[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] right, okay, we're going to carry on our series in Galatians, but I'm going to start with asking a question, as I always do.
[00:00:22] Do you like rules?
[00:00:28] Do you like. I know there's like lots of different. I don't know where you are on the spectrum, but, you know, some people like rules and a kind of knowing how they. Thanks, Gary. How they, you know, how they should operate. And some people really like the freedom to express themselves however they want to. I had a friend who was talking to me this week about. They went to an Asian country over the summer for a holiday and they were really strict on rules, like the etiquette of what you should follow. It's like really, really sort of profound. And you just kind of like coming from different countries is you kind of think, oh, what, what is this? And sociologists, or one sociologist described this as tight versus loose cultures. Have you heard about this? Or the different kind of expressions?
[00:01:21] So here you go, here's a little chart.
[00:01:24] Can you see that? You can see that a little bit, can't you? So, you know, Eastern countries, Far Eastern countries, Japan, Singapore, like that, they have a real kind of strict culture. You know, you turn up on time, the train leaves on time, whether you are there or not. You know, those kinds of things. And then you get over to South America and it's like things happen when people arrive and that's when it happens.
[00:01:57] And we can use that term.
[00:01:59] So we can use the term. I don't know if you're someone that likes rules, but you can say to people, oh, you're a stickler for the rules. Have you ever used that term? And so people that are kind of really fussy about rules and maybe we use the term legalist about them. Do you know? Oh, you're such a legalist. Do you know you've got no flexibility.
[00:02:21] Hey, that person is such a legalist. And that's a popular term in culture, but what does it mean in terms of biblical. What does the New Testament mean when it comes to legalists? What should we mean? What should we understand as that term?
[00:02:39] When we are in church and we're going to look at this in Galatians, if you've got your Bibles today, we're going to be in Galatians 5. If you don't, I will have it up on the screen. Don't worry. But it's great to go along in a translation that you're used to.
[00:02:57] And if you've been with us, we've been going through Galatians. Paul's got a bee in his bonnet about rules, about the people around that are trying to keep these rules. And we have to ask the question, is Paul just against rule keeping?
[00:03:12] Is he one of these people that's just a free spirit? And he's like, hey, stop following those rules. We've got grace now. We can express ourselves however we like. That's all good.
[00:03:25] Or is this something else?
[00:03:28] Because we can have all these different attitudes to rules and rule keeping, and we have to ask the question of why are you keeping the rules?
[00:03:38] Is it something just in your culture? Is it something that makes you feel organized or in control?
[00:03:45] Or is it for something else?
[00:03:47] And so we're going to read through first 12 verses of Galatians, and then we're going to look at it after that.
[00:03:55] Okay?
[00:03:57] Paul writes, I've got the wrong title up there, haven't I? I haven't changed it. It's supposed to say Galatians 5:1 12. Okay, so ignore that title.
[00:04:06] Okay?
[00:04:07] Yes. I'm not a legalist about the titles. Right. Thank you. He starts, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.
[00:04:17] What A declaration of truth. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
[00:04:25] Mark my words. I, Paul. That's not me, Paul. He's writing, I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will have been no value at all.
[00:04:37] Again, I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law.
[00:04:45] This is the law of Moses, the law written down. You who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated from Christ.
[00:04:54] You have fallen away from grace.
[00:04:57] For through the Spirit we eagerly await by faith the righteousness for which we hope. For in Christ Jesus. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value.
[00:05:09] The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.
[00:05:13] You were running a good race who cut in on you to keep you from obeying the truth.
[00:05:20] That kind of persuasion does not come from the one who calls you.
[00:05:24] A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough.
[00:05:28] I am confident that in the Lord's that you will take no other view. The one who has thrown you into confusion, whoever that may be, will have to pay the penalty. Brothers and sisters, if I am still preaching Circumcision, Why am I still being persecuted?
[00:05:42] In that case, the offense of the cross has been abolished. As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves.
[00:05:56] This, this passage is a bit of a summary of, of Paul's thoughts. We're coming to the ends of his sort of theological, his doctrinal points. He's come into here and he's, he's coming to a firm conclusion. I want to just summarize. Paul is saying all of what I said through chapters one to four. And I want to give you the summary train here before I move in to more things.
[00:06:22] And I want to follow Paul's train of thought in this passage.
[00:06:27] And if anyone gets annoyed with preachers trying to alliterate words or use, you know, titles like this, I'm going to use Paul's language here. Right? Okay.
[00:06:38] So he talks, he talks about cutting.
[00:06:43] He talks about circumcision. So I'm going to call it cutting.
[00:06:47] He then talks about people coming in and cut in on you.
[00:06:52] And then at the end he says some people should be cut off. Okay, so, yes, if you think that's trying to be clever, it's Paul's language, not mine. Okay, I'm going to follow through this.
[00:07:04] So he talks about cutting. He talks about circumcision, which is a word he's using to frame the whole law. Okay. Or you know, when you use a part of something to talk about the whole thing, and he's using that, the circumcision in place of the whole law. And as he's gone through this whole thing, he's been saying this whole thing about legalism. And it's that whole thing of trying to use the law, following the law to get right with God.
[00:07:34] I'm using this, following these set of rules to get right with God. And you know, the Jews had this, all of these rules that were written down and that's, you know, that's how they got right with God. That's how they thought they got right with God.
[00:07:52] And today we use the term legalism. But I wanted to ask you a question and maybe just talk to the person next to you.
[00:08:00] We haven't got those rules. We don't do sacrifices on temples. We don't wash our hands before eating in certain ways, but we still use the term legalists.
[00:08:11] What kind of things might be we describing in people?
[00:08:17] And maybe we're talking about church people here, Christians. What kind of things, what kind of behaviors would we be describing about something if we Call them illegalists.
[00:08:27] Does that make sense?
[00:08:29] Yeah. Why don't you just turn to the person next to you and just have a two minute, a 30 second conversation about what behaviors?
[00:08:41] Great, let's come back. What sort of behaviours? Anyone want to shout that? I might not be able to hear if you're right at the back, but anyone want to call out anything, Read your Bible.
[00:08:53] That's one.
[00:08:55] Anything else?
[00:08:58] Attend church. Yeah.
[00:09:00] Pray.
[00:09:03] Say again.
[00:09:05] Women cannot preach as a legalist. That's interesting. Anything else?
[00:09:16] The way we dress. Okay, let me put it into two. Right. Thank you very much for that. You got some of it.
[00:09:24] Let me try and put it into two categories because the first one actually I want to call moral legalism and the second one is spiritual. So in moral legalism I'm actually talking about behavior. Yeah. So anything from the kind of more serious sins from stealing, getting drunk, sleeping around to more things like not swearing, not saying please and thank you, not cheating on a test, not sneaking off home early from work.
[00:10:01] You've gone home 10 minutes early, not doing other things while you're working from home.
[00:10:10] Yep.
[00:10:11] So that's a real controversial one, isn't it?
[00:10:17] So you know, we can get into legalist behavior around sort of moral behavior and then also the kind of spiritual legalism that we get that we can do in church. So you know, the whole thing's about praying, reading, studying your Bible and coming to church and all things like that.
[00:10:33] And all of these things actually are goods in and of themselves being moral, practicing spiritual disciplines. But legalism is when we use them to justify ourselves, get something righteousness into ourselves by performing them. So that's legalism. That's the, that's the cutting.
[00:10:54] I'll move on from the picture of the knife to who cuts in on you?
[00:11:01] Paul says who cut on you? You were running a good race, you were doing so well, but something's cut in on you, something's hindered you. Another translation uses it's easy that this legalism creeps in that you don't notice it.
[00:11:21] What is it? They cut in. They've hindered you from obeying the truth. What truth?
[00:11:27] It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. That is the truth that Paul is trying to say.
[00:11:34] And Paul talks about legalism as being this slavery. It turns forever bound in these change that says you have to do this, you have to perform, you must do this.
[00:11:48] When I was doing a bit of research on this, I've got some books about Christian psychology as well. And I noted, or someone noted about the connection between legalism and obsessive compulsive disorder.
[00:12:05] Now, people with ocd, and you might just accuse someone of having OCD because they like a tidy house, but people with OCD perform sort of behaviors because they have is described as persistence, intrusive thoughts, unwanted thoughts or ideas in their heads. And they commonly try to manage the world around them because they think the world around them is harmful.
[00:12:35] They have that sense of profound insecurity, apprehensiveness, anxiety, helplessness because of viewing the world around them is hostile, it's going to harm them.
[00:12:51] And so the actions are rooted in an anxiety, an anxiety about what's going to happen to them. And so they try and manage the world around them, but by performing a set of rules, performing a set of behaviors to make them feel good, make them feel like they're in control.
[00:13:10] And the guy that was reading the books that I was reading said there's a similarity with legalism.
[00:13:15] There's a similarity where it's not in anxiety of the world, but it's actually a fear of God.
[00:13:22] And it's a fear of an overwhelming sense that God will punish them for not obeying perfectly his commands.
[00:13:32] And the legalist then manages that fear by adhering to a strict set of behaviors, of rules, in order to negate that fear that they've got in their hearts. And as I said earlier, the Jews, they had these rules written down.
[00:13:48] But now it's open to an interpretation, like, we've got some things that we shouldn't do. Yeah, not steal, not lie, things like that.
[00:14:01] But things like, well, how often should I pray?
[00:14:05] How do we interpret that?
[00:14:08] Things like, can I drink any alcohol?
[00:14:13] Where's the lines? This kind of gray thing, isn't it? And so we can end up in a legalism vicious circle that we try. We heap more and more and more complicated and harder rules on ourself.
[00:14:31] Why is this relevant? Well, I think because as we can see that people who have obsessive compulsive disorders, there is a vast scale in them, right?
[00:14:42] So the person who likes a tidy house, the person that is undergoing medication and treatment for it, that so legalism can be seen in that way.
[00:14:54] We can all have an innate fear of God.
[00:14:58] I think we all have an innate fear of God that is our rebellious, our sinful nature.
[00:15:04] But there are some of us that really, really struggle with it.
[00:15:08] And just as people on different scales need different help in dealing and managing their ocd, also there's different ways in which we need help in order to Manage our tendency towards legalism.
[00:15:26] And the Bible calls us to persevere in it, right? We need to just not say, I'm going to pray about it once and it's going to be all sorted.
[00:15:34] That's not the real world, is it? God calls us to persevere.
[00:15:39] We need to meditate on the truth.
[00:15:42] For freedom that Christ has set us free, we need to meditate on those truths. Allow as we meditate on those truths, the Holy Spirit to transform our hearts as we do seek help from one another.
[00:15:57] Encouragement, correction, you know, calling up on behavior. Have you noticed this in your life?
[00:16:05] And look to us to be sanctified, to be transformed over the course of, of our life.
[00:16:15] Now that kind of individual legalism, as I said, can creep into all of our lives. And as Gary said, in a couple of weeks time we're going to have a week of prayer and fasting.
[00:16:26] We're going to have these five prayer meetings, three meetings in addition to our two. And I realized that we are busy people, okay? Life is busy, isn't it? So we have these meetings and I want to encourage you all to come and, and be a part of them. But we're not legalistic about it, okay?
[00:16:45] You are not pleasing anyone or proving anyone anything to anyone else just by being at a prayer meeting. Okay? You're not justifying yourself to God, but I just want to encourage you to come to it. And we're also going to encourage people to fast during the time. And I don't know your experience, I mean, I'm sure there's people here who have fasted for many days at a time. I know, I've heard stories.
[00:17:11] You're amazing people. I have never fasted for more than a day at a time.
[00:17:17] There are some of you that have never fasted.
[00:17:20] I'm sure there are in this room.
[00:17:22] And I just want to just sort of break the legalism in it and just go like this is an encouragement to get involved. Okay? Fasting.
[00:17:31] If you heard Q's Quentin's preached from a number of months ago now about encouraging us into fasting. But be sensitive to your experience, to your needs, to your physical well being.
[00:17:46] On a personal level, I really struggle. I get chronic migraines and I find it's linked to not eating.
[00:17:55] And so I can't, you know, I physically can't fast forward fast completely.
[00:18:01] It just leads me into debilitating states, you know, I can't concentrate and I can't even pray.
[00:18:08] So how is that helpful? So I'm going to try this time that I haven't before is a Daniel fast. Has anyone heard of that? Where you just look into a very plain fruit veg kind of diet? I've seen on the web, Daniel fast for weight loss and Daniel fast for healthy living.
[00:18:29] It's not the point. The point is that we're giving up.
[00:18:32] We're going through some kind of giving up to focus us to prayer. So I'm going to try that. Maybe that's something, if you've never fasted before, to try that.
[00:18:43] Maybe you just want to fast for a meal on one day. But I just want to encourage you to get involved. And I'd love to hear stories, you know, we pray for that week that God would come and transform us as a community and bring us closer to him and to hear his voice throughout the week. So maybe that's something you want to try.
[00:19:05] Seek encouragement and accountability to one another as we do it. Great.
[00:19:11] I see. I had some things on the PowerPoint. You were running a good race. I hindered. Oh, I had some good things. Great. Okay, let me go on to the last one. So the last one.
[00:19:20] So cut in, cut in. And the last one Paul says about cut off. He says right at the end, as for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves.
[00:19:33] Strong words.
[00:19:35] Essentially, those agitators are those people that are stirring up trouble. They're leading people towards legalism. And essentially what Paul is saying, if you're not sure Paul is saying, why stop at circumcision? Why not go the whole way and cut off the whole organ?
[00:19:51] Now, Paul is not literally saying this. Please hear me, okay? This is hyperbole. This is exaggeration. In the same way that Jesus said, hey, if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. He's not telling you to pluck out your eye. He's exaggerating in order to get across a point.
[00:20:11] But I think that Paul is saying here, this is really important for the church because we should be ruthless about cutting off legalism from the church.
[00:20:23] Because legalism can, I think I'm just going to say in two different ways, affects us as a community.
[00:20:30] Legalism in the individual comes out, I think, in two ways. One in terms of judgmentalism, it burdens and restricts the church. Imagine two people. Two people. Two people come to church for the first time, right? And the first person has had a Christian upbringing. They've been in Christian home. They've had good Christian parents.
[00:20:55] Not bad ones, because there are bad ones. Definitely good Christian parents who've shown them God's love. They've had a good experience of church throughout their life. Okay?
[00:21:07] And the second person has not been in a good home.
[00:21:12] They've had parents that are addicted to drink or drugs. They've seen violence in the home.
[00:21:19] They've seen drink and drugs experience.
[00:21:23] And in early life they've started that themselves. They've got into smoking, they've got into drugs as a teenager. They've themselves become violent. They've themselves led to stealing and other people crime.
[00:21:36] Those two people come to church, right? The first says something like, hey, I can feel really welcomed because I know what you're all about and you know, I fit in with you, so hey, how can I get involved? How can I give to church? And we say, praise God, Hallelujah.
[00:21:55] And the second comes to church and says, I don't fit in.
[00:22:00] You guys are weird because you seem to have it all sorted.
[00:22:04] No one seems to have any problems and definitely no one talks about their problems.
[00:22:11] And the second can feel really looked down on and feel kind of overwhelmed to like, how can I change in order to fit in?
[00:22:22] They can definitely be scared of talking or revealing anything about their life because they're feeling like we're a bunch of judgmental people.
[00:22:36] And I think that comes from legalism as an individual.
[00:22:42] If we are individually legalistic about our own lives, then it's expressed.
[00:22:50] What's treasured in the heart is overflow comes out the mouth and our actions.
[00:22:55] And so we become judgmental about other people.
[00:23:00] But judgmental.
[00:23:02] That sort of legalism also then creates a kind of cynicism, I think a critical attitude in our heart. We default to judging other people in the church. Hey, that person, they don't practice like I do.
[00:23:20] They've got a bit of wonky behavior.
[00:23:22] So hey, they're serving nicely or they're trying to give me some encouragement, but I'm not really going to listen to them because they're not as good as me or that person at the front or that ministry or, I don't know, something that someone does. And we kind of go as cynical attitudes toward that person judge them before they've even acted.
[00:23:48] And both of these things that get come out of a legalism spirit end up in the same place as the Galatians.
[00:23:58] Do you remember right at the beginning, what was the accusation?
[00:24:02] The accusation was division.
[00:24:05] The legalists were sitting on one table and the Gentiles, the other people were sitting on another.
[00:24:12] There's division in the church.
[00:24:15] And Paul writes This division is rooted in a personal desire to be right with God through our own actions.
[00:24:25] And we need to say, come on, when we feel judgmentalism, a cynicism in our heart, that we go, let's check ourselves.
[00:24:37] Actually, how legalistic am I in my behavior, in all that I do before coming to God?
[00:24:45] Because what? Because Christ has set us free.
[00:24:50] If the band would like to come back up and come into land, as they say, we must, we must, we must concentrate on that. Christ has set us free.
[00:25:04] It is so clear. Paul wants to be so clear. He's nailed it. He said it again and again. Again. Christ has set us free from earning our rightness before God by our own actions. He has freed us from fear and anxiety before God.
[00:25:25] And in doing so, he should help us with anxiety and fear in front of others.
[00:25:34] Jesus invites us to know God as Father. He expressed that so much through his lifetime. Know God as Father. Paul has said it just before we come and see God as Abba Father, a Father that we can come close to, a Father that lavishes his grace upon us, that encourages us, teaches us, welcomes us, forgives us through Jesus Christ and brings us close and says, it is not your performance that pleases me.
[00:26:08] It is your desire to love me, just to be in my presence, to accept my grace and to live in it.
[00:26:18] Amen. Amen. Let's dance. Let's dance.
