Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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”.