When I was a pastor in Collegeville, while I was sitting in my office trying to come up with an idea for how to begin this sermon, a man stopped by the church and said he wanted to talk to me. So I walked into the sanctuary with him (that was where he wanted to talk), and within a few minutes he started asking me what I thought about particular Bible verses that had to do with healing. When he first showed up, I thought he had something urgent to talk about, but as it turned out, he was only interested in converting me to his theological position. He wanted me to believe that sickness is always contrary to God’s will, and that it is always God’s will to heal us if we simply ask in faith. After a few minutes, I told him that I was familiar with this teaching and really wasn’t very interested in discussing it, but that if he wanted to make an appointment I’d be willing to talk to him when I had more time (and then I briefly told him why I thought his ideas were foolish and unbiblical and misleading).
There are false teachers everywhere, and most of the time they seek to defend their teachings by appealing to Scripture. This man quoted one Bible verse after another. But all of his verses were taken out of context, without any attempt to look at them in the light of the general teaching of Scripture. And when I pointed that out to him, he showed no interest; he just quoted a few more verses. He wasn’t interested in discussion. He only wanted to convert me (or make himself feel good by trying to convert me). He even tried to intimidate me by informing me that he’d read the New Testament 20 times and the Old about 10 times or so, and then asking me: “and how many times have you read the Bible?” When I said that I’d read through the Bible at least 20 times (although I'd read the New Testament and Psalms far more than that, since the Bible reading plan I follow goes through them twice a year), he was taken aback and didn’t know what to say.
When people come to us with novel teachings like this, they’ll use all kinds of tactics to persuade us to follow them: intimidation, endless quotations from Scripture, bullying, trying to make our position look foolish. Probably the teachers at Galatia were doing all these things, and the Galatians were being overwhelmed.
Remember that the teachers who’d come to Galatia were telling the churches there that if they wanted to be saved they needed to receive circumcision and begin following the Law of Moses. They were telling the churches that their primary relationship with God is through the Law. This letter is Paul’s response. The Galatians think they’re supplementing the gospel, that they’re following a teaching which will raise them to a higher level spiritually, and Paul responds that this teaching actually amounts to a defection from the message of grace. If they follow this teaching they’ll be departing from Jesus Christ.
The Galatians, in listening to the false teachers, have forgotten who they are. They’ve gotten disoriented; maybe these teachers have bullied and intimidated them. But, in any case, they’ve forgotten who they are in Jesus Christ; otherwise they wouldn’t have taken this new teaching seriously. So Paul reminds them that their relationship with God is not primarily defined by the law; if it were, they would still be in a condition of slavery. That’s what their situation used to be, before they responded to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now that they’ve responded to the gospel of grace, they are children, part of God’s family. They’ve been redeemed from slavery and adopted as God’s own children. This truth that we are adopted as God’s children, as part of His family, says something about our personal identity, about who we are; it says something about our corporate identity, about where we belong; and it says something about our future, what we have to look forward to.
First, our personal identity. In the story of the prodigal son, the thing that I most often think about is the phrase in verse 17: “When he came to his senses....” (Luke 15:17). Henri Nouwen has a wonderful book about this story (and a painting Rembrandt did of it). Nouwen points out that it’s a realization of his sonship that first causes the prodigal son to return to his senses: “The younger son’s return takes place in the very moment that he reclaims his sonship, even though he has lost all the dignity that belongs to it. In fact, it was the loss of everything that brought him to the bottom line of his identity. He hit the bedrock of his sonship. In retrospect, it seems that the prodigal had to lose everything to come into touch with the ground of his being. When he found himself desiring to be treated as one of the pigs, he realized that he was not a pig but a human being, a son of his father” (The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 49). When the prodigal son went away and wasted his inheritance, part of what was happening was that he had forgotten his identity; he didn’t remember who he was (whether he was intentionally walking away from his identity or whether he was just caught in the fog of his own desires).
Paul wants the Galatians to know that they are children of God. That hasn’t always been true of them. “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods.” We saw in the last sermon that the law was a custodian (something like a protective escort) to lead them to Christ. But as long as they were under the care of this custodian, they were essentially in bondage. The law is incapable of freeing us from sin; all it does is reveal our failure. So Paul has been telling them that when they were under the law they were in constant bondage to a system of demands which they were incapable of fulfilling. “As long as the heir is a minor, he has no advantage over the slave. Though legally he owns the entire inheritance, he is subject to tutors and administrators until whatever date the father has set for emancipation. That is the way it is with us: When we were minors, we were just like slaves ordered around by simple instructions (the tutors and administrators of this world), with no say in the conduct of our own lives” (The Message).
That’s where they were. But now everything has changed. “But when the time arrived that was set by God the Father, God sent his Son, born among us of a woman, born under the conditions of the law so that he might redeem those of us who have been kidnapped by the law. Thus we have been set free to experience our rightful heritage” (The Message). Paul uses the word redeem to describe how this change has come about. In using this word, he is pointing to a practice that people would have been familiar with. “Sometimes a slave caught the attention of a wealthy free person and for some reason or other – compassion, affection, justice – the free person decided to free the slave. The free person would then go to the temple or shrine and deposit with the priests the sum of money required for manumission. The priests would then deliver an oracle: The god Apollo has purchased this slave so-and-so from owners such-and-such and is now free. The priests then passed the redemption price on to the recent owner. The exslave who all his or her life had been treated as an inferior, useful only for purposes of running someone else’s errands, doing someone else’s work, was no longer subject to such evaluation. The person was free. No price could be put on that head again” (Eugene Peterson, Traveling Light, p. 116). In redemption, the slave was bought and paid for, then set free. Christ was born under the law, lived without ever violating it, and then died to pay the price to redeem us from the law. He paid our redemption price. But then God went even further; He not only redeemed us from the law, He also adopted us as His children. We’ve not only been set free from bondage to the law, we’ve been adopted into God’s family. We’re no longer slaves; we’re not even mere free citizens. We’re part of God’s family.
That’s our personal identity. We’ve been adopted as God’s children and are no longer slaves. We may still feel like slaves sometimes. No doubt when slaves were redeemed in the ancient world it took a long time for the reality of the change to sink in. We easily fall into old patterns and begin thinking of ourselves as slaves in bondage to the law. But Paul wants us to know the truth about who we are: the price has been paid in full, and we’ve been adopted as God’s children. We now belong to Him.
That leads to the next point, which is about our corporate identity. We aren’t adopted as “only children.” Often evangelical teachers make so much of the personal nature of faith that they undermine the importance of the Church. We aren’t redeemed and left on our own. We’re redeemed as part of a body; we’re made part of God’s family: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Listen to this verse in The Message: “In Christ’s family there can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal. That is, we are all in a common relationship with Jesus Christ.” In this world that is so full of discord and hatred and alienation, God has given us a place where we belong. He’s made us part of His family. We may not always feel a strong sense of belonging in the church, but the truth is that this is our family; we’re united in Jesus Christ. As we’re increasingly transformed into His image, we’ll experience a growing bond with His people. But whether we feel like it or not at any particular time, the Church is a place where we belong. It’s not that we’ve decided to get together with others who think like we do; it’s that God has adopted us together as part of His family and has called us to grow together into His image.
The third point is about our future. Our life in Christ is not primarily about things that are happening in the present moment. We’re living in an in-between time. The price for our redemption has been paid, but we haven’t entered into our full inheritance. We’re looking forward to the time when we will experience the fullness of what Christ has purchased for us. “Also, since you are Christ’s family, then you are Abraham’s famous ‘descendant,’ heirs according to the covenant promises” (The Message). We don’t always feel like people who’ve been set free. We don’t always feel like we belong in the Church. But we look forward to a time when we will feel these things, when we will experience the reality of these things. We won’t always be living by faith. As God’s children, we are also His heirs: “So you are no longer slaves, but God’s children; and since you are his children, he has made you also heirs.”
Who are we? We’re God’s children; we’ve been redeemed from bondage to the law and have been adopted. Where do we belong? We’ve been made part of God’s family, a body of people who are being transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. And what do we have to look forward to? Our full inheritance as God’s children. Paul said our future inheritance is so glorious that it can’t even be compared to the sufferings we experience in this life: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).
The man I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon was teaching things that lead to bondage. That’s what false teachings do. They lead us to forget who we are. If we think God always gives physical healing, then when we don’t experience healing we’ll question our relationship with God. We’ll be in slavery; whether or not we’ve received physical healing will become the foundation of our relationship with God. False teachings always lead us into bondage in one way or another.
We are no longer slaves. We are God’s adopted children. This outlook determines everything. It’s meant to transform every area of our lives: our sense of personal identity, our sense of where we belong, and our understanding of what we have to look forward to in the future. The price has been paid in full. We’ve been redeemed from slavery and adopted as God’s own children. The hymn "Day By Day," begins with these words: “Day by day and with each passing moment, strength I find to meet my trials here; trusting in my Father’s wise bestowment, I’ve no cause for worry or for fear.” Then, in the next verse: “The protection of His child and treasure is a charge that on Himself He laid....” God, our Father, has adopted us as His children and has committed Himself to care for us. He is a perfect Father, and we belong to Him. He is everything we expect fathers to be (but which we all fail to be in one way or another). We’re not slaves; we’re adopted children of our heavenly Father.
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