Sermons

Your Freedom in Christ is Serious Business

November 5, 2017 Speaker: Reid Strahan Series: Freedom in Christ - The Book of Galatians

Topic: The Gospel Passage: Galatians 5:1–6

The gospel is a liberating message. Jesus came to set captives free. He came to give you a way of living that can be described by one word, - “freedom”. Liberty is at the very heart of the gospel. To NOT believe this, to not experience this freedom, is to miss the experience and life that Jesus died to give you! The problem is there are always voices either, inside your head, or coming from various teachers, that will turn you away from this freedom, toward a law-based kind of living.

The churches in Galatia were made up of a bunch of people who had been saved out of paganism. They were enjoying the favor of God as a pure gift, received by faith. They had received the Spirit by faith, they experienced the miraculous gifts of the Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus was moving and working among them. They considered themselves greatly blessed. They were free! Until someone told them they weren’t! People came into the churches and told them, they needed to live by the law, they needed to add works and rituals to the work of Christ and the Spirit. And they bought into this legal mind-set. As a result they were in serious danger of losing their freedom in Christ.

Paul used every possible argument, from every possible angle to keep these people free. And in this chapter he says FREEDOM ITSELF IS A PRECIOUS THING. Freedom itself is a good enough reason to stay free.

The ISV translates verse 1 “The Messiah has set us free so that we may enjoy the benefits of freedom”. Christ set you free simply so you could be free! NASB “It was FOR freedom that Christ set us free.” FREEDOM ITSELF is WHY Christ removed the yoke of the law from us. There is more too it, but he came to set you free, simply so that you might be free indeed!

Let’s imagine that you have been sentenced to lifetime of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp. Day after day you are forced to go to work in freezing temperatures, doing backbreaking work in a mine, or carrying heavy rocks. You work 18 hours a day, your food rations are barely enough to keep you alive. You have no hope of escape and no hope of ever seeing your family. Then let’s also imagine that one day the prison authorities tell you, you are all released from the prison. You are free to go! You are completely free from this whole system!!

Everyone is hugging each other. Some people start singing, some are dancing. If someone asked you WHY you were so happy, what would your answer be? “Because we are FREE!” We are free from something that was a burden to us, that enslaved us, that bound us. It is just wonderful to be free!

Isaiah the prophet, 700 years before Christ came, he hears the coming Messiah say, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed and to bind up the brokenhearted, TO PROCLAIM LIBERTY TO CAPTIVES and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor….”.   In our sins and under the law we are viewed as slaves or captives. Jesus Christ, the Messiah, proclaims liberty to us, release from prison.

The Messiah also says, “The Lord has anointed me to bestow a crown of beauty, instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, a mantle of praise instead of a spirit of despair”. Let’s say you have the option of beauty, gladness and praise, OR of ashes, mourning and despair. We would take the crown of beauty, the oil of gladness, the mantle of praise, wouldn’t we? Because there is something intrinsically valuable to us in these things. These are things our hearts long for, things we desperately want. We sense that these are things we were made for and that we are not really living without them.

The same is true for freedom! When Jesus said he proclaims liberty to captives, our first reaction is not “Why would I want that? I think I will choose captivity!”. We wouldn’t say, “What’s so great about that?”, or even “What would I do with that?” (Although that has to be asked at some point.) But our response is thank God for freedom. EVEN if we do not fully understand the ramifications. We know intuitively that freedom is precious, and something we long for, and we know that we are not really living at all unless we are free!

“It was for freedom that Christ set us free’. Freedom itself is such a basic heart cry, meets such a need in our soul, that just to be free is a blessing sufficient in itself.

Who set us free? Christ set us free! Christ purchased your freedom with his own blood and he says to you, “I want you to enjoy it. I want you to live as a free person. I want you out from under the law of performance, and self effort, and establishing your OWN righteousness, and the burden and yoke and shame and guilt and sense of failure that all goes with that!”.

Jesus Christ does NOT want you to take on a set of rituals or rules or laws to gain God’s approval.

Therefore let it be known to you, that through him forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you and THROUGH HIM, everyone who believes is freed from all things, from which you could not be freed through the law of Moses. (Acts 13:38-39)

Christ’s purpose is that you would live as a free man or woman! If someone who loved you, bought you a new car, and you parked it in your driveway or in your garage and never, ever drove it, what would they think. They might even say to you, You know I bought that car for you to drive, to go places, to be free to use it. I didn’t buy it for you to sit in your garage and gather cobwebs.

What is this liberty? Of course, it is not the liberty to sin – that is slavery! But it is freedom from condemnation for our sins. It is liberty from the crushing weight of trying to qualify yourself to gain acceptance with God. It is to feel free, because the yoke of working for righteousness is lifted off of you. You can breathe, you can heave a sigh of relief.

John Stott defines this freedom as the freedom of acceptance with God and of access to God through Christ. We have complete free, immediate access to God any time, any place through Christ. HE brought us to God! We don’t work our way to God, we don’t sing our way to God, or worship our way to God, we don’t fast and pray our way to God, or read and study our way to God. Christ opened the new and living way to God through his blood! We sing and pray and worship because WE HAVE this complete acceptance and access through Christ.

Luther put it this way, “This is liberty in the conscience. Our conscience is free and quiet because it no longer has to fear the wrath of God. This is real liberty, compared with which every other kind of liberty is not worth mentioning. Who can adequately express the boon (happiness and blessing) that comes to a person when he has the heart assurance that God will nevermore be angry with him, but will forever be merciful to him for Christ’s sake? This is indeed a marvelous liberty, to have the sovereign God for our Friend and Father who will defend, maintain, and save us in this life and in the life to come”.

But there is even more to this liberty. It is the liberty to live for Christ, without the rules of the law to keep you in line. It is the liberty that comes from faith in the working of God’s Spirit in you to produce the practical righteousness you need for daily living.

We are free from the law or laws as the rule of our life. We do not live by a code or set of laws. We are under a higher principle, the guidance of the Holy Spirit who empowers us to obey and leads us from our hearts into the way of life that pleases God.

You are never free if you are always trying to do something you don’t really want to do AND that you are not capable of doing. A big part of the liberty we have in Christ is the Spirit putting OUR hearts in sync with God’s heart and empowering us to love and live for God.

The rest of verse one says, “stand firm therefore and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery”. Too often, like the Galatians, we let some form of law-based thinking bring us back under a yoke of slavery. And what is SUPPOSED to be a life of freedom feels like having a yoke around our neck.  

Even though God’s law is good and holy, the law called for a way of living that was not free. It is described as a yoke, or a burden.

Jack Arnold said, “(The Law) sets forth rules and regulations in such a way that it confines men in the area of freedom of choice and self-determination. The law puts a man in a straight-jacket, cramping his experience, hindering his actions and keeping him from experiencing the leading and empowering of the Holy Spirit.”

Christ brought in a new way of living before God in freedom, led by the working and willing of the Holy Spirit inside you. The new life you have in Christ was not made to live under law! As a new creation you are meant to live as a free person.

So Paul says, “Don’t let anyone burden you down again with the law”. Don’t ever let anyone put that harness of slavery on you again! The reason you need to stand firm is because there WILL BE pressure to abandon your liberty in Christ.   Your Christian Liberty must be vigorously defended.

To stand against something implies that it takes some effort, some determination! You have to develop a kind of defiant attitude about this. When that voice of legalism comes into your mind, through your own thoughts or through the voice of a well meaning Christian, you say, “I’ve been there, and done that, and I will not submit again to that yoke of slavery”.

In fact, this goes MUCH farther than just an encouragement to stand firm. Verse 2 “Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all”.

So Paul is not just saying it would be a good idea for you to live in a little more freedom, he say’s it is life threatening if you don’t! So now “freedom” becomes the serious business of your life!! CS Lewis said joy is the serious business of heaven.   This is serious!

If you put your faith in your works or your law keeping, or your religious duties, to qualify you with God, then the perfect standing Christ offers you won’t help you one bit. Christ can’t remove your sins as far as the east is from the west, if you are trusting something else to do that. Christ can’t make you whole again if you are trusting something else to do that.

That is a strong statement! And its troubling! And it is meant to be! This is meant to trouble you! It is

The people in these churches, thought that circumcision would gain them the blessing of God, failing to see and believe that Christ gained for them all the blessing of God, the total blessing of God. Christ gained for you the blessing of God in such a complete way that nothing you can do can add one ounce of blessing to it.

And to seek to gain God’s acceptance by adding anything to the completeness of Christ’s gift, is to discredit Christ.

And just in case anyone missed that point, Paul says, “Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised, that he is obligated to obey the whole law.” If you place value in some work of yours to make you right with God, then you have to fulfill every detail, every command, every ritual in God’s law with absolute perfection.  

When it comes to law based living people always want to do one or two things they think will give them a better status with God, keep the Sabbath, or keep one or two of the 10 commandments in an external way, some other religious duty. Paul says, if you go in for little legalistic living, you have to go for the whole thing! You don’t have one or 5 or 10 things to do, you have THOUSANDS of things you need to do!

Verse 4 “Those of you who are trying to be justified by the Law have been cut off from the Messiah. You have fallen away from grace”. Each warning keeps getting more serious! There is a point where people trust so substantially in their works, that Paul says they are cut off from the Messiah! They won’t experience the benefits of the Messiah.

“You have fallen away from grace”. To fall from grace does not mean the same thing as falling into sin. It means falling away from grace as a means of relating to God. It means to move on to something OTHER THAN GRACE. A person might be a very moral person, living a very clean life, and keeping very high religious standards, yet NOT be living in grace at all!

Verse 5 “For through the Spirit we eagerly await by faith the righteousness for which we hope”. Kenneth Wuest said this about eagerly wait: “The word speaks of an attitude of intense yearning and an eager waiting for something. Here it refers to the believer’s intense desire for and eager expectation of a practical righteousness which will be constantly produced in his life by the Holy Spirit as he yields himself to Him.”

Jack Arnold - “In this verse, Paul gives the first mention of a new kind of life the Christian is to live, not by law but by faith and through the Holy Spirit. This is the life of liberty in Christ Jesus.

The "righteousness" in this context refers to experiential righteousness in one’s life after conversion to Christ. This is the practical righteousness that one hopes for, as he is dependent on the Holy Spirit in his daily life. The true believer is constantly and continually looking for this righteousness to flow from his life. Every Christian should have an intense desire for, and an eager expectation of, practical righteousness which will be produced in the life as he yields to the Holy Spirit in his daily life.”

If you want to live for God, don’t turn back to laws or the law. Go learn what a relationship with the Holy Spirit is all about. Walk in the Spirit. Live in the Spirit.

Verse 6 “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love”. These rituals and external religious duties of the law count for nothing, mean nothing, and add nothing. Paul had to always remind the church of what really matters. 1 Corinthians 8:8 says, “Food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do”.

Circumcision, (or vegetarianism), or any other external practice, itself is fine, as long as you do not attach any spiritual meaning to it. If you think that it will give you standing with God, that’s a problem.

But, if you are enamored with what Jesus did for you on the cross and what the Holy Spirit is doing in you now, you intuitively know that external rituals are meaningless. You know that “faith expressing itself in love” is what matters. Freedom in Christ gives us this single laser focus on love!

Those who become enamored with a more legalistic form of Christianity, always miss this. Jack Deere said, “I’ve known people who never missed a quiet time but who were meaner than a junkyard dog”. How does that happen? Because it becomes about the performance, not the Spirit. The law distracts people from love! They are worried about keeping up their duties and whether other people are keeping their duties and love becomes choked out of their lives.

But faith results in the love of God being poured into our hearts by the Spirit. And then that love is poured out of our hearts to others. And so this becomes the main thing about us, living by faith, expressing love, expressing the amazing, radical love of God.

What it is that makes us free and keeps us free? Trusting that what Christ did for you on the cross was enough to make you forever right with God, AND trust in the Spirit sent into your hearts to lead you in daily practice of righteous living. It’s all about the cross and the Spirit not anything else. That’s what keeps you free and living in love.

meant to scare you away from the law. We ought to tremble lest we place any trust at all in something we do, or perform, to justify us with God.

More in Freedom in Christ - The Book of Galatians

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January 21, 2018

Do Not Grow Weary In Doing Good

January 14, 2018

Bear One Another's Burdens

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