Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

This is the last stop in this series called “Explain Yourself”, which has been about better understanding some core beliefs among Christians generally, and specifically for Baptists.

We’re living in a time where the rest of society has less and less understanding of what the Church is, so being able to explain our beliefs in a clear and compelling way would help.

Unfortunately we’re also living in a time when the Church seems to have less and less understanding of that the Church is, too.

That’s a bad combination, and I want to keep looking at ways that, at our church, we can offer and encourage opportunities for discipleship that will help us know and represent Jesus well to others.

I hope it helped a little to have talked about what it means to call Jesus Lord, why we trust the Bible, why each believers should grow their personal understanding what the Bible teaches, and what it means that we are all priests.

For today my original intent was to talk about baptism, and I will, but this final message also ended up focusing on what it looks like for a Christian to have freedom because of their faith, so we’ll spend a bit of time with that, too.

There’s a lot of meaning backed into todays short passage from Galatians, so I’ll dive right in.

Faith and Law

Today’s passage focuses on a contrast between two ways of living - by faith or by law.

Verse 23 starts with “before the coming of this faith” - meaning, before Jesus came.

Before Jesus, the Apostle Paul writes, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed.

So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.

(Galatians 2:23-24)

By “the Law” Paul is talking about the the overall story and specific commands of the Torah - the first five books of the Old Testament.

There were 613 commands identified through the story told in the Torah.

But even in the Law there is a recognition that people can’t live up to it - Moses declares at the end of the final book of the Law that there is a problem with people’s hearts.

They want to reject the Law.

People can’t be good enough to follow the Law unless their hearts can be changed somehow.

When you move beyond the Law into the next set of Old Testament books, the Prophets, we see more and more references to someone who will come - the Messiah, God’s annointed, the Christ - who will actually enable people’s hearts to change so that they want to love God and others.

But Paul is talking specifically about the Law here, and He compares it to something called a “pedagogue.”

The NIV translates that to “guardian.”

These guardians were slaves who were given the responsibilies to guard a family’s child from the evils of society and give them moral training from around age 6 until puberty.

And these guardians could often be quite strict or very harsh in how they carried this out.

Paul writes “The law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.

Now that this faith has come we are no longer under a guardian.”

(Galatians 3:24-25).

So, speaking particuarly to formerly Jewish believers trying to adhere to those 613 commands of the Law, Paul says this is not the way to be a Christian.

That guardian from our childhood isn’t in charge of us anymore.

The Law was useful for exposing evil and demonstrating that our hearts need to be transformed.

The scriptures promise that God will send a Savior who can do this, and now, Paul says, this Christ has come.

We have Jesus.

The Law is not opposed to Jesus, the Law shows us why we need Jesus.

But now that we have Jesus that’s who we follow, not a list of commands.

This is good news, Paul says, because the Law divided people.

The Law was given to the Jews as God’s chosen people who were called to be a witness to the world of who God is.

But that Law separated Jews from Gentiles, and in the way it was being followed in Paul’s day it led to a sense of superiority felt by men over women and slaves, too.

Some Jewish men used to pray “I thank you God that you have not made me a Gentile, a slave, or a woman.”

Someone who prayed that would have had a hard time with what Paul says next, which is an extaordinary thing for this time and culture.

Paul says that since, by faith, you have outgrown that guardian, the Law, you are all children of God.

Everybody who is baptized into Christ - everyone who has a spiritual union with Jesus by putting faith in Him - is joined together as part of the body of Christ, the Church, where those old divisions are obselete.

The playing field is leveled when people have “clothed themselves with Christ.”

Clothed yourself with Christ is an interesting image - putting on your Jesus suite?

Paul is quite possibly pointing to Roman culture again there.

When a child in Roman society reached the age and matuirty to be considered an adult he was given a special toga which symbolized having the full rights of the family and state.

Paul tells the Galatian Christians that through faith in Jesus they have, as one commentator puts it: laid aside the old garments of the Law and had put on Christ’s robe of righteousness which grants full acceptance before God.”

You have clothed yourselves with Christ.

And in Christ “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one...”

There’s no spiritual hierarchy in the body of Christ.

This is still a good challenge for today, because Christians can wrongly imagine that sex or nationality or status makes them superior to others.

But this statement, when Paul made it, was one of the “turn the world upside-down” kind of statements in the Bible.

Nobody, certainly not someone raised in the Jewish tradition like Paul, thought that way before.

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith… How you were born doesn’t matter once you’re reborn into the family of God.

Baptized into Christ

That’s my segue into the final important Baptist belief I wanted to touch on during this series, which is baptism itself.

This passage doesn’t talk about baptism in a lot of detail, you have to look a few other places to build the full picture.

But it does help define what kind of faith committment forms the foundation for baptism.

Growing up in a Baptist church most of the kids my age were all encouraged to take baptism class around age 12, and just about everyone from a good church family goes ahead and undergoes baptism afterward.

That’s not a bad thing necessarily, but there is the danger of turning baptism into a right of passage or something a kid does to please their family rather than something driven by a committment to Jesus.

Baptists practice believers baptism.

We don’t baptize people with the expectation that the act changes that person’s status with God.

We baptize them as a symbol and celebration of that person’s faith in Jesus and their desire to serve Him as their Lord.

And Baptists baptize by immersion.

We don’t sprinkle or pour, so long as you can physically handle it we want to dunk you.

That’s how Jesus was baptized, that seems to be the normal way anyone we read about in the New Testament was baptized, and there is a significance to that act of going beneath the water and coming up again.

It symbolizes dying to your old self and old life, and rising again with a new life found in Christ.

Speaking of being “clothed with Christ” from today’s passage, this is the reason why churches often use special baptismal robes, often white ones.

It adds to the symbolism of coming up out of the water sharing in the ressurection life of Jesus Christ.

Today’s passage highlights this transition from one kind of life to another.

Some denominations differ in their thinking here, but for Baptists I think it’s fair to say that nobody is born Christian.

A faithful family is a wonderful blessing, but at some point you must make your own choice about Jesus.

There is the path of faith in Christ, or something else.

There is a kind of Law people with a Christian upbringing can follow, one where you don’t have a living faith but you still try to follow most of the normal Christian cultural rules.

And, whether you start with any Christian experience or not, you can certainly choose a path of lawlessness, one that rejects God and the things of faith altogether.

The person who goes through the waters of baptism is declaring publically that they are turning away from any law or form of lawlessness as the foundation of their life and instead building a new life on the foundation of Jesus as part of His Church.

Give Me Freedom

Today’s passage describes this as a liberating experience.

“Before the coming of this faith we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed.

The law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.”

The law was restrictive and impossible to live up to.

The way of Jesus is one that we pursue willingly out of gratitude and love, not out of obligation or fear.

There is freedom in this.

But what I kept getting stuck on when working on this passage was how you would explain to a normal person - some typical Nova Scotia who isn’t interested in religion at all, that Christianity is something freeing.

Compared to the way first century Jews were expected to adhere to the law, faith in Jesus clearly brought some newfound freedom.

But that’s very different from most of the people around us who aren’t held in custody under the law, but instead practice lawlessness.

They don’t worry about chosing some best way, they pick whatever seems to work best for them.

They haven’t agreed to be held to any particular standard, so they don’t really have to accept any complaint or critism that comes their way.

Compared to being a Christian, which still clearly does have rules and expectations and requirements, aren’t you more free if you just do things your own way?

This was what I was still pondering on Thursday afternoon when, fortunately, I was feeling well enough that Amy I travelled up to Wolfville for the funeral for Bill Brackney.

Dr. Brackney was my professor of theology and ethics in seminary, and the interim pastor here at Faith Baptist during my first year when I was doing my internship.

And about six months ago he went from a healthy senior citizen to nearly dying of a severe infection.

He survived, but never truly recovered.

It was six months of complications and set-backs with a great deal of pain and confusion and discouragement at times.

Not that you would know that from the funeral.

The service that he wanted was one that didn’t say much about him and his extremely long list of academic accomplishments and all the churches he had pastored, but one that was filled with hymns and scripture that simply praised God and affirmed His never-failing love.

That had an impact on me all on its own.

But then what hit even harder was the sermon, preached by Bill’s good friend, the Rev. Dr. Dan Gibson.

I don’t know the medical specifics affecting Dr. Gibson, but he preached from a wheelchair, holding the microphone in the one hand that had some ability to grasp, while someone held what I suspect was a very large-print manuscript for him and helped point to what came next if he lost track.

His speech was muddled and hard to follow.

But his faith came through loud and clear, starting with a verse from the book of Job: I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth.