As heirs of the efforts of the
founding fathers of our nation, we not only crave, but believe
that we have the right to liberty, to freedom. As the Declaration declares,
We hold these truths to be self-evident. The mighty men, you don't have
to prove them. You don't have to make an argument for them. Anyone who honestly considers
them knows they're true. We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by
their creator, not their government. their creator, with certain unalienable
rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. And by pursuit of happiness,
they didn't mean, they weren't referring to the emotional state
of happiness. Happiness at that time carried
the sense of your condition in life. But liberty. If you have life, you want liberty. We insist on it, don't we? Men and women have laid down
their lives in the pursuit of obtaining liberty. Slaves, and I'm thinking at this
time of the slaves of our nation's past. Some of them craved liberty to
such a degree they were willing to risk brutal beatings and even
death in an attempt to obtain it. In all things, all people want
freedom, don't they? Even though we don't make wise
use of it, we want it. We come into this life wanting
it, wanting absolute freedom. That's why it's a good thing
we have parents, because everything we want to be free to do is not
good for us. And hopefully we have parents
with enough wisdom and fortitude to direct us in a path in which
we can be both free and prosperous. but everyone wants to do what
he wants to do. And yet, when it comes to this
business of religion, men crave bondage. Really. You say, well, what do you mean
by that? Very simply this, and this is the bondage or slavery
that Paul is speaking of when he says, do not let yourselves
be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. He's speaking of trying
to be justified by God based upon something you have done. Now people throw the word legalism
around a lot. And often when people are arguing
about legalism, they're not even talking about the same thing.
That's why it's always good, if you ever enter into a debate
with someone, and it seems like it's going nowhere, say, just
a minute, no, we're debating legalism. What do you mean by
legalism? Well, here's what the scriptures
would say is legalism. Any system that puts you under a burden
of doing something from your own natural self, which will get a return of favor
and blessing from God. Now, there are people whom we
might call legalistic, and it's not as though they believe that
we are saved by our works. It's just sometimes we use that
phrase to describe people who have a stricter standard of conduct
than we do, and seem intent to make others feel uncomfortable
if they don't follow their prescribed conduct. Now, there is such a
thing as proper conduct. But there's not an agreement
among humans, not even among believers, on what constitutes
proper conduct in every situation. But I wouldn't call a person
a legalist simply because he has what I would consider a very
restricted code of conduct, that his conscience is so bound up
Maybe having been bound up by former religion. A religion in
which they were raised that laid on them the burden of the performance
of many duties and responsibilities. And you know, when the Lord saves
someone, that doesn't mean immediately all those things get changed
in their mind. They do understand that salvation
is without works. No believer thinks that he can
earn his salvation. But the conscience is not only
something that God puts there as kind of a preloaded operating
system in the minds of every person, but it's also formed
by the way our parents raised us, by the way our church or
whatever religion we grew up in, what it told us. And as we
grow, our I imagine they could actually show this if they wanted
to, but the parts of our brain that result in discipline and things
like that, that is, that direct our conduct, they are wired according
to what we've been taught. And when God saves a man, well,
part of that saving is giving him spiritual life, a life he
did not have. And that life is without flaw,
it's perfect, it came from God. It's spirit, but it dwells within
the same flesh. The salvation of God, the salvation
God performs while we are yet in this world, those works of
salvation, they do not necessarily do anything to what the scriptures
refer to as the flesh. If a person is saved by the grace
of God, the things that tempted him before will likely continue
to tempt him and trouble him and vex him. The sins that characterized
his life before will still hang on. And not only this, whenever
he finds himself in what we might call notable sin or in some sin
that he has struggled to overcome but hasn't been able to, he finds
himself in that, the instant knee-jerk reaction will be to
think that by such sin we have brought ourselves into a state
of condemnation once again. Now, you don't have to really
raise your hand, but in your heart, raise your hand if you
know what that means. I do. I made a profession of
faith when I was seven years old. I believed the truth as
much as I understood it at that time, and called on God to save
me, and I have no reason to believe that he didn't. And if indeed
that was the time when God visited me with his grace, than I have
been in a state of grace for over 60 years. And I still wrestle with condemning
guilt. I still find this natural reaction
that when I'm brought into a sense of the sinfulness of what I do,
my first thought What can I do to make up for that? My first thought, okay, I've
got to redouble my efforts. My first thought, God might not
send me to hell for that, but he's going to do something. Bondage is as natural to us as
breathing. We were born in a state of bondage
to sin. Bondage to the law, you can call
it the same thing. Because he who is in bondage
to the law is in bondage to sin. Seeing that no man can keep the
law, the law therefore reveals him his sin and brings him under
the condemnation of death. We were born in that condition.
It's as natural to the fleshly way of thinking as anything can
be. I said we love liberty, but freedom, spiritual freedom,
scares us to death. Let me show you an example. And
I'm not trying to make a political argument here. This is just something
going on in our society, an argument going on, and maybe you can identify
with it. There is a constant effort on the part of many to
limit what we call our Second Amendment rights, the right to
keep and bear arms. And there is at least, as many
people, very protective of that right. Now, some people are afraid of
that freedom because they are afraid of, well, if people, you
know, if you have guns and stuff, that gives you a certain amount
of power. And they're not willing to trust people with that amount
of power, don't know what they'll do with it. And yet, those who
are in favor of that particular freedom, they will say, just
a minute, It's true that other people may make ill use of it,
but I'm not afraid of that liberty for me because I know I won't
do anything wrong with it. I'm not a murderer. I'm not going
to kill anybody with it unless it's in self-defense. I'll hunt
with it, shoot at targets and things like that, but I trust me with a firearm. And so should the rest of society,
trust me, and not try to take away that right. So that's why
people, for the most part, aren't afraid of Second Amendment rights.
Most people aren't going to do anything bad with it. But when
it comes to spiritual things, we are scared to death of freedom. Because we'll fear we'll use
it for the wrong reason or to the wrong purpose. Why? If you
tell people they're free, they're going to go out and sin all they
want to. You know what? People are already
doing that. Natural man cannot bear the freedom
of the gospel because he cannot trust himself to behave. He says, if you set me free,
he doesn't say this out loud. He'll say it about other people,
but what he fears is about himself. If I were truly set free, oh,
what I would do. I need the rules. I need the scowling look from
religious leaders that cause me to wither inside and bow to
their will. Because if I don't have that,
I'll run wild. Brother Scott Richardson. preached
a message about, I don't know if the whole message was about
this, but he made the point of the believer's freedom from the
law of Sinai. And after he was done and he
walked out into the parking lot, a man ran up to him and he said,
he might have called him Reverend Richardson, he'd call him that
if he didn't know him. Maybe he called him Brother Scott,
I don't know what he called him, but he said preacher, we'll just say
preacher, preacher. I just gotta have that law. And
Scott, who was hillbilly wise, he looked at him and said, I
have it. And you can. If you are afraid to be free,
you are free to have the law. But if you are under the law,
you are under a curse. For it is written, cursed is
everyone who does not continue in every point of the law to
do it. Not to admire it, not to try
to do it, not to give it your best effort, to do it perfectly,
continuously, all the time. And that's bondage. People are afraid of spiritual
freedom. And maybe they have cause to
be. Maybe if they were set free in
their present state, they would run wild. But the believer has no reason
to fear the liberty given to him in Christ Jesus. Yet because he is still in the
flesh, when some truly legalistic preacher
shows up and preaches a message of condemnation, they feel it. and their natural sense of pride.
See, pride keeps us in bondage. We all like to be able to pat
ourselves on the back. And if you want to, you know,
look good in religion, then there's things you've got to do. There's
laws that you must follow, depending on which religion you're in.
But man is naturally proud. And therefore, there's an attraction
to legalistic religion because it will give him a reason to
brag about himself, just like that Pharisee who prayed within
himself, Father, I thank you that I'm not like other men. And he ran off a list of things
he did do and things he didn't do, and then ended with, I'm
certainly not like this tax collector over here. He loved the bondage
because if you are in slavery, now you think of this and you
can compare it to the American slavery, not all slaves were
alike. There were slaves that the master
liked and approved of. There were slaves they didn't
like and didn't approve of. There were slaves who were given
the nastiest jobs. There were slaves that worked
in the house. and had a relatively easy job.
And if you looked at them, you would find that the ones that
were submissive and obedient probably looked healthier. You
found someone that was disobedient, there would be scars from whippings
on his back. All the signs of the master's
disfavor would be there. And the one who had the master's
favor could go around and say, I'm better than that one. Here's the problem. all you are
is a better slave. You haven't gone from being a
slave to being free. If you do absolutely everything
the Master tells you to do, all you've done is become a perfect
slave. You're not free. But religion, religion as formed
by man, as understood by natural man, will always come up as a
series of rules and regulations to follow, some of them based
upon commandments that God has given, but they'll try to make
them even more severe, try to add corollaries and addendums
and all that to them, until finally you feel so wrapped up you dare
not move, lest you step out of line. And yet, if you come to a person
who has not been born again by the Spirit of God and say, do
you want that? Or would you like the freedom
experienced by a freeborn son in the household? They'll take
the bondage every time. Now, they wouldn't take it if
you asked it like that. But you watch what they do. Notice
here, he does not say, stand firm then. And it's a hard way to word this. He says,
don't let yourselves be burdened. In other words, the idea is that
these people were allowing this enslavement to happen. Why would
someone allow anything like that? What if someone came to you? You're at your house. You own
your house. You got your own household. You're
freeborn. And they come up and say, I just
bought you. You belong to me. Put these on
and give you some shackles. What are you going to do? You're
going to say, well, I don't know who you paid, but whoever you
paid didn't own me, so you didn't buy me. I'm free. And you're not going to put chains
on me. And if they try to, there's going to be a fight, isn't there?
These Judaizers that came into the Gentile church at Galatia
saying, in order to be saved, you must be circumcised. They were coming in with a set
of shackles. They were coming in with chains.
And what did the people do? OK. Don't let yourselves be shackled
again. Don't let yourselves be burdened
again. This scripture starts out with a very obvious statement. In fact, I almost called this
sermon Mr. Obvious. It is for freedom that Christ
has set us free. And I want to go, well, duh. For what else would you want?
Or for what else would you set someone free? And yet so foolish
are we in our flesh that we'll say, yes, Christ has set us free. You got any handcuffs? Those who have been set free
by Christ, it was so that they would live free. So that they
would never again submit to the whip, to the chain, to the command
of the taskmaster. It is for freedom that Christ
has set you free. Stand firm. I've mentioned to you a couple
of times that a fellow has sent me some emails rebuking me that
I don't, in his estimation, preach enough about what Christians
ought to do. Are you a believer? You pretty
well know what you're supposed to do. I'm not saying believers don't
need any instruction on that, and I do give some, but you don't
have to wag your finger in the face of a believer. You don't
have to hold a whip in your hand. You don't have to scare him or
threaten him. Why? Because anything that a believer's
supposed to do In his heart of hearts, that's exactly what a
believer wants to do. And his sins are the result of
this lingering flesh, which Paul called this body of death. It
clings to him and he can't get free of it. It is for freedom. Therefore,
I have realized this in the years that I've been preaching. It
is much more difficult and requires much more exhortation and preaching,
this subject of standing firm in freedom. Much more preaching
needs to focus on that and really not a whole lot on conduct. We read from John chapter 8,
it says, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.
He went on to say, if the Son shall set you free, you are free
indeed. And if you have been set free
by Christ, you are free. And you know something? You don't
have to be afraid of that. Now, you might say, but I'm just
afraid if I don't have those rules or if I don't have a preacher
that's constantly on my case about how I behave, I'm afraid
I'm going to do something wrong. Can I tell you something so that
you can get over your fear about whether you'll do something wrong?
You will. I kind of laugh, I know sin's
not a thing to laugh at, but it's laughable to me that people
think that somehow or another they're going to be able to get
into a state where they don't do anything wrong. Doing wrong
is what we were born doing. Doing wrong is what we did all
up until the time God made Christ known to us and we trusted on
Him and called on His name. And this natural part of us is
still doing wrong. And I don't mean that we shouldn't
resist. I don't mean that it doesn't matter if we don't resist.
I'm just saying this, there's no use you getting your mind
all bound up in this matter of your conduct. Because you think
that if you try hard enough, and are chained with tight enough
chains and lashed with sufficiently painful lashes, that somehow or another you'll
get to a condition where you won't sin. It's not going to
happen until you're done with this, this flesh that we were
born with. Paul said, oh, wretched man that
I am. I love that he used the present
tense. He didn't say, oh, wretched man that I was. As a believer,
even an apostle of Jesus Christ, he said, oh, wretched man that
I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death? And so even
Paul, who did give exhortations about how we ought to live, to
live honestly, to live compassionately and mercifully and to abstain
from various things, various sins. He said all that. And yet he testified in his own
experience. that he was not able to deliver
himself from any of those sins. He was looking for a deliverer. Who will deliver me? And I'll
tell you right now, child of God, there's a part of you that
hates and despises sin and it brings you to tears. It may even
stir up your conscience and make you wonder whether you're a child
of God at all or if God's going to disown you. But know this, where sin did
abound, grace did much more abound. Know this, that your experience
of wrestling with sin and losing is the common experience of all
of God's people, even the Apostle Paul. And while we are not to
cease striving to do what is right, We do so. And as Brother Henry Mahan used
to say, hang on to your pew, we're about to jump a creek. Strive. And in the midst of your failing,
in your striving, know this, you're free. Your sin will not bring you back
into bondage. And don't let anyone make you
think that it has. If the Son has set you free,
you're free. If Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
has set you free, you're free, and no person, no angel, no demon,
not the devil himself, can bind you in chains again. You're free indeed. Don't let yourselves be burdened
again by this yoke of slavery that makes you feel that your
sin has brought you in a state of condemnation once again. And
Paul shows how easily that can be done. Now, we know this. If a person is truly saved by
the grace of God, he's never unsaved. However, if someone
says, I've been saved, we'll take their word for it, but we
all also know this, only time will tell if that's the truth. So Paul says, mark my words,
I, Paul. tell you that if you let yourselves
be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. Now
he's not speaking there of merely the act of being circumcised,
because later on he says neither circumcision nor uncircumcision
means anything. It has no significance. The reason
he used circumcision here is because that was the point that
some professed Jewish Christians were bringing into the Church
of Galatia, saying to them, you must be circumcised in order
to be saved. And he says, okay, if you let
yourself be circumcised, believing what those guys just said, believing
that it's helping you on your way to heaven, I tell you this,
Christ is of no use to you at all. Imagine that. He didn't say, and you'll notice
Paul here, he told us to stand firm. Notice how firm he's standing
here. A ritual, a ritual the Jews have
been practicing as far back as Abraham. Performed, I believe, at eight
days old for every boy born in to a Jewish household. And when
the gospel went out, remember the gospel started in the Jewish
nation, and the first converts were Jews, and so some of these
converts to Christianity, it found out they weren't converts
to Christ, they were just converts to Christianity, and they dragged
their Judaism with it, and they said, well, and this is what
they said to the Gentiles, yes, salvation's by grace, but you
know, we're God's favored people, and before you can become Christian,
you kind of got to become a Jew first. And that was done through the
ritual of circumcision. Oh, how artful are the deceptive
arguments of the devil. Doesn't that make perfect sense?
For all those centuries, God had spoken pretty much only to
Jews, and now the gospel goes out from the Jewish nation, and
some Jews, full of their own pride and everything, go out
and say, yes, you Gentiles can be saved, but you first gotta
take that step of becoming a Jew, at least outwardly, and then
you can be saved by grace. And Paul says, if you do that,
if you let them talk you into that, That didn't make Christ
accessible and useful to you. It made Christ utterly useless
to you. And why is that? He said, because
if you are circumcised, thinking that by performing that, by being
obedient to that particular ritual, that you have gained favor with
God, he says, if you do that, you've got the whole law on your
back. It's all you. And you can put anything in there,
in place of circumcision, it still works. If you be baptized,
thinking it by your baptism, you have gained a leg up on heaven.
I tell you, Christ profits you nothing. If you live a very strict and
rigorous moral life and think that God is more pleased with
you than your neighbor who doesn't have such a rigorously moral
life. Christ profits you nothing. You
see, in this business of grace, the Lord Jesus Christ is going
to sing a solo or he's not going to sing at all. Salvation is
going to be all together by him or all together by you, but there's
not going to be a joint effort between you and Christ. It's
not going to happen. that's why the greatest danger
to professed believers is not grievous falls into sin. I'm not saying that's a nothing,
I'm just saying that David, look what he did. Took a man's wife
and took his life. That's horrible. If we had been,
if someone say in our congregation did that, we probably think,
well that guy's lost. David wasn't lost. He did not lose the least bit
of the favor of God. God disciplined him as any father
would discipline an erring child. He disciplined David for other
things too. But you know where David is right
now? He's in the presence of God, faultless and full of joy. Not even his adultery and murder
was able to bring him into the slightest condemnation. It didn't
even get him one of the outer rings of mansions. David was in Christ, and Christ
is fully accepted, and everyone in him is fully accepted. But
he who is in Christ has abandoned all hope in himself. That's why
he says, if you're going to put some hope in what you do, Christ
is not going to be any use to you. You are under the responsibility
to the whole law. And notice this, verse 4, you
who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated
from Christ. It's interesting that he takes
a description of the Gentiles he used in Ephesians. aliens to the commonwealth of
Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, without Christ. And he says anyone who tries
to be justified by law, whether by keeping the whole law or just
keeping a tiny bit of it or something like it, if you try to gain God's
judgment of not guilty by your own works, you are cut off from
Christ. Now friends, I don't want you
to steal, I don't want you to murder, I don't want you to commit
adultery, I don't want you to lie, I don't want me to do those
things. But none of those things are
half so dangerous, not even one-tenth so dangerous to your soul, as
trying to be good in order to earn a blessing from God. Stand firm. if you don't stand
firm in that liberty. Say, how do we do that? Well,
he says over here, you've been alienated from Christ. This is
verse four. You have fallen away from grace. It's funny, you know,
somebody gets caught up in some really scandalous sin. They go,
ooh, he's fallen from grace. That's not how you fall from
grace. You fall from grace by trying to be good in order to
obtain grace. That's how you fall from grace. But notice what Paul says about
the believer in righteousness. By faith we eagerly await through
the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. Don't you hate what you do, child
of God? Don't you want to be like Christ? Don't you wish you could love
like you ought to love? You wish you could worship God
as he deserves to be worshiped. You wish you could love your
neighbor as yourself. Oh, all those things you would
love to do, but you also know that you don't do them anywhere
near perfectly. You long to be like the Lord
Jesus Christ. If Christ is in you, you want
that. but you wait for it. While you try to behave the best
you can, you're not pretending that you are obtaining a righteousness
by your works. You're waiting for righteousness. A righteousness that we've had
one charge to our account already. We've already had God declare
us not guilty. And I tell you right now, if
you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, if they opened
up the books in heaven with a record of every person's conduct, you
would find your page full of righteousness. And you'd go,
what? I don't remember doing that. Well, you didn't. The Lord
Jesus did. But his record got charged to
you, got credited to you. We've got that. But you know
what? There's more. We aren't going to be as we are
forever. A time will come when not only
will we be saved from the penalty of sin, we will be utterly saved
from the presence of sin. Never to be tempted again. To
be untemptable. You know, Adam, he hadn't sinned,
but he could be tempted. We won't be. We'll be like the Lord Jesus
Christ. And that's not something we'll
ever achieve here. And it's not something that's
going to be given to us because we tried to achieve it here.
It says we are predestined to be conformed to his image. So we wait for it. And while we're waiting, we say,
oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me? Paul went on
to say, I thank God through Jesus Christ. That's who's going to
deliver me. I love the freedom of the gospel. Some people think that means
you're free to go out and sin all you want. I'll tell you this,
and I believe this is true, and I heard this from a missionary
in Mexico, a fellow named Walter Groover. A man confronted him
about his lesson he had taught about the believer's freedom.
And he said to Walter, he said, if I believe that, I'd sin all
I want. Walter said, I already sin more
than I want. Yep, you can set a believer free.
Will he sin? Yes. It's written in us. But here's
something, you don't need an external restraint on him. He
has an internal restraint. And therefore he lives in this
world as a freeborn child of God. And if you're that, don't
let anyone make you a slave. And if you are not that, I realize
you cannot become a child of God by your own works or by your
own will. Yet there is this promise, and
others like to it, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you
will be saved. That's true. It isn't straighten
out your life and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, nor is
it believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and straighten out your
life and you'll be saved. It's believe on the Lord Jesus
Christ, you will be saved. That's pretty simple, isn't it? Well, I actually have a lot more
that I planned on saying. I could go on and on, but before
long you all are going to get up and leave on your own without
singing the last hymn. Oh, listen to me. when you hear
the lash of the whip, run. If the message that someone is
preaching puts you under bondage, run. You say run where? To Christ, because He can set
you free. Yea, if you run to Him, He will
set you free. Well, the Lord add his blessing
to his word.