Good morning, my name is George, no, just kidding.
My name is Jerry, you guys know me.
Today's scripture reading is from Galatians 3, 27 to 29.
It's on page 1003 in the Bibles in the back of the pews.
If you wanna follow along there.
Starting at verse 27.
For those of you who are baptized into Christ
have been clothed with Christ,
there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free,
male and female, since you are all one in Jesus Christ.
And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed,
heirs according to the promise.
This is God's word.
Yeah, yeah, it's always good when the word of God
gets some claps, you can give it a...
Or were you just, were you clapping for George there?
Okay.
Joe.
Joe, yeah.
The Bible knows nothing of the idea of an unchurched Christian.
It knows nothing of the idea of an unchurched Christian.
In the book of Matthew, chapter 16, verse 18,
Jesus said that he will build his church.
He will build his church.
And Paul said it this way in 1 Timothy, chapter 3.
He said to Timothy, I have written
so that you will know how people ought to conduct themselves
in God's household,
which is the church of the living God,
the pillar and foundation of the truth.
I've written you these things so that people know
how they ought to behave within the household of God,
which is the church of the living God,
the pillar and foundation of the truth.
Jesus is building his kingdom through his church.
And the Bible knows nothing of the idea
of an unchurched Christian.
Instead, they know of the household of God,
which is the pillar and foundation of the truth.
There's a quote from a commentator or a preacher,
John Stott, said, Conceived in a past eternity
and being worked out in history
and to be perfected in a future eternity,
God's work is not just to save isolated individuals
and so perpetuate our loneliness,
but rather to build his church,
that is to call out of the world a people for his own glory.
We are called to a life together.
The word church comes from the Greek word, ecclesia,
which means the gathering of those summoned.
The ecclesia is the gathering of those summoned
or the gathering of the called out ones.
It's life together.
You aren't a football player
if you are not on a team of other football players.
You are not a solo soldier without an army.
But as you know, there's a problem.
People don't really like to get together,
at least not very well.
And when we do, we don't play very well together.
We especially don't naturally connect
with people who are different than us.
We are more comfortable with those who are like us
than those who are different.
And so the gospel is bringing us together,
and it's bringing together all kinds of people
who aren't naturally drawn to one another
or by every natural measure
are actually opposed to one another.
How is this thing that God is building gonna work out?
And Paul is dealing with that question
in a sense in the book of Galatians.
Galatians was a letter that Paul wrote
to the church in Galatia,
a province of what is modern day Turkey.
And the question of the day was really
what is required to belong to the church?
Or what does it mean to be in God?
Or pleasing to God or righteous before God?
Number of Gentile non-Jewish believers
was growing as the gospel had spread out
to new places and was reaching new people.
And a group of Jewish teachers had come along.
They were called the Judaizers,
who said that in order to be saved,
one must obey the Mosaic law and customs,
and most specifically for salvation,
the ritual of circumcision.
And they had to do that first.
That first in order that they might then come to Christ
and receive all that he offers.
Convert to Judaism first,
then you can become a Christian.
But all paths lead through Judaism.
But the gospel that Paul was preaching
was a gospel of faith alone in Christ alone.
And many Gentiles were coming to the faith.
And so there was a problem and this group of Judaizers
arrived and they say, not so fast.
There's something else for you all to do
before you can believe.
It would seem by the introduction of this book
that some of the folks in Galatia believed the Judaizers.
And began to yield the gospel of faith alone
in Christ alone to this gospel
that they were preaching, so to speak.
And so Paul writes this letter to argue
that they've gotten it all wrong.
That's the letter of Galatians.
You got it all wrong if you go down that path.
Right out the gate, after the standard introduction
in the book of Galatia and the greeting,
Paul immediately turns to the issue at hand.
In a typical letter that Paul would write,
often times you had this introduction,
here's who I am, apostle Paul called by the Lord so and so.
And then your standard greeting, greetings
in the name of the Lord Jesus.
And then a paragraph of like fuzzy, warm,
lovey-dovey encouragement for how much he loved them
and he was so like on board and affectionate toward them.
Or maybe some sort of kind of theologically rich doxology
about who God is and how amazing he is.
This one Paul goes, my name's Paul, howdy.
Let's get down to business.
Let's skip the fuzzy warms, let's skip the doxology,
let's get right to it.
And in fact, in chapter one he goes right to this.
This is so important, it's too important to wait
through all the standard niceties.
I am amazed that you are so quickly turning away from him
who called you by the grace of Christ
and are turning to a different gospel.
Not that there is another gospel,
but there are some who are troubling you
and want to distort the gospel of Christ.
But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach
to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you,
a curse be on him.
As we have said before and I now say again,
if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary
to what you received, a curse be on him.
You're turning away.
You're turning away to a gospel which is no gospel at all.
You're turning away from grace to human effort.
Curse the person who preaches a so-called gospel of works,
the one who distorts the gospel of Christ.
The gospel is all about what was done for us,
not what we do.
And since it is not by our efforts but by his grace,
that puts us all on equal footing.
Outside of Christ, we are unable to do anything
to secure our salvation.
In Christ, it has all been done for all of us.
Oh, but I come to Christ with great riches and wealth.
Surely I have a leg up on the poor person.
But I come to Christ with great wisdom and knowledge.
I'm way smarter than those dumb folk on the other side of the aisle.
But I come to Christ with a life of good works.
That person has been a problem since they were a teenager.
I come as a man.
Surely that gets me somewhere ahead of the women.
No.
The gospel comes and says we all come
with the same level of need.
We all come.
And we are all welcomed in the same way through faith.
Believing is belonging.
Verse 27 says,
For those of you who were baptized into Christ
have been clothed with Christ.
Baptism, as we think of it, is that symbolic reenactment
of what is actually a spiritual reality
that we go through when we are born again in Christ.
And here, Paul is referring to the reality of what the acts
that we observe in the baptismal symbolizes.
He's talking about the reality behind it.
Since you have died to the flesh and sin
and have been raised to life in Christ,
you are now clothed with Christ.
Once you could only relate to Christ from afar.
The only way you and I could relate when we were outside of Christ
was through worldly understanding or knowledge.
I don't know what I think about that Christ guy.
I don't know.
I gotta think about his teaching and see how his teaching
measures up to other teaching.
And I gotta weigh it in a worldly way.
I gotta reason this out.
I gotta use all my reasoning faculties to figure out
whether I believe Christ or I believe this guy.
That's the only way we could relate to Christ.
But the work of the gospel has fundamentally changed
the way you and I relate to the triune God.
And it is now through our union with Christ,
who is the second person in the Trinity,
that we are now like a piece of clothing
wrapped around our body.
We are drawn in to experience union with God through Christ.
But you are not the only one.
Back to our original points.
You are not the only one.
Anyone who has been baptized into Christ
is there with Christ as well together.
We are one together in Christ.
Which leads us to verse 28 and 29.
There is no Jew or Greek slave or free,
male and female, since you are all one in Christ Jesus.
And you belong to Christ.
And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed,
heirs according to his promise.
Paul lays out in verse 28 some natural points of division.
Jew, Greek, slave, free, male, female.
The phrase there is no Jew nor Greek addresses the racial,
the cultural divides of the time.
Jews and Greeks or Gentiles were often in conflict
with deep-seated prejudice and religious differences.
It was really hard for them to hang with each other.
It was so different.
Paul asserts here that in Christ,
these racial and ethnic distinctions are irrelevant.
Irrelevant.
Believers are united in a new identity
that transcends these divisions.
Did you know that we are still divided over race
and cultural expression in the church, the household of God?
That may surprise you depending upon where you're at
or what you see.
But there are stories out there, me and Mike,
we're just at a conference hearing plenty of them.
In 1912, a group of leaders at the Anderson family camp
or the Anderson camp meeting asked all the black folk
to please not come anymore.
Because their presence was keeping white people
from hearing the gospel and coming to the Lord.
Put out, eventually a camp was formed,
I think it was a Middlesex, formed in 1917,
where they could then go and go to camp
with whoever wanted to come and worship.
But it was an Anderson camp.
We have heard a story of a black female pastor
in the district who will not go to Diamond Arrow
because it was at Diamond Arrow
that she was first called the N-word.
She's still alive, so this is in her lifetime.
I don't want to air all of our dirty laundry,
you might be like, where's the door, let's get out of here,
but would you be surprised if there was a district
within our movement that refuses
to credential black pastors?
Refuses, today, refuses.
It's not over there, it's not out there, it's not back there,
oh, that's 1950s stuff, it is 1950s stuff,
but it's also today.
We still see divisions within God's household
over things like race, differences in ethnicity.
To this day, I won't go into detail,
but hearing firsthand stories of feeling like
I don't belong, I'm with the wrong people here.
I don't, I don't know, I don't know,
why I'm here.
Breaks your heart, knowing that's not something,
and that's not a delusion,
that's not something fabricated in a mind.
There's evidence that speaks,
not necessarily one-to-one.
I would hope that none of us have ever
said that directly, some of those words that I repeated,
but it's not a delusion.
I said that directly, some of those words that I repeated,
but it's possible.
The gospel is that great equalizer,
because we can all come from different places.
We can even come from racist background.
The gospel can change us by bringing us into a family
of lots of different folks and change our hearts
so that we can see differently the people who are around us,
not primarily by those things that divide,
but by the one thing that unites in Christ.
Verse 28 continues with the statement
that there's no slave or free.
This speaks directly to a social and economic division
that was really prevalent in the Roman Empire.
There was a significant gap between the slave
and the free people, and Paul's message is radical
in this context.
In the Christian community, that will not be.
That distinction will not be.
These social hierarchies are destroyed.
Both slave and free are equal in dignity and worth
in the eyes of Christ and in his household.
James chapter two, giving exhortation to us, the church,
said, brothers and sisters, do not show favoritism
as you hold on to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus,
for if someone comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring
and dressed in fine clothes, and a poor person
dressed in filthy clothes also comes in,
if you look with favor on the one wearing the fine clothes
and say, oh, sit here, here's a good place,
or maybe you could sit at my feet, the place of honor.
And to the poor person, you say, hey, behind the curtain,
or in the back, or in the corner.
It's all practical reasons.
You smell, you're unsightly, you're scaring people.
Haven't you made distinctions among yourself
and become judges with evil thoughts?
Jews, Greeks, slaves, free, by saying,
there is no male and female, what is Paul saying?
Is he agreeing with our modern social movement
to erase all gender distinctions?
He can't be doing that, for God created it in goodness.
Paul is addressing a culture where women
were often considered inferior to men,
and so this statement that in Christ
there is no male or female
would have been a revolutionary statement.
The Jewish man gave thanks to God
in a liturgy that went like this.
The Jewish man of the first century gave thanks to God
in a liturgy every morning.
If he was the head of the household, he would get up,
and he would say, at least in part, this liturgy.
Thank you, God, that I am not a Gentile,
a woman, or a slave.
Thank you, God.
And Paul is pointing out that in Christ,
all the old dividing lines and walls
that were accepted and even extolled in Judaism
had been broken down in Christ.
This is part of the good news of the gospel.
It implies equal value and equal access to God's promises
and blessings for both men and women.
The concluding part of verse 28 says,
since you are all one in Christ Jesus,
and that's key to understanding the verses.
Why is there no Jew or Greek?
Why is there no slave or free?
Why is there no male or female in Christ?
Because we are all one in Christ,
and that's the beauty is in the all one word.
It's this Greek word that means one entity or one person
We are all, plural, we are all one person in Christ.
And elsewhere in the scripture,
it talks about the parts of the body, right?
You don't say to the parts of the body,
I don't need you, I'll cut you off.
Ah, you're inferior to me.
You're not a part that's noble, so I don't need you.
I'll leave you behind.
We don't cut off parts of our body, do we?
Well, we're one person in Christ.
One person in Christ, and so where do these divisions come from?
If we wouldn't do it in our own body,
why do we do it in God's, in his household?
You are one person in Christ.
All believers share the same status,
regardless of their racial, social, or gender,
because they are one new person in Christ.
If there is no love, there is no love in Christ.
If there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free,
male or female in Christ, what is there then?
What are we now?
Well, verse 26 actually tells us right before.
For through faith, you are all sons of God in Christ Jesus.
No longer distinction, Jew, Greek, slave, free, male, female.
No, we are all sons of God in Christ Jesus.
Christ Jesus was the son of God.
We are all sons of God.
This passage is all about status.
It's all about the status of every believer,
Jew, Greek, slave, free, male or female,
that they have in Christ, and that is sonship.
We all have sonship.
Now you might immediately go, wait, that sounds gendered.
It's not like we're talking about men again.
It was a legal status, a legal status that conferred the benefits
on anyone with that designation.
What benefits?
Sonship in Christ is an equal heir to his kingdom and promises.
The status of sonship entitles us to full participation in Christ Jesus.
It entitles us to justification by faith in Christ
and union with God through Christ and through the Spirit,
as is talked about in chapter four of Galatians.
Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,
which cries, Abba, Father.
So you are no longer a slave.
We sang that earlier.
You are no longer a slave, but a son.
And if a son, then God has made you an heir.
Jews, Greeks, slave, free, male, female.
The female didn't have the hope of being a son,
to receive the inheritance of her father, her earthly father.
But in Christ, she is as a son.
She is as a son, full inheritance, full participation in Christ,
no mediator needed, justified, sanctified,
and unified with God through Christ and the Spirit.
Some think that, or sometimes I think we think that we are complete,
we are simply called to kind of give mental assent
to the components of the gospel.
We think that mental assent, yes, I agree with that,
I hear that, I hear that, I hear that,
that's believing, or that's faith.
But that is so wrong.
The church is called not merely to believe the gospel,
but also to become the gospel, and thereby advance the gospel.
The church is a living explanation of the gospel.
People don't want to hear what you believe.
People don't want to hear, yes, in Christ, we're all one.
We're one big happy family.
I'm so glad I'm a part of heaven.
Right?
Show me.
Exegete it.
Let the church be the living example of what that even looks like.
And we go, oh, I'm so proud.
I wouldn't be surprised if that song was sung at Anderson Camp
with all those folks who were uninvited, not present.
I'm so glad I'm a part.
That probably came later, but.
That's a Gaithers, right?
They had their own.
Oh, I believe because I evaluated each component
and I said, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no.
That's not belief.
Belief is loyal love and faithfulness.
Belief is trusting in something so as to put the full weight
of your life on it, as if you were leaning on something sturdy.
And so if you say, I put my full weight on the gospel,
then the gospel has broken down divisions
that many people in our society and culture want to hold on to.
And many people in the church don't look much different.
But if you really do believe the gospel
and the gospel has the answers for the questions
that the people in this world are asking,
then we have to lean fully our weight on it
and believe it not just here, but live it out here.
There can be no division among us.
There can be no division, ethnic or racial division,
financial or status or economic division.
There can be no gender division among us.
That one is prime or has primacy over the other
or one is necessary for access to God.
No.
We have to live and embody the gospel
in the way that we live out this one community
that we are in Christ.
The gospel is the great equalizer.
And we are called out to participate in what God is doing
by becoming the gospel embodied.
It's not easy.
How many of you guys have had to have a hard,
difficult conversation with a brother or sister
in order to maintain unity and peace?
How many of you guys have had a difficult conversation?
Yep.
It's not easy.
You don't even want to do it.
But the alternative is pack your stuff and run,
go somewhere else, right?
And to live a life hopping from one place to the other
in division without living.
It's not easy.
They had lots of questions to handle.
Paul had to figure out how he was gonna interact with Peter
when Peter seemed to be backsliding
and associating only with the Jewish believers
in the presence of the Gentiles
and making them feel inferior.
And so Paul had to say, what am I gonna do here?
I could say nothing, that's Peter.
That's the rock.
Paul said, no, this is too important.
I'm gonna step out, I'm gonna call out Peter
and say, no, we don't divide over that.
Not in God's household.
And we don't tolerate it.
You know, I just, I don't remember where I was sharing it recently,
but you know, culture is built,
maybe I shared it this last week,
culture is built by what we celebrate
and what we communicate and what we emulate.
And the final one is what we tolerate.
So what's the culture in the house of God?
Well, it should be biblically informed.
It should be based on the word.
But just know that whatever we're tolerating
in the house of God is becoming part of our culture.
Who we are and how we relate to one another.
And when you tolerate division on those basis,
you're fracturing God's household.
You're weakening the witness that it has in this world.
We are not to divide,
nor are we to treat anyone as less or unimportant.
We have been clothed,
remember this part of the scripture,
we have been clothed with Christ.
But it's when we start slapping bumper stickers
and patches on that clothing
to shout out all of our other allegiances
that we start to introduce all kinds of problems
into the body of Christ.
Republican, Democrat.
For this, against that.
We start slapping on all kinds of patches
onto the clothing that Christ has provided
and pretty soon we're divided over things.
Yes, he didn't include political affiliation in his list,
but I guarantee he would.
It should not divide us.
We are one person in Christ.
Our society is looking for the answer to the question,
how can we live together?
And no institution is more equipped to answer that question
than the Church of Jesus,
the pillar and foundation of the truth.
We are called to participate in what God is doing
by becoming the gospel,
embodied for the world to see.
No matter the dividing lines, we are to set them aside.
All humanity is in the same sinking ship
and in need of a savior,
and no one is more deserving of it than anyone else.
Some may wonder why other voices seem to dominate
the conversation and discourse over diversity,
equity, and inclusion.
I think it's likely, as I've heard other pastors say,
it's likely because the church has given up its position
and yielded its authority to speak the truth on these issues.
And when we don't speak the truth about what this world is
and what it's like in Christ,
we yield the field to other people to try to figure out
how do we make this work.
And I think what we need are bold people of faith
who can go out and say,
hey, we're all in the same boat here,
but in Christ, we find a household of faith,
a place that we can be drawn into and changed
by his grace and his love at work in our hearts.
And we can find a way to live together
under his banner and his love.
It's likely that we've given up space,
and so others speak their truth on the issue.
People often argue that religion has been the cause
of many wars and divisions in the past.
And so how dare you Christians think that you have the answer?
What about this and what about that in the past?
And if you're measuring your behavior against your neighbors
to determine who is better,
then that's a legitimate argument,
because there are times where other organizations or people
have acted better than the church.
But if there is an immovable standard of perfection
that is Christ Jesus,
and you were so bad that someone had to die to save you,
well, there's no room for you to judge
or sneer at your neighbor.
No room.
Yeah, you weaken.
You wanna parse over whether or not you are a better person
or you do gooder works than me?
That's one way to do it,
but we could do that all day and still die
on the sinking ship.
There's only one way, and that's to abandon that way
and instead to look to the one who died for us
to save us because we were that bad that we needed someone
to die and save us,
and if we're that bad and you're that bad
and everyone is that bad, then we're all the same.
You're no better than they are,
and they are no better than you.
And if you were so unbelievably loved
by someone who was willing to die to save you,
there's an immense freedom to move forward in confidence
and grab hold of all the other unworthy ones along the way.
In Christ, all may be one.