Paul’s Letter to the Gauls (Galatians) – Intro

It is the nature of all men who are part of the fallen race to desperately need to conform to some sort of code. It is almost necessary for your nature to conform to some sort of standard, and not only to conform to it, but deep down in the heart and soul of every Christian breathes a Christian with a soul so dead who does not have Blastinius lurking in his head. Somewhere deep inside you is a guy who not only wants to follow a standard but also wants others to follow it. Yeah. Say amen to that. Don’t just sit there. Don’t just sit there like that. I am quite certain that Blastinius has visited your gathering, has broken bread in your home, has spent the night in your house, and maybe even lurks in your heart. I have, right now inside of me, something welling up that I cannot articulate. It’s so deep, and it trembles so in me that it literally cuts off my ability to communicate. This thing I would drive home to you is that what you need so much is some kind of prop in your life to live by. A man, a woman, naturally put themselves under some sort of law.

Folks, saints, brothers, sisters, we’re dealing with something here even more basic than the law. When I went to the seminary, even before I went to seminary as a young Christian, I kept hearing preachers preach about the law, the law, and boy, they were putting down the law, and you know, I’d say then, and I say now, who cares? It’s a dead issue. It was resolved in the first century. I used to preach as an evangelist…law, law, law. It’s grace, grace, grace. Invitation. Come get saved, you poor sinner. Let the Lord Jesus save you, and that was it—the law. But there’s something deeper here. The law came out of man’s basic fallen need to have some standard to live by. If there had been no law for the Jews, they would have created one, and the Gentiles, with all their looseness and all of their tendency toward license, had their standards of good deeds. But still, Gene, we are saved by grace, and we did understand that we were saved by grace. We have not been circumcised, and we are not under the law, but I think we miss a point. I think the theologians miss it. I think we Christians miss it. Hear me.

Dear brothers and sisters, this letter was not written to lost men. I have preached to people: you’re not going to get saved by good works; you’re saved by grace. That’s where we usually discuss the law with lost men, and it’s a good place to do so because lost men feel such a strong need to be good. I think somewhere in this room there lurks a human being who feels the need of being good. The problem we’re dealing with here, even though it starts off discussing salvation, is not salvation. This happened to believers already redeemed who went back to an awful, killing standard of conduct. They went back to it. Is it conceivable that a Christian in our day might even have fallen prey to this disease unwittingly and unknowingly? Look here, y’all…so good to come back to the South where I can talk English. I live in New England. Those people…they spend all their time talking to me, saying, “Huh?” And I spend all my time talking to them, saying, “Huh?” We do not understand one another. Listen, y’all, it comes down to this. This is so basic, and it’s got to be rooted out of you and me, and I’m going to tell you why. Because the Christian life is closed to us if it’s not rooted out, it boils down to this. Closed, the adventure of the Christian life means its depth and riches are closed to us if we have the idea that we can earn God’s favor.

Forget work and forget law, let’s get it down to this. Can you get God’s favor? Can you impress Him? Can you impress Him? Well, Gene, that’s funny. Just think about it for a minute. Just think for a minute. By certain things you do, you’re going to impress him. Certain things you don’t do, you’re going to impress him. Certain things you do, you’re going to be in big trouble, and certain things you don’t do, you’re going to be in big trouble. Now, you tell me that that concept doesn’t lurk around in you somewhere. I believe, dear saint, dear child of God, that that is just as inbred into you as it can be.  And for the first century people, that was the law and good deeds, and for you and for me, what on earth could it be? I don’t know what it is for you, but I can tell you where you got it. You got it from two places. You got it from your fallen nature and probably got it from Baptist preachers. A Baptist mother, but you got it. Now, I must warn you, from this point on, you might wisely pack your bags, go home, and forget you ever came to Memphis, Tennessee, because dear brother and dear sister, before this week’s over, it will be my determined desire to free you from the concept that you can in any way. I’ll use the vernacular and get brownie points with God for anything you do. Anything you do.

Now, on the other side of that, if you can ever get clear on this, the other side is the thing Paul is writing about, and it is the door for them, for you, for all of us. It’s the first door you open to the Christian life, and that door is freedom. Freedom. Now, I may get a little extreme. I grant you that could possibly happen. I could get a little extreme, but you’ve got to start with freedom. You don’t start with freedom with this qualification and that qualification. You start with freedom and go from there. You don’t start with salvation by grace, then get a few rules, and then hope to branch out from there, from freedom to freedom. It doesn’t work. We will discover a passage in Galatians that says, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump.” You get a lot of grace to save you, but if there is a little bit of leaven in there of something that is not grace, grace, grace, it will leaven your entire Christian walk. You aren’t going to walk into the riches of Christ unless you are liberated from, if you are a Jew, the law, and if you are a Christian, you’re going to have to be liberated from those things that we, in this generation, like every past generation, we’ve got to be liberated in every age from the things that this age puts on us as believers.

I don’t know what yours is, but we’ll try to find it, we’ll try to find an old, forgotten key, stick it in a rusty lock, and let you out of jail, for it was for freedom that Christ has set you free. We will begin with freedom. Utter, total, absolute unconditional freedom. Gene…don’t do that. Please don’t do that to us. We’ll all go out of here and start getting drunk and cussing and chewing, and we’ll start committing morality, and we’ll start watching stuff we shouldn’t watch and saying things we shouldn’t say and reading stuff we shouldn’t read and doing things we shouldn’t do. No, that’s what you’re going to do if you stay under your law, whatever it is you’re put under, brother. I do not know why we ministers feel we are called of God to keep you from sinning. We are terrified that you, laymen, forgive me, I’m being sarcastic. We are terrified that if you laymen don’t get the pants scared off of you about sin and the devil and this and that and the other, you’re going to go out and do horrible things. So we keep warning you: don’t do this, and don’t do that, and we build up in the Christian atmosphere…it’s much more intangible, but there is something as all-pervasive as the Jewish law ever was.

Brother, you start with freedom. You start with freedom. You begin with freedom, and I’m going to take a radical stand and stay radical to the very end for your sake. But Gene, we’ll just all go out here and do terrible things. Well, let’s find out. Let’s find out. I will read an article in a major paper: There was an experiment in Memphis, Tennessee, in the winter of 1987, in which a group of Christians were liberated to do absolutely anything they wanted to do, and this is what happened. Completely set free from all standards of conduct and concepts of what they should and should not do. Now, I know some of you are scared to death.

That we will become a stumbling block? You are already a stumbling block. (laughter) All those preachers on television are a stumbling block. They’re causing the unbeliever to stumble all over the place. You know what the typical view of the world is for a Christian? He’s somebody sucking on a pickle. Now, I’m not going to stand up here and tell you to go be happy and all of these things. That’s got nothing to do with it. I’m talking to you about a deep internal thing. I’m not speaking of something outward. I’m talking of a deep spiritual release, a freedom that most of us have. I am not speaking of external things, going out here and being hip, hip, hooray, and smiling all the time. That’s just as bad as that stuff you see on television. They got these, they got these smiles painted on, and they won’t move. They just sit there. I keep looking at those people. I read an interesting article that said that the average smile lasts four to five seconds, and except under extremely unusual circumstances, a smile will last four to five seconds. If it’s longer than that, it is almost certainly pretentious. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saves a wretched like me. The world can see through that, too. I’m not talking about that. No, this is a deeply spiritual matter.

Brothers and sisters, you’re in bondage. If you’re half the Christian that I think you are, you’re in bondage to something, but Paul was not fighting the law. He was fighting something deep within the nature of men, and so was your Lord. We will meet the freest creature in the universe. Absolutely unbounded and unfettered by anything, and He came to make you a son and a daughter.

The book of Galatians makes seven references to what we would call today the Bible. It says either “it is written” or “the scripture says” seven times. Now there are approximately 150 sentences in this book. Seven references to scripture; 50 references to the Lord Jesus Christ. I say that to you to let you know where this man is coming from. I want you to know where, as we say…where his head is, where the ruts in his thinking patterns are. It’s Christ again and again and again. Seven references to what we would say “the Bible,” although, of course, the word did not exist then. 50 references in 150 sentences to the Lord Jesus Christ. Where is this man coming from? What’s on his heart?

Tomorrow morning, not tonight, the first piece of Christian literature ever penned makes no reference to prayer; at best, one, but nothing like the prayer you and I have been told to pray. There isn’t a single reference in the first piece of Christian literature ever penned to going to church. There isn’t a single reference to reading your Bible. There are 50 references to the Lord Jesus Christ. Gene, we have to read our Bibles, and we’ve got to pray, and we must go to church. Well, I’m going to challenge that first of all. I’ll say it a few times later, but I wouldn’t spend 10 minutes out of your praying like most Christians pray. That’s just terrible. Now, if you want to talk about fellowshipping with the Lord Jesus Christ, that’s a different matter. That’s a whole other matter, and that’s what the one possible reference in Galatians is about. As far as reading the Bible, you’re out of luck. It’s 50 AD. You’re slaves. There are 140 of you, and 10 of you can read. Five of you can read Greek. Five of you can read Hebrew. None of you has got an Old Testament. There’s one down in the synagogue, but if you’ll remember, you and I, all of us got thrown out of that synagogue, and all they’ve got down there is five books of the Pentateuch and the Psalms, and with luck maybe the book of Isaiah, and they won’t loan it to you. If they were out of some grace to loan it to you, the five dear Christians who could read Hebrew would stand up in front of all you illiterates, and they would begin to say things like this. El Shaddai Elohim. Now, you’d get a lot out of that, wouldn’t you?

Saints, I’m not being derogatory. I am holding you to historical, unmovable facts. You are illiterate. There is one fragment of the Bible in the Jewish synagogue. That’s all. Those things are as rare as mowers and chickens’ mouths. Thank you. They don’t exist. You got one piece of literature. You just got it the other day, and five of you could read it in Greek; probably had to translate it into the Phrygian language, which has never been put into written form. In order for you to be able to hear it, someone had to stand there who could read Greek and who also knew Phrygian and translate it for you. That’s how bad off you are. You had four months of help from the outside from the day you got saved, plus the perversion that has come to you from Blastinius, and a man is writing to you who is going to straighten the record out about those two incidents that Blastinius told you about. He is going to take you to the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the only hope and help of your faith. He will start there. He will set you free to Christ, and you will work out from there.