Galatians chapter three, and I'd like to read from verse
one. Galatians chapter three and verse
one. O foolish Galatians, who hath
bewitched you that ye should not obey the truth before whose
eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you? This only would I learn of you.
Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law or by the hearing
of faith? Are ye so foolish? Having begun
in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? Have ye
suffered so many things in vain, if it be yet in vain? He therefore that ministereth
to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth he
it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith. Amen. May the Lord bless to us
this little reading from his word. Our chapter is opening again
with the Apostle continuing to emphasise the central Gospel
teaching of justification by faith. Or let us say, rather,
justification by the righteousness of God. and the apostles' insistence
that the Galatians face the reality of what has been happening to
them. They have been deceived, the
Apostle Paul calls it, bewitched by false teachers. Pretend apostles,
legal preachers that have come amongst them and out of jealousy
and greed and envy, because that's what is contained in that little
word, bewitched, out of jealousy and greed and envy, they have
hijacked the simple, straightforward teaching of the apostle concerning
justification by the righteousness of God, and the Galatians have
been deceived into renouncing the peace of knowing their sins
forgiven and are deprived of the comfort of knowing their
acceptance with God on the sole grounds of imputed righteousness. Basically, these Galatians had
had their pockets picked by these Judaizers. They've been robbed
by men who perverted the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And
I think that it probably does us all good to be reminded that
this is actually a thing, that such a thing as this is possible. that error creeps into a congregation,
that believers can be distracted from looking to the Lord, that
we can be taught in our doctrine that there are things that are
important and as important and perhaps more important than the
simple truth of the gospel of God's grace. And it's good that
we should be reminded that this is an influence that has affected
and afflicted the church throughout its history. If there were bewitching
influences in Paul's day, And if there were gospel perverters
amongst the Galatians, we ought not to be surprised if believers
today are still exposed to such hypocrisy and even vulnerable
to the very same lies. So let me be blunt about this,
if I may. It is my firm belief that there
are liars in pulpits today, that there are deceivers in churches
and false doctrines being pushed and promoted today under the
disguise of true gospel ministry and you and I, we need We all
need to be on our guard against it. So let me say a few things
about what Paul has to say concerning this matter in these verses before
us today. First thing I want to mention
is this. It is foolish for believers to let this deception happen
to us when we know better. Now. Clearly, being deceived
is not something that you can mitigate against if you're being
deceived. But what the apostle is saying,
by calling these people foolish, is that they were being naive. They were not testing, they were
not thinking, they were not assessing what it is that they were hearing.
And testing these things, testing these spirits, if you like, Paul
tells them that the Lord Jesus Christ has been set before your
eyes. Evidently so. We have seen him
crucified with our mind's eye. We have learned about what he
endured. We have read the testimony of
the apostles. We know he bled and he died. We know the sufferings that he
endured. We know the true cost of righteousness
and justification. We have seen by faith, which
is a kind of spiritual vision, and by which we perceive these
spiritual things, we have seen by faith what it cost the Lord
Jesus Christ to secure our salvation and gain us justification with
God. And so it's as though Paul is
saying to these people, do you think that anything you can do
in your fallen nature, in your sinful flesh, can add something
to the preciousness and value of the redemptive work of the
Lord Jesus Christ? Do you think you can add to the
price he paid or to its worth as a sacrifice for your soul. It's foolishness even to countenance
such a notion, far less fall into the trap of entangling ourselves
in a system of law or an attitude of duty and obligation to that
end. Paul was anxious about the spiritual
well-being of his friends in the Galatian churches. These
were his spiritual children and it is as though he said to them
as he did to the Corinthians, I fear lest by any means, as
the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your minds should
be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. So let us,
as we hear this word of challenge to the Galatians, let us be determined
that we shall be careful about what we hear and let us be advocates
of that simple gospel of salvation by grace through the work of
the Lord Jesus Christ alone. Another thing I want us to notice
here is that the greater guilt is with the false teachers. Now, there is a rebuke, there
is an implicit rebuke to those who are deceived when they ought
not to have been so. And when that is down to their
gullibility, a lack of due diligence, if you like, And yet the greater
condemnation is against the false teacher. And I want to stress
this. Whosoever dares to touch or deceive
or harm the Lord's people is in personal jeopardy of their
soul. You and I, we protect our children,
do we not? We warn them, we try to give
them the benefit of our experience, we encourage them to be careful,
we warn them, we're firm with them even. We're disciplined
with them. And we tell them, don't be foolish
to fall for the tricks, to fall for the deception that there
is around. There's always going to be someone
ready to part you from your money, ready to part you from your goods,
ready to do you down if they can. So be alert, be aware. That's what we tell our children. And we get disappointed if we
don't see them acting in a way that is responsible. But let
us not take away from the fact that the greater guilt is with
the thief and the greater condemnation is with the deceiver. Woe betide
those who hurt one of the Lord's little ones, especially from
the pulpit. Another thing that we can glean
from what the Apostle Paul says here is that obedience to the
truth is our responsibility. We have a duty of care. We have a duty of care for one
another, certainly. A pastor has a duty of care for
his congregation. but we have a duty of care to
our own souls as well. And that is always an encouragement
to be serious about our reading, our hearing the gospel, our studying
the word of God, our prayer, and endeavouring at all times
to have a sensitivity to the provokings of the spirit. It's as if Paul is saying, these
people here, these Judaizers, these troublemakers that had
come to the Galatian churches, these people are telling you
that you need to be obedient to the law. Well, let me tell
you what you need to be obedient to, says Paul. You need to be
obedient to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Our loyalty,
our devotion, our allegiance ought to be to the gospel that
saves and liberates. And we should be jealous about
that. We shouldn't just shrug our shoulders
and assume, well, yeah, we've got it, we know where we can
go and get it, we know what it is, we know what it's about.
These were believers who had had the apostle Paul preaching
amongst them. And yet, and yet, it only took
the arrival of these troublemakers and suddenly the Galatians had
lost sight of their first love. We need to be devoted to the
true gospel, not some false gospel that steals our joy and binds
our conscience. We ought to know the gospel,
we ought to value its truth and be jealous to keep that gospel
personally and protect it collectively as a fellowship and maintain
the integrity of the ministry amongst us. Paul's heat, Paul's
warmth, if you like, I won't say his anger, but his warmth,
his pointedness in this matter is certainly for the sake of
the gospel and for the Lord's glory. but he also knew the trouble
and the distress that legalism would bring to the Lord's people
because he knew that they would be denied of the joy and the
blessing of trusting wholly in Christ. When a man or a woman spiritually
hears the gospel and discovers the truth of the Gospel. They don't do that by works. They do it by faith. It is an exercise of faith that
brings us into the experience of grace. Now I trust we all
know that as a fact. It is by faith that we receive
all of the blessings of grace. And let us not imagine that we
are saved by our faith. We are not saved by our faith,
we are saved by God's love, we are saved by God's mercy, we
are saved by His grace and by the satisfaction provided by
the Lord Jesus Christ for our sins as our substitute on the
cross. And yet, to say it again, it
is by faith that we receive all of the blessings of God's grace. All of the things that the Lord
Jesus Christ has accomplished for us, the benefits and blessing
of those things come to us by faith. For example, first of
all, the very first thing that is given to us is the gift of
faith. And then we understand something
of the gift of cleansing, of pardon of sins, of peace of conscience,
of freedom from condemnation. These things did not come to
us because of our works, but by the gift of God through the
gift of faith. And this is such a telling question
that the Apostle Paul sets for the Galatians here when he asks
them about this matter. It's a powerful argument against
anyone who tries to bring believers under a duty of obedience or
under the law as a rule of life. This is the means of pleasing
God. Faith is the means of pleasing
God. Paul asks, receive ye the Spirit by the works of the law
or by the hearing of faith? And I just want to mention that
Paul assumes that these people have the Holy Spirit. He's not
writing to unbelievers here. He's writing to regenerate converted
men and women, brothers and sisters in Christ who had received the
Spirit. And it's the Holy Spirit that
the Apostle is talking about. The Holy Spirit that brings wisdom
and knowledge of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit that regenerates
and makes all things new. That grants and teaches us of
faith and conveys to us the blessings of adoption into the family of
God. The same Spirit that is the earnest
of our salvation, the seal of what God has done for us, and
the promise of the glory that is to come. Of course, grace
was discovered by faith, not by works. Then why should we
imagine that growing in grace would come by works? He says
in verse 3, are you so foolish, having begun in the Spirit, are
ye now made perfect by the flesh? Well the answer is, of course
not. We have begun in the Spirit and
we are made perfect in the Spirit by faith. We always come, brothers
and sisters, we always come to God, we always come to Christ
in only one way. We come as sinners seeking his
mercy, we come as guilty men and women needing his grace,
but we come by faith alone. Let us never imagine that we
come deserving anything but condemnation. but let us always come confident
that it is by grace that he is pleased to bestow his gifts to
us. The Apostle Paul said in Romans
8, There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are
in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the
Spirit. This is the same thing as Paul's
talking about here. There's no condemnation to them
that are in Christ Jesus who walk not after the flesh, that
is, walk not after the works of the flesh or the works of
the law or endeavouring to please God by the things that we do,
but walk after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of
life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and
death. And this is the great paradox
of believers coming into God's presence. We come feeling unworthy. We come needing grace. And yet we come confident that
all we need is freely available in Christ. and that itself is
a gift and assurance of faith. There's never a day that a believer
does not labour under sin. There's never a day that a believer
does not feel the weight of sin and does not feel the burden
of sin weighing down heavily upon him or her. And yet the invitation from Christ
is to come unto me. And he encourages us to seek
rest in him constantly, not by the things that we do, but by
trusting in what he has done. We will never find rest for our
souls under the law. We shall never have done enough. If our doing is in any way our
offering to a holy God. Having begun in the spirit, we
shall never be made perfect by the flesh. And that's Paul's
argument. His reference to suffering in
vain reminds us that the true church of Jesus Christ, the Lord's
elect, shall suffer for the truth of the gospel. And because we
hold imputed righteousness, because we hold justification by the
blood of Jesus Christ and salvation experienced through faith alone,
because of that we will find that there is an ongoing enmity
between this world and our testimony, between our flesh and our spirit. And yet that is another evidence
of grace. Because the Galatians had suffered,
the Apostle Paul encourages them to press on, to stand fast, to
be strong and adamant against the deceivers who tried to compromise
their commitment to the gospel of free grace and righteousness
by Christ alone. Finally, one last thought and
then I'm done. It's the Lord Jesus Christ that
Paul is speaking about in verse five, who ministers the Holy
Spirit to his people. The Lord Jesus Christ said, I
will send you a comforter. He says in John 15, when the
comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father,
even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he
shall testify of me. So when we have the Holy Spirit,
It testifies, not of our goodness, not of our abilities, not of
our works, it testifies of Christ's work on the cross. So Paul says,
now, how is this comfort, this spirit of comfort, how is this
spiritual experience and the blessings that come from that,
how is it received and applied? By the law or by the gospel? By the works of the law or by
the hearing of faith? Well, why, it's by the hearing
of faith, of course. Everything a believer possesses
of Christ, every good and perfect gift that comes down from the
Father of lights comes to us by faith. Our reason for hope
the grounds of our peace, the peace that passeth understanding,
our confidence, our assurance, the joy that we have in the Lord
despite the hardships that abound around us and in us, all the
promises of God that are yea and amen in Christ are received
and applied by faith. Does Christ bring these blessings
to our souls, to our experiences, by the works of the law or by
the hearing of faith? Well, the answer is by faith.
And all God's blessings to us in Christ are revealed to us
by faith and are to be interpreted by us as coming from God. by faith and thereafter our thanksgiving
is to be offered to God by faith. These are the arguments that
the Apostle Paul sets before us and we do well to be both
protective of this message and circumspect that we retain it
and maintain it when we are tempted to do otherwise. May the Lord
bless these thoughts to us. Amen.