Law & Gospel (Galatians 3:15-4:7)

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Good morning church and go ahead, grab your Bibles. Open up to Galatians 3. Galatians, 3. We’ll start in verse 15, this morning. Galatians, 3:15. As you’re turning there, I was quite close with my high school music teachers, and so every year I got to watch him go through this unfortunate process where the seniors would start to talk about where they’re going to be studying, and then also what they were going to be studying. And a lot of them, because he’s one of the music teachers, would tell them they’re going into music, and he would have to be the one to tell them, Don’t do it, you know, don’t go into vocal performance, because you can’t really carry a tune with two hands and a bucket. So, you know, like architect, maybe I don’t know, just something else other than this. It wasn’t fun. He didn’t look forward to this. Of course, at any point hard conversation wasn’t fun, but it was necessary, because it was better to spare them future pain by causing just a little bit of discomfort. Now, better than having to switch majors or three, four or five years down the road in this career, realizing you can’t hack it in the industry would be a bad thing. So a little bit of discomfort now is better. It’s good to know who you really are and who you really aren’t at the same time, and that says Paul is exactly why God gave us the law, which would be one of the big questions the Galatians would be asking at this point in the letter. If, if Abraham and the promises God gave him are really the the key to our relationship, then what’s the point of Moses? What’s the point of the law we just saw last week, chapter three, verses 11 and 12, Kyle took us through it that we live by faith, not by works of the law. So then, why did God give the law? What is its purpose? And these are questions not just that the Galatians would be asking, but that we should be asking, also related questions, at least, if we are saved by grace alone, does that mean we don’t have to obey the law? Why strive for holiness if we can just rest in forgiveness? Do we have to keep all the weird laws that we just looked at in the book of Exodus, for example. In answering these questions, Paul is going to make an argument from salvation history, and especially the way salvation history unfolds. So the timeline is going to matter so much here, the Judaizing agitators Paul’s opponents here in Galatia would be saying that, look, Abraham’s descendants are the people who keep Moses’s law. Paul is going to argue, no, no, that’s not it at all. The Mosaic Law was a temporary interim period meant to do something else, to drive us back to the promises and which is it then? Which one of these groups has it right? Paul or his opponent? Spoiler alert, it’s going to be Paul, but let’s track with his argument as he makes his case. It goes through three stages, sin, Savior and sonship. That’ll be our outline as well as we answer the question for ourselves also, why the law. So let’s start with sin, your sin verses 15 to 22,
brothers and sisters. Let me take an example from everyday life. Just as no one can set aside or add to a human covenant that has been duly established, so it is in this case, the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say and to seeds, meaning many people, but and to your seed, meaning one person who is Christ. What I mean is this, the law introduced 430 years later does not set aside the covenant previously established by God, and thus do away with the promise. For if the inheritance depends on the law, then it no longer depends on the promise, but God, in His grace, gave it to Abraham through a promise. Why, then was the law given at all? Was added because of transgressions, until the seed to whom the promise referred had come, the law was given through angels and entrusted to a mediator, a mediator, however, implies more than one party, but God is one. Is the law therefore opposed to the promises of God? Absolutely not. For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law. But Scripture has locked up everything under the control of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. Pause there. If you were here last week, you’ll note that in this part, Paul strikes a friendlier tone than he did. So last week he started off You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? Modern translation would be Hey dummies. And so here the fact that he’s going brothers and sisters, this is nice, right? He’s He’s turned. A corner, and he’s expressing the deep love that He has for the Galatians. In fact, it is the love that drove his anger, his frustration last week. Just be like a parent, you know, with a student who comes home having failed a class, and the parent expresses some anger. What were you thinking? I told you not to go to the party, but to study instead. Now look what happened. But where’s that anger coming from? It’s because they want what’s best for you. They want you to succeed. That’s what Paul was experiencing as well. So now we get the love. We get the love Express. We’ll see it even more next week, and with this love, then he like a good preacher, which Paul certainly is. Takes an everyday illustration. He says, Look, you know how covenants work, right? You can’t just set a covenant aside. You can’t change a human covenant. If you do, you get sued pretty quickly. You can’t say, I’m going to pay you $100 per widget, and then when the widgets get shipped, pay $80 I just didn’t think it was worth it. That’s that’s not going to go well in that conversation. So if even human covenants are inviolable, unbreakable, how much more so divine covenants, covenants established by our God, the God who won’t ever renege on his promises, who always keeps His word, God made these promises to Abraham Paul reminds us and to his seed. And you’ll notice that he makes a lot of the fact that the word seed is singular, which is interesting, because seed is actually a collective singular in Hebrew, in Greek, honestly, kind of even in English, collective singular meaning. You use a singular even though you mean lots of things. You order a fruit salad when it shows up with grapes and apples and pineapple, you don’t send it back and say, I ordered fruit salad, not fruits salad. You did this wrong. It’s the same idea here. So what argument is Paul making exactly like surely he knows this means more than one person. The promises made to Abraham were meant for all of his descendants, Paul knows this. He speaks Greek. He’s writing in Greek. He speaks Hebrew. He’s reading the Hebrew. So he knows all of that, but he also knows that there is a singular promised seed, and that that promise runs throughout Scripture as well, right there, the very first promise given in Scripture, Genesis 315 is when God’s cursing the serpent, and he says, the seed of the woman is going to crush the seed of the serpent’s head. He is going to crush the Serpent. He’s going to stomp on that snake’s head. There’s one seed who is coming. Ultimately, even with Abraham’s own kids. You’ve got two seeds, but really just one seed, because it’s Ishmael. He’s not part of the promise. Isaac is there’s Jacob, not Esau. You get to the 12 sons of Jacob, sure, they’re all part of Israel. But even then, it’s Judah who is the promised seed, because it’s the son of Judah David, who is the chosen king when God makes His covenant with David, he says this in Second Samuel, 712 using the exact same word. It’s translated as offspring instead of seed. But say, my idea, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you. Well, how many people take the throne after David? Just one. Otherwise, that goes really badly for a country. Ultimately. Then, of course, the son of David is Jesus, the son of David, the promised seed, the fulfillment of all God’s promises. And he’s here. That’s Paul’s point. He’s arrived so that the new age that he’s bringing has dawned with his arrival, the promises made to Abraham had become reality in Christ. Jesus, if that’s the case, why would we move backwards? Why would we go from the New Age back to the old age away from fulfillment? Once again, the timeline is what matters here. The promises were made first centuries before Moses, in fact. So these promises that were made first, they can’t just be set aside. It’s not really a promise if you add requirements to it later on. And it’s not a promise that you receive, but it’s a wage you earn by keeping these requirements. I mean, just imagine you get a letter in the mail someday. It’s a great uncle that you didn’t even know you had, and he says, I want to give you a million dollars. That’s amazing. You just gotta, you know, send him your bank information, something like that. What if he says, though, I want to give you a million dollars if you move into my home and care for me in my old age, next 10 or 15 years or so, and based on some issues that I’ve got, it’s gonna get worse and worse. That’s not receiving the promise, then that’s just getting a wage. I mean, you know, it’s a good salary, I guess, million dollars divided by 15 years, not a great salary. Would you move leave your career? I don’t know. No, I mean, that’s a lot. So those are very different situations, and that’s what Paul’s saying here. Which one is it you have to keep the law to get the promise, or was the promise actually a promise? Do you believe the promise or keep the conditions? And so that’s the disunity that Paul sees between these two covenants, between the covenant made with Abraham, the covenant made with Moses, which one supersedes? Well, it’s the original promise, of course, because God keeps all his promises, that’s what verse 18 says, if the inheritance depends on the law, then it no longer depends on the promise. But God, in His grace, gave it a gracious gift, given to Abraham through a promise. Okay, so then why did God give the law? We’re still asking the question. In fact, Paul himself asks it there in verse 19, Why then was the law given at all? And he says it’s given because of transgressions. And you think, Okay, I think I know what Paul’s saying here, he’s saying because we keep messing up. So God gave us the law, kind of like guardrails kind of keep us on the straight and narrow. It’s exactly the opposite. In fact, God gave us the law in order to increase transgressions. Think about what transgression means. It’s even there in the word trans you have to go across something. So there has to be a line in order for you to cross it. So as soon as the law was given now, there was something to break. Think of it like this, at a certain point in history, and I don’t know when it was impossible to speed when driving, because they didn’t have speed limits. And then, as cars got faster, at some point, some city somewhere, said, You know what? Why don’t we post a speed limit? What happened at that moment? It increased transgressions. I mean, you think it did not make law keepers of us. It made law breakers of us, especially if y’all from Chicago, okay, you’ve been on a highway during commuter traffic, something like that. If you’re going 55 on 88 with commuter traffic, you had better be in the right lane, and even then, you’re going to get some looks as people are flying by you. So the law does not create obedience. The law actually causes us to break the law. Now, maybe there’s some scrupulous law keepers, you know, drive 55 Arrive alive, just going down the road, but for the most part, it creates law breakers. The law increased law breaking. That’s what happened with Moses also. And so the law was meant to make us aware of our need for a Savior, until the promised seed finally arrived. And again, the good news is he’s here. He’s come. That’s what Paul keeps saying. So the promise is superior in every way. It’s superior because it was given directly by God. God speaks directly to Abraham, whereas the law comes through mediators. God gives it to angels. Give it to Moses, who gives it to Israel. So it’s parties removed angels. I know some of you are going, we just did Exodus. I don’t remember there being angels at Sinai. I don’t Sinai. I don’t remember there being angels at Sinai either. But Scripture talks about it in a number of places. So apparently there were Stephen mentions it when he’s almost killed in Acts seven. Hebrews mentions it as well. And of course, we have it here. And maybe more importantly, the promise is superior, because the promise actually brings life, which the law can’t do, because we can’t keep it perfectly. And so the law can only bring death the first time we transgress, the first time we cross that line, it brings death into our lives. And so the law serves a very different purpose in God’s economy than the promise did we need to know that purpose or we’re going to use the law in the wrong way? I think it was Spurgeon who said a handsaw is a great tool. You wouldn’t want to shave with it. And that’s that’s Paul’s argument here. Also, okay, if you’re using a hand, a hand saw, to shave. I mean, it’s going to be messy, painful and wildly ineffective, and that’s what’s going to happen if you use the law to try to save yourself. That isn’t its purpose. Commentator Andrew Jukes puts it like this. He says, Satan would have us prove ourselves holy by the law which God gave to prove us sinners. So that’s the purpose. The law isn’t meant to save us. The law is meant to show us we need to be saved. The point of law is not to make us better, but really to make us worse, to show us our sin, so that we see our need. It so we can fill in the blank at this point, why did God give the law so that you would recognize your sin, so that you would recognize your sin, and then fling yourself back on the promise? This passage humbles us. It shows us that we are totally unable to remedy our sin problem. We can only acknowledge it and see that spiritual life comes only from the promises, which is the foundation, the basis for the whole Christian life. John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress, great Puritan preacher, he he had a little poem to kind of to show the difference between law and gospel. He says, run, John, run. The law commands but gives us neither feet nor hands. Far better news, the gospel brings it bids us fly and gives us wings. That’s the difference, right there. The law says run to somebody who doesn’t have any legs not helping us out, and we go, okay. So now you know you can’t run. Try flying gives you wings, which takes us to the second part then, so recognize your sin. The second section here dealing with our Savior. Let me keep reading the rest of chapter three, verses 23 to 29 before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. So in Christ, Jesus, you are all children of God through faith. For all of you who were baptized into Christ, have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ, Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs, according to the promise note. He starts in verse 23 with that word. Before we’re still talking about the timeline, still making a historical argument. Before, what before we understood that salvation comes by grace, alone through faith, alone in Christ, alone before Jesus arrives on the scene. In other words, what were we like? We were locked up under law, which is actually set in parallel to what we see in verse 22 that we were locked up under sin, meaning the same thing to be under laws, to be under the power of sin, imprisoned in our inability to save ourselves. That means the law was meant to serve a temporary purpose. That’s why Paul uses that term guardian. Here, a guardian a babysitter, basically, back in, you know, Greco Roman culture, where Paul’s writing, you could be heir to an estate, but until you reach the majority age, when you were still a minor. I mean, you were, you were under a guardian, a tutor, a disciplinarian. So you weren’t really like an heir. You were just under somebody else, under somebody who would tell you, what would that Guardian do? The Guardian would tell you what to do, what not to do, and then what would happen if you did that or didn’t do that? That’s it. That’s all the Guardian could do at that point. That’s all the law can do for us as well. So it tells us what to do, what will happen if we don’t obey but it can’t change us. We know it doesn’t change us. It doesn’t matter how scary the Guardian is. Like picture the scariest drill sergeant you can imagine, towering over you, purple face, yelling at you. You know you will not be selfish anymore. That’s not changing your heart. Might change your behavior a little bit on the outside for a time, but it’s not changing your heart. And so the law just locks us up as prisoners and brings discipline into our lives, the punishments that we deserve. And can I say here, Paul’s talking about the Mosaic law, but it’s not just the Mosaic Law, and he’s going to expand his view in a little bit here anyway. But all works based religions share this character, any religion, any worldview that says, Do this, don’t do that, or else shares this character. It makes of us slaves. We’re enslaved to law, keeping anxious always about our standing before God or whatever Ultimate Reality is out there, because we’re anxious before the God, the judge, before whom we’ll stand. There’s not even the warmth of relationship there. It’s just impersonal based on the fear of punishment and the selfish desire for rewards. And the selfish desire for rewards is significant because it means we’re still unchanged, still just looking out for number one. So this passage gives us an incredibly pessimistic view of human character, which has been proven true by all of the available evidence throughout all the centuries of human history. The law is not enough. Teaching morals will never be enough. When you think about the amount of time and energy that corporations have spent teaching people about sexual harassment since third wave feminism cropped up in the 70s. How’d that go? When the ME TOO movement broke out? Teaching morals is not enough to change hearts, that’s the problem. So why did God give the law if it’s not going to change us, it’s just going to bring discipline. It sounds not good, but it serves a good purpose. Do you see that there in verse 25 that we might be justified by faith? There’s the law’s purpose that we might be justified. I love the way John Stott sums it up. He says the law’s purpose was to shut us up in prison until Christ should set us free, or to put us under guardians, until Christ should make us children. That’s the purpose. So once we believe, receive the promise, don’t earn the reward, we become children and therefore heirs through faith alone. How? Well, because we’re united to Christ, that’s what baptism pictures. That’s why Paul mentions baptism here. We’re united to Christ. We’re in Christ. Christ is in us. We’re buried with him in death and then raised to new life in him. So we’re united to Christ, but to the Christ, who is the promised seed, and therefore the true son, which means, if I’m in him, I’m a true son now too. And that means we are then clothed with Christ, the kind of word we can skip quickly past in our Bible reading. But what’s let’s just like, squeeze out all the meaning from this word here for a moment. If we are clothed with Christ, what does that show us? It shows us, first of all, that Jesus is our primary identity. You think of how often clothes function as a uniform, sometimes literally. You can tell who a police officer is because they’re dressed like a cop or a soldier, a doctor, something like that. But really, for all of us, clothes function like a uniform. They’re saying something. We pick our clothes to say something about ourselves. You see it really clearly in high school, of course, right? Like I’m a jock or I’m one of the artsy kids, I’m a non conformist. You can tell because I’m dressed like all the other non conformists. So, right? So our clothing functions like a uniform. Our uniform is now Christ. That’s my identity. I’m a Jesus guy. So that’s the first part. But second, the clothing shows our closeness to Christ, because your clothes are quite close to you, not closer than your skin, but right there next to it, at least, always with you. Carry it with you, kind of wherever you go. So we see the intimacy, the closeness that we have with Christ, and then imitation we’re clothed with Christ. In other words, we’re supposed to look like Christ. Well, how do we look like Christ? It’s not our physical features, but our spiritual life, our changed behavior in Christ, and finally, it shows us our forgiveness in Christ, because when did humans first put clothes on? We came into this world naked and unashamed, and then we sinned and we had shame. We tried to sew fig leaf clothes, and that didn’t work. So God offers the very first sacrifice and clothes, Adam and Eve in animal skins to cover their shame. I am clothed in Christ. That means my shame, my guilt, is covered. That’s what it means to be clothed with Christ. We have a whole new life in Christ. Isn’t that why we love hearing testimony so much? It’s that right? There’s a whole new life that I just heard about. We just sang it right. Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, I once was blind, but now I’m found now I can see because our “in Christ-ness” is our primary identity. Well, that means that all our other distinctions become irrelevant in the Christian community. That’s verse 28 we see the unity of God’s people. Evil, not Jew or Gentile, slave, free, male, female. None of that matters anymore. Now, these distinctions are not wholly erased. You remain a male or female after you come to Christ, and forever, you would still be a slave, even if you gave your life to Christ. You might get free later on. But whether or not you’re in Christ doesn’t really change that. We know that this is the case. Paul doesn’t erase these distinctions, because in other places, Paul actually gives information instructions. Colossians, three. Ephesians, five and six. Paul says, Hey, if you’re male, hey if you’re female, hey if you’re a slave, if you’re free, this is what you should do. No, the point isn’t to erase distinction, but the point is that we should be without division any longer. We are getting at the equality of all believers. Before God in Christ, was common for free Jewish men of this time period to pray daily. I thank God that I’m not a Gentile, a slave or a woman. Why not? Because they were racist, classist and sexist, but because each one of those categories, what brought with it a barrier to your access to God. You could see it physically in the temple. So if you were a Gentile, for example, you would go into the court of Gentiles, and that’s as far as you could go. You couldn’t get all the way to God. Of course, no one could, except the high priest, and even then, only one day a year. But now in Christ, all of that’s done away with forget the temple. We can waltz into the very throne room in heaven boldly approach God’s throne of grace to receive mercy in our time of need. Doesn’t matter who you were before Christ or who you are now that you are in Christ. If that’s true, that changes how we relate to one another, doesn’t it? I mean, shouldn’t church just look so different from our fractured, polarized world, the love that we have for one another? This is why Peter was so incensed, or Paul was so incensed with Peter back in Galatians two he was going, Peter, it is ridiculous that you won’t eat with Gentiles because we’re one in Christ, he broke down the barrier. Why are you rebuilding it? It is ridiculous that we wouldn’t eat with anyone in Christ, Jesus. So sexism, racism, classism, can we agree those are major issues in our culture. You can talk. It’s fine, yeah, okay, major issues in our culture. It should be anathema in the church, because it’s not just like you’re, you’re, you’re giving in to culture sin or something like that. You are functionally denying the gospel when you’re racist, sexist, classist. I mean, I hope that changes some of you today, because even the jokes we make sometimes like they just, they just come out, you know, like whatever, it’s so much better than what you see on social media. This is like sanctified humor. It’s not sanctified when you belittle women because they are more emotional than you are as a man. It’s gospel denying. Then verse 29 sums up Paul’s argument. Who are Abraham’s true children. The Judaizing agitators would say Jews, Jews, physical descendants of Abraham. Those are his true children. So you better become one if you want to be a Christian. But Paul and more importantly, God’s word, all of God’s word, even the Old Testament, says all who come to Him by grace through faith in the promised seed, Jesus Christ alone. If we do that, we are heirs according to the promise, not according to law, not according to the works we’ve done, but according to the free gift of grace that He promised. So why did God give the law so that you recognize your sin and then run to grace? Run to grace so that you would here’s your fill in the blank, trust your Savior. Not trust in yourself your ability to rely on the law, but trust your Savior, who, as we saw last week, kept the law perfectly and then took the laws punishment on himself in our place. We just sang it right in my place, condemned. He stood under the law all my speeding tickets on him so that I could be welcomed in his place. Takes us to our third point, then the last fill in the blank sonship. Let me read chapter four, verses one to seven. What I am saying is that as long as an heir is under age, he is no different from a slave. Although he owns the whole estate, the heir is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also when we were underage, we were in slavery under the. Elemental, spiritual forces of the world. But when the set time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law that we might receive adoption to sonship, because you are his sons. God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out Abba Father, so you are no longer a slave, but God’s child, and since you are His child, God has made you also an heir. Paul’s not saying anything new here, right in this paragraph, Paul’s just illustrating what he already taught in the last section. Makes my work easier, because it means he’s given me the illustration for what he just taught. Error is the key term. Like that’s the key illustration, because the big question, the big argument in Galatia is still, who will inherit Abraham’s promises, and how does he answer it? By going back to the timeline again for a time, the heir to the estate is no different than a slave. I mean, an infant king like Henry, the sixth of England still has a nanny, a nurse, a tutor, a regent, really reigning in his place, even so he owns it all, the heir to the estate, but he doesn’t get the benefit of owning it. Instead, he gets a guardian, and a guardian who might well beat him even to teach him so that he’ll be a good heir and ruler when he gets there. Well, prior to Christ’s Advent, that’s all of us. We were all of us under slavery. Slavery is our natural spiritual state. Does not matter if you are Jewish, pagan here, atheist today, slavery is our natural spiritual state. And that’s Paul’s point when he brings up this idea of the elemental spiritual forces. So word that’s used there is actually the word they use for the ABCs, like it’s how you say alphabet in Greek, right here. But the point is, it’s the it’s the elementary understanding of how things work spiritually, and what is that elemental understanding? It’s what you see absolutely everywhere other than within the gospel message. Measure up, measure up to someone else’s standards. Keep the Mosaic Law. Follow the eightfold path, the Four Noble Truths, keep Sharia, or even again today, be a good social justice warrior. You know, vote the right way. What’s your recycling look like? Kind of cardio drive, whatever it is, we all have these standards that we think we need to live up to. That’s how we come into the world. But when there’s that timeline again, but when the New Age dawned, but one Christ came born of a woman born under law. Everything changes, because Christ has come to save us from having to save our selves. Now notice that he’s born under the law. That’s really significant. That’s what Kyle took us through last week. If you weren’t here, you can go back and listen to it. But he became a curse for us, right? He redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us taking the punishment of the law on himself. He did that to redeem us, which is the word Paul uses here. Also redemption has to do with slavery. It means to purchase someone’s freedom. So that’s what Jesus has done. He’s purchased our freedom from slavery to these elemental spiritual forces because we couldn’t measure up. The law showed us our failures, so he measured up for us in our place, and then gives us his reward so that we can be welcomed in his place, truly and fully. Because notice that we are welcomed as heirs, because we’ve received adoption to sonship. It is significant in Paul’s context that it’s sonship here. You are not redeemed to daughtership, adopted to daughtership, not because you’re not a woman anymore. Ladies, that’s not it at all. But back in this time, at least, you had to be a son to be an heir. And so he’s saying you get the inheritance that we all do, men and women, we get the inheritance. But his point here is, it doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish or Gentile. There are no natural born children in God’s household, except for Christ. There is no accident of birth that gives you a leg up. You have to come like the rest of us, through Christ. But if we’re in Christ the instant, we’re united to Christ by grace, through faith, we’re in the family. On April 28 2011 there was a woman named Kate Middleton of bucklebury. Yeah, that’s it. That’s all she was the next day, April 29 2011 some of you will remember, just like that, when she was united to Prince William by marriage, she became the Duchess of Cambridge and joint heir to the throne of the 16 realms of the Commonwealth. Whatever it is, I’m American. We don’t do kings right? I hope you caught the work of the Trinity in our adoption, because you are his sons. God, the Father sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, they’re all involved in this work. So God sends His Son What we saw in verse four, to secure our legal adoption. But then verse six, God sends the Spirit of his Son so that we could experience it fully, the wonder of our adoption, which you can see here in what happens the Spirit who calls out. Abba Father. Think about what that means. So the word calls out there, calls out is probably a tame translation. It really means to cry, almost even to scream. So there’s this strong feeling, this passion behind it. So this is something we feel. We don’t just know, but we feel in the depths of us, and we call out that, of course, would be referring to our prayer life. When you call out in prayer life, that means it’s it’s free and relational. It’s not mechanical. It’s not like there are set times of day where the timer buzzes and you go, Okay, I gotta say this set, formulaic prayer at this point? No, it’s conversation, because this is a son calling out to a father. You got kids. You know that kids don’t talk to you in a mechanical way. They just never stop talking whatever is on their mind. Right? Then that’s what we do with our father as well. And we call out because we know that He hears us. Think about how significant that is. So for the last almost 18 years now, my wife and I have slept with a baby monitor in our bedroom. Why? So that our kids can call out in the night to know that we will hear them. They still take advantage. This is not an old illustration. This was last night Callum Mom, mommu, mamu. He calls her mamu. No one knows why. That’s what he calls her, but he knows that she’ll get up. You notice he called out mamu. He does not call out Dadu. Dadu does not get up. Dadu rolls over a pillow over his head, but Mamu gets up and that’s it. The Lord hears us as well. And in fact, I even love the whole reason I brought up the Mamu thing is because we call out Abba. You know what Abba means? It’s Mamu, but for dads, it’s baby talk. This is not father. This is when you say Baa, baa, baa, baa, baa, because that’s how kids talk to begin with. That’s why we’re all Mama and Dada and Papa, whatever it is, even today in Arabic, they would call their dad Baba. It’s the same idea. So it’s baby talk. So it’s that same like warmth and trust and love that we see. That’s the wonder of adoption. By the way this Abba, to whom we call out, he’s the God of the universe. You think of the security and peace that should bring us to know that when we call he hears and he answers. Know about you, but when I read this, I want to lean into my adoption. So how can we do that? How can we lean into our adoption? There are two ways, primarily, of course, the first is the word of God. We see it here because this is Paul’s whole argument, but especially verses four and five, his whole argument is based on a deep understanding of God’s Word and of salvation history. This is why we spend so much time in the Old Testament here at Cityview. We want to understand how all of it is pointing to Christ, what the exodus is teaching us about the freedom that we now have in Christ, we want to understand all that we can of Jesus’s work. So the word, how are you meditating on God’s word? So that you grow in the knowledge of His love that surpasses knowledge and understanding. The other way is prayer, of course, what we see here in verses six and seven, calling out like Callum, living moment by moment, with the knowledge that our God and Father loves us and hears us. Tim Keller asks the penetrating question, am I acting like a slave Who’s afraid of God or like a child who’s assured of My Father’s love? Why? Did God give us the law so that you’d recognize your sin and trust your Savior? And then third, live your sonship, live like an heir, like a child who’s been adopted into God’s family, and to see how much better that is than being a slave, even when it comes to keeping the law. And certainly we do try to keep the law still, but we don’t keep the law to measure up because we know we didn’t measure up. Instead, we obey God because we love him, because of all that he’s done for us, and we want to please him. It’s an act of grateful joy, like the two lists that Kyle talked about last week, remember the Galatians are in danger of going back to slavery like Israel when they were wandering in the wilderness after God brought them out of Egypt. And they’re going, we should go back. They had cucumbers back there. We should go back. That’s where the Galatians are here also, but Paul wants them and us to live in freedom. We are adopted children, not unwelcome slaves. So let’s live like it, resting in our Father’s love, recognize your sin, trust your savior, live your sonship. John Stott sums it up neatly. He says it like this, once we were slaves, now we are children. How then can we turn back to the old slavery, the old slavery of trying to measure up? How can the Judaizers insist the Galatians keep kosher and get circumcised and keep the law in order to be right with God? Or how about us? How can we gage our relationship with God on the basis of our performance that day? How can we puff ourselves up with pride when we’re doing well or collapse under the weight of shame when we’re not how can we reduce intimacy with our loving father to mere mechanical acts, checking boxes, prayed today, read my Bible, went to church, tithed all good things, but not when they’re done for the purpose of earning salvation. How can we do any of that we can’t right? It makes no sense. No the law, the requirements of the law were meant to help us recognize our sin and trust our Savior and then live our sonship. Let’s pray to our Father now calling out to our Abba, Abba, Father, we call out to you because we know that you hear us, because we know that you love us. You have welcomed us as your children. We understand also how this has happened, not because of anything we have done to deserve it, but because of everything Christ has done to deserve it for us and now because we are united to him by grace, through faith, through our trust in Him, we know that we come to you clothed in Christ, clothed in his perfection, and so we can approach your throne of grace boldly to receive mercy in our time of need. Lord, would you give us your mercy new afresh this morning, that we might better understand who you are, what you’ve done for us, and what it means that we are and can be your children, by grace, alone, through faith, alone, in Christ, alone, and it’s in his name we pray amen.