Galatians 4:12–20 | Paul’s Pastoral Plea to a Wounded Church

Galatians 4, starting the first 12, Colin.

Freth, I beseech you, be as I am, for I am as ye are.

Ye have not injured me at all.

Ye know how through infirmity of the flesh I preach the gospel unto you at the first.

And my temptation which was in my flesh y ye despised not, nor rejected, but received me as an angel of God even as Christ Jesus.

Where is then the blessedness you spake of?

For I bear your record that it had been possible, ye would have plucked out your own eyes and have given them to me.

Am I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth?

They zealously affect you, but not well.

Yea, they would exclude you, but you might affect them.

Sorry, they exclude you that you might affect them.

But it is good to zealously it is good to be zealously affected always in a good thing, and not only when I am present with you.

My little children, of whom I travail in birth again, until Christ be formed in me.

I desire to be present with you now and to change my voice, for I stand in doubt of you.

May the Lord add his blessing for this his most precious word.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, and I pray you are in Christ this night.

We're at Galatians 4.20, second part 12 to 20.

It's again the personal letter of Paul.

And up to this point, Paul has been arguing, teaching, correcting, and defending the gospel.

But here, here in this section, the tone changes.

The apostle becomes pastor, the pastor becomes a father, and the father becomes a wounded friend.

The passage is not cold theology, it's warm, aching concern.

It's in Paul's heart in this writing.

And if we miss that emotional shift, and it's not often I talk about emotion when we preach, in that emotional shift, we miss the whole weight of this passage.

Paul starts, Because as I am, for I became as you are.

Paul's plea of friendship.

He opens it with that great phrase.

Brethren, I beseech you, be as I am, for I am as you are.

He's not commanding them here as an apostle.

He's not demanding their attention.

He is appealing to them.

And he's appealing to them as brothers and sisters.

He is saying, Look, I've stood with you.

I lived among you.

I've eaten with you.

I've been here when you've gone through hard times.

You've been there when I've gone through hard times, and we'll come to that later.

He laid aside his Jewish distinctives.

Remember, he Paul is a Hebrew of Hebrews.

And he put that to one side so that he could be one with you.

He didn't keep his distance, which he should have done according to the Lord at the time.

He became like them, he became one of them.

And now he's going around to them saying, Come back.

Come back to what you were, come back to me.

Keep away from those people that are telling you false stories, setting false rules.

Come back to the freedom of the gospel.

And this is not the voice of a man defending his reputation.

It's the voice of a man longing for restored fellowship.

See, Paul is reminding them all of something they've forgotten.

Christian ministry is not just truth spoken when it's done right.

It's a life shared.

It's connections outside the formal church function.

And he had shared that life with them.

He hadn't demanded special treatment being an apostle, which he could have done, I suppose.

He lived as one of them.

He hadn't insisted on Jewish customs being followed.

And he had not stood above them.

He hadn't put his position first.

He stood with them.

And now he says, Become as I am.

In other words, return to the freedom you once knew.

Return to the gospel you first receive.

Return to the simplicity of Christ.

And I want to jump aside here a wee bit.

Because we talk about the simplicity of Christ.

Ryol talked about the simplicity of the gospel.

In essence, the simplicity of Christ is this.

It is the removal of all ceremonies when it comes to the worship of God.

Indeed, I would argue in its purest form of worship of God in reality and truth.

But come as you are, not come dressed up to perform like some sort of creature.

This is the first sign of Paul's concern.

He wants them back to that simplicity.

Not back under his authority, but back under grace.

Paul refuses to take offense.

He adds, you have not injured me at all, which is a remarkable statement.

They haven't bruised his ego.

They haven't upset him.

He refuses to make this personal.

He's not blaming them for their falling away.

He's not blaming them for being rude to him or ignoring him.

He refuses to accuse them of harming him.

He refuses to let his own feelings become the center of the conversation.

A lesson for every pastor, I suppose, for every leader, for every Christian come to that, who has ever been misunderstood or sidelined.

Paul does not make himself the victim.

He does not say you've hurt my ministry.

He does not say you've wounded my pride.

Sometimes we put ourselves first without knowing it.

Sometimes we put ourselves first because we think we know better.

Sometimes we put ourselves first because we see no true leadership or leaders we can follow.

But for Christians, our natural place is a very strange second.

You see, we're here, all of us, to serve others.

We are here to serve others on behalf of Christ.

And sometimes that second does mean we seem to be first.

But all we should ever be is servants.

Firstly servants to God, secondly servants of those around us, and not just servants, but willing servants, happy servants.

We are, as Paul writes it, willing slaves, because we are willingly in the Christ, and we serve Christ willingly.

Paul says it, you haven't wronged me.

The issue is not his feelings, the issue is their spiritual danger.

And Paul's concern is not self-protection of his opinions, of his state of face in front of them, it's their salvation.

In verse 3, Paul then reminds them of how they once treated him.

He'd come to them in weakness.

We don't know what the weakness actually is.

There's lots of story floating around.

This particular piece I was reading thinks it might have been an eye condition.

There are some that reckon he had a form of epilepsy.

We don't know for sure.

It was some sort of physical aim and ailment that made him unattractive or unimpressive.

In those days, it could have been anything.

And yet they didn't do what would have been the norm in those days, which was to chase Paul away.

As somebody unclean.

They took him in.

They looked after him.

They didn't treat him like a burden.

And he says this really strange thing, doesn't he?

He goes, what is it?

Instead of uh in verse 14, sorry.

Um received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus.

It's an astonishing language phrase.

It shows how deep their affection was for him.

They'd honored him, they had listened to him, they had loved him, they had treated him with reverence, not because he was impressive, but because the gospel he carried was precious.

And Paul even says, You would have plucked out your own eyes and given them to me.

Now I don't know whether that's a literal or metaphorical statement, but the meaning is clear.

Their love for him had been sacrificial.

Christ's love for us was sacrificial.

And our love for each other should be sacrificial.

And now well they're cold.

Now they're distant.

Now they are suspicious.

Paul is not manipulating them by reminding them of this.

He is simply showing the contrast that something somewhere has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

And he says to them, he says to them, have I become your enemy?

Because I tell you the truth.

It's a pain of honesty.

And it's one of the most heartbreaking lines in this whole section of the letter.

Am I there before become your enemy because I tell you the truth?

This is verse 16.

Paul is bewildered, and he's confused.

He's hurt.

Not because they've wounded his pride, not because they've insulted him, but because they've turned away from what he had once taught them, what they seem to have accepted.

This is a truly pastoral experience.

Every minister, people I've I've had it, others have had it, we eventually face it.

Truth, you see, can make people uncomfortable.

The reality of the news, the reality of life, the reality of the Bible makes us uncomfortable if it doesn't fit our views.

Even speaking the truth as you understand it can make people uncomfortable.

And truth can expose motives, truth can challenge habits.

That's what we don't like.

We don't like our habits being challenged.

Truth can confront sin.

And when truth confronts us, especially biblical truth, we do one of two things.

We either repent or we resist.

What did the Galatians do?

They resisted.

And Paul feels a sting of that resistance, but he's not their enemy.

He feels a pushback that the Judaizers are taking over.

And yet he was one of who first brought them to life.

So they're ignoring what he said.

And now, and now because he tells them the truth in love, they treat him as though he is against them.

But it's another hard point.

What is truth as love?

Sometimes truth can sound harsh or even controlling.

Let's make no point about it.

The difficulty for all of us is recognizing when it is truth being told harshly or truth in love.

And I struggled to find an example, but I think I've got this one, this one might work.

If you had a child, I've had two, but you had a you saw a young person, very young person, dive out in front of the road in front of traffic, and you called that child back, and you actually grabbed hold of its arm and said, You've got to come back, your life's in danger.

It's truth.

And although the action is violent, it's actually truth in love.

Because you didn't want the child to get hurt.

But to others looking around you, it could just be some old person grabbing out of a young child and yanking them off the road.

And you have to take the knock for that.

You're harsh.

But you're harsh to stop the child being hurt.

A harsh truth would be telling a child off because they broke a toy.

The truth is he damaged the toy.

But do you need to point it out to him?

He's already upset.

She is already upset that their toy is broken.

Why do you need to go and remind them about it?

But if you see somebody doing stupid, it is better to try to stop them than to let them continue.

I've said it many a time.

People say to me, I talk too much about sin.

Because that's a big problem between man and God.

If I was to declare to you, or not to declare to you, that we are all sinners in front of a living God and we all need to repent of our sins and turn to Christ who can free us of our sins, I wouldn't be telling you the truth in love.

You may not like me telling you you're a sinner.

You may think you're a wonderful person, but no, you're not.

None of us are.

Especially not me.

But until we recognize we are sinners before a sinless God, then if you've got any hope of getting into heaven, it's squashed.

It won't happen.

Not everybody who dies enters the kingdom.

It's not a one-shot fits all.

It's the elect.

It's those who have repented, those who have accepted who Christ is.

And to tell you anything other than that is not to tell you the truth in love.

Not a pleasant message, but it's the message of the gospel for the last 2027 years.

And Paul goes on to talk to the Jew about Judaism that they zealously affect you but not well.

The danger of false affection.

People who are nice.

Paul now exposes the exploit.

Paul now exposes the motives of the false teachers.

And he says they zealously affect you, but not well.

Or in plain language, they're flattering you for their own ends.

We've all been flattered, haven't we?

You know, everybody says you're doing well and everything's fine, but they don't really mean it.

They're courting you.

They're making you feel special, but their motives are not good.

False teachers quite often use affection as a weapon.

They make people feel chosen, included, valued, but only so they can isolate them and turn them away from true teachers of faith and true doctrine and teach them some other doctrine.

How do you find out such people when you actually take their words and you check it out against God's book?

Because if it doesn't match what this says, false doctrine, it's spiritual manipulation, emotional control.

It's the creation of a closed circle where only the false teacher has influence.

And Paul's concern is not that he's losing influence, his concern is that they are losing the gospel.

He then adds, it's good to be zealous, it's good to be excited about something.

It's good to be affected, that is, to want to do something.

Zeal in itself is not wrong.

I remember when I first came here, I used to be told, you're too zealous, you're too emphatic about preaching, about telling us about sin and telling us about Christ.

It's not wrong.

Passion, being passionate for something, it's not wrong.

Affection is not wrong, but it has to be rooted in truth.

Otherwise, it's nothing more than manipulation.

And he goes on.

Verse 19, he says, My little children, I travel, I travail in birth again.

He's talking about something that the men here will not know, but the women may, and it's childbirth.

He's using maternal imagery.

My little children of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you.

He's not speaking as a theologian.

He's speaking as a mother in labor.

He's saying, I am in pain for you, I am laboring for you, I am suffering for you.

I want Christ to be formed in me.

And notice what Paul wants.

Not loyalty to himself, but loyalty to Christ formed in them.

And this is the total heart of any Christian ministry.

See, the goal, my goal is not to make you like me.

The goal I have is not necessarily to gather followers, although I wouldn't object to seeing a full church.

But the goal I rarely want is to see Christ formed in every single person that comes to this place.

Even if they come without having Christ and they go with Christ and they go somewhere else, that's fine.

As long as Christ is formed with them, I'm happy.

And this begs the question of the church, anyway.

What's a church model?

You get some churches, and I see it, you see it on Facebook, especially with the American mega churches, where they have percentages.

They actually set a percentage growth target for the church.

We want to see 10% more people come to church in a year.

We want to see 15 or 15% more people get baptized this year.

We want to see, we want to see, and it's a percentage figure.

It's performative Christianity.

And I'm not talking here about the Gospel of Prosperity Gospel preachers.

I'm talking about standard churches.

But they treat it like a business.

And you see that in some of the churches here.

It's starting to appear.

I know churches here where people travel for hundreds of miles just to attend.

Some of the biggest churches one over the road from me.

They don't consider looking up their own local areas.

They all travel to the big one.

It's performative Christianity.

But the true church seeks to model the people within it on Christ.

And I doubt if the early church modelled it up on these mega churches.

In fact, the little we know about the early church up to 200 AD, there were small communities.

They weren't large numbers.

They couldn't afford to be large numbers.

Because most of the time they were on the run from the authorities.

Yes, invite people to church.

Yes, pray for new members.

No.

Yes to prayer, no to target.

And you know what?

That strikes me as being more of the church than of the world.

But if you go to a church that sets target above prayer, then that church is more of the world and lost to the church.

And Paul had already gone through the labor of bringing these Galatians to Christ.

And now he's going through labor again because they are drifting.

They are losing the shape of Christ in their lives.

Paul ends with a simple human confession.

I desire to be present with you now and to change my voice, for I stand in doubt of you.

He wishes he could see them, he wishes he could hear their voices again.

He wishes he could read their expressions.

He wishes he could understand what's happening in their hearts.

Distance.

Distance makes everything so hard.

Letters can be misread.

Tones can be misunderstood.

Motives can be questioned.

Paul wants to be with them so he can speak gently if needed, firmly if needed, and clearly always.

But he cannot be there, and so he writes with concern, with longing, with perplexity.

And this is the final note of the passage.

Paul is not angry, he is confused and concerned.

But when we put this together, we see the heart of the passage.

Paul wants them back in the freedom of Christ.

He refuses to make himself the victim.

He refuses sorry, he remembers their former love with tenderness.

He feels their pain of being misunderstood.

He exposes their manipulation motives, the manipulative motives of false teachers.

He labors like a mother for Christ to be formed within them.

And he longs to be present so he can speak with clarity and compassion.

And this is not doctrinal arguments.

This is a pastor's cry.

And the same cry I make, same cry any pastor should make.

And it teaches us this.

The gospel is not only truth to believe, it is a relationship to protect.

And when Christ is formed in us, we recognize truth as love, correction as care, and warning as mercy.

Paul's concern for the Galatians is Christ's concern for us, that we remain free, we remain faithful, and we remain firm in him.

Amen.