InLine Life

If you have a Bible with you, let me invite you to turn to Galatians chapter 2, verses 11 through 16.

Galatians 2:11–16

Now I know some of you are thinking, are we in a time warp?

Did we study that last week?

Yes, and we will study it again next week for various reasons.

And so let me kind of set up why we're doing this the way we are.

A few years ago, uh when my son Connor graduated from university, I took him on a trip to the Grand Tetons.

And we were planning to go and visit the national parks that were in the area.

So Grand Tetons one day, and then whatever the next one was.

And we went to the Grand Tetons the first day and walked around, loved it, had such a good time, we said, let's just come back here tomorrow.

This is there's so much to see.

So the first day we walked along trails in one part, the second day we kind of hiked up a mountain.

Uh the next day we came back down, or you know, we walked to an area that was better for my knees at this point.

And we saw a bear, we saw moose, we saw all kinds of things.

It was really fantastic.

So every day was something new.

And uh that's why we're doing this passage again is because I think we're gonna see some of the same things.

You have to go to the gate, you know, at Grand Tetons.

Uh, you're gonna go to the gate, but we hopefully will see some new things as we go through.

So if you're able, let me invite you to stand as we read again.

Galatians chapter 2, verses 11 through 16.

Galatians 2:11–16

But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.

For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles.

But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party, and the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with them, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.

But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, and that's what we're going to focus on today, when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, if you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?

We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners.

Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.

So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law.

Because by works of the law, no one will be justified.

So we're justified only in Jesus.

Let me pray and ask Jesus to bless us so we can learn more about justification.

Lord Jesus, we are grateful for this space that we have been able to use.

We pray that you would direct us as we plan for the future and what's coming next.

But for right now, for right now, in this place, at this time, we pray that you would pour out your spirit and enable us to think about the internal life, of faith, and living before you as those who are called to belong to you.

Would you bless us, and Lord, would you bless me?

I pray that you would give me the words to say that would be of encouragement and of courage to your people.

I pray that those words would not fall on deaf ears, and by that I mean my own.

Bless us.

And be with us, we pray, in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Please have a seat.

We go to the same beach every year in South Carolina, and it's a 56-year tradition.

And so I I grew up going to the beach, my kids have all grown up going to the beach, my brother's kids have all grown up going to the beach.

And uh when my there's just kind of a gap between the age of my kids and my siblings' children.

My siblings, their children are in their 30s, ours are kind of like in their 20s.

And uh, but when they were little, we used to do this thing at the beach because it's an old beach, and uh there are old houses and old churches and old graveyards.

We used to do this thing that we thought was fun at the time called ghost busting.

I don't believe in ghosts, but it's kind of a fun thing for us to do as a family back in the day, where we would go into the graveyard and there was this one mausoleum that was extra creepy to go into, and there was a story behind it, and we didn't believe any of that.

Uh, but we would tell the story to the big kids, the 30-year-olds, when they were young, and uh they thought it was the creepiest, most wonderful thing ever.

Like great great uncles, great dads, great aunts and uncles, all these things.

And uh when my kids got to be a certain age, uh, and my sisters, their kids are kind of the same age, or some, and we did they decided, why have you never taken us ghost busting?

We want to go ghost busting too.

We hadn't done this for years, and we thought, that's a great idea.

Let's let's do the let's pull that out of the tradition.

And so one of the cousins, the little cousins, uh, we'll just call him Chuck, uh, just you know, in case y'all ever ran into him.

Chuck, uh, we we kind of had to set up the story, about to tell the story of the mausoleum and all these things to the little kids.

And and Chuck was really, really creeped out by the whole thing.

And he said, we said, do you still want to go?

And Chuck said, Yes, I still want to go.

But it's scary.

I'm really scared.

This is gonna be awful.

And he started asking questions about the ghost and what we might see in it.

And we're saying, there's not really a ghost.

It's just a creepy place.

The lighting's creepy.

There are no ghosts, it's gonna be fine.

But, you know, we told the story and kind of set the stage.

And we probably made it in the car a hundred yards.

And Chuck was having such a fit about the whole thing, we canceled ghost busting forever and never went back and did anything like that again.

And what was fascinating about it is we told all the kids a ghost story.

And Chuck believed the ghost story.

And it shaped before we even got into the car, it shaped the way he saw the situation.

He saw us, he saw the world, he thought he was gonna see ghosts everywhere, he was asking questions about the ghost and the life and everything.

And what was fascinating to me is like he believed it and it shaped everything he saw from that moment on.

Now, what was interesting is if I had told, if we had told Chuck a different story, he would have seen that whole situation differently.

Like, hey, Chuck, we're gonna go to the candy store.

The candy store! I love the candy store! You're the best uncle ever.

I love you, Uncle Stephen.

And so there it would have been changed the situation completely and totally, changed his outlook on what he was gonna see, what he was expecting to see, what he was going to experience, what was going to happen to him.

So, what was Chuck doing at that moment?

He was doing faith.

He was doing faith.

He was believing something.

Uh, we all do this as we look at the bigger world.

We we have these expectations, what's the way we see the world, our sense of security, what we're supposed to get out of the world, all of these things.

We do this.

Even as adults, we tell ourselves stories about the nature of the world that shape how we see it and enter into it.

Several years ago, there was a there was a um an interview with Bono from U2, and Bono was talking about his modest home that he has in Ireland.

Now he's he's a superstar, he has made a lot of money, he can afford big houses everywhere, but in Ireland where he lives, he has a very modest home.

And the talk show host was saying, This is your home, this is a very modest home for uh a rock and roll superstar, and he said, Yes, because uh people in Ireland and people in the United States see homes differently.

In the United States, when a person sees a big mansion up on a hill, a person in the United States will look at that house and say, Yeah, someday that's going to be me.

I'm gonna be up in the house on the hill.

But in Ireland, when a guy sees a big house up on a hill, people in Ireland say, Yeah, one of these days I'm going to get that guy.

It's just a very different mindset about how you enter into the world.

And so do you see what's going on is Americans and Irish approach the world with stories, with ghost stories and candy store stories, grievance stories, wealth stories.

And so, you know, on one story we say, Will I see a ghost?

Oh no.

And the other is, will I go to the will I see candy?

Oh boy, this is great.

It's different.

And so, do you know what's happening when we approach the world that way?

It's it's faith.

Faith is not a compartment for our lives.

Faith is how we see and experience every bit of our lives.

We see, experience, navigate through the world based on the story that we accept.

And it's inescapable for all of us.

And we see that in Galatians 2.14.

Uh this is what Paul means when he says in Galatians 2.14 their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel.

At that moment, they're believing something else.

And that's what we're going to talk about this morning, being in line with the gospel.

The gospel directs our lives, our conduct, our impact, that it directs everything.

So, 214.

Paul writes in 214, their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel.

So, what is the gospel?

The gospel simply means, says a word, good news.

But it is the ultimate good news because it's the ultimate, it's good news about ultimate reality and our relationship with God being completely and utterly restored.

The Bible's quite clear on the matter.

None of us has lived the joy-filled, loving, beneficial, productive life for which God made us.

And it doesn't do any, it doesn't do any good for any of us to compare our lives to other people, the shades of gray, the shades of gradient that are there.

None of us lives the life we ought to.

We are self-absorbed.

We live a net negative life in terms of our effect on the world.

The good we should do, we don't do.

The bad we ought not to do, we often do.

And uh it can look like this, it can look like anything.

It can look like the sins of liberalism, it can look like the sins of conservatism, it can look like the sins of the wealthy, it can look like the sins of the poor.

All of us, all of us have sinned, all of us are accountable, and this is what God's law was intended to show us.

Not what we need to do to escape that, but it serves a little bit like a breathalyzer test to show us the reality of what's really going on inside of us that we don't measure up.

So in the gospel, God gives what we desperately need, but do not have ourselves.

He gives us a righteousness to enter into his presence.

So the gospel explanation has these two big ideas.

One is that Jesus has paid for our sins.

He's taken all the guilt, he's paid the debt, there is no debt left for those who believe in Jesus.

Period.

And then the second is that he lived a perfect life and gave us his gold medal.

So when Jesus approached the Father and had the gold medal for the life that he won, he presented it to the Father and said, Treat the people who believe in me as if they've earned this medal.

This medal is theirs.

Some of you may have never heard of a guy named Dickie Simpkins.

Does anybody happen to know who Dickie Simpkins is in here?

Dickey Simpkins is a fun name to say.

He's unknown to most of us, but Dicky Simpkins has more NBA championships than many megastar NBA All-Star players.

Just period.

He has three.

And not many of them have that many.

Three.

He played for the Chicago Bulls 1996 to 1998.

And so he was in the championship.

The reality, though, is uh he had zero points, zero rebounds, zero assists, zero blocks, zero steals in the entire playoff run for both of these years because he played zero minutes.

He was a bench warmer.

Yet his ring is the same cut, the same quality, and the same design as Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.

He got the exact same award, the exact same ring.

Why?

Because he was on their team and they went out and won the games that he couldn't win.

He was just a bench warmer.

And what we see in the gospel is that bench warmers are champions through faith in Jesus Christ.

We have the same righteousness, we have the same medal, we have the same championship ring because Jesus has earned it for us.

We're all Dickey Simpkins, all of us.

That would be a great t-shirt for our church, right?

Grace President.

We're all Dicky Simpkins.

And yet we're and we're all counted righteous through the efforts and the work of Jesus.

And this is why Paul confronted Peter.

Because Peter is treating these Gentiles as if they haven't done the work, because that's what the un that's what the circumcised Jews who came to town were saying.

And so Paul confronted Peter.

And this is what he says in 2.14, your life's not in line with the gospel.

When I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, or the way the NIV says it, in line with the truth of the gospel.

He says, I said to all of them, and that's where 15 to 16 we're going to talk about next week.

So let me give you a little background.

Paul refers here to the circumcision group, and this is a group of first century Palestinian Jews who came into Antioch, and they were, they they, we talked about this last week, they turned everything upside down by saying, the Jews and Gentiles who have been relating and having table fellowship and enjoying company together only in Jesus, that can't happen anymore.

Because the Gentiles are not circumcised, they're not worthy to sit at the table with the circumcised.

We have to separate these two.

So, Peter, you can't sit with the Gentile Christians anymore.

Now, the Gentiles mentioned here that there were Christians who weren't Jewish.

They had no Jewish cultural background.

They didn't keep the ceremonial laws.

That was all foreign to them.

They had been told that Jesus was Jewish, but when Jesus died on a cross, he died to cover their sins too.

And so the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians in Antioch had one happy family living together before the face of Christ.

And all they had to do was to believe in Jesus as the centerpiece in the lives.

So these Jewish Christians from Jerusalem who came in, they said, We're the elite.

And they treated the Gentile Christians with contempt and rejected association with them.

They claimed that the Gentile Christians were clearly not really Christians unless they were circumcised.

So Paul came to Peter and said, You are not in step with the truth of the gospel.

Now notice what Paul doesn't say.

Paul doesn't say you're not acting on what you believe.

Because that's not true.

At that moment, Peter was acting on what he believed.

He just wasn't believing the truth of the gospel.

He was believing something else.

So what does it mean to believe?

Now, you know this, I know this, we grew up with this in school.

Culturally, since the Enlightenment, we have defined the word faith to refer to accepting something as true when you don't have all the evidence for it.

Or even if you have contrary evidence to it.

That's faith.

You don't have any evidence for it.

But that's a misrepresentation and a reductionistic explanation.

Because as you begin to look at the history of the word faith throughout the centuries, Christians talked about faith as something very different.

And I'm going to give you three elements to help you think about this.

One is being convinced, captivated, and compelled.

To have faith in something means that you are convinced it is true.

Other things that purport to be true are not true.

This is true.

I'm convinced this is true.

The second element is captivated.

To be captivated refers to what you think is valuable or worthwhile, what's supreme, what is best.

So when you say I believe, you're saying, I believe this is best.

I believe this is worthwhile.

I believe this is better than everything else.

This thing.

I believe this.

And then the third is you're it's you're compelled by it, convinced, captivated, compelled.

So it's what you give your life to.

It's what your mission in life is.

It's a life well lived.

So to sum it up, faith is what you base your life on.

So a lot of people, when we talk about Jesus, I believe Jesus died for my sins, yes, and I'm gonna go to heaven when I die.

But when the Bible talks about faith in Jesus, it's saying that I don't just believe that Jesus is going to do something at the end of my life.

I believe that Jesus is true and worthwhile and completely compelling now in my life, for the way that I live my life right now.

I believe these things.

But everyone has this kind of faith of saying, I'm convinced, I'm captivated, I'm compelled by something.

Everyone does this.

Everyone bases their life on something.

It's just a question of what your faith is in.

For the Christian, we believe the whole gospel message that Jesus is the Christ and he died for our sins and he calls us to live a certain way.

So Paul is not telling Peter you stop believing.

He's saying you've started believing something else.

He's saying you are believing something else besides just the gospel of Jesus because you're not acting in line with the truth of the gospel.

You're not acting in step with the truth of the gospel.

And so, what does he mean?

What he means is this is the gospel has lines of transformation.

The gospel has lines of obedience.

The gospel has lines of grace that are drawn from it to the way that we live our lives.

And that means that Christian obedience isn't just rules.

It's saying, I believe something deep within me that's directing me outward.

It's not an external rule that I'm just trying to keep.

It's saying there's a truth inside of you about the gospel of Jesus Christ that directs the way that you live.

So if the gospel is true, and if God has truly forgiven somebody's sins apart from anything that they do, and they receive the full righteousness of Christ apart from anything they do, and Peter, you've accepted the same righteousness in Christ apart from anything you do, that means that you and the Gentiles are on the same plane before Jesus.

Jesus makes them right, and Jesus makes you right, and there's nothing that should get in the way of that.

And so when he's saying you're not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, he's saying, Peter, you're not believing the truth of the gospel right now, you're believing something else.

Imagine it this way.

Imagine you've got a big tank, like not like an army tank, but you know, a big container.

A big container and it has a spigot on it and a hose, right?

If you turn the spigot and it comes on, whatever's inside of the tank is gonna come out of the end of that hose, right?

So if there's water in the tank, water is gonna come out of that hose.

If there's gas in that tank, gas is gonna come out of that hose.

If there's pudding in that tank, it's gonna take a really long time, but pudding is gonna come out of the end of that hose.

And that's what he's telling us here is Peter has a cultural story, a ghost story, a candy story that he believes.

And we can see why it would be so easy for him to believe that, because that's what he grew up hearing.

He grew up hearing that Jews and Gentiles don't associate.

And when and he heard the gospel, he's trying to live this out, but when these people from Jerusalem came in, it was so easy, so quick for him to fall back into what he had heard his entire life about what living before God and living life in the world is supposed to be like.

Um he believed the first century Palestinian Judaism story, and that took up space in his heart.

So that when he turned on the spigot, that's what was coming out at this particular point in time.

So no matter what Peter knew about the gospel, no matter what role he had played in bringing the Gentiles into the church, no matter what how he had seen Jesus interact with other people, the assumptions of this Jewish story were still so strong that the pressure to conform, the subtle and not so subtle arrogant critique of the value of other people and the idea of what makes me right with God, depending on what I do, that Peter fell out of step with the gospel.

The line wasn't being drawn.

And the reality is that you and I step into the world just like Peter.

We have we have cultural stories that we tell, ghost stories, candy stories, grievance stories about life in the world, and they shape what we're looking for.

They shape how we act, they shape what we do, they shape how we Spend, how we view other people, and we were born into it, and it shapes us just like Peter, and there's a competition in our hearts for what the gospel says and what we know to be true, and then what our culture says around us, what we grew up with, that makes sense to us because we grew up in the United States, this is where we are, and Christians often find that like Peter, that the cultural candy story is in conflict with the gospel story that we hear.

And uh I'm encountering that.

I'm encountering that for me.

I am I'm not old enough yet, but I'm getting pretty close to retirement age.

And uh I'm thinking about retirement.

And I'm I ride around the villages and I think about what will my retirement be like.

And as I look around, and you've probably experienced the same thing as you're walking as you're riding around, retirement or not, you're riding around and you can see the reflection of the me generation kind of like playing itself out.

And it's not just the me generation, it's a me civilization, like all of us.

That was the label that somebody gave it back in what, the 70s.

And part of that for us is I'm telling myself a story about what retirement is going to be like.

And I'm finding that the story I tell myself about retirement is going to be like is not like what the Bible says retirement ought to be like for me.

Right?

And so what that means is Rebecca and I are gonna live in a cabin out in the woods away from everything and everybody.

Wouldn't that be a good way to spend our retirement out in the woods with the deer and the moose?

We're gonna build a little cabin back at Grand Tetons, nobody will find us back there.

It'll be fantastic.

And then I think, oh wait, no, love God, love the world.

Okay, so we can't just isolate and pull ourselves away from people that way.

Uh and I'm thinking about what it will mean for me not to be a preacher necessarily anymore, but moving on to something else.

Like I shouldn't be done ministering to people.

And I came across a podcast this week, and it asked the question do you know how old Moses was when God called him into ministry?

And uh we I know we saw the Prince of Egypt movie, it's this animated movie.

It's a cartoon, right?

It's not necessarily based on Moses is like 32 or something in that movie, like the way they have him drawn.

The first 40 years of Moses' life, he lived as a son of Pharaoh in Egypt.

Then there was a big kerfuffle, and he had to flee for his life, and then for the next 40 years, his career was as a shepherd in Midian.

So when God appeared to him in the burning bush and said, Go to Egypt and confront Pharaoh, and I'm going to release my people from bondage, Moses was 80 years old.

And then the next 40 years were spent wandering in the desert with a bunch of ungrateful people.

It's like, okay, uh, God isn't through with you.

God isn't through with you.

There's a whole group here.

And one of the things we want for our church, and one of the reasons we're thinking about a building is a tool, how can we more effectively reach our community?

And we're already doing that, but how can we do that more effectively?

And so we've got some, we're we're not just gonna be planning and thinking about the vision for a building for the future, but a building uh uh a vision for our church, how we can be more effective in our outreach to our community.

Young people.

We have young people, hey, let's see.

We have a few other young people.

Um what about you?

Youth culture in the United States looks a certain way.

Um it has for a while.

Came across, I'll ask a different question this week.

How old was Moses?

How old was the apostle John when God, when Jesus called him?

Most people think he was sometime, it was after his bar mitzvah, so it was sometime between the age of 13 and 22.

He was that young when Jesus said to come and follow him, to leave his boats and go.

So God can use the 80-year-old and he can use the 13-year-old because he's that powerful.

Now, at this point, as we're looking at this, Paul is not coming and putting personal pressure, he's not putting pressure on Peter about the gospel and saying, this is the way it ought to look for you necessarily.

He's doing something different.

He's not putting a guilt trip on Peter, he's putting a grace trip on Peter.

Because it was the it was the Jewish people coming in and saying, your life has to look this way, even though the gospel may call you to something else, it has to look this way.

And Peter, and Paul is saying to Peter, you don't have to listen to them.

Listen to what the gospel tells you.

What does the gospel say that should convince you and captivate you and compel you to live your life differently?

What should come out of the hose of your life and what's in the tank?

What do you believe truly?

And so he's not putting Peter under condemnation.

He's doing the exact opposite.

He's releasing him.

And he's saying, the gospel releases us from all the things that have constrained us.

We don't have to be constrained by what other people think our lives ought to look like.

We find our lives to be free in the gospel.

So if the gospel story is true, if you're really forgiven in Jesus and restored to God in Jesus, then what are you convinced is true?

What's the world really like?

What are you captivated by when you look at the world and you say, This is the most beautiful?

This is beautiful.

And then what are you compelled to do because you see the need around you?

What does this mean for you to conduct your life in step with the gospel?

Well, we see it here, and we see it fleshed out elsewhere, is Paul's application here is really about relationships.

It's not necessarily about going to some foreign country or anything.

It's saying, what kind of people are in your life?

And the gospel creates a new story that enables us to extend ourselves to anyone.

In this case, it was the Jews with the Gentiles.

Jesus has broken down the wall of hostility and said, hey, you can be together in the same family, in the same church family, in the same room and worship because the gospel is that big.

Jesus came because he loved us and he calls us to love other people, even people who are different than us, even people who are very, very broken that other people would reject.

So one of our probably for many of you, your one of your favorite stories in the Gospels is the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus.

Zacchaeus was a wee little man.

A wee little man was he.

And uh he's a short man.

And when he he was the tax collector, and everybody in town hated him because he was a tax collector.

So he is worse than a gentile in their minds.

And when Jesus was coming through his town, you can read about this in Luke 19, Zacchaeus, like everybody's like a celebrity.

I want to see this Jesus that people keep talking about.

So he, you know, he as he kind of tried to look over people's shoulders, you can imagine people kind of shouldering him out because he's the tax collector.

So Zacchaeus can't see over the tops of people's heads like I could.

So he climbed up in a tree.

And so what that means is everybody sees Zacchaeus shambling up this tree so he can get a good view of Jesus.

And nobody else is in a tree, as far as we know.

It's just Zacchaeus.

Everybody sees Zacchaeus, including Jesus.

And Jesus makes his way over to Zacchaeus and crosses a boundary that nobody else was willing to cross.

He goes to the tax collector, the hated person, and says, I'm coming to your house today.

And that was the day that Zacchaeus was converted because Jesus was willing to cross that boundary.

Zacchaeus today, I'm coming to eat with you.

Jesus loved the outcast, and everybody watched as Jesus loved the outcast.

Because he's Zacchaeus is in the tree, all eyes are in Jesus, and they listened to this.

And how do you think that affected them?

So, Peter, these Gentiles are just as acceptable to the Father as you.

You and they came in the same way.

You're both clothed in the righteousness of Jesus.

In Jesus, we are all Dickie Simpkins, and we can enter in.

We all have Jesus.

We come in with nothing but are given everything.

We're given the credentials of Jesus.

So if you believe that the gospel is by grace and anyone is acceptable just by believing in Jesus, then you're open to all sorts of people in your life.

And in Jesus, we endure the messy specifics that love requires.

This is part of why the in 1 Corinthians, love is patient, love is kind, doesn't envy it, doesn't boast.

And he's talking about what's typically in our hearts and saying, no, the gospel.

The gospel changes that.

And what he's saying to Peter and to us is we don't get to choose who comes in.

Jesus gets to choose.

And we are bound together in him.

What he's calling us to do is go and spread the gospel, tell, and then whoever he brings through that, they're now a part of our family.

Probably one of the best pictures of that, and we'll close with this, one of the best pictures I've ever seen of that was actually not in a church.

But it was while we were in seminary.

When we were in seminary, we uh we had some mutual friends, two friends, and then Jared and Mimi.

Jared and Mimi, at some point in the they lived together, at some point they got married, they were not Christians.

Uh, but at some point in the midst of our friendship with them, they decided to have a party.

And at this party, they invited everybody they knew.

It was the most diverse people I have ever been in the room with in my life.

And it was it was both outstanding and terrifying at the same time.

It was not, it was people from different races, different nationalities.

There was Rastafarian, uh, there were uh people with alternative lifestyles, there were all sorts of people in this room.

And as we walked around, we recognized we're all here, not because we know each other, we're here because we know Jared and Mimi.

That's the unifying factor, that's the unifying relationship for all of us.

And so as we walked around, it's like uh where are you from?

Who are you?

Why are you here?

It's like the same reason.

We're here because we were called, we were asked, we were invited by Jared and Mimi.

And I thought that is a great image of what we can be and maybe should be is churches in the United States, a very diverse group of people who say the only thing that brought us here is Jesus came to the tree I was uh sitting in and said, Today salvation has come to your house, today I'm coming to you, and we're going to have a meal together.

So, as we look at this passage, we just kind of crossed out of the Grand Tetons, we're getting back in the car, and the next week we get to go to the highest peak in the mountain range, and a thing that holds all of us together.

So let me pray for us.