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We are exploring a series of messages on the book of Galatians and we are calling it “Getting the Gospel Right”.
When I say the word “Gospel”, what do I mean?
There are probably a lot of ways that you could express what the Gospel means
God’s plan to redeem His people and to make them holy.
In other words, the Gospel is something that happened when we met Jesus.
We were made righteous before God.
And it is something that continues to happen as the Holy Spirit transforms us to make us holy.
And it will continue to happen until that day when we are united with our Father and made perfect.
So when I use the word Gospel, I am talking about all three of these aspects.
It is a then and now and future
But for those of us in this room who have confessed Jesus as Lord, I am most concerned about what the Gospel is doing in our hearts now, and what it will continue to do in the future.
A number of Sundays ago, when we first started looking at the book of Galatians, I showed you this slide:
The Gospel is a message
Not of bondage, not of law
But of liberty and freedom
I wonder how you felt when I showed you this slide.
I’m wondering how you felt, because in my experience as a conservative Mennonite, we have had kind of an uneasy relationship with this word “freedom”.
The reason for that is because many of us have grown up with a very defined set of rules, written or unwritten, for life and worship.
These rules were meant to:
help protect us against the world
help bring unity perhaps, or a uniform way of doing things at least
preserve culture
And usually when we heard the word “freedom”, it was used as way to say, “Hey, I am NOT going to follow those rules that have been set out for me”
The Bible says that I am free
The church says, don’t cut my hair.
But I’m free so I will
The church says, cut my hair.
But I’m free, so I won’t
And the list could go on and on.
A few months ago I told you the story of how when we were living in Ohio, and the church we were attending was going through some challenging times.
And how part of the conflict was between the “liberals” and the “Conservatives”
And one evening when we were spending some time with another couple, and we were hashing around all that was wrong with our church
The lady finally just declared, “Well, if they don’t want to follow the rules, maybe they should just go somewhere else.”
This has been our relationship with “freedom”.
Freedom has, in many cases, been perceived as a threat to our culture, unity, and way of life.
Even though we know that we have been set free, I think it’s quite possible that as conservative Mennonites, we struggle with being set free, and living free.
In Galatians, Paul is writing to a group of people who are struggling to understand what it means to be set free, and what it means to live free.
And as we get into chapter 2 of Galatians, we start to discover that, contrary to how it sounds, the Gospel of Freedom actually puts some pretty heavy demands on us.
Living free is not “doing what I please or “bucking the rules of the church” whatever those may be.
But these demands are not something that a church constitution or “lifestyle guidelines” can fix.
They are matters of the heart.
Here are some of the demands found in chapter 2 that the Gospel of Freedom places on us.
It demands
Unity
Humility
Sanctification
The Gospel of Freedom demands Unity
Look at what is going on in chapter 2 starting in vs. 11
Paul catches Peter acting like a hypocrite
Peter had been allowing the Gospel to work in his heart, and he was “mending fences” with the Gentiles, and eating with them
But we find that the Gospel still had some work to do in Peter’s heart.
Because some men who were sent from James arrived, and Peter immediately draws away from the Gentiles and starts eating with the Jews instead.
And even Barnabas follows his lead and is lead astray
And Paul basically tells him, “you are acting like a hypocrite, Peter.
You aren’t acting in step with the truth of the Gospel.
(vs.
14)
The Gospel of Freedom demands that there is no distinction between how we treat our fellow Jews and how we treat Gentiles.
In fact, as Paul says later in Galatians 3:28 “28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
In Ephesians 2, Paul calls it the “dividing wall of hostility” that caused disunity between the Jews and the Gentiles.
Paul says that the Gospel breaks down that wall of hostility.
And really, you can’t get much bigger of a wall than there was between the religious Jews and the pagan Gentiles
The Gospel of Freedom demands Unity.
The Gospel of Freedom demands that walls between followers of Jesus come down.
Much like in our building project, we took a wall out which largely divided two rooms.
Now both rooms are one
We talk about the importance of unity in our fellowship here at Fairview.
We know that we here should be unified.
But here’s where things get tough
Are we supposed to be unified with other believers who don’t come to our church?
This Gospel that we profess.
Does it demand that we be unified with people from other churches?
Does the demand of unity extend to the body of Christ around the world…to all those who have confessed with their mouths the lordship of Jesus Christ and who believe that He has been raised from the dead
Or, is it just for us here inside these walls?
If it does extend outside these walls, how far does it extend?
What does it imply?
A few months ago, Pete Keller from Zion called.
As you know, the Zion church rents our facility for roughly a week usually in March
The reason they rent it is to hold a bible school.
An intensive time of teaching and fellowship for young people who come in from all over the country.
And also, they usually pick up their operation and move it out of here for Sunday morning and then move everything back here for Sunday noon and for their choir program Sunday afternoon
This time, Pete wanted to know if there was any way possible to use the facility on Sunday morning, holding their service here and inviting us to join them.
I said there might, but let me talk to the elders and see what they thought.
As I remember, the conversation went something like this:
I expressed my desire to be helpful to them, because I realize that it was probably a big logistical challenge for them to find another facility, and switch between the two.
And so we talked about it.
And we asked, “are there reasons for NOT doing this?”
Well, it’s inconvenient, it’s not normal, we feel put upon that they would even ask such a thing.
They are coming into OUR turf, etc.
And on top of that, we have felt offended by them in the past
All of these reasons to say “no” seemed kind of…well, not exactly good reasons
But were there reasons to say “yes”?
There were lots of reasons to say yes.
First and foremost, if Jesus were approached with such a request, what would His response be?
What about for the sake of relationship?
Letting them know that we care about them and want to help their bible school go well and smoothly
What about for the sake of Grace?
Going that extra mile and making that extra effort to extend an act of grace
What makes it especially full of grace is that it’s something that we wouldn’t be expected to do
Maybe reflecting the grace of Jesus which was shown when He did something that no one would have expected Him to do
So as we talked about it, we found ourselves saying, “Why don’t we try it?”
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