Freedom: Life in the Spirit – Not So Religious
Dr. Tom Pace
October 29, 2017
Galatians 5:1-6
We start a new sermon series today and it’s called “Freedom: Life in the Spirit.” Let me give you the context for Paul’s letter to the Galatians. We’re going to look at chapters five and six of Galatians. If you’ve been in our Scripture Shared Bible Study we’ve been studying the whole letter to the Galatians.
Here’s the context: Paul went on his first missionary journey from Antioch around 47 A.D. or so. He left Antioch and went through the region of Galatia which is in modern day Turkey. He planted four churches there, at least four that we know of based on the book of Acts. Then he returned to Antioch. After he returned, some other Jewish Christian teachers came from Jerusalem. They began to teach in the churches there that in order to be a Christian that gentiles - these churches in Galatia were amazing mixtures of both Jews and gentiles together. So these teachers from Jerusalem began to teach that if you want to be a Christian you need to convert to Judaism first. That Christianity is really just a sect of Judaism and that Christians are to follow all of the Jewish laws. This included the dietary laws, the rhythm of festivals as well as the practice of circumcision. So this group was called the Circumcision Faction.
So when Paul heard about this it upset him greatly because he believed that both Jews and gentiles came to be accepted by God the same way – by faith alone. That’s really what he talks about in the first four chapters of Galatians as well as this little bit at the beginning of the Galatians 5.
We’re going to look at that today and then the next three weeks we’re going to talk about the rest of the letter where Paul talks about what that means in our lives and how we live that now. Listen as you hear the Scripture read from the fifth chapter of Galatians.
Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.I am emphatic about this. The moment any one of you submits to circumcision or any other rule-keeping system, at that same moment Christ’s hard-won gift of freedom is squandered. I repeat my warning: The person who accepts the ways of circumcision trades all the advantages of the free life in Christ for the obligations of the slave life of the law. I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love. Galatians 5:1-6 (The Message)
Let’s pray together. O God, open us up. We do believe you have something for us. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel. And then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
I was walking through one of our upstairs hallways recently and in those rooms they teach music lessons. We have a Bridges Academy that teaches children, and all the way up through adults, different kinds of instruments. It’s a great way to nurture musicians. As I was walking down the hall I heard someone playing scales on the violin. Up and down the scale.
I assumed it was some child or adult in there learning to play the violin so I peered through the window to see the teacher and the child. What I discovered was that it was just the teacher. Just the teacher in there playing scales. I thought, “How amazing that there would be a teacher who is a master violinist – or whatever you call that – who has to play scales to practice. Just dealing with the basics.”
What I want to talk about today is basics – basic Christianity. Sort of the core of New Testament teaching about what actually is a Christian. What is the Christian faith?
In the first four chapters and then sort of trickling into chapters five and six of Galatians, we get a basic Christian doctrine. Let me read to you from Galatians 2:16 because this is sort of the topic sentence and sort of the essence of the launching pad I guess for Christianity.
Paul writes: “Yet we know that a person is justified not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” A person is justified. Sometimes your Bible might translate it “reckoned as righteous.” I like to use this language. A person is made right with God, not by works of the law, not by anything you do, any rules you follow, but by faith in Jesus Christ.
In the early 1500s in the midst of the Protestant Reformation – I guess it was sort of a revolution – Martin Luther was sort of the troublemaker. He was the organizer – instigator – stirrer-upper against the Roman Catholic Church. But he had a collaborator, a man named Philipp Melanchthon who was really the brains behind it all. He was the theologian, the intellect, the smart guy. He wrote a number of treatises, but basic teaching was expressed in Latin as Sola Fide, Sola Gratia, which meant “Faith alone, Grace alone.” Those four words became the very basic premise of Protestant Christianity. For we know that a person is made right with God, not by following any rules, but by faith in Christ.
What I want to do is for us to explore together what that means, looking at this Scripture that we read today. I want to do that by drawing four distinctions for you.
First, it says that Christianity is about relationship, not religion.
You read here that Paul says, “So we await a satisfying relationship with the Spirit.” Our relationship is with God made flesh in Jesus Christ that we know through the power of the Holy Spirit. That relationship is the essence of the Christian faith. We were made to be in relationship with Jesus Christ.
Paul writes this: “when you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects you are cut off from Christ.” In other words, when we decide we want to be really religious and that’s what matters, then we begin to lose that relationship we have with Jesus. Wow – that’s scary!
I’ll have to say when people come up to me and we’re in a conversation, they’ll ask a question, “So are you religious?” I always have this kind of weird feeling inside. I’m not sure because on the one hand I clearly am. I am a preacher, I go to church every Sunday, I read my Bible and I pray. I do all this stuff that you’d count as religion. But I don’t want to be religious. Because religion in my mind and in the minds of many in our world around us, leads to things like self-righteousness, narrowmindedness, worrying about what the neighbors and other people think about us. It’s about social contracts with one another. All those things I just want to push back against.
The Christian faith is about a relationship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the great theologians of the 20^th Century. You may know his story. He led a group during World War II as Hitler was rising, called the Confessing Church. Most of the church at that time went along with Hitler and Nazism, but there was this smaller group called the Confessing Church that did not go along with it. In fact, taught against it. Bonhoeffer was arrested. He was part of an actual plot to assassinate Hitler. He was put in jail, and actually executed by hanging just two weeks before the Allies liberated the concentration camp in which he was being held.
In the two years before he was executed he wrote letters to a good friend named Eberhard Bethge and those letters have been compiled in a book called Letters and Papers from Prison. I want you to listen to what he says. He’s there in prison in Germany at that time. He writes: “I shall not come out of here a religious man.” He declares that in the note dated Nov. 21, 1943. He goes on, “My fear and distrust of religion have become greater than ever here.” Then April 30, 1944 he writes: “What is bothering me incessantly is the question of what Christianity really is. We are moving toward a completely religion-ness time. People as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.”
Wow – that’s so interesting. It’s almost like a prophetic 75 years early. Just a move away from religion. He’s been paraphrased to say this sentence which I love: “Christianity has nothing to do with religion, it has to do with Jesus Christ.” It has to do with that relationship.
Let me go at it in a different way. One of the great writers of the last century was C.S. Lewis. Many of you have read a number of his books. The one that I like best because I’m kind of simple minded is The Screwtape Letters. This is a fantasy story about this devil – sort of a supervisor devil. His name is Screwtape and he’s writing to an apprentice devil who’s new to the business of being a devil. His name is Wormwood. Wormwood has been assigned this subject – or patient as they call him sometimes – and Wormwood’s job is to lead him away from God. To make sure that he doesn’t ever come to Christ.
When you listen to what I’m reading, you need to understand that these are words of a devil to another devil in the letter: “My dear Wormwood, one our great allies at present is the church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the church as we see her spread through all time and space and rooted in eternity terrible as an army with banners. That I confess is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy.
“But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. And when he goes inside he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics mostly bad and in very small print.
“And when he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. So work hard then on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman.”
Wow – ouch! For those of us who have given ourselves to this business that stings. But I think that Mr. Lewis is trying to use hyperbole to say that those of us in the church have to keep the main thing the main thing. And being religious, coming to church, and singing our songs and reading our prayers and practicing our religion is not the main thing. The main thing is a living relationship with Jesus. Everything else grows out of that, but that is the essence of the Christian faith.
Then in our quote from Galatians Paul goes on. Listen to the next part where he finishes that same sentence: “When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace.” Then he says, “As you fall out of grace.” Ooo, that’s a tough one.
The Christian faith is about grace, not about virtue. About grace, not virtue. Now the word grace just means gift, it’s a free gift. It’s not something you earn. So not only are we not made right with God by our religious practices, we’re not made right with God by our moral practices either.
Sometimes people will say to me, “You know it really doesn’t matter what you believe, what matters is that you’re a good person. That’s what matters.”
Well, there’s a lot of problems with that argument. First of all, how good do you have to be? That becomes the question. If you believe that you have to be better than Hitler but maybe not as good as Mother Teresa. Somewhere in between there. So which is it? Just better than half good? Just one percent better? Is it like a civil trial where it’s the preponderance of evidence? Or is it like a criminal trial where it’s beyond a reasonable doubt? How good do you have to be?
See, that’s the problem. There’s no line in there. The only line would be Jesus himself and you’re not going to reach that one.
Here’s the other part. When you read the Scripture, what it makes clear is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of God’s love is not just for good people. It’s for all people. Good people and bad people. If all of them were invited to the Gospel feast, it was the good ones who didn’t even come. They didn’t think they had to. They had it together. They were virtuous enough. They thought, “I don’t have to go to the Gospel feast.”
It isn’t about how good you are. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners and they beat up on him because of it. We tend to get in our minds that if we can just be good enough, if we can just be a good enough person, then God will celebrate.
Here’s another way to look at it. You know, and this is a little bit of a confession – a mea culpa – I don’t know if I can change it actually. When I preach at a memorial service, I listen to the family and we do the best we can to come to know who the person was and we identify the really good parts, the parts that look like God. We lift those up and we talk about them in that memorial service.
The problem with that is that it’s all well and good because with all of us there’s both good and bad, and it’s a good thing for us to lift up the good part. But in that moment in that service the real issue isn’t how good or bad the person was. The issue is what God has done for them in Jesus Christ. That’s why we’ve come together to celebrate. That’s why we’re worshipping God in that moment. It’s because of what God did for them, not what they did that was good. And as we work on this, sometimes our focus – we get off the right focus because in that moment our focus isn’t really about how good they were, it’s about God’s saving grace. And when we call it grace, what we’re saying is that it’s a gift.
It doesn’t have to do with how good or bad we are, it has to do with the goodness of God. It’s about grace, not virtue.
Now you might say to yourself, “So then I can do anything I want. I can be a bad person and that’s all great.” Well, that’s sort of true. How good or bad you are; it’s not going to change how much God loves you. But let me say it a different way. The good things that we do then we do out of gratitude, not out of obligation.
For those of you who were in our Galatians study, please forgive this repetition because this is an illustration I used there. But it’s the best one I can come up with so I wanted to use it here as well.
I love my wife with all my heart. I love her. That is something inside me. It is more than just a feeling. It’s a matter of my heart given to her. Think of that like faith. Now because I love my wife I do things for her, just like because she loves me she does things for me.
Like this weekend for example, she asked me to build a little shelf behind the garage for her to put her potted plant pots on. Even though there was a football game going on, I’m just saying… though there was a football game on, I helped build the shelf. I helped reset some planters in the front yard. Because I love her.
Now here’s the point I’m trying to make. I wasn’t obligated to do those things. In fact if I’d said to her, “Hey, I’d really like to watch the football game.” She would have said, “Okay, watch the football game. That’s great.” It wouldn’t have been an issue. There was no rule that I had to follow that said I had to do these things, I did them out of gratitude and love. They are as it says in verse six where we read a few minutes ago, the only thing that counts is faith expressed through love. It is that sense of we do these things as an expression of our love.
Here’s what’s even more significant. Just because I do those things does not necessarily mean I love her. You can go through the motions of doing something for someone, but there’s not that real love. It’s the same with our faith. The good things, the reason you come here to worship, the reason you tithe, the reason you do acts of service, the reason we worship, the reason we practice our five Inside/Out Habits. It’s not because that will make God love us any more. We do them out of gratitude, not out of obligation. We do them out of gratitude and love. That’s the response to this gift God has given us. It’s gratitude.
Here’s what’s interesting. If I went to a therapist and we were talking about a relationship with my wife and I said, “You know, I’m really getting tired of having to do this stuff. I’m really getting tired of it.”
See, when we do things out of obligation what happens is resentment begins to build. That’s why he says, if you’re just practicing your religion you’ll fall from grace. You won’t experience it as a free gift anymore. You’ll think you’re owed something because of it.
The therapist might say to me something like this: “You know, just keep at it. Just keep at it. Keep working at expressing your love and maybe that love will come back inside you.” I’d argue that that’s true a lot of the time. I might say that’s true with our faith a lot of the time. There have been times in my life when my faith seemed dry and when I prayed it seemed like I was just talking to the wall. And when I read the Bible it felt like this was a book written long ago to a people a long time ago that had no relevance for us and in my life today. And when I come to church I’m just going through the motions. There have been times like that, but if I hang in there and stick to it. I’d say the same thing to you most of the time. Just hang in there, stick to it, let that be the skeleton and your faith will come back again. I agree with that.
But there might be times when you say, “You know, I’m going to stop doing this for a bit. I’m going to take a little break from coming to church and practicing all those things because I’ve come to realize I’m just going through the motions. And I’m playing like a Christian, I’m not a real one. And I need to focus on that love inside rather than the practices of my hands and feet.” I think it could go both ways.
So that leads me to the last piece, and the last distinction is between trust and entitlement. I’m going to shift illustrations, analogies with you. So rather than it between a married couple, let’s now make it between a parent and a child.
So if I have a parent I trust, that that parent – my mother or father – loves me, and that they will do whatever they need to do for my good. And I trust that. But there’s a fine line between trusting that they will do everything for my good and believing that I’m entitled to everything they do for me. We don’t like entitlement. Entitlement has this sense of being owed something. It’s interesting that Paul uses the image that we are adopted heirs of the promise. So if you’re an heir of the promise that doesn’t mean you can say, “I’m entitled to your love. I deserve it.”
No, we come before God not self-righteous that way. We come before God humbly. Jesus tells the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The Pharisee says, “Thank God I’m not like these others.” And the tax collector who says, “Lord have mercy on me.” We come before God not entitled but humbly asking for God’s love and mercy. Because we know we don’t deserve it. But we trust in God’s goodness.
Here’s a little test that might help you. One of the ways to know if you’re practicing entitlement is if you believe that somehow you have the right to determine whether someone else is right with God. If we begin to say to ourselves, “You know, we’ve got it but I don’t think that person has it.” Friends, that’s above our pay grade. The sovereignty of God, we come before God not controlling him like he’s a lottery machine, controlling him like he’s a vending machine. We come before God humbly recognizing that God will save whomever God wants to save. God can save whoever God wants to save. That’s God’s prerogative, not our call to make. Because even us, we’re not entitled to be made right with God. It’s God’s grace.
This is basic Christianity. Being made right with God, justification by God’s grace, a free gift that we accept through faith.
There’s a reason we sang “Jesus Loves Me” today. The great theologian Karl Barth was asked if he could put the Christian faith in a few words and he said, “Jesus loves me, this I know.”
That’s why we’re going to sing “Amazing Grace” in a few minutes. Because sometimes we get so involved in our practicing the Christian faith that as John writes in Revelation where he’s talking about the church at Ephesus. He says, “You have forsaken your first love.” We forget that this is really about God loving us and us loving God back. So friends, I just pray that somehow we’ll catch that. Our merit based minds have such trouble with that. This basic idea that there are no hoops you have to jump through. God loves you, it’s that simple. That’s God’s goodness. And all we do is receive it.
Gracious God, we thank you for how you have blessed us with your love. Not because we deserved it, not because we are virtuous, not because we’re religious. But only because you love us and have chosen to restore our relationship through your Son Jesus Christ. Break through our shells that push you away. Let us receive you with gratitude and faith. In the name of Christ we pray. Amen.