Seeking for the help of the Lord,
I direct your prayerful attention to Galatians chapter 6, reading
from our text, verse 14. It is specifically the latter
part of the verses on my spirit, but we'll read the whole text
and speak from the whole text. But God forbid that I should
glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the
world is crucified unto me and I unto the world. Galatians chapter six, verse
14. There are many things that poor
fallen man will glory in. And since the fall, most sadly,
it is not in the first place in the Lord. He glories even
in his sins. man glories in his appearance,
fallen though it is and so marred and defiled by sin, yet he will
so attempt to make his appearance as nice as he can, even in an
outward way, to disguise those ravages of sin or age or affliction. in some way that there might
be some glory, some beauty, some praiseworthiness in self. Others will glory in their knowledge,
their wisdom, yet poor fallen man is fallen from the knowledge
of God, the wisdom of God, and we are told that man by wisdom
he cannot find out God, but man glories in what wisdom he does
have. of earthly things and even of
spiritual things, yet without the Spirit. The Pharisees were
like that. They gloried in their appearance
of being religious and long prayers and going with flowing robes
and appearing unto men to be righteous, and yet inwardly the
Lord said that they were full of every evil thing. and yet
man will glory in these things. We can glory in our chapel going,
we can glory in that we have never missed a time in the Lord's
house, or our good works. We revert to that which We are
made under the law, under a covenant of works, and we refer to that
again and again. And this is the very thing that
the Galatians were going back under the law, they were going
back seeking that, well, if a man is to be right and accepted with
God, then he must keep the ceremonial law, he must be circumcised,
and they would glory in that. The apostle identifies this in
the verses prior to our text. For neither they themselves who
are circumcised keep the law, but desire to have you circumcised,
that they may glory in your flesh. That they may say, well, we've
got converts, these are these people, they're following us
and they're doing what we bid them to do, they're converts
to us. and thy glory in that. But you know the apostle when
he wrote to the Corinthians in the first epistle to them in
the first chapter, he speaks of the wisdom of God in calling
those that There weren't many mighty, weren't many noble that
are called. And he says, but God had chosen
the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. God had
chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things
which are mighty and base things of the world and things which
are despised hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not
to bring to naught things that are. And then he gives this reason. that no flesh should glory in
his presence. That in the presence of Almighty
God, that sinful man might not rise himself up and glory in
himself and take the glory to himself. And it's in the context
that even if a believer, even of those that are saved, those
that are known as the Lord's people. We're prone to that,
you know. They're disciples. There was
one time the Lord asked them what they had been talking about
by the way. They couldn't answer him. The reason was they'd been debating
who was the greatest, who was going to have the right glory.
Another time, one wanted to sit one at the right hand, one at
the left of the Lord in his glory, all the time seeking some prominent
position. And our Lord spoke of those whom
he observed when they went to the feast. They immediately made
a beeline for the highest seats and uppermost seats. He said,
no, he said, when you are bidden to a feast, you take the lowest
place. And then when the person that
bid you, you say, come up higher, and you take a higher place.
Lest if you take the highest place, and the one that bid you
come and say, friend, you go back down lower and ask someone
else to sit in your seat, and then you, with shame, take that
lowest place. How many times through the word
of God, the Lord is so careful that in those things that he
does, even for his people, whether it's in grace or whether it's
in deliverance, that the glory is not taken by poor man. The apostle said, what hast thou
that thou didst not receive? Each one that is called has received
it as a free and sovereign gift. His mercy they didn't deserve
it. How can they then glory? The
Lord guarded Gideon in that way. God was going to use Gideon.
Gideon felt how small he was when the Lord first appeared
to him to deliver Israel in the time of the judges. Gideon was
raised up as a judge, deliver them out of the hand of the Midianites. But God was going to use an army,
but not the size that Gideon had. And Gideon had to have that
army reduced down, right down to 300 men. They asked first
if anyone was fearful, frightened, and they could go home. Many
went home. Then it was still too many. Then
they brought them down, tested them at the waters to see how
they would drink, whether they would lap water, bending down
with their lips to the water, or pick up the water in their
hands and lap from their hands. And the Lord divided them in
that way. and ended up with 300 men. And
it was that lest Israel say by our own hand that we got this
victory. That's why they were brought
so low. May we remember that. The Lord
knows how proud we can get, how prone we are to raise up and
to glory in what we are doing and we can In many, many things
we can glory in. We can see a brother that's not
as good at doing something as we are and our pride rises up. We glory in those things. We're
poor, fallen creatures. Well, the apostle says to the
Galatians here, when he speaks about those that are glorying
and glorying In the flesh of the converts, he says, but God
forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus
Christ. Except in this one point, in
this point, he will glory. And I want to look this evening
at this, accept or save. What the apostle would glory
in? And so, two points. Firstly, what the apostle would
glory in, clearly said before us here, in the cross of our
Lord Jesus Christ. But then secondly, the twofold
use of the cross in separating a believer from the world. From the world. The Lord said,
remember in John, 17, they are not of the world, even
as I am not of the world. And we have here that by the
cross, the twofold use of it, by whom or whereby the world
is crucified unto me and I, and to the world. In other words,
through the cross, the world does not want the believer, and
the believer does not want the world. But firstly, what the
apostle would glory in? In the cross of our Lord Jesus
Christ. This could be looked at several
different ways. One thing that most certainly
the apostle was not glorying in was a wooden or any other
material imitation of the cross. They have in some churches a
cross on the wall or people hang a cross around their neck. The
apostle wasn't glorying in something like that. Even if we could find
the very wood that our Lord and Savior had hung upon a calvary,
he would not glory on that. He's not going on a pilgrimage
to find some relic and to glory in that. We think of Hezekiah. godly king of Judah, and the
golden serpent, or brazen serpent rather, not gold, brass, that
was made by Moses in the wilderness and blessed. Those that looked
on that in the wilderness, they looked and they lived. Those
that looked by faith, they looked past that to what our Lord sets
forth in John 3. As Moses lifted up the serpent
in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but should
have eternal life. Well, that was a sign then. And
those that looked, they lived in obedience. But years later,
that same thing, they made a god out of it. They went after it
as a god. Hezekiah, he took it and he ground
it up. He called it Hattustan, which
is just a piece of brass. That's all it was. So when the
apostle says he's glorying in the cross, he's not raising up
some even thing like the brazen serpent or the cross of our Lord. He's speaking. about what was
accomplished and done at Calvary, the cross of Christ, and more
than that, there's several aspects concerning the cross here. Maybe
it's a good place to start in the very context because we have
in verse 12 that those that were wanting the Galatian believers
to be circumcised was only lest they should suffer persecution
for the cross of Christ. And what he means is that the
teaching that he'd brought to the Galatians was that there
is salvation, not through obedience to the law, the ceremonial law,
or the moral law, but faith in the Lord Jesus Christ in what
was accomplished and finished at Calvary. That Christ, as the
spotless, sinless Lamb of God, He shed His blood and paid the
debt that we owed and couldn't pay. that the belief in the finished
work of Christ on the cross, that God accepted that payment,
the tomb was empty, the Lord rose again, that that doctrine,
that teaching, that trust of a believer solely in that and
not in the deeds of the law. Man is justified by faith, not
by the deeds of the law. that when one believed that,
when one held that, then those that were cleaving to the law,
they would persecute those because of their belief in Christ's finished
work on the cross. And so, joined with the cross
of Christ, the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, is a cross that
we also carry if we believe. The Lord says in John 17 again,
he says, I have given them thy word and the world hath hated
them. Paul clearly saw that those here
in Galatia that truly believed in the Lord Jesus Christ and
what he had done at Calvary, They were suffering for that
belief. He had suffered for it. He suffered
greatly because he believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son
of God, the eternal Son of God. He is the eternal Son of God. Not was, he is in heaven now.
But also he believed that he had died and he'd rise again
from the dead. in the Acts of the Apostles and
throughout the epistles again and again you find that when
the Apostle Paul was speaking of the Gospel, it was when he
got to the part either of the Gospel being sent to the Gentiles
or the part where he spoke of the resurrection from the dead
that immediately he suffered persecution. The Jews hated to
hear either one of those things. And the Gentiles as well, mocked
at the idea, the thought, that one should rise from the dead.
And so in the context, what the apostle says, that he should
glory in saving the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, he would
glory in this, that the Lord had counted him worthy, that
in believing and testifying and following the Lord Jesus Christ,
he suffered for it. He was not going to be ashamed
of what he believed, what he testified. He would rather glory
in what the Lord had given him to believe. brought him so sovereignly
to believe. Once he'd been an unbeliever,
once he had persecuted himself, those that believed these things,
the Pharisee of the Pharisee, but God had made a difference,
changed him, converted him. And with that conversion, there
came persecution because of the cross of Christ. Our Lord had
taught that we also must take up our cross and follow him,
and the idea that we shall hold the true faith of God and never
be persecuted, no one will speak against us, we won't lose any
friends, we won't have anyone hostile against us. That is contrary
to the word of God. When the Lord sent his disciples
in the world to preach the gospel to every creature, He said, he
said, if they receive you in not one city, or if they persecute
you in one city, then go to the next city. And certainly those
cities, those places in Galatia, the apostle had been persecuted
from one city to another city right through that region. He
knew what it was to suffer persecution amongst them when their churches
were formed. And so the cross, the cross,
the apostle, word glory in, is the belief, the embracing of
the faith of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and of teaching
it and walking it out. It is also glorying in what was
done, on the cross, to realise what a miracle, what a great
work, the only sacrifice that this world has ever known to
put away sin was done there at Calvary upon the cross by our
Lord Jesus Christ. There was laid on him the iniquity
of us all, we have that in Isaiah 53, And we see him pressed down
in the garden of Gethsemane before going to the judgment hall and
before going to the cross, weighed down, exceeding sorrowful, sweating
great drops of blood. He was never made a sinner, but
he bore the sin of many. And he made intercession for
the transgressors too on the cross with the dying thief. So the apostle, fully realizing
what was done at the cross, could glory in that. You know, if we
had an army, a general, that could look back to a wonderful
victory that he had brought about, wouldn't he glory in that? Wouldn't
he think, What wonderful strategy, what wonderful accomplishments
were done there. Well how much greater when a
believer can look back and realize what was completely finished
there. Many times in the accounts of
the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ we have that the scriptures might
be fulfilled. We have the word of our Lord
to the two on the way to Emmaus. Ought not Christ to have suffered
these things and to enter into His glory? How vital is the cross. Without it, the Old Testament
scriptures not fulfilled. Without it, no sin are saved,
no sin put away, no heaven at all. The believers all was accomplished
and done there. And the Lord, in the ordinances
of his house, believeth's baptism, buried with him by baptism into
death, risen again in newness of life, or in the Lord's supper,
this do in remembrance of me. As oft as ye eat this bread and
drink this cup, ye do show forth the Lord's death till he come. Lord will not have the Church
of God forget Calvary. It must be always before them,
not to be ashamed of, not to think smally of, but to glory
in what the Lord has done, what he has accomplished there. And
the Apostle surely then would glory in the cross, in that conquest,
in that victory. that the Lord had gained there
on the cross. But then there's also the doctrines
of the cross. All of the teaching of the gospel
of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, not of works, lest any
man should boast, but by grace. Those are doctrines where glory
ends. The doctrine of not our righteousness,
but Christ's obedience, even unto death, the death of the
cross. The doctrine, the blood of Jesus
Christ, God's son, cleanseth from all sin. The doctrine, if
any man being Christ is a new creature, old things are passed
away, all things become new. the doctrine of Christ, and I,
if I be lifted up above the earth, would roar all men unto me. They shall look upon him whom
they have pierced, they shall mourn for him. And all of the
teaching of the Church of God, we think of the apostles speaking
of the children of Israel going through the wilderness. They
drank of that spiritual rock that followed them, and that
rock was Christ. and that rock was a smitten rock. We read, Abraham saw my day,
says Christ, and he rejoiced at it. When did he see it? When
he said to Isaac, my son, God will provide himself a lamb for
a burnt offering, and the substitute was offered. The doctrines of
the substitutionary offering of Christ, those precious doctrines
and teachings. The doctrine of her elder brother
born for adversity, the doctrine of the heavenly Boaz, the man
is of a near kinsman, the doctrine is spoken by Anna. When our Lord
was brought into the temple as a babe, she spoke of him to all
them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem. than ever be before the world
ashamed of the doctrine of the cross, the doctrine of free and
sovereign grace. And so when the apostle says,
but God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our
Lord Jesus Christ, There's many things that are bound up with
it. Comes to mind the apostle saying
that he will glory, and it seems to be something different, that
he'll glory in his infirmities. He says, when I am weak, then
am I strong. And why was that? Because he
had the thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, and that was given
him because God had given him The wonderful revelation caught
up into the third heavens, and lest he should be exalted above
measure, lest he should glory in those revelations, God gave
him a messenger of Satan. And he prayed and prayed that
the Lord would take that away, but the Lord said, no, my grace
is sufficient for thee. Paul, you must have this cross,
you must have this trial, you must have this thorn in the flesh,
this messenger of Satan, but I'll give you grace to bear it.
and he was going to glory in that grace. You know the grace
of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet he became
poor, that ye through his poverty might be made rich. And again,
he comes back to the cross, and that is what the apostle would
glory in. May we join with him in this. And we also say, God forbid,
that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. May that eclipse everything,
that we be humbled in the dust and low before the Lord. I want to look then secondly
at the twofold use of the cross. in separating a believer from
the world. When I say the use of the cross,
in the very things that I have spoken of as what the apostle
gloried in the cross. The Lord's people are not to
be of the world. They are not of the world. The
Lord says that they are not. But we're still in the world.
And his prayer was, Father, I pray not that thou wouldst take them
out of the world, but that thou wouldst keep them from the evil. And James tells us, know ye not
that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever will be a friend of
the world is an enemy of God. What was happening at the cross? The world was saying, away with
him, away with him, crucify him. They did not want the Lord Jesus
Christ. They wanted him finished and
dead and buried and gone. But did the Lord want the things
of this world? One of the thieves, he says,
save thyself and us, come down from the cross. I still want
this world. I want to dwell here. I don't want to die. But the
other one, no doubt at first he was saying the same things,
but a real change was noted. And he said, and he reproved
the other thief being crucified with him, and he said, does thou
not fear God? being in the same condemnation,
we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds,
but this man hath done nothing amiss. He turns to the Lord,
Lord, remember me, when thou comest into thy kingdom. They're
very different sides, isn't he? He's not asking to come down
from the cross, he's asking the Lord would remember him. The
Lord says, verily, verily, I say unto thee this day, shalt thou
be with me in paradise. The cross is a separation. The world does not want the Lord,
it does not want his people. Our Lord said, If they have persecuted
me, they will also persecute you. While he was being led away
to the cross, he said to the women and those that bewailed
him, if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be
done in the dry? If they've done these things
to the spotless Lamb of God, what shall we done to those of
his dear followers and those of his brethren, those who are
sinners themselves. The world cannot love the people
of God. It is enmity against God. It hates the things of God. We
do by nature. The whole work of grace is to
reconcile us unto God. And so being reconciled, we immediately,
it's like with the Apostle Paul. While he was persecuting the
Church of God and those that called upon the Lord Jesus Christ,
he was not being persecuted. He was a persecutor. But as soon
as he joined and he was a believer himself, then he was the persecutor. Then the world, then the religious
world was hating him. And so the Lord has so ordered
it, that that which shall do his people the greatest damage,
the greatest damage the people of God can have, is that they
be swallowed up by the world, they become worldly and carnal,
and that they take up with the things of this world. This was
the children of Israel when they went into the promised land,
into Canaan. They forsook the Lord and they
took with them the idols and practices of the heathen nations
that were around about them. They learned the ways of the
heathen. God said, learn not the ways of the heathen. But
we can be like that. We can grow so worldly and carnal. We can be like these Galatians.
who had at first received the gospel and then turned back from
it. And we might feel to be, even
this evening, so much in the ditch, so much so full of the
world, so disinclined for the things of God, so lacking an
appetite for the word of God, a carnal affection so strong,
a love of the things of this world so strong, easy to take
up with, natural carnal things and hobbies and be able to even
work on the house of God or do gardens or do work around the
house but to sit down to have the quiet time with the Lord,
to meditate on his word, to feed upon the word, to have that time
with prayer and communion and fellowship with the Lord or to
join with his people and have sweet fellowship in the house
of God And amongst those that fear his name, there's not the
joy and the delight and the desire sometimes even for it. And sometimes the people of God
get like this and get very alarmed. What if the Lord leaves them?
What if he doesn't revive them? What if he just lets them go
that way? What if the world just takes
over and I never again have another desire? The apostle so warns,
walk in the spirit, you shall not fulfill the lusts of the
flesh. To be spiritually minded is life
and peace, to be calmly minded is death. You read Romans 8.
And yet how fast we get calmly minded. We abhor, like in Psalm
107, every form of meat. The very word that we know is
to be our help and reviver, we're abhorring it, and we haven't
the appetite for it. You like that this evening? So
how can this be changed? How can there be that Separation
between my soul and the world. How can it be? What is in our
text is a two-way separation. It's not just on one side. And
it all centers in the cross of Christ. It's not something that
we're doing as such ourselves. But as the message of the Lord
in this way of you and I would be truly dead to the world, and the world dead to us, then
it shall be through the cross of Christ. As we glory in that,
as we delight in that, as we view that, as we meditate, upon
what our Lord did there and suffered in our place, and how he was
treated by the world. And how he said, I pray not for
the world, but for them whom thou hast given me, those that
were out of the world, and they've been brought out, called out,
separated. And how shall that be maintained? through the cross of the Lord,
through the people of God, looking upon their Lord. That's why we
mentioned the ordinances of the Lord's house, but the preaching
of the cross, that is what revives the people
of God. And it is by this, by whom? By the Lord Jesus Christ and
his cross, the world is crucified unto me. It is dead to me. Its illumined, its dulled, its
beauties dim away when they see, when we see what the world did
to the Lord. When we hear their cries, away
with him, away with him, crucify him. When we hear their words,
that deceiver said when he was yet alive, three days I'll rise
again. Now, if you were to go into a
room, a company of the people of this world, and they started
speaking against the Lord, deriding Him, calling Him this deceiver,
ridiculing His teaching, His doctrine, His people, would you
feel comfortable? If you like to embrace what they're
embracing and walk with them and go with them, the more that we are brought to be
in the company of our suffering Lord and to realize why He suffered,
the more it will be that this world loses its charms, its delights,
its attraction. It is in this way the Lord takes
it away, not by resolutions, not by efforts of our own. The apostle says in Romans 8,
if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall
live. It is turning to the cross. When our eyes are looking there,
they're not looking at the world. When our ears are hearing there,
we're not hearing the world. When we look again to the world,
we see it in its true shape and true form, and we don't want
it. By her in the world is crucified
unto me. but then it's the other way around.
And I answer the world. The world, looking upon a believer,
looking upon the apostle, how many times they said with him,
away with him, away with such a one. We don't want him. And
the more the people of God confess their Lord and walk in his ways,
it will be a two-way thing. It won't just be the people of
God saying, I'm sorry, I can't walk with you. I'm not going
to go with you. The world will say, we don't
want you in our company. We don't want you pricking our
consciences. We don't want you here speaking
the word of the Lord. We don't want you doing the things
that we know in our consciences we should be doing and not doing
those things that we No, we really should not be doing. And so the
world would rather separate. And the Lord has pronounced a
blessing on those that the world separates you from their company. Blessed are you when men shall
do that to you. For so persecuted they the prophets
that were before you. It is this two-way thing. Here, the apostle is identifying
it just in one doctrinal point. And we might think, well, there's
just one doctrine of our most holy faith. If I deny that, if
I just don't make an issue of that, that will be all right. The apostle could have said,
here, it's only circumcision. Let's just not worry about that.
Let's let them be circumcised and they can believe in the Lord
as well. But he says, here, they escape
the cross in that way, but in that way they deny the faith. They completely deny what the
Lord accomplished at Calvary. May we be given that discernment
and to know what is vital. There are some things that are
not essential truths. There are things that are not
clearly laid down in the Word of God. We're not told in our
services how many hymns we should sing, or how long the reading
should be, or the sermon should be, or how often we should meet,
or whether we should meet in the week at all. We are told
that we are to keep the Lord's day, the Sabbath day, to gather
together as the New Testament church did on the day the Lord
arose from the dead. Those things are very clear by
the example of our Lord in his rising, appearing and blessing
his disciples on that first day of the week and the church following
that pattern. Very clear one day in seven principle
from the foundation of the world in the creation. Lord bless the
seventh day and sanctify it and that which is reflected in the
moral law of God as well. Wonderful provision for the people
of God. But in many other things, in our lives they're not expressly
set forth in the Word of God, but the doctrines of the cross,
the substitutionary offering of our Lord, and all that is
bound up with that, anything that robs the Lord of the glory,
the glory as being the only saviour, the only name given among men
whereby we must be saved, that no one, no minister, no person
has a part in that. His name shall be called Jesus
for he shall save his people from their sins. There shall
be none in heaven saying, yeah but I took my part and I preached
well and I prayed wonderful prayers and that's why I'm here. And
these people over there, they were part of my congregation,
and I was used in their salvation. Great honor and blessing, should
that be so, but not something that we should glory in, because
as the apostle says, one sows, another waters, but God gives
the increase. And what is the servant? What is the man? The glory alone
is the Lord, and in Emmanuel's land it shall be only him that
receives the glory. And may it be so with us here,
and may through that same cross the world that so plagues us,
takes away our enjoyments, grieves the Holy Spirit, that it might
be crucified unto us, and we and to the world. May the Lord
add his blessing. Amen.