“Getting the Gospel Right: The Gospel and the Grace of Christ” - Galatians 1:6-10

 

 “Getting the Gospel Right: The Gospel and the Grace of Christ”

Galatians 1:6-10

Introduction: It seems that today one of the most valued attitudes by our society is that we be tolerant and inclusive, even in matters of faith.  One former evangelical wrote a book entitled, “Love Wins,” which essentially arrived at a position of universalism: eventually our loving God will let everyone into heaven. So basically, it doesn’t really matter what you believe, as long as you believe in yourself, you’ll be ok. To say that there is a narrow road that leads to life, to say that there is only one way, one truth, one life, to say that there is only one name under heaven by which we must be saved, that would be so intolerant as to be offensive. We don’t get to make up in our own mind what is truth! The God who is Truth has spoken. One young pastor had begun to doubt the authenticity of God’s Word...

A couple of years after [he] was called to pastor a church, he was visiting one of his members who was very sick with a terminal illness. He suggested, “Perhaps you would like me to read some Scripture and pray with you?” The man agreed and handed the pastor his Bible. When he opened it, he was shocked at what he saw. Many of the pages were torn away, some chapters were missing. A number of verses were actually cut out of other pages. It was a terribly mangled volume. Reluctantly the pastor asked, “Haven’t you got a better Bible than this?” The dying man replied, “When you came to our church, I believed the entire Book. But as soon as you told me that certain sections were not true, I removed them. When you said some stories were “pious fictions” and called them myths, I tore them out. I think if I had another year under your teaching, I would have nothing left but the covers!”  

Which will it be, the slippery slope that leads to “nothing but the covers”? Or “I believe it, cover to cover!”? The Bible claims to be the inspired Word of God. The central figure of the Bible is Jesus, the central message is the Gospel. Many today dilute or pollute the Gospel. They dilute it by downplaying the fact that all humans are sinners desperately in need of a supernatural rescue. They pollute the Gospel by adding human effort or good works as a necessary element of our salvation. Both are deadly, a perversion of the truth.

       There are some who call themselves Christians, but they deny the core truths of the Bible. The miracles Jesus did are explained away, even the historicity of the resurrection is denied! Others would urge an ecumenical spirit of tolerance and inclusion, and want to affirm that Christianity is just one path among many that lead to God – in other words it really doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you really believe it.  Most of us are wary of the slippery slope of compromising the truth.  However, in Galatians we see a more subtle threat, a danger that any of us can easily fall into, even out of a desire to protect the truth, we actually begin to pollute it.  That danger is legalism. We’ll see in this letter that even Peter was not immune and, at least in terms of his practice, once had to be confronted and corrected by Paul. Does the Gospel mean that we have license to sin? God forbid! Can we add to or complete our salvation by our own effort? No! Jesus paid it all! C.H. Spurgeon said it well, “If we try to add one stitch to the garment of our salvation, we’ll ruin the whole thing!” Let’s be sure we get the Gospel right!

The Big Idea: God is pleased when we hold fast, and hold forth, the Gospel of His grace.

I. Be determined: There is only one way to life. The Gospel of Christ is the foundation and the fuel of the Christian life and must not be compromised (1:6-7).   I am not a builder, perhaps some of you are. I know one thing, before you construct a building, you had better have a firm foundation! I remember once on one of our trips down to the coast of Sao Paulo, Brazil, near the city of Santos, there were two apartment buildings, side-by-side. They should have been parallel to each other, straight up, but one was tilting about 15 degrees away from the other! Clearly something went wrong, there was not a proper foundation! Our faith has got to be grounded in the Gospel, that alone is God’s rescue plan for humanity! Paul is amazed that they are so quickly being turned from the Gospel they had believed, by which they were saved!

⁶ I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel,  ⁷ which is not another; but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.

       We were already alerted in the opening of this letter, in verses 1:1-5, that Paul was writing with urgency. He affirms his apostolic authority, and summarizes the Gospel that he preached in those few verses. That urgency continues here, in what is said, and in what is not said. This epistle is striking in that almost without exception Paul follows his initial words of greeting with thanksgiving to God for some feature(s) of the recipients’ life and faith.  Even the carnally minded Corinthians received such a word (1:4)!  In this case it is as though Paul has no time for such formalities, and he is compelled by the urgency of the situation to come straight to the point.  It was not simply a matter of practice, but it was the heart of Christian doctrine, the Gospel itself which was under attack, and Paul’s response is direct and emphatic, “I am astonished…!”

       These false teachers were turning (a process) Galatian believers from the truth (and Paul says that in the process they were being turned from God!).  Compromise is like that—most people who abandon orthodox Christianity don’t do it at once.  They begin “snipping out” a verse here or there, questioning the historicity of a narrative, soon they are denying anything “supernatural.” Miracles don’t happen, God doesn’t speak, he doesn’t act in human history. Or, “This is only cultural; Paul would never say that today!” The “Gospel” in view here is the central message of the Bible, the truth of salvation by grace through faith, apart from works. For many, human reason, or secular science, becomes the real authority through which the Bible is interpreted.

     The word “turning” here is interesting: according to John Stott it was also used of transferring allegiance, of soldiers deserting or revolting, of someone abandoning one political or philosophical school for another, a “turncoat.”  These traitors compromised the truth of the Gospel and in so doing were “turning from the One who called them…” They weren’t just turning from right doctrine, they were turning from God!

       We’ll see that the compromise here was legalism.  This is a danger to which even we Baptists can be susceptible. We rightly recognize that holiness, a transformed life, is a normal part of healthy Christian living. We go wrong when we start defining spirituality by what we don’t do.  We essentially add our “rules” to the gospel and say this is what Christianity should look like. The problem is when we look for things that are not specified in the Bible and make them an essential criterion, in our view, of authentic faith. Is it something the Bible talks about, like meat sacrificed to idols? Oh, that was something else for another message! Our salvation is not based on us being good enough. It is based on putting our trust in the only One who was good, Jesus Christ.  God is glorified when we steadfastly hold to His Word and do not compromise the Gospel of Christ. It pleases Him when hold fast, and hold forth, the Gospel of His grace.

II. Be discerning! It is a matter of life and death. We must reject any teacher whose teaching is contrary to God’s revealed truth (8-9). 

⁸ But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.  ⁹ As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed.

       Paul uses the strongest language imaginable to make his point here, and for even more emphasis, he says it twice! “Even if we…” He is saying that even if he, the apostle Paul, began to contradict God’s Word, “…or an Angel from Heaven…” Even if an Angel came down from Heaven and began to preach a contradictory message, “let him be anathema, accursed…” (vv. 8-9). The sense here is “Let him be eternally damned!”

 Do you get the sense that Paul was passionate about this? We must be diligent, vigilant, and have zero tolerance to hold to the truth of the Bible. Now don’t immediately call for a business meeting if you hear me say something that seems a little off!  But don’t just let it slide – make a note of it, and ask me or one of the deacons about it.  Occasionally I will say something that I did not mean to say, and sometimes I will be just wrong! The issue here is undercutting the central message of the Bible, the Gospel of the grace of Christ! When we compromise that, souls are at stake. We need to get the Gospel right.

       Paul then moves from the hypothetical to the actual, repeating the anathema: “…if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed…” He is not talking here about disagreeing on some fine points of theology—there are some things about which godly, sincere Christians disagree. But if we are compromising the Gospel, the heart of the Christian message, that is a problem that can’t be ignored! This week I read a critique of a heretical book entitled, “Love Wins” by Rob Bell. The reviewer said he wrote his critique because the Gospel was at stake, “This is about the truth, about how the rightness or wrongness of our theology can do tremendous help or tremendous harm to the people of God.” That is what was at stake in Galatia. So, Paul says of those perverting the Gospel, “Let him be accursed [anathema].”

       The very heart of the Gospel message was at issue, human souls were at stake. Paul is saying this is not open to debate, it is not something about which we can agree to disagree. We need to get the Gospel right! Either we are saved by grace through faith alone, or by grace plus works, but it cannot be both.  C.H. Spurgeon warned, “If we try to add one stitch to the garment of our salvation we’ll ruin the whole thing.” There is only one “Gospel,” the Good News that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. To use the language of Galatians, “Jesus… gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according the will of God our Father.” THAT is good news! We are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.  God is pleased as we hold fast, and hold forth the Gospel of His grace… So, 1) Be determined, be 2) discerning, and…

III. Be devoted: For the love of God. Though compromise might win the favor of men, we hold fast to the truth because that is pleasing to God (v.10). “For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.” (NKJV).

       Finally, the third statement that grows out of the underlying truth of only one gospel is that the servant of the gospel seeks to please God alone and not men. I like the NKJV here, Paul is basically asking, “Am I trying to please men or convince them? The One I want to please is God!” In verses 8 and 9 Paul had just said something that will not win him many friends. It’s not pleasing to hear someone pronounce the sentence of eternal damnation! And so, what Paul does in verse 10 is give an account of why he is willing to talk this way. He is willing to talk this way because pleasing people is much lower on his list of priorities than serving Christ. He wants to convince people of the truth, and so please God. Paul makes a similar statement in 1 Cor 4:1-4,

Let a man so consider us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.  ² Moreover it is required in stewards that one be found faithful.  ³ But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by a human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself.  ⁴ For I know nothing against myself, yet I am not justified by this; but He who judges me is the Lord.

       Two things are at stake when the gospel is perverted: one is the glory of Christ; the other is the salvation of sinners. If the gospel is twisted, the all-sufficiency of Christ's work is dishonored, and the way to salvation for sinners is hindered. God is pleased, through the foolishness of the message preached, to save those who believe. As Paul seeks to persuade people, God is pleased. They need to her the truth! So, in order to serve Christ—to advance his glory and achieve his saving purpose—Paul must oppose the perversion of the gospel, whether it pleases people or not, for the glory of Christ (6:14) and for the good of those who have yet to hear and believe the gospel (2:5).

       The lesson to learn from verse 10 is not that the more people you can displease the more spiritual you are! It wasn’t Paul's aim to alienate people and it shouldn’t be ours! On the contrary, in 1 Cor 10:31f. he says, "Do all to the glory of God. Give no offence to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please all men in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage but that of many, that they may be saved." And in Romans 15:2f. he says, "Let each of us please his neighbor for his good to edify him; for Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, 'The reproaches of those who reproached thee fell on me.'"

       But, Galatians is not a lesson on how to win friends and influence people! It shows that we need to love people enough to tell them the truth! The point is that we should speak out of love, desiring that people recognize and respond to the truth.  With Paul, we urge men and women, on behalf of Christ, to be reconciled to God! Whatever we do, our desire should always be to please God, to do all to the glory of God. Our heart has to be set on pleasing God, and loving people. We can be crippled in terms of living out our faith if we tiptoe around people, always striving for their approval, afraid of offending them with the truth. What we can do is determine to love people enough to  tell them the truth!  The joy of knowing we live to please Jesus is enough.

What is God saying to me in this passage? 1) Be determined to hold fast to the truth, because only the Gospel of the Grace of Christ is the way to God; 2) Be discerning, because the truth is a matter of life and death; 3) Be devoted, for the love of God. God is pleased, He gets the glory, when we steadfastly hold to His Word and do not compromise the Gospel of Christ. Hold fast, and hold forth, the Gospel of His grace! The fundamental truth of the Gospel is that we are saved by the Grace of God, that is by His unmerited, undeserved favor.  Grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Nothing we do can adds to our salvation – and as we’ll see in this letter, we can’t do anything to earn it, perfect it, or to keep it. 

       The rabbis showed this same tendency by building a “hedge” around the Law, i.e., adding man made rules which became a measure of spirituality. The motives might seem good at first, but the end thereof is the way of death.  Galatians will talk about holiness, but such a change needs to come from inside out. We need a new heart, then we’ll live a new life. Paul calls it the “fruit of the Spirit”. We are not under the Law, we are free in Christ. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, you are free indeed…”

What would God have me to do in response to this passage?  Where do good works come in then?  Faith works through love.  Because God has loved us, we love Him in return. And that love will overflow in our relationships, we love one another. And when we do, we strive to conduct ourselves in a way that won’t cause another to stumble, or hinder an unbeliever from coming to faith.  We’ll see in this letter, the change in us does not come from imposing external rules.  It comes in the form of the “fruit of the Spirit.”  We believe God. And God in us is changing us, transforming us, from the inside out.

     Let’s not judge another because their life does not conform to our idea of what Christianity should look like.  What does the Bible say? Remember, Jesus was a friend of sinners (Matthew 11:19).  Today, the world asks with Pilate, “What is truth?” It doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you really believe it. Have you heard that? That is clearly wrong!  Legalism imposes man-made rules, that too is wrong.  Remember: "The secret of the Lord is with those who have been broken by his cross and healed by his Spirit." Galatians holds forth these two things: the cross of Christ as the only way a person can get right with God, and the Spirit of Christ as the only way a person can obey God. Let’s be people who rejoice in the Cross, and who walk in the Spirit!  AMEN.