Word of Salvation – Vol. 35 No. 20 – May 1990
Freedom In Jesus Christ
Sermon by Rev. F. L. Vander Bom on Galatians 5:1-15
Reading: Genesis 21:1-13; Galatians 4:21-31
Singing: BoW Ps65, H303, S46, 428, 211:1,23
Brothers and Sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ,
As you can sense by reading the text, the first part of chapter 5, the part we have just read, is very much part of this letter to the Galatians which is a letter of argument. Right through this letter Paul is speaking about the Gospel to people who have seen the Gospel, have heard and had accepted the Gospel but had rejected it, let it go. So in most of this letter Paul is arguing with these people, trying to bring them back to the basics. The basics, which are so simple and so beautiful, but which we, because of our unbelief, human pride and arrogance, find hard to accept.
In this text too, Paul is painting a stark contrast between two totally different kinds of religion. He is not just saying that you have two kinds of Christians, the type you have among you there in Galatia and the type I preach the Gospel to. No, Paul is saying they are two different types of religions. If you get circumcised, Paul says to the Galatians, because of what these people are telling you, then you have nothing to do with Christ. You are outside of the religion of faith in Jesus Christ, but you are of the religion of circumcision. A religion of good deeds, of doing the right thing in order to be accepted by God.
Now you might say, “Why bother with this letter? Circumcision is no big deal for me.” The fact is, brothers and sisters, that this letter to the Galatians has always been one of the most important letters in the history of the Christian Church. Luther’s favourite letters in the whole Bible were Galatians as well as Romans.
The Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages had become very man-centred in the type of religion it preached. The Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages said: you can only be saved by faith plus prayers, masses, worshipping images, living a good life, obeying the church, obeying the priest etc., and that problem didn’t stop at the time of the Reformation. The idea that to be a Christian you have to have faith PLUS: do this, do that, belong here, do the right things, is a very human problem which all Christians right through history, both before the Reformation and since have had great problems with. Why is it that today there are Reformed Church members who make so much of what it means to be Reformed? As if it’s not good enough to trust the Lord Jesus Christ and to accept that there are Christians in other churches. No, it seems you have to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ but you have to be Reformed too!
Now you may be in the Reformed Church for very good reasons. You may not be here because you are getting rich by it, or because it makes you popular or because you were brought up in this church. Whatever the reason for your being in this church, it is important that you know that it is not being a member of the Reformed Church which saves you. It is the Lord Jesus Christ who saves you. To be right with God, it doesn’t matter which colour or which flavour or which group you meet with. To be accepted by God it doesn’t matter whether you have had a charismatic Holy Spirit baptism experience or not. To be a Christian it doesn’t matter whether you go to mass or Lord’s Supper or whether you go to communion in the Church of Christ every Sunday. Those are the extras which may be very important and which may be very close to our hearts but they have nothing to do with what it means to be a Christian. That is what Paul is on about.
Paul starts with a statement in verse 1: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free”. In other words what he says there is that Jesus came so that we might be a free people. Notice that. Jesus came not just so that you might be a Christian. Jesus came not to make you happy but Jesus came to make you free. This text is going to tell us what that freedom means.
By choosing this word “free”, Paul is immediately bringing up the picture in our minds that people who are not Christians are people who are not free. By using these words Paul is saying that Jesus Christ is the liberator, the one who sets slaves free. By becoming a Christian you came from slavery to freedom. The Christian life, says Paul, is a life of freedom and we are talking about what that freedom means today.
What does Paul mean by freedom? It doesn’t mean that suddenly I am free from problems, free from bad health, free from sins and weaknesses – that wouldn’t be true to reality. What Paul means by freedom is basically that my conscience is free from the harsh and condemning word of God’s law. When I am free I know that God is not against me He is for me. In other words, even though I am not free from the power of sin totally and fully, I am free because I know that God regards me a child, not an enemy. Christian freedom means freedom to be accepted by God because of what Jesus did, not because of what I do or I think, or what I can manage or not manage.
Then in the rest of verse 1 Paul says, “Stand firm then. Don’t let yourself be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” In other words, he says to the people of those days: don’t go back to what you had as Jews, where being right with God depended on being circumcised and depended on sacrifices and depended on what the priest did for you in the temple. Jesus Christ came and He did what God wanted. He met the demands of God’s law in our place and yet He allowed himself to be condemned and put to death as if He was disobedient. Because Jesus did that, I am free to be accepted by God. And then to go to God; to think of myself as a child of God. Therefore says Paul: walk straight, walk tall. How is it possible for you to allow yourself to be treated as a slave once again? That’s so cruel, impossible, and so totally unnecessary a burden to live under.
But having said that in verse 2, Paul goes back to the big issue of his day which was the issue of circumcision. When we hear Paul talking about circumcision we are inclined to say, “Why all the fuss? What’s the big deal about circumcision?” Probably half our men and boys are circumcised. It is something minor that a doctor does these days. We know that Jews regard it as a ritual by which you show that you are a member of God’s covenant; something that happens in the first week of life for some baby boys. What’s wrong with being circumcised?
You see, for Paul the important thing is not what circumcision is in the physical sense, but the fact for Paul was that circumcision was an issue. It was the tip of the iceberg for what these people were on about. Just as for Martin Luther the tip of the iceberg was that people were being asked to pay to be forgiven: that was the indulgences issue that many of you will remember learning about. Now there is nothing wrong with paying money to the church (if you wish) so that they can build a big cathedral in a faraway city. That’s not a big deal. The big deal is that people were being told that unless you pay you cannot be sure of your forgiveness. You may never get out of purgatory; you may never get to heaven.
Brothers and sisters, that is how we have to see it today. ANYTHING apart from the clear teaching of God’s Word, on the basis of which people say you can’t be a Christian, you can’t belong to the church unless you do that, is an issue. It is something that becomes a burden. It becomes a matter of slavery. And so I can accept people speaking in tongues. I can accept people baptizing adults rather than children, even though I disagree with it. Those things are matters on which we can differ. But as soon as people say that unless you speak in tongues you cannot be sure that you are a Christian, unless you are baptized as an adult, unless you make the decision to be baptized, you cannot be a full Christian: that’s where you must say, because that’s where the Bible says, there is an issue. When people say that you can only be a Christian by something other than faith, trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ, then you have an issue.
In verse 4 we read: ‘You who are trying to be justified by the law have alienated yourself from Christ. You have fallen away from grace.” In other words, Paul says, if you add any rule whatsoever to what God gives us in Jesus Christ you lose Jesus Christ. Paul says: If you think, or someone else thinks that they are right with God because of some fancy extra that they have added to the Christian life, they have turned their back on God’s grace. In Paul’s eyes, these are not just differences in the Christian church, but it is a matter of two religions. Paul is talking here about the religion of law and the religion of God’s grace. He is saying that the religion of God’s grace is Christ, and Christ alone. If you add anything to faith in Jesus Christ, in effect you lose Jesus Christ.
In verses 7-12 he goes on to point out the reason why these changes were happening in the church in Galatia. It was because of the influence of their teachers, their leaders. He doesn’t say very clearly who exactly those people were. Were they imports, were they the regular minister, were they a group within the leadership of the church, maybe some of the elders? We don’t know, but in verse 8 he tells us why he hates it. “That kind of persuasion” (which had been going on in the church at Galatia) “does not come from the one who calls you” he says. In other words, the teachers or the leaders in the church in Galatia, these influential people in the church were persuading people to do things that never came from God. Their teaching had nothing to do with the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. Their persuasion did not come from the One who called them.
The second thing that worries Paul about these leaders is in verse 9. “A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough”. In other words, these human ideas of these people were spreading. The idea that a Christian must do a few particular things of my choosing, as well as trust Jesus to win God’s favour, is a very popular idea. It’s no wonder it was spreading, and so in verse 12 Paul says: “As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves.” That’s a very strong statement, isn’t it! Why does Paul say that? It sounds coarse. Some of the translations say, “I wish these people would make eunuchs of themselves”. In other words, they advocate circumcision, why don’t they do the whole job while they are at it! I am sure that Paul is not just coarse or short tempered when he says that. Nor is he trying to get revenge on these people or wishing them something really bad. Paul is driving home that what these people are really doing, these leaders and teachers in the church, is destroying the church. And Paul cares about the church so much that he says he would rather see them do something drastic to themselves than take away the simple message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ from the Christian people of Galatia.
We live in a day and age where it is not fashionable to have black and white. We live in an age of tolerance. In many ways that is a necessary thing and a healthy thing. We don’t want a Northern Ireland or a Lebanon in Australia, where people of different denominations or different religions fight and kill each other. This is not the kind of religious intolerance that is Christian and that honours God and furthers His plan.
And yet there are times when Paul puts himself and these religious teachers in sharp contrast. They talk about a religion where people have to do certain things to save themselves. Paul is talking about a God who gave His Son so that apart from trusting Him we don’t have to do anything. That is not a popular Gospel. That is why Paul talks about being persecuted in verse 11. People simply do not want to be told: “Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to your cross I cling”. People prefer to be told that they can make themselves more acceptable to God by having or doing a certain thing, or by going through a certain ritual or tradition or by believing a certain set of teachings of a particular church. People don’t like to be told there is nothing you can do; Jesus Christ has done it all. We like to be told our good life really means something to God. It’s my good life that makes me acceptable to God. People say “I know lots of hypocrites who go to church every Sunday but you just see their life! I don’t need Christ because I’m sure my good life makes me acceptable to God”. That’s what people prefer to believe.
The Gospel is different, and you have to choose between the religion of your own efforts, your own ideas, which is the religion of circumcision, and the religion of Christ and his cross. If you want to feel good or if you want to make others feel good, go around telling them that there are certain things that they have to do and God will accept them. Telling people that there is nothing they can do and that God had to do everything because of the effect of my sinfulness, and that God is so good that He has already done everything that was necessary for me to be forgiven, that humbles you, that can make you feel inadequate, insufficient, frustrated. And yet what you choose, whether it is the religion of Christ or the religion of circumcision, that shows what’s going on inside you. Do I want to flatter myself, or do I want to recognize the cross of Christ and what God has done in his great goodness? What is necessary for me to be forgiven?
Having said that, Paul continues to talk about freedom in verses 13 to 15: “You were called to be free, but don’t use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature.” That’s the first thing that Paul says to correct what some people may think about freedom. Freedom doesn’t mean giving in to sin.
The second thing Paul says about freedom in these three verses is at the end of verse 13. “Rather serve one another in love”, and also in verse 15 “If you keep on biting and devouring one another watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.” So Paul is saying there that Christian freedom doesn’t mean exploiting or hating your neighbour, trying to push your neighbour around, arguing, quarrelling, or criticizing your neighbour. Paul says that if you go on using your freedom in that kind of way, watch out!, for it will destroy you. And so to put it positively, Christian freedom means loving my neighbour, allowing my neighbour to be him or herself, not biting, not devouring, not barking, not destroying one another, but rather serving one another in love.
The third and the final thing that Paul says about freedom is that it means not disregarding the law but loving it and keeping it with a loving and free attitude. Verse 14: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” That’s the teaching of the New Testament. That the law is something that we are free from, and yet we will love it, honour it, and we won’t do that in a nit-picking way, but we will do it because the love of God which is the summary of the law fills our heart and our lives.
This is one of the reasons why these days we try not to read the Ten Commandments every Sunday. People used to think that loving God meant obeying the 10 commandments. Jesus underlined each of the Ten Commandments but He also gave us a lot more commandments, and Jesus very deliberately concentrated our minds not just on the Ten Commandments but on the love of God: the love of God which summarizes the first four commandments about loving God and love which is the key word of the second group of six commandments which are about loving our neighbour.
Jesus came and He said “I didn’t come to abolish the law but I came to fulfil it. And the Law is summed up in that one word: LOVE. So love God and your neighbour as yourself with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your strength.”
This is what it means, said Jesus, to show that freedom that God has given to you. To illustrate that love, do not kill, do not commit adultery. But Jesus went on to say that those commandments in themselves don’t help you to show love because there is a lot more in the sixth commandment than: not killing. It also means that I love, that I build up, that I accept and care for my neighbour. There is a lot more to the seventh commandment than not actually committing adultery. It means that my whole relationship with people must be clean and wholesome and pure in my heart as well as in the externals.
So freedom, according to these three verses, means not to give in to sin but to control myself. Not to exploit people but to love them in a full and healthy and up-building and positive way. Freedom means not to disregard the law but to keep the law, to fulfil it to the whole extent. Not just in the literal sense of the Ten Commandments but fully and wholeheartedly through the power of God’s Holy Spirit working in me. When I have been set free by Christ, that’s how I want to show my freedom, by controlling sin, by serving God and my neighbour, by loving God’s law as Jesus did.
That’s the kind of freedom for which the Lord Jesus has set me free and to which you and I have been called, and to which Paul points so strongly and so passionately in this chapter. Hold on to that freedom; don’t let it go; don’t let rules and regulations and prejudices and your own sinfulness take away freedom. Stand firm in it. Keep your balance. Don’t fall back into slavery, nor into lawlessness.
AMEN