Galatians 4:1–11 — No Turning Back

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This message is from Galatians chapter 4 verses 1 through 11 and is entitled "No Turning Back."

Galatians 4:1–11

It was delivered to Ecclesia churches on March 23, 2025.

So up to this point, we've had a lesson from Paul in redemptive history, that is, God's plan to save us.

And Paul took us from the promise made to Abraham, through the law given to Moses,

and our redefinition not as ethnic Jews, not as perfect law followers, but as sons of God in Jesus Christ.

And we obtained this title of "Sons of God through the work of the Son of God," a title that's exclusive to Jesus.

Verse 29 of chapter 3 says, "And if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise."

So just to clarify, an heir is the person who receives the inheritance, or all that was passed down to them by the Father.

Now Paul is turning a bit from the Jewish believers to the Gentile believers.

You'll notice that his language starts to change a little bit in chapter 4, and there are fewer references to Jewish figures and titles and laws.

However, the main thrust of chapter 4 is for all.

It's for the Gentiles and the Jews, and it's this.

Paul wants to help us see the freedom of our new identity as sons of God in Christ,

and urge us never to look back to the slavery we once lived in without Christ.

So it's this transition to sons from slaves.

And so let's go ahead and read together Galatians chapter 4, verses 1 through 11.

Galatians 4:1–11

"I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything,

but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father.

In the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, 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, crying, "Abba, Father!"

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

And if a son, then an heir through God.

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods,

but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God,

how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world,

who slaves 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."

So let's begin with those first three verses, talking about the heir and children.

In both Jewish and Roman households, children really weren't thought of very highly,

which is part of what makes the comments of Jesus about children so notable in the Gospels.

It really was a surprising thing when Jesus commanded his disciples to let the little children come to me.

Children were valued because they would one day become heirs,

and they would one day be married, and they would one day carry on the family name,

but their value was really understood in terms of what they would become, not what they were at that moment.

And so Jesus was, and is, pretty counter-cultural in his attitude toward children,

because he valued them for who they are, not for what they could do.

Even, he even said that the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these, referring to children.

Why?

Because children understood one thing better than any adult by their very nature.

They understood dependence.

They had not learned to depend on themselves yet.

Where adults tend to struggle with self-righteousness when it comes to salvation,

children have a lot less trouble with the idea of depending on Christ for salvation.

But the flip side of that is that as a child, you really are not in control of your own destiny in any meaningful way,

which is what Paul is getting at here, right?

Even the heir to a kingdom, the crown prince, even though he technically owns everything,

he's still limited in his freedom as a child.

Think about the life of a baby.

You eat what you're given when you're given it, for the most part.

You literally sleep in a bed with bars and play in a little baby jail that we call a playpen, right?

You have no control over what happens in your world.

But even more so on the inside, you don't have any control over yourself.

If you're upset, you cry.

If you're hungry, you cry.

Mom takes your toy, you slap, and then dad yells at you for slapping your mother, and you cry, right?

This is the kind of enslavement that Paul is getting at in verses one through three.

He's saying, "In a lot of ways, a child is enslaved, and we were a lot like that before Christ.

We did what we felt like.

We sinned without thought of consequence.

We were enslaved to our own desires and selfishness."

Best case scenario, we had a guardian, which is what Paul calls the law, that at least kept us in check.

But it didn't do anything to curb those internal desires and enslavement to them.

This reference that he makes to the elementary principles of the world is a reference to a philosophy,

which isn't all that different, actually, from some new age religious ideas today,

that you are naturally born with the right desires.

He's kind of poking fun at that a little bit.

The idea that somehow you would be better off by getting back to your true self,

that is the self that only recognized your base desires.

I can tell you as a father of five kids that maturing is a good thing,

and according to both scripture and my personal experience, you are not born with good desires.

So Paul's talking about the basic way the world teaches us to live.

Like, just do what feels right and follow your heart,

but that kind of thinking doesn't actually set you free.

It traps you.

The Greeks and the Jews in the first century would have understood that also,

and both cultures had ceremonies that would have recognized a coming of age

and entrance into the freedom and responsibility of adulthood.

For Jews, it would have been the Bar Mitzvah and the Bat Mitzvah,

in which the child was considered an adult in the community.

Roman youths would have gone through a ceremony in which they would remove a crimson-bordered garment

that signified childhood, and they would put on the adult toga,

making them or marking them as a man.

So for Christians, there's this expectation of maturity of behavior,

not to our flesh, but to Christ.

It should not come as a surprise that while we participate in this work,

it is God who brings it about through the work of Christ.

So while we were slaves, God didn't leave us there.

Right? How do we become sons of God?

Verse 4 gets into that.

He says, "But when the fullness of time had come,

God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law,

to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons."

Let's talk about each part of that, because Paul is giving us this packed statement full of details,

these parts of the process for a reason.

A lot of questions and frankly a lot of heresies that are still present today,

which is untruths about God,

are going to be answered in this short little two verse statement.

So let's work it through one bit at a time.

When the fullness of time had come, it's saying,

"God set this whole thing up beforehand.

God knew what was going to happen.

All that happened, He allowed to happen for His purposes.

Nothing happens outside of His permission for it to unfold as He sees fit."

It doesn't say, "God had to wait for His time," or "bide His time" until the right moment, right?

It says, "When the fullness of time had come," said another way,

"When everything had played out the way God ordained it to happen, God sent forth His Son."

His timeline, His perfect timing, His Son.

Not one of His sons, not an angel, right? Not a prophet, His Son.

But specified, He says, "Born of a woman."

Why does Paul say that? He says it because Jesus was fully man.

He wasn't just appearing as a man, as some people had said.

He wasn't just stepping onto earth as a vision, right?

It says, "He was born of a woman," meaning He was fully human.

Just as important, He was born under the law.

Okay, He's not only entered into time and space as a man, with all of man's limitations,

He also came under the law.

The difference was, this was one man who could live up to the perfect standard required of the law.

The only man able to live out a perfect life satisfying the law.

But we also know, He didn't just do that to set an example, or to show that it could be done.

In verse 5, He says, "He did this specifically to redeem or to buy back,

to save those who were under the law."

That's us, right?

So that we might not only be saved from the curse of the impossible to satisfy law,

but ultimately to be adopted as sons of God.

Okay, I told you, this section is packed. Let me just restate those two verses as a paraphrase.

When everything in God's plan had played out,

God sent His only Son to become a man by being born as one through Mary.

As a man, He was born under the same expectation of God's perfection,

but unlike all other people, He was able to live up to that perfection.

He did this not just to set an example, but to die on behalf of all mankind

as the perfect sacrifice in our place,

so that we could die to our sin and be raised into new life as a child of God.

And being a child of God changes everything, right?

Verse 6, He says, "And because you are sons,

God has sent the spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, 'Abba, Father.'

So you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God."

We are not just changed in position to God.

We don't just stand forgiven, though we do.

We stand inhabited and filled by the Spirit of God.

God's Spirit comes in and starts to not just change our actions, but our motivations,

the things that could never be changed by the law.

This says it changes the response of our heart to God.

"We who were once slaves to our sin and enemies of God," Scripture calls us,

"now have our hearts calling out, 'Abba, Father.'"

Notice that the first sign of the Spirit that Paul mentions here

is not signs and wonders.

It's not miracles.

It's not visions or speaking in tongues or anything supernaturally sensational.

It's a turning of our hearts toward God, addressing Him as "Abba."

Okay, a word on "Abba," it's an Arabic word and a familiar one used by children

to refer to their own Father.

I've heard preachers try to translate this as "Daddy," but that isn't quite right,

because it's a term adult children would use as much as small children.

It's an intimate term, but it's not a childish one.

So for an earthly father, if father feels formal and daddy feels awkward past a certain age,

then dad is about as close as we can get.

Nobody else calls me dad, but my children.

That is their exclusive right.

And because of Jesus, we get the privilege of having that same intimate relationship

with our Heavenly Father.

More than just forgiveness, we are able to call Him "Father," and He calls us "Sons."

So before we conclude, Paul has a warning that we would do well to pay attention to.

He's reminded us who we were.

He's told us who we are in Christ, and now he's going to issue a warning about the temptation

to go back.

In verse 8, he says, "Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that,

by nature, are not gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God,

how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world

whose slaves you want to be once more?"

Okay, turning back to your base desires, turning away from God leads you back into slavery.

That's something Paul is worried about because the temptation is real.

And verse 10, he gives us some hints at what those temptations may have looked like.

He says, "You observe days and months and seasons and years."

Now, we must remember the audience here. We must remember the context. Otherwise,

we read that verse alone, and we end up with weird ideas that Paul hates calendars and doesn't

celebrate holidays, and thinks that partaking in either is leading you into the slavery of sin.

Remember, this is a group of people who have grown up, Jews and Gentiles alike,

thinking that their relationship with God, or gods, depended on them performing on all the right

days and months and seasons and years. This is shorthand for talking about their old religion.

For the Jews, the temptation was to integrate back into Jewish feasts and temple practices

and customs as a condition for their salvation. It was more than just a cultural thing to take

part in. It was believing that those things brought them life. You can't add something to faith

as a requirement of salvation if you're not trusting in Christ alone, which is the only way

to be saved. It's Christ alone, or it doesn't work. For the Gentiles, the temptation was to

allow certain previous practices, idols, influences, superstitions, to creep back into their lives.

This area is an idol-rich territory, and there are lots of options for people to turn from Jesus alone,

renouncing their old ties, and turn back, at least in part, to their old practices.

So now that we understand where they were at, I think we can come to look at ourselves. For us,

the temptation could be a mixture of either one of these. If you grew up in a religious and maybe

a legalistic home, your temptation might be to go back to the safety of clear rules and practices

and habits that offered to provide a feeling of holiness on the outside without addressing

what was going on on the inside. I actually think of a friend of mine who left the Orthodox Church

to become Protestant years and years ago, but in the time that I knew him, he went back to the

Orthodox Church because of the allure of all of the external practices for soothing his conscience.

Let's face it, doing heart work with Jesus on your desires and your sinful flesh is hard.

It is far easier to say, "I went to the service, I prayed the prayer, I was blessed with the Holy

Water, and so now I'm good for a week, and I don't have to think about it anymore."

I understand how that could be attractive. If you grew up in a secular home in which you were

free to follow your passions wherever they led and follow your heart was the closest thing to

moral instruction that you received, that's an awfully tempting setup to go back to. Anyone who

has struggled with addiction of any kind knows how easy it is to return to the allure of whatever

that thing is, only to find that it's just as empty as it ever was. This is particularly hard for

those of us who are raised to believe that true freedom means living only under your own authority.

America is a nation built on independence, which isn't bad in itself, but it can stand in tension

with biblical freedom. Biblical freedom comes through joyful submission to the one true king,

Jesus, and submitting to a king or the idea of that can be hard to stomach for a people whose

nation began by rejecting theirs. Paul recognizes that only God can see the hearts of a person,

and that leads him to worry for his congregation, because he can't see whether they're legitimately

and wholeheartedly turning to Christ or whether they're at risk of looking back and turning back

to their old ways. In verse 7, he says, "I am afraid I may have labored over you in vain."

So what does he do? What does he do with that fear? He reminds them who they were,

and he reminds them who they are in Christ. He shows them how the old life was slavery,

and the new life is sonship. So I'm not going to do any different. Life without Jesus is slavery

to our old broken condition. Life with Jesus, though, leads to freedom and new life in his name,

and for the followers of Jesus, there is no turning back. The only option is to turn our

faces to Jesus and remember who we are in him and keep walking forward. And there's a hymn that

comes to mind that I've been singing since I was a little, little kid, and then it says this beautifully.

It says, "Turn your eyes upon Jesus and look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth

will go strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace."

Ecclesia is a church of house churches gathering weekly in Councilbluffs, Iowa,

and in homes throughout the week. We are a Bible-centered church focused on preaching

from Scripture and making disciples of Jesus. You can learn more about our statement of faith

and contact a pastor by visiting ecclesiachurches.org.