More Than One Neck Needed
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Context
Paul’s concern in the letter is that people would stop messing with the gospel and that people would top tolerating those who were messing with the gospel. The idea that one could believe Jesus is the Christ and that He died for our sins and that He rose from the dead and expect to be justified by placing one’s faith in these truths were ok, but one must also obey the Mosaic law, and in particular, be circumcised.
Paul has argued that justification is by faith alone in Christ alone. The law was not given to provide salvation, but to make clear that salvation was necessary and could only be provided through a Savior. The law now is a blueprint for holy living for those who have been made holy through the redemptive work of Jesus.
And as we have made our way through this epistle, we have come to some of the problems the Galatian church were experiencing as a result of this faulty theology. hey weren’t getting along. There was a sense of chaos among the people and, sin was evident and Paul was urging them ro come back to the truth, and provided instruction and warning to help them not only have peace with God but with each other.
What we will see today is something that is not difficult for us to relate to. People weren’t getting along. People were sinning. How do we handle that?
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. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. 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. For each will have to bear his own load.
Introduction
“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
Process for confrontation
Church discipline
Confrontational but loving
Practicing this is part of what it is to help one another.
We typically think of helping one another within very specific parameters. And these parameters are too narrow.
FCF: Our understanding of helping each other is too narrow.
Main Idea
Burden-bearing requires confrontation.
Burden-bearing requires confrontation.
Why is confrontation necessary for burden-bearing?
Why is confrontation necessary for burden-bearing?
Because confrontation nurtures spiritual health (1-3)
Because confrontation nurtures spiritual health (1-3)
AQ: How does confrontation nurture spiritual health?
It exposes sin (1a)
It exposes sin (1a)
Notice how Paul begins this chapter: brothers. This brings back what Paul said in
I have confidence in the Lord that you will take no other view, and the one who is troubling you will bear the penalty, whoever he is.
When we were here a few weeks ago, I noted this was a little difficult for me to understand. Where does this confidence come from. It’s not in the people of the Galatian churches.... it’s in the work of God in the people of the Galatian churches. And Paul’s confidence in God is now being reflected in how he is referencing the people… brothers. For all the concern and criticism. For all the doctrinal missteps. For all the in-fighting and division, Paul remains confident in the Lord, and continues to appeal to this troubled church as brothers.
Now remember the concerns Paul referenced in the previous chapter.
On the one side of the coin was a concern for legalism. Legalism is the presumption that people can, through their effort, gain and retain God’s favor. In the Galatians’ case, that showed itself in the false teaching that circumcision was a necessary means to gain God’s favor. Paul countered this idea when he said:
Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you.
But on the other side of this same concern coin was antinomianism (no law). The belief that the freedom we receive through Christ in our salvation frees us to from the law in such a way that it is no longer relevant to Christian living. And Paul expressed his concern for this when he said
For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.
In light of all the false teaching that was going on in the church, the willingness to entertain that false teaching, it no surprise that Paul addresses how to deal with sin in the church. This is Paul’s instructions on church discipline, which in some ways echoes what Jesus taught about church discipline in Matthew 18.
caught means suddenly discovered in a transgression. When we come upon someone who is living in sin, how are we to handle it. You see, in the next verse Paul will issue a command to bear one another’s burdens. But when you and I think about bearing each other’s burdens, we don’t think of that kind of help in confrontational terms. The kinds of burdens that we help each other bear are sickness, loss, financial struggle, some kind of oppression.
But given the context of these verses it is clear, I suggest, that the kind of burden-bearing Paul is referencing is one that requires loving confrontation. It’s the kind that sees a brother or sister struggling in their sin, and instead of concluding that that kind of struggle is none of our business, we get in the swamp with them to gently urge them to come out back onto dry and stable ground.
And what this kind of confrontation does. The kind of confrontation that is a means of bearing another’s burden is that it helps to expose sin. It sees sin as God sees it. But in exposing sin, we do not become judgmental or censorious, but we go to our brothers and sisters out of a concern for their spiritual well-being and the glory of Christ.
Another way confrontation nurtures spiritual health is
It promotes maturity (1b)
It promotes maturity (1b)
Now how would confrontation promote maturity?
Notice who Paul identifies to be involved in confronting those caught in any transgression: you who are spiritual. Those who are spiritual are mature. They are characterized by the Holy Spirit.
Look how this same word is used in
But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.
Notice the contrast. spiritual people and people of the flesh. The difference has a great deal to do with the maturity of the people.
Remember, we just dealt with the fruit of the Spirit in the previous chapter. Those who are spiritual are those who display this fruit through their lives.
So mature people are to engage in this work of confrontation, but how is this maturity displayed? Notice what the spiritual are to do: restore him in a spirit of gentleness.
Now the word restore carries the idea of repairing something that is broken. In fact, this word was used to describe mending fishing nets:
And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets.
This is the procedure of the confrontation. This is the process of church discipline. What Paul makes clear here is that the purpose of this kind of discipline is remedial and not punitive. In other words, its purpose is to fix what is broken, not punish the broken.
This is emphasized by how Paul says this process is to take place. End of v. 1: in a spirit of gentleness. Remember, gentleness is an aspect of the fruit of the Spirit. There is no room for harshness or a condemning, judgmental tone in this confrontation.
But what this is making clear is that this kind of restoration cannot be accomplished without confrontation, and while this kind of confrontation requires a firm urging to repent, it also must be qualified with gentleness… that is a mild, even-tempered approach.
This can be a difficult needle to thread, and all of us need to depend on the leading and working of the Spirit to manifest His fruit in us as we engage in this kind of ministry, but it also requires that we be spiritual, that is, mature. Characterized by the Holy Spirit.
Another way confrontation nurtures spiritual health is
It strengthens community (2a)
It strengthens community (2a)
Really, v. 2 is the heart of this passage. It is the main message.
To bear something is to endure something difficult.
Now you might have noticed that this sermon’s title is a little peculiar: More than one neck needed. Burden here is literally a heavy weight or stone that someone has to carry a long distance. Here, of course, the weight are difficult circumstances. Even more specific to the context, the burdens are the difficulties we experience as a result of our own sin. And if these burdens are like heavy weights or stones hanging around our necks, our brothers and sisters are called to lend their necks to help us endure the weight. It may be that we are justly bearing the weight of our sin, but that does not mean that in the body of Christ, we should not anticipate or expect that members of the family of God will come to our aid.
And when the body of Christ functions this way, the community is strengthened. Number of people is one thing, the quality of the community is something else.
But their is a purpose to this burden bearing. There is something about our efforts to help each other bear the weight of our difficulties that goes beyond our present ability to endure. You see, Another way this kind of confrontation nurtures spiritual health is:
It honors Christ (2b)
It honors Christ (2b)
Notice what Paul is saying here. By bearing one another’s burdens we fulfill the law of Christ. What is the law of Christ?
Now anyone who has been tracking Paul’s argument in Galatians carefully will notice that law, at least the way the false teachers and many in the Galatian church were handling the law, has not been discussed in positive terms.
In other words, throughout Galatians, Paul has pictured Christ and the works of the law as opposed to one another. And his point in this contrast was to show that justification can never be achieved by observing thee requirements of the law. Justification comes only through faith in the atoning death of Jesus and His resurrection.
But what is also true, especially in chapters 5-6 is that the moral law of God has never been annulled (cancelled). The civil and ceremonial aspects of the law have been made obsolete by the coming of Christ, but the moral law, epitomized in the 10 Commandments are relevant to the church.
And it is the moral law of Christ that calls the church to bear one another’s burdens. It is the moral law of Christ that calls those who are a part of the family of God to do the hard and uncomfortable work of coming alongside a brother or sister who is pursuing their sin instead of pursuing Christ and call them to repentance because we want to help bear their burdens.
When we do this, we fulfill the law of Christ. We fulfill the whole tradition of Jesus’ ethical teaching for His people.
And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.
This is what we fulfill when we bear one another’s burdens. So it’s not just about helping one another. It’s helping one another with the aim to glorify Christ.
But we have a hard time with this. Perhaps confronting each other in love is one of the more difficult ministries we can attempt to carry out in the body of Christ. We tend to err on one side or the other. We may, in our confrontation, confronting in a censorious manner, leaving the person we confronted feeling judged and abandoned. But we may, in our efforts to confront, fail to properly acknowledge the offense of the person’s sin and perhaps leave him or her with the sense that their sin is less of a problem than it actually is.
What will help us with this? You see another way this kind confrontation nurtures spiritual health is
It requires humility (3)
It requires humility (3)
Humility is the key to balancing our confronting of one another.
Verse 3 is a warning against spiritual pride.
As one commentator summed up verse 3: what is good for nothing becomes nothing. As soon as you and I begin to think we are something. Believe that we have something of value to offer our brothers and sisters apart from the work of the grace of God in our own lives, we become good for nothing. And when we become good for nothing, we become nothing.
It’s not that we have ceased to have value. We have value because we are made in the image of God and God has redeemed His people through the blood of His Son. But functionally in the lives of others, when pride dominates our perception of ourselves, we are of no real use to them. We become non-entities.
We can’t bear one another’s burdens and believe we are something at the same time.
So burden-bearing requires confrontation. And confrontation is necessary for burden-bearing because it nurtures spiritual health. But another reason this kind of confrontation is necessary to burden-bearing is
Because confrontation requires self-examination (4-5)
Because confrontation requires self-examination (4-5)
AQ: What does self-examination have to do with burden-bearing?
Paul just finished warning against spiritual pride, so it’s not unexpected that self-examination is brought up. But what does it have to do with bearing the burdens of others?
Self examination clarifies the standard we use to assess the need for burden-bearing (4)
Self examination clarifies the standard we use to assess the need for burden-bearing (4)
Now remember what I suggested earlier. What Paul is addressing here echoes Jesus’ instruction regarding church discipline. And something we need to know about the process of church discipline right off the bat is that we are called to confront sin, not suspicions of sin.
“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.
So verse 4 is a word of caution when it comes to this kind of confrontational burden-bearing. Verse 4 begins with the word but, and I don’t want to make too much of that, but after commanding us to bear one another’s burdens, Paul commands that we test our own work.
Now we’ll address what Paul means by this in a moment, but the command to test is a command to check. The same kind of cautionary approach we use to check that we have everything we need before going to the DMV to do something or before going on a trip. Check and recheck. So much more so, we are to test our own work.
Now, what does Paul mean? I think this is a call to take our own spiritual pulse, and as we do so we continually seek to yield our thoughts, attitudes and actions to the will of God.
You see, the command to test introduces a standard. How do we know if we pass a test. There is a standard we must meet. We don’t determine the standard for getting an A on a test, the teacher does.
Now it’s here that we should take a step back, and make sure we’re still operating in the context of Paul’s argument. We’re not talking about how one is justified. We do not take a test and pass to get justified. And we do not take a test, do the work of self-examination in order to maintain our justification. But as justified people, we care about living according to the Spirit of God and not according to our flesh. And if we expect to bear each other’s burdens in a way that helps each other and fulfill the law of Christ, we cannot do that according to the standards our flesh sets out.
Our standard is the law of Christ. Our standard is the fruit of the Spirit.
Sometimes out standard becomes the affirmation and applause of other people. Sometimes our standard is ourselves.
When our standard is someone else or ourselves, then we will end up boasting in ourselves. I pleased him or I impressed her so I doing ok. What I am doing and what I did feels good so it must be good.
Our concern is that we are in it, including bearing one another’s burdens for the glory of Christ.
So again, our concern transcends our present concerns and reality. The work of burden bearing has an eschatological dimension to it. We don’t want to shrink back from using those kind of words. These words are important and relevant. We use these words to help us grow and not stay still.
You see
Self examination keeps the reality of Christ’s future judgement in our present view (5)
Self examination keeps the reality of Christ’s future judgement in our present view (5)
So it is easy enough to see the future tense in verse 5. For each will have to bear his own load.
What’s not as clear is what Paul means here.
So verse 5 should not be understood separate from verse 4. Verse 4 makes clear that our standard is Christ. When we test our own work, the standard we use to test is Christ and His law. And the reason that is true is because Christ is our judge. We may behave as if someone else is our judge or that we are our own judges, but ultimately Christ is our judge and He will judge us.
And when that day comes when those who are in Christ and stand before His judgement seat, we will have to bear our own load. I won’t be judged on the basis of who you are what you did, and you won’t be judged on the basis of who I am and what I did.
On this day our responsibility will be to Christ alone. And no one will be able to step in for us.
A sobering reality to be sure, but we should be thinking of this reality now. And what will help us to do that is to commit ourselves to the work that Paul emphasizes here. Burden bearing.
Conclusion
Burden bearing requires confrontation
Burden bearing requires confrontation
And the reason confrontation is necessary to burden-bearing is that this kind of confrontation
nurtures spiritual health and
requires self-examination
Remember the words of Jesus from the passage in Matthew 18 that we read earlier: If your brother sins… Part of what it is to be a family, that is, a church is to bear one another’s burdens… But some of those burdens are present in our lives because of our own sin, so to bear those burdens we must lovingly confront one another. This is what family does for one another.
Benediction
May we trust in the Lord and be like trees planted by water. May we not fear when heat comes; may our leaves remain green; may we not be anxious in the year of drought and never cease to bear fruit.