Why does trying harder to be a good person never seem to be enough?
WATCH
Transformed, 3 of 3 from May 3, 2026
“We are transformed when we abandon our old good substitutes.”
Galatians 2:11-21 by Michael Lockstampfor (@miklocks)
SUMMARY
The sermon warns that we are prone to fall back into familiar but false substitutes instead of resting in God's grace. Pastor Michael shares that Galatians 2 insists that because God's standard is perfection and no one can achieve it, only Jesus' sacrificial death and our justification by faith in Him can truly transform us. This means we are called to abandon those “old good substitutes” and live in surrendered, relational trust rather than transactional effort.
REFLECTION & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
💬 What are the things we trusted most as good news before we heard of God’s grace?
💬 Where are you most tempted to “fake it ‘till you make it?”
💬 What effort do you point to when you want God to respond positively?
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Well, good morning, Church. Well, I got a couple with you. All right. That's all right. We'll get there.
Have you ever had. Have you ever had something that you thought was the real thing and then like, you had the real thing later on or like, oh, the thing that I started with was, was not the real thing. Like, I was pretty satisfied with that until I had, like, the real, real thing. And now. And now I got a coffee story.
In fact. Thank you. I did not drink coffee at all growing up. It was a habit that I developed in college because I thought the solution to having more time was sleeping less. And I thought the solution to sleeping less was more caffeine.
And the socially acceptable caffeine addiction on a college campus is coffee. And so I went to the inside of the library. There was like a coffee shop that I could use. I could use my dad's hard earned money for ridiculous amounts of coffee. Because, like in our school, they had this weird system where dad had to give them cash money so that they could convert that into meal points so that then I could spend their meal points on campus.
Like, it's just a weird thing. I don't know. It was a scam. But here's the deal. I didn't like coffee.
I never had any coffee. And so what I did was I ordered a drink and it was called a creme brulee latte. Now, I don't know what's actually in that. And I've got some, like, authentic coffee people in the audience. So at risk of offending Tim and Grace, let me explain to you what I think, what I think I was drinking.
I think latte means mostly steamed milk. Yeah, mostly steamed milk with a shot or two of espresso. Right? Yeah. Yeah, okay, sure.
No, no, no, no, no, no. So mostly steamed milk, a little bit of espresso. So a little bit of coffee with a lot of bit of milk. Right. But then this creme brulee thing, man, let me tell you, it was.
And people get weird about this, but it was white chocolate syrup. Like, I know some people have strong feelings about white chocolate. I'm not here to fight with you. I'm. I'm right about this.
But it was, it was white chocolate. Pumps of white chocolate syrup with pumps of caramel syrup. So I've got, I've got a little bit of coffee and I got a lot of. Bit of milk and then I got a whole shot of like, sugar, sugar. And then I got another whole shot of sugar, sugar.
And that in college is what I Thought I. That's what I thought coffee was. And so it turns out I liked sugar, not coffee. And the way that I learned that I didn't like coffee is I went to South Africa. I had the opportunity to go and work in an orphanage for three months.
And when you go out of the country, there's this thing that happens where they actually, like, drink coffee, and it's good stuff, but they don't do, like, drip coffee machines. Like, that's at least in South Africa. And where is that? They don't do drip coffee machines. What they do is, is this invention that I only knew about because Jesse's grandparents had embraced it wholeheartedly.
It's this thing called instant coffee. Have you heard of this? You just put hot water in this, whatever it is, and it turns into a coffee thing. That's what they drank. And so I was like, I like coffee.
And then they're like, okay, cool. And they mixed up this cup of instant coffee and gave it to me one morning and was like, I do not know what this is, but this is not coffee. Right? And then three months of that abuse. You know what I learned to like?
I learned to like instant coffee. I came back to the States, and instead of going to the library, I went to Walmart, and I got a thing of instant coffee. And it was so cheap. It was the cheapest thing. It was great.
And that's when I drank. And I would be like, people would come over and I'd make them breakfast in our little quad or whatever, and I'd be like, would you like some coffee? They'd be like, yes, I'd like some coffee. And I'd give them instant coffee. They'd be like.
I said, I like coffee. What is this? This is hot garbage. And some people are like, well, coffee in general is just hot garbage. But, like, like.
So that's like the thing. Okay, so I like. My taste buds are not good. I'm not refined. I don't have good tastes at all because I liked instant coffee.
But then. But if you don't know, like, Jessie is like a culinary genius. Like, she studied culinary. She knows all the things and all that kind of stuff. So then she started, like, taking.
And she would grind coffee beans, and we would make it in, like, an aeropress and she'd get, like, fresh coffee. And then I tasted like coffee coffee, and I was like, oh, this is not instant coffee. This has. I don't know what it is because I have bad tastes like this. But this has a thing that is not in instant coffee.
Instant coffee just kind of punches you in the teeth and walks away. But this coffee, like, has like, it's kind of. I don't know. And then, and then I realized that not only did I not like, like the instant coffee, I didn't even like the milk sugar that I used to drink that I used to call coffee. Right.
Have you ever, like, gotten used to something as a thing and then getting down the line, you realize, oh, I, I was actually enjoying a bad substitute for the thing that I actually now like. Is anybody else? Like, it's coffee like you get. We can laugh about that and you can have your opinions and I can be right about all of mine. But.
But we do that about all kinds of things. Whatever we grow up with is normal for us. And whatever we grow up with just becomes natural. It's the thing that we like. And I like what I like and you don't get to yuck my yum.
Right? And so that's insignificant when it comes to coffee. It doesn't super duper matter. But when it comes to things about how we relate to people, how we operate in a relationship, when it comes to really how we operate with God, like, that actually carries a lot of weight where if we have like adopted as my, as the thing that I love, a really bad substitute, then we're actually in a lot of danger. And so today as we open up, this is our last Sunday together in this series that we're calling Transformed.
As we open up, we're going to look at a situation that kind of grew up where somebody was embracing a bad substitute for loving God. Okay, so before we do that, I'm going to ask if you would pray with me. It's our habit as neighborhood church to pray. The disciples prayer, the words are here on the screen if you'd like to kind of read it out loud. But the reason that we do this every week is not because I can't think of something to say, like I talk for a living, so, but it's because Jesus, when the disciples kind of asked Jesus, like, how should we pray?
This is it. This is how he answered. And so if we're going to pray together, I think it's helpful for us to kind of try to follow the model that Jesus has kind of set for us. Okay, so I'm just going to give us a moment. Let's take a deep breath, and if there's something that you want to say to God just in the next minute or so, I'll give you the opportunity just to pray quietly.
And as we turn our attention to his word, let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
Let's navigate together to the book of Galatians in chapter 2. Galatians. Galatians 2.
Over the course of this series, we've been looking at this letter. And this is a letter that was written by a guy named Paul. He was an apostle. He was a church planter, and he had traveled all through this whole region of the Roman Empire that was called Galatia. And as he traveled through this region, he would stop at cities and he would preach the gospel.
People would believe the gospel, and churches would start. But when we think of church, we probably shouldn't think about, like, they built a building with a steeple. We should be thinking about, like, there was a group of people that believed that this was true and then started living together as they worked out what it meant to follow those truths. So oftentimes they met in people's homes, and it was much more about the people than it was about the building. I've noticed this over the last couple of years, probably been a decade now.
I made the decision that when we greet one another here on a Sunday morning, I say, good morning, church. Have you noticed that? I say that, and it's great, because when I say, good morning, church, you know who responds? The church responds. And it's never been the building.
I've never said that. And the building's been like, good morning, Michael. It would probably fall apart if it did that. But so, like, as he went around and he started churches, he's starting these communities of people who have believed, believed in the gospel and now are kind of living together and working that out. But there's a relational dynamic.
And so as Paul has done that, he's moved on. He's continued to plant churches. There have been some other teachers that have come along and said, hey, it's good that you believed in Jesus. That's a good place to start. But in addition to believing in Jesus, you also need to keep these rules.
And I don't know why Paul didn't tell you about these rules, but let me tell you about these rules, because God's not happy with you unless you keep these rules. Okay, so that's kind of the situation. Paul gets word of this and he writes this letter to say it's Jesus, period. That's the end of the sentence. Salvation is by Jesus, period.
You don't add anything to it. You don't take anything away from him. He just is the answer. Okay? And so he has been, over the last couple of.
I guess, couple of chapters, he's been. He's been explaining to them his story, how he came to trust Jesus, how he became convinced of what the gospel was. And he says, if there's anybody who comes and preaches a gospel different than the one that I gave you, that person should be accursed. They should be cursed by God and live kind of separated from God. So this is a really, really big deal for him.
Right now. We're going to pick up in Galatians chapter two. We're going to start in verse 11, and I'm going to read those first two paragraphs here to get us started. So Galatians, chapter two, starting verse 11. If you're in the blue Bibles, it's page 1122.
1122 in the blue Bible. I should have given you that a minute ago. Sorry. Okay, But when Paul, he continues. But when Paul.
Excuse me, the title, the title in mind says Paul opposes Peter. But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned. So that sounds like conflict, doesn't it? Yeah. All right, so just let me translate for you real, real quick.
Cephas is another name for Peter, and Paul is telling this story. But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned. 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. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.
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? We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners. Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. So just a little bit of background.
Like, as Paul is telling his story, he says, listen, I was a person who was persecuting the church. I was a person who was going and arresting people that were on Team Jesus and trying to make sure that they got prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Paul oversaw executions of people whose only crime was that they trusted in Jesus as the Messiah. So, like, he was a bad dude and he's on his way to a town called Damascus. And as he's on his way, Jesus kind of rolls up and puts his high beams on.
He blinds him with these bright light and says, why are you persecuting me? And so Paul meets Jesus personally on the road and says, actually, like, you're not going to work against me anymore. You're going to be on my team. And so his friends kind of carry him or lead him to the rest of the city. And he just kind of sits there and prays for three days.
Because what do you do when you suddenly can't see? And what do you do when you heard the voice of Jesus ask why you're persecuting him? Like, I feel like he has some things to reflect on in those couple of days. So he personally met Jesus, and then a guy comes and he prays for him and falls off his eyes. He can suddenly see.
And what he does is he actually withdraws into the wilderness. He says he left for about three years, and it seems to me like he just studied up. Like, he's like, okay, this. If Jesus is Messiah, I got to take a look at the book. I got to know what it was that I was supposed to be expecting.
I thought I could see clearly. And when Jesus blinded me, he highlighted how blind my heart was. And. And so now he withdraws and studies for three years, and then he gets a call into ministry, and he serves 14 years in the first, like, multicultural or multiracial church. So, like, when he kind of leaves that period of study, he serves 14 years at a church in Antioch.
Now, Antioch means nothing to most of us, but Antioch was the first time that Jews and Gentiles kind of served and worshiped together within the same congregation. It was groundbreaking, groundbreaking stuff. And then after he had served for 14 years in that church, he came to Jerusalem, which is where the apostles were and where all of the people who kind of, like, were the first Christians, they were the authorities. He went to them. He said, hey, this is the gospel.
This is the message that I've understood from Jesus. Am I on the right track. And they said, yeah, you are on the right track. It's Jesus, period. Nothing else.
And so you keep going and preaching to the Gentiles and we'll keep going and preaching to the Jews. Now you're like multicultural church. Like, what are you even talking about, Michael? What's the big deal? Here's the deal.
Christianity started out. It started out of Judaism. So the first Christians, everybody who was the first person, like, the first couple of people to believe in Jesus were Jewish. Like, okay, well, like, they had a worldview, they had practice, they had a way that they approached the world. They had categories that they saw people in.
They had very strict standards of how they operated in the world, which is actually the way that God had kind of taught them to be. But as they, as they, like, began to trust in Jesus, they thought that Jesus as the Jewish Messiah was coming to save Jews. Which makes sense, right? All of the Old Testament is a story about how God kind of creates and pursues and tries to communicate his character through one specific family. So you guys have heard of Abraham.
So Abraham has a bunch of kids, or he has one kid, and then that kid has a kid, and then that guy has a bunch of kids, and then all those kids become the tribes of Israel. But it's really just one family. They're all, like, related by blood, right? And then, like, God continues to tell his story about his character and how he pursues people who continue to mess up, but it's always about this one particular family. And he keeps telling them, by the way, like, you guys are going to be a light to the rest of the world.
And what they heard was, I'm going to show off myself through you, and then I'm going to burn everybody else up. They thought, we're the only ones that are going to be right with God. And we're looking forward to the day where God sends his chosen one to make. Make sure that we kind of get caught up with God and everybody else gets burnt up. And so their understanding of the world was.
Is very black and white. There were only two categories of people. There were people who were in the family, and there were people who were out of the family. There were people who were Jewish and then there was everybody else. And their name for everybody else was Gentile.
So if you were not Jewish, you were a Gentile. And if you. And if you were Jewish, then your understanding was like, you belong to this family and God cares about this family and only this. The rest of the world's going to hell. But he's got us.
That's where it starts. And it's crazy because Jesus, like, gathers up all the boys. Like, he. You know the story. He dies and he comes back to life.
Like, that's actually the hinge of all this. That's not true. Then. Nothing else is. But when he comes back to life, he's got all the boys together in Jerusalem, which is, like, the central hub of Judaism.
And. And he. And he says, hey, I'm leaving. I'm gonna leave the Holy Spirit, and I'm leaving. And when I go, you're gonna be my witnesses in Jerusalem.
Sweet. And in Judea. That's, like, the region that Jerusalem's in. That's like the. The county.
He's like, sweet. And they're like. And Samaria. I was like, hold on a second. That's the next counter.
That's the other side of the tracks. Like, I don't know about that. I guess they're half Jewish. It'll probably work. And then to the ends of the earth.
And he gives them that instruction, you're gonna be my witnesses all the way to the end of the earth. In Acts, chapter one, and for the next 14 chapters, the next 20 years or so, you know what they do?
They hang out in Jerusalem and they tell other Jewish people that Jesus is the Messiah, which is great, but it's not what he told them to do. It's good for them to know, and it's good for them to trust Jesus as a Jewish Messiah. But they never, like. It took them a long time to wrap their arms. Arms and wrap their head around the fact that Jesus is for everybody.
He's not just for the Jewish people.
One of the. Sorry, I've got a lot of words on the paper. One of the things for Jewish people in this. Like, this. Like, either Jewish or you're not.
Was that you actually, like, are not actually supposed to go into the house of a gentile person, because then you become unclean. And if you're not allowed to go in their house, you certainly. You certainly. You certainly are not supposed to eat with them. Like, Jews are supposed to be special.
They're God's chosen people. They're not supposed to be with Gentiles, and they're definitely not supposed to eat with Gentiles. So Paul is serving in the first multicultural church where it's not just Jewish people that have embraced Jesus as the Messiah. It's also gentile people who embrace Jesus as Messiah. People who were polytheistic who ate ham and shrimp, they were People, which is like, whatever.
We do that all the time. Yeah, yeah, because y' all are Gentiles too.
Like, these. Like, if you come, if you. Like, it's weird. We will bring, like, ham to an Easter potluck or something, which we don't think about. But if you're coming from a Jewish background, it's like, you can't eat ham, you can't have bacon, you can't put cheese on your hamburger.
Like, it's just not a thing that you do. And so it makes potlucks really, really interesting for them to try to figure out how to do that. And Paul has had 14 years of negotiating this tension of people who were trying to honor God by the laws that he kind of gave them. And these people who are coming from out of, like, come out of left field who are like, I didn't know we had to do any of this stuff. But they're all together in the body of Christ.
Interesting. He starts off, and we'll get back here. We are circling back into the text. Okay, so verse 11. When Cephas came to Antioch, I oppose him to his face.
So Peter comes from Jerusalem to Antioch, the first multicultural church. And he's like, this is super cool. He gets to sit down and eat with Gentiles who are trusting in Jesus. He's like, oh, my gosh, this is what God has called clean. We should not call unclean.
Which was a big deal for him. You should read the story. In fact, we will. I'll just say if you're like, I'm completely lost, you should know we're going to go back and we're going to study acts in the fall. So if you're like, I'm completely lost.
Just stick around. We'll get there.
Peter got to sit and eat with people that he never would have crossed paths with. And he seems to, like, like, be processing this. But it seems like there's something that's unsettled because there's a group of people who come from. From Jerusalem to visit Antioch, too. And when they walk in the door, he moves tables.
Instead of sitting with the Gentiles, like, was. He goes and he sits with the. With the other people who are Jewish. He's like, ah, I don't want to offend anybody. I don't want them to be offended that I would be eating with these people who are eating ham sandwiches.
Like, let me just. Let me just separate. And Paul says, that's not in line with the Gospel. The way that you treat other people actually reflects your Understanding and the truth about what's going on in your heart. And so Paul looks at the way that Peter is behaving and says, bro, you wrong.
You're out of line because you had no issue with eating with Gentiles before the Jewish folks, like, showed up. And now you're acting like you're so. Like, now you're acting completely different now that you've got a different audience. And he says, and not only that, Peter, you're a leader. You're somebody that people look up to.
And in verse 13, the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. Now, you guys don't know Barney, but he's a really cool dude, and his name means son of encouragement. Like, he's a guy who just brings people together. Every time you find a story about Barnabas, he's advocating for somebody. He's trying to encourage them.
He's trying to build them up and be on their team. And Paul is saying, even Barnabas was starting to act like a hypocrite because of Peter's influence in this situation. That's crazy. And 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? He says, you're Jewish, you were born that way, you grew up that way, but you don't even live that way consistently.
You didn't have any issue eating at a table with Gentiles, and you didn't even, like, wash your hands. He didn't say that, but, like, just putting more into them. He says, if you won't even hold yourself to the standard, how can you look at other people and say, like, you also, you must act like me, even though I can't even act like what I'm supposed to do. And Paul says of himself, he says, we ourselves are Jews by birth. Paul says, I was born Jewish too, and we're not gentile sinners.
I'm not from that family. I'm not like, I'm not the guy who is coming in from the outside and kind of arguing that you should let us all in. He's like, I'm part of the family, bro. I also was raised Jewish. And I'm saying, you're out of line.
You're not walking in step with what's true. Because verse 16, we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law. Because by works of the law no one will be justified.
There's a couple of things that are going on here and I probably have spent more time speculating than I had intended to. But I just, I wonder what does Peter's behavior kind of tell us about what he actually believes? Because it seems to me like, and I don't know, Pete, he's probably going to punch me in the teeth when I meet him in heaven. But it seems to me like he is more afraid of what men think than about what is true. He's like, I don't want people from back home to know how I live when I'm out away.
I don't want them to think less of me because of the people who I'm associating with now. I think God can forgive Gentiles, but I don't know that I should spend time with them.
I think. I think he's comfortable with how he was raised. And in this moment of testing, he like shifts back into his default setting. I grew up my whole life and I was told that I wasn't allowed to be with those people. And that's normal to me.
And now I'm like realizing that God's doing something kind of incredible and it's starting to make me uncomfortable because, you know, you don't know what you believe until people say, start to examine you. And when people from back home start to ask questions about how you're living now, that's where you really figure out what you want people to think about you. And so here he's like, I'm going to go back to the way it was.
There's a couple of truths. They go together. I'm going to give you one at a time, and then I'll jam them together. The first is we do what we believe. We do what we believe.
Your behavior indicates what you actually believe about yourself. And if we can wrap our heads and hearts around that, that really helps us. It helps us to clarify that some of the times that we fail are not because it was just an accident. It's because we actually have a false belief about what we ought to do or who we are. But knowing what's right doesn't mean we do what's right.
I wish it were that easy. Because you know what they do everywhere? Everywhere, they put these Numbers on signs that tell you the maximum speed limit you're supposed to drive? Have you read those Carl's? Never seen one before.
Knowing what's right doesn't mean we do what's right.
I know all kinds of things that I ought to be doing, but I don't do. I've been under conviction for weeks that I need to, like, wake up earlier and be more proactive in starting the day instead of just letting the day start me. And I have been super frustrated at the lack of, like, physical activity and taking care of myself. Like, I have not been stewarding my body well, I know that. But what I do is I sleep in.
We do what we believe, and knowing what's right doesn't mean we do what's right. If I could just give you the information about what you ought to do, that doesn't mean that you would be better.
In fact, that's exactly the whole thing that God did with the law. He said, you want to know what I'm like? You want to know what I expect from you? Here's a list. And the people took that list and they said, you know what?
I don't really have to do any of that stuff.
If it was sufficient for God to like, give us instructions and then we could follow them, then, like, we really wouldn't have a need for Him. He could just reveal his will to us and then we could just do that.
But we are transformed. Not just conformed, but we are transformed when we abandon our old good substitutes.
Because when we start to taste and see that the Lord is good, we realize what faith really is. We realize what joy really is. We realize what peace that passes understanding really is. And we realize that all of the things that I looked to for comfort and completion and validation in the past was actually kind of a crappy substitute either. It was just milk and sugar, and it made me feel a whole lot of things but didn't have any substance or is just abuse that I got used to.
But when we realize that the things that are natural to us are old substitutes for goodness and that God is offering to us true goodness, true life, and true restoration, that's where the transformation happens.
So what are the things that we trusted the most as good news before we heard of God's grace? Like, I'm assuming that most of us have heard of God's grace to some degree or another. What are the things before you had heard that message that you thought, that's pretty good, that's pretty good.
Family takes care of one another. It's pretty Good. Blood is thicker than water. You've got to hang together. It's pretty good.
You can achieve a lot at work and get recognition at work. It's pretty good. They'll even give you money for time and stuff. That's pretty good.
If you dress a certain way, you get a certain kind of attention. It's pretty good.
What are the things that we trusted the most as good news before we heard of God's grace? And the reason I ask that question is because those are most likely to be the places that you're tempted to return turn for a poor substitute of the grace that he's trying to give you when things get hard, when it hits the fan, we actually just kind of shift back into whatever our automatic responses are. If I yell louder, they stop asking me questions. That's my automatic response.
If I say something sarcastic and cutting and I wound them, they won't actually see what's going on in me. That is hurt. I can protect myself that way.
If I refuse to let anybody get close to me, then probably I won't get hurt again because that's the best way to go forward.
If I'm aggressive and forthright and I put all my ideas on the table and I manipulate people into doing what I want, then I can get the accomplishments that I want and I can overpower people.
Those things that we accepted as like good are not life.
They're comfortable to us.
We might even consider them as part of our identity. This is just who I am. This is just what I'm like.
But it's a poor, poor substitute for the goodness and the grace of a loving God who would see us in our sin and intervene.
Paul asks Peter how it makes sense for him to expect Gentiles to be like Jews when he doesn't even have the same expectation for himself. It's interesting. He says, I confronted him to his face because he stood condemned. Just the chapter before Paul says, if anybody's preaching a different gospel, he should be accursed. And so it's almost like he's like, yo, Peter was believing a different gospel and he was on the verge of being a cursed by God.
He stood condemned. And so I confronted him to his face.
He was acting like a hypocrite.
It's a favorite word.
If you haven't been accused of being a hypocrite yet, just spend some more time around church. It'll happen. Hypocrisy is pretending to be something that you're not. Like the term itself is pretending to be something that you're not. And it does relate to, like, the theater world.
And it relates to masks. It's like, I am a thing, but I'm going to put a mask on to pretend to be something that I am not that thing. Okay, there's hypocrites in church. You may have met them. I think the text is clear that even at times the apostles themselves were hypocrites.
So if you are feeling hypocritical, you're in good company. We all have seasons where we are pretending to be something that we're not inside the church. That's true. And I don't have any issue calling that out. It's also true outside the church.
It's funny to me how oftentimes people are like, well, I don't want to go into church because there are just so many hypocrites. I'm like, have you been to work?
Why do you go to work? There's so many hypocrites there. They are so hypocritical. Let me tell you.
It's interesting, though, I noticed in some of my reading this week that hypocrite, it refers to somebody who's knowingly pretending to be something that they're not. But it's not a term that Jesus ever uses of his disciples.
Guys that messed up, guys that lacked faith, guys that struggled a ton. Never in the scripture does Jesus turn to them and call them hypocrites.
Immaturity is not the same as hypocrisy. And everybody starts as babies. Like, we start thinking that the whole world revolves around us. We start thinking that the throne room of God is on our shoulders. And we learn that actually that would crush me.
And, like, my life is not about me. It's about Jesus and what he wants to do. But that immaturity is not the same as hypocrisy. And the expectation that Jesus has is that we grow. You can't expect things to grow if they're already perfect.
If there's no room for improvement, there's no growth. You might as well just seal it up into a little plastic plexiglass box and suck all the air out so that it never ages. The goal of God in our lives is growth. And it's interesting that grace is the mechanism.
God's goal for us is that we grow. And it's his grace that's the mechanism. I see that in verse 15. We ourselves are Jews by birth and not gentile sinners. Yet verse 16.
Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law. Because by the works of the law, no one will be justified. Grace is the mechanism. It's God giving us a gift that we don't deserve.
That he would give us his favor, that he would give us his kindness, that he would make it right for us to even have a conversation with him, is the mechanism by which we grow.
Where are you most tempted to fake it till you make it?
Here. I'm just going to dance on all those insecurities this morning. All right. Where are you most tempted to fake it till you make it? Like it's an impulse that I have.
I'm a people pleaser. I don't like conflict. I grew up in a passive aggressive environment. Like, I'll do everything I can to make all you guys happy. Okay.
Where are you most tempted to fake it till you make it?
That faking it can either be hypocrisy or it can be a step in growth. And I like the line for sin runs through the heart. I can't tell you where you're at, but the Holy Spirit does. Are you honest about what you are or what you aren't? Do we put up the mask and say this is who I am or do we put up the standard of Jesus and say that's who I'm trying to be?
Am I hiding what's actually going on beneath the surface? Or am I showing that and all the ways that I fail to meet the thing that he has called calling me up into?
Are we honest about what we are and what we aren't? If you say you've got it all together and you don't have it all together, you're a hypocrite. If you admit I don't have it all together and I'm trying to get it all together, then you're not a hypocrite. You're growing.
If you are tempted to fake it till you make it, I just ask. Are the masks helping you deal with what's actually wrong? Or are we just kicking the can down the road?
And I wonder how might trusting Jesus grace in that area that you're so tempted to just cover up? How might trusting Jesus grace in that area actually bring you freedom?
Because we're transformed when we abandon our old good substitutes.
Let me pick up again in verse 15 and I'll keep reading. We ourselves are Jews by birth and not gentile sinners. Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not the works of the law. Because by the works of the law, no one will be justified.
But if in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too are found to be sinners, is Christ the then a servant of sin? Certainly not. For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. For through the law I died to the law so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ.
It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me and the life I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself. I do not nullify the grace of God. For if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. You should know that, like, faith and belief are like really, really close.
They're almost synonymous words. They're kind of different forms of the same word. Faith and belief are like an expression of trust and trustworthiness. So when we say I have faith in Jesus and I trust Jesus, Jesus, I trust that he is capable and he's going to act right? And justification means.
Justification means that we have God's approval. Justification means God looks at me and he approves of my life. And so what Paul is saying is that nobody gets God's approval by doing enough good stuff to earn his approval. No one gets God's approval by following the law. It doesn't happen because by works of the law, no one will be justified.
No one will be approved by God by doing enough of the right thing. Nobody will be approved by God by avoiding enough of the wrong thing.
The only way that we can be approved by God is by trusting that Jesus can make us approved by God. Well, what if he doesn't? What if he doesn't? What other hope do you have? It can't be done.
You can't earn it. You can't pay it back.
I suspect that we will never fully embrace the good news of God's overwhelming grace until we stop minimizing the bad news. There comes a point in our life where we start to look at, like, our faith and what Jesus is calling us into. And we start to look backwards and go, you know what? The way that I was really wasn't that bad. Like, the reason why I was the way that I was was because of all of these reasons.
I've Got reasons why I was the way that I really wasn't that bad. And why can't Jesus just like, take his blessing and like, sprinkle it over top of me while I'm over here trying to do the thing that I was doing that was killing me before?
I suspect that we won't ever fully embrace the good news that we could never earn God's grace until we stop minimizing the fact that this was killing us. That the natural order of the way that we learned how to do life apart from Christ is death. Whether that was apart from Christ, apart from religious system acting in an atheistic way, just trying to do the do good enough good to like, not do harm in the world, all those kinds of things. Or if our, if our system was like, you gotta, you gotta follow the rules of religion, like, neither of those things are able to get you to a place where God looks at you and goes, you know what? You're right, you're really not that bad.
Because his standard is perfection.
But we are transformed when we abandon our old good substitutes. If we fail in verse seven, I'm going to give you, like, my rewording in verse 17. If we fail while working to follow the law, does that mean that Jesus is empowering us to fail?
If I'm like, trying to follow the law and Jesus is like souping me up and then I fail, does that mean that Jesus is now empowering me to sin? No, absolutely not. Verse 18. If we repent and are delivered from our sin and from our sinful habits, but then I choose to reestablish myself in those sinful habits and re embrace all of that sin. The problem is me.
If I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. God's standard for perfection is clear. And God's standard for perfection is condemning to every single human that's ever walked the planet.
We embrace the requirements of the law to our own personal destruction. If you look at God and say, God, your standard is true and good and right. What that means is I embrace my destruction. There's no other way. The only solution to our failure to follow the law is death in verse 19.
For through the law, I died to the law. And the hope being that I might live to God.
When we trust Jesus, all of our old substitutes for good died with him.
I have been crucified with Christ. When I trust Jesus in his sacrifice, I take myself and, and all of the things that I have used as a bad substitute for goodness, and they die with Me, I have been crucified with Christ.
It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.
And trusting Jesus, death and resurrection completely transforms the dynamic between us and God. This is pivotal. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me and the life I now live in flesh. I live by faith, by trust in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. Do you see the shift?
We shift from this transactional relationship with God where He sets an expectation and then I meet that expectation, or I don't. But it's all a transaction. I'm going to exchange something for another. But when we put our trust in Jesus that He has made the exchange, we're no longer operating with God transactionally, we're operating with God relationally. When I trust Jesus, I trust him.
Because the life that I now live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me, that's not a transaction. Like he gave Himself for me because of his love. Like he loved you when you were failing. He loved you when you thought that good substitute was just fine. He loved you when you were opposed to everything that he knew was good and right and true.
And his love was so compelling that he was willing to give Himself up for you. And so why would I try to resurrect what he killed?
We're transformed when we abandon our old good substitutes. Verse 21 kind of seems to me like he's addressing a criticism. So the phrase to me just kind of pops out of nowhere. He says, I do not nullify the grace of God. I'm like, I don't know where that's coming from.
I think that was a thing that the Galatians had kind of said about him, or that these false teachers had said that the way that Paul's teaching, he's actually nullifying the grace of God. I think the false teachers may have been saying that the law is a gift, which, by the way, I kind of think is true, that the law is a gift. But they were following up, and the false teachers were saying that neglecting to follow the whole law is so spurning God's gift. And I think the false teachers were saying that God's grace comes through keeping the law. And if you don't keep the law, then you're spurning God's gift of grace.
And Paul is saying, I'm not nullifying the grace of God by acknowledging the fact that I never could keep the law. Because if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. If it was possible. Listen, think about the best person. You know, you got somebody who's the person that you're pretty sure glows in the dark when they go to bed.
I'm not talking about like radiation or anything like that. I'm just like, there are those people in your life that you're like, man, they get it. They're just locked in. They're just holy. Think about that best person.
If it was possible for that person, the best person you could possibly think of, to earn acceptance with God through the law. If it was possible, then there would be no reason for Jesus to die.
Because if it were possible for us to get there, then the expectation would be that we would be required to follow the law and get there.
I don't think I could follow the law that much. I don't think anybody could follow the law that much. If that's where you're at. Listen, if that's where you're at, what you're doing is you're embracing the bad news. I'm trying to ask you to not minimize the bad news.
Because when we stop minimizing the bad news, then we are transformed by the good news that God in His grace, in his rich loving kindness extends to us approval. Not because we've earned it, not because we're good enough, not because we clenched our teeth hard enough, not because we bit our tongue hard enough, but because he loves us and gave Himself for us that we might be with Him. It's a gift.
The gospel is not that God helps me to do better than I could do on my own. The gospel is not that God, that only God is good and that the gospel, this is one that I gotta do, right? So let me read it. The gospel is not that God helps me do better than I could do by myself. That's not it.
The gospel is that only God is good and that I am only good if he makes me good. And the gospel is that God wants to make me good and he did the work to make it possible.
So how do we do that? What does that look like? If I could put it into bullet points, these are the bullet points that I would do. Hypothetically. If we willingly agree that God's standard is right and that we have failed and deserve destruction is the first step we stop minimizing the bad news.
Say, yep, you're right, God, if I could have done it, then you would have that expectation and I couldn't do it, and nobody's been able to do it, and we all deserve destruction. Like nobody starts in the neutral towards God. We all start as enemies of God. The Church word for that is confession. I agree with God that what God said is true.
Then I trust that Jesus destruction on our behalf can satisfy God's standard for perfection. I don't know how the economy works in the spiritual exchange. I don't understand all the intricacies of how that ends up being a right and just thing. But I trust that Jesus says that his payment was enough and that he was destroyed so that I wouldn't have to be. That's faith.
Trust. Faith is the church word. And then surrendering our life completely to Jesus and living in light of his grace is repentance. Saying the bad news is bad. And there was nothing here that was actually helping me to walk with God.
And so I leave those things behind. I have been crucified with Christ. And the life I now live in the Son of God, I live for him who loved me and gave himself for me. And the church word is repentance.
And so I just want to invite you, if the Lord is tugging on your heart today, that today would be the day that you willingly agree that God's standard is right and that you trust that Jesus destruction on our behalf can satisfy God's standard for perfection. And that you would surrender your life completely to Jesus and live in light of his grace.
He lets us do it.
You don't have to earn it. You don't even have to earn the right to hear it. You just heard it. That is free.
My friends, we're transformed only when we abandon our old substitutes that we used to think were good. Let's pray.
Lord, there's just a lot. There's just a lot. A lot, a lot.
There's a lot. And there's times where it feels like this is all just up in the clouds, and it doesn't. How does it relate to what's going on with me and Lord, I just pray that you would take it out of the clouds that justification by faith alone in Christ alone would not just be a phrase that's in our head and living in the sky. But, Lord, there would be something that could settle into our souls that we would not live condemned by the sin that we grew up thinking was kind of okay. Lord, we can leave those things behind that.
Those things, we're not just leaving them behind. And maybe we'll pick them up later. No, those things are crucified with you. They're dead. They're gone.
And the life that we live, we live in you, Lord. I know our propensity to just be caught in the same patterns of thinking and I know that there's no way that we become convinced of what is true apart from the work of your spirit. So Jesus, I pray that you would send your spirit to show us what is true.
To convince us of what is bad, to convince us of what is good that we would agree with you today that Lord in agreeing with you we would also trust your character that when you say Jesus destruction counts for me, that I just embrace that, Stop trying to figure out how I can add something to it or be worthy of it. I just say yeah I can't but you say you can and that today would just be a day that we would unclench our fists, surrender our lives to youo.
Jesus. Would you do the work?
Would you call us to repentance and faith?
Would you give us the strength and the courage to follow you there.
LINKS
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
