EPISODE 76 GALATIANS CHAPTER 5 "Remember Who You Are"

Welcome to Share the Word, a Great Commission project. In Galatians 5, the Apostle Paul continues to call out the Judaizers on so many topics, but one of the topics is about a procedure that the Judaizers are trying to convince those who Paul has brought to Christ that they need to have done in order to be part of God's covenant. Are you curious yet? Listen. Galatians chapter 5. Remember who you are.

I'm going to date myself a little bit with this anecdote. I've always liked sports, several different kinds of sports, followed them pretty closely over the years. I think it's because I am so competitive myself. I enjoy watching the very best go at it in a given sport. Watching the Olympics has been a must-see event since I was old enough to know what the Olympics were. During that quadrennial international competition, I often find myself watching sports I don't even care about because it's a matter of my country competing against your country or some other country, and that adds something to the whole equation.

When I was reading and thinking about Galatians 5 for this lesson, something Paul wrote there brought a vivid scene back to my mind from the 1984 Olympic Games. An American woman named Mary Decker was entered in the 3,000 meters, a long-distance race, and was one of the favorites to win it. With two minutes to go, she was in a tight three-way pack, all vying for the lead, when suddenly one of the other runners, Zola Budd was the woman's name, made a move and attempted to pass Mary, but she cut in front of her too sharply and the American runner was tripped. She tumbled onto the track headlong, and I can still picture her there lying on the track, grasping her right leg as others passed her by. She was more frustrated and angry than physically hurt, but she lost that race and lost out on a medal she had trained years for.

Everyone on the Olympic team was so disappointed, and many, I'm sure, in the whole country were disappointed and angry too. In chapter 5 at verse 7, Paul asked the believers in Galatia, You were running a good race. Who cut in front of you to keep you from obeying the truth? The apostle Paul must have liked sports as much as me because he often used sports analogies in his writings. He knew the answer to this question about who cut in and tripped up the Galatians, obviously. He knew very well who was responsible for getting them off track.

He was just underscoring the disappointment and righteous anger he felt when he learned that so many of them had fallen for the lies of the Judaizers and had been tripped up in their Christian walk. His first line in chapter 5 was, It's for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then. Don't let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. To the apostle Paul's mind, for a believer who had already been adopted into God's family by faith in Jesus, to then accept the lie that they needed to somehow add to that or complete that through their own efforts, as the Judaizers had convinced them, that was no different than a slave who had been set free willingly putting himself back into bondage. Can you imagine how confused and misled a slave would have to be who, once emancipated, then willingly put himself back into bondage to slavery again?

That would be nuts. That's what Paul wants the Galatians to see. I wish I had a recording or at least a transcript to hear how the Judaizers had presented their wrong ideas in the Galatian churches. We don't have that, unfortunately, so we have to try and imagine the pitch they made from how Paul responds to it here. What exactly were the ideas he found so wrong and so objectionable? Apparently, what I gather from his responses here in this chapter is that numero uno, the number one thing the Judaizers were impressing on the Galatian Christians was circumcision.

The men and boys in their church needed to get circumcised. What? You probably just said that out loud, didn't you? What? What in the world would that have to do with anything? Well, that's a good question.

In my society anyway, for the most part, that medical procedure is simply done for hygienic reasons when a male child is a few days old. Most doctors will recommend it. But to Jews in particular, it holds a deeper cultural and religious meaning. Historically, going way back to the beginning of their nation, circumcision was the physical mark that God said should distinguish them from the tribes around them. It was a sign of His covenant with them. This goes back to the time of Abraham again, who we were talking about last chapter.

Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, was told by God—this is Genesis chapter 17—This is my covenant, which you shall keep between you and me and your seed after you: every male child among you shall be circumcised. My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. So to the Jewish people, this became kind of a point of pride. Circumcision was not practiced then by other people groups, but for them it was a physical sign of their unique covenant with God. Sounds pretty odd to us. But you often read in the Old Testament of the Bible, and particularly the Israelites speaking about the peoples around them disparagingly as the uncircumcised, or those uncircumcised Philistine dogs did this or that.

It does sound pretty odd to us now. But the early Christians in Galatia were being told by those false apostles from Jerusalem that circumcision was where obedience to God starts, that submitting to circumcision would mark them as members of God's covenant people. And many of them, apparently, were buying into that and were undergoing that procedure. Ouch! This really made the apostle Paul react when he heard it. On the one hand, to the Galatians he wrote, When you go back to that kind of thing, you are in fact turning away from Christ, away from God's offer of salvation to you by grace.

He assured them that in this new era, we call it the church age as we call it now, whether we are circumcised or not matters nothing to God at all. Unless we missed just how ticked off he was at those who were urging the Galatians to do this, he added, As for those who are troubling you, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves. That's chapter 5, verse 12. He really said that. By the way, some of the pagan cults at that time, religions these people would have been familiar with, some of them maybe even participated in, required their priests to undergo emasculation. One prominent mystery religion of the first century Roman world was the cult of Cybele.

Its male priests castrated themselves and dressed up like women. That sounds a little too much like some weird stuff going on in our day, doesn't it? But Paul was saying, If the Judaizers insist that you cut on your bodies in an effort to make you more acceptable to God, then why stop with circumcision? Those guys should go all the way and castrate themselves. That's pretty funny, actually. His line at verse 9 about a little yeast works its way through the whole lump of dough was a common idiom, and by that he meant that if the Galatians accepted that one small additional rule, trying to make themselves more acceptable to God by doing that, there would be many more rules required of them by the Judaizers.

The law of Moses, remember, had hundreds of regulations. If you put yourself under that one, Paul was saying, in principle, you must put yourself under all of them. And he's already warned us that no one can keep the Old Testament law perfectly enough to really please God. So he says at verse 10, I am confident in the Lord that you will take no other view. That is, by now I am sure you understand my point and you will turn away from this nonsense the Judaizers are spreading among you. He then added, The ones throwing you into confusion, whoever they may be, will have to pay the penalty, meaning God will punish these false teachers who misled them.

And he will. It's hard to imagine anything more offensive to God than religious teachers misleading people who trust them to tell them the truth. And about the most critical question of all, what must we do to be saved? Can you imagine if when Paul and Silas were asked that all-important question by that desperate jailer in Philippi we saw in Acts chapter 16, What must I do to be saved? they had told them, Well, actually, the first step would be to have yourself circumcised, and then after that, we have many more religious rules for you to keep. That guy hearing that would have probably gone ahead and hara-kiried himself.

But we saw in Acts 16 what Paul actually told the man: Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Put your faith in Jesus as your Savior. And that's exactly what he taught these people when he and Barnabas were at Galatia a year or so before. Okay, I think by now we have talked plenty about law-keeping and circumcision and slavery, etc., don't you? I definitely do. And I hope you have got in Paul's big idea in Galatians and now understand why he was so riled up when he wrote this letter.

It's because the message of the gospel, that is, how we are saved, and that it's on the basis of grace and through faith in Jesus, absolutely cannot be changed, cannot be altered, as the Judaizers had been attempting to do. Paul says that can't happen, not them or anybody else who tries to do that. That marks someone as a false teacher that God will one day punish. Interestingly, related to this, I was just accused online of hate speech by a woman recently is because I answered a question on Quora related to this issue of whether people can be saved by keeping one religion's rules and laws or whether there's only one way, the way God has made for us through Christ. And I answered the question clearly according to the New Testament and according to Jesus' own claims.

Then I told the lady, who was very upset by that, just as Paul told the first recipients here 2,000 years ago, Don't regard me as your enemy because I'm telling you the truth. The truth was, sadly, that religious leaders she trusts have led her astray on this critical point. So I urged her to read Galatians for herself and think it through, clarifying this critical question is why this letter is in our New Testaments. Paul's diatribes are not just aimed at that one isolated group of false teachers in the middle of the first century. It's very clear his denunciation here is from an apostle of Jesus Christ against all man-made religions and distortions of Christianity that people have devised throughout history. We can say this on the authority of inspired Scripture, like this epistle.

If anyone contradicts or adds to the gospel of salvation on the basis of grace through faith in Jesus, if anyone insists that their religious rules and laws must be obeyed in order for people to be justified in God's eyes, they are false teachers, just like the Judaizers. And Paul said to them what? Let them be accursed. Did I just hear a gasp? It's not hateful to plainly speak the truth about such an important matter. Those who spiritually mislead others and turn people away from the gospel of Christ with contradicting ideas are God's enemies.

Their lies, which lead people away from trusting in Christ, need to be exposed, just as Paul is doing in this letter. Now, at verse 13, Paul turns from doctrinal instruction to practical instructions, and he makes a crucial point that we need to underline. After all of his insistence that faith in Jesus is the way God made to save sinners, not our merits earned through obedience to rules and laws, Paul follows that up immediately with his exhortation: You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free, but don't use your freedom to indulge your flesh. By flesh, Paul means our baser nature, our fallen sin nature as we humans all are born with it. This is important.

People too often misapply what naturally follows the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus, being saved by grace, and assume that that means that if I am saved by grace, it's nothing to do with me or my works, and how I live thereafter makes no difference. Being saved by grace does not mean that how we live thereafter makes no difference. It certainly does matter to God. When I was a young man studying for the ministry, I ran across a TV preacher broadcasting a show on a tiny UHF station coming out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and he got my attention. I had never encountered anyone like him before, saying the things that he said. He was always in a makeshift-looking studio, all alone, usually wearing a kind of funny hat with a scraggly beard, sitting in a comfortable easy chair.

He always had a big cigar in one hand and a glass of unknown beverage on a small table beside him. And between puffs and occasional swigs, with his big Bible open, he preached to his listeners that it didn't much matter what we do after we received God's gift of salvation, because we're saved completely by grace and has nothing to do with us anyway. Grace, for him, meant it's okay now to live however I want. Now that I belong to Christ, I am safe with God. And he peppered his messages freely with profanity and stories about his multiple marriages, just to be sure his watchers got his point. You probably think I'm making this up, but I'm not.

I remember the guy. I could tell you his name, but I won't. Could be still alive, but I doubt it. But I remember being kind of amazed by this guy and thinking, as a 20-year-old, could he possibly be right? I mean, we are saved by grace and not by works. But no, let me assure you, he is not right.

And we know it's not right for one place in the New Testament, right here in Galatians 5, Scripture makes it very clear that that would be twisted thinking. In verses 13 and following, Paul stressed that Christians, although free from the Old Testament law, are now under a different kind of obligation he calls the law of love. Elsewhere he calls it the law of Christ. Being a follower of Christ brings along with it moral and ethical expectations because Jesus challenges his followers to love God with all of our hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That's hard to do for sure, because we don't lose our old sinful natures when we become Christians. But what does happen is that we are given a new nature now, and we also are given the Holy Spirit to help us.

He comes to live inside us, we're promised. At verse 17, Paul says, So therefore, the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh, and they are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. There will be a conflict inside us between God, what He wants, our old nature, and what it wants. As believers, we find ourselves having to choose which of those two natures we will now yield to. We can yield to our new godly spiritual nature that always wants to lead us into a life that pleases God, or we can yield to our old fleshly nature that always wants to have us living selfishly with no regard for God's will. It's very important when those conflicts arise in our hearts and minds to remember, God doesn't tell us what we should choose because He wants to confine us or constrict us.

He's our wise and loving Father, and He wants what's best for us. In verses 19 through 21, Paul actually lists, so these new believers won't misunderstand him, several of the kinds of things that characterized their old lives before they became Christians, things He wants them to choose against now, continuing in their lives. Things like, he said, sexual immorality, a broad term which covers any kind of sexual activity that oversteps God's boundaries. Then anything to do with the occult or drug use, which in that society went hand in hand. Then hatred and fighting others, then jealousy and envy toward others, then drunkenness and carousing, just to name a few from his list.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of things God wants us to turn away from, by the way, but these are examples, likely things which marked many of the Galatian believers' lives before they chose to follow Christ. These are some of the things that characterize people's lives in any generation who do not know God. Paul adds then, those whose lives are given over to these kinds of things and show by their behavior and appetites these kinds of things are what they are interested in will not be in heaven one day. These are not the things that mark God's legitimate children. On the contrary, he writes at verse 22, the fruit of the Spirit is love and joy and peace, forbearance, which means being patient with others, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness. That word means the opposite of wrong anger and self-control.

By fruit of, Paul means these are the types of godly things that start growing in the lives of those whose faith is real. These are godly qualities that grow in us as we yield to our new nature and listen to the Holy Spirit's promptings within us. Again, not an exhaustive list, but a good sampling of the qualities that should manifest in our lives more and more as we keep our connection with God strong and listen to the Holy Spirit, walk in ways that please our Heavenly Father. So Paul's big idea to these young Galatian believers in this practical section of his letter is this: although we cannot save ourselves by trying to keep moral and ethical rules, religious laws, and so on, once we have placed our faith in Christ and are born into God's family as his sons and daughters, our desires will change.

We will have new desires to please our Heavenly Father, even though our old desires won't go away. We'll get new desires on top of them. The more we yield to these good influences within us now, the more we will overcome sin and the things that disappoint God. The more we will live in ways that please our Heavenly Father. It's not about living this way in order to become God's children. It's about living this way because we are now God's children.

I hope that distinction is crystal clear. Let me finish today with this illustration, and hopefully it'll make this a little clearer. Oftentimes, when I was growing up, if I was going to be out of my parents' sight for a while, let's say I went somewhere with a group of friends, or maybe I stayed over at somebody else's house for a day or two, one or the other of my parents would send me off with these words: Hey, Paul, remember who you are. Remember who you are. I knew what they meant by that. They meant while I was out of their sight, and because I was going to be with people who may very well have different values than our family, they wanted me to bear in mind who I was, where I came from, not to do things that would displease or dishonor them.

That's what Paul is urging the Galatian believers to remember here. That's how he wants them to think about their relationship to their heavenly Father. You're not saved by your behavior, by your obedience to rules, but now that you have been born into God's family through faith in Jesus, remember who you are. You're a son or daughter of the Most High God. This is great instruction coming out of chapter five for all of us who are God's children. When you're at school, remember who you are.

When you're at work, remember who you are. When you are on the highway and somebody ticks you off by pulling in front of you, remember who you are. When you're alone and a temptation comes your way, remember who you are. The Holy Spirit is always in us. Remember that. We are children of the Most High God.

Remember that. Think, live, and act in ways that please your heavenly Father who has saved you by His amazing grace. Remember who you are. Remember who you are. Thanks, Paul. Remember that when we accept Christ as our Lord and Savior, we're sealed by the Holy Spirit as a child of God.

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