Gospel Transformation (Galatians 1:11-24)

Galatians chapter 1, starting in verse 11.

Galatians 1 · chapter mention

For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel preached by me is not of human origin.

For I did not receive it from a human source, I was not taught it, but it came by a revelation of Jesus Christ.

For you've heard about my former way of life in Judaism.

I intensely persecuted God's church and tried to destroy it.

I advanced in my people, I advanced in Judaism beyond many contemporaries among my people, because I was extremely zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.

But when God, who from my mother's womb set me apart and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his son in me, so that I could preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone.

I did not go up to Jerusalem to those who had become apostles before me.

Instead, I went to Arabia and came back to Damascus.

Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to get to Nociphas.

I stayed with him fifteen days.

But I didn't see any of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother.

I declare in the sight of God, I am not lying in what I write to you.

Afterward I went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia.

I remained personally unknown to the Judean churches that are in Christ.

They simply kept hearing, He who formerly persecuted us now preaches the faith he once tried to destroy, and they glorified God because of me.

And Lord, as we study your word, I ask that you would be glorified, that you would fill me with your spirit to teach your word accurately, that you would fill the hearers with your spirit to rightly divide what is true and what is of you, and that we would grow in you and grow as a body as well as a result.

In your name.

Amen.

Please have a seat.

So the nice thing, we're at the beginning of a book, so we don't spend like the first chunk of this doing a whole bunch of catch up of what we've been going over for chapter and chapter and chapter and chapter.

So I love Corinth.

Corinth is great, Corinth is good.

It's nice to be past Corinth right now and in Galatia here.

Just a little bit of a reminder with these churches, because Corinth is a city.

We spent two books talking to a church, a specific church, in a city.

Galatia is a region.

So it's not just one church, it is multiple churches, especially because we've seen verse 2, to the churches of Galatia in this whole region in modern-day Turkey.

And so when Paul is writing to this, he's not writing to a specific body singular, but to a bunch of different churches.

And he led, as we saw last week very, very well.

He led not even with the I praise God and my prayers for you always, because of this you do, and because of this you do.

He goes straight into why are you turning away from me when you call due to the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel?

What are you doing?

And that's what we get the tone of in a little bit for here.

Because what we see is movement, is a return to Judaism among the Christians here in this whole region.

It's not an isolated thing, it's something that is spreading throughout.

And so when Paul says here in verse 11, I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel preached by me is not of human origin.

I didn't receive it from a human source, wasn't taught it, but it came by a revelation of Jesus Christ.

He's laying out his thesis for this entire section here of him stating that the gospel is not a human invention, but rather is divine.

Came from Jesus.

Amen.

Please, amen anytime.

I'm good with that.

And uh with that in mind, he is going to contrast that divine gospel versus the human origin path constantly throughout this book.

And it's really, really, really hard not to teach other passages when we teach our one chunk because it's all intertwined.

And so I have to behave and stay in my lane today.

So all I will say is throughout this whole book, look for places that he's contrasting the gospel of Jesus versus what we do as humans to try to earn our salvation.

That's going to be a theme throughout this whole book.

So when he lays out here, I want you to know, brothers and sisters, key point here, he's talking to Christians, talking to believers here, that the gospel preached to me is not of human origin.

That is his key here because what he just talked about in the previous chunk is that this different gospel is circulating from people who are troubling you and want to distort the gospel of Christ, as we saw in verse 7.

And so he's getting back to the core of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And he's going to start here in this chunk by giving a little bit of his testimony of how that gospel impacted him, giving firsthand testimony of this.

Make sense?

Sweet.

Why would they return to the law, by the way?

Why would they return to Judaism?

That seems stressful, but it seems controllable.

That's the thing, is that it's when you go to the law, when you go to trying to earn your righteousness, it's something that you can do, hopefully, try to do, is something that you can achieve and then feel really good about and proud of yourself.

And that is the temptation and all these things.

Because I'm sure there's people in this room or who are listening to this who have Jewish ancestry, but with the for a lot of us, we don't sit there and go, you know, I want to need to convert to Judaism today.

That's just something I'm gonna do today.

Not really, but there is something that we want to return to, a gospel of works, where we earn salvation because we are the good ones and we are the right ones, and we have the right way of doing it, and it's the same thing to where we want to try to earn our way to God.

And we'll see that doesn't work so well.

So it's also familiar and comfortable.

We always return to something that's comfortable, and so if somebody who is raised in Judaism, they may want to go back to that.

So here he's gonna combat both of those.

Starting in verse 13 here, you have heard about my former way of life in Judaism.

I intensely persecuted God's church and tried to destroy it.

I advanced in Judaism beyond many contemporaries among my people because I was extremely zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.

The before.

Whenever we encourage people to give testimony, we talk about the before, we talk about how they encountered Christ, and then we talk about who we are now in Jesus.

He's gonna do the same thing here, which is really cool.

Nice and simple format.

His before is a little bit more intense than ours may be.

So if it is not, if you were actually looking to murder Christians, please don't tell me I don't need that burden to have to figure out how to report that to the police.

So here, you have heard about my former way of life in Judaism.

I intensely persecuted God's church and tried to destroy it.

What does that look like?

We're gonna have a little bit of coinciding with Acts chapter 9.

Acts 9 · chapter mention

So please take a mental note of Acts chapter 9 and be able to do that.

Acts 9 · chapter mention

We're not gonna flip back and forth and back and forth, but there's gonna be a little bit of coincidental information here.

So in Acts chapter 9, verses 1 and 2, Saul, who is Paul, was still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.

Acts 9:1

He went to the high priest and requested letters from him to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any men or women who belonged to the way, he might bring them as prisoners to Jerusalem.

So that's bad.

That's we can all agree that's not normal behavior, but this is such the extent of his zeal in his faith and in his belief here as a Pharisee.

So he, when he says he intensely persecuted God's church and tried to destroy it, he's not talking about what we call persecution today, where somebody said a mean thing about us.

He's literally trying to persecute, imprison, and destroy and murder Christians.

He advanced in Judaism beyond many contemporaries among his people because he was extremely zealous.

So, Paul here, you see, here's the thing, I'll say it this way.

You see, in a lot of his letters, he goes, grace and peace before Christ, threaten murder, and that's how he would open his uh his letters.

So you never want to open a letter from Paul back before he met Christ.

He went to the high priest and requested letters so that he could go to Damascus, round up Christians, drag them back to the epicenter of Jerusalem to be put on trial, uh, jailed, and executed as uh for being Christians, followers of the way there.

So when he says here, he intensely persecuted God's church and tried to destroy it.

We learn three things here that are important to know what he's trying to communicate.

Number one, he was not looking for Jesus when he encountered him.

No.

There is not, he was not a hungry soul searching for any answer he could possibly find, and what he found was this religious opiate that that made him feel better inside.

In his mind, he was full.

Full of Judaism here, full of zeal.

He was at the top of his game when he collided with Jesus.

So, with that in mind, he's not saying, look, I wasn't just hungry and desperate here.

Look, he didn't think he was, looking for something.

He thought he had everything he needed, and then he encountered Jesus and realized he had nothing he needed.

Number two, this idea of the with as it pertains to the law, these people in this area of Galatia, they want to return to the law.

And Paul here is like, guys, I had it.

I had all of it.

I was at the top of the game, I was the apex Pharisee.

And it is not what was fulfilling, it did not fill me up.

Not only that, but it actually drove me to unrighteousness.

And that leads us to the end game, point number three, for what he's saying here.

The end game of this, he has a zeal here, but his zeal in legalism led to sin.

That's what's crazy.

He was so self-righteous and so upright and so zealous that it led him to do exactly what was wrong in the first place.

And in contrast, we're gonna see grace in a moment here, is going to result in imputed righteousness.

And that's the contrast that we have here.

So, this is a big issue here, because he was extremely zealous, he was very self-righteous, and it led him on a crusade.

I'm sure we cannot connect any cultural dots to our area, our culture today.

Sure, I'll leave you guys to do that.

But with that, just keep this in mind zeal, intensity, plus self-righteousness results in a crusader spirit where the end justifies the means and we end up doing harm and thinking we're doing good.

And that's the danger that we experience here.

So, with that in mind, if we are, if I can leave you with this thing just to chew on, if we are angry about somebody else's sin and that consumes us, we might struggle with self-righteousness.

So, having that said, three big points.

He thought he was full when he encountered Jesus and realized he was empty.

He had what they wanted and it wasn't enough, and then his zeal and his intensity there led him towards sin instead of what he encountered, which was a grace that resulted in forgiveness.

So continuing onward here, verse 15 when God, who from my mother's womb set me apart and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his son in me, so that I could preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone.

Pause there for a second.

Here's what I love.

There's two contrasts here between verse 14 and verse 15.

On one side, he had the traditions of his ancestors.

So he has the lineage, he can trace his lineage back.

He was the Pharisee of Pharisees, and the traditions of his ancestors drove him.

But in verse 15, we see God calling him from his mother's womb.

And that's a cool contrast here because usually you can take that passage and people get in this argument about whether or not people are, you know, basically about predestination called from their mother's womb.

Any questions you have about that, please ask Pastor Chris next week.

For today, I love the contrast there that between the traditions of his ancestors and God calling him from his mother's womb.

He had a calling in Christ that predated his ancestral traditions.

But also, his traditions led him toward zeal, but God set him apart by grace.

Those two do not coincide.

Zeal and grace.

Human, I'll put it this way, we see in James 1, wrath of God does not produce the righteousness of God.

So, but here we see that he has at the top of his game, he had zeal and had to encounter grace.

Why?

Because grace was not something he could earn.

Grace is a gift.

And he had to earn, he could not earn that, he had to actually receive it from God.

And that's what happened.

Was pleased to reveal his son of me.

Here's a cool thing in verse 16, just a side note.

It pleases God to reveal his son.

Isn't that cool?

Salvation is not a puzzle that we have to try to figure out.

It's not given only to the super elite people, because God is raising up, he's picking his pieces so that he can put the best team together.

He's pleased to reveal his son, and that's really cool to see.

What did that look like?

Well, continuing Paul's story in Acts 9, verses 3 through 6 of Acts 9, as he traveled and was nearing Damascus, a light from heaven suddenly flashed around him.

Acts 9:3–6

And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

Who are you, Lord?

Saul said.

I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting, he said.

But get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.

So he is on his crusade from Jerusalem to Damascus to arrest Christians, fully convinced that he is the most righteous guy around.

And then a light from heaven suddenly flashes around him, falls to the ground, he hears a voice that his people can't, his companions can't hear.

Why are you persecuting me, Saul?

It's all what you're doing, man.

And he says, Who are you, Lord?

I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting.

Now we know this story.

This is normal to us, and we go, yeah, well, yeah, that's what happened.

Can you imagine how agitating that would be to Saul, who is trying to destroy the church of Jesus?

And Jesus is speaking to him and knocking him off his horse, light from heaven, which by the way, we we can't do really.

Yes, we can have a facsimile of that.

And just side note, growing up, not a great area.

This is one of the only first things I learned.

The lights go up, they're having a sale.

The lights go down, stay out of that area.

That's for free.

But with that in mind, a light comes from heaven.

He says, I am Jesus, whom you're persecuting.

Get up and go to the city, and you will be told what you must do.

Now, spoiler alert, what's going to happen here is he's going to encounter a disciple named Ananias.

God prepared Ananias to go and pray for Saul that he would receive his sight.

You know what we don't hear in that story?

We don't hear Ananias going to Saul and laying out the gospel to him.

So when Paul says here in Galatians 1-12, he didn't receive it from a human source, he wasn't taught it, it came from revelation of Jesus.

The gospel of grace through faith in Jesus came from Jesus.

And that's the cool thing of what changed him and what he because he ends up being healed, and then he ends up being a follower of Jesus, and a very ardent one at that.

In the midst of that, Paul's calling here.

Because here's here's a little bit of the story.

God tells Ananias, hey, go pray for Saul to receive his sight.

And Ananias is like, you want me to go pray for the guy who is murdering Christians.

I kind of like him better, blind.

Just saying.

It's kind of to my advantage that he can't see me.

And God says, number one, he says two things that probably comforted Ananias.

Number one, that he is, that Paul is God's chosen vessel to preach the gospel among the Gentiles in Acts 9.15, but also I will show him how much he will suffer from my name.

And I bet Ananias is like, okay, I'm in.

But with that, at some point in this story, between Saul encountering Jesus on that road and being led by the hand to Damascus, he encounters the gospel that saves.

When he thought he was full, he realized how empty he was and encountered salvation by faith in Jesus, which is a gift of grace.

So continuing forward in here, he was pleased in verse 16 to reveal his son in me so that I could preach him among the Gentiles.

I did not immediately consult with anyone.

I didn't go up to Jerusalem to those who had become apostles before me.

Instead, I went to Arabia and came back to Damascus.

We get a little bit of the picture that we don't necessarily get in Acts 9, a little bit of first-hand info, which is nice.

So, what did he not do?

He did not immediately follow the rabbinic process of learning.

He didn't go and find the person who would teach him what he needs to know in order to become a better follower of Jesus immediately.

Now that's not a bad thing, obviously, but ultimately that's not what made him a follower of Jesus.

His gospel was not imparted to him by the apostles.

Rather, it was imparted to him by Jesus.

And what's the first thing he did?

He leaves.

He goes into the wilderness, Arabia, just which is Arabia is synonymous with desert.

It was not a bustling city, is where he went.

Before he goes to Damascus.

Now, why is this interesting here?

Because he didn't immediately dive into the church ladder system, climbing system of becoming an apostle.

He went to the wilderness, which is for free as well.

So Jesus, by the way, after his baptism.

Immediately he went into the wilderness and was attempted for 40 days.

But here's the thing: Paul's process here wouldn't really fit in well with contemporary church practice.

If I can say this gently, the the danger that we can run into.

And I actually see this in really good, well-respected books on pastoral ministry that an important uh component of pastoring is uh ladder climbing and networking.

Those aren't necessarily bad things, but ultimately uh in the Bible, um, that's really kind of an aspect of the culture of our day.

Paul does the opposite.

He doesn't go into the process, because here today, uh, if if basically you're going to uh become known, then what you have to do is be useful to the person in charge in the church.

You have to have a skill or an aspect that or time availability that's useful to them, and we equate that with calling.

And then ultimately you stick around long enough and they go, okay, there you go, out the door.

Or if you land in an area, what you have to do is find the good old boy club and network with that, and then you're in.

Paul here goes to the desert.

Kind of the opposite of that.

Why do you think that is?

Well, we don't know.

We don't know for sure, but I can imagine there was a whole lot of processing he had to do.

Can you imagine?

Well, traditionally, Pharisees would have to have memorized huge chunks of what we call the Old Testament at a young age.

So Paul has the Bible in him, in his head, and now he has to understand all of that through the proper lens of Jesus.

That's a whole lot to unpack.

So, With that, he encounters things like Isaiah 53 and goes, Oh, that makes sense.

It's like a lamb to the slaughter, the sacrifice, the Jesus.

And by the way, it is also very, very likely that a very zealous Pharisee Saul was in Jerusalem at the crucifixion of Jesus because that was one of the feasts, Passover, where everybody goes to Jerusalem.

So it's very possible that he actually saw that happen in real time with a heartened heart.

So continuing onward, he went to Arabia and then he came back to Damascus, which is where he was going in the first place.

Came back to Damascus as a very different guy, right?

So that coincides with what we see in Acts 9, 19 through 25.

I'm not going to read the entire chunk there.

We just see that he is with the disciples in Damascus.

Suddenly he is preaching that Jesus is the Christ.

But that time in Arabia is important because otherwise, if you just read the book of Acts, you can make it seem like he was this guy, and then he professed faith in Jesus, and then they handed him a microphone and said, Go.

There was a whole lot of refining that happened in his time in the wilderness.

So he came back to Damascus, and then in verse 18, after three years, I did go up to Jerusalem to get to Noseephas, who's Peter, by the way, and stayed with him 15 days.

But I didn't see any of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother.

I declare, in the sight of God, I am not lying in what I write to you.

Okay.

I really wish I was here for this.

Because Paul and Peter are not the same people.

Not the same temperament, perhaps.

So you have a Paul, again, Pharisee of Pharisees, the ultimate in discipline, in uh strategy, right, in intensity, planning, purposeful, and then you have Peter, who leads by talking.

He starts, it's like, whoo, here we go.

You know, he's up with the mountain of transfiguration.

He sees Jesus transfigured, he sees Moses, Elijah, and what does he immediately start to do?

Talk and say, hey, let's build some tents.

This is good for you guys to be here.

We'll get going.

And God has to say, stay in your lane, bro.

So I would have loved to have seen this 15 days at work, where you have Paul and Peter, and who's trusting Paul right now?

That's, I mean, that would that's the difficulty here.

That's crazy.

And so a little bit of the subtext we don't get in Galatians that we do get in Acts chapter 9.

Acts 9 · chapter mention

Nobody wanted Paul there, and Barnabas grabs them and takes him to the apostles, which is so cool.

He had somebody who saw the change, believed it, believed the best in them, and brought him to the apostles.

How cool is that?

And to the church.

That's a beautiful thing.

We need more of those.

We need more of those in our uh in our lives.

So, just a quick note what on earth is an apostle?

Uh, okay, a disciple, which is what we saw with he was among the disciples in Damascus.

That's a follower of Jesus, right?

An apostle, a few different things here.

So there is the aspect of an apostle that we saw in the first century church, which was a figurehead in the church who was marked by having been there for the resurrector for uh the death and resurrection of Jesus, having spent time among that, and being called as such.

And so an apostle there, we see Peter, we see James the Lord's brother there, um, somebody who was actually there as an eyewitness, firsthand person of Jesus, who is one of the staples in the early church.

But you also see a spiritual gift of apostles, apostleship, apolicity, who uh is somebody who is sent out, somebody who is sent to declare the word of God.

So two same word, two slightly different things.

Gifts are alive and well today, but uh, if somebody call says that they are an apostle in this way, get a little bit like put up your red flag for a second there.

So, having that said, if there, if you ever like someone says, I'm an apostle like Peter, you'd be like, So and James the Lord's brother.

And I love that.

Just more subtext in verse 19.

One of the prominent people in the Church of Jerusalem, one of the many, is James, who is the Lord's brother, who is one of the people who wanted to seize Jesus by force because they said he was crazy.

So his con well, I want to hear his conversion story too.

That's what's cool, is that at some point in time they went from uh Jesus' brothers being obviously embittered toward him and thinking he's out of his mind to being a follower of Jesus and being one of the members of the Church of Jerusalem.

So again, all this to say Paul did not start his uh following of Jesus uh by climbing the church ladders.

He did not get in with the people in power, whoever those would be.

I mean, even the next chapter, he's like, Well, I went and saw these people, whoever they were, apparently they're pillars, who knows?

I just talked to them.

And so here he talked 15 days to Peter, and then he talked to James.

He didn't get the gospel from these guys.

Rather, he got the gospel from Jesus that transformed him, and that transformation allowed him to be in relationship with these people, because otherwise he would have been nowhere near those people.

And he says, I declare inside of God, I am not lying in what I write to you.

Just a little signpost of where we're going with this.

He's again, he's saying, number one, that the gospel is not of human origin, it comes from the Lord.

It's a divine salvation by grace through faith in Jesus.

That's his big point here as he's telling his story, and he's using himself as the story.

He's also talking about how he didn't think he needed Jesus when he encountered him.

And then he also talks about the end result of that legalism is self-righteousness resulting in zeal, resulting in sin, as opposed to grace resulting in imputed righteousness.

God's righteousness being imparted to someone.

So, verse 21.

Afterward, I went to the regions of Silesia, Assyria and Silicia, and I remained personally unknown to the Judean churches that are in Christ.

He did not go immediately on his book tour.

He went to Syria and Silesia.

Do you guys know some of you do, but like as a whole, where Syria and Silesia is, nobody knows where that is.

I mean, it's these outlying areas.

Syria ends up being a place that became a home base for uh Paul's missionary journeys and such.

It became a prominent place in the church to the point where in the early first five centuries AD it became one of the bishoprics of that, one of the five there.

But ultimately, at this point in Paul's conversion, it was an it was a nothing place and it was nowhere in terms of that.

In Cilicia, same thing.

We don't know about them except by how the gospel spread through them, if that helps.

If it weren't for the power and the spread of the message of the cross through these areas, we would think of them as just another one of those old places that we know nothing about.

So that's what's cool.

So, but he didn't go to Jerusalem for that, he didn't go, then I started my residency in Jerusalem.

And that's the cool thing because in Judaism and in that system, everything moves toward Jerusalem.

The goal is to go toward that way.

If you're a Pharisee and you're growing in that way, if you're going to be a priest, you want to grow and prove yourself to such a point you get promoted towards Jerusalem.

That's where you want to be.

That's where Paul was, and God sent him out and away from there.

But he sent him out and away with the gospel to spread.

So cool.

Uh human and why do I say that?

Because the human origin salvation is going to want us to gather together and build a name for ourselves.

I think there was a story about that in Genesis.

Babel, uh, where gather together, build a name for ourselves, build a tower.

And rather, here, God sends out with his word to the nations.

Beautiful thing.

Which the vast majority of us are uh spiritual byproducts of.

So, verse 23, they kept simply hearing, he who formerly persecuted us now preaches the faith he once tried to destroy, and they glorified God because of me.

So, although he's not known really here, he's not known as Paul the Apostle.

He's not known as Paul, the guy who healed people in the book of Acts in really weird ways, uh, cool ways in that.

He's not the known as the guy, um Paul the Apostle, who didn't turn down a beating at any given point, apparently.

He, they're like, there's this guy, but what we know about him was he was the enemy of Jesus and he became a friend of Jesus and now preaches the faith he once tried to destroy.

And that's the beautiful thing we see here.

Is what's known about Paul here at the beginning is not his prowess, his acumen, and what an amazing Pharisee he was.

What they know about him is there's this guy who hated Jesus and now he loves Jesus and preaches Jesus.

Isn't that cool?

That's beautiful.

Here's the challenge with this.

How many Christians prior to Acts 9 probably prayed for God to strike Saul dead?

Like a lot, yeah, like that.

I probably would have in that moment too.

Basically, he's somebody who is persecuting the church, who is wreaking havoc, who is murdering their friends and family, and arresting them and bringing them into trial.

He was the guy who stood as the ascenting Pharisee while Stephen is stoned to death for preaching Jesus.

Up until that point, I'm sure there are many Christian followers of Jesus that we can put ourselves in their shoes who just pray, God, can you just strike this guy dead?

Can you please get rid of this guy?

And yet, God had bigger plans.

And that's a beautiful thing.

Praise the Lord for unanswered prayer.

That's all I would say in that context.

And the result here is that God is glorified.

This is the natural result of gospel transformation as opposed to human religion.

In human religion, the self is glorified by how well we have kept the law, by how well we have done, and how righteous we are.

In gospel transformation, God is glorified by what he has done to hardened hearts.

And Paul is the ultimate example of that.

And it's such a beautiful thing.

So when Paul is speaking to the Galatians, it's not just clinical to where he's saying, hey you guys, I'm just gonna tell you this is this is one of those, this is my recycled sermon that I use when I go and preach in different places.

This is this is one of the ones that I, you know, I have in the roster.

He's like, guys, what are you doing?

What are you doing?

Why would you go back?

And not only why would you go back, let's use me as an example.

I was there, I had what you want, and it was killing me and everybody else.

And I encountered Jesus, and that's when I found life and peace.

And here's the beauty of this, in contrast to earning, as we round up for a close here, the transforming power of the gospel is simple, and I think that's why it's so threatening.

It's simple in that we cannot achieve it, we cannot earn it, instead, we must receive it, and by receiving it, we have to be willing to confess and understand that we can't earn it, but then also that we are in fact sinners.

So we have to be able to get past that point of self-righteousness, saying, I'm good enough, I'm better than that guy, at least I'm not that guy, and at least I don't do this, and go, no, I need salvation, and then be willing to take what we cannot earn and receive forgiveness.

Sometimes we want to take the gospel, but sometimes we get a little freaked out by what because we don't want easy believism.

We don't want to have this idea that, well, all you have to do is that, and there's no transformation, and we really have to worry about that.

Uh, if I can just gently say, there is no difficulty in the gospel, in receiving the gospel, except receiving it.

There's no asterisk and go, yeah, but what you really have to do is this, this, this, and you have to do it in this way, and then you have to do this.

Um, after that, there's the aspect of sanctification that happens where we are progressively transformed.

But after that, you have the Holy Spirit living within you who does that work within us as we follow Him.

So, just if I can lay this forward, what we see here in uh Paul's life here, the receiving of that gospel is dead simple.

It is as simple as understanding that we need salvation because we have uh violated God's commandments and we are sinners, and we have no way of earning our way back to God on our own, but rather need to receive what he has offered, and what he has offered is the substitutionary death and resurrection of his son Jesus, who was a perfect sacrifice, lived a perfect life, was murdered because he took our sin upon himself and paid our price on himself so that we could have his innocence placed upon us if we would receive it.

Isn't that beautiful?

And encountering that, that encountering, truly encountering Jesus, as we see in Saul's life here, breaks the stronghold of human zeal and self-righteousness and results in the glory of God rather than the exaltation of self.

So, this is what we are seeing here.

If you're gonna come away from this passage, come away from this week and go, I went to church and I heard everything I knew all this already.

I know that you needed to follow Jesus, that you need to have faith in him, and um that that's where salvation comes from.

Well, good.

It would be disturbing if I was teaching you something different than that.

But ultimately, if whoever hears this has not accepted that, it's a challenge.

It is a challenge to understand that we need salvation that we cannot earn, that we cannot do on our own.

And the only way we can achieve that is by receiving that, by confession and belief in Jesus.

And praise the Lord that that's how he changes us and transforms us, not to perfection afterwards, but to forgiveness that imputes his righteousness upon us.

Praise the Lord for that.

Let's pray, Lord.

I thank you so much for the gift of your son.

I thank you that you have made a way of reconciliation to yourself when we were your enemies, that you have made a way to be restored to righteousness when we were not seeking it.

That you have offered us your innocence in the place of our guilt, that you have offered us your life and taken our death upon you.

Help us to walk in that, to not try to retread paths of self-righteousness and works.

Help us not be filled with a self-righteous zeal that is so angry at the sins of others and so blind to our own.

Rather, let us have our eyes on you, the author and the perfecter of our faith.

And for anybody who has heard this and has never heard the gospel or heard it a thousand times and has not accepted it, it is as simple as receiving that gift by faith in Jesus and believing that he has offered that sacrifice for you, paying in his death the death you deserved, and offering you the life in return and walking with him.

And that is as simple as receiving that gift.

And Lord, I ask that anybody who hears that, who has not received you, that by your Holy Spirit, you would work on their heart to see their need, to see the life that is waiting for them, and that they would be filled with you as a result.

Grow us, conform us more and more to your image.

Help us to never think we need to outgrow the cross, but rather to double down on it.

Be glorified in your name.

Amen.