Well as you’ve heard, this morning we are introducing our new teaching theme for the ministry year. Our ministry year begins in the fall and runs through the summer of next year. And so we’ll be thinking in the course of this year, in various ways across the ministries of our church here at First Presbyterian Church, about “Grace and Glory: The Power and Prospect of the Christian Life.” We are going to try and understand from Scripture what grace is – where it comes from, how it works, what it does. And we’ll spend time reflecting on the destination toward which grace ultimately draws every one of its children – the glory of God and the glory of heaven. Jonathan Edwards famously said that “Grace is but glory begun and glory is but grace perfected.” Grace is the power, the animating power of the Christian life, and glory its great final prospect. Glory is where we are going; grace is how we will get there.
In all the pews there are these bookmarks with the theme on them and some prayer points on the other side. We’d be delighted if you’d each take one and keep them in your Bibles and use them to prompt you to pray for the Lord to work by the course of teaching that we are receiving in this year. And as David mentioned earlier, right after this service and just before Sunday School, we’d love it if you’d join us for a few minutes for some refreshments in Lowe Hall right behind me. If you go out this door and turn immediately left and follow the corridor, you’ll get to Lowe Hall. And we want to show you a short video further introducing the theme.
Today, as part of our consideration of that new theme, we are going to begin a fresh study in the book of Galatians. So if you have not done so already, go ahead and turn with me please in your Bibles to Galatians chapter 1. Galatians chapter 1; page 972 if you’re using one of our church Bibles. Given our theme, if you know anything about Galatians you will understand why we are looking at this letter of Paul. It is supremely the epistle of grace. The nature and the work of grace is its great theme. Generally regarded as the earliest letter of the apostle Paul, it has the unique distinction of being written directly by his own hand, rather than through the use of an amanuensis, which was a kind of personal secretary that the apostle seems to have used in the other twelve letters that we have from him in the New Testament. So he says in Galatians 6:11, “See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand.”
And by the way, that reference there to these large letters with which Paul was writing his epistle, that tells us something else that singles Galatians out from all the rest of Paul’s letters, and that is, that Galatians isn’t nice. Galatians isn’t sweet. Galatians is blistering hot. Paul’s large letters are, I suppose, his equivalent of texting someone in all caps. He is shouting at the Galatians. You sense something of his vehemence all the way through the book. Let me give you some examples. Chapter 1 verse 6, instead of the customary word of thanksgiving to God or prayer for his readers, which is typically how he begins his letters, Paul cuts directly to the chase and starts out instead, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you.” Chapter 1 verses 8 and 9, he pronounces the divine anathema, the judgment of damnation upon anyone who distorts the Gospel. Chapter 3 verse 1, he calls, “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” Chapter 4 verse 11, he’s so alarmed by their departures from the truth that he confesses to them, “I am afraid I have labored over you in vain.” And in 4:19, he says, “My little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” So Paul is riled up. He is in anguish over them.
Now what’s going on? Why is he so very upset? Is this a temper tantrum, a defensive young minister frustrated at not getting his own way? What is the problem here between Paul and the Galatians? I had a friend who was a child of missionaries in India and at that time at least it was not uncommon for long term missionaries to send their children to a boarding school while the parents were on the field. Now this was supposed to be a Christian school, designed especially for missionary children. And so far as her parents knew, it was a safe and healthy environment for their daughter. But in the event while she was there, she was horribly mistreated and assaulted by the very people into whose care she had been entrusted. Paul planted the churches in Galatia. They were his children in the Lord. But while he has been gone from them, some of their teachers have begun to abuse their office and instead of nurturing the Galatian Christians, they were feeding them doctrinal and spiritual poison.
Now suppose you were the parent who had discovered the abusive treatment being given to your child in your absence. You’ve entrusted them to the care of others and instead of care, they have received abuse. How would you react? You would not shrug and smile and say, “Well, that’s not how I parent, but each to their own. Who am I to impose my standards on other people?” No, you would be outraged and you would denounce and condemn the abusers and you would do everything in your power to rescue your child from their influence once and for all.
And that is what the letter to the Galatians actually is. It is an intervention; it is an emergency rescue operation. Paul knows that since it was the very nature of the free grace of God in the Gospel that was here under attack, therefore the eternal destinies of the members of the Galatian churches was on the line. And so he is not messing around. He is fierce and urgent and impassioned because he wants to get through to them and to us not just the logic of the Gospel but the gravity and the urgency of it as well.
As you can see from your bulletins, today we are considering the opening five verses of chapter 1. We are going to look at these verses under four headings. First, in verse 1, we’ll look at the authority of the Gospel. The authority of the Gospel. Then in verse 3, we’ll think about the principle blessings of the Gospel. The authority, then the blessings of the Gospel. Third, in verse 4, we’ll consider the molten heart of the Gospel. The authority, the blessings, the heart of the Gospel. Then finally in verse 5, the goal of the Gospel. The authority, blessings, heart and goal of the Gospel. But as always before we read the passage and consider those themes, let’s pause and pray and ask for the Lord to help us. Let us pray.
Our gracious God and loving heavenly Father, we pray as we read these urgent words of the apostle Paul that You would give to us a sense of their urgency and gravity that we would receive them meekly and attentively, be instructed and shaped by them, changed into the likeness of our Savior, and by Your Word and Spirit, enabled to trust Him wholly with our salvation. For we ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.
Galatians chapter 1 at the first verse. This is the Word of God:
“Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead—and all the brothers who are with me,
To the churches of Galatia:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.”
My wife will chuckle sometimes when she gets a text from her father back in Scotland because like the Boomer than he is, he signs his texts, “Love from Dad.” We already know who’s writing the text. His name is in our contacts, but there’s this sort of deep compulsion to conform to the letter-writing conventions that have been drummed into him throughout his whole life. And so he signs his texts. Now you probably know there were similar letter-writing conventions in the ancient world. You can see them in all of Paul’s letters. He begins by identifying himself, then his readers to which the letter is addressed, then there is a typical greeting – “Grace to you and peace.” And Galatians has all of these features as well. And it would be easy given all of that, as we see them here in these opening verses, to just breeze right past them assuming they have no more importance than the letter-writing conventions of our own day. Paul, like my father-in-law, is writing like this out of nothing more than muscle memory, out of mere habit and convention. But that would be an error. Actually in this case, driven as Paul was by such urgent concern over the incipient legalism that has begun to undermine the gospel of grace in Galatia, he squeezes into these standard introductory formula some very non-standard messages. Let’s look at them together.
Notice, as expected, Paul introduces himself, “Paul, an apostle.” But he can barely get past the word “apostle” before he erupts in theological polemic. Do you see that in verse 1? “Paul, an apostle – not from men nor through man but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.” So right away, almost with his opening breath, Paul is establishing the legitimacy of his own authority as an apostle and therefore also the binding authority of the Gospel he has been commissioned to preach. And so that’s the first thing that I want us to see here. The authority of the Gospel.
The Authority of the Gospel
You’ll notice Paul asserts his apostleship was neither sourced in human decision, it is not from men, nor was it mediated by human action – it is not through man. That is, it was not conveyed to him by ecclesiastical authority. There were those in Galatia who were insisting on a different Gospel than the one that Paul preached to them. And so as J. Gresham Machen has put it, “The Judaizers had not been able to gain an entrance for their false teaching so long as the authority of the great apostle remained beyond dispute.” So they had preceded to undermine that authority as best they could. They had said that Paul was at best an apostle of second rank. His was a derivative apostleship, possessed only of an inferior authority; one that could err, that could be countered, that could be rejected. And so Paul responds and says, “Not at all. My apostleship has only one source. It has come through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead.”
That mentioned there, by the way, of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is important. It’s Paul’s way of reminding us what a real apostle actually is. He is an eye witness of the risen Christ, commissioned directly by Him to be His authorized interpreter and spokesman. And you will remember that is exactly what happened to Saul of Tarsus on his way to persecute Christians on the Damascus Road. He was knocked from his horse by the glory of the risen and exalted Christ who brought him to saving faith and set him apart to carry Christ’s name before the Gentiles. And so Paul is asserting the divine authority of his apostleship and he insists on that not because he feels threatened by the false teachers or defensive about his own rights and prerogatives among them, but because the credibility and authority of his Gospel depends upon it. Actually, you could almost take the phrase, “not from men nor through man,” as the great theme of the whole book of Galatians. Paul is going to insist on it in various ways right throughout the whole letter. Not only is his apostleship, “not from men nor through man,” neither is his Gospel, neither is the way of salvation for any of us. The most basic note that will sound throughout Galatians sounds here first of all in the very first verse. This is God’s way of working – whether in the calling of an apostle or the conversion of a sinner, grace itself is not from men nor through man.
And one reason Galatians is such an important book for us to understand is because we’ve got such a hard time understanding that concept, haven’t we? We are constantly trying to insert ourselves into the plan of salvation and carve out just a little bit of space for our own accomplishments, to say, “Look what I did. Because of this God has accepted me or loves me or will give His grace to me.” And that’s why we need to hear loud and clear the opening assertion of divine authority that Paul is making because we have got to stop arguing with God and submit to the authority of Christ speaking by His apostle who is proclaiming to us, assuring us in the name of the risen Savior, grace really is free. It’s free! So lay your deadly doing down. Give up all your efforts to secure the favor of God by your own performance. Stop already with your attempts to find peace and rest in being good enough. It is an impossible task, you know. Instead, hear the voice of the apostle who declares that your only hope, your only hope comes not from men nor through man but in the glorious free grace of Jesus Christ who has risen from the dead. “Thy work alone O Christ can ease this weight of sin. Thy blood alone O Lamb of God can give me peace within. Thy love to me, O God, not mine, O Lord to Thee, can rid me of this dark unrest and set my spirit free.” So we need to see the authority of the Gospel and stop our futile arguing with God and accept that grace is extravagant and free.
The Blessings of the Gospel
Then look down at verse 3 with me please and notice in the second place the principle blessings of the Gospel. What does God bring into your life by this authoritative Gospel Paul preaches? The authority of the Gospel; now the blessings of the Gospel. You’ll notice Paul writes, “To the churches of Galatia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Here again is a letter-writing convention; we’ve seen it before, many times, as we’ve read through the New Testament. Grace and peace are the common greetings of the epistles in holy Scripture. When the IRS send me a letter with a notice that I owe them a big fat check at the end of the year and they begin their letter, “Dear Mr. Strain…” I’ve never once thought it strange that the tax man should harbor such strong affection for me. We know better, right? That’s just the polite way to start a letter. I’m not dear to the IRS!
But customary though it may have been to write “Grace and peace” in a letter in the New Testament, once again in this case it’s much more than just a polite convention. You’ll notice that having insisted that his authority as an apostle came to him “through Jesus Christ and God our Father.” Now he tells the Galatians, “Grace and peace will come to you in exactly the same way – through God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” The point, I think, is that grace and peace are the principle blessings of the apostolic Gospel Paul has been authorized and commissioned to proclaim and of which he is now so burdened to write in this very letter. The Christian life is not a matter of learning some new philosophical calculus. Neither is it simply a moral makeover that you need or a new set of spiritual practices and tools to help you live your best life now. That is not what it means to be a Christian. If that’s all you’ve got, you are not yet a child of God by grace. No, the essence of authentic Christianity is grace and peace. Grace to find us because we are lost, and peace to fill us once we are found. Grace for our utter spiritual helplessness, and peace for our guilt and shame before God. Grace to animate and empower spiritual life, and peace to sustain us in every trial while we live it. Grace to unite us to Jesus Christ, and peace to guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
When Paul says, “Grace to you and peace,” it’s much more than the ancient equivalent of, “Dear Mr. Strain.” Grace and peace is the whole Christian life in summary – which rather begs the question of course, “Does that characterize, do these realities characterize my Christianity? Is yours really a religion of grace and peace?” That will be the central challenge Paul will issue to the Galatians and to their false teachers and to us in these coming weeks. Their religion, you see, wasn’t really a religion of grace and it offered as a consequence no meaningful peace for anyone. There is no peace without free grace. Grace is the root. Peace is the fruit. And Galatians is about making that fruit abound in your life by helping you to see and to understand and rest on the free grace of God in all its wonder and fullness. The authority of the Gospel. The blessings of the Gospel.
The Heart of the Gospel
Thirdly, look at verse 4 where Paul articulates the very heart of the Gospel. And here’s another reason why we need Galatians because it helps clarity for us what the Gospel really is. Were I to come down among you right now and take a microphone and ask each of you to answer the question, “What is the Gospel?” in a single sentence of two, I wonder what you would tell me. Would you tell me perhaps that the Gospel is that God accepts everyone? That, I suspect, is close to the prevailing opinion in our culture right now, isn’t it? The good news is, there is no bad news. God loves everyone, accepts everyone, and it doesn’t really matter what you believe or how you live. Or perhaps if you’ve been around the church for a while, you might say, “No, no, the Gospel is that you must repent of your sin and believe in Jesus, and if you do, God will forgive you.” And that’s certainly a vital, precious truth. And you must repent of your sin and believe in Jesus, for sure, but neither of those is how Paul answers the question, “What is the Gospel?
Look at how he summarizes the Gospel in verse 4. What is the Gospel? “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” – here it is – “who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father.” The Christian Gospel – do you see this now – is not first of all something you do, even if that something is to repent and believe. Those are the implications and the “So what?” of the Gospel. But the Gospel itself is rather a declaration of something Jesus has already done. Look at what Paul says Jesus has done. First of all, “He gave Himself.” He gave Himself. That is love, isn’t it? That’s what it is. He gave Himself. The Son of God loved us and gave Himself for us. “Here is love, vast as the ocean, lovingkindness, as the flood. When the Prince of Life our ransom, shed for us His precious blood.” It’s love. Love that makes Jesus the Son of God give Himself for you.
And Paul says He gave himself “for our sins.” That’s not just love displayed at the cross; that’s love accomplishing something particular. It is accomplishing atonement. He is making payment for our sin by acting as our substitute. There is an exchange that has taken place. Our guilt on His shoulders. The punishment we deserve rolling down upon Jesus in our stead. And with what goal in view? Why does He do it? Why does He love us and give Himself for our sin? It is, Paul says, “to deliver us from the present evil age.” It was a rescue mission. The “present evil age” was a really important phrase. It’s Paul’s way of talking about the world as it now is dominated by rebellion against God. And into the midst of this present evil age, another age has already broken in so that now we can be delivered from the former and translated into the latter. The age to come, the age of new creation, the age of resurrection life has already erupted into the midst of this present evil age when Jesus triumphed over the grave on the third day and rose again to life. And because He did, He became the deliverer of all who put their faith in Him.
And do notice, finally, that the whole thing was God the Father’s idea. Do you see that in the text? The cross, the rescue mission, the love of Christ for sinners, all of it, Paul says, was “according to the will of our God and Father.” This is so very important for us to see and understand. If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you are beloved by God, chosen by Him, and His dear child, not because Jesus came and persuaded Him to love you and choose you and adopt you. The cross did not twist God’s arm. He is not a reluctant Father toward you. The Gospel is according to the will of God our Father. Jesus gave Himself for our sins according to the will of our God and Father. It was, as Isaiah says, “the will of the Lord to crush Him.” The Father sent the Son to seek and save the lost because the Father has loved His people from all eternity.
And so now if you are His child through faith in Jesus Christ, do you see how utterly secure you are in His marvelous love, how stable and settled and immoveable, unshakeable, unassailable His love is toward you? After all, you did not cause Him to begin to love you. Jesus did not cause Him, even by His obedience and blood, Jesus did not cause Him to begin to love you. The Father loved you already eternally, freely, sovereignly and He sent Jesus to deliver you out of this present evil age into the embrace of that everlasting love. And because of that, dear brothers and sisters, the Father’s love will never let you go. Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Goal of the Gospel
The authority of the Gospel. The blessings of the Gospel. The heart of the Gospel. Finally, verse 5, notice the goal of the Gospel. Look at the text again. “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.” What is it that so animates Paul that he comes out of his corner swinging like this as he begins to write his letter? We said earlier that Paul is on fire with zeal to protect and rescue his children in the Lord from the legalism of the Judaizing false teachers. And that’s certainly true, but the furnace that keeps Paul’s passion burning so hot isn’t ultimately the urgent danger confronting the Galatians. It is, rather, his single-minded zeal for the glory of God.
Because that’s what’s at stake, do you see, when the Gospel gets lost or diluted or confused. We rob God of His glory and we assign it to ourselves. We are claiming some credit for our own salvation. “It was some work of mine, some choice of mine, my sacrifice, my law-keeping, my religious performance, I prayed, I committed, I gave, I showed up whenever the doors were open, and because of me, God loves me and accepts me.” But that’s what makes Paul incandescent with rage. How dare we steal the glory that belongs to the Lord alone who saves sinners who cannot save themselves! Salvation belongs to the Lord! All credit is His. All our boasting must be in Him. All the praise goes to His great throne.
And that is the final reason, really, to make careful study of this letter together. It is going to help us refocus once again, not upon ourselves. If you are like me, you need all the help you can get to resist the gravitational pull of selfishness, for self to fill the whole horizon of your view. And Galatians is going to help you refocus your gaze not upon yourself but upon the living God, on His gracious work for you in His Son. And as we begin to grasp that wonder together with growing clarity, we pray there will be renewed fires of gratitude and praise and honor that begin to burn in our hearts and ascend to heaven’s glory. May God help us and bless us, therefore, in the weeks ahead, as we seek to get a fresh grip on His grace. Or maybe better I should say, may God be pleased to give His grace a renewed grip upon each of us in the weeks ahead as He works in our hearts by His Word and Spirit through the book of Galatians. Let us pray.
Our Father, we bow before You and as we trace out the emphases and themes and purpose of this book together, even in these introductory verses, we see in our own hearts how badly we need its message, how prone we are to self-reliance and self-righteousness, how we are myopic and fill our own gaze so readily and we take our eyes from Your glory and we rob You of the praise that is Yours, taking credit to ourselves when all our boasting should be in Your grace alone. So we bow down and we cry to You, by Your sovereign grace and by Your Spirit, O God, shatter the idol of pride in our hearts. Teach us to see the depth of our need of Christ and the riches of Your provision for our need in Jesus, that there is indeed more grace in Christ than sin in us. And resting on Him, on His grace, fill us anew with Your marvelous peace. For Jesus’ sake, amen.