[00:00:01] Welcome to the River Church podcast. We're all about bringing the life, hope and love of Jesus to everyone around us. For more information, check out our
[email protected] so this morning, this morning we're going to go through Galatians. I'm doing the bit that I was supposed to do last week, but I'm on here now, so that's good.
[00:00:27] Do you think you're someone that can be easily persuaded?
[00:00:33] Do you think that someone can try and get you to do something you wouldn't already have done?
[00:00:40] Hands in the room. Who do you think? Are you kind of like, over this side? No, no one can convince me. I'm really firm in my beliefs or I'm really easily persuaded. What do you reckon? Are you over here?
[00:00:54] You're over here, are you? Who's right over here?
[00:00:58] Okay, who's got a cupboard of stuff that they bought that they didn't think that they needed, but someone sold it to them?
[00:01:08] Do you know all those things about the technology, gadgets, you really need this, this will change your life.
[00:01:15] And you buy it and it goes in the cupboard, never to be seen again. I'm really convinced by the adverts that tell me a robot lawnmower will change my life. I really want one. But, yes, I'm not going to spend that much on that. But, you know, we do get persuaded about stuff, right? We get persuaded about all kinds of stuff, just simple stuff, day to day stuff. But there's actually some really big things that we as humanity can get persuaded. If we look around the world, if we look at politics in different countries, we might claim, how on earth can you believe that?
[00:01:55] Do you know, we think of the divisions and the wars that have gone on and we hear stories of people in different countries. They tell us, you know, they do interviews. If you've seen interviews with people in different countries around the world and you think, how on earth can you believe that we can be persuaded about things?
[00:02:15] And I think we can also be persuaded over our belief in Christianity.
[00:02:21] I think that although we may go, hey, I'm. No, no, no, I know the truth.
[00:02:26] I really know the truth. I'm never going to be persuaded about stuff. I'm never going to be persuaded to do something that's not the truth. I think there's loads of history that says, yes, we can. We can be persuaded even from fiction. If anyone remembers the book Da Vinci Codes, anyone remember that? It's a fiction book, but it had a story all about, hey, they found secret papers that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a child and people were questioning their faith, all about it. I'm like, what's that all about?
[00:03:03] But yeah, we can get persuaded about things. And the question is not that we get persuaded, but it's how do we hold on to the truth?
[00:03:11] How do we actually, what can help us follow the truth? And that's where I want to go this morning in the book of Galatians.
[00:03:23] Now we're going to read in a moment from the start of Galatians, Galatians 1 through chapter 1, verses 1 to 10. I will bring it up on the screen.
[00:03:33] But yes, Galatians is a letter written by Paul.
[00:03:38] He is an apostle. He was sent by God and he went around, around Eastern Mediterranean and then further on sharing the Gospel and planting churches. He went on his first apostolic mission from the 47 to 49. And no, I don't mean 1947 to 49, I mean 00:47 to 49. And here's a little map for those people who likes maps.
[00:04:09] Little map. This is modern day Turkey.
[00:04:12] And yeah, it's a few of his missionary journeys. He had the three that we know of at least. And he sets out, he goes to Cyprus and then he goes up into what is modern day Turkey. And you can see this little area in the middle called galatia.
[00:04:28] And there's 1, 2, 3, 4 cities that are recorded in Acts. If you look, read through Acts 13 and 14, Paul visits. Paul and his team visit Pisidian, Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe. And then for some reason they stop there and turn around and go all the way back that they've come, but they go through that. And this whole journey is probably taking them something around 18 months to two years, something like that. And at the end of Acts 14, it said Paul and Barnabas appointed elders for them in each church that's in each church in each city, and with prayer and fasting, committed them to the Lord's in whom they have put their trust. So Paul's been through there. He's planted churches, they are healthy, they are growing. He is confident to leave them and that they can grow on their own.
[00:05:21] And now we're going to read Galatians 1. So let me turn that and read it through with you.
[00:05:29] It says, Paul, an apostle sent not from men or by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead, and all the brothers and sisters with me to the churches in Galatia. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age according to the will of God our Father, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.
[00:05:58] That's a nice start, isn't it?
[00:06:01] We flip over.
[00:06:02] I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all.
[00:06:15] Evidently some people are throwing you in confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.
[00:06:21] But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preach to you, let them be under God's curse as we have already said so. Now I say again, if anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God's curse.
[00:06:41] Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings or of God?
[00:06:47] Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.
[00:06:57] Let me pray.
[00:06:59] Lord, you have given us your word. It's the word of Jesus Christ, the word of the Father, the word of the Spirit given to us for our teaching, for our encouragement, for challenging us.
[00:07:12] And I pray right here this morning, Lord, you would help us hear your voice through it that you would come and challenge our hearts. Lord, you encourage us, you teach us, Spirit of God, teach us into all that Jesus has said through these words that Paul has written down.
[00:07:30] Amen.
[00:07:31] Amen.
[00:07:33] So Paul has planted these churches. These are healthy churches and yet now we can see there's a problem.
[00:07:42] He says, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one.
[00:07:50] He's astonished. He's like, he's disbelieving. I was going to picture up, put a picture of Victor Meldrew if those people who were around in the 90s. I don't believe it. He's like, I can't believe what's happened.
[00:08:06] I thought you were going strong. What's happened to it? And it's not like written to just one church. It's not an isolated incident. He's writing this letter to four churches in Galatia. He's writing to them all and he's going, what's happened?
[00:08:22] And it's happened so quickly. There's a commentator, Michael Burra, who says the quickness he's referring to is the suddenness of this happening.
[00:08:32] Do you know, I think that this is not. This is not likely to be the only letter Paul written to these churches. Right. Paul's been there and in a cup. This letter is maybe two Years later, Paul is a pastoral teacher and pastor and leader and apostle. He would have been writing letters back and forth and getting updates. How you doing? What's going on? Let me teach you about something.
[00:08:58] And then suddenly we get this letter that's been written down, this letter that we've got in our Bible. And it's like what happens?
[00:09:07] Some news came and it's changed everything.
[00:09:11] It's good to know we weren't the first people in which news goes viral. Right. This is news that's gone viral. And the problem with viral news is when everyone talks about something, they all think that it's true, but Paul's here saying it's not true at all. And I want to look at this section that we've got in a sort of two ways analogy.
[00:09:35] Do you know the two ways kind of thing that comes through the Bible? So in Proverbs you see the wise man and the foolish man, right? That's a kind of common two ways thing. And Jesus picks it up, doesn't he? And he says, the foolish man builds his house upon the sand. Yeah, I thought we've got some kids in the room, they would know this.
[00:09:58] And the wise man builds his house upon the rock. Yes. And other things.
[00:10:06] The foolish man goes through the what gate?
[00:10:11] Wide gates. And the wise man goes through the.
[00:10:14] Yes, we're here. Well done. Give yourselves a pat on the back. No. And so Paul does this through the letter. And you will see these two ways kind of thing. Which way are you going to choose? It's like faith or works. It's.
[00:10:28] And grace. And those will be unpacked. And what we want to show you this morning is that Paul gives a similar thing here. And we see this in a kind of. You can look at this section and see the start and the end of it.
[00:10:43] So that slide's not there? No. Okay. The slide's not there. Okay. So right at the start you saw that it said Paul and apostles sent from.
[00:10:53] Sent not from men or by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father. And then at the end he says, am I now trying to win the approval of human beings or God? And I think Paul is trying to call in this question of who are you following?
[00:11:12] Who are you following?
[00:11:14] Are you following people like Paul who says he's an apostle and he sent one by God, or are you following other people?
[00:11:24] Other people who are people pleasers who are trying to win the approval of people?
[00:11:32] And that's the challenge for us today, isn't it? In a world with so Many voices, so many possible things that you can hear, so many Christian literature or preaches or sermons out there or songs or blogs and everything. It's who are you listening to, who are you following, and where are they taking? And I just want to look at some of the sort of identifying characteristics to help us think about critically about who we're following, who we're listening to.
[00:12:06] And so I want to talk about people pleasers.
[00:12:10] People pleasers. And I want to jump right to the end of the letter, because Paul sums up his arguments at the end of the letter, and he says in Galatians 6:12, those who want to impress people by means of the flesh, people pleasers, he says they're of the flesh. What does that mean? Well, he means not of God. He means sort of sinful desires and actions. And if you go into Galatians 5, he will list a whole lot of things, things that you typically might think about, things like participating in pagan religious festivals, sexual immorality and drunkenness.
[00:12:50] But he also lists more subtle things, things like hatred and envy and selfish ambition and divisiveness. Those are things that he's saying of people that want to impress others.
[00:13:06] And I think, unfortunately, in our day, but in every day throughout history, there are famous people who are celebrated because of their hatred towards others.
[00:13:20] I'm sure, you know, I'm sure you've read or seen people quote and they're celebrated because of the way they get to put down other people do. You know, they can bring a real rebuke on someone else. And it's like, yeah, he's great, and he gets celebrated, or she gets celebrated.
[00:13:40] But rather than be something to celebrate, I think it's a warning sign to us about the character of that person talking.
[00:13:49] But the second thing in that verse also is that it goes on to say the only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ.
[00:14:03] Now, plenty of celebrities who like putting down others also welcome a public fight, don't they?
[00:14:12] They welcome a spat or a battle over social media or the news, Twitter and things. And it's seen as a measure of strength. Isn't it like, hey, I can put down someone, I can engage in this battle. I can win the Twitter war. And it's seen as a measure of strength.
[00:14:31] And it's like, you know, people gather around them and follow them because of their strength. But let's remember the context in which Paul is writing.
[00:14:42] Let's remember the context that we were seeing earlier about Jesus, because Jesus was publicly, he was shamefully executed by crucifixion by the Romans.
[00:14:56] Do you know to associate yourself with Jesus is to associate yourself not with a warrior, not with someone who is strong in the public eye, but someone who is despised.
[00:15:12] Someone who many people would say was defeated upon that cross.
[00:15:19] And people pleasers don't do that.
[00:15:21] They don't associate with weakness.
[00:15:25] And it should really be a warning sign to us if we're following people that only associate with the strong and the powerful. Let me give you two examples.
[00:15:38] When you read through the Gospels, who does Jesus most have a go at?
[00:15:43] The Pharisees. Yeah.
[00:15:47] And you can think, hey, he's having a go at the people in charge. Right? These are the powerful people and we all dislike powerful people because they're all corrupt. So these must be the powerful people that Jesus is having a go at. Right.
[00:16:04] But the problem with that is they're not in charge because the Romans are in charge.
[00:16:11] And I don't know if you've noticed, but Jesus doesn't really have much to say about the Romans. He doesn't talk about them very much at all.
[00:16:21] But he has a go at the Pharisees. And they're these people that know the law, know the scriptures, and they put a real pressure on dietary and sort of purity laws of following the Jewish customs. We had the law of Moses, but over time, the Jews had built up many, many sort of laws around that so that you don't cross and you don't cross one of the laws of Moses. So we build up some protection, fences around it.
[00:16:49] And so they were doing it, and Jesus was accusing them of focusing on all of these laws and not focusing on God.
[00:16:57] They'd missed the point.
[00:17:00] And in doing that, what they'd done is they hadn't made it easier to follow God, they'd made it harder.
[00:17:07] And this whole thing, they'd become the professional, they'd become the professionals.
[00:17:13] They were the professional religious people.
[00:17:16] So if you as an individual wanted to know, how do I follow God? You had to go to them.
[00:17:23] You had to go to them.
[00:17:25] It's like going to a solicitor these days, isn't it?
[00:17:28] How do I, I don't know, get a mortgage? I need to go through a solicitor, you know, how do I need to do anything legal? They were making themselves out to them. And what were they getting out of it? They were getting power out of it, they were getting celebrity, they were getting. People had to follow them.
[00:17:48] Another modern example, and I'll try and tread carefully, but there are people these days who preach a Health and wealth gospel who preach what's sometimes called a prosperity gospel.
[00:18:02] And they might look at the scriptures and think like and talk about how, hey back Abraham.
[00:18:08] Abraham was a man who followed God. God blessed him. And God blessed him with a big family, with livestock, with gold and silver. That was a sort of a measure. They could say that was a measure of Abraham following God. Well, and they might look to Israel and Israel when they had David and Solomon, who were people that really followed God, that Israel was blessed as a nation. And they grew and grew and they had gold and silver and armies and wealth. They were a big nation.
[00:18:42] And then Jesus comes along and says, hey, we should have life and life to the full. Have you heard that phrase? It's from John 10:10. And he says, hey, Paul, God wants to bless you.
[00:18:54] God is a father who loves you and wants to give you good gifts and he wants to bless you. So we should come to him and ask whatever we need and we should expect God will bless us.
[00:19:09] And looking back to the Israelites and looking back to the Old Testament and saying a measure of God's love upon you is the blessings that you receive.
[00:19:21] Now, if you've listened, if you've heard anything like this before, just want to say, please ignore it. Please turn away from it.
[00:19:33] It's taking little bits of scripture and forgetting the whole big narrative. Forgetting that Jesus went to the cross and died and that out of the 11 apostles that were left, tradition says that 10 of them were martyred.
[00:19:48] That persecution of the church and weakness of the church throughout the ages is a sign of God's, of us following God.
[00:19:59] People preach these messages.
[00:20:01] I actually turned onto a channel on TV I won't name. And I watched a little snippet of a preacher preached the other day.
[00:20:11] And I thought, there's something wrong about this because all he ended up with is saying, you're wonderful.
[00:20:19] And that's right, you are wonderful.
[00:20:23] But we're wonderful because we're in Christ. And I didn't hear a lot of in Christ being spoken.
[00:20:30] And then I thought, it's finished. And that's funny. And then came the expected thing. Hey, if you've been blessed by this, his message, send me money.
[00:20:40] He knew that was coming.
[00:20:42] People pleasers win approval not because they want the approval, but they want something else, be it power or money.
[00:20:55] Paul says, don't follow them, follow him, follow Paul. Paul.
[00:21:02] Paul is a man that wants to please God.
[00:21:07] And the first thing that we can see about Paul is that he is not using approval to get something Else, approval from God is enough to satisfy Paul.
[00:21:18] That's all he wants.
[00:21:20] We go through Galatians and they talk about God as Father and how we should reach out to our Father and reach out and call Him Abba, calling him Father, calling the one that's close to us and receive his love and his grace.
[00:21:37] And that is all that we need.
[00:21:41] People that are content with that, more content with that than anything else in this world, because everything created is just a mere shadow compared to God.
[00:21:53] We shouldn't be using, trying to follow God for anything else. As Augustine says, you have made us. He writes this to God. God, you have made us and drawn us to ourselves. And our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
[00:22:09] We need to follow people who follow God. But also, Paul's not focused on affirmation from people.
[00:22:17] He's not focused on trying to win friends.
[00:22:21] That doesn't mean he's a grumpy old soul who goes around criticizing everyone left, right and center. I don't believe that.
[00:22:30] But it means that his godly behavior is more important than pleasing people around him.
[00:22:38] That not being divisive, not being full of hatred, not putting people down, he will suffer not pleasing people so as not to cross these lines.
[00:22:52] And lastly, I think also that God pleasers suffer persecution for the cross of Christ. There's one verse right at the end of Galatians there, and he says, from now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.
[00:23:10] What does he mean by the marks of Jesus? Does he mean a nail through his hands? No, it was. If we have a look at 2 Corinthians, Paul lists loads of ways in which he suffered. He suffered for the Gospel, including arrest, beatings, imprisonment. He's been cancelled, he's been shunned, he's been thrown out of towns. Again, again. He's put himself in danger by traveling through lands that are hostile, that are full of bandits. He's been putting himself in trouble by crossing seas in stormy waters.
[00:23:41] And he's chosen to do the work of the Gospel at times for going sleep, food and shelter.
[00:23:49] And I want to say, are the people that you are following like this today? Model a heart that is seeking God's approval above everything else?
[00:24:01] Do they model a life that is humility and selflessness and generosity and grace?
[00:24:10] Do they model that sacrificial sense?
[00:24:15] And I don't mean they've gone to prison, but a willingness to suffer financially, relationally, social loss to continue the work of Christ.
[00:24:28] These are the people that we should be following because they're the ones that are going to point us to God.
[00:24:34] If the bands would like to come back up.
[00:24:38] And I just want to say right at the start that this is not.
[00:24:44] This is not unimportant to Paul. When we read this first part of the letter, it is of critical importance.
[00:24:53] This is something of real, real importance. He says to the there we go, two ways. There we go. Yeah. He says, if anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God's curse. Meaning let them be far away from God's blessing.
[00:25:14] They'll be away from God's blessing. They won't have God's blessing upon them.
[00:25:21] People who preach the false gospels, the performance of prosperity, are people away from God's blessing, God's approval.
[00:25:31] And that's the destination of the people that follow them as well.
[00:25:35] But the opposite, the opposite for people who please God, who preach the gospel of Christ is found in verse 3. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:25:51] Grace and peace is yours if you follow Christ. Grace and peace is yours because of the blood of Christ, because of what he did, because of what he did in the cross, of what we've been singing about this morning.
[00:26:06] He's made the way. He's crossed the boundary. He's done all the work for us.
[00:26:12] And so he calls us, calls us to live a life of freedom, of live a life of being redeemed, people to celebrate in that.
[00:26:23] Not to go around chasing money or power or anything else, but to chase after him by offering all that we have.
[00:26:36] Because do you know what? There's nothing else in this world that is worth everything that you have.
[00:26:43] So sad to see people in this world give everything and yet attain nothing.
[00:26:50] But grace and peace are yours.
[00:26:55] Are yours if you would follow Jesus.
[00:27:00] Amen. Amen. Let's stand. Let's just worship our God.
