"No Advantage to You" (Gal. 5:1-6)

Transcript:

Well, tonight for our sermon text, we are considering Galatians, chapter 5, verses 1 through 6. If you were using one of the pew Bibles, this is on page 1157. 1157, 1157.

Hear now the word of the Lord From Galatians, chapter 5, verses 1 through 6. For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Look. I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you.

I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You were severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law. You have fallen away from grace. For through the spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Please be seated. And as you're taking your seats, let's join our hearts together tonight in prayer. Pray with me.

Gracious heavenly Father, we do thank you for your word. We thank you for Christ, who is our only exclusive Savior, who saves us to the uttermost. And so tonight we pray that we would get really clear on this, not to confront the problems that others have, but to remove the specks or even the logs from our own eyes that keep us from trusting entirely with the entire weight of our eternal souls on the rock solid foundation of Jesus Christ and him crucified. And so we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Well, our catechism tonight is warning us particularly, it is calling us to consider something about Jesus, but it is giving us a very clear warning against adding to Jesus about seeking security beyond Jesus in anyone or anything other than Christ alone. And the particular concern that is here in the Heidelberg Catechism has to do with a line that we read in question 30. Do those who look for their salvation and security in saints or in themselves or elsewhere, really believe in the only savior, Jesus? It's a particular question addressed to consider the concern of those who would seek help from the saints who were in heaven, praying to them, asking for them to pray for us. And this message is particularly associated with Roman Catholicism.

But it's a message that finds wide currency in our culture. There was a movie, maybe you saw it, that came out a little over 20 years ago that told the true story of a man named Jim Morris, a 35 year old who got a second chance at playing Baseball in the major leagues as a pitcher. It's kind of a fun story about how he washed up through injury early in his career. But then as he was coaching a very small town baseball team, they challenged him that if they could win districts, that he should try out again. And they did.

And so he tried out and was able to pitch in the major leagues briefly. Now, it's a fun story. I enjoyed it. Baseball season starting, there's a lot of that in the air. But the problem with this movie and the way that the movie is told is it's framed at the beginning of the movie and the end of the movie as an emphasis on praying to the patron saint of lost causes.

The patron saint of lost causes. You see sort of the little emblem on a necklace that he wears, a. That he's seeking help from the patron saint of lost causes. Now, the idea here is that if you need help, Jesus is certainly good. Jesus is certainly the only savior.

But if you need help, you can go to specific saints in heaven and seek help from them because they have particular powers or they have particular areas of influence. One over lost causes, another over various different kinds of sicknesses. And. And on and on it goes. And what the scriptures declare is that this is really not that far off from the pagan ideas of gods who exercise their dominion over different domains.

You would go to Zeus if you needed something related to the sky or the storms. We should potentially have been praying to him this last week. You would go to Hera if you were looking about something about marriage or women or childbirth. Poseidon if you needed to sail across the sea, Ares if you were going to war. All of these gods had different dominions.

When you really need help in some area, you need to find the God or the patron saint who has this special area of influence. Now in Roman Catholicism, they would argue, hey, this is really kind of helpful. Just as you would ask a. A friend to pray for you. Why shouldn't we ask the saints in heaven to pray for us?

Except that we are given no scriptural warrant for praying to those who are dead to ask for them to pray for us. So Roman Catholics would say, this is helpful. Hollywood thinks this is harmless. It's a fun way to tell a story. But the scriptures say this is heinous sin.

Because if our salvation and security rests in Christ alone, outside Christ, we have no hope. And there are no good things that you can affix onto Christ to try to expand your hope and comfort in this life and the next. But here's the catch. This is not only a question related to circumcision, as Paul writes about here. This is not only an issue for Roman Catholics in the way that they pray to saints, to Mary and the saints.

This is a searching issue for each of us because at core, each of us is tempted to try to diversify our portfolio to try to find a little extra help, a little extra security, a little extra comfort outside of Christ. And the Scriptures give us very dire warnings about this. If you do this, Christ will be of no advantage to you. And so this is something that we have to get right. Our theme tonight is that Christ saves those who seek security in him.

Christ saves those who seek security in him. So we'll look at this short passage of Scripture in three parts. First, that Jesus saves sinners. Jesus saves sinners in verse one. Second, Jesus saves exclusively.

Jesus saves exclusively. And third, Jesus saves entirely in verses 5 and 6.

So first, Jesus saves sinners. Galatians 5:1. Paul writes, for freedom. Christ has set us free. Now, what does he mean by this?

Before we get to the nature of freedom, it's important to understand what he says within the context of the entire letter written to the Church in Galatia. This letter to the Galatians was addressing the question of justification. That is, how are we made right or accounted for, righteous in our standing before a perfectly righteous God? In Galatians, chapter 2, verse 16, Paul put it very clearly where he said, 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.

You will not be justified by the works of the law, nor by pagan gods, nor by patron saints, nor by any of the ceremonial practices commanded by the Old Covenant Law. And particularly he has in mind the ceremonial practice of circumcision. You see, the question that was in the mind of these Jewish believers was that as more and more Gentiles were coming into the church, and we're reading about this in our study in the Book of Acts in the mornings, but as more and more Gentiles were coming in the church, you can think about these Jewish believers who were looking at these unwashed, unclean, uncircumcised Gentiles who are coming into the church in droves in some cases, and they're wondering, how can these unwashed masses come to Christ when they remain unclean, polluted, defiled, filthy Gentiles? Don't they need to clean up the mess of their life a little bit before they come to Jesus. Don't they need, like we have been, to become circumcised and to go through all the ceremonial cleansings and the ceremonial rites and rituals to clean up their lives before coming to Jesus?

And what we saw back in Acts chapter 10 is that it was a very bold thing for Peter to go to the uncircumcised in Caesarea, and yet he went to them, and we are told specifically that he ate with them. That's really important, because to eat with uncircumcised Gentiles was uniquely defiling, uniquely polluting. But what we read is that he was criticized by the circumcision party in that passage in Acts 11:1, 3 for going to these Gentiles and for eating with them. But in Galatians 2, we read of some other incident where Peter stopped eating with the Gentiles, fearing the circumcision party, the same circumcision party that had rebuked him earlier for doing this very thing of eating with Gentiles. Now Peter had stopped doing this because he feared them.

And so in Galatians 2, Paul rebuked him to his face to call him back to the purity of the gospel of salvation in faith alone, in Christ alone. And as we talked about, when we talked about some of these passages in Acts, I want to say again, these controversies seem so foreign to us because they answer questions that we have never answered. They deal with issues that have never the least been a concern to us. But the issue that these issues point to is very much a concern to us. Namely, will Jesus save only those who have first cleaned up their lives and then come to him?

Or is Jesus the one stop shop, so to speak? Is Jesus the exclusive savior of sinners, so that to try to find a little extra, or a little preliminary salvation, or a little going beyond what is required salvation, or extra comfort or security anywhere outside of Jesus actually undermines the freedom that we have in Christ. And what Paul says is that it does. We have been given freedom, freedom from the obligations of the ceremonial law, freedom from the external rites and rituals that formerly characterized Old Testament worship. Not that they were designed to be external, they were always pointing to the internal heart matters.

But they could easily be turned into mere externalities. And as such, they were a yoke. They were a bondage to keep the law in every particular, in every command. Now the law was given. The yoke of the law was given for a reason and for a season.

To teach us that we were sinners who even with a divinely imperfect appointed law, a law coming down from heaven, from God himself. Even so, even if we have the perfect blueprint of how to live in a way that is pleasing to God, we still fall short. Because it's not the law that is the problem for us. It is what the law exposes in us, namely, the sin in us. Slavery to law is only a problem when we are slaves to sin than we are unless Jesus has liberated us, has set us free.

And that's exactly what Paul is declaring here in verse 1. For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. This Heidelberg Catechism 29 reminds us tonight the Son of God is called Jesus. And this is such an important, important thing.

Because the name Jesus means the Lord saves. And he's called Jesus because he saves us from our sins and because salvation is not to be sought or to be found in anyone or anything else. Well, let's apply this. Jesus saves sinners. Jesus forgives the guilty.

Jesus cleanses the defiled. Jesus reconciles those who have been estranged from God. Jesus adopts enemies of God into the family of God. As children of God, what about in your life? Is your past checkered?

Do you feel the weight of guilt before a holy God because of your sin? Do you feel unclean, filthy, polluted and defiled when you think about where you have been and what you have done? Do you secretly worry that you are such damaged goods that even God would not, could not receive you on your own? You're correct. If it's just you standing in the light of the perfect law of God, you do not qualify.

You cannot enter into God's presence. The law exposes every one of your flaws, every one of your mistakes, and all of the ugly sin from which those sins have arisen. You have on your own no hope in this life or the next. But the gospel is not and has never been about what you can do for yourself to clean your life up so that you can qualify for heaven. It has never been about how to build a tall enough tower so that you can rise up into God's throne room to present yourself before him.

It has always been about how God so loved the world that he sent his only Son into this world for us and for our salvation, so that whatever unclean things you have done might be cleansed by the sprinkled blood of Jesus Christ shed for you at the cross and wherever you have trespassed. God's holy and righteous law. You can be forgiven because God's only begotten, precious, beloved Son was bruised for your iniquities and was crushed for your transgressions. God sent Jesus, his only Son, as a substitute for sinners, the righteous for the unrighteous, to reconcile us to God and salvation is only and exclusively in Him. You do not receive this salvation by what you do, by your careful duty, diligent law keeping.

It's not by doing more, not by trying harder, not by working longer to earn something from God. And none of it comes from asking for help from saints in heaven or by seeking additional security outside of Jesus. It is simply by receiving what Jesus has done for us through faith, which we receive as a gift. You're free. You're free from the burdens of the ceremonial law.

You're free from your sin. You do not need to eat the right foods, to wear the right clothes, to cut your hair the right way, and to submit to the sign of circumcision for freedom. Christ has set you free. Stand firm, therefore, against the yoke of slavery.

Now again, that's a wonderful, rousing thing when we think about circumcision, as long as we keep it away from us. Because when it's someone else's issue, they're always so much easier to diagnose and deal with, right? But what about us? The constant temptation, whatever the issue is, whatever the age, whatever the culture, the constant temptation is that the free grace of God sounds too easy to our ears. It sounds too simple.

Okay, that's really good news. But what's the catch? When does the other shoe drop? What do I need to do? What's this going to cost me now?

Maybe Christ alone might work for some, but I would rather be safe than sorry kind of thinking. However, Paul writes in the next section will actually put you not in a safer position, but in a far more dangerous position. Because Jesus saves exclusively. That's the second section. In verses two through four, Jesus saves exclusively.

Verse two, Paul writes, look, I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. Again, they were looking at circumcision as a prerequisite exam, as something that would ceremonially cleanse these unclean, unwashed Gentiles so that they might be in a state ready to come to Christ for salvation. But what Paul was doing was exposing the flaw in this that this way of looking at circumcision, this way of looking at Christ, this way of looking at the salvation that Christ offers What it does is it says that Christ is not enough on his own. It shifts God's salvation away from being a gracious gift to undeserving and helpless sinners and toward being a little boost for me to functionally save myself. It diminishes the glory of Christ and it shifts the emphasis as a fundamental error away from.

From faith alone. Suddenly our salvation is Christ alone. Faith in Christ alone plus something else needed to get over the requirements of God. And what Paul says is, if that's the case, if you accept this extra thing, Christ plus something else, then Christ will be of no advantage to you because he refuses. He refuses to be part of your diversification strategy.

In finances, you're supposed to diversify, not put all your eggs in one basket. You're supposed to put a little bit here, a little bit there. In case there's a downturn in one area and an upturn in another, you're going to be safe. God does not want you to diversify your heavenly portfolio. What he says in verse three is that something must.

Something must bear the exclusive weight of your eternal soul. You can't mix and match one thing or another thing will bear the exclusive weight of your soul. And if it's going to be the law, then that's going to be what your hope rests upon. Verse 3. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law.

You thought you were receiving circumcision just to be able to enter into the kingdom of heaven, enter into salvation through faith in Christ. But if you're going down that road, if you are trusting in the law to make you safe, then only the law will be your safety. And again, if all of us are standing alone in the blazing light of God's holy law, none of us has any hope in this life in the next. The law exposed our sin. The law was exposed why we needed Christ in the first place.

And so if we re yoke ourselves to the law, we lose Christ. That's what he says. In verse 4. You are severed from Christ. You who would be justified by the law.

You have fallen away from grace. Either Christ saves us by his grace, or we set out on some path to find salvation somewhere else that cannot ultimately save it's law or gospel. It's merit or grace. It is doing or it is receiving. In terms of our justification, there is no way to mix faith and obedience in terms of what counts us as righteous before God.

Now again, I don't want to preach a Sermon about an issue that's 2,000 years removed from us. Circumcision is not our temptation, but it's still the same question. Will you be justified by faith alone, through grace, alone, in Christ alone, or with a little help from the patron saints who pray for you in heaven? Or will you be justified because not only are you a Christian with faith in Christ, but you also have a very good reputation? Or you also have a very good and well known name?

Or because you work really hard, whether on the job site or at home or at church, or because you have not fallen prey to certain addictions to drugs or alcohol, or because you have made it through with sexual purity that others cannot claim. Or because you take the right political stances and cast the right votes. The list could go on and on. But think about it this way. Fill in the blank here.

When I will stand before God, I will feel safe. Because what if those other things are sources of confidence for you? Then those will be your only sources of confidence. There is no Jesus plus source. Something else.

There is Jesus alone, or whatever else you were trying to get just a little more stability from. You know, when I was young, maybe middle school, I went to a camp that had a 30 foot rappelling wall. So I climbed to the top of this thing and then I just backed over it. And entirely perpendicular to the wall, I bounced down this thing and my life was in the exclusive hands of the equipment that I was using. Yes, certainly, like probably many of you, I've had dreams where I've been able to fly.

But you know what? I really made sure that equipment was exactly how it was supposed to be. Because I was not imagining that in that moment, if the equipment failed or it was installed incorrectly, that somehow I'd be able to fall back on flying. That I was able to do in my dreams. I would certainly fall back, but there would be no flying.

Jesus is the same kind of thing. Either you're trusting in him, either he is your source of confidence, or if you're looking for someone else, that is all you get. Heidelberg Catechism 30 do those who look for their salvation and security in saints, in themselves or elsewhere, really believe in the only Savior Jesus? No. Although they boast of being his by their actions, they deny the only Savior Jesus.

Now that's frightening, especially if you consider the kinds of things that we put our hope in. Because as you look at them one by one, you see how flimsy there are. You start to see that as much as I can boast about something in this area. I fell short there, or as much as I did pretty well here. I violated the requirements, the total requirements for that one, too.

And one by one, you're going to have to remove those sources of confidence until you have nothing left but Jesus. And that's exactly where you need to be. I will feel safe before God because of Jesus. That's the only safe place to be. Because while other false saviors cannot save at all, the promise we have is that Jesus saves entirely.

Jesus saves entirely. That's the third point in verses five through six. Paul, he's been quite hard on his hearers throughout this entire letter, and especially in verses 2 through 4. But look at what he's calling them back to in verse five. For through the Spirit by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness.

It's interesting that he points to the role of the Holy Spirit, reminding us that even the faith we have is not something that we produce or generate for ourselves. We are dependent upon the Holy Spirit to give us faith. Faith is a gift. But this idea that we are awaiting the hope of righteousness by faith underscores the very vulnerable position that Christians are putting themselves in, that we must entrust our eternal salvation to Christ. Again, when I was going down that rappelling wall, it is a terrifying thing because you can't even look below you.

You just are sort of backing up and you're staring up into heaven. I guess you're easier to pray, but as you're going down, all you have is that equipment to hold you up. That's all you have. And it's for someone who's afraid of heights, it's a terrifying, vulnerable place to be. Either this equipment will work or it won't.

The same thing is true of faith. If we're not hedging our bets here and there and finding comfort and security and this or that. If we only have Jesus, then that's all we have. Will he be enough?

In verse six, Paul says, he certainly will be. For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything. Don't look to those, but only faith working through love, not Jesus plus your works or your love or fill in the blank will lead to your justification. But notice that the faith we have doesn't exclude love. The faith we have actually leads to love, not as some of the grounds of our justification.

Faith in Jesus plus nothing justifies us. But faith in Jesus plus nothing not only justifies it, it also produces the fruit of good works, of love, of all Obedience.

Now, essentially this passage teaches us two things. First, by mere faith in Jesus, you have all you need for salvation. And second, if you try to diversify your certainty or your safety by works or by your reputation or by whatever it is that you are putting your hope in, in right stances, right theology, the right family, the right, whatever, if your confidence is that you have some righteousness in you, then Christ will be of no advantage to you. Again, our catechism is specifically dealing with a Roman Catholic question. Can we, should we pray to saints?

Will that give us a boost in our standing in heaven? But for Roman Catholicism, they have a very different view of justification. For them, it's not about receiving Christ's righteousness by faith. Justification is a process that starts by faith, but that must be completed by works. It's not that faith leads to love, it's that we have to be formed.

Love actually is the thing that's form our faith to fully and utterly justify us. And for this reason, Roman Catholics reject the idea of eternal confidence. Because for them to say that I know that I am going to heaven when I die, I am confident that I will stand righteous before God because of Jesus. That's to say, I think I have been fully made righteous in this life. I think that I am already a perfect person.

What Galatians and Romans and the entire Scriptures declare, however, is that we are not counted righteous when we become personally righteous in the way that we live our lives. Rather, we are counted righteous because of our faith in Jesus. He gives it to us. It's a gift. It's not something we produce, it's something we receive so that we who are wretched sinners are entrusting ourselves to Christ who justifies the ungodly.

So again, this isn't just a problem, a question, a catechism that is addressing the issues of Roman Catholics. All of us are always tempted to rest on something else, to find security somewhere outside of Jesus in addition to Him. It's not a secondary issue. If you're trusting in anything in addition to Jesus to be safe before God, Christ will be of no advantage to you. So tonight I want to press you ask yourself, first of all, are you confident?

If you were to die on the way home tonight and you were to stand before a perfectly righteous God, would you be confident before Him? I hope you would. But if you say that you are, the second question I want to ask is why are you confident? Are you confident because you are in Christ and something else is true of you? If that's the case, then repent from that.

Get that off of your list. Get that out of your mind. Instead, do the business with God tonight by prayer, where you're stripping away those things and you're just resting. Either Christ will be enough or I have no hope anywhere in this life or the next. Because if your hope is in Christ, what the Scriptures declare is you have the warrior of God, the eternally begotten Son of God, who came into this world as the servant appointed by His Father to do warfare with sin, death and the devil on your behalf.

And this great king, the Lord Jesus Christ, won the victory decisively, not in. In a way that the world could perceive. Because he won this victory by submitting to being sacrificed on the cross, by being nailed to the tree, accursed by God and by men. And yet in doing so, he took upon himself the entirety of God's wrath against sinners. He drained the cup completely so that you could go free.

It's for freedom that Christ has set you free. Do not submit again to the yoke of slavery. Jesus Christ has come. Jesus Christ has lived perfectly. He died a cursed death and he is risen again.

And one day he will return for you. If you were looking to him in faith, are you confident in him alone? Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that you would give us great confidence in Jesus Christ and Him crucified and nowhere else. We pray that our hope would be in him and that we would put aside any idols, any false confidences, any dependence upon anyone or anything that determines from finding our safety and comfort exclusively in Jesus Christ and Him crucified, because he saves entirely.

And so we pray for every person in this room that you would point all of us again to exclusive faith in Jesus Christ for our salvation. We pray this for Christ's glory and our good. It's in Jesus name we pray. Amen.