[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] Good. Well, for those of you who don't know me, my name's Al, short for Alistair, not Alan, please don't get those mixed up.
[00:00:25] And one of the elders of River Church, although more often at Gray's End at the moment than here. So it was going to be Ian today, but he's had a nasty wasp sting which he's had a bad reaction to, so he's not feeling too good. So we swapped our sessions. So I'm starting off this new series. But on the second part of don't worry about it, it will work. Okay, so I want to look at this section with three one word headings.
[00:01:08] I couldn't make them rhyme, I couldn't make them all start with the same letter. I couldn't make them spell a word that helps you to remember.
[00:01:16] And so I apologize up front about that, but I did come up with what seemed like a good idea. How many of you are familiar with the what three words? Do you know what that means? What three words? It's about three people who have seen, heard of. That's great. But just to fill you in briefly, it's an organization, They've given every 3 meter square in the world an address made up of three words.
[00:01:45] And you can just put in these three words onto your map system or something and it will give you a route to some obscure place somewhere in the world. So I thought, that's interesting. And I, I thought, I know what I'll do. I'll put my three words, my headings, I'll put them into the app and see where it takes us.
[00:02:06] So that would be fun. And so I did that and I got a reply.
[00:02:10] It's a short reply, it just said no address found.
[00:02:15] So I was a bit disappointed because I thought, wouldn't it be great if actually I put these three words in and it came up with the Mick Jagger center? We could feel wow.
[00:02:24] But that didn't happen. So I was a bit disappointed. But then I did feel that God spoke to me about it. And actually what God said was, I can speak to everyone without the gimmicks and let's be open to that. Let's just be open and expectant to what God wants to say.
[00:02:45] So just to give you a little idea of where we're going to go, the first of my three headings would be the longest part. The next two will be shorter. I wanted to put that up front. So you didn't get to the end of the first part and you think, oh, gosh, we got that about twice. Ignore, miss our dinner, or whatever. All right, it's not going to be like that.
[00:03:03] And my three words then are change, relationship, and accountability.
[00:03:14] Now let's see if we can.
[00:03:18] Okay, that's handy. It doesn't come up on the monitor. Never mind.
[00:03:26] Oh, there you go.
[00:03:30] Okay.
[00:03:32] So I was listening to a message by Tim Keller on Galatians just recently, and he challenged his listeners about their view of the gospel. And he said this. He said, it is not enough to understand the gospel intellectually if it hasn't changed your life.
[00:03:50] You don't know the gospel.
[00:03:51] And if you say that you know God has forgiven you. Excellent.
[00:03:56] That's working now. Thank you.
[00:04:02] If you say you know God has forgiven you, but you still feel racked with guilt, you don't know the gospel.
[00:04:12] And let me just say, if that describes anybody here, we'd love to pray for you at the end of this service. So please come and get hold of somebody and say, please pray for me for that.
[00:04:22] But just think back to before you became a Christian, okay? For some of you, it won't be very long. For some of you, it will be a long time back. But just think back about and ask yourself this question. How has your life changed since that moment? If there are people who knew you then, who haven't seen you for a long time, and they see you now as a Christian, what would be the changes, the things that they would comment on? What changes would they see in you now? Please, this doesn't mean that since you became a Christian, you will never sin again. We all know that that's not true.
[00:04:57] And if you do sin, it doesn't mean that you don't understand the gospel.
[00:05:04] Because when we become Christians, we don't get a transformation all in one go. We actually begin a process of change.
[00:05:15] We still make mistakes.
[00:05:17] Sometimes they're small, sometimes they're big. But when we understand the gospel, we know what to do when we make a mistake, we don't hide away. We come back to God. We confess our sin. We receive forgiveness through the sacrifice that Jesus made when he went to the cross.
[00:05:33] That old hymn, Peace Like a River, puts it like this.
[00:05:37] My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought. My sin, not in part, but the whole is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more.
[00:05:47] Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. O my soul, that is a glorious Thought, isn't it that our sin, whatever we've done, whatever's in the past, when we've confessed it, when we've repented, when we've taken it to God, we receive his righteousness, we receive forgiveness, we receive cleansing, we receive so much our sin is nailed to the cross.
[00:06:11] For the Apostle Paul, the writer of this letter to the Galatians, people noticed a dramatic change.
[00:06:20] Now let me just mention here as well, before we go on that sometimes I'm going to talk about Paul and sometimes I'm going to call him Saul. And that's because that's what the Bible does. In the book of Acts, when we first hear about him, he's called Saul and then later he gets called Paul. This isn't the dramatic change I'm talking about. I'm not talking about a name that just has one letter change and wow, how dramatic.
[00:06:47] It's not that spectacular. It's basically two versions of the same name. The Jews would have called him Saul, the Gentiles would have called him Paul. Don't ask me why that's the case, but that's what happened. And it so happens when in the New Testament, later in Acts, when his name changes and the use of the name changes from Saul to Paul, it's about the time when Paul begins his mission to the Gentiles. So it's a very practical how I can connect with these different people that we're involved with.
[00:07:20] So let's get into this and let's start with Galatians 1. Yeah, that's great.
[00:07:27] So from verse 11, dear brothers and sisters, I want you to understand that the gospel message I preach is not based on mere human reasoning. I received my message from no human source and no one taught me. Instead, I received it by direct revelation from Jesus Christ.
[00:07:45] You know what I was like when I followed the Jewish religion, how I violently persecuted God's church. I did my best to destroy it. I was far ahead of my fellow Jews in my zeal for traditions of my ancestors.
[00:08:03] For Paul, it was a dramatic change.
[00:08:06] And I'm sure many people who live law abiding, respectable sort of lives may feel, yes, he needed to change. He sounds a really nasty piece of work, but they can't see why they need to change.
[00:08:19] Do you ever feel that there might be some people sitting in right now think, yeah, I can see the sort of stuff Saul did.
[00:08:25] He certainly needed to change. I don't do that sort of thing. I'm not like that. I'm a much better person at that.
[00:08:35] Let's just pause here again, though, because although Paul was violent and angry, the Pharisees, the Jewish leaders, they approved of what he was doing. They approved him in arresting followers of the way the Christians who were starting in this new church, they approved of that.
[00:08:54] Saul wanted to bring them back to Jerusalem in chains.
[00:08:58] The Jewish leaders thought that was a good idea.
[00:09:01] As far as Saul was concerned, in his thinking, he was doing God's work. That's how he saw it. And the Jewish leaders and the Pharisees, they supported him in that view.
[00:09:15] So there are people today not maybe doing quite that sort of thing, but they go through the motions of Christianity, like these scales that we've just come up. Their main aim is to try and outbalance their bad with their good. Okay?
[00:09:35] I've heard people talk about this. They say, I don't think I need to become a Christian. I think I'm doing okay, and I'm sure a bit more good than bad. I think when, you know, when God looks at that, he'll be happy.
[00:09:46] That's not true.
[00:09:48] We can't outbalance our bad with the good.
[00:09:52] They may even attend church regularly. They may read the Bible. They don't lie and swear they're honest. They're good people. They keep the rules, especially ones in the Bible. And yet they don't have this living relationship with Jesus.
[00:10:05] Okay?
[00:10:08] They put their trust in their own good works rather than in Jesus. They're like the guy I was just saying about who thinks his good will outbalance his bad.
[00:10:20] And although they look very different to Saul when you narrow it right down, actually their issue is the same as Saul's. They're putting their faith in their good works rather than in Jesus.
[00:10:34] The only thing that makes us acceptable to God is putting our faith in Jesus in that sacrificial death on the cross.
[00:10:44] Lots of New Testament writers will put it like this. John 3:16 is the way John put it. This is how God loved the world. He gave his one and only Son, that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. Luke writes in Acts 10, everyone who believes in him, that's Jesus, will have their sins forgiven through his name. Paul in Romans 10 says, if you declare with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
[00:11:12] Salvation is all about trust in Jesus. That's the only, only way that we get saved. We don't get it by however many good deeds we do. I remember years ago in Floyd McClung, who's gone now to be with Jesus. But he was a preacher, and he told a story about an Indian man that he met who said he had never sinned. He said, this is amazing. I've never met anybody who's never sinned before.
[00:11:41] And the guy, well, that's me, you know.
[00:11:45] He said, I guess you're quite proud of that, aren't you? He said, yes, I am. He said, congratulations. You just committed your first sin.
[00:11:58] Let's get back to Saul.
[00:12:00] When Jesus met with Saul on the road to Damascus In Acts 9, we read about it. It says, let's just read you a few verses. As he was approaching Damascus on his mission. His mission was to arrest Christians.
[00:12:13] That's what was in his heart. That's what he wanted to do.
[00:12:16] A light from heaven suddenly shone down around him, and he fell to the ground. And he heard a voice saying to him, saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? Who are you, Lord? Saul asked.
[00:12:27] A voice replied, I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting. Now get up and go to the city, and you'll be told what you must do.
[00:12:37] So this is an incredible experience that Saul has just had.
[00:12:41] He's had this light from heaven that is so bright, it's actually blinded him.
[00:12:50] And he just can't do anything. He's lying on the floor, and then Jesus tells him to get up. And the people around him, they can hear something. They can hear, like, somebody speaking, but they can't see where it's coming from. They're not sure what's going on.
[00:13:11] And they have to lead him by the hand because he's blind. He can't see anything. He can't see any dim things. He has to have them take his hand and lead him to Damascus.
[00:13:21] And he stayed there. He was blind for three days. Didn't eat or drink. He didn't know what to do. He was in a real state. And then the Lord speaks to a man called Ananias and tells him to go and pray for Saul that he be healed of his blindness. Now, Ananias is one of the Christian guys, and Ananias has heard about Saul and the sort of things he did. And he questions God. He said, lord, is this a good idea?
[00:13:44] Better surely to leave him blind? He won't cause so much trouble that way.
[00:13:49] And God says to him, he's my chosen instrument to take my message to the Gentiles. I've got something for him to do. I've got important things that I'm going to use him for.
[00:14:02] So Ananias goes and he finds Saul and he prays for him. And it says that instantly something like scales fell from Saul's eyes and he regained his sight. Sorry, I need to fast forward through this.
[00:14:22] So talk about the gospel affecting change.
[00:14:26] This has got to be one of the most dramatic, life changing testimonies. You know, you hear testimonies from time to time, don't you? Which are. You think that's amazing, the change in that person's. This has got to be up in the top 10 of those, surely. Amazing testimony. He's changed all his change from being a violent, angry man who hates the church into God's chosen instrument who's going to suffer for the sake of God's name. It says he's changed from one who hates people coming to Jesus into one who encourages people to follow Jesus. He's changed from one who wanted to destroy the church into one who will plant churches in many locations.
[00:15:08] Amazing changes. But what brought these about? Why did he change so much? What happened in his life that caused him to change? Particularly his attitude towards the church.
[00:15:19] I think one of the key things was this revelation that he received about Jesus and the church.
[00:15:28] Saul has been tireless in his mission to persecute the church. But on the Damascus road, Jesus asked him, why are you persecuting me?
[00:15:38] And Saul says, who are you? He said, I am Jesus. You're persecuting.
[00:15:44] You see, when Jesus was here on this earth, he made some amazing promise to his followers.
[00:15:51] I'm just a slight diversion here. We'll come back to it very soon.
[00:15:56] He made a promise that I think still stands for believers today. He says, I will not abandon you as orphans.
[00:16:04] I will come to you soon. The world will no longer see me, but you will see me. Since I live, you also will live. When I'm raised to life, you will know that I am in my Father and you are in Me and I am in you.
[00:16:18] Okay? That was a promise Jesus made to his disciples.
[00:16:21] The church is meant to be a people who follow Jesus and whose lives are intertwined with his.
[00:16:30] Okay, Following Jesus and your life intertwined with his.
[00:16:37] When we share the gospel, we're relying on Jesus the Saviour. When we pray for the sick to be healed, we're relying on Jesus the healer. When we're moved by compassion, we're sharing Jesus heart of compassion. The changes we experience takes us and makes us more like and more like Jesus as we follow him and as we obey him day by day. Okay? That is his plan for it. He wants to infiltrate your Life. He wants to be intertwined with your life.
[00:17:09] But what this also means is that when people oppose or persecute the church, they will always ultimately fail.
[00:17:19] Because, like Saul, they think they're persecuting the people in the church and the people will run away.
[00:17:26] Actually, they're persecuting Jesus.
[00:17:32] An encounter with Jesus changed everything for Saul, and it should do for us.
[00:17:40] Let's move on a bit into Galatians.
[00:17:45] Galatians 1:15. But even before I was born, God chose me and called me by his marvellous grace. Then it pleased him to reveal his Son to me. So I would proclaim the good news about Jesus to the Gentiles.
[00:18:01] When this happened, I did not rush out to consult with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to consult with those who were apostles, because I was.
[00:18:12] Instead, I went away into Arabia and later returned to the city of Damascus.
[00:18:19] And we don't know what he did in Arabia. But I think he wanted to spend time with God and get this clear in his head. He's had such a change. His thinking's got to change. Everything, everything about him has got to change.
[00:18:31] And he needs to get time with God to get the feel of what he's going to do. He's been a dedicated persecutor of the church. Now he realizes, actually, I was persecuting Jesus. I was persecuting the Son of God. I was persecuting God.
[00:18:49] For somebody with a bit of understanding and was receiving more understanding about God. This must have been a scary thing to have discovered. He was actually persecuting Jesus. He thought that he was fulfilling the Jewish law, but he's beginning to understand that the law presents such a high standard that it's impossible to live up to its requirements. He's beginning to grasp that the purpose of the law was to show us our need of a savior. Galatians 4 he'll come on to that.
[00:19:17] Galatians 3 he'll come onto that a bit more. Let me just steal the verse for a moment.
[00:19:22] A law was put in charge to lead us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. And now that faith has come, we're no longer under the supervision of the law. Okay? That's the realization he got. He got this realization that the law that he thought he was upholding, actually he had the completely wrong idea of what it was for and what it was all about. And he's grasping this.
[00:19:50] So what is needed is a relationship with Jesus. It's also good, healthy relationships with one another where we can help each other to be followers of Jesus. So let's move on to our second word, we, which is relationship.
[00:20:05] Okay, let's go into Galatians one again.
[00:20:11] Three years later, I went to Jerusalem to get to know Peter, and I stayed with him for 15 days. The only other apostle I met at that time was James, Lord's brother. I declare before God that what I'm writing to you is not a lie. After that visit, I went north to the provinces of Syria and Cilicia, and there.
[00:20:29] And still the churches in Christ that are in Judea didn't know me personally. All they knew was people were saying, the one who used to persecute us is now preaching the very faith he tried to destroy.
[00:20:43] And they praised God because of me.
[00:20:47] So, having spent three years in Arabia, he goes to Jerusalem to meet with Peter and stays with him for this couple of weeks.
[00:20:56] He also meets James, and again, we don't know what they talked about, although I'm pretty sure he would have talked about what had happened to him and what he felt God was calling him to see. I think in this, what we're seeing, I think he's reaching out for friendship, relationship.
[00:21:13] It's not good to be isolated.
[00:21:18] It's not good to be isolated from other Christians.
[00:21:21] Paul understood that we each need each other.
[00:21:24] And in 1 Corinthians 12 he uses that example. You'll be familiar with it, of how the human body is made up of lots of different parts, but actually no one part exists on its own. And for the human body to function as it was designed to function by God, all parts are necessary. We need all the different bits, and they all need to be functioning properly.
[00:21:48] This means that more than just seeing each other in church on a Sunday morning, it means that friendship relationships, where we can encourage one another and gently correct one another if necessary, and where we can receive correction because we know that our friends care for us and want to help us.
[00:22:06] Proverbs says, faithful are the wounds of a friend.
[00:22:12] Move on to my third word, which is accountability.
[00:22:17] Fourteen years later, I went back to Jerusalem again, this time with Barnabas, and Titus came too.
[00:22:23] I went there because God had revealed to me that I should go. And while I was there, I met privately with those considered to be leaders in the church and shared with them the message I'd been preaching to the Gentiles. I wanted to make sure that we were in agreement, for fear of all my efforts having been wasted and I was running the race for nothing. And they supported me and did not even demand that my Companion Titus be circumcised although he was a Gentile.
[00:22:51] Even that question came up because of some so called believers there, false ones really, who were secretly brought in. They sneaked in to spy on us and take away the freedom we have in Christ Jesus.
[00:23:04] They wanted to enslave us and force us to follow their Jewish regulations. But we refused to give in to them for a single moment. We wanted to preserve the truth of the gospel message in you. And the leaders of the church had nothing to add to what I was preaching.
[00:23:21] By the way, their reputation as great leaders made no difference to me, for God himself has no favorites. Instead, they saw that God had given me the responsibility of preaching the the Gospel to the Gentiles, just as he had given Peter the responsibility of preaching to the Jews. The same God who worked through Peter as the apostles to the Jews also worked through me as the apostle to the Gentiles. In fact, Peter and John, who were known as pillars of the church, recognized the gift God had given me and they accepted Barnabas and me as their co workers. They encouraged us to keep preaching to the Gentiles while they continued their work with the Jews.
[00:24:00] Their only suggestion was we keep on helping the poor, which I've always been eager to do.
[00:24:08] Fourteen years later he goes back to Jerusalem and this time he does meet with the other apostles. And he seems to want now to make himself accountable to them.
[00:24:21] The things he's preaching to the Gentiles, he wants to be in agreement with them.
[00:24:28] This is amazing because he believes that his teaching was things that Jesus had revealed directly to him.
[00:24:36] But he doesn't play the God told me so nobody can try and correct me card.
[00:24:42] Some people are like that. God's told me this and they're not willing to submit that to others. We need to. It's a big thing to say God told me this.
[00:24:53] Let's never use that lightly. Let's never just assume that we can do that to override any other objection anybody might have to what we're saying. Well, God told me. I've heard people use it in ways that I don't think it was God at all.
[00:25:10] And we need to be careful. Paul is a great example to us in this. Accountability is so important, especially if you're in any sort of position of influence.
[00:25:21] And it works best if it's asked for rather than if it's imposed. Okay, if we come up with some sort of plan that says everybody needs to be accountable to somebody and you know you're going to be accountable to this Person you're to that person. Da da da.
[00:25:36] No, actually if you want to grow and if you want to safeguard what you're doing, find somebody you trust and say, can I be accountable to you? Because that's where it works so much better.
[00:25:48] Every now and then we hear sad news of a well known Christian leader who's gone off the rails.
[00:25:54] It's always sad when you hear that. Very often there's a recurring pattern. They start off well, they become well known in their family of churches or across particular area. Then their fame spreads, they become national figures, they become international figures.
[00:26:09] Now so far so good. I can think of lots of people that all that will be true about and they've been an incredible blessing to churches they serve.
[00:26:19] But occasionally the fame bit seems to go to their heads and they stop being servants and they start becoming like corporate bosses who control people, the people who are beneath them.
[00:26:32] They have no one who can speak into their lives, no accountability.
[00:26:35] And then we hear of them falling into sin in some way and their reputation is in tatters.
[00:26:42] Always sad when you hear that. Sad when it's somebody you actually know. I've heard it of people who, I've sat and listened to them preach and thought I've been really blessed by them. And then they've sort of progressed and gone into this fame thing and crashed and burned.
[00:27:00] So sad when it comes. It's so sad. And accountability is the way that we safeguard against that. Trusted people are not afraid to get permission from you to speak into your life. There's a band we'd like to come up. We're going to sing in a moment.
[00:27:21] Paul is guarding against this by meeting with the leaders of the church. As God's told him.
[00:27:28] He's leading by example and we do well to take notice, especially if we're in an influential position of any sort.
[00:27:36] So we've looked this morning at my three words. Change changes the evidence of understanding the gospel changes the outcome of the gospel relationship. Good relationships within the church help us following Jesus and accountability helps us to be true to what God has called us to do.
[00:27:58] So my attempt at what three words may not have brought us to a destination, but actually these three words will bring us closer to Jesus.
[00:28:06] Let's pray together.
