We’re going to be in Galatians chapter 6 tonight. You can find that on page 975 in your pew Bibles. A few years ago, the Nebraska Tourism Council came up with a new slogan for their state. After a few years of ranking as America’s least visited state, they felt like they needed something different to catch people’s attention; something to change their perceptions, something offbeat and funny perhaps. And so, since 2018, the tourism slogan has been, “Nebraska – Honestly, it’s not for everyone!” And so some of the ads have displayed a quote of people’s negative perceptions about the state matched with an image to challenge those perceptions. Like, “Lucky for you, there’s nothing to do here,” with a picture of friends floating down a river in a livestock tank! Apparently it’s something they call “tanking!” There’s another one that says, “Famous for our flat, boring landscape,” and it has a picture of a man jumping from rock formation to rock formation in the Toadstool Geological Park. They’re trying to challenge our perceptions of what we usually think about the state. Now we all know, we all know that the best reason to go to Nebraska is to win a baseball national championship, right? But their tourism council wants us to know that the rest of the state is not as boring as people sometimes think.
Well tonight, we come to the next fruit of the Spirit; it’s goodness. And goodness is boring, at least it seems that way when you think about what it is that usually gets the most attention. After all, negativity is what wins elections, bragging is what gets posted on Instagram, controversy and scandal is what attracts viewers and gets “clicks.” But goodness? Goodness seems strange in our culture. It seems unusual even. Goodness, it doesn’t grab anyone’s attention; it’s not what gets results. Honestly, goodness isn’t for everyone. It’s hard to do good. It’s hard to do good for the long haul. But that’s basically Paul’s instruction; that’s basically the last instruction in the letter to the Galatians – “Don’t give up on doing good.” Don’t give up on goodness.
And perhaps we need that same encouragement tonight within our secular culture and knowing the fickleness of our own hearts. Let’s not grow weary in doing good to our neighbor, to those in our church, for the glory of God and for the sake of the Gospel and the name of Jesus Christ. So our two points for these verses will be, number one, the problem of goodness, and then secondly, the goodness of goodness. Before we read, let’s pray and ask God’s help and blessing.
Our Father, we come before You as the God of all goodness. You are good and Your mercy endures forever. And so often we find ourselves falling far short of goodness and finding it hard to persevere. We thank You that You have called us not because we are good, but because You are good and because Your grace is greater than all our sin. We thank You that You have sent us Your Son, Jesus, that You have given us the Holy Spirit, that You have promised to do Your work through Your Word. And so we pray that You would do that tonight. Speak, Lord, Your servants listen. And we pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Galatians chapter 6, verses 9 and 10:
“And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
We can grow weary in living the Christian life, can’t we? Weary of trying to discern God’s will for our lives. Weary of trying to fight temptation. Weary even of prayer and of the spiritual disciplines. And we can grow weary of doing good. Doing good can be hard work. It can be unnoticed and unrewarded, and often other people seem to be having a whole lot more fun doing whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it. We get tired of doing good, not to mention, well, we’re saved by grace alone and not according to our works. And so what’s the point of doing good works? Well here’s the deal. This book, Paul’s letter to the church in Galatia, it is all about salvation by grace. It’s all about justification by faith alone. “We know,” Paul writes in Galatians chapter 2, “We know that a person is not justified by works but through faith in Jesus Christ.” And he writes in chapter 3 that, “It is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for the righteous shall live by faith.” Paul cannot stress it enough, and we cannot stress it enough that the good news of the Gospel is that what counts before God is not anything we have done. It’s not our best efforts. It’s not our proudest accomplishments. It’s not even our most shameful failures. What counts before God is Jesus. What counts before God is trusting in Jesus and trusting in what He has done on the cross to forgive our sins and to make us right with God. It’s all about faith and not works.
And I’m guessing that we all need to hear that again tonight. There’s nothing, there’s nothing else that can set us free from our pride. There’s nothing that can set us free from our pride of thinking that we can figure it all out, that if only we worked harder we can get and do what we need. And there’s nothing that can set us free from our shame – from the shame of a guilty conscience, from the shame of being completely helpless to do the right thing. There’s nothing else but grace. God’s grace sets us free from all of that. And all that we have to do is receive it by faith. All we have to do is say, “I believe. I believe that Jesus has done that and that He has done that for me.” Now how life changing is that? In fact, it’s so life changing that Paul unleashes some of his strongest rebukes, some of his saltiest language on those who are at risk of subverting the message of grace from the message of salvation. “I am astonished,” he says in Galatians chapter 1. He says, “If anyone preaches any other message, let him be accursed.” “O foolish Galatians,” Galatians chapter 3, “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” In fact, he even says in chapter 5 in what is obviously tongue in cheek language, he says he wishes that “those who tried to unsettle them would emasculate themselves,” according to the ESV translation. You see, Paul is adamant to emphasize that God’s blessing comes not from good works, not from obedience to the law, but by grace through faith alone.
And then essentially, the last thing he writes in the body of this letter to the Christians in Galatia is this – “Let us not grow weary in doing good, and whenever you have the opportunity, do good to everyone.” How does that fit? How does that fit with the overall message of the rest of the letter? How does goodness fit into the Christian life? Well here was the problem in Galatia. Certain teachers had come in and they were saying that in order to be right with God, the people needed to be circumcised. In other words, observance to the law was required in order to receive the promises of God. But what happened, what happened in making it about law and in making it about external obedience and in making it about the flesh or the outer man, is that it actually shifted the whole basis of their being together, the whole basis of their life as a body to something individual and personal, to something that they had done, to something that could distinguish one person from another.
And that’s exactly what had happened. The false teachers, they thought that they were better than others because they thought they had a better understanding of the message and they were merely using the people in the church to advance their own reputation and agenda. In fact, even Peter and Barnabas were led astray and they withdrew themselves from the Gentiles in Antioch because of the differences between Jews and Gentiles. And the whole congregation, the whole Galatian church was at risk of biting and devouring and consuming one another. Why? Because their focus was on works and not on faith and they were living according to the flesh and not according to the Spirit. And that’s what makes the difference in understanding the role of good works in the Christian life. That’s what makes the difference in cultivating goodness in our lives together. It’s a matter of how we sow and what we reap. It’s a matter of sowing and reaping.
You know we all have those words, those phrases in our every day language that become so familiar that we really don’t think about what we’re saying anymore. Simple things like – washing machine. We know what it is, we know it’s for washing clothes, but do we ever think about how we refer to it regularly as a machine? Is that funny to anyone else or just to me? We don’t talk about a coffee machine or a toaster machine, but we talk about a washing machine and we don’t even think about it. Or what about a chest of drawers? We probably refer to it as a “chest-a-drawers” or maybe if you’re southern enough it’s a “chester drawers.” We know what it is, but literally it’s a chest of drawers.
Well I think we do the same thing with the fruit of the Spirit. We know what the fruit of the Spirit is – it’s love, joy, peace, patience, and so on. But do we think about how it’s the fruit of the Spirit? It’s fruit. And the metaphor that Paul is using in Galatians 5:22-23 is an agricultural metaphor. It’s about a planting and harvesting of a crop, and that’s still the metaphor that he’s using in these verses that we read tonight, in verses 9 and 10. What he’s saying is that if you sow to the you will reap to the flesh, but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap to the Spirit. In other words, if you live according to the law and works, then you are going to get division and corruption and trouble. And we’ve seen that, haven’t we? Oftentimes when we notice a pastor or a ministry leader or maybe a politician who really takes on the role of a moral crusader and is always preaching against immorality and fraud, so often that person will end up getting caught up in scandal himself. It’s a sad result. It’s a sad result of sowing and reaping to the flesh. But if we sow to the Spirit, if we live according to grace, what do we get? We get life. We get unity and goodness. And what Paul is saying here in verse 9 is, “Don’t grow weary of doing good.” How do we not grow weary of doing good? The way to not grow weary is to continue to sow to the Spirit and not to sow to the flesh. But that’s difficult.
One of the stories that sticks with me from The Little House on the Prairie series was when the Ingalls lived on the banks of Plum Creek and the wheat harvest was almost ready to be cut and it was the best harvest they had ever had, the best crop that they had ever produced, and then seemingly out of nowhere, a cloud appeared on the horizon and covered the sky. And it looked like a big storm was coming, but it wasn’t a storm. It was actually a swarm of grasshoppers or locusts. And it was a swarm which descended upon the wheat field and it devoured every stalk of grain within hours. And they ate all the potatoes, the carrots and the beets and the beans and the corn. It was all gone. And all that was left was a bare and a brown prairie. There wasn’t a green thing in sight anywhere around. It was devastating to them. But do you know how the chapter ends? The chapter ends with Pa working for Mr. Nelson to earn the use of Mr. Nelson’s plow. And then Laura writes this. She says, “He began to plow the bare wheat field to make it ready for next year’s wheat crop.” Just like that. He started all over again. It would have been so much easier to give up if giving up was an option.
And ever since Adam’s first sin, the ground brings forth its fruit through thorns and thistle and by the sweat of man’s brow, and the same thing goes with sowing to the Spirit and reaping from the Spirit. There are plenty of reasons to give up on doing good. And number one, it’s doing good to others. And that’s selfless. That comes at the expense of our own time and energy. That maybe will come at the sacrifice of our own desires. And goodness isn’t always recognized. It’s not always rewarded as you would hope it would be. Verse 9 says, “In due season we will reap if we do not give up.” You see, the reaping is not immediate. There are delayed results, there are deferred benefits to doing good. And that’s not to mention that it isn’t always seen as good. Isn’t it true that popular morality is oftentimes upside down? And what we read in places like Isaiah 5:20 sounds frighteningly modern and contemporary. When Isaiah says, “Woe to those who call good evil and evil good, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.” It’s hard to keep doing good when everybody says that that good is on the wrong side of history.
And Paul even talks about that in the book of Galatians. He faced persecution because he held to the truth of the Gospel and he refused to go along with popular opinion. You see, in a world where Jew and Gentile were kept apart, it would have been easier, it would have been more popular to have a church where Jew and Gentile were kept apart. But that’s not the Gospel. And by the way, there’s an application for us there today. In our culture, in our culture that so emphasizes and focuses on issues of race and gender and sex and politics, it would be easier and more popular to make those the focus in the church as well. But that would be losing focus of the Gospel. But on the same token, to make the Gospel the main focus, means that there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male and female, but all are one in Christ Jesus. And so the church should be the place where those differences are brought together in Christ.
So for instance, to make the focus on being a multi-ethnic church will be to lose the Gospel, but to focus on the Gospel, should mean looking like a multi-ethnic church. And Paul is stressing that throughout his letters. Those are difficult things. That’s really hard. And it calls for grace – showing grace to one another, showing grace to those around us. But again, goodness is difficult. And goodness doesn’t quit. Doing good is hard because it’s word and deed, it’s thought and look over the whole course of our lives, and it’s to everyone. Goodness means doing goodness even to problem cases included. But there’s no vacation from it. There’s no offseason for goodness. There’s no, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” when it comes to goodness. And when you think about it that way, when you think about how often we fail and fall short, it’s no wonder that we want to give up.
But we were redeemed for a life of goodness. And Paul says it elsewhere in Ephesians chapter 2. He says we were “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” And what he is clearly talking about is the goodness of goodness. And so we see the problem of goodness, but secondly the goodness of goodness. What is goodness? It’s really not complicated. It’s washing the laundry and cleaning the dishes and taking out the trash. It’s giving someone a ride to church or a ride to a doctor’s appointment. It’s a hot meal, a cup of cold water and a listening ear. It’s giving to the poor and loving the stranger who is among us. It’s being a friend, opening your home, sharing your stuff, offering an encouraging word and a moment of prayer for someone who needs it. In fact I think there is a great definition of goodness just in Galatians chapter 5 verses 13 and 14 a few verses back from this one. Paul says, “You were called to freedom, brothers, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love, serve one another, for the whole law is fulfilled in one word – you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” To love your neighbor as yourself, that’s goodness. Or maybe it’s what we find in Micah chapter 6 verse 8. “What is good and what does the Lord require of you? But to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.” That’s goodness. And what is religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father? James chapter 1 verse 27 says it’s “to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” That’s goodness. We know what goodness is. We know that it’s good. We just grow weary of it and we forget to look for opportunities among those around us, even in the household of faith, even in the church. Not to mention we forget to look for opportunities, to be on the lookout for opportunities in the world around us, to everyone, everywhere around us.
And again, we’ve said this before in this series on the fruit of the Spirit, that when we think about the fruit of the Spirit, Paul had a specific purpose in mind in the words that he chose in recording these things. And it’s our tendency, as preachers and teachers perhaps, to pluck one word out of context and to talk about anything that has to do with that one word. So we could talk about the goodness of God, the goodness of God in creation and providence and salvation, and yes, those are true and we need to talk about that. And we could talk about the goodness of Christ and how He went around teaching and preaching and healing and working wonders and giving Himself on the cross and being raised from the dead for our salvation – the goodness of Christ. Of course. And yes, those things have to do with how we understand goodness. But when Paul is talking about goodness as one of the fruit of the Spirit, he is talking about goodness in the Christian life. He is talking about goodness not just as a character trait that we develop in our quiet times. He’s talking about goodness as a character trait that is worked out in our relationships with other people, especially he says, with those who are “of the household of faith.” Because that’s what unites us together and that’s what furthers the ministry of Christ among us through the work of the Holy Spirit.
How do we do that? I think there are three “G”s that we could look at as we think about good works, goodness. And the first one is “grace.” Grace. There is no one who does good. There is no one who seeks God. We are all like sheep who have gone astray. We have all turned to our own way, but God, who was rich in mercy, loved us and made us alive together in Christ when we were dead in our trespasses. What does that tell us? It tells us that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. And so there is no place for boasting. There is no place for trying to prove our merit and our worth. There’s just grace and gratitude.
The second “G” is “gratitude.” Grace and gratitude. Whatever good works we do are an expression of our thanksgiving to God for what He has done for us in Christ. It’s not about keeping score. It’s not about trying to even the balance of the scales. It’s not about trying to ease a guilty conscience. It’s not even about trying to feel good about being needed. It’s just gratitude. It’s “Jesus paid it all, and all to Him I owe,” out of an abundance of thanksgiving to Him.
And then the third “G” is the “glory of God.” Grace, gratitude, and the glory of God. Any mark of goodness, any good of any deed is measured by the glory that it brings to God and not to ourselves. And any ability to do any good work is not from our natural ability but it comes from God through the gift of the Holy Spirit. And if it comes from God, then all glory and praise goes back to God for enabling that in us. Grace, gratitude, and the glory of God. Those are the foundations of good works. Those are the keys to a good life; the keys to cultivating the goodness of goodness.
I once heard Sandy Wilson talk about Jim Collins’ book – I’m sure many of you have heard about it – Good to Great. Good to Great was written several years ago. It’s a book about business and leadership principles and it’s about companies that went from being good companies to being great companies and what it was that helped them make that leap, make that jump. And there are a number of helpful lessons in that book that have become in some ways classic business principles since it was written. But what Sandy said is that he wanted to see what the Bible had to say about being good and about being great. And so he searched through the Scriptures for those words and how they were applied to people throughout Scripture. What he said he found was that there are plenty of people who are called “great.” They were wealthy, powerful, impressive, feared. They were great. But there were very few people who were called “good.” There were very few that displayed the qualities of goodness. There were very few who finished well in a life of goodness, who did not grow weary of doing good.
And so what he said was, what we need instead of trying to understand going from good to great, is we need to understand how to go from great to good. And we find it here in the Gospel. To go from great to good, or not so great to good. It’s here in the Gospel. It’s grace, gratitude, and the glory of God. “Let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap if we do not give up.” Let’s pray.
Our Father, we confess that we often grow weary of doing good and we settle into lifestyles, into patterns of behavior that are focused on ourselves, that seek our own good, seek our own pleasure. And we ask that You would forgive us for those things, that You would set us free from sowing to the flesh and help us to sow to the Spirit, to remember the Gospel, to remember the grace of Jesus, and that You would plant that grace deep within us that it would grow a fruit of the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. That we might look more like Christ and be a compelling witness to Him in the world around us. And we pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.