A Strongly Worded Letter

09/17/11

Scripture:

Before I begin with the reading of scripture...Jake is going to be videoing the sermon.  I want you to know that we’ve been trying to use video more in our ministry.  You remember how Mike and I did the question and answer thing?  Well, last week Mike and I...and Jake videoed it...went ahead and answered a few more questions and they’re on our church website.  So if you submitted a question...I remember Darrell submitted ‘how is our faith increased?’ and we did that question last week, and it’s on there.  You can go home at your convenience and click and follow along and learn from Mike and me how much we really don’t know. 

Today we are beginning a new sermon series on a letter of the New Testament called Galatians.  How many of you in all honesty have never read Galatians before, don’t know anything about it?  Okay, a couple of your hands are going up.  Thank you for your honesty.  How many of you don’t even know where Galatians is...you’re like I can’t quite find it yet?  I know how it is with some of you.  Galatians is a letter from Paul that was written to a group of churches in an area of Turkey, modern-day Turkey, called Galatia.  It’s a region, so it’s a letter to a region of churches, just like maybe I might draft a letter and put an ad in the St. Louis Post Dispatch and say Attention all Metro East Churches.  So this is a public letter that Paul has written and he’s written because he’s very upset.  He’s not happy, and he’s not happy, as you’ll see, because he’s concerned with the congregations, with their spiritual well being.  And so we’re going to start today reading this text and we’re going to work our way through it all the way to Advent to learn from Paul, to learn from this letter, what exactly does it mean to have and to get our gospel right. We as a church have a gospel.  We have good news that we’re called to take and to share with the world.  But how do we know that what we say we believe is right?  We’re going to let Galatians and Paul speak to us as we learn about getting our gospel right.  So let’s begin with chapter 1, verses 1-10.

Galatians 1:1-10  ^ESV  Paul, an apostle - not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead -  ² and all the brothers who are with me, To the churches of Galatia:  ³ Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,  ⁴ who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father,  ⁵ to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.  ⁶ I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel - ⁷ not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.  ⁸ But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.  ⁹ As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.  ¹⁰ For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.

May God bless this reading from His word and may we receive it and grow from it today and always.  Amen.

You know, it’s not easy being a whistle blower.  I brought a whistle; this is for when you fall asleep.  I’ll wake you up.  You know what I mean by whistle blower, right, someone that sounds the alarm because something’s not right.  It’s not easy to be a whistle blower.  Just ask Dr. Stockman.  See Dr. Stockman was a pretty popular man in his small coastal town of Norway.  In the town that Dr. Stockman lived, the town had recently invested quite a bit of money, private money and public money, toward the development of baths--baths that visitors could arrive in town and sit in the warm spring water that was considered to be healthy for you.  So Dr. Stockman and his brother Peter, the mayor of their town, had led the campaign to raise the funds to make this new bath system, what was considered to be of great medicinal value, as a tool to help their community.  The idea was it would become a tourist boom.  It would draw in outsiders who would travel great distances to enjoy the springs, the baths, and bring their money with them.  Now just as the baths were getting developed and people were starting to come, Dr. Stockman became a whistle blower.  See, he discovered something.  He was running a test one day on the spring water that fed their baths, and he discovered that it had become contaminated from the town’s tannery and that the waters were polluted enough that they would be a health risk for those visitors arriving in town and making use of the baths.  Dr. Stockman expected that this discovery would be welcomed and even celebrated by the folks in town, so he sent word to his brother, the mayor, and to the other key leaders in town, and he found that they weren't very supportive of his claim.  In fact, they discouraged him from making that information public, but rather to sit on it because if it got known that the baths, that the spring water was polluted, it would be bad for the town’s business.  And so Dr. Stockman found himself at an impasse.  The leadership of the town, even his own brother, did not want to act properly with the truth that the water was contaminated, and so he did what any whistle blower would do.  He went to other notable people in society and he called together meetings with them.  One of such individuals was Captain Horster who, at his home, Dr. Stockman made an appeal to him and to those present that the water was polluted and dangerous.  Much to his surprise, Dr. Stockman discovered that the townspeople, those that were eager to give money and develop this project, were now rejecting him and his words.  In fact, they turned against him en masse and began to taunt him and to denounce him as a lunatic in the town and labeled him an enemy of the people.  The story I'm telling you is from the great playwright Ibsen, and it’s a story about how difficult it is to be a whistle blower.  In fact, Ibsen throughout his characters in the story says the strongest man in the world is the man who stands the most alone.  When you’re a whistle blower at times you feel like that.  It’s not easy to be a whistle blower--let’s just ask the Apostle Paul.

The letter that we’re looking at today is literally his whistle that he’s sounding, the alarm that he’s giving through the churches that he taught and led and developed.  It’s a whistle-blowing alarm that Paul is concerned with something greater than simply polluted spring water or the sickness of a few people.  Paul as a servant of God is in great turmoil because he sees something bad happening.  He sees a distortion in the church of a clear understanding of the gospel.  So what’s going on in this text?  How do I get this sense that Paul is a whistle blower, he’s not happy with what’s going on here?  Well, we have the letter itself that we’re going to turn to.  We’re going to see in this letter for the next few weeks that Paul is laboring here for the purity of the gospel.  He is greatly concerned because others have come along and have twisted it, have distorted it, and have made it something that it wasn't.  And so I invite you to join with me this morning as we look into the text of Galatians 1.  We’re going to look at some points here of note. 

The Integrity

The first one is the integrity of Paul.  We’re going to start there.  I want you to see that in this letter Paul as a spokesperson for God has already come under attack.  His integrity has been questioned.  How do I know such a thing?  Well, he has been the product of a misinformation campaign.  It happened to Dr. Stockman.  What do you do to silence the doctor who says the spring water’s polluted?  You tell everyone he’s a lunatic and they dismiss what he has to say as valid.  How do you get people to believe that Paul’s teaching of the gospel is wrong?  You dismiss it.  You tell people that Paul’s not really speaking for God--he’s making up stuff on his own.  And so Paul right away in this text is having to defend his integrity.  Let me show you.

If you’ll turn and look in the first two verses of this text, you’ll look at Paul’s beginning.  He says:  Paul, an apostle - not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead - and all the brothers who are with me, To the churches of Galatia.  You notice there’s a lot of phrase there.  Paul could have simply wrote ‘Paul, an apostle, and all the brothers who are with me,’ but he added in this elaborate phrase that he was an apostle not sent by men but sent by Jesus Christ himself.  He’s here appealing to his integrity because it’s been attacked.  How do I know that?  Well, if you look at some other letters that Paul writes you’ll notice that he begins referring to himself in different ways, but he never has to come along and say I'm legit’, here’s my ‘creds.’  For example, in 1 Corinthians Paul says:  Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes, to the church of Corinth (1:1).  In Philippians: Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi (1:1).  In 1 Thessalonians:  Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (1:1).  No, here in Galatians, unlike those other places, Paul is having to prove that he is in fact a spokesperson with and for God and what he says is true.  The reason that I think this is important to talk about Paul’s integrity being attacked is I want you to realize that it’s always that way. 

From the very beginning, in the Garden of Eden, the evil one raises the question did God really tell you this?  It’s questioning the message, and it’s questioning the messenger that is an enemy’s tactic to lead a church astray.  I think it’s significant here that Paul’s having to defend his integrity to this congregation because these are people who first learned of Jesus through Paul.  These are Christians that Paul preached to and then baptized in the name of the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit and called them into these church communities. These are people that saw Paul suffer and bleed for Christ and already they are dismissing him.  Already they are questioning their loyalty to him.  Like the people in the town where the doctor was teaching there, they bought into the lie that he’s a lunatic, ignore him.  I think this attack on the integrity of Paul is very important as we consider getting our gospel right.  Who do we listen to?  How do we evaluate what is true?  There are a myriad of different statements out there about who God is and what God is like.  How do we know what the truth is?  To whom do we listen?

Paul himself says in 1 Thessalonians 5:  Test everything; hold fast what is good (5:21).   So I want you to realize that it’s our job to test and to see is Paul really speaking for the Lord.  If he is, then we need to ground our gospel in what he has to say.  We need to know.  It’s not easy being a whistle blower so if you’re one of those people like Paul that you’ve stood up and you said this isn’t right at work, if you’ve stood up in your family and said I can’t condone this behavior anymore, this is incorrect and you’re catching grief for it, I want you to know you’re in good company.  When you stand up for what’s right, you’re going to get hit.  People are going to come after you and attack who you are and question your motivations, question your integrity.  You’re in good company.  The important thing is that you stand on the side of truth.  That’s what Paul did.  He was a person of integrity and we’re going to see as we work our way through this text that he spends a lot of time in Galatians defending who he is and what he did and how he was received by other leaders in the church because he’s been smeared and he’s attempting to say you can trust me. 

The Infraction

The second thing I want you to see here in the text is the infraction.  What exactly has gotten Paul in a rankle?  He’s upset.  In fact, it’s interesting.  If you read his letters usually he begins with the introductory part—hey it’s Paul, I'm writing to this church and then he has a section about I'm very very thankful for this, and then he gets into kind of the meat of the message where he talks about I'm concerned about this, make sure you do that.  He doesn’t even have a thanksgiving section in this letter.  He just jumps right into the stuff that he’s upset about.  Well, what is it?  Let’s look at verses 6 and 7 and find out:  I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel - not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.  Do you see what’s going on here?  Paul is concerned that these Christians, these people who once grounded themselves in the gospel of Jesus Christ, now they’re turning away from that and they’re embracing something else that’s undoing that work.  They are buying into what someone teaches is a distortion of the gospel, and Paul is very, very upset about that.  And his letter is the whistle blower sounding the alarm calling everyone back to what is really the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Now I think this is significant for you and me because if people who become Christians under an apostle, who watch and hear the teaching of Jesus Christ from a firsthand leader...if they can miss the mark, if they can lose focus, if they can end up going astray, then you and I have the potential of doing the exact same thing.  And so we need to realize that we can fall away.  We can buy into a distortion of the gospel ourselves if we’re not careful.  In fact, I think it’s interesting that there is a solution to make sure that you and I get our gospel right and then keep our gospel right.  You know what it is, it’s whistle blowers.  It’s people in this community that have the willingness to stand up and say I'm on the side of truth and they’re willing to stand up and take their lumps from those that don’t agree with them.  And I want you to know, I'm giving you permission to be a whistle blower.  I'm not going to give you a whistle today and have you blow it because you’ll probably blow it and go okay, the sermon’s done pastor--it’s time to go home.  But I want you to realize that you have as a member of this church a constitutional right to be a whistle blower here.  In fact, you’re needed to do that. 

In our Eden Church constitution there’s a paragraph that describes everything that we pledge ourselves to as members, and I want you to hear this paragraph (we’ve talked about it some on Sunday mornings before).  “Members shall pledge themselves to attend the regular worship of the church and the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, to live the Christian life, to share in the life and work of the church, to contribute to its support and benevolences, and to seek diligently the spiritual welfare of the membership and the community.”  Who does that?  Pastors shall pledge themselves to...no it didn’t say that.  Council members shall pledge themselves to...no members pledge themselves to.  You are a whistle blower for the church to make sure that we as a community stay on the right track.  But in order to do that, you have to know the gospel well enough to know when you’re not hearing it right from the pulpit or you’re not hearing it right in a Sunday school class or a Bible study.   So my question to you is do you know the gospel well enough that you could be a whistle blower and say I think things aren't right at Eden now?  If you don’t, you need to be there, and I want to challenge you to be there.  Throughout the study of Galatians, let’s let Paul teach us the gospel anew.  Let’s ground ourselves here so we can know what it is that’s this message that we center our lives upon.  That’s the infraction.

An Implication

Thirdly, there’s an implication here.  What happens when people lead astray?  They do so at great consequence.  Paul says in verses 8-9:  But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.  As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.  Twice it’s repeated there let him be accursed.  ‘Let him be’--the Greek word is ‘anathema.’  It means to be cut off from God.  Wow!  Paul was saying something pretty serious here.  He is saying that when someone gets up and they distort the message of Jesus Christ it would be better for them to be sent to Hell.  Now why would he say that?  Why such strong language?  Because the gospel is essential to our life and our well being.  It’s what gets us home with God, but it’s also what gives us the power to change and to be different people.  That’s why in Romans 1 Paul talked about I am not ashamed of the gospel...it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes (Romans 1:16).  The gospel has power--power to change lives, to change hearts, to change people’s eternities.  In fact Paul talks about that in verse 10.  He refers to himself as a former people pleaser, but he’s not now because he’s been set free by Jesus Christ.  Chuck Swindoll, the author and great radio preacher, in his book Grace Awakening talks about how before he became a Christian he was eaten up with jealousy.  He was just consumed with it.  But after he became a Christian it went away, and it wasn't because he read a book ‘Eight Steps to a New Less Jealous You.’  It happened because the gospel got hold of him and changed his heart, and the gospel does that today.  But if we distort it, if we pollute it, then we lose the power of the gospel to sustain the life and the well being of this community.  So we need to realize and know the gospel. 

So how well, church, do you know the gospel?  Can you spot the correct gospel?  I challenge you over the next few months to really invest yourself in knowing what the gospel of Jesus Christ is so you can determine yes, I believe this, and then you can live accordingly.  I want to show you how to do it.  You can take out your money like this and you can hand it in to me; I’ll take all denominations.  No, I'm just kidding.  The key to you being able to know the gospel...all you have to do is look at a dollar bill and think about it.  There are real dollar bills and there are fake dollar bills.  We call them counterfeit, right?  How do you learn to identity the real thing and to spot a fake?  If you work for the Treasury Department, you know how they teach you how to spot counterfeit money?  You don’t have classes on this is ‘Counterfeit 101.’  They give you the real money and they make you study it very very thoroughly with great time and detail, and over that period of time you become so familiar with the real that when you see a fake you spot it right away.  And you’ve got to do the same thing.  If you want to learn how to identify the real gospel, join with me.   Let’s study Galatians.  Let’s learn from the text the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ so you can release that power in your own life and in your family and in the world. 

Let’s pray together.  Heavenly Father, I thank you for the gospel of your son Jesus Christ.  I thank you for the power it has not only to wash away the sin and guilt that we carry but to really change us from the inside out.  I do pray for us, oh Lord, that you would help us to get the gospel right and not only to have our own understanding clarified but to have the passion to share this wonderful powerful message with those around us.  You have come; you have reached out to us through Jesus.  May we live in Him and may we share Him with this world that others may come to know this great and awesome good news of our Savior.  We ask this prayer in His name.  Amen.