[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 morning, everyone. It's great to be here. And we're going to get into. We're continuing our series through Galatians, through the book of Galatians. If you have your Bibles, please grab them, whether it's on a phone or paper Bibles or tablet or whatever we're going through. We're going to be looking at Galatians 2 from verse 11. Going to read a section there.
[00:00:38] I'll put the words up on the screen and I'll read it through.
[00:00:42] But yeah, I'm just going to get straight into it actually, if you're ready. You ready? Good. Okay, let's get straight into says when Cephas came to Antioch. Cephas is the Hebrew name of. Of Peter. You might know him as Peter. I know a lot of people in this room have names from other languages. This is just. This is Peter as Cephas.
[00:01:08] It says, I oppose him to his face. This is Paul speaking, because he stood condemned for before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group, the other Jews who joined him in his hypocrisy.
[00:01:33] So that by the hypocrisy, even Barnabas was led astray.
[00:01:39] When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the Gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, you are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it then that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? We, who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles, know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.
[00:02:03] So we too have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law. Because by the works of the law, no one will be justified.
[00:02:16] But if in seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews find ourselves also among the sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin?
[00:02:27] Absolutely not. If I rebuild what I destroyed, then I would be a law breaker. For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live. But Christ lives in me. The Life, I now live in the body. I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
[00:02:54] I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing.
[00:03:03] Father, we just want to thank you for these amazing words, the truth of the gospel, the truth that reminds us what Jesus has done for us.
[00:03:14] And, Lord, I just pray. Holy Spirit, I so ask that you make these truths alive and vibrant and before us in all that we do as we walk in life.
[00:03:30] Lord, these are words that we hold onto. They are our rock in times of trouble. They are our celebration in times of joy.
[00:03:41] Lord, I pray. Come and reveal your word to us here this morning.
[00:03:45] Amen.
[00:03:46] Amen.
[00:03:48] Great.
[00:03:49] Okay. So the film A Few Good Men, many people know it here.
[00:03:55] Yeah, it's a film. It's probably quite old now, showing a bit of age. A film. Colonel Jessup. Jack Nielsen plays Colonel Jessup in it. And he is a hard man. He is responsible for battalion, platoon, group of soldiers, and responsible for their training and for them making them into good soldiers that can go out into battlefields and depend upon one another and work together.
[00:04:28] And so he's a man that is quite strict.
[00:04:31] He has a set of rules and beliefs about how it makes. How we make what. How it makes soldiers into those that can go out and be good soldiers on the battlefield. And through his rules, he's got this quite.
[00:04:46] He enforces these rules quite severely. Like, you have to really pay attention and fall in line with the rules. And if you don't, he's got some harsh measures about how to.
[00:04:59] How to judge, how to punish those who fall out of line.
[00:05:05] And through the story, one of those soldiers who gets exercised this punishment on actually dies through the process. And there comes this big court case. And in the court case, you know the line, don't you?
[00:05:21] You can't handle the truth. What is the truth? You can't handle the truth.
[00:05:26] And it shows. What it shows is Colonel Jessup as a hypocrite.
[00:05:32] It shows him as a person that is really strict on rules and on. You need to follow the law. You need to follow what I've put down.
[00:05:41] But he doesn't follow the rules that other people have put down. He's a hypocrite in the sense of it. He's like, I can do. I can. You know, everyone needs to follow the rules, but I don't need to follow the rules.
[00:05:55] And hypocrisy. Hey, it's a problem, isn't it? In our society, hypocrisy is something that we see all the time.
[00:06:03] I mean, I don't even have to point to the news this week about a cabinet member having to sit down, stand down, resign because of hypocrisy. We see it in politicians, we see it in celebrities, we see it in people all the time. People who say one thing and then it shows that in their life they're doing something else.
[00:06:23] And our culture as it goes, at the moment, what's important to our culture is something.
[00:06:30] One of the values is authenticity. People that do what they believe in, that stand up for what they believe in. So, you know, hold the phrase, be who you are, do the things that are really important to you. And that's something that is really important. So when people show their lives in an authentic way on social media or whatever platforms, people are heroed because of it.
[00:06:57] We have a problem with trust in our culture. We have a problem with authority. And so we are looking for those that are authentic in it. And so hypocrisy is a real problem.
[00:07:09] Hypocrisy is, you know, we see it as people are trying to manipulate us. They're not being truthful, they're manipulating us. They're presenting a false image.
[00:07:20] And so, you know, those that express hypocrisy are then canceled, aren't they?
[00:07:28] Their voices are quashed.
[00:07:30] They need to be not listened to.
[00:07:33] And so we get to this story in Galatians and what's the accusation?
[00:07:38] Paul's accusation to Peter is that he is being a hypocrite. He is saying one thing and doing another thing. And it's easy actually, I think, to point the finger at Peter and say, hey, he's a really bad person, right? To say Peter is the bad man in this story. But we actually realized that he says that men from James came. Who's James? James in this story is the leader of the church in Jerusalem, the Lord's brother, not one of the apostles. It's very difficult, actually, I find in the New Testament to sort out all the many James's. There are many, many Jameses. But yeah, so James has sent men to kind of with. To say to these Jewish Christians there to follow some of the Jewish, Jewish laws, not the Jewish Christian laws.
[00:08:35] I'm confusing you, aren't I? Who's confused? Yeah. Okay, so the Jews as they grew up had very many laws around sort of religious purity. So they'd follow specific eating habits. They had to wash at certain times. They had to go to the temple and Pray at certain times and sacrifice at certain times.
[00:09:00] And this whole sort of doing all these, all these things were a way of being good before God.
[00:09:07] But we can say, hey, what was James doing telling the Christians that they need to behave like the Jews did?
[00:09:16] And you kind of go, hey, what's he doing here? And I think we need to actually give James a bit of a benefit of doubt. So Bible scholars who've kind of looked at it and tried to come up with a reason is that we can see that what happens is a lot of persecution. So where Christians in towns and cities have been, where new churches have formed, that they've got a lot of persecution from the Jews, they're saying, hey, you're trying to undermine our religion, you're trying to undermine our society, our, the way of life for Jews.
[00:09:49] And so it's proposed that James is saying, hey, let's try and get on their side a little bit, let's try and not make such a big thing and let's try and quell the persecution by just sort of reaching out to them, being nice to them by saying, hey, we just, we do some dietary laws, we follow some of that, we follow some of the hand washing and things like that.
[00:10:13] And it's easy, I think, to think about this and think, hey, actually it's a reasonable argument, right, in order just to sort of reach out, to compromise a little bit in here, to reach out. And I think even then it says Barnabas persuaded was kind of leans towards, hey, this is a reasonable argument.
[00:10:32] But despite good intentions from James and Peter and Barnabas, despite good intentions, there seems to be a bad outcome.
[00:10:45] Now, I don't know about you, but there is, in this society we can look at people and say, there are the pragmatists and the idealists.
[00:10:56] Who's a pragmatist in the room?
[00:10:59] Who's those in a pragmatist in the room and who thinks they're an idealist and who's in between?
[00:11:06] Everyone else.
[00:11:07] Idealists. Like we get these sort of images, don't we, about idealists and pragmatists and we can use them in a sort of derogatory way. Oh, you're one of these, right? And so we can say, hey, idealists are those that want to get things perfect, get things right.
[00:11:26] They are ones that think about things a lot, the vision of perfection, how we should do things right and work out how we should get there. And pragmatists are those that think, hey, I just need to get on, I need to do something now. We need to do something right now. So we need to find a practical solution of what works right now, in the moment.
[00:11:46] And while idealists can be great, but the accusation is they spend too much time on figuring out what to do and they never actually start anything. Okay. So my wife says I'm probably a bit of an idealist when it comes to diy.
[00:12:03] Do you know, I want to look at all the YouTube videos, especially go to B and Q and buy a tool. That's the most important thing to buy, the best tool for the job.
[00:12:14] Yeah. And I never actually start anything, but there we go. I know there's probably lots of other men in the room that are like that, but. Yeah, but pragmatists, the accusation is, hey, they just get on, start something and do something without actually figuring out whether it's the right thing to do.
[00:12:33] And here I think James and Peter and Barnabas are leaning towards the pragmatist. Hey, let's just do something.
[00:12:40] Let's do something. Let's find something, let's do something that helps.
[00:12:44] But the thing is, they haven't thought about the fallout.
[00:12:48] And that's what comes in a minute, which we'll look at.
[00:12:52] And perhaps this is an example where we do need to rely on both. We need to think.
[00:12:59] If we're a pragmatist, we need to get idealists around us. If we're an idealist, we need to get pragmatists around us so we can think and action. Well, do you know, we need to think about what God says in order to act, to do life. Well, it happens all out for our culture. We can easily jump into, hey, I'm just going to reach out to this person. I'm going to sort of talk to this person. But we don't think about the impact in this day and age where society is questioning what it means to be man and woman and that we can think, hey, I want to love people, so I'm just going to love them where they're at.
[00:13:44] Which means thinking about whether you attend certain events at work or you go to different things out in society. And you think, well, actually, what does God say about man and woman? That God created man and woman? What does that mean for society? What does that mean for how we as Christians should act in society?
[00:14:09] And if we just sort of just jump in that we can not act in a right way.
[00:14:15] There's loads of other examples and things like this, but you know, it's just. Yeah. For example, just in a preaching, I want to read out the Word of God, because I believe that it's God's Word and so we should honor it.
[00:14:32] And when we read out God's Word and meditate on God's Word, that actually God is working through it.
[00:14:40] There's lots of other, you know, today churches that are much more sort of cultural seeker sensitive that might just pepper a preach with a words, with a word of scripture here and there.
[00:14:55] But that's. We're kind of, you know, we're thinking about what is our theology, what do we understand about the Word of God and how should that impact how we do church, how do we do community, how do we live life, how are we parents, how are we, how do we do in relationships, how do we act at work?
[00:15:13] So I think this story gives us a call to just think now and again how we act in what do we do and how does it interpret, how does it show what we interpret as God's word?
[00:15:27] But secondly, what is the problem right here? What is the problem right here? The next few verses from verse 16 onwards. The next few verses, I think are such a great summary of Paul's thought and it's really dense so it can be misinterpreted. So I'm going to say a few words about it and hopefully they're helpful. But Paul says here a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.
[00:16:00] What's he talking about?
[00:16:02] Justification. He said justified four times in the space of two verses. So it's obviously important. What does he mean by that?
[00:16:10] Justification is the whole is a law court imagery and it's the thing of being declared not guilty.
[00:16:20] That's the thing. Justified. I'm justified. You are declared not guilty in a courtroom.
[00:16:26] And that imagery Paul uses and the New Testament uses to talk about the last days, it talks about the day when everyone has died and everyone is raised up and comes before God. There will be a day. The Bible teaches that we will all come before God and give an account for our lives.
[00:16:48] Have we done well or not?
[00:16:50] And many people put that in terms of am I good enough?
[00:16:55] God, am I good enough?
[00:16:57] Paul is saying here a person is not justified. They're not declared good and free by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.
[00:17:11] Now, what did the Jews think? So why is Paul saying this? Why is it such a problem? What did the Jews think? And it's actually quite hard because there's a lot of Jews and there's a lot of different things, thoughts that are going in. But Paul himself is from a group called the Pharisees. And they were very strong on this whole, adhering to the law. So all the practices that go along, observing Sabbath, not doing any work on Sabbath, observing all the dietary and purity laws, and they thought that if you did these laws, if you did them in your life, then on that last day you would be granted, well done, your goods. You are free from this law court right now. There wasn't this concept of perfection, right? You didn't have to adhere to everything perfectly because they had the sacrificial system. When you went to the temple, you would bring your offering and that would be sacrificed, and that would be granted forgiveness through that sacrifice. So it wasn't that you had to be perfect.
[00:18:18] It was just the thing of you had to try and observe all of as many of the laws as possible as you could do. So it's such a big emphasis on adhering to the laws.
[00:18:31] But what does Paul teach for believers?
[00:18:34] He says that keeping these laws does not make you good enough in God's books.
[00:18:42] It's belief in Christ Jesus, that he died for our sins.
[00:18:51] But it's not just a problem for our Jews. For the Jews, this whole thing of wanting to achieve, of being good enough for God is not just a problem for Jews. It is a problem for humanity as a whole. Do you know, if you look at all of the major religions of the world today, you will find that they have an emphasis on being good, on doing the right action. So whether it's Islam that has a big focus on prayer, certain times of the day, of fasting, of giving, of pilgrimage, whether it's Hinduism or Buddhism, with their right actions and following them, all religions today are about trying to please God, trying to do enough. Have I done enough to please God? And it's actually a corruption of the human heart across the whole of humanity that we can see in Genesis 3, right in the story of the garden, even, that they wanted to be in control.
[00:19:54] Adam and Eve wanted to be in control of their lives. They wanted to have that control, to know that they were good enough.
[00:20:04] And when we look at Christianity, it's not like Christianity hasn't been affected.
[00:20:10] Just because we have faith in Jesus Christ doesn't mean we're suddenly in our hearts and our characters and our minds. We're suddenly changed in an instant, right?
[00:20:19] You know this. You are not suddenly changed in an instant and think, hey, I don't need to strive.
[00:20:24] We all try and still strive in some way.
[00:20:28] So last term, if you remember, as a church, we went Through a preaching series called Forgotten Pathways. Has everyone forgotten them already?
[00:20:38] We went through and we looked at things like prayer, fasting, about solitude, about reading the Bible.
[00:20:45] And these are ways in which we can connect with God and receive God's grace.
[00:20:52] But I think we all end up with a thing of attention in our hearts, don't we? Of going, have I read my Bible enough?
[00:21:00] Have I prayed enough?
[00:21:03] Have I done it enough?
[00:21:05] And then we get into little competitions between one another. Do you know, we hear someone else who's going, hey, they're praying all this much and I'm not.
[00:21:13] So obviously they are more holy than me.
[00:21:17] I've heard that out of so many people's mouths.
[00:21:23] We can get into it. We can get in this competition.
[00:21:27] Am I good enough? We slip into it.
[00:21:30] As Colin said, we're going to go into a week of prayer and fasting. And these things aren't bad. These are ways how we connect with God and receive God's grace in our life. How he changes us just by doing things that he has called us to do.
[00:21:48] But we have this tension of slipping off. Do you know, either we don't do everything or we do everything, try and achieve. What is the law?
[00:21:57] What's the answer to it all? The answer was what Paul says. And these are just Galatians, 1922, 1920.
[00:22:09] Just words that resonate in me that I have to say to myself.
[00:22:14] You know, almost daily says, for through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live. But Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
[00:22:39] Paul says, for through the law I die into the law.
[00:22:44] But Paul, you're still alive.
[00:22:46] What are you talking about?
[00:22:49] What are you talking about, Paul?
[00:22:52] It's his metaphor for through the law I die to the law. How?
[00:22:56] Because I am in Christ.
[00:22:59] And as Christ died for me and I am in him, I have died to the law. And through Christ, I was crucified. I was nailed to the cross and in it I died.
[00:23:15] But again, I am still alive. What part of me?
[00:23:19] It's that part of me that is the rebellious nature against God. That part of me that's in Adam and Eve, as they said, no, I don't want to follow God. I want to go my own way. That part of me that led my decisions to stay in day by day, every day of my life, that still affects me.
[00:23:40] That part of me that says, I just want to seek my own benefit.
[00:23:44] That says, hey, how can I make this day easy for Ian?
[00:23:50] How can I achieve my own aims? How can I enjoy this life today?
[00:23:56] How little can I do for other people to make my life enjoyable today? We all know what we're talking about.
[00:24:05] And it says. Paul is saying that nature died on the cross.
[00:24:11] That nature died on the cross.
[00:24:14] Do you know? And so even when.
[00:24:17] Yeah. That what was good for me. So even when I tried to do good things, it was still even for my own benefit. Even when I was trying to help other people, it was still to make my life good.
[00:24:30] Still to make my life easy.
[00:24:33] What can I do to keep my children quiet so I can have a quiet afternoon?
[00:24:38] Parents, I know you think about this. I do. No, I don't anymore. Well, no, I still do, actually, but. There we go.
[00:24:48] Well, Paul says that nature has died to the cross. And now, in faith, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. If the bands could come back up would be great.
[00:25:06] See, but the problem is that even though that nature has died, we still struggle every day.
[00:25:14] It's not like it's just disappeared. It's not like that's it. It's gonna. I still feel like a hypocrite.
[00:25:25] I don't know about you, there probably isn't a day when I don't feel like a hypocrite.
[00:25:32] I've still sought my own ends.
[00:25:35] And I suffer the years.
[00:25:38] I suffer the fallout of the years of making a groove through habits, of seeking my own ends, of seeking what pleases.
[00:25:50] But the thing is, even though that is still the reality, even though it doesn't change the truth, it doesn't change what God has declared over you and me.
[00:26:04] It doesn't stop the fact that we are loved, we are accepted. And in faith, we are declared justified in God.
[00:26:16] It doesn't change the fact that we are never going to be good enough.
[00:26:22] We are never going to be good enough. No matter how much you try, no matter how much effort you put in, you are never going to be good enough.
[00:26:32] But the truth is, it doesn't matter.
[00:26:36] Because Jesus is good enough for you and me.
[00:26:40] Amen.
[00:26:41] Jesus is good enough.
[00:26:44] He is the one that could take all of our sin, all of our rebellion, what we've done in the past, present and future, no matter what we do in the future, no matter how much I slip up, my future is with Jesus in Christ. We are with God, adopted and brought into his family. And so I know when I die and I raise when I'm raised again and when I stand before God, he is going to say, welcome, come in.
[00:27:16] Why? Because I just believe that Jesus has died for me.
[00:27:22] And so that should shape our everyday.
[00:27:26] Paul says that should shape our everyday. Why? Because we do not strive.
[00:27:32] We just don't have to strive. We don't have to observe all of these rules and regulations.
[00:27:39] I want to say it doesn't matter how much you pray.
[00:27:44] That doesn't affect your justification before God.
[00:27:48] It doesn't matter if you slip up, if you swear sometimes at work.
[00:27:55] Do you know?
[00:27:57] It doesn't matter because in faith we believe that Jesus covers our sins. That doesn't mean that we go and do whatever we like.
[00:28:07] That's a different argument that Paul expands in lots of other places. He will do later on in Galatians, when we get to see the reality of what that means.
[00:28:19] But it means that before God we are righteous and holy.
[00:28:27] That is who we are before God.
[00:28:29] And he calls us to come before Him. Let's dance.
