The Gospel for All of Life (Galatians 3:1-14)

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Well, good morning. Go ahead, grab your Bibles and turn to Galatians chapter 3. It’s page 944, if you’re using one of the black pew Bibles there in front of you, or maybe underneath. If you don’t have a Bible, we’d love for you to take that one. That’s our gift to you this morning if you don’t have one. Now my wife, Jackie, was discipled by one of our youth leaders in high school, and I cannot overstate how important this individual was to Jackie’s spiritual growth. The lady who discipled her was an extrovert, was an evangelist at heart, and didn’t have a filter, if you know what I mean, but in good ways and bad ways. But she was unashamed of the gospel, unashamed of asking the tough questions. Jackie needed someone, as she was growing in her faith, to come alongside her and lead her small group. She needed somebody to sit down with her, one on one and engage her with God’s word. Ask her the tough questions of life, pursue her heart, listen to her, especially when her dumb boyfriend kept breaking up with her. If you thought that was me, you’re right. I was immature. I was in high school, okay, but she was there for those moments, and then she also was there for all the other important moments of life, from Jackie’s baptism to her graduation to our engagement and our wedding, writing many cards of encouragement along the way to help Jackie continue to pursue Jesus at every step of her life. And some time passed because she moved away and until she came to visit with Jackie shortly after CJ first was born, and she came over to meet with Jackie, and I walked in the house after work knowing that they had been together, and I remember looking at Jackie’s face, and the look she gave me was one of those looks of like I’m a little freaked out. Not good. Starting already. I knew something was wrong. There were some quick, awkward goodbyes, at which point Jackie… So wrong of illustration…. Jackie went on to tell me, and then we soon discovered more, as we looked into the church that our friend was now going to there’s a church that she believed was the right thing for her family, saying that they need to follow all the Old Testament feasts, removing yeast, even from her own home. The church told them there’s different levels of giving, and this is what how much you need to give. There’s many more things that we discovered over time, but one of the worst ones was there was like seven steps to salvation, seven necessary things you had to do to be saved. So how do you think you would feel if someone you loved, who taught you about Jesus taught you the gospel, started to tell you that there was things necessary for you to be saved that you haven’t done enough yet. I think you understand more of how that felt if you haven’t experienced by hearing Paul as he comes to terms this morning with the reports that he’s received from the Galatian about the Galatian churches, experience the same exact thing where we are now in the book of Galatians. Is a transition point, because Paul has had some introductory remarks for the Galatian churches. He’s had some greetings. He’s also had a rebuke early on, which we’ll get to here in a second. But since chapter one, verse 10, until now, he’s primarily been defending his ministry, who he is as a minister. He’s been defending the gospel. He’s been defending his his call into ministry and defending the gospel, even against these Judaizers who have come in to the church, leading Jews astray, like Peter, which we saw, and Gentiles as well, trying to convince them that they need to adhere to the Old Testament law, become Jewish, in a sense, in order to come to Christ. So there was something they needed to do first. And now he picks up where he left, the Galatians in chapter one, verse six, when he says this, you can look back if you want. He said, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ, and are turning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all. Now he says that in chapter one, verse six, and then last week we ended just right before what we’re going to look at today with him saying this in Galatians 220 I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me the life I now live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who love. Me and gave himself up for me. He’s saying, That’s the gospel. This is the gospel. There is no other. And it’s right after this that he needs to remind the Galatians because of what they are hearing. He needs to remind them of the gospel they experienced. That’s the first point in your outline this morning, the Gospel experienced. Look at verse one. We’re going to read verses one through five, you foolish Galatians who has bewitched you before your very eyes, Jesus Christ was clearly, clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you. Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by believing what you heard. Are you so foolish after beginning by means of the spirit? Are you now trying to finish it by means of the flesh? Have you experienced so much in vain? If it really was in vain? So again, I ask, does God give you his spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law or by believing what you heard? We’ll pause there. Paul doesn’t beat around the bush. This is not, oh, you foolish Galatians, if we were to translate it today, he’s saying You idiotic Galatians. To be called foolish was harsh for a reason, because, to Paul, it is so irrational and unthinkable to him that he says, there can only be one explanation, and that is, you are brainwashed, that you have been tricked and deceived to believe something else. Somebody had to do something for you to really abandon the gospel that you believed in when I first came to you that was so clear to him when he first visited them, and that’s why he’s so confused. Now, there’s probably something else going on here that Paul is getting at by using the word bewitched. It’s the idea of a spell like he knows there’s false teachers. He knows they’re trying to persuade the people to go back to the Jewish customs and laws, but there’s something deeper going on, similar to what we see in Ephesians six, when Paul says to put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. There’s something evil behind what’s happening in the churches in Galatia. When I walked into my house that day, Jackie was with our friend. I didn’t see her at first. When I first when I made eye contact with her, right before that, I walked in the house and I felt something heavy, I don’t know how to explain it, other than there was evil, until I heard everything that they had talked about, then I understand why my heart felt like that, walking into my home, and that’s what Paul feels. There’s something going on here. There’s no other explanation as mine that makes sense because of what they experienced when he first preached the gospel to them. Whenever Paul goes, he brings up this point. We just read it in first Thessalonians. Here it is again. When he goes to that church, he says, For we know brothers and sisters loved by God that he has chosen you because our gospel came to you, not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. This was the normal pattern of the gospel being preached. This is what Paul saw, and he saw it in Galatia. There was this wasn’t just some intellectual understanding of the gospel. It came with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. It transformed them. They were different because of it. It did something that Paul knew only the gospel could actually do, so powerful, in fact, that Paul says Jesus Christ was crucified right before your very eyes. This is not true. This is this is decades later. So what does he mean by that? He’s saying the change that happened in you was like you were standing at the foot of the cross looking at Jesus. That’s how powerful it was in their life, so drastic of a change. And so Paul employs some rhetorical questions here as a great tool to help them understand what they’re missing out on, trying to help them understand how they got to this point and remind them of the gospel experience they had at first. And he gives three evidences through these rhetorical questions that we just read. Here are the three evidences that he revealed that he saw in them. One, they received the Spirit. It was clear they received the Spirit of God. Second, they were persecuted for their faith. There was such a change in them that people said, There’s something different about you, and they persecuted them because of their faith. And third, there were miracles worked among them. All three of these things. To Paul, this is what the gospel does you? And all of these things happen before they knew the law. This is what happened, was the gospel is proclaimed. So Paul is saying, I’ve seen all of this. You put your faith in Jesus, not because you followed a list of rules. That’s not what happened. That’s not how these things happen. Now, these false teachers have come in trying to persuade the Galatians that they can’t be saved unless they follow some certain steps, like you must be circumcised, you must follow these types of rules, the Mosaic Law. Let me teach them to you, and then we can talk about Jesus. Somebody should have stepped up and said, why would we want to be circumcised now we have the spirit. Why would we want to start following the clean food laws? I’m enjoying my pork sandwich. Why would we start following all these special days when God has worked miracles among us? Why would we start keeping track of the 613 laws in the Old Testament when Jesus saved us, as we actively broke all of them? Why would we go back? This is why Paul is so frustrated, because they’re going backwards. You receive the Spirit, not by the law, because that’s not what Paul preaches. He did not come into their towns, or any town for that matter, and declare, here is the law. Go do these things. First, send someone to come get me, and then I’ll come back, and once I’ve seen that you followed all the laws, then I’ll preach the gospel of grace. Then what is grace? It’s earned because they followed the law? No, that’s foolishness. Paul rolls into town, into the synagogues, first with the Jews, and then once they reject him, he goes out of the markets and the community centers and the streets declaring the grace of God through Jesus Christ crucified, saying there’s nothing for you to do. It has been done. So what do you think you could possibly do now to be accepted by God when He accepted you already at your very worst, you see how unimaginable This is to Paul, why he’s so frustrated in saying, You foolish Galatians. But let’s look at our own lives. How foolish can we be? Because this is what it looks like in our life. We’re not maybe tempted to follow the Jewish customs and laws. We just are really good at creating laws for ourselves. We’re really good at creating laws for other people, saying you need to follow these things. And it’s this kind of sort of self salvation project, which can I just I want to speak to that real quick, because I think I understand what the Judaizers are doing. Like, I’ve spent my entire life following the Jewish laws and these people just to get in, get get to get in. Like, how many times in our life have we seen something we like we want you to go through the same difficulties we had, the same thing. You got to work. You got to earn it. You just get everything. And so I understand it from that standpoint that they’re like, I mean, we’ve been doing this our whole life, but that doesn’t mean it’s true that they should be able to do that in the lives of others. Instead, we say we have had this burden of following the law, and now we’re preaching grace. I’m so thankful you don’t have that burden on you. Come on in. Well, what does this look like in our life, if you decided to come to church today and sit in the pew because there’s something going wrong in your life and you’re thinking, God’s going to look at you and change your circumstances because you’re sitting here today? That is work based religion as not the gospel. Later this week, when you give into temptation and sin and your first response is, what can I do to make this up to God? As works based religion is not the gospel, and if you have a past that includes things you wouldn’t even want to tell anybody in this room and that you have to clean yourself up to bring yourself to God. That is works based religion. It is not the gospel. Paul has made it clear that the Galatians were not saved through adhering to the Mosaic law, but only by the gospel. What did they believe? Then to receive the Spirit. That’s where Paul goes next. In our next section, verses six through nine, the gospel is announced. Let’s read it together here, starting verse six, so also Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Understand, then that those who have faith are children of Abraham. Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and announce the gospel in advance to Abraham, all nations will be blessed through you, so those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. Now logically, you would think Paul would start talking about Moses. We’re talking about the Mosaic Law, right? Like when things were finally put down for the people to listen to, because that’s the issue that they’re dealing with here from these Judaizers. So you got to do this before you come to faith in Christ. But it’s important that Paul goes back to Abraham, because Abraham, even though he is the father of the Jewish nation, he’s called by God, and we know what’s going to happen with his life. He has a lot in common with the Gentiles, because if you think about if we pull all these different parts of Scripture together, what we see is that Abraham is living in ur he’s living in a place with a family that’s polytheistic, worshiping other gods. They’re not following the God of the Bible until the God of the Bible shows up and calls Abraham out of this and chooses him and says, I’m going to make something out of you for My glory, which means that Abraham was called by God before the law was given. And yet, in Abraham, we see a man who believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness that’s in Genesis. Chapter 15, so he’s declared righteous by God before he gets circumcision in Genesis. Chapter 17, this is important for the argument that Paul is making. Verse nine, then gives us a great summary of Abraham. He was a man of faith. How great would that be to have on your epitaph just your name, man of faith, woman of faith. We can’t overstate how important faith or belief is to Paul in this passage, because in these 14 verses, he uses the word faith, or believe, 10 times. He wants to make sure they truly understand what’s happening, what faith is, what belief is. So a working definition for us this morning of faith that I love by Tozer defines it this way. He says, Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God. Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God. The Galatians, just like Abraham, were saved by believing what they heard by what they saw. And we get the example of Abraham’s faith in verse six here, which is again quoting Genesis 15, where God takes Abraham outside, has him look at the expanse of the sky. And he says, You see all these stars. And he says this to him when he is childless, an old man with a barren wife. And he says, you see all this, all these stars, so shall your offspring be? And Abraham looks around, I don’t have any kids, I don’t have a pregnant wife. I don’t even know all this is going to happen. But God, I believe your word, and in believing that word, God said, credited him with righteousness, credited him, meaning he he gets something from God that he didn’t have before God gives it to him. His faith alone, without any actions, means that God sees Abraham as living a righteous life, a life that we know he’s going to continue to mess up in. And yet it’s his faith that saves him, because it’s his faith in who, who he believes in, not what he does, not what he will do, whether good or bad. I believe your word God and he gets credited with righteousness. God saw Abraham and all of his sins, all the things he would do, not as and he saw him as perfect, not because he was but because his faith was in God, the One who would fulfill all of his promises to Abraham, all of his promises in Scripture. And then verse eight gives us the gospel message from Genesis. Chapter 12, it says, all nations will be blessed through you. This is what Abraham hears from God. Now it’s not immediately, you know, obvious, but if you think about it, all nations will be blessed through you. And you think about John 316, For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. And you go back to Genesis 12. And what Abraham is hearing, all nations will be blessed through you. The world will be blessed. What is a blessing? Eternal life. They’ll get eternal life through you now, not through Abraham specifically, but through the seed of Abraham, which we’re going to talk a lot more about next week. So you see all of this coming together. This is the gospel and scripture has been saying from the very beginning that the Gentiles would be saved. The Gentiles would be saved. Now, some of you are in the perspectives class that’s happening on Tuesdays, and I was told to tell you this. This is your Honda CRV moment. Okay, so everybody who’s laughing understands if you’re not laughing. Let me explain it to you, the teacher the first week of perspectives. This was talking about how he never really thought about Honda CRVs before, until he rented one, right? He had to rent a car and he got a Honda CRV. What do you think when he’s driving around town? And even now, he thinks about and sees all the time Honda CRVs, all of a sounds like they’re everywhere. He didn’t notice them before because he didn’t have one. Now he had one, and now he sees he sees all of them. That’s exactly what happens here when we read Scripture and see that God is a missional God going after the world, including the Gentiles. And once you see that, you cannot unsee it anymore as you read scripture, just pops out. So this teacher said, I want you to have the Honda CRV moment every time you’re reading scripture. You’re reading scripture that it just pops out. God is saving the world, not just the Jews, the Gentiles, too. And Paul knew this because in his journeys with the churches in Galatian Acts, chapter three or Acts chapter 13, sorry, he was he’s gonna get rejected by the Jews. And so he’s talking to the Jews, and they’re already rejecting his message. And this is what he says. Then Paul and Barnabas answered them boldly. These are to the Jewish leaders. We had to speak the Word of God to you first, since you reject it and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles, for this is what the Lord has commanded us. I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth, I have made you light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth. That’s a quote from Isaiah 49 that’s not three weeks ago for Paul. It was from Isaiah 49 and Simeon, when he gets Jesus in the temple eight days after Jesus is born, he prays a prayer, and he says this about Jesus, that He is the light for the Gentiles. So Simeon is saying, this Savior has come for more than just Israel. He has come for the world. So God has been a missional God from the beginning. So what do they need, then, to be declared not guilty, not works, not the Mosaic law. They don’t need to become Jewish. First Look at verse nine. So those who rely on faith are blessed, along with Abraham, those whose souls gaze at Jesus, the God who saves, are blessed. Now, what is the blessing they received? This isn’t a shallow like, bless your heart. I hope good things happen to you today, or you sneeze, bless you. Even better, God, bless you. That’s not what this is. What’s saying here, the what he’s saying here, when they blesses you, is this is God in His grace, in his favor, is coming near you. The God of the universe is coming near you. And it’s actually a double blessing. We’re going to see the first part here, and then the second part later. The first blessing here is justification. That’s what he just said in verse eight scripture. Foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles. It’s the same for us today. We are just justified, declared not guilty before God. There’s nothing you could do to change your guilt, to change your status, unless you put your faith in Jesus. As John Stott said, it’s very simple, Christ was lifted up on the cross, and faith gazes at him there. That’s what happens in the gospel. That’s the gospel announced. This is Jesus. I’m just going to look at him. I’m going to believe in what he has done. Now, before we move into the last section, it’s important to mention something here about the law, and we’re going to talk a lot more about this next week, but I want to, I want to mention it here, because you can, you can think that the law is bad. Okay, the law is not bad. In fact, in Romans seven, Paul says the law is holy, just and good. Another way of describing the law is just saying God’s teaching like, What has God taught us? And that’s what we have here. This is what God teaches us about how we are to live. We did a whole series on the 10 Commandments. We did not get up here and say, the Ten Commandments mean nothing. They’re bad. We said, how do we live in light of Jesus Christ? Like, what do these look like in our life? Now we’re gonna again, talk about it a lot more next week, but the Bible makes it very clear there’s a certain way for us to live if we call Jesus Lord. So what is the proper relationship for a Christian with the law? And we get a glimpse of what it is not, and then a little bit later, we’ll see what it does look like. And like I said, next week, we’ll spend a lot more time looking at that. But as the last section, we see that the gospel is accomplished. Okay, the gospel is accomplished. Look at Verse 10, read to the verse 14, for all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written, Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law. Clearly, no one who relies on the law is justified before God because the righteous will live by faith. The law is not based on faith. On the contrary, it says, The person who does these things will live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole. He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ, Jesus, so that by faith, we might receive the promise of the Spirit. So right away, we see that we are not to think how we are not to think about the law, how we’re not to think about it. And it’s in that word rely, in verse 10, for those, for all who rely on the works of the law. And the meaning here is it’s an identity. If you identify with the law, then you have to live by the law. So if you’re going to say, I’m following the law, that means you have to follow everything about the law. And since we cannot live it perfectly, we are cursed. If you start to look at the law as the way to be saved again, if we open up any page in this book and think that there’s anything we can do to be saved, we are cursed. Being cursed means being under God’s wrath. It’s the opposite of his blessing when we are under God’s wrath, we are there because we have sinned. We have not lived up to the standard that he calls us to if we identify with the law, because we cannot pick and choose which laws we follow and then bring them to God and say, I did these really well. These aren’t the important ones right over here. Like I tried to do these as best I could, that’s not the standard. If you say I’m going to live by the law, then you better live by everything in the law, because everything is important in God’s law. Everything is important in God’s word. And so it’s an important question to ask, if the Jews who had the Old Testament law in their possession followed it, memorized it, if they couldn’t be saved by it, how could the Gentiles ever possibly hope to be saved by it? Like, what are they going to do that the Jews couldn’t have done on their own? So why are you being pulled to go back to the law? We cannot be justified by it. We cannot stand before God and be declared righteous by adhering to the law, because we have not done everything written in this book. So unless you can hold up a perfect record, we are cursed. So when we look at the law, all we see is this big sign that says you can’t do it. You can’t accomplish this. But that’s actually really good news. When you understand that, when you finally say, Oh, wait, I can’t do it, that’s when you really, truly find freedom in the gospel. That’s when, like, I’m going to put my faith here, which is where Paul goes next. Clearly, no one is justified by following the law, because we cannot do it perfectly. So then, how were people saved? And for this, Paul quotes Habakkuk, two, four, and Habakkuk is in the Old Testament. Think that’s important, the righteous will live by faith. What this is saying is no one could get up before the Gentiles. As a judaizer trying to say, you need to follow the Old Testament law. You need to become Jewish in order to be welcomed into the Christian community. None of them could stand up before the Gentiles and prove from scripture that any old testament saint was saved because of law following not Abraham, not Moses, not David, not Elijah, not none of them. Where are they going to go in Scripture and say they followed it perfectly? So you have to be like them first, then you can be brought into the Christian community instead. How are these people remembered? Hebrews chapter 11, called the hall of faith. It walks through these names and many more. And when you come to the names, it says, by living a perfect life according to the law, no what does it say? A very simple little phrase, by faith. By faith. Abraham did this by faith. Moses did this by faith. David did this over and over and over again every single time. So why would you go backwards? Abraham couldn’t do it. Moses couldn’t do it. How do you think you’re going to do it to be accepted by God? So it makes it clear, Hebrews 11 six says without faith, it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists. It’s impossible to please God without faith. Everyone Old Testament. New Testament is saved by faith. Today we are saved by faith. The Old Testament, saints are saved by the promises God gave them. Just like Abraham, all nations will be blessed through you. Your offspring is going to be like the stars in the sky. I believe you God, it’s credited to him as righteousness, every single one of them, not their law, following and we on this side of the cross look back at the promises fulfilled in Jesus. Say, I believe that he did what he said he did. I believe in His perfect life, His death, His resurrection. That’s where my faith is today. But if we are all under the curse of God, under his just wrath, how do we move from the cursing to the blessing? And that is the good news of verses 13 and 14. We are redeemed by Jesus. We just sang this on this morning, redemption written on his hands. That’s what he came to do to buy us back out of our slavery into freedom, slavery to the law, to the freedom of living in Christ, this is the good news to experience that freedom and blessing that he offers, but that cost Jesus everything, because he became the curse, it says, for us, substituted himself for us, and by becoming that curse, he legally became sin on that cross, he experienced what it was like to be forsaken when he cries out, My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me? What would have been worse? On the cross in that moment, and because he experienced that in our place, by faith, we will never experience that. We only get the promise that He will never leave us or forsake us, because Christ took that and we cling to that promise that regardless of my law, keeping what I do or don’t do, He will never leave me. He will never forsake me in those moments on the cross. Jesus the only one who had the perfect record. Brandon talked about this last week, we get that perfect score of Jesus, but it’s his perfect score, that perfect record, who did everything written in the Book of the Law, every single thing, everything he was not supposed to do. He didn’t do those things, everything he was supposed to do. He did those things perfect. And he didn’t look at himself and say, I’m blessed. You’re cursed. Figure it out. No on the cross, He takes our sin, He takes our shame, and he looks and he says, Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t understand how bad this is he takes the most shameful position, arms outstretched on a pole, which, for the Jews, when they think of that, and they think of what we just what’s quoted here, for us in Deuteronomy, a pole in the Old Testament, was a place of shame. It was a place where you were killed, most likely by stoning, and then set up on the pole so everybody could see this person is cursed by God. And here’s the guy going around saying, I’m the Savior, and he’s on a pole. Of course, the Jews would find this a stumbling block, as it says in First Corinthians, the cross is a stumbling block to the Jews, but they don’t realize it’s their curse that’s on him. If they believe that, they look at it totally different. And the Gentiles, it says the cross is foolishness, until they realize he didn’t stay dead if he died, yes, it’s foolish. If he stayed dead, it’s foolish. Why are we following him? But when the gospel came to them, they knew, not only did he die, he rose from the dead, and they received the Spirit. And Paul says, That’s the gospel. That’s what came to you. That’s what transformed you. It’s not all. Jesus cried from the cross, of course, little while later, before he gave a spirit breathed his last. He said, It is finished. His work accomplished. The curse of the law ended, and the blessing can now be received, which we see in this passage, as I mentioned, this double blessing we already saw. We’re justified by faith. Faith. The second blessing in verse 14 is by faith, we might receive the promise of the Spirit. That’s what we get, this blessing of God’s presence with us. This is the very thing that Paul saw, what he just said at the beginning of this chapter. This is what I saw in you. You were saved by the Spirit, not by the works of the law. And this is what we get when we believe in Christ, when we fix our gaze on Jesus, when we believe in what he accomplished, His Spirit is with us. We no longer rely on the law. We rely on Him through faith. Now our lives are an act of worship to Him, not to get something, but because we’ve been given everything. So here’s the big idea this morning. It is to fix your gaze on Jesus so that you receive His blessings. Fix your gaze on Jesus so that you receive His blessings. You see what’s not in that statement, fix yourself. Fix your gaze on him. There’s nothing to do. There’s nothing to do. There isn’t a list to follow to get to this point. It’s simply looking at him, acknowledging him as your Savior, relying on what he has done, identifying with him, and then we live out these blessings of justification and the Holy Spirit. So then, how do we interact with the law, with the things that God has called us to do? I want to illustrate this with a story, because I think this might be the best way of thinking about it. Imagine a woman has a very unloving husband, and every day before he leaves for work, he gives her a list of things that she needs to do before he returns home, no matter how hard she tries to complete the task, she can never do it. She’s never successful. So every night, he scolds her for her poor, poor performance. Her life with her husband is very hard. A little while later, her husband dies, and she marries another man a few years after that, who is kind and loving. They have a wonderful relationship, and she’s happy. And one day, as she’s cleaning her home, she comes across a list of the tasks her former husband gave her to finish. And she looked at the list, she was amazed to discover that while she could not complete the task for the former husband, no matter how hard she tried, she was she was now accomplishing all of these and more with her new husband. You see the difference when we understand we are loved, we do the things even without being asked, without being told, because instead, we go to God and say, How can I love you because of everything you have done? Not give you my give me my list so I can. I can try to do it so I can. I can fix myself. I can do the things you want me to do first. No, he puts his love on us. We say, How can I live now to worship you? That’s the difference. It’s impossible to keep God’s law consistently, let alone perfectly. But when we are saved in this loving relationship, we follow Him because we love him, our love for God is not what’s most important. It’s his love for us. We love because he first loved us and gave himself for us, and now our response is love, but the most important thing is that God loves you, not that you have to do anything for that. It’s not the legalistic do’s and don’ts. We don’t earn it. We don’t balance out our sin. It’s the loving response to what this God has done for us. So if you’ve been relying on the law to save you, and I’m not even saying the Old Testament law, I’m saying the laws that you create, the laws that other people have created for you, and you’re getting nowhere. There is hope, and it’s not another list, it’s not a different list, it’s not a different thing. It’s simply turning your attention and your gaze on the Savior who made it possible for you to be saved, to be empowered by the Spirit now to live your life for him. I wish I had a happier ending to the story. I started off with Jackie wrote a letter to our friend, which he sent back to Jackie with a lot of red pen, defending herself. The difference between Jackie’s letter and her letter was, one was all about God’s grace and love and forgiveness, and the other one was, I have to do these things because she’s missing out what’s been done for her. So the burden of the law was back on her, instead of the freedom that she has in Christ, Jesus. So let’s get rid of all the eyes. Say, what has he done? What is he doing? Because that’s the only thing that’s really going to change us, that’s going to transform us. So if you’re here this morning, and you have never given your life to Jesus, and you keep trying those self salvation projects, you keep trying to fix yourself, clean yourself up, look a little bit better, so that you can come in. We’re so glad you’re here, because guess what, all of us are mess. We’re all messes. We’ve all been messes. We’ll continue to be messes, hopefully a little bit less messy than yesterday, you know, as we faithfully pursue Jesus. But here’s the thing you need to hear. One of the things we love to talk about here is the gospel waltz. It is looking at our life and saying, What is the gospel? What do I need to do to believe the gospel? Just that believe the gospel like I just need to believe the gospel. There’s no list for me to do. So when we talk about the fact of like, our turning of our attention and our gaze to Jesus, what happens when we turn to Jesus is we’re turning away from our past. We’re turning away from our sin. So that’s what we say. We repent, we turn away from the way we used to live. So maybe that for you is the legalistic do’s and don’ts. Maybe that’s for you is like, doesn’t God have to forgive me? We don’t see that in this passage, why we’re so much on legalism this morning. But maybe that’s you. Maybe you’re saying like, Oh, doesn’t God have to forgive me? Isn’t my sin make his grace greater? Maybe that. Maybe that’s it for you. Maybe it’s something else. I’m not sure where you are. But what does the law do now? What does all of this do? As we read this, it reminds us first that we need Jesus, so then we repent and we come back to him. So instead of beating yourself up over your sin, we remember that law keeping wasn’t what has got us in in the first place, and if it didn’t get us in in the first place, why are we keeping all this stuff inside? Bring it out. Bring it to him. If you put your attention, your gaze on him, you repent and turn from your sin. What else does the law do? It drives us back to Jesus. This is belief. Your faith has been credited to you as righteousness. What Jesus sees when he looks at you is Christ’s perfection. You have to believe that to keep going, one to not feel the shame of what you’ve done, and also to keep going, which is the final thing, the law, everything we read in here becomes our guide for life. We obey. Obedience is key, but we don’t rely on it. That’s the difference. We don’t rely on our obedience to get us in. We don’t rely on our obedience to keep us in. We don’t rely on our obedience so that God says, I still love you. He’s going to say, I still love you in spite of what we do good and bad. So we don’t obey for Christ’s acceptance, we obey from it. So repent, believe and obey. And maybe you need to do that for the first time. And I guarantee for all of us here, we need to do it for the 1,000th time, 10,000th time, I don’t know, but do it right now. In these next few moments, the worship team is going to come up here. Brandon will lead us in a time of confession. What is it for you that you need to give but here’s what I don’t want to have happen is you sit there and be like, This is what I have to do today. The only thing you have to do is gaze at him. And if you gaze at him and see what he did for you, you’ll gladly follow him, because you understand what it cost him to redeem us. And when he said it is finished, he meant it. And so for us now, we just the glad obedience of following our Savior each and every day. So repent, believe, obey, let that be the thing that’s going through your mind all the time, always remembering that he has accepted you, He loves you, and by faith, he has justified you and given you his Spirit, so that you can go and live your life, and not live your life like a prisoner, but live it in freedom. And when people see that, they will be attracted to it, and they’ll say, there’s something different. And then when those things come in, those self salvation projects, those things that come in at our mind, like, I need to do this. I need to do that, we can get those things out, because we can say I wasn’t saved for those things by those things anyways, of somebody faith in Jesus Christ, and it’s to him I’m going to continue to cling to. Let’s pray.