, but in childlike tendence.

Abba, Father, is what we're crying at.

You turn your back from back on sonship and back to slavery.

When you understand how precious a thing sonship is by grace, how can we choose anything else?

And Paul asks verse 12 to 20, why are you treating me now like your enemy?

Galatians, when I showed up, even though I showed up under difficult circumstances, I was quite ill, and you are taking care of me.

I've sworn you took care of me as such grace and generosity.

It was like the Lord Jesus Himself was caring for me.

What's happened?

Where did your blessedness go?

You treated me with grace, and now you're treating me like I'm your enemy.

And it's not as though Paul doesn't know the answer, the answer.

He knows that when we choose slavery over sonship, we will only be hostile to the idea of grace.

Because if I am what I do, then I have to be hostile to the idea that I am what I receive.

If we choose one, we will end up rejecting the other.

Paul knows the Galatians have made a disastrous choice.

But it is not too late to recover the treasure of the gospel that is freely theirs.

And friends, it's for us to recover that either.

It's never too late for us to turn away from that.

Here's all the things I'm trying to do, to be the best kind of Christian, to be the best kind of person, and simply receive the gift of being God's son, his daughters, simply because God loves you and has given himself for you.

And will send his Spirit to you to cry out of Father.

Don't settle for less than the gospel.

Only the gospel finds our graves and frees us to be sons and daughters of our gracious Heavenly Father.

When we say we're a gospel-centered church, it's this reality we want to bear witness to.

We are daughters by grace.

Well loved by our Heavenly Father.

And friends, don't you think that's what our community needs to hear?

If we rightly understand God, not as our taskmaster, but as our Father in Christ, through the Spirit, we will rightly understand God.

His well-loved children by grace.

And there is no more secure place to be than God's children by grace.

Thank you for listening today.

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