This morning I want to spend
a little bit of time with you. in the early verses of this letter
of Paul to the Galatians. Galatians and chapter one. Now we've already read the whole
of the chapter together, so I just want to read the first few verses
again in your hearing at this time. So we're in Galatians chapter
one, and I'm going to read the first few verses. Paul is the author and he gives
us his name as he does on most of the epistles that he writes. with the exception of the book
of Hebrews, if indeed he was the author of that book. This
is the way that the apostle begins all his letters. He says, Paul,
an apostle not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ and
God the Father, who raised him from the dead. And all the brethren
which are with me unto the churches of Galatia, Grace be to you and
peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, who
gave himself for our sins that he might deliver us from this
present evil world according to the will of God and our Father,
to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. I want to draw your attention
to the third verse here at the outset of our thoughts. The apostle writes, grace be
to you and peace from God the Father. Grace and peace. Grace and peace. These are two qualities that
are worth thinking about. These are two aspects of God's
revelation to his people that we ought to give attention to. Grace and peace are heavenly
blessings. Grace and peace come from God. They come from God to men and
women upon earth. And we might say that the highest,
the fullest, the best and the most perfect expression of grace
and peace is divine. Whatever we know about grace
in this world, It is a faint shadow of the grace which comes
from heaven. Whatever we might experience
of peace in this world, it's not to be compared with the peace
that comes from God through the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace and
peace are heavenly blessings and their fullest, greatest,
best manifestation is that which comes from God on high. Paul says here in this verse,
as he is writing to the Galatians, that they come, grace and peace
come from God the Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Now maybe you think you know
what these two words mean. Maybe they're not too complicated,
are they? Grace and peace. Maybe you think
you know what grace and peace are. And maybe you do. Maybe
you do. Maybe if I were to say, well,
tell me what you think they are, you would be able to give me
a good definition of each of those words. Perhaps you would
say, grace is mercy when you deserve punishment. And I would say, good answer. That's a good answer. Grace is
mercy when you deserve punishment. And maybe you would say, peace
is the end of conflict and trouble. And I would have to say that's
a good definition as well. That is exactly what these two
words mean. But today I want, if I may, to
move a little bit beyond the definition of these words and
ask you about the experience of these words. Let me tell you about haggis. I come from Scotland. Now, I
don't know whether any of you have ever been in Scotland, but
we have a delicacy in Scotland. A food called haggis. You've heard of haggis, have
you? You haven't? Oh, some people have. Some people
have. Well, okay. Let me tell you what
haggis is made of. Haggis is made of cow intestine. Pretty much all the stuff that's
left when the good stuff gets taken away from a cow. Maybe you'd call it awful. Well
that's what haggis is made of. It's mixed with animal fat and
porridge and it's cooked in a sheep's stomach. And it's delicious. It's delicious. You put salt and you put pepper
and you put seasoning in there and we eat it on special occasions
because we wouldn't want to spoil it by having it too many times
in the year. Now I ask you, do you know what
haggis is? And maybe you could Google a
recipe for me. But have you ever tasted it? Have you ever tasted it? Do you know what a rose is? And
you could describe its shape and its texture and its color.
You could maybe tell me the best growing conditions. But have
you ever walked through a rose garden on a summer's night and
smelled those flowers' fragrance perfuming the air? You might be able to give me
a whole host of definitions about what love is, but I tell you
this, love is better experienced than talked about. The psalmist says, taste and
see that the Lord is good. There has to be an experience
of these things. We come to church to learn about
God, and we've tried to do that a little bit in our first few
minutes here with the children, to teach them a little bit about
God. But you see, all I can teach
you by the words that I speak, by the direction that I give,
is a message which goes in your ears and perhaps to some extent
addresses your intellect, your mind, your intelligence. And
I strive to do that. I work, I prepare, I think about
what it is I'm going to say so that in some small way I might
be able to communicate with you. But I know that there is a world
of difference between the definition and the explanation and the tasting
and the experience. Paul is writing to the Galatians. This letter, this epistle, we
call them the epistles or the letters, that's all it means.
This letter goes to the Galatians and Galatia was a region in what
was also called Asia Minor. Today we call it Turkey. If you
can imagine the Mediterranean Sea with Europe at the top and
Africa underneath and Israel in there at the right hand side.
We're looking north. Then Turkey is there on the north
coast of the Mediterranean. And that's where the churches
of Galatia were found. And the Apostle Paul had been
there. He had been there preaching the gospel and ministering amongst
them. And he had established a number
of churches there. And after a while, he had gone
away, moved on to other areas, different places, and he would
write letters back to the churches that he had previously visited. Sometimes he wrote to churches
that he hadn't even visited. And it is the letters that Paul
wrote that we have as our scriptures today. He was teaching the people
there the doctrines that he had taught them when he had been
to preach amongst them. And we are very pleased, we're
very happy that the Apostle Paul wrote these letters and that
the Holy Spirit has brought them together and given them to us
because here we know what is taught of God by these godly
men, these chosen people. And Paul writes that he was an
apostle not of men, He wasn't commissioned, he wasn't ordained
of men, but rather he was an apostle, a messenger, that's
what the word means, a messenger carrying a message from God to
the people of his age. And we have these letters and
they have been handed down through the generations in the church
so that we can still read of these truths, this gospel today. So Paul is writing to the Galatians.
What is modern day Turkey? And he writes to them about grace
and peace. And he's writing about a grace
that can be experienced. a peace that can be enjoyed here
in this life, a divine gift, a gift from God, God's gifts
to his church and to his people. And he says in verse three, grace
be to you, to you, and peace from God the Father. and from
our Lord Jesus Christ. See that little phrase there,
to you, those two little words, that means, that means that you
and I have an interest in what the Apostle Paul wrote all those
years ago. That means that there's something
here which is important for us to hear and to know. This to
you means that we're not reading these letters in some sort of
theoretical way, some sort of abstract way. This is not a dead
religion. This is not mere formality. But that to you means it's personal. It means it's experienced by
people like you and like me. It's warm. It's alive, it's vital. It's a knowledge of God's dealings
with men and women like you and like me. It's the experience
of what it is to be accepted in God's presence and to be at
peace with him. Grace is something that must
be tasted, it must be experienced, and it must be individually received. It's to you, it's to me. It must be received as a living
spiritual life. It is granted not to another,
Not to somebody else, but to me. God is speaking to me when we
read these truths together. Maybe you know people who are
Christians. Maybe you know people who have
an experience of this grace and this peace. Maybe you've heard
that it's possible to have this, like you've heard about Haggis.
but you've never tasted it. Or you've heard about a rose,
but you've never really stopped to smell it. It's just something
that you've heard about, just something that you really don't
know anything too much about. Well, grace and peace to you,
says Paul. He's writing to the Galatians,
but it is relevant to men and women today, in this place, in
our own age. Peace personally experienced. Peace with God. Peace in our
heart. Peace in our life. Peace in our
conscience. A felt relationship with God
and with the Lord Jesus Christ. full, free, life-changing. Paul calls these blessings, this
grace and this peace, he calls it the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's the name of it. It's the
gospel of Christ. If you look down at verse 7,
he says, talking about the gospel, and
he says that it is the true gospel. It's not another gospel, because
there are some that try to pervert the gospel, the gospel of Christ,
and this is what he's calling it. The gospel of Christ is the
message of grace and peace to sinners. I want to tell you why it's called
the gospel of Christ. I want to tell you why this grace
and this peace is called the gospel of Christ. Firstly, it
comes from the Lord Jesus Christ. It comes from him, that's why
it's called his gospel. It comes from him. And that's
very important because God's grace and God's peace comes to
sinful men and women from the Lord Jesus Christ. I'd love to
be able to give you it myself, I'd love to be able to give it
to my children. I'd love to be able to give it
to my family and to my friends. But this is not my gospel. This is the gospel of the Lord
Jesus Christ and it has to come from him. It comes from the Lord. Imagine for a moment that you've
done me wrong. Imagine that you've offended
me in some way and that after you've done me wrong, you come
to regret it and you come to feel sorry for what's been done. And maybe in your conscience
you've been pricked about what's happened and you've no peace
about it. It irks you, it annoys you, it's
got consequences that you can't deal with. So you come to me. You come to me and you say to
me, I've done this and I'm sorry. And I listen and I hear what
you have to say. And after a while, I think, you
know, this guy's sincere, this woman's sincere. And I say, okay,
I forgive you. I forgive you. You can go in
peace. Go in peace. The offense that you've caused,
I've forgiven. The sin that you perpetrated,
I'm not going to hold it against you any longer. Now that's all
very well. That's good. And we should seek
to have good relationships with the people around about us. When
we've offended them, to deal with that offence. But really, what we need to know
more than that is that we have offended God. We have sinned
against God. And it's God's forgiveness that
we need. It's to hear him saying, I forgive
you, go in peace. That's the peace that comes from
God. That's the peace and the grace
that flows from the Lord Jesus Christ. Why is this called Christ's
Gospel? Because it has to come from Him.
And we might have good relationships with the people around about
us, with our friends and our family, but what's our relationship
with God like? Have we got peace with him? Have
we tasted that grace that comes from heaven? The wayward prodigal son must
come to the father and say, I have sinned against thee. It is God we have offended. and
it's God's grace and it's God's peace. It's the peace of God
in the Lord Jesus Christ that we must have. Here's another
thing. This is called the gospel of
Christ because it's revealed by the Lord Jesus Christ. This message of the gospel, it's
not an invention of men. It's not being made up by people,
by smart people. I could tell you a story. If
I was clever enough, I could tell you a story. I could invent
a religion. People do it. There are invented
religions in America today. And there are pop stars and film
stars that clamor to be part of that religion. but it's a
made up religion, it's an invention. But this is the gospel of Christ. This is the gospel of Christ.
I could come and I could try and sell you a proposition, but
in the end it would just be vanity, just mere speculation, nonsense. Because what we need, what we
need is a message, what we need is that revelation which will
enable us in a day to come to stand before the Holy God and
to be acceptable to Him. Not to be His enemy, not to be
a rebel against Him, but to be at peace with Him. That peace
is only to be found in the Lord Jesus Christ. This is Christ's
gospel. It comes from him. And it's that
fact that makes it worth believing. Paul is a fine example of the
point that I'm trying to make here. Paul says in these verses,
look at verse 13 in this opening chapter here of Galatians, and
let me just explain to you what Paul is saying here. He says,
for ye have heard of my conversation. That conversation there is not
in the way in which we have a conversation together. It's talking about
my life, everything that I had done, the person that I was,
my conversation. He says, you've heard of my conversation
in time past in the Jews' religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted
the Church of God and wasted it, and profited in the Jews'
religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more
exceedingly zealous of the tradition of my fathers." What Paul is
saying there is this. As far as religion is concerned,
I was the top man. I was right, I was right. There
wasn't a person in the whole of the country, there wasn't
a person in the whole of my nation that was more zealous for the
traditions of the fathers, for the Jews' religion than I was. And I put that zeal into effect
because wherever I found this Christian faith, I wasted it. I spoiled it. I brutalised it. I did everything that I could
to destroy it and stamp it out. That's the kind of man that we're
dealing with here in this man who was called Saul of Tarsus,
but who was converted to become Paul the Apostle. He knew what
it was to know about the religions of the world. but he also discovered
where grace and peace was to be found. He discovered it because
he met the Lord Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus as he
was going into that town in order to put Christians into prison,
to put them in bonds and in chains, to beat them up and to flay them
and to hit them with rods. He had an encounter right there
in the street as he was travelling. with the Lord Jesus Christ. And that's the reason why he
says in verse 12, I neither received it of man, neither was I taught
it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. Jesus himself came
and spoke these truths to the Apostle Paul, or to Saul of Tarsus,
as he then was. Now do not misunderstand me. God uses men to preach the gospel
to men and that's what Paul is saying here when he says in verse
16 that it pleased God to call him by his grace and then to
reveal his son in me that I might preach him amongst the heathen.
So Paul was commissioned to go and carry this message which
he had received directly from the Lord Jesus Christ to the
nations around about, and that was his practice. He went to
the Galatians and he ministered amongst them. But I can explain the gospel
to you as clearly as I am able, but it takes God the Holy Spirit
to apply it to your heart and to your life. It takes a divine
revelation in a sinner's heart to bring grace and peace to their
experience. This is the gospel of the Lord
Jesus Christ because it comes from Christ. It's a gospel of
the Lord Jesus Christ because it's revealed by Christ. And it's the gospel of the Lord
Jesus Christ because grace and peace has been secured by the
Lord Jesus Christ. It has been gained by him. It has been worked out by him. It has been won and accomplished
for his people, for the church, for believers, by the Lord Jesus
Christ. We can't earn grace from God. Not by trying to live as good
a life as is possible. We can't earn it. We can't pay
for peace with God. You don't have enough money.
You don't have enough energy. You don't have enough good works. You don't have enough religious
zeal. You don't have enough ability
to do anything for God. Remember who he is. He is the
Spirit. He is the all-knowing One. He
is the all-powerful One. He is the One who knows everything
about us. What can we do for God? Nothing. He's got everything
He needs. But if He will be merciful to
us, If he will show us grace, if he will give us peace, oh
what a blessing is ours. Oh what a privilege that God
should give a blessing like that. How is it possible that a holy
God can look upon a sinful creature and say, I am at peace with you. How is it possible for God who
is holy to be at peace with someone who is so filthy, so terrible,
so rebellious, so grievous in his attitudes towards people
around about him, towards God himself, that it is as if we've
put our hands in the face of God and said, I don't want anything
to do with you. and yet he is merciful towards
us. How is that possible? Does God
take our sin? Does God take our wickedness
and say, well, forget it, forget it. I can put it away. I can sweep it under the carpet.
We'll pretend it never happened. Not a holy God. No, that sin
has to be dealt with. A price has to be paid, a punishment
has to be meted out. And that again is why we call
this the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, because it's the Lord
Jesus Christ that has paid the price for the sins of God's people. Paul, immediately here in this
letter to the Galatians, immediately reminds them as to where their
grace and peace comes from. Look at verse four. It's speaking about the Lord
Jesus Christ. And it says, who gave himself
for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world,
according to the will of God and our Father. This work which
the Lord Jesus Christ performed on the cross, this work where
he gave himself, gave himself willingly, volunteered himself,
volunteered his body on the cross, in order that he might take away
our sins, in order that he might pay the price so we did not have
to pay it, in order that we might be delivered from this present
evil world. Grace and peace, reconciliation
with God is possible because Jesus Christ paid the price. So God's holiness is vindicated. He doesn't merely sweep it under
the carpet. He deals with it in justice.
And yet, despite that sin in our lives, because our substitute
has taken it, God is able to deal with us in grace and in
mercy and in peace. This is indeed an evil world. Paul calls it this present evil
world and evil pervades every aspect of this world's life. Our relationships get all messed
up because of evil. Our aspirations are disappointed,
our ambitions are thwarted because of evil. Our dealings with one
another, they're corrupted because of evil. This is an evil world. It's a fallen world. Sin is in
this world and it has to be dealt with. Every single person that
is born into this world is born in sin, with the sole exception
of the Lord Jesus Christ. But a deliverance from this present
evil world has been secured by the Saviour. The sin which has
entered into our thoughts, into our actions, into our words,
that sin was laid upon the shoulders of the Lord Jesus Christ as He
hung upon the cross. And God, as it were, slew His
Son. We were talking about that a
little bit earlier. It pleased the Lord to bruise
Him. in order that he might deliver
us from this present evil world. That's the gospel of the Lord
Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ has brought
grace and peace to sinful men and women by the sacrifice of
himself. God is vindicated, Christ was
punished that we might go free. Christ gave himself to deliver
us from this present evil world. When he died on the cross, there
was purpose. There was design in the Lord's
death. There was intent. God used that
in order to bring about the redemption of his people. He willingly,
voluntarily, purposefully went to the cross. It wasn't an accident.
He wasn't taken despite himself. He wasn't taken when he did not
want to be taken. But he willingly gave his life
for our sins. The price of our deliverance,
the price of our redemption was the precious blood of Jesus Christ. And he sacrificed himself the
death of the substitute. But I want you to notice as well
that not only did the Lord Jesus Christ give himself that we might
be delivered, but that he did it according to the will of God
and our Father. Here in this verse, this third
verse, it's only the introduction. He's hardly even started what
he's going to say to the Galatians. Paul's got a problem with the
Galatians. He's got a problem because they've
started to go off track with their understanding of the gospel. So right at the very beginning,
he nails it. He says, this is the gospel of
Christ, that Christ died for our sins. And he did so according
to the will and the purpose of God. Our salvation, grace and
peace with God is the fulfilment of God's will, the accomplishment
of his purpose, the product of his love towards us. And Paul
understood what the gospel was, and he would have us understand
what it is today. The church is redeemed out of
this sinful, fallen world. according to the election of
grace. God is a chosen people. He has
chosen that people from before the world ever existed. This
deliverance of men and women out of this present sinful world
is according to the will of God. It was He who designed it thus. It was He who planned it to be
so. This isn't up to the will of
the individual. This is up to the will of God.
It's His will that we are reading of here. It's His purpose that
is being satisfied and fulfilled. Consequently, it is God, God
the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom
glory is due. Paul says in verse four, speaking
of the Lord Jesus Christ, that he gave himself for our sins,
that he might deliver us from this present evil world according
to the will of God and our Father, Then what does he say? To whom be glory forever and
ever, amen. Where does the glory go for this
work of Christ? Where is the praise to be directed? Who takes the credit for this
work of redemption? The glory goes to God. When did you ever hear anybody
saying to somebody else, thank you, thank you for trusting in
the Lord Jesus Christ? Nobody says that. That's not a phrase that we would
use. Thank you for believing in Jesus. It's not the individual,
it's God who gets the thanks. We say thank you to God for bringing
his people together, for bringing his people to an awareness of
their sin and their need, and for granting that grace and peace
from on high that comes to sinners through the work of Jesus Christ. This is the gospel of Christ.
We thank Christ for bringing divine grace and peace to us. We give God glory for the gospel. we began our service by saying
that grace and peace were more than just head knowledge, that
to be properly understood, they have to be experienced, and they
are God's gift to whomsoever he is pleased to bestow them. I can't give you this grace and
peace today, but God can. God is able to save to the uttermost. There's no one too bad. There's
no one too wicked. There's no one too extreme. There's
no one too lost. This is a grace that is free
as God is pleased to distribute it to one and to another. And
this grace and this peace is experienced through faith. It
is by believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, it is by believing in
this work of grace and peace bestowed to men through Christ's
sacrifice that we begin to experience the blessing of God's goodness
and his love towards us. I say this this morning to you,
friends. If God would be pleased to grant
you grace and peace, He will give you that faith that is required. He will open your heart to himself. He will reveal Christ in you
just as surely as he was revealed in the life of Saul of Tarsus. And that man was converted, that
man was transformed. He became Paul, the apostle of
Jesus Christ. and he will bring you to confess
your sin and to trust in his son. Only then will you know,
only then will you experience the grace of God in Christ. Only then will you have peace
with God. Only then will you know what
it is to be delivered from this present evil world. May the Lord, our God, be merciful
to our souls. Grace be to you, and peace from
God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself
for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world,
according to the will of God and our Father. Amen.