Galatians 4:12-20
You may be seated. Please turn
in your copy of God’s word to Galatians 4, 12 through 20 will
be our reading from the scriptures today. Have a little confession
to make probably for the last nine years of preaching through
Christmas. worked up a little Advent series, maybe four or
five sermons, six or seven, if I went all the way into January.
And this is the first time I’ve ever just stayed in my series. And so maybe a handful of you
may be disappointed. We’re not going to Luke’s gospel
or something in the Christmas story. But I do want us to think
today about the larger implications that come to us from the coming
of Jesus Christ in the world. We live downstream as Christians
today. We live downstream from the blessings
of Christ having come into this world and accomplished redemption
for us. And so let’s turn now to God’s
word and hear it together. Galatians 4, beginning at verse
12. This is the apostle Paul speaking
to the Galatian Christians scattered through that southern region
of churches where he did his first missionary work. And he
writes to them saying, brothers, I entreat you become as I am. For I also have become as you
are. You did me no wrong. You know
it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to
you at first. And though my condition was a
trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me
as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus. What then has become of
your blessedness? For I testify to you that if
possible, you would have gouged out your eyes and given them
to me. Have I then become your enemy
by telling you the truth? They make much of you, but for
no purpose. They want to shut you out, that
you may make much of them. It is always good to be made
much of for a good purpose. And not only when I am present
with you, my little children, for whom I am in anguish of childbirth
until Christ is formed in you. I wish I could be present with
you now and change my tone for I am perplexed about you. This is the word of the living
God. I wonder if you begin to think
about the Christmas story, when would you pinpoint that the Christmas
story began? Would you go back to Bethlehem
and to the stable? Or perhaps you may take it back
to Mary’s childhood home where the angel appeared to her and
said, you were with child and this child that you bear will
be a special child, a light to the nations, a savior and redeemer
for Israel. Or perhaps you would go back
to the prophecies of the scriptures, maybe back to Micah and the prophecy
of Bethlehem or to Isaiah and the prophecies about the suffering
servant or even the babe that should be born from a virgin
who will conceive. Or maybe you would go back to
the prophecies to King David. Someone will sit on your throne
after you and your throne will be an eternal throne, never left
empty. Or perhaps you would go farther
back and you would go into the story of Moses. And Moses would
say to Israel, you know, I’m a prophet, but after me, there’s
gonna be a greater prophet and he will speak greater words and
do a greater ministry. Or you could look at Elijah and
Elisha. You could look at all the types or the shadows that
pointed to Jesus. You could even stretch all the
way back into Genesis three and see when God lined up Adam, He
lined up Eve and He lined up Satan after they sinned and ate
the forbidden fruit and He gave out the curses and the punishments
for their temptation and their succumbing to temptation and
sinning against God. But I would suggest we should
go back even farther, back into eternity, into the fellowship
of the Father and the fellowship of the Son and the fellowship
of the Holy Spirit, where we read in the early chapters of
Ephesians and in other places in Paul’s writings, that in eternity
past, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, in
a sense said to one another, what will bring us the most glory?
What will glorify our Trinitarian love before others? And their
decision was to create a world and everything in it very good.
but to permit it to fall into sin and to let it get under the
travail of the curses of the fall. And then God would send
his son, the Lord Jesus, to redeem us and to redeem the earth from
this great curse that we live under. We call this in theology,
the covenant of redemption, the pactum salutum, the covenant
made between God, the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy
Spirit. God, the Father would be glorified through the sending
of the Son who would come and live as our prophet, priest,
and king. He would die in our place. And
by faith, we would receive his righteousness and have a just
standing before him. And the Holy Spirit would bring
about this work of redemption in the hearts of his children. That’s what would bring them
the most glory. And so the father and the son and the Holy Spirit
and eternity past agreed to this great plan of redemption. And
so the story of the scriptures is the unfolding. It’s the unpacking
of these promises. And yes, Genesis three would
bring us to the first instance of the gospel and not necessarily
when God promised to Eve that he would sinned from her offspring,
one who would crush the head of Satan. But I think we get
a glimpse of the first gospel in the earlier verses of chapter
three, when Adam and Eve were hiding from God and they had
sewn together fig leaves and covered their sin and their shame
and their nakedness. And God said to them, this self
made covering and sacrifice won’t do. Your shame is still there. And so he took an animal and
sacrificed it. Without the shedding of blood,
there is no remission of sin. And so we saw the first sacrifice. We saw the first act of mercy.
We saw the first true covering of sin and shame by God. And
this would ultimately point to Jesus and his sacrifice at the
cross of his own life, where we exchange our filthy clothing
and he gives us his clean and righteous robes. And so the story
of the scripture from Genesis on is the unfolding of this story
of redemption that glorifies the father through the mission
of the son. And we see on page after page
of scripture, this wonderful redemption. This time of year,
we remember how necessary redemption is. We see it as the days shorten,
as the temperature grows colder. We see it as the crime rates
rise. We see it as the ethics of this
world, the morals of this world seem to be at a perhaps rock
bottom place. We see it in the wars and the
famines and the sickness and the pestilence. And we see in
Romans chapter eight, we read that all creation is groaning
It is straining, it is struggling under the weight of sin and curse. I love the line that we sing
every Christmas in joy to the world, the Lord has come. No
more let sin and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings
known as far as the curse is found. How wonderful it is to
sing of that biblical hope. that Jesus Christ is coming again
to make all things new. We think of the glimpse that
we get of heaven in the book of Revelation, where all those
who’ve suffered for the sake of Jesus are under the altar
and day and night they cry out to God, how long, oh Lord, until
you avenge our deaths? How long, oh Lord, until you
make all the wrongs of this world right? Well, in the coming of
Jesus, in the coming of the son of God, the mission of Christ,
the incarnation of God himself brings light and brings hope
to this world. And so many people who knew what
the coming of Jesus meant, like Mary and perhaps Zechariah and
Anna and Simeon and others that we read of in the Christmas story,
they said at last. At last the Savior has come to
make all things that are wrong, right. And so we see God in his
son, Jesus, fulfill that ancient covenant. And he humiliated himself. He left the riches of heaven. His is not a rags to riches story. It’s a riches to rag story. We just sang thou who was rich.
beyond all splendor for our sakes became poor. That comes right
from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. God was rich in heaven and his
son, Jesus, but like Moses, he’d rather identify with the people
of God than live in the wealth of the palace. And so just as
Moses delivered his people from Pharaoh and from slavery, Jesus
has left the palace. He’s left his father’s place
of pleasure and riches in order to bring his people out of sin
and sickness and darkness and Satan’s rule. And all of that
comes to us in the story of the helpless babe who grew in wisdom
and stature, who was baptized and affirmed by his father. This
is my son with whom I’m well pleased. He was tested and tempted
in the wilderness, but passed that test where our forefather
Adam had failed. And he sets his heart, he sets
his mind, he sets his mission to Jerusalem, to the cross, where
he undergoes the greatest miseries from humans, but also from the
father who poured out his wrath upon him for our sin at the cross.
And Satan begins to think there’s a victory when Jesus is lying
in the grave, when Jesus is under the power of death and in the
tomb with the stone rolled there tightly for a time. But we love
to sing that Jesus came up from the grave. He was raised by the
power of God. Death could not hold him. And
so he was raised from the dead and for 40 days he spent time
with his disciples. He prepared his apostles to receive
the Holy Spirit and to go into all the world, making disciples
and baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. And we fast forward into the book of Acts to a story we
read some time ago and heard in our study of Acts where Paul
and Barnabas and Antioch were set apart by the church. and
they were sent to Cyprus, where they ministered across that island.
And then they made landfall across the way on to the stretch of
land that we call the Galatian region, the region of South Galatia,
where he ministered in Antioch of Pisidia. He ministered in
Iconium and Lystra and Derbe. And his ministry was met with
mixed reception. Some people loved him, others
hated him. The Jews reviled him. The Judaizers brought up all
kinds of things against him. Paul also said we had gospel
success. And when they came back from
this first missionary journey and reported that God had fulfilled
their work before their eyes, that God’s grace had opened up
doors for the gospel, the people at Antioch, their sending church,
rejoiced. Paul and Barnabas, these missionaries,
scattered the seeds of the gospel, and those seeds seemed to take
root. But a report comes to them as
they’re back at Antioch that Satan, who we call from the parable
of the sower, the seed snatcher, he takes that gospel seed that
is sown and snatches it from those who heard so they may not
grow in the grace and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus. Paul has this
great concern for the people in the churches of Galatia. And
as we’ve been making our way through this letter, we’ve seen
his arguments He declares from the word of God that he is an
apostle of Jesus Christ. He has credentials from Jesus,
not men to preach the word. He has a message from Jesus,
not men. And it’s a message of salvation
that he proclaims and preaches anywhere and everywhere that
he can, whether it’s in a jail cell or a synagogue or a living
room, he goes and proclaims the gospel. And he’s presented to
them thus far in the book of Galatians, rational arguments
for why they ought to hear him. He’s an apostle of Christ, why
they ought to listen to him. He has a message from Jesus and
he’s presented to them who he is in God’s sight that he is
worthy of listening to. But we, we land today in a special,
a special section of his argument. And he’s going to argue, from
their personal and mutual experience together. Maybe some of you as
you sit around Christmas visiting with family, you’ll say, remember
when we did this? Remember when we did that? Remember
back in these days when this? And your hearts are knit together
in those shared experiences. And that’s exactly what Paul
is doing here as he shares with them. his experience with them
while he was among them preaching the gospel. And he says to them
so very clearly in verse 12, become as I am. This is his main plea to them,
become as I am. And we have to think about what
he means by this. What does Paul mean, become as
I am? I mean, he was a short, stubby man. His eyes were dim. He had poor eyesight. He had
taken so many beatings. and even a stoning or two by
now, he was nothing to look at. So become as I am a ugly little
beaten up guy. No, that’s not what he means.
Think about the arguments he’s been making about their falling
back into the errors of living by the law. And think of what
you give up when you come to Jesus. When we are in Christ,
we are a new creation. The old is gone and the new has
come. Paul had given up his exalted
position in Judaism, Paul was most likely a candidate to be
the next high priest. Don’t know that for sure, but
he was well on his way. He was brilliant. He was well-educated,
and he was, as we say, well-healed. He was a blue blood. If anybody
was a good candidate for high priest, it would have been this
smart, well-educated guy from the right family who did all
the right things, and Paul gave it up to receive Jesus and to
rest in him alone for his salvation. Now, the Gentiles had given up
idols. They had given up their pantheon
of Roman gods. They had their faith in this
and that and the other in the Roman pantheon of gods of this
and that and the other. And they gave that up. And he’s
reminding the Jewish Christians in Galatia, you’ve given up the
old covenant rights. You’ve given up law keeping,
you’ve given up circumcision, you’ve given up all the marks
and the rights and the systems and the ceremonies that pointed
to Jesus. You’ve given all these up to
receive and rest in Jesus alone for your righteousness. and for
your ongoing growth and grace. And isn’t it the same for many
of us? We had to give up much to follow
Jesus. Perhaps we came to faith late
in life or in midlife, and we’ve given up the things that our
fingers were so tightly wrapped around. And as we came to faith
in Jesus and began to grow in the wisdom and knowledge of God
by his word and spirit, our fingers, became loosened from our idols. And we’ve left many of those
things behind. Perhaps some of us are in the
process of that now, but we’re beginning to put to death what
is earthly in us and only to love and long for and follow
after the things of righteousness. And so we leave the kingdom of
darkness, the kingdom of Satan to follow Jesus and his kingdom
of light. We leave it all behind more and
more. And we make our way to the heavenly
city, longing for that city and looking to Jesus. And Paul is
saying to them, become as I am loyal to the gospel and those
gospel ways. And he says a second thing to
them as he speaks of his shared experience while he was among
them. They for sure, as people who
are dabbling with law-keeping and ceremony-keeping and right-keeping,
they realize, yeah, he really did leave all this behind. This
was a guy who knew how to do it all and do it well and right,
and exactly, he left it behind. Now Paul is gonna say to them,
you did me no wrong. He’s been pretty upset with them.
We’ve read some pretty hard things in Galatians that Paul has said
to the people. And in verses 12 through 15,
he explains to them, you’ve done me no wrong. I’m not yelling
at you. I’m not fussing with you. I’m
not striving with you because you’ve done me wrong. No, I’m
striving with you. because I love you and want the
best for you. You all are aware that the relationship
between a pastor and the congregation can either be a blessing or a
curse. A couple of you in the room have been elders. A couple
of you in the room have been pastors. You know that it’s not
always rosy. It can be. Stories can tell of
the horrors of the life of a pastor or even the blessings of being
a pastor. And Paul is reminiscing here
with them that in the providence of God, he had some illness,
he had some sickness, some malady would befall him that providentially
placed him among the Galatian churches. The guess is that Paul
wanted to go a greater distance with the gospel. The guess is
that Paul had already done some ministry in this area and there
was already some semblance of Christianity in the area And
he wanted to go into the West a bit more. He wanted to make
his way into Europe and all the way to Spain, if God would allow,
with the gospel. But because of a sickness, because
of some malady, he was providentially among them for about a year.
We don’t know exactly what the sickness was. We can guess as
it was an eye disease. Could have been malaria. But
at any rate, because his body was badly beaten from the 39
lashes he received and from the stoning he received at Lystra
and other body ailments, he was nothing to look at. And he says,
you didn’t scorn me. You didn’t reject me, you didn’t
despise me, but you received me as an angel. You received
me as Christ. And we think of the prophecies
of Jesus in the book of Isaiah, particularly in Isaiah 53, the
suffering servant. He was despised and he was rejected
by men. He was acquainted with sorrow
and grief. And Paul ministering on behalf
of the Lord Jesus, was received as an angel and as Christ. He wasn’t despised and rejected. And he even says, if you would
have, and if you could have, you would have given me your
own eyes. At the end of his letter, when he’s pleading with him one
last time, he says, see how big are the letters I write with
my own hand. His eyes can’t see to write little
and to keep it neat and in between the lines and to keep the weight
down for the lesser stamp on the postage, maybe. But he says,
you would have given me your eyes. You did me no wrong. But he’s gonna speak now of a
change. He says in verses 15 and 16,
what became of your blessedness? I got to thinking about some
good Southern words we like to use when somebody is not being
blessed, they’re being cussed, right? They’re just being disagreeable.
And so what happened to your blessedness? It’s turned into
cussedness. What’s wrong? Well, I can tell
you what’s wrong. There’s a love triangle. There’s, there’s Paul, there’s
the Galatians, but there’s the Judaizers. And the Judaizers
have been poisoning the Galatians. You don’t want to listen to Paul.
He’s nothing to look at. You don’t want to listen to Paul.
He’s not that impressive. You don’t want to listen to Paul.
He preaches a false gospel that’s told, particularly you Jewish
people, all the beauty and wonders of your rites and ceremonies.
He’s told you to quit all that and put it away. Didn’t you love
all that? Didn’t you love the tradition?
Didn’t you love the year by year by year days and ceremonies and
months and rights and customs? He’s taken that away from you.
We’re going to give it back to you. And you begin to see, don’t
you have this love triangle between Paul, the Galatians and the Judaizers
has poisoned them. He says, you used to love me.
Now you don’t. We used to have a warm relationship
together. Now it has turned cold. They’ve
poisoned them against Paul. They’ve poisoned them against
Christ. And he goes on to say, are you angry with me because
I told you the truth? It’s almost like the more Paul
fights for their love and affection, the more Paul wrestles with them
to come back to Jesus, the more difficult it becomes because
the Judaizers are saying, you don’t want what he’s selling.
You’ve already bought into his lie once. But nevertheless, Paul
in this letter, and if he can get there one day in person,
seeks to go on a rescue mission to these people who have been
poisoned in their hearts and their minds towards Paul. The exact opposite has now come
to be true. You would have given me your
eyes, now you hate my guts. And when they reject Paul, they’re
rejecting Christ. He’s the emissary, he’s the sent
one. and he’s been sent now to warn
them of their error. You know, sometimes the preacher
is the party pooper, right? We love all the things that we
see that are glittering and sound good in this world. And you think
of Paul’s admonition to Timothy, the young preacher, when he says,
one of your tasks, he says this in 1 Timothy 4, one of your tasks
is to warn people of error. I can remember, I don’t know,
probably 15 years ago, there was a book out, it was by a heretic,
And they made a movie about it, which everybody wanted to see.
And they made all this, as they do in the Christian world, all
this paraphernalia. You could get a coffee cup, you
could get a little purse, a bag. All the little Christian trinkets
on this wonderful little heresy that was spreading. I’m not gonna
tell you which one it is, I’ll let you wonder. So one Wednesday
night at our church down in the Charlotte area, I talked to the
pastors and elders, I’m the Wednesday night teacher. Let’s do a night
or two on why you shouldn’t be messing with this heresy. Well,
it made people mad. I mean, the women had organized
a movie night out to go see this thing. You’re beginning to see
the trinkets. That year at graduation, people
were buying the book. But it’s the task of the preacher
to warn, and if he is a party pooper, so be it. Sometimes that’s
a mercy, isn’t it? Don’t listen to this garbage.
Don’t read this trash. Don’t go down this path of heresy. Stick to Jesus. Stick to the
gospel way. Well, Paul is warning them. about
the waves and the winds of false doctrine. He’s warning them as
they’re tossed on the sea and will soon drown in heresy as
they fall away from Jesus. You don’t want this false gospel
from these false prophets who’ve appointed themselves and established
their own mission and message. And it’s not from Jesus. It’s
not from Christ. It’s simply for their own gain.
Well, his last little argument with them is, I still love you.
He says in verses 17 through 20, I still love you. I’m still
zealous for you. They’re tugging you over here
in this love triangle, but I’m trying to tug you back to Jesus.
They’re tugging you to themselves. I’m tugging you back to Jesus
Christ. And he uses language here of
courtship. He uses language here of winning the affections of
another. And he says, you know, they’re
zealous for you. They make much of you and they’re trying to
box me out and push me out and poison you against me. But my
pursuit of you is so that Christ may be formed in each of you.
It’s so that you may stand on your own two feet in Jesus, mature
in the faith, mature in the knowledge, working out your salvation with
fear and trembling. hating what is evil, hold fast
to what is good, eyes to heaven, longing for heaven and looking
to Jesus. And his heart is coming out.
He’s given them his word and his arguments. He’s given them
the reasons they should listen to him. Now he’s just taken his
heart and laying it out before them in this letter, saying,
look at what we had together. And though you’ve turned against
me, though you’ve been turned against me, I still love you
and I am in anguish like a mother bearing a child until Christ
is formed in you. What a wonderful picture Paul
gives of his love for these people who’ve turned on him. You know,
we live in a day where we say, you know, we stick our hand in
the air, I’m done with them, right? We do that, don’t we?
I’m done with you people. Not so Paul. He has the heart
of an evangelist, the heart of a pastor, and he has the heart
of Jesus to say, though you put me through anguish, I still love
you. I still pursue you. And I think this gives us a snapshot
of the ongoing opportunity that we have as believers in Jesus. The ongoing opportunity we have
downstream from the coming of Christ in this world to represent
to the world what living in Christ looks like, and what warning
one another of error looks like, what pleading with one another
to continue on in the faith looks like. Yes, Christ has ascended
back to heaven, but he’s left his Holy Spirit to strengthen
us, and he’s left his people to represent him on earth. And
so as we begin next week in a new year, as we look at the darkness
of this world, it’s my prayer that our hearts would beat like
Paul’s does for people lost and who are apart from Christ, but
also people who are wandering through the many things offered
to them in the name of religion, and that we might bring them
back to just plain old Jesus, plain old faith in him, plain
old hope in him, and plain Jane resting in him alone for salvation
as he’s offered in the gospel. Nothing added, nothing subtracted,
just pure Jesus. Let’s do pray together. Our father,
we thank you that you’ve shown us what is the remedy for all
the sin and all the sickness and all the darkness in this
world. And we pray for us that as you comfort us and build us
up in our faith today, that we would be confident that Jesus
is enough and that we would be bold to proclaim that Jesus is
enough to the watching world. Give us the strength and the
grace and the opportunity to do you just this. We pray in
his mighty name, amen.