Galatians chapter 3, I'm going
to review from verse 17 through verse 21, before we get into
chapter 3, in order for you to connect the context at the outset. Let's pray. Gracious Heavenly Father, we
know that we can only be called Yours, only accepted by You,
only favored and blessed by You, through the Lord Jesus Christ
our Savior and our God, the One mediator between God and men,
the One who gave Himself for our sins. And Lord, we pray that
by Your Spirit You would enable us to understand and live upon
Him. We would hear of You from Him. And help us, Lord. Help us in
the weakness of our flesh, our sinful flesh. Help our unbelief. We pray, Lord, that you'd give
us this grace of faith in Him. Write it upon our hearts, what
the Lord Jesus Christ has done, what He means to us, and what
He means to you, so we would trust Him, even as you have received
Him for us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
In verse 17 of Galatians chapter 2, it reads, In other words,
if we mix works with grace, we sin. Christ is not to be blamed
for our sin. Our sin is all of our fault. And that sin would be the sin
of mixing works with grace. We're justified by Christ alone.
And then verse 18 says, "...for if I build again the things which
I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor." In other words, if I have abandoned
my own personal obedience to God's law, for my salvation,
trusting what I can do, to trust Christ alone. But then I try
to rebuild what I had forsaken and begin to trust again in something
about me, or something I'm expecting to become, or something that
has to come from me. Then I make myself a transgressor.
Verse 19, For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might
live to God, So, I'm dead to the law by the law itself. The
law requires that sinners die. All who disobey the law must
die. I disobey. I disobey. I must die. But I cannot die and live. I
cannot die in satisfaction to the law and live to God. That
can only happen one way, if I die with the Lord Jesus Christ. So,
the next verse says, For I am crucified with Christ. I have
a union with Christ that God made. He joined Him to me and
me to Him in His eternal decrees. And then at the cross, I was
with Him there in His actions. In all that He did and said,
God looked upon Him and received me for His sake. I'm crucified
with Christ. I died to sin, I died to the
law. Nevertheless, I live." Why? Because Christ lives. Yet, not
I. It's not life that comes from
me, but Christ who lives in me. And the life which I now live
in this flesh, in this body, I live by the faith of the Son
of God who loved me and gave himself for me. What a powerful
text of scripture. And now in verse 21 he says,
"...I do not frustrate the grace of God, To frustrate the grace
of God would be to try to mix my part with Christ's work, something
I can do. That's idolatry. He says, I do
not frustrate the grace of God, for if righteousness come by
the law, my personal obedience to God's requirements, then Christ
is dead in vain. That's a monumental consequence
of trusting my own works. If God could receive me for something
I do, something I am, then Christ's death was a waste. God mistakenly
killed His Son and judged His Son. That couldn't happen. To
think such a thought, of course, would be the most horrible and
cruel thing we could ever think against God and His treatment
of His Son. That couldn't happen. Therefore,
what's the conclusion? Righteousness does come by the
death of Christ. You see the conclusion here?
If it doesn't come by me, if Christ would die in vain, if
it didn't come by Him, therefore it came by Him, He can't fail. And that's the glory of this
text of Scripture here. It's a wonderful thing, even
though it's said in the most fearsome terms, that if we trust
in ourselves for something, then we make the death of Christ empty
and of no profit. Now, I want you to imagine what
it would be like if your own father, or someone that you highly
respect, called you foolish. Someone that you trusted, someone
you loved, and you trusted that they loved you. And they said,
you're foolish. And if they said this to you,
they called you foolish, and they asked you, what's the matter
with you? Has someone tricked you by taking
advantage of your pride and foolishness? trying to heap undeserved praise
upon you so that you would believe their lie? Are you living in
a dream? Are you living under the spell
of a deceiver? Of course, such a stinging rebuke
would greatly trouble you, wouldn't it? It would make you shrink
in shame. And it would make you wonder, what happened? What happened?
The one I trusted and loved the most has suddenly rebuked me
with a stinging rebuke. You foolish! Foolish, why have
you done this? Why have you left Him who called
you into the grace of Christ? You've believed a lie. And that's
what Paul is doing here in the first verse of Galatians chapter
3. He writes this, Oh foolish Galatians! And you have to hear
this as if they were hearing it. Here, this was the Apostle
writing to them this beautiful letter. And he rebukes them with
the strongest words possible. Oh foolish Galatians, who hath
bewitched you? It's as if you're under a spell
of a deceiver. Bewitched you, tricking you by
your own sinful pride and your ignorance. that you should not
obey the truth." And what is it to obey the truth? It's to
believe Christ, only, for all my salvation. It's to look to
Him alone. And then he goes on, and he gives
several reasons here that he issues this stinging rebuke to
them, because they were to be blamed. The Galatians here, in
chapter 3, the Galatians were at fault. They had committed
a horrible sin. They had done foolishly. And
so Paul blames them. He lays the blame at their door. He's going to lay it at the door
of the Judaizers, but he first starts with them. He says, the
Galatians were to be blamed. They disobeyed the gospel by
believing that they must keep the law of Moses to be justified.
That was their fault. They had heard the gospel, hadn't
they? They had. And they had believed it. And
they had forsaken their confidence in themselves, but as Gentiles,
they hadn't grown up on the Law, and they didn't recognize the
danger of the Law. They didn't know the purpose
of the Law. They knew they were sinners. They knew that Christ
had accomplished salvation for His people, and obtained it,
and they trusted Him for it. And yet they had begun to trust
in their works again. They had begun to trust in their
works because the Judaizers came in and introduced the Law of
Moses. These are God's requirements.
This is the way we have become acceptable and pleasing to God. You need to do this or you can't
be saved. And so they began to be diverted away from Christ
alone. They began to think that they
could add to God's masterpiece of salvation with their brush
of their works. But they couldn't. And there
are several reasons why they were to be blamed. And they're
listed here in the book of Galatians. They were given God's Holy Spirit.
And yet they believed, somehow, that they could be made perfect
by their own works. Everything they had received
was by Christ's work alone, but they were tricked and led astray
from believing that Christ is all. They began to keep the law,
to think they could keep it, and that their law-keeping could
justify them or sanctify them before God. So their error was
great, and their foolishness was profound, and Paul was right
to blame them for this. And we can learn a lesson from
them. We are to think through what the gospel means. Think
about the Galatians. They didn't have recorded sermons
to listen to every day like we do. They didn't have the scriptures
written, or perhaps they did, but it was probably difficult
for them to obtain them. They didn't have a lot of things,
but they had heard from Paul. Paul, who had seen Christ and
had been given this revelation of the Gospel, and had been given
God's Spirit to powerfully proclaim the Gospel to them. So powerfully
that Paul says, "...before whose eyes Jesus Christ has been evidently
set forth, crucified among you." Paul preached the Gospel so clearly
that as the Galatians heard it, it was as if they saw Not only
the crucifixion, but the meaning of it. And so, the Galatians
were to be blamed for several reasons. Think about what they
had learned from Paul himself in the first two chapters. Paul
had been given the Gospel by Jesus Christ directly. He himself
had gone through persecution. He had endured almost alone,
remember? It was 14 years before he went
back up to Jerusalem, when he came back to Damascus from Arabia. So, Paul was basically, in a
lot of ways, a loner as an apostle. The other apostles were in Jerusalem
and he hardly ever saw them. Only that one time with Peter
and James, the Lord's brother. And Paul faced the opposition
of the Jews as he preached in the synagogues. Wherever he went,
they were there. As he brought the gospel to the Galatians,
the Galatians saw this in Paul. And so they saw all this in Paul. And they saw that when Paul did
go up to Jerusalem, that 14 year period afterward, that when he
took Titus, he didn't submit to the pressure of the Judaizers. And the Apostles were there.
You would think that with the Apostles he would feel intimidated. But he wasn't intimidated, because
the Apostles were just men. He had the gospel of Jesus Christ
and he held to that and he himself had to correct Peter and Barnabas
and all who followed Peter. He stood alone and the Galatians
could see this in Paul. And so they were to be blamed
because they had not followed the one who brought the gospel
to them. They had some troubles but nothing like this. When the
Judaizers came in they were quick to follow them instead of remembering
how they were saved. And so this was one reason they
were to be blamed, because they had missed the example Paul had
set. And that's a big thing. And the
second thing he says here, he says, O foolish Galatians, who
hath bewitched you that you should not obey the truth, before whose
eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth crucified among you? Now, as I said, they didn't have
sermons to listen to every day, but what they heard was as clear
and pure of a presentation of the gospel that anyone on earth
has ever heard. They heard the meaning of the
gospel. And what is that meaning? What is the meaning of the gospel?
Well, that's the whole subject of our sermon. Every week is
what Christ has done, isn't it? It's who Christ is. Who He is
to God for us. And who He is from God to us.
And what He's done for us in His life, in His death, and by
His blood, in His obedience. It's all that God has seen in
Him and received from Him for us. And how He is all of our
salvation. And this is God's eternal will
for His people. And He saves them to the uttermost
by His own work. And it's all of grace. The gospel
is all about the Lord Jesus Christ and His sin atoning death. And
what He accomplished for us by that. And they had seen it very
clearly. They had understood the scriptures.
They had understood the revelation God gave to Paul. And it was
that clear setting forth of Christ in the doctrine. And how it fit
together with scripture. And how it unfolded in history.
And it was a persuasive. God used that. He wrote it upon
their heart. The Spirit of God dwelt with
them. And so he says this in the next verse. He says, this
only would I learn of you. You've seen Christ crucified
among you. You've had it explained what
it means and what God thinks about it and how He is all of
your salvation. How could you be so foolish to
disobey this truth in believing Christ and turning away from
Him? And so in verse 2 he said, he
asked them a question. First he denounces their foolishness,
and then he asks them a question. It's like when your dad would
call you into the room. What did you do, you foolish boy? And then he would ask you, now
why did you do that? Here he asks them, this only
would I learn of you. Verse 2, received you the Spirit
by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? By the
works of the law or by the hearing of faith? Did you receive the
Spirit of God? when you heard the works of the
law preached? Did you receive the Spirit of
God because you did something? Was there something about you
that God saw and said, there's one, I need to give him my spirit?
Of course not. There was every reason in you
why God wouldn't save you. But God found reason in himself
and because Christ gave himself for our sins and ascended to
heaven and sat down on his father's right hand, he sent forth his
spirit. Having redeemed us, he sent his spirit and gave him
to us. That's the way you receive the
spirit of God. He says, did you receive the Spirit of God by
the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? The hearing
of faith. Now, that's a phrase we want
to understand. The hearing of faith. You heard
and you believed. That's the hearing of faith.
What does it mean, the hearing of faith? Because it came to
them. This gospel came to them. They heard it and they believed
it. And in that hearing of faith, God gave them His Spirit. and
it was all of grace. They were objects of God's saving
grace, and He reminds them this. And so, we want to think for
just a moment about what is this hearing of faith. First of all,
the faith, when the Bible speaks of the faith of the gospel, is
speaking about the truth of the gospel, about what the teaching
of the gospel, about the subject of the gospel, which is the Lord
Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And we believe the truth of Christ
and Him crucified. That's the faith God gives to
us. So when it pleased God, in our own experience, you who believe
on the Lord Jesus, when it pleased God, we heard. We heard. We heard of Christ. Didn't we? We heard of His accomplishments
and His work on the cross. And we received what we heard
as all of our salvation. Isn't this the way you heard
the gospel? You heard about the Lord Jesus. You heard that God
sent His Son. He became a man, He took our
nature, He bore our sins. And He bore our sins in His own
body up to the tree. And He bore the curse of our
sins in His own body. And He took away our sins from
us and made satisfaction to God for the sins we committed. He
removed our offense in God and reconciled us to God by His own
death. We heard about that. We heard
how He washed us of our sins by His own blood. And we heard
this, and we knew that it was for God's people, and yet we
found that it was for sinners. And we ventured upon Him. God
gave us this... He compelled us. We knew that
we were nothing, and we learned of this, and we saw that Christ
had removed the sins of sinners, and we came to trust in Him.
And it was because it was so clearly declared to us. When
He had by Himself purged our sins, He sat down. And we saw
He did it. He did it by Himself. And it's
accomplished. He sat down. And He's exalted
and now reigns because it's a work He finished before I was born.
And now I'm trusting Him for all of that. He said, look unto
Me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth. And so I looked.
What else was I to do? This hearing of the truth of
the gospel came to us. And so we heard of his accomplishments,
we heard of his work, and we must continue to hear in the
same way, this hearing of faith. It's by hearing the gospel of
Christ that faith was first given to us, wasn't it? But it is also
by hearing the gospel of Christ that our faith is increased.
Because faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.
Faith, which is our believing Christ, comes by that hearing.
Hearing of Christ. In Romans chapter 10, he shows
us this. Look at Romans chapter 10. In
Romans 10 and verse 16, he says, But they have not all obeyed
the gospel, not all of Israel, not all who heard. They have
not all obeyed the gospel. Remember the Galatians, why have
you not obeyed the truth? For Isaiah said, Lord, who hath
believed our report? What is the gospel? It's God's
report. And where is that report given
to us? Well, Isaiah gave it. He said, Lord, who hath believed
our report? It's Isaiah 53. And what is Isaiah
53 about? It's about the suffering of the
Lord Jesus Christ. He was wounded for our transgressions.
He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement, the beating
for our sins, was laid upon Him. And with His stripes, we were
healed. And God accepted him and was
satisfied. Isaiah 53, read it in your own
time. That's the report. That's the
gospel. They have not all obeyed the
Gospel. They have not all believed on
the Lord Jesus Christ to save them by His offering of Himself
to God for our sins. And then he says, so then, faith
comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, the report. God sent His report, His Word,
and that Word is about the Lord Jesus Christ and His sin-atoning
death. That's how we're justified. We
heard What Christ had done. We believed it. It happened.
God did it. We were the objects of the operation
of the Spirit of God. He birthed us. Look at John chapter
3. This is the message of John chapter
3. Nicodemus was perplexed. How
is a man to see and enter the kingdom of God if he can't enter
without being born again? And Jesus said, this is the operation
of the Spirit of God, the sovereign operation. In verse 8, the wind
blows where it pleases, or where it listeth, and thou hearest
the sound thereof, and cannot tell whence it cometh, and whither
it goeth, so is every one that is born of the Spirit. This is
God's work. You don't make it happen. God does this. But how,
Nicodemus said, how can these things be? Verse 9, and Jesus
said, Are you a master of Israel and knowest not these things?
Are you kidding? You don't understand the very
first things about God's saving grace and the operation of His
Spirit in the hearts of sinners? Verily, verily, I say to you,
we speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen, and
you receive not our witness. If I have told you earthly things
and you believe not, how shall you believe if I tell you of
heavenly things? And then he tells him of heavenly
things. No man has ascended up to heaven but he that came down
from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven. The mediator. It's all about the mediator.
He's the one who ascended, but first he had to descend in humiliation
before he could ascend in triumph and glory. And he took his place
at the right hand of God. He seated in heaven because of
the finished work of the mediator. Verse 14. For as Moses lifted
up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be
lifted up. The one who came from heaven
had to be cursed as the serpent was cursed in the wilderness.
And God lifted him up, a serpent who had bitten the people that
whosoever believeth, just like they looked. whosoever believeth
in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." In other
words, the operation of the Spirit of God in us causes us to look
to Christ and Him crucified for everything in our salvation.
Now that's the hearing of faith. Nicodemus heard Christ speak
of His own crucifixion and His own accomplishments in His sin-atoning
death. And that's the message of the
gospel. And this is what the Galatians heard. And so Paul
asked them, did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law
or by the hearing of faith? In verse 20 of Galatians chapter
2, it's laid out there. He says, I live by the faith
of the Son of God. Who's that? That's the Lord Jesus.
I live by the faith of the Son of God. It's about Christ. who
loved me and gave himself for me. It's about his work, why
he did it. He loved me and gave himself for me. I believe that.
I believe that by the work of the Spirit of God. It was his
grace that gave me this persuasion. And this is the life of the believer.
This is why Paul set forth Christ before the Galatians so evidently. He told them in verse 1, He's
been set forth before you evidently crucified. And He told the Corinthians,
I determine not to know anything save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
And some people might say, well, if all you preach is Christ and
Him crucified, you're not preaching the whole counsel of God. I've
had people tell me that. But to think this is to fail
to see the boundless entirety of God's counsel is the Lord
Jesus Christ and Him crucified. He is the wisdom of God, isn't
He? Colossians 2, 3. In Him are hid all the treasures
of wisdom and knowledge. To us who believe, in 1 Corinthians
1, 24, He is the wisdom and the power of God. The fullness of
the Godhead dwells in Him bodily. Colossians 2, 9. And Jesus said,
if you've seen Me, you have seen the Father. We're complete in
Him. Therefore, preaching the gospel
of Christ is to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ. We seek to
know Him. We seek to know and set forth
the breadth and length and depth and height of the love of Christ,
which passes understanding. How could we say, how could anyone
say, that preaching Christ and Him crucified limits the message? It's an infinitely broad message,
isn't it? He's the brightness of God's
glory. He is the express image of His
person. So we don't lose or miss anything
when we seek to know Him, do we? In His sin-atoning death.
In fact, the opposite is true. The Galatians had done that.
If they sought God outside of Christ by their works, or if
we seek to know God in some speculative way, a way that merely enlarges
our head, then we have our reward because we puff ourselves up
in the eyes of others. If what we do gives honor to
us among men, then we should know that we have entirely missed
the point. To promote our own knowledge or understanding of
spiritual things is to seek recognition from men. And when we thus gain
man's empty praise, we have the full extent of our reward. That's
it. No, it's not seeking intellectual
command over spiritual things. as those who have gained some
kind of a PhD in theology. I'm not discounting the study
of scripture. Not in any way. But there's this
tendency in the proud heart of man to do what we do for the
praise of man. And that is wrong. That's a speculative
knowledge that doesn't get us anywhere. But if we seek Christ,
if we seek to know Him, and to be found in Him, and to worship
God by Him, and declare Him, and to seek His glory, and not
our own, then we have been given to do so by God's grace. That's the message of John 3.
If you believe Christ and Him crucified, God did that. You
didn't do that yourself. You can't produce this. God's
Spirit blows upon us like the wind and operates according to
His sovereign power. Did God give you His Spirit because
you did something? Did He give His Holy Spirit to
you because you were obedient? Or because you did what was required? Because you somehow kept the
law? Or did God preach the gospel
to you through his servant with convincing grace, so that you
saw that your sins were taken by Christ and answered by him
to God in full satisfaction, and that he put them away and
washed you from your sins, and then he sat down? And then you
said in your heart, when you were convinced of this, persuaded
this is the truth of God, when you heard it, you said, it's
mine. In your heart you said it. It
happened in a moment of time. You weren't thinking about what
you would do. You weren't thinking about how
you're going to react. You just said, this is my only
hope. Christ has done it all. And you
rested your case entirely upon Him. Isn't that the way the hearing
of faith came to you? So thus, having nothing of your
own, you took your place as a sinner and embraced Christ alone, and
you clung to Him and to His work, trusting His blood as the cleansing
of all your sins. That's it. That's all I have.
Nothing but the blood of Jesus is my only plea. All my cleansing. All my righteousness. That's
what you said. That's what sinners do when they
hear the gospel with the hearing of faith. They sit and they rest
and they look upon Christ and say, He's everything. He's all
in my salvation. And in Him, I'm complete. You
heard with understanding that He did all to save sinners of
God's choosing, by God's will, to God's satisfaction. And having
nothing, you found and embraced and laid hold on Him in trust.
And you rested upon the work of Jesus Christ with joy and
with peace in your heart. Because by Himself He purged
your sins. And by Himself, by His one offering
of Himself, which He offered once, forever perfected all for
whom He died, and you rested there." What can I do? I can't
touch this. God has done it. You weren't
thinking about your response. You were fixated on His accomplishments. and His grace to ungodly sinners
who were helpless in their sins, guilty before God, with no plea,
naked and condemned. And yet, there's Christ doing
all for sinners. And you looked and you saw, there,
there's my Savior. And you gladly took your place
there. You wanted nothing but to be someone saved by the Lord. And you said in your heart, He
is all I need in all things pertaining to God. All things for the cleansing
of my sin and for my righteousness, for life and peace and joy and
blessing and acceptance with God. And everything I need, it's
all in what God thinks of His Son. And you rested. And it seemed
as if you'd never rested before. And suddenly you knew assurance
because you were convinced that your assurance of salvation was
in what God thought of His Son. And if He received His Son, and
he received sinners in his son, then you could trust that he
received you because of what he thought of Christ. And he
gave you assurance because Christ was accepted, you were accepted.
Because he died to sin in the law, you died to it. Because
he rose, you rose. And it was the glorious news
you'd ever heard. And there was then and is now a recognition
that you were looking in all the wrong places and in all the
wrong ways, trying to do things yourself, but upon hearing Christ,
you were fully persuaded that He was enough, and you were satisfied. And you agreed with God then.
You came to see things God's way. Outside of my own personal
history, in the history of Christ's life, He accomplished my redemption,
and obtained it too, and perfected me before God. This is what the
hearing of faith is. And you are convinced. You are
convinced of this. And this is the way we live.
God has to teach us this again and again. I live by the faith
of the Son of God. It's Christ and Him crucified
who gave Himself for me. That's the way we live. That's
how we receive the Spirit. The Spirit of God came to us
and birthed us. And He operated in us and gave
us a new man. that could see Christ and live
upon Christ and find Him to be our all and give glory to God
and live for Him. Our only regret is that we can't
do more for the Lord Jesus Christ by His saving grace. That's the
life of the believer. That's the hearing of faith.
And Paul asked the Galatians, you heard the Spirit of God was
given to you in this. It's not your doing. It wasn't
by your work. You heard it under the preaching
of Christ and Him crucified. And now, why are you going on
thinking that you can somehow add to this work with your brush
on God's masterpiece of His glory in Christ's saving work." And
so he berates them. He calls them foolish. He asks
them, are you in some kind of a spell? What's wrong with you?
Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by the
hearing of faith? You just heard it and you said,
it's mine! And then you realized that operation
of faith had been operating in you. Now you see Christ as everything.
And you rejoiced that God had given you this grace of faith.
And so we ask them in verse 4. Have you suffered so many things
in vain? If it be yet in vain. Have you
suffered so many things in vain? Did you suffer because you had
left all trust in man and man's religion and trusted Christ alone? If you suffered for that, did
you suffer it in vain? Because now you're going back
to that. And then he asked this question, if it be yet in vain? hope on Paul's part that his
epistle to them would arrest them and bring them back out
of the stupor of their bewitched state to see that dependence
on works was foolishness. It was disobedience to the gospel. And says, if it yet be in vain.
Maybe it's not. It won't be. You see, these people
had the Spirit of God. They were believers. That's phenomenal,
isn't it? How could they, as believers
who had been given the Spirit of God, how could they disobey
the Gospel? Because God shows us our own
propensity, our own proclivity. to trust in ourselves. That's
why we need to hear the Word of God, because faith comes by
hearing, and hearing by the Word. We live upon Christ. We take
of Him, and handle Him, and turn Him over in our mind, and in
our affections, and our admiration, and we come to God by Him. This
is a daily and life experience of the believer. And so that's
why hearing God's Word is so essential. It's our life. And so he says in verse 5, "...he
therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles
among you, does he do it by the works of the law, or by the hearing
of faith?" Who works these miracles? Who ministers God's Spirit to
the believer? It's the Lord Jesus Christ. He's
the one who gives His Spirit. He's the one who gives His Spirit
to work miracles by His servants among them. They saw the miraculous
works of the Spirit of God. Not only had they believed, not
only had they heard with the hearing of faith of Christ and
Him crucified, and seen Paul's own life and experience of forsaking
works and trusting Christ alone, But they had seen these miraculous
miracles. We don't see them in our day,
but they saw them. And so he asked them, did the
Lord Jesus Christ, did God Himself, who ministers His Spirit to you
and works miracles among you by His servants, does He do that
by preaching the law and your own personal obedience for your
justification or sanctification? Or does He do it by preaching
Christ and Him crucified? The hearing of faith. And it's
a question that answers itself. Because it's a rhetorical question.
All these questions are questions that have the answer embedded
in the question. And so he berates them for this,
and he points them to Christ again. Isn't the gospel wonderful? He leaves us with Christ. Forsake
all that may be called yours, and look to Christ only. You
say, but I don't know if I have a warrant to look, or I don't
know if I'm one who can look because I haven't felt the right
things or seen the right things. You're not to think about yourself,
you're to look away to Christ, and see in Him all that you need,
all that God requires, all that God could possibly be satisfied
with, He finds in His Son. And He is completely and utterly
satisfied with him. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the
Lord Jesus Christ, our only Savior and our Lord. We pray You'd give
us this faith, by Your Spirit working in our heart, through
the hearing of Your Word, take glory to Yourself, exalt the
Lord Jesus, and Him crucified as You said He would be, and
all who see Him would be drawn to Him, and come to Him by the
drawing of God the Father through His own Spirit, bringing His
people to His Son, to see His glory. Have you seen my Son?
Lord, give us these eyes of faith, and hands of faith, and ears
of faith, and feet that walk by faith in Christ. And help
us to so walk as to love Him and to love His people. Desire
nothing in this world but His glory. Desire nothing in our
own esteem or in the esteem of others, but that they would see
Christ. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.