The Law To Keep

So I’ve come up with a new idea for a reality TV series—it’s kind of like Survivor, but the exact opposite (stay with me here). You know the premise for Survivor, right? A group of people are put down on a remote island, and then they compete in a series of challenges designed to eliminate them one by one, with contestants “voting” each other off until only one remains, who is then awarded the cash prize.

Well, in my idea, you put a group of people together on an island and give them a bunch of challenges to try to eliminate them, but in this version they only get the money if they all avoid being eliminated! So instead of plotting and scheming against each other—lying, back stabbing and manipulating each other in order to win—people have to work together and take care of each other in order to win.

Now, that’s a show I’d watch—but I’m not confident there would be any studios to pick it up. Because the real draw of shows like Survivor and Big Brother and The Bachelor and so on is that people want to watch contestants stabbing each other in the back! The betrayal and treachery and lies and manipulations are the real entertainment in those shows, aren’t they? They set shows like Survivor in the jungle because the whole point is to be entertained by “the law of the jungle”—every man for himself, survival of the fittest, kill or be killed.

Now, people may think it’s fun to watch a show about the law of the jungle, but it’s no fun to live in it, is it? Some of you here today know firsthand how miserable it can be—whether its from co-workers all fighting each other over a promotion or a family torn by brokenness and animosity or a spouse that betrays you, you bear the emotional scars today of the “law of the jungle” that you’ve suffered through.

It’s bad enough to have to suffer through those betrayals and lies and backstabbing in your home or your work, but it is even worse when the “Law of the Jungle” begins to invade your church—when it is Christians who are “biting and devouring one another” (Gal 5:15). That’s exactly what we see happening in the churches of Galatia—their legalism was slowly “letting in the jungle”. Back in Chapter 4, Paul reminds them that they used to be so loving and gracious to him in his weakness that they “would have gouged out their own eyes and given them to him” (Gal. 4:15), but their legalism—trying to achieve their own righteousness before God by observing Moses’ Law instead of trusting in Jesus alone—was making them hard and bitter and self-centered.

At the end of Chapter 5, Paul shows the Galatians how to “walk in the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh”—those desires to bite and devour one another in envy and self-centered pride. In verse 26, he sums up the effects of the Law of the Flesh on our spiritual condition:

Galatians 5:26 ESV

Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.

The word translated “conceited” here in the ESV is the Greek word “kenodoxos”: “keno” means “empty”, and “doxos” means “glory” (where we get our word “doxology”— “word of glory” from). The King James version translates it “vainglory”, “empty glory”. This is important because for the next two weeks as we move through the first ten verses of Chapter 6 we are going to see the Apostle Paul unpacking the consequences of “conceit” in the life of a Christian—particularly in the way that conceit impacts the life of a church.

If you are walking according to the Law of the Flesh, Paul warns, you will be full of “empty glory”. Your life will be characterized by “provoking one another” and “envying one another” (5:26). Throughout the whole letter, Paul has been warning them of the destructiveness of keeping the so-called “Law of the Flesh”. But here, he gives them a different Law:

Galatians 6:2 ESV

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.

Paul says, “You Galatians are so concerned about keeping laws? Here’s the Law you need to keep: The Law of Christ!” So what is the Law of Christ? Did Jesus ever give us a “Law” —a “commandment” to keep?

Turn to page 902 in the pew Bible—John 15:12-13:

John 15:12–13 ESV

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

So what is the “Law of Christ”? That we love each other the way Jesus did. And what does verse 13 say about the way He loved us? He laid down His life for us!

The Law of the Jungle—the “law of the flesh”—is the "empty glory” of conceit—it says “My desires, my goals and my comfort are more important than yours. My glory is more important than yours!” The Galatians were living by a Law that said “My life over yours”, but The Law of Christ says “My life for yours”!

The Law of the Flesh makes us selfish, but the Law of Christ makes us selfless.

Here in these five verses, Paul shows us three ways that the Law of Christ frees us from the selfishness of our “empty glory”; three signs that we are loving one another the way Jesus loved us by laying down our lives for each other. First, look at verse 1:

Galatians 6:1 ESV

Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.

First, we see that

I. The Law of Christ makes us Gentle (v. 1)

See here how Paul is carrying over that distinction he made in Chapter 5 between the “Flesh” and the “Spirit”—you who are spiritual should restore the one who has fallen. (And the fact that he says you should do this leads us to suspect that they are not doing this!) The phrase translated “caught in a transgression” carries the idea of someone who has been “ambushed” or caught off-guard. In other words, this isn’t someone who is unrepentantly or blatantly disregarding God’s call to holiness. The Greek word here for “transgression” gives the idea of someone who “falls” into breaking the law: They weren’t going out looking for trouble; but they fell into sin.

And in a legalistic church that is living according to the flesh, governed by the “Law of the Jungle”, then someone who falls into sin can get hammered by the conceitednesss of the rest. They’re “damaged goods”, they’re never to be trusted again, and the rest of the church will never let them forget their failure. And there are so many people who have been crushed by judgmental, “Law of the Jungle” churches that they never want to walk into another church again.

But what does a church governed by the Law of Christ tell us to do? “Bear one another’s burdens”—the Greek word for “burden” here gives the idea of troublesome, weary labor (it’s the same word that Jesus uses in the parable of the vineyard workers in Matthew 20:12 to talk about “the burden of the day and the scorching heat”—a difficult burden, associated with hardship or misfortune.

We are gentle because we love the one who has fallen

When Jesus saw us suffering under the misery of our load of sin, He didn’t “kick us when we were down”, did He? He bore that burden for us! And so fulfilling the Law of Christ means that we will step into our brother’s misery and help to restore him—we will take on our sister’s mess and help her out of it! We will not be judgmental and conceited, we will be gentle and loving—because that is how Jesus loved us!

And part of the reason we are gentle in restoring someone who has tripped and fallen into sin is because we know that we are just as liable to sin! “Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted”. If your brother in Christ has been tripped up, you can too! As the weather continues to turn colder, and eventually winter gets its icy grip on us, the ponds and lakes will freeze over. And every year we have to remind ourselves of the safety procedures for thin ice, right? How do you rescue someone who has fallen through thin ice? Do you go stomping out to the edge of the hole and bend down and grab them? Of course not—because you could fall in just as easily!

And it is the same for us when we go to rescue our brother or sister when they have unexpectedly broken through the ice and fallen into sin:

We are gentle because we are the same as the one who has fallen

We are gentle to restore them because we know that we are just as liable to fall unexpectedly into sin someday—we aren’t governed by the Law of the Jungle that says “I am spiritually superior to that poor sap—I could never fall into sin like they did! Look at me go!” We are gentle because we know that someday that could be us—that the only reason we have not fallen is not because of our superior moral fiber, but because the grace of God in Jesus Christ has spared us—and that grace is available for us when we do fall!

And this leads us to the next way that the Law of Christ changes us. The Law of Christ makes us gentle, and

II. The Law of Christ makes us Humble (vv. 3-4)

Look at verses 3-4:

Galatians 6:3–4 ESV

For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor.

The Law of the Flesh makes us self-centered and proud. As we’ve seen earlier, one of the driving forces of legalism is the drive to be better than your neighbor. Your good deeds only count if they make you better than someone else: You know your Bible better than they do ("I can find any book in the Bible in five seconds flat, but they have to look it up in the index! Look at me go!”), you attend church more regularly than they do (“And I go to Sunday School every week, too!”), you don’t have any bad habits like they do (“I don’t smoke or eat refined flour or white sugar!”), and so on.

But the Law of Christ does not drive us to be self-centered and proud:

Instead of “fooling ourselves” into thinking that we are holier than someone else—that we are “something”—we realize that (as Jesus said in John 15:5), apart from Him we can do nothing!

We are humble because we are totally dependent on Jesus

This is why Paul reminds us of the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:19-23—so that we will measure ourselves not by how we stack up to each other, but how we stack up to the Word of God!

The word here in verse 4 that is translated “test his own work” literally means to “scrutinize carefully”, to “look deeply”. It is all too easy for us to impose a level of scrutiny on other people’s actions than we do for our own, isn’t it? The Law of the Flesh that we fight with wants to scour our neighbor’s life for signs of weakness in them, but when it comes to looking at our own lives, we give ourselves a pass! But if the only way you can feel confident in your Christian walk is by looking down on people who aren’t as “spiritual” as you, then you are walking by the Law of the Flesh—the “dog eat dog, survival of the fittest” Law of the Jungle!

But God’s Word commands us to look to our own lives—scrutinize our own actions not by the standards of other Christians’ behavior, but by the standards of God’s Word!

We are humble because we aren’t competing with others

We are measuring our walk with Christ not on the basis of how much better we are than someone else, but on what we see in God’s Word about what we are to be! When you pat yourself on the back because you don’t have as bad a temper with your kids as another mom in the school group does, you’re finding a reason to boast in someone else’s frailty (and what happens the week she doesn’t yell at her kids and you yell at yours?? There goes your superior spirituality!) But when you read Galatians 5:23 and realize that it’s been three months since you last lost your temper, you see that God’s Spirit has been growing “gentleness and self-control” in you all that time, then your reason to boast is not in someone else’s failure, but in God’s success in you! And your reason to boast will be in yourself alone and not in your neighbor!

And this leads us to the third way that the Law of Christ changes us:

III. The Law of Christ makes us Responsible (v. 5)

Verse 5:

Galatians 6:5 ESV

For each will have to bear his own load.

Now on the face of it, this is kind of a confusing turn Paul has just taken in this passage, isn’t it? After all, didn’t he just say three verses earlier that we are to “bear one another’s burdens”? And here he says that we each must “bear our own load”. So what’s going on here?

One of the first things to note is that the Greek word translated “load” here in verse 5 is a different word than the word translated “burden” in verse 2. When Paul tells us to “bear one another’s burdens”, the word “burden” means a heavy, difficult load that comes from misfortune, a wearisome and onerous burden (like the hardship and pain of getting entangled with sin). But the word here in verse 5, “fortion” literally means “cargo” or “freight”—it is a load that you are expected to carry!

When you stand before God in Heaven someday, He is going to ask you to give an account of your own life, not someone else’s life! In verse 4 that means that you cannot point to your neighbor’s life and say, “See, God—I’m more faithful than she is!” And here in verse 5 it is the other side of the coin

We cannot blame others for our spiritual struggles.

On the one hand, the Law of the Flesh tells us that as long as we’re more spiritual that our neighbor, we’re doing well. But on the other hand, the Law of the Flesh wants to blame our spiritual failures on our neighbor as well! And that’s a dodge that is as old as humanity itself, isn’t it? In Genesis 3:12, when God asked Adam to give an account of why he broke His command not to eat of the fruit, Adam shifted the blame right off of himself, didn’t he? “Well, it was the woman you gave me! It’s her fault that I sinned!”

And we have been doing it ever since, haven’t we? We come before God and say, “Well, he knows how sensitive I am about how much money I make—if he hadn’t kept teasing me, I wouldn’t have blown up at him like that!” “God, I know it’s wrong to hold a grudge, but it’s not my fault—every time we go to her house she has to remind me that Mom left it to her!” “God, it’s not my fault that I keep dialing up the porn—if my wife were just more attentive to me, I wouldn’t have a problem!”

But God is not interested in hearing you shift blame for your sin onto other people. (Even if they do bear some kind of responsibility, don’t you think He sees it better than you do?) When you come before God, there is only one person you have to answer for—there is only one “cargo” you are responsible to deliver, and it’s not theirs! They will have to answer to Him for their own freight, just as you will!

We look to God for our spiritual growth.

The Law of the Flesh makes you hard and unforgiving with someone who has fallen into sin. But the Law of Christ makes you gentle with your neighbor’s burdens of sin—because Jesus Christ was gentle with you when you were miserable under that burden of guilt and shame! God made Jesus, who never sinned at all, to not only take your load of sin, but the Bible says He actually became sin for you! (1 Cor. 5:21) He bore your burden of sin and shame, and gave you His own righteousness!

The Law of the Flesh makes you prideful about your spirituality—it makes you think that you are “something” when you are nothing! But look to Jesus Christ—who (as it says in Philippians 2)

Philippians 2:5–8 ESV

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Beloved, the flesh makes you think you are something when you are nothing—but Jesus really was “something”—God Himself in the flesh—but He willingly became nothing, dying that horrible death on the Cross, so that you could be delivered from the penalty for your sins against Him!

The Law of the Flesh makes you want to compare yourself with others to prove you are spiritual, it makes you want to shift the blame for your failures onto others. But what did Jesus do? He traded your cargo of failure for His cargo of righteousness,

Colossians 1:22 ESV

he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,

When you open that cargo of the fruits of the Spirit at your final destination in heaven someday, it will be filled not with your own attempts at righteousness, but the righteousness of Jesus Christ Himself!

It is God who is at work in you, Christian, to make you more and more like Jesus Christ—to cause you to “fulfill the Law of Christ” in a greater and greater way throughout your life. So make it your aim to keep this Law!

If you aim to fulfill the Law of Christ by being gentle when your brother stumbles, Christian—you have to start to be gentle now! Far too often we let the Law of the Jungle take over when we talk about others, don’t we? We read the news or see on social media about a prominent Christian who stumbles, and we are tempted to just pile on, right? We run them through the wringer of our own judgment, without knowing anything about their situation—we’re five hundred meters off with our sniper rifles, taking shots at someone we don’t even know. But right next to us, one of our fellow church members who is struggling with the exact same problem sees us shredding a stranger for the same sin. Do you think that person is ever going to open up to you when they fall? No—you need to start being gentle now, or you’ll never have a chance to “gently restore” your neighbor someday.

If you aim to fulfill the Law of Christ by thinking and acting honestly about your spiritual condition, measure yourself by the Word of God—not by others. Honestly assess yourself—scrutinize your life. The old Puritan divines of the Seventeenth Century would keep extensive journals of their emotional and spiritual lives—not so they could self-centeredly boast and brag over their achievements, but so that they could keep an honest account of their spiritual progress measured by God’s Word. Pick up an inexpensive journal at Walmart or somewhere, and go through and put one word from Galatians 5:19-21 on each page: A page for jealousy, a page for anger, a page for strife, and so on. And use a journal like that to carefully consider what brought about that particular sin: Why did I get jealous there? How did lust get a chance to attack me there? It was John Owen who compared our battle with sin to a battle against an enemy general—we need to study his tactics, understand where he will try to attack, know when he is most likely to engage us.

Another way to think and act honestly about your spiritual condition is to find a mature Christian that you can go to to talk about your struggles—to confess your sins so that they can gently restore you and pray with you. The Law of the Flesh never wants to confess any sin, because the Law of the Flesh doesn’t want to admit any kind of spiritual weakness—but the humility borne of the Law of Christ is glad to “boast all the more gladly of our weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon us” (2 Cor. 12:9).

And when you practice this kind of careful, honest assessment of your spiritual growth, you will find that there is no longer any need to blameshift your failures on others. You are content to carry your own load, and answer for your own walk. Because you are walking with a Savior who looked on you under your load of guilt and shame and did not kick you when you were down—He said, “My life for yours”! He took your burden of sin, stretching His arms wide on that cross to embrace all of it, and then clasped it to Himself as He took it down with Him into the Grave, where He buried it forever!

And then He rose again three days later and brought you with Him out of that spiritual death into eternal life—a life no longer governed by the “Law of the Jungle” to bite and devour and strive and struggle with one another, but to love, to sacrifice, to lay down your life for others! So have done with the Law of the Flesh, and take on the life of your Savior: Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the Law of Christ!

BENEDICTION

1 Peter 5:10–11 ESV

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

What sets a church apart from other charitable organizations and clubs—even religious ones? How are we different here at Bethel from other service organizations in town?

What is the difference between “bearing one another’s burdens” in v. 2 and “each one carrying his own load” in verse 5. What are some ways we can “carry one another’s burdens” in our church family?

Have you ever had someone confront you about a sin pattern they have seen in your life? What was that experience like? How should we “restore” someone who is struggling with sin?

How does our being “in the Vine”, as Jesus said in John 15, help us to deal with our temptations to spiritual pride? How does knowing that “apart from Jesus we can do nothing” help to guard our hearts against shifting the blame for our spiritual failures onto others?

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