Sermon Tone Analysis

*Intro*

We are back after a week break in our series called “Back to the Basics: Knowing why you believe what you believe.”

We are now looking over this point:

/8.

That every believer is a new creation in Christ, and is called to walk in the Spirit, to die unto sin, and to live unto righteousness, and thereby manifest the fruit of the Spirit, conforming oneself to the image of Christ; that good works are the fruit of the Christian life, and are not ways of justification.

/

We looked at Galatians 5:1-12 last time.

We saw what freedom means in the light of how God has saved us.

We saw that we are saved by grace alone, that we cannot add anything to our salvation.

Jesus nothing = everything.

Paul was fighting a group called the Judaizers, who said that these new believers needed Jesus plus a ritual, namely, circumcision, for God to accept you.

Paul was enraged and we ended with him calling his opponents to “emasculate themselves!”

Now he wants to make sure we do not take grace for granted and live as we please.

Remember Satan does not like people in the center of truth, because that is where they are powerful in Christ.

Rather, he would want to take us to extremes.

The legalist satisfies himself, and presumably God he thinks, by adhering to a strict external code of do’s and don’ts, which he imagines demonstrate his self-righteous suitability for heaven.

The lawless libertine, on the other hand, satisfies himself by rejecting all codes and living completely according to his personal lusts and desires.

They are both man-centered and destructive in their theology.

Satan has something for everybody and both extremes are bondage.

Last time we saw Paul was calling us to live in freedom.

Today he will tell us the dangers of living in freedom without a relationship with Christ.

Jesus calls us to freedom, but that does not mean independence.

We are free from the yoke of bondage to the law, but that does not mean we have no yokes at all.

We have His yoke (Matt.

11:30).

Without a yoke, you have no direction and no purpose.

You don’t need the law to control you, but that doesn’t mean you should control you.

You need the Spirit, Jesus living in you, to control you from within.

His yoke is tailor-made for each of us and He is co-yoked with us so that we may walk and work with Him!

Unfortunately, a lot of us may have played the grace card.

I can play now and pray later.

We take advantage of God’s grace and forgiveness.

“God knows I’m weak in this area.

He will forgive me when I ask Him after I sin” some say.

So instead of legalism, there is lawlessness.

Sin becomes rationalized.

It’s especially hard because once you become a believer, God leaves (what we will learn today) /the flesh/ behind.

There is an unredeemed humanity in us whose impulse is to rebel against God.

One day the flesh will be destroyed, but until then there is an ongoing war in our hearts.

How can we be victorious against it?

How can we live in that balance of being yoked with Christ and walking with Him?

This is what we are going to look at today.

Let’s start with this:

*I.

**True freedom is being free from sin to serve in love (Gal.

5:13-15)*

Paul brings his argument back full circle.

He started off by saying Christ has set us free for freedom (Gal.

5:1) and says it again here in v.13.

Paul says God called us.

The gospel of grace is a call from God. “Come follow me!”

We were in prison to sin.

He paid the debt for our release.

He opens the prison door, fills our dungeon with light and calls us out!

But Paul says, don’t get out of the prison cell and walk into another.

When Christ saved you, you became a new creation (2 Cor.

5:17).

But there is a part of you that is not redeemed yet.

This is called the flesh.

The flesh used here, which NIV calls “the sinful nature,” is not which hangs on the bone, but rather that impulse in man, which encourages rebellion against God.

Paul uses “flesh” eight times in 5:13-6:10.

C.S. Lewis calls it “the inner cesspool” that breeds snakes of evil.[1]

The Bible says the following about the flesh:

 ·It cannot please God (Rom 8:8)

· In it dwells no good thing (Rom.

7:18)

· Do not put confidence in it (Phil.

3:3)

· Do not make provision for the flesh (Rom.

13:14) by feeding it the things that it enjoys.

John Macarthur adds, “Every wrong action, every wrong word, every wrong idea, every wrong reaction, every wrong emotion, every wrong attitude is from the flesh…the reason we have anxiety, the flesh.

The reason we have fear, the flesh.

The reason we have terrible relationships, the flesh.

The reason we have difficulty in marriage, the flesh.

The reason we have difficulty in the family, the flesh.

The reason we have difficulty cooperating with other people, the flesh.

The reason we have pride, the flesh.

All sin of every form, all wrong emotions, all wrong attitudes, all wrong actions, all wrong reactions, all wrong thoughts, all wrong words, and all wrong deeds all come out of the flesh.”[2]

I call it the “Gollum” inside you.

Before you are Christian, all you are is flesh.

You are a walking mass of a heart ruled by you, rebelling against God.

It is everything you apart from God intervening in your life.

I once saw a Christian book that had the subtitle, “Discover the Champion within you.”

Sometimes messages like those, especially to Christians, makes them feel like they are good people with all kinds of potential, without admitting that we have the flesh fighting us all the time.

The Christian has three enemies: the devil, the world’s system and the flesh.

They all work together to separate us from God.

Paul’s focus here is on the flesh.

Paul’s declaration is that Christian freedom is not a base of operations from which the flesh is given opportunity to carry on its campaigns of sin freely and without consequence.”

Don’t let lust camp under the “freedom” tent.

Paul says same thing in Rom 6:1, 15.

Their liberty was not to be used as a springboard from which to take off with their intention of sinning.[3]

So as John Stott says, “Christian freedom is freedom /from/ sin, not freedom /to/ sin.[4]

Instead, Paul says your freedom that Christ saved you for is to be a slave of love.

True liberty is not the privilege to do whatever one wants, but the privilege to do what God wants.

As C. K. Barrett: “The opposite of flesh is love … love that looks away from the self and its wishes, even its real needs, to the neighbor, and spends its resources on his needs.”

Christian freedom is freedom to love and therefore freedom to serve.

“Love” here is “agape,” which is not to human affection, but to divine love.

In other words, “This love is a love whose chief essence is self-sacrifice for the benefit of the one who is loved.”[5]

“Serve” here means render service to, to do that which is for the advantage of someone else.

He is placing /service/ over against /selfishness,/ the /positive/ over against the /negative/.

One commentator adds, “Having discouraged two forms of/ /slavery as burdensome and terrible, he commended another form that was beneficial—a slavery of mutual love.”[6]

So once you become a believer, you become less self-centered and more others-centered.

Paul says in fact, when you truly are free in Christ, you actually fulfill the law you are trying so hard externally to follow.

Jesus had said the heart of the Law in the Old Testament, boiled down to two things: “Love God and love your neighbor” (Matt.

22:39).

But we fail in keeping the law.

We hate God and our neighbor and love only ourselves.

However, Jesus died with two beams: a horizontal and vertical beam.