So as we come through this opening
chapter of Galatians, we've seen Paul express his great love to
them, and we've seen Paul bring delightful Gospel to them, so
that everyone that read this letter would first be confronted
with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus. And the Lord Jesus For Paul was
life, wasn't he? He was life and salvation, and
Paul knew him, and Paul knew him, and Paul loved him. And Paul was sent by Him to these
people in Galatia, and he went there with the words of the Lord.
He went there preaching Jesus Christ and Him crucified. He went there as an honest man,
as a faithful man before them. And in the midst of those churches,
in the midst of those villages in Turkey, those towns, gospel
churches were raised up and gathered. And Paul, as he did with the
Thessalonians, he was rejoicing. that God had visited these people,
and God had drawn them out of the pagan religion and the Jewish
religion, and God had gathered them together as churches. And
here, just a little while, he says in verse 6, he's marvelled,
he's astonished that you're so soon removed from him that called
you, removed from God that called you, and removed from grace,
removed from the grace of God. And we saw last week that to
be removed from the grace of God was meant that you were in
a place where there was no peace, there was no fellowship with
Paul and his brethren. There's no fellowship with God
the Father, no fellowship with the resurrected Lord, no forgiveness
of sins, no deliverance from this present evil world. To leave grace, to leave the
grace of God is to leave you with all that you have before
God as your own resources and nothing else. Fancy that, coming
before a holy God on the basis of your merits. Can you think
of it? Can you think of one thing that
you've ever done or ever thought or ever wished to do that is
accepted before a holy God? Our God who is a consuming fire. Paul was horrified. Paul was astonished. And he says in verse 6 how he
marvels, he's marvelled. But they'd left, they'd been
moved, so soon removed from him that called you into the grace
of Christ to another gospel and in verse 7 he corrects it immediately. as if he was mistaken to use
the word gospel in reference to what these people were teaching,
which is not another. But there are some that trouble
you, some that trouble you. That word trouble means to take
away the calmness of mind, to take away peace, to make one
restless, to cause inward commotion. Some that trouble you. So Paul's
directing these words at the some that trouble you, that would
pervert, would poison the Gospel of Christ, would turn it around,
would change the Gospel. So these people came preaching
a Jesus. They came preaching a righteousness. They came with the Scriptures
in their hands. They were coming and saying,
it's wonderful that you people have accepted the Lord Jesus.
It's wonderful that you've responded to Paul's teaching. But I'll
show you something else that you can do. Something that you
can do that will cause God to be more pleased with you. To
cause you to be more accepted. See the thing that's extraordinary
is that Paul says that there are some that trouble you. As
we see from history and as we see from the other New Testament
letters, the gospel comes and creates a division and these
letters were coming to create a division in those flocks of
people. Do you stay with Paul? Do you stay with Paul who seemed
weak and ineffectual? It seemed like his speech was
nothing. It seemed like his presence was
nothing. Or do you stay with these guys
who preach righteousness and perform remarkable things and
speak such glowing words about your ability, your will and your
works and bring you back, bring you back under the Mosaic law. What does Paul say to these Galatians? I do not frustrate, verse 21,
chapter 2, I do not frustrate the grace of God, for if righteousness
comes by the law, if righteousness comes by anything you do, then
Christ is dead in vain. Foolish Galatians, he says of
them in chapter 3, he says, who has bewitched you? Who has cast a spell upon you
that you should not obey the truth?" And Paul describes the
gospel that he brought to these people. In Galatians 3, he says,
"...before whose eyes Jesus Christ has been evidently set forth
crucified. That was the essence of his gospel,
wasn't it? Jesus Christ and him crucified. These people came perverting
the gospel and troubling these people that Paul loved. Paul had two great loves in his
life. He had love for the Lord Jesus
because he knows what it is to be a sinner. He knows what it
is to meet a holy God with the best righteousness that you can
muster under Jewish law keeping. He says that under that law in
Philippians 3, he says, I was blameless. You couldn't go to
Paul and say, here is a law from Exodus 20, here is a law that
you have disobeyed in your flesh. And Paul, when he met the Lord
Jesus for the first time in his life, he knew what holiness was
all about. He knew what righteousness was
all about, and he knew what sin was all about. He stood there
before the Living God, ashamed of everything he had
ever done and everything that he had ever thought. He knows, he knows he knew personally
what it was to be delivered from this present evil world, as we
saw there in verse 4. The Lord Jesus alone can deliver
people from this present evil world. The Lord Jesus alone can
show what is evil in this world. It's remarkable, isn't it? When
you think, and when I think naturally of evil, these days you think
of the horrible, horrible things that that mob called IS is doing
in Iraq and Syria, and you think of the shocking things that happened
at that university in Kenya, and you think of the wicked evil,
the horrible, horrible thing that was done to that girl who
should have been married yesterday in Leighton but ended up being
murdered and her body burnt. We tend to think of those things,
and rightly so, we tend to think of those things as evil. Paul's talking about another
category of evil altogether, a category of evil which he experienced
when he met the Lord Jesus. I'll just read you a few words
from Martin Luther's commentary, he says, take the best of human
activity. Take wisdom, take the talents
of wisdom and integrity. Without Christ, wisdom is double
foolishness and integrity double sin. because they not only fail
to perceive the wisdom and righteousness of Christ, but hinder and blaspheme
the salvation of Christ. Paul justly calls it the evil
or the wicked world, because when the world is at its best,
then it is at its worst. contemplate that, brothers and
sisters, when the world is acting with the most extraordinary integrity
and moral uprightness, and when the world is looking at someone
and thinks, wow, what morality, what integrity, what wisdom,
what service Luther goes on to say, he says,
the grossest vices, the ones that I've just spoken about,
are small faults in comparison with the wisdom and righteousness
of the world. These prevent men from accepting
the gospel of the righteousness of Christ. The white devil of
spiritual sin is far more dangerous than the black devil of carnal
sin, because the wiser, the better men are without Christ, the more
they ignore and oppose the gospel. Now these men that came to Galatia,
how do you get into Paul's pulpit in those churches in Galatia?
You have to look like Paul and talk like Paul, act like Paul,
in some measure preach like Paul. You have to speak much of Jesus,
speak much of a Jesus, speak much of a Christ. and then deny
the completeness and the perfection of Him. So the issue is, isn't it, John
17.3, the issue always is, isn't it, do you know Him? This is eternal life. that you
know Him, and to know Him is to throw all your creature pride
in the one place it belongs, the nearest garbage tip you can
find it. That's where all creature pride
goes. As we saw in John 6, one of the
aims of Gospel preaching is that people are left like those apostles. Nowhere else to go. Where will
we go? You alone have the words of eternal
life. Paul, out of love for his Lord,
and out of love for these people, speaks these strong, strong words,
vehement words. There was a word that in Hebrew
was used to describe someone who was damned to hell, and the
Hebrews were frightened of ever using it. But here in the Scriptures,
Paul uses it twice. And he uses it in 1 Corinthians
16. He says, If any man does not
love the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema, cut off
from God, condemned to hell. condemned to hell, because these
teachers, these false teachers, were directly and subtly attacking
the very person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And for believers,
to have our husband attacked, to say something about the idea
that his work there was some insufficiency or inefficiency,
something incomplete in who he is and what he has done. It's
a blasphemy, isn't it? But it's a personal attack upon
all those who are united to Him, who have met Him, who are joined
with Him as one flesh." It's a personal attack. You attack
the Lord Jesus' righteousness and you attack my only hope in
this life. You do something to attack the
atonement of the Lord Jesus, and you attack the only hope
I have that my sins are taken away, is that He bore them on
the cross. When I go to websites, and I
don't go to a lot, but occasionally I stumble across websites of
other churches, the first thing I look for is I want to hear
some clear statement about what happened on the cross. Just tell
me plainly. As Paul said in 1 Corinthians
2, he says, I sought to know two things amongst you, Jesus
Christ and Him crucified. I just want those words defined
with simplicity and with clarity and from the scriptures. And
it's extraordinary when you come to what happened on the cross.
Many of you have seen it again and again. All of a sudden the
words get fuzzy, get very complicated. It's like yesterday I looked
up a website for all sorts of other reasons. I went and did
the same exercise and it says that on the cross the Lord Jesus
dealt with the consequences of human sin. And what does that
actually mean? It means whatever you want it
to mean, basically, doesn't it? The consequences of human sin.
Which human sin? Judas' human sin? Cain's human
sin? Korah's human sin? It's just
this ruddery phrase, and then when you get them and you sort
of pin them down, they get squirmier and squirmier. The Gospel is
a simple declaration of who He is. The Gospel is defining the
Lord Jesus, defining the Lord Jesus in His true character,
as it is in the Scriptures. Let me quote from Herodotus von
Ahn. He said, When I hear it said,
Such and such do not believe the doctrines of sovereign grace
and substitution, but they love the Lord and are saved. How many
times have you heard that? How many times do you hear it?
It's a cop-out phrase, isn't it? Oh, they mightn't believe
the things you believe about him, but they love him. And they've
done these things. Look at all their passion. They've
been overseas, they've been missionaries, they've done this and that. And such and such do not believe
the doctrines of sovereign grace and substitution, but they love
the Lord and are saved. I wonder and ask, what then was
the Bible written for? Is it no infallible expression
of the mind of God? Doesn't it give us clearly God's
mind? Is it no standard of truth? Are we to believe what appeals
to us and deny the rest? God forbid, God's word declares
the oneness of truth and condemns every departure from the truth
as a direct attack on God himself. Do not tell me that a man's heart
is right with God when his head contains a creed of error and
denies the person and work of the Redeemer. To go back to what
I said earlier in John 73, this is eternal life, that you know
Him. To know Him is something more
than knowing some facts about Him, but it is knowing Him as
He's been revealed in the Scripture. If I told you that I know a fellow
called Simon Bell, And I start describing him to you and I say
that he's married and he's got five kids. And then I start describing
something of his history, said that he was a tradie and other
things. I could describe him and you
could say yes and yes and yes. And then I could start saying,
well, he worked as a plumber. And some of you who don't know
him very well would say, oh, well, maybe, he was a tradie,
he was a plumber. Some of you who know him well
would start to get horrified and think, well, there are lots
of Simon Bells in this world, just Google them. This is not
the Simon Bell that I'm talking about. My point is simple, isn't it?
If I went on to describe the Simon Bell that I'm talking about
as a guy who's six foot three with with red hair, you would
start to say, well, you're talking about a Simon Bell, but he's
a very, very different Simon Bell than the one I know, because
I know him. On what basis are you making your judgment? On what basis are you concerned
about what people are saying? The basis is how well you know
him. How well you know him. Why do
people sit in these places and soak up messages and come away
saying, isn't that a wonderful message. That was just a wonderful
message. I'm preaching on First John in England and I'm surprised
that the passage was the one that I heard at the last wedding
I went to. And I remember coming here on
Sunday morning still fuming over what I'd heard. And there's absolutely
no way in the world those preachers, that preacher at that wedding
could have said the things he said out of that passage if he
just kept reading the words. He'd have to say, whoops. That
doesn't mean what it says. And people, everyone that I bumped
into after said, oh, what a wonderful message. What a wonderful message.
We heard lots about love. We heard lots about how loving
we are to be to everyone. And if we are really, really
lovely to everyone, then somehow God's love would be revealed
by us loving everyone. And it's really nice to love
everyone because it's really good and warm and fuzzy. And it's
a nice thing to say at weddings. And it blasphemes the Lord Jesus
Christ. It just told horrible lies about
him and his sacrifice. The more closely we know someone,
the more clearly we want them defined. We love him because
he first loved us. Love for him provokes Paul to
write these strong, strong words. It's not another gospel. But
if we, or an angel of heaven, if Paul came back, or Paul and
any of his messengers come back and preach any other gospel unto
you than which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. He's putting himself in that
category, he's putting the people who stood alongside him in that
category, and he had reason to do so. People like Demas worked
alongside Paul and preached alongside Paul, and then at the end of
his days, the end of Paul's days, Demas had left him. And the extraordinary words that
he says in describing him, he said he had loved, all that he'd
ever really loved was this world. Demas having loved this world. If anyone comes back, Even an
angel from heaven. Of course, Paul is just using
strong, strong language to say it doesn't matter what they look
like, these false teachers. They can be dressed as an angel
from heaven. They can look like it, even if
an angel from heaven. None of the angels in heaven
would preach anything other than the true gospel of the Lord Jesus.
They couldn't wait at the birth of the Lord Jesus to come and
proclaim gospel tidings. that if anyone preaches any other
gospel than which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed."
And Paul says it for a second time in verse And as we said
before, so say I now again. If any man preach any other gospel
unto you than that you have received, let him be accursed. He says it a second time. He
says it a second time for emphasis, the Jewish way of emboldening
something. We put exclamation marks on it
and put it in bold letters and things. In those days, in their
writings, they simply repeated it. When something was wanting
to be said with emphatic seriousness, you just repeated it twice. When
the angels want to describe how glorious the holiness of God
is, they use it three times, only time in the scriptures.
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. He quotes, he says
it, repeats it for emphasis, he repeats it to ensure that
no one would think that his first statement was just something
that slipped out, as it were. It's repeated because of the
seriousness. The false teachers go to hell. Those who bring another gospel
go to hell. people we know, preachers we
know of, go to hell. If you turn in your Bibles to
Revelation 22 there's just an interesting description. In verse 12, the last 10 verses
of the Scriptures. He says in verse 12, And behold,
I come quickly, and my reward is with me, to give every man
according as his work shall be. I am the Alpha and the Omega,
I am the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Blessed
are they that do His commandments, that they may have the right
to the tree of life. and may enter in through the
gates into the city." We read about that in John Chapter 10,
didn't we? He is the way in. There is no other way in. He
is the tree of life. For without, outside, are dogs,
sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters,
and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. The ETH endings are showing
a continuous activity. They continue to love a lie and
they continue to make a lie. The scriptures are just full
of warnings, aren't they? 2 Thessalonians 2 talks about the workings of Satan. His coming
is after the workings of Satan with all power, and signs and
lying wonders, and with all deceivableness and unrighteousness in them that
perish, because they have not, they receive not the love of
the truth that they may be saved. And for this cause, verse 11
of chapter 2, and for this cause God shall send them a strong
delusion that they should believe a lie. that they all might be
damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure, the pleasure
of this world, the pleasure of their flesh, the covetousness,
the pride of life and lust. They had pleasure in unrighteousness. The world is pleased. The religious world is pleased
with them. The Gospel The Gospel describes
a person and his work. The Gospel describes the Lord
Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And rather than focusing on the
negative, it's good for us to spend a little time just contemplating
again the Lord Jesus as He is described in this book, to preach
Jesus Christ and Him crucified is absolutely essential for the
well-being of your soul. See, the false teachers are happy
to have your body in church, and they're happy to have your
body doing things for them, and they're happy to have your money.
God's servants have one thing in mind. The glory of the Lord
Jesus I have one meeting in mind that you would know Him, that
you would go from this world into eternity with what He calls
the full assurance of faith, looking unto Him, the author
and perfecter. They want you to see Jesus. Forget
about men. Look to Him. So what is it to
preach? as Paul says in chapter 3, to
have the Lord Jesus evidently set forth before you as crucified. And I just want to look at six
or seven things and then we'll wrap this up. And we can compare
these as we go through Galatians and you can check them out to
see whether you're hearing the truth. To preach the Lord Jesus
Christ is to preach him as our eternal surety, our eternal guarantor,
our covenant head. What's the cross? An afterthought
in the mind of God. I read on another place the other
day that after the fall, then God instituted a way of saving
his people. As if somehow when things got
a little bit out of control, he then comes along with plan
B and he has this rescue plan. What's the cross and afterthought?
Did he contemplate that later? Did he begin to have a new plan
after the fall? Christ again and again in the
Scriptures is portrayed as the Lamb that was slain before the
foundation of the world. To preach Christ crucified is
to preach Him ordained to die in God's covenant of grace from
all eternity. God's children are saved because
of a union with Him before the foundation of the world. We like
to quote those verses out of 1 Timothy, who has saved us and
called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but
according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us
in Christ Jesus before the world began, 1 Timothy 1.9, but is
now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ who
has abolished death and has brought life and immortality to light
through the Gospel. Imagine those great promises
and here are these Galatians being troubled and led astray
from that Jesus. To preach him is to preach the
eternal covenant because of that relationship that goes back to
eternity past. From the beginning, Paul says,
We're bound to give thanks, says Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2, bound
to give thanks always to God, dear brethren, beloved of the
Lord, because God has from the beginning, what beginning? From
the beginning of time, from the beginning of that eternal covenant,
has chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit
and belief of the truth. People are saved by believing
the truth about the Lord Jesus Christ. Hebrews tells us, and
we looked at it last week, a week before, in Hebrews 13.20, we
read of the blood of the eternal covenant, the everlasting covenant
in his blood. that God of peace, that brought
again from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ, the great Shepherd
of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant." Eternal wisdom, eternal sovereignty,
eternal everlasting redeeming mercies and redeeming grace. Paul preached this Jesus Christ
in covenant headship to redeem his people and to redeem them
through sacrifice and as a result of that to raise up a church
for his divine glory, for the glory of the Lord Jesus. What infinite wisdom and what
infinite love contrived that scheme, that covenant that saved
us from before the foundation of the world. The Gospel is a
proclamation of pardon and mercy and peace through the labours
of the Lord Jesus Christ, through His labours and through His death,
and through them alone, a covenant keeping and covenant making and
covenant honouring God is what it is for Him to be the Christ. And Paul, to preach the Gospel
is to set forth Jesus Christ before people as crucified. He died for the sins of us. He died for our sins, the sins
of a particular people according to the Scriptures. According
to the Old Testament Scriptures, the Lord Jesus came with a purpose. He came because of His love and
His relationship with those people. He loved them, He loved them
everlastingly, He loved them and with loving kindness He draws
them to Himself. When He is lifted up He will
draw all people to Himself, He will draw all of His own. The
Scriptures testify of him. The Scriptures he's talking about
there are the Old Testament Scriptures. You search the Scriptures for
in them you think you have life. They are they which testify of
me. Moses wrote of me. So from Genesis
3 to Calvary there is a trail of blood. All of the blood of
all those sacrifices is representative and speaks of the blood of the
Lord Jesus Christ. For Adam and Eve in the garden
to have their shame covered, an animal must die. Their shame is covered by a substitutionary
death. Abel, just outside of the garden,
comes to that first church service recorded in the Scriptures. They
come to a place of worship and Abel brings a blood sacrifice
representing the Lord Jesus and Cain brings the work of his own
hand. All through the rest of the Old
Testament, from Genesis to Calvary, there is just continually a reminder
that blood is to be shed to cut a sin. Blood is to be shed by
a substitute. That's what Passover is about.
That's what the Ark of the Covenant and the Mercy Seat is about.
That's what the tabernacle and the fittings of the tabernacle.
And only when we see the Lord Jesus dying at Calvary Do we
actually see these scriptures having any meaning whatsoever?
Isn't it extraordinary that religion without Christ breeds the most
blind pride? There were those Pharisees and
those priests at that temple every morning and every evening
at nine and three, day after day after day, hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of years. They took a lamb without blemish
and they put their hand on that lamb, and they slit its throat,
and it died in its blood, and its blood was shed. You would
think, wouldn't you, that that would lead to humbling, and yet
the proudest men on the planet We're still proud in the face
of all that. It just shows you that without
sovereign grace, without God moving hearts, religious activities
and religious knowledge just becomes a source of more pride
rather than a humbling thing. To know the Lord Jesus is to
know Him crucified. To know Jesus Christ and Him
crucified is to know all that you need to know. It's all that
you need to know. There is a limitless, a limitless
learning, a limitless source of contemplation for God's people
in Him, and we'll never get to the end of it. But the false
teachers come and they preach Christ as head, but they don't
preach Him as the whole of salvation. They say, it's all very well
that He died, and then they say, but, but you must do something. His death was sufficient. His death was perfectly satisfactory. God is pleased with His sacrifice. So to preach Christ and Him crucified
is to preach His sinless life. This is my beloved Son, said
the Father, in whom I am well pleased. He told the Jews, see
if you can find any sin in me. You've got three years to find
sin in me. You've got Judas who will be
with me for three years. See if you can find any sin in
me. Which of you convinces me of
sin? This Lamb of God was examined
meticulously. He was without sin. If he had
any sin of his own, he couldn't bear my sin. and his sinlessness
makes his death effectual." So the Lord Jesus didn't die as
a martyr, and he didn't die as a reformer, and he didn't die
as an example. The Lord Jesus died as a substitute,
preaching Jesus Christ and Him crucified is identifying who
He is, who Christ is, and He's identified by what He's done. This is the Lamb of God. Behold
the Lamb of God, says John, who takes away the sin of the world. Christ is a representative person. You can read about it in 1 Corinthians
15 and many other places. There was a first Adam, and all
of humanity is represented in him. And there is a second Adam,
and all of his people are represented in him. He came down to do something
for us toward God. See, the biggest problem that
sinners have is the very being of God. That's the problem, isn't
it? God is holy. God demands perfection. To be in His presence you must
be as holy as He is holy. He came to represent us toward
God. His obedience to the law was
toward God. His obedience in His death and
His satisfaction with sin was toward God. His sin offering
was toward God, towards God and as a representative of us. So
we preach His sinless life. We preach His perfect life. We
preach His holy life. He is both God and man. Holy, holy is our Christ. And to preach Christ is to preach
Him as risen, to preach Him as risen and exalted and reigning,
to preach Him as interceding for His own, to preach Him as
returning. For Him to rise from the dead,
He must have died. He cannot perform the work of
the high priest. He cannot offer the blood sacrifice
unless He dies. and has a blood sacrifice to
offer. And these false teachers are saying to the Galatians,
you can offer something of yourself, something that you must do to
show how devoted you are to God. He has and has presented and
continues to present this offering. There has to be atonement. by Christ we have received the
atonement. We have, we have a great high
priest who passed into the heavens, Jesus Christ the righteous. Let
us come boldly before this throne of grace. We have, as God's children,
a right into the courts of heaven because our priest is there and
he proceeds for us. He is to be proclaimed as a mediator
and he has something to mediate, doesn't he? He has a righteousness,
a perfect God-accepted righteousness to plead before God. There is
a need, isn't there? There is a need for us, for someone
to stand before us, someone to cover us, someone to take our
place before God. God in His holiness, us in our
sinfulness, the mediator must have something to plead on our
behalf, the advocate must have something to take into court
on behalf of the guilty sinner, and he does. He has a perfect
righteousness. He has a perfect sin-bearing
death. He's taken our sins away. All
He did was deal with the consequences of my sin, for whatever that
means. It's not good enough. He took
our sins away. He became sin. God made him sin for us. He who knew no sin, that we might
be made, made gloriously by God and kept being made by God, the
very righteousness of God in him. A mediator who pleads. who is returning. He's coming
back to his own. He hasn't left us as orphans. He's interceding for us right
now and he's coming back. He's coming back with his reward.
He has a reward that he's earned. He has a reward, a kingdom to
bring his people into. He died that He might be Lord
of the living and the dead. He's purchased the right to reign. Christ and Him crucified finally
is the motive for all love and obedience. The love of Christ
compels us. The love of Christ constrains
us. We love Him because He first
loved us. See, fear, legal fear, it produces
an obedience, but it's an obedience of resentment. It's an obedience
of self-righteousness. Legal fear produces no holiness
whatsoever. And the promise of rewards produces
a hypocritical obedience, just a show. So much of religion is
just a show in the flesh. God says, give me your heart.
Give me your heart. True love for Christ, because
of His love for us, produces an obedience from the heart.
It's faith. He works faith in His people. They look to Him. They cling
to Him. They rely upon Him. May the Lord cause our hearts
to break as Paul's heart does. I grieve so much over the coldness
of my heart when I read these words of Paul and the deep passion
that he had for the glory of God. I don't know about you,
but sometimes when we become familiar with the glorious doctrines
of the Gospel, the glorious doctrines of the Lord Jesus, it can become
a bit I pray that that doesn't happen. I pray that the Lord
stirs our hearts and causes our hearts to break, causes our hearts
to break with love for our brothers and sisters, causes our hearts
to break when we hear our Saviour's name blasphemed, when we see
Him treated as something, as someone who tried hard and failed. Someone who loves but doesn't
love enough to get those he loves out of hell and into heaven.
Someone who died and tried and didn't actually achieve anything
by his death. Someone who seeks and searches
and somehow can't find and bring his sheep home. I know my sheep. We read it in John 10. What remarkable
promises the children of God have in the Gospel. I give, I
give unto them eternal life. My sheep hear my voice, and I
know them, and they follow me. A stranger they will not follow,
but they will flee from him. for they know not the voice of
strangers. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow
me, and I give a gift of eternal life, and they shall never perish,
neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father which
gave them me is greater than all, and no man is able to pluck
them out of my Father's hand. I and my Father are one." As
we saw last week, to leave grace is to leave all those extraordinary
benefits of the Gospel. To leave grace and to go back
to works is to have nothing but works. We have an amazing Saviour
who's finished His work. He's finished His work on behalf
of His people. It began before the foundation
of the world. It was written and it's signed
and it's sealed and no one can take us. No one can take His
people out of His hand and no one can take them out of His
Father's hand. May God have mercy on us. May
he cause us to be a place where his gospel is proclaimed with
faithfulness. And if it's not, may he close
us down. May he close us down. I'm confident
that he has begun a good work. And he has begun a good work.
We'll see it through until completion, until the day of the Lord Jesus.
These churches in Galatia disappeared probably within a couple of hundred
years. And there were no Christian witness
in that land from 600 when the Muslims came through there until
the 20th century. It's a precious thing to have
the gospel. It comes for a time. and for
a season, and it comes to a particular group of people. May God cause
us to honour His blessings and His Gospel. Let's pray.