It's Still Not Up to You
Galatians • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 45:39
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· 43 viewsNo matter how much you grow in your walk with Jesus, it's still not up to you.
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Have you ever seen a movie where the heroes get separated from the people who are supposed to help them, and one says, “It’s all up to us now.”
That’s when the real hero emerges as he takes charge of the situation and leads the group to safety or victory.
We admire the heroism of that guy—he takes charge and does what has to be done.
However, there is one glaring area where that approach doesn’t work, and that is in our walk with Jesus.
That’s what we are going to see as we make our way through Galatians 3:1-5 this morning.
As Paul wrote to the churches in Galatia, he was writing to correct a group of false teachers who were saying that you could only get right with God and stay right with God by following all the commands in the Law of Moses. They are known as the Judaizers.
Paul’s frustration has been building, and here it boils over.
He has reminded the Galatians of the gospel, he has established that he knows the Law and Jesus, and he has established that we are justified by faith in Jesus.
Now, he turns to confront the false teaching head on.
Start in 3:1...
It’s as though he is grabbing these churches by the shoulders and shaking them out of their confusion.
He calls them “foolish,” which here means they are spiritually dull.
He asks “who has cast a spell on you?” or “who has bewitched or hexed you?”
We said back in chapter 1 that the teachings from this group called the Judaizers wasn’t just bad; it was another gospel that Paul rebukes in the strongest possible language.
The teaching must have sounded persuasive, though, causing the Galatians to act like they were in a trance or under a spell.
To snap them out of it, Paul does something that shouldn’t surprise us at this point.
Where does he direct them?
Back to the gospel. Look at the last part of verse 1 again.
When Paul was among them, he presented the gospel to them plainly and vividly. They heard the gospel in such a clear way that it was like Christ had been crucified before their very eyes.
Now, they were abandoning Christ and turning to a false gospel.
Over the next two chapters, Paul is going to give several arguments that show that God saves through faith in Christ and not by good works through the Law.
We are only going to look at one of those today, and that is the argument of personal experience.
Paul is writing to people who are saved, and he is calling them back to remember what God did when they put their trust in Christ.
Last week, we saw what happens judicially—we are justified by faith. The old part of us that was enslaved to sin was put to death with Jesus, and now Christ is living through us.
This week, he is going to remind us to think back to some of the other ways God worked in us when we first came to Christ.
He does this through a series of four questions, and as we look at each of these questions, I want to remind you again of just how God works to save and sustain us.
I want to reinforce this idea this morning: Your salvation isn’t up to you. Instead, it rests in God alone. It always has, and it always will.
To remind us of that, Paul starts by asking:
1) How did you receive the Spirit?
1) How did you receive the Spirit?
Look back at verse 2...
If you notice, the word Spirit here is capitalized. That’s because we believe Paul is referring to the Holy Spirit here.
The Holy Spirit is the third member of the godhead, and he is uncreated and fully God, just like the Father and the Son.
When a person gets saved, the Holy Spirit comes and takes up residence in a person’s life.
As Paul points out, we receive the Holy Spirit as a gift from God, not by doing good works.
While there are good, godly people who disagree with us on this, we feel that the Bible is crystal clear that a person receives the Holy Spirit when they become saved and not as a separate experience.
This verse points toward that since it uses the same kind of language that Paul used of salvation back in chapter 2.
Not only that, we find Paul writing this later to the church at Rome while dealing with some of the same issues he was here in Galatia:
You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him.
So if you have not received the Holy Spirit you do not belong to Jesus.
When you take into account the rest of what Paul writes in that section of Romans 8, it is clear that you receive the Spirit as a gift when you get saved.
How many of you play video games, even games on your phone?
You know how you unlock certain abilities or powers or gear after you get to a certain level?
Some seem to approach the Holy Spirit like this.
We feel like we have to make it through the tutorial phase of following Jesus and then we get the “good stuff”—we unlock the Holy Spirit.
That isn’t the picture God gives us at all.
While we grow in our understanding of how the Spirit works in our lives and how best to respond to his leading, he takes up residence in us from the very moment God saves us.
He doesn’t give us the Holy Spirit because we have reached some level of spirituality/.
That’s what would have had to have been true if the false teachers were right—You had to follow the Mosaic Law well enough, and eventually, God would save you and give you his Spirit.
That isn’t how this works!
We should be humbled by that reality: God lives inside of you, and it isn’t because you did such a great job of cleaning the place up and now he can live there; he is the one who came in and cleaned you up and clothed you with the righteousness of Christ.
Don’t be proud and foolish enough to think that somehow you were good enough for God to give you all of that; God gave you the Holy Spirit because God is that good.
You simply believed that what he said was true. He drew you to himself and you trusted him to save you, and in his mercy he justified you, he made you alive, and he placed his Spirit inside you.
Not only did he give us the Holy Spirit when we believed in Christ, but it is through the Spirit that we continue to grow as a believer.
That’s his second question:
2) How are you continuing to grow as a Christian?
2) How are you continuing to grow as a Christian?
Read verse 3...
It was God who justified you, and it was God who put his Spirit in you, and it was God who made you alive with Christ.
If that’s the case, what makes you think that somehow you are going to be good enough in your own strength, your own wisdom, and your own understanding, that you can finish what God started?
This gets to one of the most interesting paradoxes in Christianity.
Think about when you started a new job or when you started a new subject in class.
They may not have been great, but you probably had some kind of teacher or trainer whose job it was to show you the ropes and how to do that new thing.
Eventually, they handed it off to you, and you started doing it on your own.
That’s how that’s supposed to work, right?
We see a similar concept with any new skill we develop, don’t we?
When you first learn to play an instrument, you need lots of lessons or YouTube videos. If you are in the gym, you need a trainer to show you the proper form so you can work out without hurting yourself.
Eventually, you learn the muscle memory you need to play that instrument or the technique you need for those lifts, and you pull away from your teacher and start doing more on your own.
There may be some aspects of walking with Jesus that are like this.
You may need a teacher to help you learn how to study the Bible and understand what God is saying, or you may need someone to help you to learn to pray in a different way.
As you grow, you can eventually begin teaching others what God has taught you through his word and through other people.
However, at no point will you ever outgrow your need for the Holy Spirit.
Christian growth and maturity is not growing to the point where you can say, “Thanks God, but I can take it from here.”
If anything, it is the exact opposite.
Christian growth is growing more and more aware of my desperate need for the Holy Spirit to guide me, strengthen me, correct me, encourage me, fill me, and work in and through me.
That’s the truth Paul is pointing out to the Galatians.
The false teachers say you have to work hard and you have to keep the Law and that’s how you are saved.
God says you can’t do that, and the way you were saved and the way you continue to grow to live out that salvation is by recognizing that.
That’s why Paul would write to the church at Philippi:
I am sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
He didn’t tell them that he was sure that they could take it from here; he said God would complete what God had started.
Again, for us to rely on our good works to get us saved or keep us saved is futile and empty.
We cannot do it! We still sin, we still don’t understand what we need to do, and we are still weakened because we live in bodies and world tainted by sin.
We strive to grow and we strive for Christlikeness, but we do that by turning more and more to Christ and to God’s Word and by resting in his grace and by letting him guide and trusting that he knows what he’s doing and all of that.
We are growing out of what Christ has done in us, not to try to earn standing with him.
Maybe this is part of where you are struggling this morning.
You know the gospel, and you have trusted in Jesus.
But now, you feel like it is up to you to try to figure this out on your own, so you just try to muscle your way through.
When is the last time you started your day by praying for God to fill you with his Spirit in such a way that he controls your thoughts and words and actions?
What was the last thought you had before you went into that stressful meeting at work or sat down to have that hard conversation at home?
When you were face to face with that temptation again, did you try to fight it off in your strength, or did you stop and ask for God to help you see the way out and then, in his power, take it?
He isn’t likely to speak to you in an audible voice, and you may not recognize his strength until you are on the other side, but you didn’t start this walk with Jesus on your own, and you can’t finish it on your own either.
Listen and seek for God to guide you through his word and learn to rest on him more and more.
That’s the opposite of what we often do, and it is the opposite of what the false teachers taught, but it is how we grow in our Christian life.
As Paul continues to point back to what God has done in their lives as evidence, he asks:
3) Did you suffer in vain?
3) Did you suffer in vain?
This is Paul’s third question, and we find it in verse 4.
The word “experience” here can also be translated “suffer.”
Scholars may debate exactly what Paul meant, but I think it would be right to say that they had suffered for believing what Paul taught.
That’s what Paul is pointing to here.
He isn’t talking about the general suffering everyone experiences in life; he is specifically talking about what they suffered because they believed in Jesus alone for eternal life.
We find the stories of the gospel spreading in the region of Galatia in Acts 14.
Paul and Barnabas were preaching the gospel, and it made people mad.
At one point, the town united against them and wanted to stone them. They left and went to another town, but eventually, the Jews that started trouble came and successfully stoned Paul and left him for dead.
Here’s the thing: Paul and Barnabas left those cities, but the believers he was writing to stayed.
We don’t have a specific record of the suffering they endured after Paul left, but it is implied when he comes back through their towns later:
After they had preached the gospel in that town and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, to Iconium, and to Antioch,
strengthening the disciples by encouraging them to continue in the faith and by telling them, “It is necessary to go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.”
They had endured suffering and hardships because they believed in Jesus.
Now these false teachers were coming in and telling them that they were wasting their time living out the gospel when they should be doing all these other things.
Paul asked the Galatians: “Do you really think all that was for nothing?”
Let’s be clear here: lots of people suffer for sincerely believing the wrong thing. Just because you are suffering for something doesn’t mean it is true.
However, when we are tempted to give up on trusting Jesus and try to trust ourselves for salvation, we need to ask this same question: Was all of this really for nothing?
Has God really not done anything in your life? Is all this a complete sham? Did you not experience both conviction for you sin and love from God in ways that shook you to the core?
Is all of this for nothing?
This is one of the reasons why it is so important to surround yourself with other Christians, especially when you find some who are older than you.
When you and I have moments where we doubt, and almost all of us will have those, we can draw strength from others who have gone ahead of us.
Let me do what I can to tell you that Jesus really is worth it.
I have followed him for thirty years, and I have had my fair share of doubts.
However, I tell you in full sincerity that he is absolutely worth it.
I cannot imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t have the Holy Spirit with me to guide me and comfort me and the assurance that I will one day see Jesus face to face.
I haven’t gone through all this for nothing—believing in Jesus and Jesus alone for eternal life is worth it.
Let’s look at one final question:
4) What caused God to do miracles?
4) What caused God to do miracles?
Pick up in verse 5...
Miracles? What’s that all about?
Going back to Acts 14, we hear about the miracles God did when Paul and Barnabas preached in these towns.
When Paul preached in Iconium, the Bible says:
So they stayed there a long time and spoke boldly for the Lord, who testified to the message of his grace by enabling them to do signs and wonders.
We don’t know exactly what they were doing, but going off what we see elsewhere in the New Testament, this probably involved healing diseases, casting out demons, and other signs that demonstrated God’s power over everything.
When they left Iconium, they headed to the towns of Lystra and Derbe.
There, God gives us a more specific record of one miracle:
In Lystra a man was sitting who was without strength in his feet, had never walked, and had been lame from birth.
He listened as Paul spoke. After looking directly at him and seeing that he had faith to be healed,
Paul said in a loud voice, “Stand up on your feet!” And he jumped up and began to walk around.
When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they shouted, saying in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!”
God worked so mightily that the pagan people there thought Paul and Barnabas were the gods Hermes and Zeus and tried to worship them.
With this question, Paul was asking the Galatians to think back to those miracles.
Why did God perform those miracles? Because they had done such a great job following the Law and doing good deeds and avoiding bad ones?
No; he did those as an act of grace because the people believed the gospel.
So, does that mean that God is going to heal people and cast out demons when people get saved today?
He doesn’t usually do it like this, but he sure can. I could have one of my friends tell you the story of how God undeniably healed his wife miraculously a little over a year ago.
However, here’s what I do know: God does a miracle every single time someone believes in Christ.
He talks about it beautifully in Ephesians 2. Paul begins by reminding us that our sin made us dead spiritually. He goes on to say:
But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us,
made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace!
What’s the miracle? God raised you and me from the dead!
Not because we had worked really hard because dead men can’t work!
No; God, in his grace, made us alive in Christ!
He keeps going, pointing out:
For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift—
not from works, so that no one can boast.
Salvation is a gift. It always has been, and it always will be.
When we are saved, God gives us his Spirit. We didn’t have to reach some level to earn him; he is a gift.
That same Spirit continues to grow us to look more and more like Jesus.
He sustains us through suffering, making every single bit of it worth it.
He miraculously makes us alive through believing in Jesus.
Have you trusted him today?
Are you still trusting him, or are you trying to handle life on your own?
What do you need to do in response?