Galatians 3:1-5
You may be seated and turning
your copy of God’s word to Galatians three, one to five, as you’re
turning in the pages of your Bible there to the third chapter,
I want to remind you where we have been, where we are headed.
We’ve been thinking through Paul’s first letter that he wrote to
churches where he preached on his first missionary journey.
This chronologically is Paul’s first letter. He’s, upset with
the Galatians because the Judaizers, the folks from Jerusalem have
come and said, yeah, Jesus is great, but you need circumcision
too. Jesus is great, but you need to follow some of the ceremonial
law as well. And so Paul is writing to them
his indictment, his accusation against them for falling away
from the gospel. And he’s using a series of proofs. I didn’t get my gospel from man.
I got it from Jesus. I didn’t get my apostleship from
man. I got it from Jesus. Justification
by faith, he explains the work of the Holy Spirit. He goes on
to speak of. And today in our passage, he’s
reminding them of the experience they all had when he came among
them for that stretch of time during his first missionary journey.
And he preached. the gospel of Jesus to them.
And they received Jesus and rested in him alone for their salvation.
And during his ongoing ministry there until he left, they, in
his estimation, not only heard the word, obeyed the word, but
they began to grow in maturity. And now he’s saying, what happened? What’s wrong with you folks?
And so let’s give our attention now to God’s word. Galatians three, one to five.
Oh, foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? It was before
your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this. Did
you receive the spirit by works of the law or by hearing with
faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun
by the spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things
in vain, if indeed it was in vain? Does He who supplies the
Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the
law or by hearing with faith? Amen. The word of the living
God, may He write its eternal truths on our hearts. And may
we put it into practice in our lives. Well, after a hot summer,
after really July and August beating down on all of our lawns,
I imagine some of us have done what everybody seems to do in
the fall. We get the little machine and
punch holes in the yard and loosen up the soil. We get some grass
seed and we put it down. We pray for rain or maybe run
the sprinklers. And we put down a little fertilizer,
hoping that before cold comes, our lawn will be rejuvenated. A couple weeks ago, the fellow
that helps me out brought his tractor over to the house and
he punched the holes in the lawn and loosened up all the dirt
and put down seed and fertilizer. And I have been nervously walking
around my yard for the last couple weeks, looking for little bitty
signs of life. I’m one of those people who,
when you spend money, you want to see some value out of it,
right? And so, as I walk around the
yard, I see signs of seedlings, but it’s not always in the places
I hope. Sometimes it’s in the sidewalk
cracks. Sometimes it’s over in the edging where my natural area
is, and I’m going to have to kill that new grass at some point,
because if I don’t, it will take over the natural areas. but over
in the patchy spots, over in the shady spots, can’t seem to
get grass to grow. Isn’t that the way it is? You
wash your car and it will rain. You don’t wash your car and it
won’t rain. You plant grass seed and it doesn’t grow and you throw
grass seed out and it grows in the cracks. That’s just the way
it seems to be. And all of this to help us think
through Jesus’ parable of the sower. Remember, he tells a story
about how the sower went out to sow seeds, and there were
four types of ground on which the seed or the gospel fell. Now, a couple of days ago, I
was listening to my daily newscast, The World and Everything In It
from World Magazine, and they were interviewing farmers out
in the Midwest who are now using GPS self-driving tractors with
computer driven programs to actually put the seed in the ground. And
all of this planting now has calculated how much seed, at
what rate is it spread, or at what pressure is it placed in
the ground. And then the seed is specially formulated for their
soil, for the anticipated rainfall or the anticipated drought that
is coming because of the almanac or the weather forecast. And
it wasn’t like that in Jesus’ picture. When Jesus says the
sower went out to sow, I don’t know if you’ve seen this before,
but a farmer would get a bag of seed and he would walk and
his stride would be to walk and to cast. And as he cast the seed,
some would fall on the path. Some would fall among the thorns.
Some would fall among the rocks and other would actually fall
into the good dirt, the good prepared soil. They needed the
GPS driven tractors back then, I suppose, but the sower would
cast his seed widely. And as you picture this, You
can begin to see in Jesus’ mind what he’s saying to his disciples
and to his hearers. Not every bit of gospel seed
falls into good soil. We cast it wide, we cast it far,
and we cast it equally among everyone. But the seed that falls
upon the path is trampled. The seed that falls upon the
rock has no moisture. The seed that falls among the
thorns is mixed in with the weed plants and the thorny plants.
And of course, the seed that falls on the good soil falls
in just the right place. Now, when Jesus explains this
parable to his disciples, he says, you have eyes to see, you
have ears to hear, the common folks don’t. And he explains
that the seed that falls on the path is both trampled and snatched
up by birds and eaten. The birds devour that seed, or
he says, the devil takes it away from the hearts so that those
who heard it may not believe and be saved. And then he goes
on to explain the seed that falls on the rock, where it has no
moisture, it grows up quickly, but it withers. And those are
those that hear the gospel and with joy, they receive it and
they follow it. But after a stretch of testing,
they follow away. And then the seed among the thorns,
it falls and grows among the thorns, which Jesus says are
the cares of this world. It’s hard to be a worldly. Christian,
isn’t it? But we get concerned with the
cares of this world, the riches of this life, the pleasures of
today. And well, There’s no fruit from the seed because it doesn’t
grow or bear fruit. It does not mature. But the good
soil, Jesus says, receives that seed and it yields various degrees
of growth and maturity. This is those who hear the word.
These are those who with sincerity of heart, they hold fast. to the word with a sincere heart
and with an honest heart and with a good heart. And their
lives bear fruit with patience. And as you think of this picture
of the sower going out and sowing the seeds, it falling in different
places. And you think about perhaps your own experience in the church. Why doesn’t everyone receive
the good news of salvation through Jesus like I have? And why don’t
they rejoice and live it and love it like I have? You can
imagine that not all the Galatians, not all the churches in the region
of Galatia, we don’t know how many churches there were, several,
where Paul preached for a stretch of time. We can guess that some
seed fell on the path. Some seed fell upon the rock.
Some seed fell and grew up among the thorns. And of course, some
seed fell on good soil and it grew. And so when Paul is speaking
to the Galatians, we can probably have in mind different Different
soils, different places where the seed fell. Not all Galatians
fell for this false teaching, but some did. Perhaps many did. And Paul gives them his indictment
here. Oh, you foolish Galatians. Remember, we’ve talked about
how Paul usually is nice in his letters. Hey, Thessalonians. Hey, Timothy. Hey, Titus. Hey,
Ephesians. Even the Corinthians, and they
got four nasty grams from Paul. We got two of them in our Bibles.
He was pretty good to them, but the Galatians, oh, foolish Galatians. I wonder if he was having a Mr.
T moment. You know, Mr. T, you know, I
pity the fool. That was what we grew up on in
the 1980s was he having a Mr. T giving a funny pejorative to
these people because they have been duped. They have been fooled. They have been tricked. Well,
actually it’s a bit more serious than that. You think of the biblical
contrast that we see in other places in the Bible, particularly
the wisdom literature like Psalms and Proverbs, there is a great
contrast between those who are wise and those who are fools.
In fact, if you read the whole book of Proverbs, especially
all of my son’s statements, you’ve got a father speaking to a son
saying, son, don’t be a fool, be wise. The fear of the Lord
is the beginning of wisdom. But the way of folly is the way
of destruction. And so we see a biblical contrast
that Paul, the Old Testament scholar, certainly would have
known a biblical contrast between wisdom and folly. And you remember
this from Psalm 14, I’m sure. The fool says in his heart, there
is no God. And you can imagine Paul as he’s
thinking through what to say to the Galatians, how to say
in the strongest possible way, you’ve lost your minds. How to
say in the strongest possible way, you are on thin ice. How
to say in the strongest possible way, you’re on a path to destruction
if you continue on it. You know, we live in a day. where we kind of pat people on
the head and we don’t tell them the truth. We tell them some
whitewashed, well, it’s just a lie, isn’t it? Because we’re
afraid that the gospel will offend them. We’re afraid that telling
someone they’re wrong and on the wrong path, that we’ll lose
a friend and so on. You get the idea. We’ve become
Casper milquetoast. We’ve just become spineless and
weak. And it’s gotten that way in the
church. Do you know that in today’s evangelical church, churches
that believe the good news of Jesus, and sad to say it, in
some of our reformed churches that hold fast to the scriptures
after the Protestant Reformation, We are seeing people dabbling
with saying certain heinous sins are okay as long as you don’t
act on them. It’s okay to claim this lifestyle and to claim this
is your identity. So the reformed church and the
evangelical church is saying you can be a sexually deviant
Christian. That’s incompatible, isn’t it?
And what Paul is saying here is it’s incompatible to trust
Jesus and add ceremony. It’s incompatible to trust Jesus
and require circumcision. It’s incompatible to trust Jesus
and add anything else to the gospel. And so when he says,
oh foolish Galatians, he is speaking of their carelessness. They’re following their emotions
and their whims. And a couple months ago as we
finished our study of Acts and Paul was on the shipwreck and
they were storm tossed at sea for two weeks, dragging anchor
and the ship was breaking up and they saw no stars, no moon,
no light, no daytime, no nothing for two weeks. Can you imagine
when he writes to Timothy in his pastoral epistle to Timothy
about people, one day they’ll have itching ears. And one day
they’ll gather preachers to say the things that they want to
hear, not the things that God says they ought to hear. And
they’ll be tossed to and fro from every wind and every wave
of doctrine. We’re living in that time now,
aren’t we, in our culture. You can pick your church like
you do your restaurant. And do you know how most people
pick a church these days? Not because of worship, not because
of the word and not because of good church discipline and order.
No, they pick it because of the coffee bar. They pick it for
the youth group, the women’s group. They pick it for the a
la carte things that yes, can help you grow in grace, but they
aren’t the main things. Is the church faithful to the
scriptures? Is the church faithful to the historic faith and practice
of God’s people throughout the centuries? Those are the ways
we should evaluate, but we’re living in a time where people
are duped. They are careless, they are thoughtless,
they’re choosing by emotion, and they’re being tossed by every
wave and wind of doctrine. In fact, Paul’s gonna give it
a stronger word here. He’s gonna say, O foolish Galatians,
who has bewitched you? I was a child of the eighties
and the nineties back when Saturday Night Live was, you know, funny. And I can remember Dana Carvey
dressing up as the church lady and his answer for anything that
went wrong in the church was, could it be? Okay, I remember
Satan, right? I thought of that this week.
Who has bewitched you? Well, this is a rhetorical question
Paul is asking that needs an out loud answer. Who has bewitched
the Galatians? It’s none other than Satan himself
sending the Judaizers into the church to undo his gospel work.
He’s come in and he’s a seed snatcher. He has taken away the
gospel so they don’t believe it in their hearts, and he’s
given them a false gospel. You need Jesus, oh yes, but you
need ceremony, you need circumcision. And Paul is saying to the Galatians,
and I think he’s warning us as Christians who live in a world
full of false gospels, you’ve lost your minds. Or for us, don’t
lose your minds, go on in the gospel. And there’s three things
I believe that Paul puts before the Galatians that he puts before
us. And it’s an appeal to their experience. Now, normally Paul is going to
appeal to God. He’s going to say, God, who made
the heavens and the earth, who spoke by his word through his
prophets and now his apostles. and the things that are written
down in the scriptures, that’s how he should appeal. You know,
God says it, do it, right? God says it, believe it. God
says it, worship him, that kind of thing. Well, here he’s gonna
appeal to their experience. Now we know our experience will
lie to us, right? Just follow your heart, people
say. Follow your heart, it’ll never lead you astray. Well,
how’d that work for Adam and Eve? They follow their hearts
and the rest of us are stuck with Adam’s sin until Christ
comes. But here he does appeal to their
experience and he appeals to their experience in three ways.
You sat under the lively preaching of the word. You heard with faith
and the work of the spirit was powerfully working in you to
do mighty things. And so when he appeals to their
experience, he’s going to say as their pastor, I saw the gospel
go into your lives. I saw the gospel come out of
your lives. I saw the spirit’s transforming
power. What do you think you’re doing? Walking away from the spirit’s
power and going back to the flesh. Think for a moment about the
lively preaching of the word that Paul speaks of. He says,
it was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed
as crucified. Paul, I think, I’m just guessing
here, but I think Paul is remembering as us preachers are want to do
and can do, I think often do, Paul is remembering the occasion
of his sermon. He’s remembering the hours of
study and preparation. He’s remembering the room. He’s
remembering the day. He’s remembering the things surrounding
that time when he preached the gospel of Jesus. And you understand
he did this multiple times in multiple churches throughout
the region of Galatia. This is him remembering hundreds
of sermons perhaps. And he’s remembering that agony
that he was under, the distress that he was under until Christ. was formed in these Galatian
people. Yes, he had his first encounters
where he presented Jesus. Yes, he had people getting saved
at different times and at different places and moments during this
Galatian missionary journey. But he’s remembering that as
he went back to Jerusalem or back to Antioch to report after
a stretch of time on the missionary field, he’s remembering with
great joy that God’s word did not return void. Through his
explanation of the Old Testament, through his preaching of what
would become the New Testament doctrine that we find in Romans
and Ephesians and Galatians and all his other letters, this special
revelation from God sunk in to the minds and the hearts and
the lives of the people. They saw Christ lifted up. And they received him with joy
and put the ethics and principles and practices of the kingdom
to work in each of their lives. God himself spoke through Paul
to these people and he saw it work. You know, preaching is
supposed to be a dynamic event where God, through his word,
through his preacher, under the power of the Holy Spirit, does
two things. He convinces and converts sinners
and he comforts and builds up saints. And we don’t think this
way as often as we should, and I’ll confess preachers don’t
think this way as often as we should, but it could be under
the sound of God’s voice through the faithful preaching that someone
gets saved, that someone in the room passes from death to life,
that someone’s chains fall off, Someone’s heart is set free.
Someone will rise and set forth from their pew today and follow
the Lord Jesus Christ. We don’t expect God to do that,
do we? But we should. I’ve been watching
recently a series on the Puritans and our forebears in the Reformed
faith and the Presbyterian faith were people who expected God
to act And particularly the Puritan
preachers, when they went into the pulpit, they expected that
God would convince and convert sinners or comfort and build
up his saints. How often do we pray for the
preaching? How often do we pray for the
hearers? How often do we pray that the
word will go on its errand and do the work that God set out
for it to do? Think of Luke 24. as Paul is
thinking about the people hearing his preaching and seeing the
cross with Christ on it before their eyes. I think of Luke 24,
where Jesus was walking on the road back to Emmaus, leaving
Jerusalem after he had been raised from the dead. And he’s with
those two disciples that don’t know who he is. And later on,
when they figure out who that was walking with them, they say,
we’re not our hearts burning within us. And I wonder if Paul
is thinking of something like that. I saw, Your heart’s burning. I saw you, as we like to say,
I saw that you were on fire for Jesus. The word did its work. And he’s going to add to this
lively preaching a second ingredient that we ought to see here in
Galatians and maybe consider for our own walk with the Lord,
hearing with faith. And doesn’t that pair well with
the expectation of the Puritans that when the Word of God is
read, that when the Word of God is preached, when the Word of
God is sung, when the Word of God is dwelling plenteously in
the worship service, we should hear it with faith. You know, we don’t do this in
our tradition, but some churches proceed in with the Bible. There’s
a processional into the church. The Word of God is in our midst.
The word of God that can save, the word of God that can convince
and convert and comfort and can build up. And so there’s a reverence
of the word, which is not inappropriate. Now we reverence it by, you can
see my Bible and this is the pulpit, it’s front and center,
and it’s not obscured by other things. But I want to ask what
obscures you? Do you hear with faith? Do you come to church ready to
hear the word, receive the word, and do you trust that it is the
very word of God and it can do something? It will do something,
it is doing something, and it’s probably gonna hurt. You’re gonna
leave church probably with a limp, right? You’re gonna leave church
with a longer to-do list to live for the Lord. Do you hear with
faith? We live in a world of choices.
And I mentioned earlier the itching years that Paul predicted would
come. And I’ve watched in my ministry people a la carte church. You know what a la carte is?
That’s French for pick what you want at the restaurant. You go
through the buffet line. That’s why people love the Golden
Corral. That’s why people love the K&W. You can see all the
choices and you can pick what you want and get as much as you
want, as long as you can pay for it by the pound. And people
like to do that with church. Well, I go here because I like
the music. We go here because we like the preaching. We go
here because we like the youth group. We go here because we
like the women’s ministry. We go here because of the men’s
ministry. And before you know it, we’ve a la carte-ed church. And, you know, we’re listening
to so-and-so on tape. And I’m gonna tell you why that has so
many difficulties. It’s because if God places you
in covenant relationship with a body of people and with a group
of elders and with a minister who love you and are praying
for you and are getting to know you and begin to know what makes
you tick, they can also know how to minister and pray for
you. And all of heaven comes down on you when you live in
fellowship with a church that loves you and takes care of you.
Yes, not perfectly, but we lead our folks to Jesus and to the
cross. We live in a world that not only
all parts church, we believe that spiritual things are equal. That is the big lie of the day.
As long as I do spiritual things, I’m in good shape. And remember
the context here, Paul is saying, Galatians, fools, you’ve been
duped, you’ve been bewitched. And so it’s good for us to think
about not only the lively preaching of the word, but hearing with
faith. What do I bring to church to
prepare to hear God’s word on the table in the fellowship hall?
There’s a stack of books. that give you some tips on how
to listen to a sermon. I encourage you to pick one up,
pass it around, get together for coffee with someone and discuss
it. It’s important how we hear. In fact, Jesus gave a parable
about it, didn’t he? The seed falls in different places
and we wanna be the good soil ready for the word of the living
God. We should put aside all other
things and say the voice of God and the voice of God alone I
will listen. Now, Paul, I think, could tell
that he had people who heard with faith because he says it
twice. He says, you heard the preaching, the demonstration
of Christ crucified, and you heard it with faith. He saw their
eyes. He saw their faces. He saw them
at the back door of church. He followed up with them and
did one on one ministry in their lives, and he saw that God had
been at work in each of their lives. He saw that the knowledge
sunk into their brain. He saw the faith and the ascent
to the truths of the gospel. And he saw their faith grow and
that they had put aside all their idols and said, God is trustworthy. But now Satan has slipped in. Satan has slipped in and he’s
begun to snatch the seed from the church. A third part of Paul’s
experience or their experience that Paul appeals to is not just
the preaching. It’s not just that they heard
with faith, but he says the work of the spirit was evident in
you. I saw your personal Pentecost. I saw you receive Jesus. I saw you walk. in newness of
life. I saw, as he says in verse two,
the spirit was given to you, you received it. He says in verse
three, you began your new life in the spirit. It says in verse
five, the spirit was supplied to you. You were transformed
from sinner to saint. It says in verse five, you suffered,
or maybe we should think more In our terms of you experience
the newness of life that comes by the power of the Holy Spirit. I saw your conversion. I saw
your faith was genuine. I saw your change was genuine
and you had all that you needed in Jesus. Jesus was sufficient
to you. And so Paul says, you heard,
you believed, you received, you experienced, and now you’ve become
duped. You’ve been bewitched by the
seed snatcher. And you think leaving Jesus behind,
you can go on in the flesh. You remember the grocery things
you used to get? I think that’s what we did when
I was a kid. You get stamps at the grocery
and you lick the stamps and put them on the paper. When you get
enough, you can go in and buy a radio. Right? You could go
in and have enough stamps. You could get a vacuum cleaner.
You go in and get enough stamps. You could get certain things.
And I think that’s what the Galatians are thinking. We need to collect
stamps, lick them and put them on the paper and say, look, God,
I’m doing all that is required. But what did Paul preach? What
did Paul proclaim to them? When he proclaimed to them, Jesus
Christ crucified, it is done. It is finished. It is complete. And Paul saying, you have tasted
and seen that God is good. How can you see Jesus Christ
crucified so clearly, experience his miracle of salvation, and
now how can you choose to go on in the flesh and go on in
the works? Paul is saying it doesn’t work.
All you need is Christ. Let’s do pray together. Lord,
we clutter up our lives with superstitions, with man-made
rules, We get tired of the simplicity of the gospel that receiving
and resting in Jesus alone is not, it’s not sexy enough or
bohemian or cool. And so we want something else.
We want to be able to brag. We want to be able to wear the
t-shirt that says I’m super spiritual. That’s not the way it’s supposed
to be, so help us to trust Jesus, his finished work, his completed
work, and to be okay with Christ, and to be okay with Christ alone,
and not to be ashamed of the simple gospel that Jesus has
taken our sins. Jesus has borne them on Calvary’s
tree. Jesus has given us his righteousness,
his obedience. He’s given us all the forgiveness
we’ll ever need. or let us not grow weary in the
simplicity and the beauty of the true gospel of Jesus. Help
us to keep our eyes fixed on that until we land safely on
heaven’s shore and behold the beautiful lamb who has paid the
price of the sins of his people. Hear us and help us. We make
our prayer in Jesus’ holy and precious name, amen.