Galatians 1:10 – 2:14

For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. 

11 For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. 12 For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. 13 For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. 14 And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers. 15 But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, 16 was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone; 17 nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. 

18 Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him fifteen days. 19 But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother. 20 (In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!) 21 Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. 22 And I was still unknown in person to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. 23 They only were hearing it said, “He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” 24 And they glorified God because of me. 

…

2:11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. 12 For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. 13 And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. 14 But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?” 

Last week we began our 14-week study of Paul’s letter to the churches of Galatia.  You can read about Paul’s planting of these churches in Acts 13 and 14 and you can go to our podcast site and listen to the sermons there on this section of Acts if you would like to go deeper into the background of Galatians (the link to which is in our e-newsletter).

Paul spent the better part of two years planting churches in Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe.  He arrived in Galatia with a tropical disease.  The work was so difficult young John Mark left Paul and Barnabas to go back home.  Paul and Barnabas were harassed by Jewish leaders, beaten, driven out of towns, and Paul was stoned and left for dead in Lystra.  That gives you some idea of how “heavily invested” Paul was with these congregations to whom he had preached the glorious message of freedom in Christ.

But nice Jewish men had come from Jerusalem to Galatia on the heels of Paul’s work; they brought a message that REAL Christians must keep the Law of Moses if they want assurance of God’s pleasure.  Nice preachers had come to tell nice people how to be nicer.  These nice preachers’ message was almost indistinguishable from Paul’s teaching.  

Both they and Paul could recite the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds with no problem at all.  The nice men from Jerusalem and Paul both believed Jesus was Messiah, that Jesus atoned for sin on the cross, died, was resurrected, was the Second Person of the Trinity, and would return to judge the quick and the dead.  They would affirm that all men are saved by grace through faith in Christ.

The nice men from Jerusalem would be called “Christians” in almost every corner of the world today, particularly in Rome.  But Paul calls them false brothers, spies, slave traders, egocentric, dogs, self-mutilators, and wolves; in this letter he will invite them to go cut off their own male “parts.”  Last week, we read that Paul calls down upon them eternal damnation.

Why is Paul so mean?  Why does Paul want to disrupt the peace of the church, engage in name-calling, hurl curses, and invite them to self-mutilation?  Simple: the glory of God is at stake! 

If God’s approval of us depends in any part upon our performance, God is robbed of his glory.  Paul is passionate to preserve the glory of God, not through robes, bells, and smells but through the doctrine he received directly from Jesus.  Jesus’ teaching (through Paul) proclaims freedom into every aspect of our lives.  Its root is grace.  Its fruit is peace. And we see that peace at work in Paul this morning as he rests in God’s one-way approval.

Our passage this morning shows us:  (1) our primary problem is vertical, not horizontal (Godward focus); (2) a proper vertical relationship produces gospel-focused horizontal relationships (Gospel focus); and (3) overemphasis on the horizontal produces bad doctrine (lacking gracious fearlessness).  These “requirements” are gifts you already possess in Christ.

    1. GODWARD FOCUS (1:10-17)
  • Jesus-Centered Doctrine (1:10-12)
        1. Paul’s focus was God-ward.  We cannot experience the peace of God by looking inside ourselves.  We can only experience it by looking out and up at the cross.  Jesus has made peace with God FOR us.
        2. That is an external, objective reality.  Our increasing trust in that fact is the only thing bringing lasting, real peace to meet our deepest longings.
        3. Paul writes in vv. 10-12, “For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. 11 For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. 12 For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”
        4. Notice what Paul says: you can perform to please people or you can be a servant of Christ.  Paul’s focus is not on what makes the people around him happy but upon what Jesus has taught him.
        5. The message of the Gospel is that mankind’s problem is not horizontal; it’s not about other people or our environment.  Mankind’s problem is a lack of peace with God because of our sin nature, our performance-driven, control-seeking, peace-longing, approval-desiring, God-rejecting flesh.
  • Man’s Gospel
      1. What is man’s “gospel” that Paul called a counterfeit gospel in v. 6? Man’s gospel is the ear-tickling message.  It is designed to make the sin nature grow and flourish as opposed to getting the death it deserves.
      2. Man’s gospel is the self-rescue project.  Be the best mother, father, wife, husband, child, student, professional you can be.  Dig deep and follow these 10 steps; memorize these 5 life-principles.  Give something to get something. Make God happy.  Make people happy.
      3. Man’s gospel looks inward.  The revelation of Jesus Christ Paul received and taught forces us to look outward.
      4. Man’s gospel can NEVER assure you that you have done enough.  Just a few weeks ago a 21-year-old intern for Bank of America died in his London apartment of a seizure brought on by working 72 straight hours in a desperate attempt to get the attention of his bosses.  He wasn’t sure he had been sufficiently noticed to receive a job offer when he graduated.  The tragedy was that executives had already recognized young Moritz Erhardt as one of their top interns. 
      5. Since we cannot be sure of its meaning and value, no work the flesh performs can EVER be enough.  We doubt the performance means anything because we can’t control how our performance turns out; we can’t guarantee earning enough approval.  Our flesh believes that human response validates our work as a professional, a parent, a spouse, a church volunteer, or even a pastor.
      6. The flesh also craves to earn God’s approval through performance.  But the Law demands total perfection, not good intentions.  So we can never please God with our efforts any more than we can please people.
      7. The nice men from Jerusalem who offered to add performance-approval to the message of grace and peace.  But no matter how many all-nighters they were encouraged to pull, the Galatians would never find their deep longings fulfilled through performance-based religion.  They must return to the revelation of Jesus Christ. They needed to regain Gospel-focus.
  • GOSPEL FOCUS (1:18 – 2:10)
  • God-Ordained
        1. The nice men from Jerusalem were teaching that Paul might be a great guy, he might be really smart and know lots of good stuff about Jesus, but he didn’t have the stamp of approval from the Holy Mother Church of Jerusalem.
        2. The nice men claimed to have real authority from real apostles.  Paul, bless his heart, was getting it wrong because he had been away from Jerusalem for so long; Paul was out of touch.  Lasting approval from God requires human performance + grace.
        3. So Paul lays out a brief story of his calling and ordination that came directly from Jesus, not through any human agency – not even through the other apostles.
        4. He tells us he didn’t head to Jerusalem until three years after his conversion, at which time he met only with Peter and James.  Then, 14 years after his conversion, he went to Jerusalem a second time with Barnabas the Jew and Titus the uncircumcised Gentile in tow.
        5. There is no agreement among scholars about whether Paul is writing here of his visit with gifts for the poor of Jerusalem (Acts 11) or his visit for the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) which granted formal approval of Paul’s message.
        6. It makes no difference what date we set for Paul’s visit to Jerusalem because his point is VERY clear.  His calling, his doctrine, and his office came DIRECTLY from the Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore his approval came directly from Christ and that was all the approval he needed and desired. 
  • Slavery of Submission
      1. Notice how Paul describes the nice men from Jerusalem in 2:4-5, “4 Yet because of false brothers secretly brought in—who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery— 5 to them we did not yield in submission even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.”
      2. Moralism rarely barges in the front door.  It hides in the hearts of all us recovering Pharisees.  That’s because performance is SO ingrained in our human nature that even the legalistic Judaizers don’t really see their own sin.  They are simply nice people who want other nice people to be as nice as they are.
      3. “…self-exaltation rarely feels evil.  Misguided moral fervor feels good, even virtuous.”  And yet Paul calls these nice men false brothers, spies, and slave traders.
      4. They wished to bring us into slavery.  The slavery of their message was: Jesus has done his part; now you need to do your part if you want God’s approval.
      5. This is a double slavery: living to gain the approval of others and living to gain the approval of God.  This double slavery was the traditional teaching of the rabbis for many centuries before Paul.  So it’s easy to see how it crept into the New Testament Church.  After all, tradition is good; new is bad – or suspect at the very least.
      6. The rabbis had taught “grace + works” for centuries.  So if Jesus was Messiah, he certainly came as YHWH’s ultimate grace.  But their view of grace was small because it was only a part of the equation; God demanded human performance for divine approval. Grace met the good Jew in the middle and helped him along.
      7. So the nice men were calling Paul a fake apostle with a self-invented doctrine.  And their message was successful to some degree everywhere they took it throughout Paul’s entire career, even after the Jerusalem Council declared salvation apart from Law-keeping to be the true gospel message.
      8. If you were to go back and listen to some of our sermons on Acts, beginning around Acts 11 (where Peter has to defend preaching the gospel to a Gentile and eating with him in his home) through the end of the series, you will get some sense of the tension between the Jewish Christians of Jerusalem and Paul.
      9. Paul was pressured on all sides about the radical grace he preached.  You know, Paul, grace is good but if you preach too much of it you’re going to be encouraging people to sin (as if ANYONE needs encouragement to sin).  Paul, you need to balance all this grace-boy preaching with some law.  You can’t buck tradition, Paul.
      10. But Paul was fearless when it came to the glory of God in Christ Jesus!  And we see that in this last section of our passage this morning.
  • GRACIOUS FEARLESSNESS (2:11-14)
  • Gospel Unity
        1. Paul writes in vv. 11-14, But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. 12 For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. 13 And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. 14 But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?” 
        2. The question of whether this incident with Peter in Antioch took place before or after the Acts 15 Jerusalem Council is interesting historically, but not theologically.  The Jerusalem Council concerned itself with how Gentile Christians should behave in light of the gospel, not how Jewish Jesus followers should behave.
        3. The tenses of this text indicate Peter was in Antioch for some time and that he had grown accustomed to eating with Gentile believers during the Agape Meal of which the Lord’s Supper was a part.  In 1 Cor. 11:20 we see the celebration of the Supper practiced with the regular common meals, pot-luck suppers.
        4. Jewish tradition had very strict regulations for mingling with Gentiles.  The regulations for eating anywhere near Gentiles were even stricter.  In Acts 10 and 11 the Spirit leads Peter to stay in a Gentile home and eat with a Roman soldier.  This led to some scandal in the Jerusalem church.  The elders ultimately decided Peter was in the clear; but that didn’t cause the Jewish Christians of Jerusalem to abandon their traditions. 
        5. So Paul relates how believers from Jerusalem, who still practiced Jewish customs, came to Antioch.  Their refusal to celebrate the Lord’s Supper with the Gentiles rubbed off on Peter and Barnabas who slowly, subtly stopped celebrating the sacrament of the Supper with the Gentiles.
        6. This wasn’t just about losing their taste for pork or shellfish; this was a refusal to worship with the rest of the Body of Christ by elevating tradition above the Word of God!
        7. Why would Barnabas and Peter do that?  They refused to worship with the Gentiles because they were more concerned with the approval of men than consumed by the one-way approval of God.  
        8. When horizontal approval is our goal, bad theology happens.  “Pope” Peter feared another inquisition from the Jerusalem elders; he feared loss of reputation.  Perhaps he feared losing his “infallibility” – because we all know the pope is infallible.  Well, not ALL of us know that – Paul obviously had not been told that Peter was the infallible Bishop of Rome.
        9. Peter isn’t admonished for living like a Jew among Jews or living like a Gentile among Gentiles.  Paul did that.  Peter gets spanked for making a public preference of Jewish scruples in front of Gentile believers to the point where he breaks table fellowship.
        10. “Peter caused the Jews to believe that the ways of the Gentiles were forbidden and that the ways of the Jews were necessary, even though he knew that the ways of both were unrestricted and permissible.”
  • Fearless Fellowship
      1. So Peter, Barnabas, and the Antioch Jewish believers let fear of losing human, horizontal approval govern their worship.  They enslaved themselves to the doctrines of men, just like the Galatians were doing.
      2. The soul craves loving approval.  Sometimes we seek worldly approval.  Sometimes we seek churchly approval.  Either idol creates most of the fear, frustration, and anxiety of our lives.  One word of criticism will outweigh hundreds of affirmations
      3. But the deep need of your heart for Belovedness goes FAR beyond anything another sinner can say or do for you.  Paul got that.  Paul wanted Peter and Barnabas to get that.  He wanted the Galatians to recover that.  The Holy Spirit wants US to get that this morning!
      4. If you are trusting into Jesus this morning, you already have the infinite love and approval of the great triune Godhead and there is NOTHING that can separate you from that.
      5. You cannot sense that by concentrating on what YOU need to do!  You can only rest in the one-way approval of God by hanging out at the cross.  It’s not that you don’t “do” anything; but it is God who works in you and controls the results.

“It is God who affects the ends, God who makes the results. Our dignity and pleasure lie in our freedom to work, not in its results. We toil in the fields, but it is God who grows the crops (1 Cor. 3:6). The Gospel gives us comfort, allowing us to stay safely on the other side of results, which are God’s possession. It is God who is productive, secretly and busily at work in the world. We can rest in the pleasure and freedom of our work — in the world, the home, and in the church — knowing that God already sees, already notices, because he is already at work with us to finish the job, never failing to achieve the perfect results he desires.

“Our work, thank you Jesus, is never enough.  It can never earn us enough approval and it can never control the end result.

“This must certainly be one of the many lessons of Sabbath observance. One more workday isn’t going to matter. So, instead of doing, receive: worship, rest, and joy in the fruits of your labor — however imperfect and incomplete it is. Rest knowing that the Father, as Jesus testifies, is still at his work, even to this day, for you and for me (John 5: 17).”

There is a small beach town along the southern coast.  They have a sign on the edge of the city that reads: “Relax, you’re here.”

That’s the Holy Spirit’s sign to you from Galatians this morning.  Relax, you’re here.