Galatians 6

25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. 26 Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.

6 Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. 2 Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. 3 For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. 4 But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. 5 For each will have to bear his own load. 6 Let the one who is taught the word share all good things with the one who teaches. 7 Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. 8 For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. 9 And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. 10 So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.

11 See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. 12 It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. 13 For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh. 14 But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 15 For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. 16 And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.

17 From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.

18 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.

 

Last week we saw how Paul gave a partial list of works performed out of our sin nature (anger, enmity, strife, jealousy, immorality, etc.).   Those were individual consequences of a law-driven life.

Compared to that performance-based checklist, he wrote about the fruit (singular) of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.  It’s not a checklist.  This is description of the attitude that the Holy Spirit brings through grace to the Christian.  The attitude produces action by instinct in the lives of those who avail themselves of the means of grace: the Word read, studied, taught, preached, prayed and portrayed in the Supper and baptism.

 

So now Paul closes this letter with some final descriptions of what life through the Holy Spirit should look like in the church and how that comes about through death to law.  Those are the two broad categories into which our text breaks down: (1) Life through the Spirit [6:1-11]; brought about by, (2) death to the law-driven ego of self [6:12-18].

 

  1. LIFE THROUGH SPIRIT (6:1-11)
    1. Brothers
      1. Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.
      2. Remember 3:1? O foolish Galatians! What a contrast between 3:1 and 6:1.  In chapter three Paul pounds the table with his apostolic authority.  Here in 6:1, he models the gentle concern he wants them to have for one another in the grace-driven life.  The grace-driven life does not bite and devour; it restores in gentleness.  The law-driven life accuses; the grace driven life restores.
      3. When the fundamental doctrine of the gospel is in danger of being redefined into Jesus + my faithful works, Paul does not bother with kindness. He doesn’t call the Jerusalem gurus “brothers”; he calls them slavers, mutilators, sorcerers, idolaters, slanderers, dogs, and eternally damned to hell.
      4. But when his sheep are in danger of wandering away into the law-driven life that produces either prideful moralism or self-indulgent materialism, Paul encourages those who “get” the gospel to leave the 99 and go out to search for the lost one.
      5. Paul models this kind of gentleness when he writes to Philemon, urging him to accept back his runaway slave Onesimus. Paul could have said, “Hey, I’m an apostle and I demand you take this man in without punishing him.” But his letter drips with a spirit of gentleness and encouragement.
      6. Listen to how he addresses this man who was well within his rights to kill Onesimus. “I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers, because I hear of your love and of the faith that you have toward the Lord Jesus and for all the saints, and I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ. For I have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you” (Philemon 4-7).
    2. What “Spiritual” Looks Like (2-9)
      1. Paul addresses this “what to do” list to you who are spiritual, which begs the question, “What does “spiritual” look like?”
      2. Paul never divorces the “what to do” from the “who you are in Christ.” So when we answer “What does ‘spiritual’ look like?” we must recall all of the doctrine of the preceding 5 chapters of Galatians.
      3. Those who were spiritual among the Asian Gauls were those who still clung to Christ as their ONLY hope for God’s approval and for the satisfaction of their deep longings. They look like Paul’s description of Philemon in Philemon vv 4-7; because they trust Jesus, they love people.
      4. Those who are spiritual, both then and now, know that while they were dead in sin God raised them up and gave them trust in Jesus’ perfect Law-keeping life and in his infinite suffering upon a criminal’s cross for the sins of His people as the sacrificial Lamb of God.
      5. They hope in his resurrection and ascension, knowing that He rules all things for their good and His glory. They look to the New Heavens and Earth as that day when every tear will be wiped away and they will spend infinity singing new songs with perfect voices to their Savior because sin and death have been cast off forever.
      6. They take no pride in “getting better and better” on this sin-cursed earth because, by grace, they see more and more of Old Adam at work in their flesh; so that they repent more often and taste more of the joyful sweetness of their gracious God and His one-way love as the Holy Spirit continues to testify in their hearts to the person and work of the Last Adam, Jesus.
      7. Because the ONLY thing that can make anyone, in any sense, “better and better” is tasting more and more of the bitterness of sin and the sweetness of Jesus. The one who is spiritual never tires of grace, never gets sick of hearing “I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind but now I see.”
      8. When people begin to grasp the height and depth and breadth of that wonderful news, they become free to bear each other’s burdens out of the instinct of their new nature. They seek to deliver people out of sin and not deride them for sins because “True justice has compassion …false justice is indignant.” [1]
      9. The sinless God did not consider it an indignity to bear all the guilt and corruption of his people. “According to Isaiah (cf. 53:4), this means: ‘He bore our sins,’ so far was He from abandoning, accusing, and damning us with them and in them. But He dealt with us just as if He Himself had done those things which we had done. He paid for what He had not robbed.”[2]
      10. So, says Paul, we restore people and teach the word and share all good things with those who teach us and we do it with humility because we do not glory in keepable little “l” laws that the nice gurus from Jerusalem believed made them something when they [were] nothing.
      11. The one that is spiritual knows she is nothing except an eternal debtor to God’s one-way love. Luther: “And if it is a debt owed to love, then I must serve others with it, not myself. Thus my learning is not my own; it belongs to the unlearned and is the debt I owe to them. My chastity is not my own; it belongs to those who commit sins of the flesh, and I am obligated to serve them through it by offering it to God for them, by sustaining and excusing them, and thus, with my respectability, veiling their shame before God and men, as Paul writes in 1 Cor. 12:23 that those parts of the body that are less honorable are covered by those that are more honorable.
      12. “Thus my wisdom belongs to the foolish, my power to the oppressed. Thus my wealth belongs to the poor, my righteousness to the sinners. For these are the forms of God of which we must empty ourselves, in order that forms of a servant may be in us (Phil. 2:6), because it is with all these qualities that we must stand before God and intervene on behalf of those who do not have them, as though clothed with someone else’s garment….”[3]
      13. He that is spiritual is like the father who runs to meet his tattered squandering son reeking of pig excrement, and covers him over with a cloak of inheritance and righteousness because that’s what grace looks like and thinks like. That is how grace responds to offenses and offenders.
      14. The one that is spiritual knows that God does not need his good works, but his neighbor does. She knows that the wicked accuse, but the righteous defend and that feeding beggars is superior to reading bloggers.  He understands that the person who plants selfishness reaps weeds; but the one who responds to the gospel through the work of the Spirit harvests a crop of real, eternal life.[4]
      15. People who hang out at the cross understand more and more that they have been crucified to the world. The old Adam, the ego, is being killed off.  The Last Adam is living in their stead and supplying the good works he has prepared beforehand for them to do.
      16. That message is SO vital to Paul that he points out how he has scrawled out this letter in his own, unprofessional handwriting (v. 11). He didn’t want to take the time to dictate it.  He wanted to rush this message to Galatia as soon as possible and make it as personal as possible.

 

  1. DEATH TO OLD ADAM (6:12-18)
    1. Rituals (12-13)
      1. 12 It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. 13 For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh.
      2. At the writing of this letter, the government of Rome is not persecuting the Jesus Movement; the Jews were. So the Jerusalem gurus have found a safe middle ground to avoid persecution: get circumcised and live under the Mosaic Law as a system and participate in the temple feasts and practices.
      3. The more people the nice men can convert to their brand of Messianic Judaism, the more irrelevant Paul becomes to the Jesus Movement and the sooner persecution will stop. Judaism will become a powerful force for good in the world and the Kingdom of Israel will be restored as a blessing to the whole world. The prophecies of Jerusalem and its temple being a world-wide center of worship will finally and literally come to pass.
      4. But if Paul’s gospel is allowed to gain followers, then the Jesus Movement will die out as persecution grows. Messiah cannot restore the Kingdom of Israel if all his followers are dead or hiding, or remain Gentiles cut off from temple worship.
      5. For the Jesus Movement to grow and be influential in the world, Paul’s theology had to be recast because it was divisive and schismatic. It ignored the ancient practices so important to Jewish church culture and tradition. Paul calls this a good showing in the flesh as opposed to those that are spiritual.
      6. The nice men from Jerusalem were proud of keeping the Law. Sure, maybe they weren’t perfect at it but the parts they could keep they were really good at keeping: like circumcision and ceremonial washings and observance of fast and feast days — things Paul says are absolutely useless without perfectly keeping all the requirements of the Mosaic system.
      7. But the nice men from Jerusalem believed themselves correct since they were gaining followers. THEY had the crowd; Paul didn’t.  More people believed the Jerusalem gurus than Paul.  They weren’t the ones getting stoned and beaten and chased out of town, Paul was.  They are boasting in their popularity.
    2. Crucified (14-17)
      1. Paul had been down that road of popularity. He was a Pharisee of Pharisees who had risen above his fellow career climbers in the Jerusalem legal community.  He was the golden boy of the high priest, a student of the most famous scholar of the day, and a cut-throat prosecutor against the Jesus Movement.
      2. If there was a 1st century Jewish equivalent of Texas Monthly Magazine, Paul would have made the cover every year in its Super Lawyer edition. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Mosaic Law and how to use it. He developed a specialty in how to have Jesus followers stoned.
      3. But his rising career completely disintegrated when the Lord Jesus arrested Paul on the Damascus Road. He showered Paul with one-way love and taught him more tenderly and patiently than Rabbi Gamaliel the great doctor of Judaism, president of the Sanhedrin, and Paul’s former teacher, could have ever done.
      4. In the light of grace, no human approval (not even religious glory) could compare to the love of Christ who gave his life as a ransom for Paul’s sins, pronounced Paul to be a new creation, and banished Paul’s guilt as far as East from West, and showered Paul with infinite approval.
      5. A man who once had Jesus-followers bound, beaten, and stoned to death in order to claw his way up the career ladder was now regularly being bound, beaten, and even stoned for the glory of Christ Jesus. When Christians are persecuted today, we think it shame.  But to Paul and the 1st-century saints, it was a great honor to testify to the glory of Jesus above the approval of men; persecution was but light and momentary trouble compared the eternal weight of glory (2 Cor. 4:17).
      6. How could such thing be? What steps did Paul follow to become so spiritual?  14 But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 15 For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.
      7. No steps but death to the law-driven self, Paul says. Paul has no interest in the culture of self-esteem, not his own nor anyone else’s. His focus is fixed upon God’s one-way love displayed at Calvary.
      8. What does it mean to be crucified to the world? Paul tells the Corinthians, “3 But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. 4 For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me” (1 Cor. 4:3-4).
      9. “Paul is saying to the Corinthians that he does not care what they think about him. …his identity owes nothing to what people say. It is as if he is saying, ‘I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what anybody thinks.’ Paul’s self-worth, his self-regard, his identity is not tied in any way to their verdict and their evaluation of him.[5]
      10. Paul isn’t saying he doesn’t care for the Corinthians or the Galatians. He has been freed from the chains of his ego with its craving for human approval and its “give-to-get” worldview. He is free to care for them regardless of whether they love him back.
      11. The cross of Christ, where Paul hangs out, has provided Paul all the approval, all the status, all the love he will ever truly need. Jesus met all of Paul’s deep longings.
      12. THAT is what it means to be spiritual. It means being truly free – free to love your neighbor regardless of what you get in return, free to give whatever you have because you have been given all you need, free to defend and not accuse, free to receive love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control and pass that fruit on to those burdened under the works of the flesh and the little “l” laws of their own egos.
      13. That kind of fruit only grows in the soil of the means of grace (the Word read, preached, sung, prayed, and portrayed in the sacraments) and only ripens over a lifetime of trials that grow our trust. Trials are the marks of Jesus worn on our bodies (v. 17).
      14. Those who walk by that rule will have peace and mercy (v.16). They will be the Israel of God in whose hearts the Old Adam has been cut off (circumcision is a matter of the heart, Rom. 2:29) and the Last Adam lives.
      15. What do I do? Avail yourselves of the means of grace so that you can shower grace upon your neighbors.

Finally, Paul writes, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.”

Paul always pronounces grace, the one-way love of God, upon his congregations.  If we trust God’s grace, we understand that God has provided for all of our deepest longings right now and forever more.  Then we become free to give others more and more grace as our trust grows deeper and deeper.

What do I do? Trust God and get going in giving.

 

[1] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 27: Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 5-6; 1519, Chapters 1-6, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 27 (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 388.  Quoting: Gregory I, XL homiliae in Evangelia, II, 34, 2, Patrologia, Series Latina, LXXVI, 1246.

[2] Id. at 389.

[3] Id at 393.

[4] Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2005), Ga 6:7–8.

[5] Keller, Timothy (2012-04-01). The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness (Kindle Locations 218-220). 10Publishing. Kindle Edition.