Galatians chapter 5 and I would
like to read just the first three verses. Galatians chapter 5 and
the first three verses. Stand fast therefore in the liberty
wherewith Christ hath made us free and be not entangled again
with the yoke of bondage. Behold, I, Paul, say unto you
that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing. For
I testify again to every man that is circumcised that he is
a debtor to do the whole law. When we come together to worship
the Lord and when we meet for fellowship like this, We take
the opportunity to turn to the scriptures so that we might hear
something helpful for our lives, hear something, as it were, directly
from the lips of the Lord or from the pen of one of his apostles. We come to remember what the
Lord has done for us. We come to thank him for his
love and his mercy in saving us. We come to honour his name. And we gather, feeling our need
for his help, seeking his guidance for matters to do with God and
with man, and to ask for his daily direction for how we live
our lives. And we believe that a spiritual
relationship has been established by God in our lives by which
he leads us through the troubles and the trials and the confusion
of this present earthly life. We could say this present evil
world and it would be the same point. And we believe that by
his kindness, occasions such as these, simple as they are,
do our souls good. We are here because we believe
that these occasions do our souls good. Now, in recent weeks, we've
been listening as the Apostle Paul has been wrestling with
the Galatians who had become distracted by these religious
zealots who were, it seems, following the Apostle Paul around with
the purpose of undermining his ministry and persuading young
Christian believers away from the gospel and away from the
simplicity that is in Christ Jesus. These men were troublemakers. They had infiltrated the Galatian
churches and they were blinding people's eyes to the truth. They were binding consciences
with a heavy yoke of legal duties that they imagined would please
God. And they were shackling these
Gentiles with a ball and chain of works, claiming that it would
enhance their standing with God, which in truth is the essence
of all man-made religion. The real motivation of these
Judaizers was to prosper themselves, either for their own material
good or to elevate themselves or in some way to recommend them
back to some seniors in Jerusalem or whatever it might have been.
But it was for selfish reasons that they were trying to diminish
the testimony of the Apostle Paul. And Paul, anxious about
the well-being of the Galatian churches, has gently, in the
past four chapters, but firmly challenged the Galatians with
their foolishness for being so easily duped by these Judaizers. And the apostle has restated
the gospel that he had previously preached amongst them. That is,
that Christ's redemption is a completed and successful work. That justification
is free and it is all of grace. And that the true spiritual faith
of a believer is God's enabling gift to those he loves and purposes
to save according to his own will. And Paul's defence of the
Gospel closed at the end of chapter 4 with an explanation of how
the Old Testament history of Abraham's relationship with Hagar
and Sarah and the births of their respective children, Ishmael
and Isaac, the one contrived by the flesh and the other given
by promise, was an allegory about grace and works and that the
Galatians, realising that, ought to follow the example of Abraham
and reject or be rid of the Judaizers and cast them out like Abraham
had to cast out Hagar and Ishmael. And our recent studies in the
book of Isaiah, because here we're about to speak about circumcision,
and people might think, well, what on earth has circumcision
got to do with all that we've been talking about? But our recent
studies in Isaiah, you might remember me saying this last
Lord's Day, we saw that the prophet summarised the whole of the law,
the whole of the Jewish religious system under the single law of
Sabbath-keeping. He spoke about those who kept
my Sabbath. And that Sabbath-keeping was
signifying the whole religious system. Well here Paul uses circumcision
in the same way. Instead of using Sabbath keeping
he uses circumcision to convey the same thing. Circumcision
was a cutting of the flesh to signify a spiritual relationship
and inspire a national covenant identity amongst the Jews. but it became symbolic of the
whole body of duties and responsibilities that fell to the Jews. And if
there was any proselytites came into the Jewish faith, then they
had to be circumcised as emblematic of the fact that they were submitting
themselves to the whole mosaic. system. They had to accept the
whole truckload of stuff that came with it and the circumcision
was emblematic of their acquiescence to that. Now the Lord's apostles
had very early after the ascension of Christ and the coming of the
Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The Lord's Apostles very early
rejected imposing these Mosaic Law duties on the Gentile converts. Now that's another study, but
that decision was taken at Jerusalem by the Church of Jerusalem. They
gathered Apostles and the Church of Jerusalem, and it's recorded
in Acts 15. We have thought about that in the past, but basically
they realised a couple of things. One, that these were too much
for even the Jews to carry. So why would they impose them
on to the Gentiles? And also that they were pictures
of what Christ fulfilled. And we've seen in the earlier
passages of Galatians that we've looked at how the Apostle stood
for this Christian liberty of which he is speaking here in
chapter 5, stood for it right at the beginning when he went
up to Jerusalem for that conference. and also as he withstood Peter
later at Antioch when Peter was to be blamed and when he had
led away many Jews including Barnabas by his error of reverting
back to these Old Testament practices. Paul says we're done with that,
we're through with that. We've got to understand that
our Christian liberty has to do with our recognition of what
the Lord Jesus Christ has accomplished. So Paul is here speaking up for
Christian liberty and our Christian liberty as believers is in the
Lord Jesus Christ and Paul tells the Galatians that they must
stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free. Now, the liberty that Paul is
speaking of here is the perfect, complete freedom that Christ
has obtained for his church and his people by his obedience,
sacrifice and death. He has, as the representative
of his people, redeemed us from the curse of the law, having
been made a curse for us. So that all of the claims of
the law are satisfied in and by Christ. And this liberty,
this freedom, is a characteristic of the Christian faith. and it
may well be and rightly contrasted with servitude, slavery and bondage. The bondage and slavery that
comes with sin in which we are all trapped by nature and by
the fall. so that the Lord Jesus by his
death as our substitute has freed us from our bondage to sin. He has freed us from our captivity
to Satan and he has freed us from the curse and condemnation
of the law for every breach of its demands that we would have
been guilty of. Now, this does not mean that
we have no sin. Although we are freed from the
bondage of sin, it doesn't mean that we have no sin. It doesn't
mean that we are not tempted by Satan to sin, although we
have been freed from the captivity of Satan. Nor does it mean that
we are lawless without any standard of righteousness. What it does
mean, however, is that we have been blessed with a new relationship
with God, founded on Christ's suretyship work, his representative
work as our head, which is infinitely superior, more precious and rewarding. and it is not to be given up
or surrendered for any reason. Our Christian liberty was dearly
purchased by the death of the Lord Jesus Christ and we are
not to give it up without a fight. Christian liberty is enjoyed
by faith and it consists in seeing and believing that all our righteousness
and all our justification is in and derived from the Lord
Jesus Christ. Now let's not just say those
things without realising what they mean. All our righteousness,
everything that recommends us to God, is in and from the Lord
Jesus Christ. We have nothing in ourselves
that recommends us to God. Everything is derived from Christ. All our acceptance with God is
built upon Christ's full payment for our transgressions and his
cancellation of our sin debt. It is to do with the complete
removal of our guilt and condemnation. And all our reconciliation, all
our peace with God is based on the full satisfaction that Christ
has paid. and we have a full and free supply
of grace for every divine requirement that is laid upon us. This is
what our Christian liberty consists in. It is understanding this
position that we have, this ground upon which we stand as beneficiaries
of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And these Judaizers,
they were proposing that the Galatians abandoned those principles,
those assurances, in order to return to a system of human effort
and fleshy striving as though man's works could in some way
contribute or replace. the sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice
and that was a notion that was both foolish and false. And Paul says to the Galatians,
you've got to stand fast. You've got to remain unmoved
in this liberty. You've got to hold firm to the
truth that you've received and reject utterly the false teaching
of men who clearly had never themselves personally tasted
or enjoyed the blessings that they were trying to get the Galatians
to forego, to give up. Now remember how I started our
little talk, our little time today. Remember how I began these
few remarks by saying that we are here as well as to thank
God for his grace, also to learn something helpful for our lives
and something comforting and securing for our souls. and that's what Paul is giving
us in these verses. This is the foundation stone
of Christian doctrine that I wish we could all grasp and keep a
hold of, that Christ has made us free. Let no one bring you
who know what Christ has accomplished for you into bondage to works
by enforcing on us any religious obligation that is supposed in
some way to enhance our standing with God or improve our relationship
or increase our holiness. Jesus Christ is all our standing,
all our holiness and all our hope. Our rest, our peace is
enjoyed by faith. That is, not by what we do, by
faith, by trusting in what Christ has done, what he has accomplished. And as we stand fast in the conviction
that no contribution from us will add anything to that. Let me close by just making this
point. The Apostle Paul uses the word
entangled to describe the Judaizers' proposals to the Galatians. He says, being entangled again
with the yoke of bondage, or he warns against being entangled
again with the yoke of bondage. And by the use of the word entanglement,
he is expressing the subtlety with which legalism and ritualism
and works righteousness can ensnare us. Little things that seem insignificant,
like what we eat, and what we drink, and what we wear, and
what we watch, and how long our hair is, and how long our, whatever,
how long our skirts are, or our jackets, or whatever. All of
these things, which are imposed out of, I don't know, some sort
of cultural idea of what is proper, what is right, what is appropriate.
Little things that might seem insignificant in many ways. We
have to be careful that they don't begin a process whereby
we find ourselves ensnared in a form of activity that we imagine
recommends us more to God. And it gets even more subtle
than that. Practices like dutiful Bible
reading, when and how we pray, how often we go to church, these
can be employed to entangle the Lord's people almost casually
and imperceptibly. As believers, our spiritual relationship
with God and with the Lord Jesus Christ does not consist of food
and drink or even routine, except to the extent that it is useful
and helpful to our spirits. And too many have become bound
up in imposed expectations, someone telling you what you should and
what you should not do as a Christian believer. without realising that
our relationship with God is spiritual, it is guided by faith
and the personal witness of the Holy Spirit. Believers are the
richest, freest, most blessed and privileged men and women
on the face of this planet. We are the sons and daughters
of the King because of the blessings that we have in Christ. So let
us guard these blessings carefully and hold them dearly and stand
fast against every encroachment against them. Our Christian liberty
and the purity of the gospel are two sides of one truth and
Paul was determined that neither should be compromised. May the
Lord bless these thoughts to us.