Does God expect more from us after we receive salvation?
WATCH
What We Believe, 8 of 11 from August 10th, 2025
"When we follow Jesus He transforms us completely for a fruitful life."
Christian Life by Michael Lockstampfor (@miklocks)
SUMMARY
This sermon explores how believers, having received salvation as a free gift, are transformed by Christ for a fruitful life. Using Galatians, Pastor Michael Lockstampfor demonstrates that sanctification happens by faith, not by our efforts to earn God's favor, as Christ's righteousness is applied to us and the Holy Spirit produces fruit in our lives when we trust what Jesus has declared over us.
REFLECTION & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
💬 Have we asked Jesus to change places with us?
💬 How are we tempted to retroactively earn the free gift of salvation?
💬 What works of the flesh are we still practicing?
💬 What fruit of the Spirit have others seen grown in you over the last year?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
📖 Sanctification by faith alone in Christ alone (Galatians 2:20-3:9)
📖 The Christian responsibility to the law (Acts 15:13-21)
📖 Freedom for love of God and neighbor (Galatians 5:13-6:1)
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PLEASE NOTE: The following transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.
[Music]
Hey, good morning, church. Welcome to our neighbors. I am gonna invite you. This is God. I'm just kidding.
It's not. Hopefully he'll speak this morning. But I want toa invite you to consider a hypothetical with me. So can we like put our kid nationry imaginary hats on? You do this with me?
Got your imagination Hats on. All right. Come on, Alex, help me out. You're gonna put your imagination hand. All right, cool.
I want you to imagine a world where everything's free. Free. Freeay gut reaction. Or is this a positive change for you? Or is this a negative change for you?
Positive. Everything's free. That means I don't have to worry about what the Numbers are and the gas. Like, let's just fill her all the way up, right? I don't have to worry about the price eggs ever again.
Okay. I just there omelettes every day, six egg omelettes every morning. Right? That sounds like a dream come true. What else?
I mean, what if everything was free? Like we like do sergeant Smoke for like every single meal. You'd have every single Sunday lunch with the best barbecue in the state of Florida. Right? That'd be all right.
Okay, sure. What else? Like if everything is free, you ve got your imaginations. Caps on. What else are you really excited about?
Lobsters, pizzas. All right, let's get out of food. I go to food first. Let's think about some other things too. Houses.
All right. We don't have to worry about where we're living. Vacations, education, health. Okay, you're cann afford doctors. That'd be nice.
We could just afford to go and visit the doctor every now and then. Whoew? That'd be all right. Life eternalkay. If everything was free, I think initially we'd be like, oh, sweet.
I can just go ham right now. Think about if everything has been free for you for 10 years.
I mean, you, you did that shoping spree early on. You did, remember that old show, the grocery dash thing? What was thatee? Supermarket sweep. You did that like six times in the first week.
Right. You had to take a day off. Right. Because we gotta be Biblical. But your six days you did a supermarket suitep.
But now it's been 10 years.
Everything's been free for you for 10 years of your life. Like, okay, does lobster still taste the same? No. And what effect has the butter had? That the butter sauce that the lobster was covered in after 10 years, it's a good thing the doctor's free.
But they have, they have limits too, right? Because you can only do so much. Like if everything is free, eventually you get to a place where you come to the limits of even what you are able to spend. Now, we don't live in that reality. We put our imagination caps on.
However, maybe we do. We talked last week about how as we come to Christ, as we trust Jesus, the thing that he does for us is he gives us the free gift of salvation. So we have a free gift that we can be made right with God. Okay, which is beautiful. It's incredible.
It's astonishing. If you have not begin to try to wrap your head and your heart around that, I'd encourage you. That's one of the most important questions that you can wrestle with today or any other day of your life. But after 10 years, don't the free feel a little stale?
What does it look like to have free access to the presence of God after 10 years?
What does it look like for all of our concerns to know with confidence that they're heard, but then see that maybe sometimes God is not as eager to answer our prayers in the way that we asked him to? What does the Christian life look like? So we've been going through a series this summer. We've called what We Believe and we've taken apart what's our statement of faith, our doctrinal statement, kind of passage or paragraph by paragraph and just zooming in on what does the whole Bible have to say about one specific topic. And so today I have the task of trying to tell you in 40 to 60 minutes what's the Christian life all about.
Now, this is a topic that is addressed in some way for the majority of the New Testament. And so if you really wanna know what the Christian Lives's all about, you got plenty of homework to read up on. But we wanna tackle the subject in a way that we can kinda wrap our heads and our hearts around. Because the crazy thing is God makes it possible for us to be right with God and then he leaves us here in this world that is not right with God. So there must be something else that he's doing.
And so what does it look like to live in light of all of that we know? We've already established that God created man and woman and his image. And as a result, all people are bearers of that image. However, Adam's subsequent sin resulted in a condition of spiritual death. So when we're born, we're spiritually dead.
However, the salvation brought by God is complete and eternal salvation by his grace alone, received as the free gift of God through personal Faith alone in the Lord Jesus Christ, in his finished work as he declares believers righteous in him. Beautiful. Then what now? How then do we live now? If you're somebody who is exploring faith, you're not sure you're on Team Jesus yet.
You've still got some questions and hanging out. I would encourage you to consider and continue to hang on through this message, but understand that I'm talking specifically about folks who have already surrendered their life to Jesus. So there may be stuff in here you're like, that's not true. I don't feel like that's real. Well, there are things on the other side of what Jesus does in our life that you don't see or experience unless he's done a menu, however, like there's a beauty, a beauty in what God does in us.
And so I just wanted to make sure that we kind of knew that that was where we're at from the beginning. It doesn't mean that your questions don't have answers, just means I'm not gonna talk about this morning, most of them. So let's start this morning and we'll pray together. It's our habit to pray the disciples prayers. It's not like a magic spell or anything.
This isn't gonna make your life like instantly better. However, when the disciples asked Jesus how they ought to pray, this is what he gave them. And I'm simple enough to just do what Jesus said. So let's pray together. I didn't love it if you'd pray out loud, but more importantly, it's what's happeneding in your heart.
So let s take a deep breath, settle our thoughts, and let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy 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.
For yours is the kingdom and the power and glory forever. Amen.
To begin or to continue our conversation, we're going to take a look at the statement in our statement of faith related to the Christian life. So this is what our doctrial statement says about the Christian life. And if you're following along in the document, you'll notice that I'm a little bit out of order. And that's okay. It's true whether it's paragraph seven or whether it's paragraph six.
So this is kind of where we're at today. So what about the Christian life? I ve God I of already established this, but it bears repeating. The believer is saved by faith alone. That faith that saves, or the faith that saves is expected to produce obedience and good works, which are the products of the indwelling Holy Spirit.
The dimensions of Biblical ethics are both individual and social and extend every facet of life. God faithfully continues to finish the work of sanctification which he initiated in the life of each believer with the goal of Christ likeness. So that's kind of the laboratory definition of the Christian life. That's what it would look like in a lab. That's what it would sound like in a lab.
It'a little bit detached, don't really feel it. But I gave you a couple of principles last week and if you weren't with us last week, I'd encourage you. It's gonna be really helpful for you to go back and to listen specifically to the message last week. Cause we talked about that salvation, the believers saved by faith alone. That salvation actually gets expressed in three phases.
And we talked about those phases. The first is justification, the second is sanctification, and the third is glorification. Do we remember that? Okay. And we talked about how justification.
In justification, Jesus has saved us from the penalty of sin. He has declared us to be right with God. Like it's a legal status that has already been done. It happened when we trusted Jesus for salvation. However, he is also in the process of saving us from the power of sin.
Having declared us righteous for the rest of our life, he helps us to grow in the right way that we relate to God until finally glorification, when he returns, he sets all the scales to where they ought to be. He finish, finishes the process completely. Jesus will save us from the presence of sin. Do you remember? Does that sounding familiar?
Ish. Okay, good. If it doesn't, then it's there on the podcast or on our website. You can listen to that. But we noted that we depend on God.
We depend fully on God to save us every step of the way. And so justification kind of makes sense. Yes, I need Jesus to intercede on my behalf before the Father. But then sanctification is like, okay, 10 years in, now that I have that, like, how is it that I should be living? He.
I probably owe him something. And I'm concerned that we might have a skeptical idea of how God operates. We might hear God's gift of grace is free and go, yeah, free for how long? The first one's always free. I've talked to that dealer before.
Right. The first one's free and Then I owe you something, right? And I don't know that I necessarily trust God's character quite yet. And I'm not really sure how all this works out. So clearly God's gonna cover me for the first one, but I gotta step it up.
I owe him something. I gotta make sure that I'm covered. I gotta pursue, I gotta work hard. I gotta be the one. I gotta maintain it.
I gotta make sure that I don't lose what I got for free. And maybe even we trick ourselves into thinking that although we have received it for free, now we can make ourselves worthy of the free gift that we already possess. Maybe, hypothetically, if that's not you, then maybe it's a small comfort that the Biblical writers and the people in the first couple of generations of Christians, that's the way that they thought about it. So we don't have to look in the mirror so much. We can just look at these guys.
So I'm gonna invite you to turn with me to the letter of Galatians, the book of Galatians in the Bible. I'm gonna be on page 1213 in the blue Bibles, if you wanna follow along there, page 1213. And I've got two kind of passages I'm gonna address out of the book of Galatians. So if you wanna turn there, that's gonna be helpful to you. I'm not gonna put the Galatians versesus necessarily up on the screen.
I've got one other passage I'm gonna tell you about, but I'll put that one on the screen so you don't have to flip. I'm just trying. Just trying to save your fingers. I know we're used to doing this, the turning the pages. We're reducing this risk of paper cuts here this morning, very concerned, because doctors are expensive Galatians.
And I'm gonna begin in chapter two, in verse 20. Now, this letter's written to a number of different churches, kind of in a region. And the author's writing, he is somebody who started the churches. So he was the one who first preached the gospel to these people. He's traveling and he's been away from them for some time.
And now he's writing because he's heard that as they have walked out their Christian life, there have been some misunderstandings and how that thing gets worked out. So let's read Galatians Chter 2, starting in verse 20. 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 for me. I do not nullify the grace of God. For if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.
O foolish Galatians, he says, O foolish people who I'm writing to. O foolish folks in this region, who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you this. Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?
Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now perfect by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain? If indeed it was in vain? Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law or by hearing with faith?
Just as Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness, Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the Scripture foreeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, in you shall all the nations be blessed. So then those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. So this is one of Paul's earliest letters. So as he's writing, he's pretty fresh in the ministry, if you didn't know.
Like the book of Galatians is the book with the most curse words in the Bible. He's a little bit aggressive. I don't know if you picked up on that. We feel that, oh, you foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? Some of my favorite verses in like high school, just because it was fun to say, right, who has bewitched you?
But the thing that has caused Paul to have such a very strong visceral reaction is this idea that I have received justification by faith and now I have to work to keep it and to make it like it now is dependent upon me. Kind of like Jesus gave me the job. Like he got me into the company of, I don't know, Spiritualism Incorporated. He got me the job and now I have to work my butt off to climb up the ladder. And there's folks that are just starting out there, entry level jobs.
It's all they can do to keep from cursing. They're working real hard all day long to kind of keep their mouths clean. But then you got that preacher up there. He talks for 45 minutes on a microphone and doesn't say no bad words at all. He must be higher up the echelon.
No that's not the idea. He says, who has bewitched you? It's not as though now it is dependent upon you. We actually depend on God fully for salvation every step of the way. That means our sanctification is fully dependent on him sous trusting Jesus.
Payment for the penalty for your sin means his death is applied to you. When we trust Jesus to forgive our sin, what actually happens kind of in the spiritual realm is that his death gets applied to us. So if you have, like asked Jesus, Jesus, will you forgive my sin? You have died. I don't know if you know that, like, you have died.
You died an awful execution at the hands of Roman centurions. And you died spiritually and were completely separated for gone. And then God brought you back to life.
I didn't know that happened. I don't remember being teleported back to 33 AD. I just prayed a prayer and I just felt this sense of peace. There are things that God was doing in your soul that you were unaware of. And one of the things that Paul is saying here is like, as a result of him praying and trusting and asking Jesus to forgive his sin, the result is this.
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but it is 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 for me. So the way we come to Christ is the way that we continue in Christ by faith through hearing.
Substitution kind of works both ways. So we talked about how in justification it'you bring all of your sin to court and you know you're not going to be able to stand. And then Jesus stands up and says to the Father, who's the judge, says, I'll take his place. And they do that. Okay.
I think we sometimes get the idea that what Jesus does is cancel my debt alone. So I come to God a debtor. I've got more sin debt than the national debt. Like, it is awful. Trillions of dollars.
We're going to the Googleplex dollars of sin debt that I owe to God. And the miracle of Jesus. We tend to think the miracle of Jesus is that now my debt has been canceled, it has been paid for and I'm back to zero. But he's saying, if we have died with Christ and Christ lives with us, it's not simply that our debt has been canceled. It is that Christ's righteousness has been applied to us.
So it's not that Jesus simply gets us back to zero. And now we're right with God and we've got a clean slate to start over. We start off with God with a bank account full of righteousness. Not our own righteousness, but the righteousness that Jesus has accomplished, the righteousness that he had with God before the foundation of the world. I't really.
I don't really feel like that holy most of the time. Right. There's some times we're praying and I feel like I'm right there. And yeah, I can get like on a Thursday when it's been a week, and the stuff just keeps coming. And every time you turn around, there's something else that the wheels are falling off of.
And can't they just get their act together for five minutes?
We exchange our debts for riches, not just for a cancellation of our debts. And so, my friends, I said at the beginning I wasn't really gonna talk to folks who haven't surrendered their life to Jesus. But this is the first step. Like that exchange can happen. Not hypothetically, but for you in reality.
And so have we asked Jesus to change places with us? Because you do not have the ability to make yourself right with God. Even if you know what it would be like to be a good person, you don't have the ability to actually pretend to be a good person.
And so if you're gonna be a good person, a person that's right with God, it's gonna happen. Cause Jesus makes it possible. Have you asked Jesus to change places with us?
But again, the temptation of having received a free gift is then to turn around and try to earn it. You ever do this? I don't have to ask you. I know you do. I know you do.
Because how do you feel when somebody buys you lunch? I'll get you next time. We got to do this again. Not because I really want to spend time with you, but because now I owe you a coffee.
We can't just take a free gift. You can't do it. That's why birthdays make us so uncomfortable. It was my birthday last week. Did you know that?
Some of you did. It's okay. And here's the thing. I didn't want anybody to know. I was appalled that people had found out and they wanted to say happy birthday to me.
It was awful because we don't like free gifts. I feel like now I have to remember your birthday. And I should.
I should handwrite all of you cards. I should, like, pick out special Bible verse that are custom tailored to you. I should tell you how much I appreciate you, but I don't.
It's not that I don't appreciate you, is that I don't write it down.
Lord. Lord, have mercy._day and next to my notes.
The temptation of having received a free gift is then to try to earn it. Okay? But here's what happens when we trust Jesus. Like you come from death, spiritual death, to life. Oay.
What God is doing in you is the Holy Spirit is regenerating your soul and it is indwelling you. So now, before, you were on your own and dead before God. But after you trust Jesus, the Holy Spirit comes and lives in you to make you a part of the body of Christ. You can't be a part of the body of Christ without also possessing the righteousness that Christ possesses. Okay?
And that's not something you earned. I don't care how nice of a person you are. I don't care how many birthdays you remember. You are not righteous enough to have the same righteousness account that Jesus had. He did it better than you and he always will.
But he gives you that account. And that trust is given by faith through the message that we hear. Did you know, like, even maybe you weren't thinking about it this morning, but did you know that Christ applies his righteousness to you?
When we come to Christ, I think we oftentimes are asking God, will you forgive my debts? I cannot pay my debts. I owe you so much. And all we're asking for is just to get the balance back to zero. We would not even think to ask that the righteousness of God could be applied to our account.
We're not asking for that kind of thing. It would not occur to us. But we know that he does that because he tells us.
You would not guess how many of y'all have met a Christian before. A couple of you. Good.
You would not guess that anything miraculous had ever really happened in that person's life, would you? Because they still don't glow in the dark, right? Even the people who have a massive change of heart, even people who approach life drastically differently after Christ than they did before, they still have to put, like, they have to stand on the floor to put their pants on and their knees are aching the whole time, like Christians are pretty normal for the most part. We would never guess that the righteousness of the Almighty Creator who sung everything into existence has been applied to our soul because we're still pretty normal. We're still pretty jacked up.
So then now do we have to work to keep it? I think what he's saying Here is no who is bewitched you. Let me ask you this. Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law? Did you do something to earn God's favor or by hearing with faith?
Yeah, it was the hearing thing. Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? If you had the self control to be a good Christian before you were Christian, you would have done it.
You're not gonna be perfected by that which was dead before. And so he says it's possible that you could have suffered these things. You could have suffered making a declaration of faith in Jesus that could have caused problems in your life. You could have suffered that in vain. But he encourages you.
Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law of by hearing with faith, just as Abraham believed God, who was counted to him as righteousness. The perfecting is like the point of origin. If we believed by faith at the point of origin, then our perfecting is done by believing by faith. The refining continues by the same principle of redemption. If we were not able to redeem ourselves, neither are we able to refine ourselves.
The stem grows from the root. And if the root is by faith in Jesus, so also is the stm.
So how are we tempted to retroactively earn the free gift of salvation? Like what are the things that you think that you ought to be doing that are gonna help you be good enough for God to have wanted you on his team?
It's silly, but I have a list of things that I think I ought to do.
And remember then as you consider those things, maybe write a couple of them down. And remember that the refining process is done by faith in what Jesus has declared over you. We trust what he has said and he makes us what he has said. That's too simple, that's too easy. I read somewhere that Jesus said his yoke was easy, his burden was light.
And if you're like working so hard of the Christian life that it is crushing your soul, then you're doing something wrong. You're hitched to somebody other than Jesus. He says, my burden is easy, my yoke is life. He says, when you work together with me, I'm doing the heavy lifting. And there's somet times we're he's asking to do is just, yes, Lord, I don't see how you're doing it.
I don't see how you're growing it in me, but I trust that that's what you're doing. And so I'm re just gonna lean in on you and what you're doing there. But did anybody else pick up on the Abraham thing? Like what's an Abraham and what's an Abraham got to do with me? And how I'm living on a Thursday is really the question.
It's a question that you probably were not asking, but I think you likely should because the Bible's a big book, right? So I'm gonna show you a passage because every time I teach what's in the Bible, I introduce this passage by saying I wish more Christians knew about this. And it occurred to me this week that I could make that possible. I could inform other Christians that this passage is in the Bible and it would be helpful to you. And so I just want you to say like there's something that God is doing with Abraham that now is applied to us.
Now then know then, excuse me, Know then that those of faith are those of faith who are sons of Abraham. It is those of faith who are sons of Abraham. And the scripture fore seeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith preach the gospel beforehand to Abraham saying in you all the nations and you shall all the nations be blessed. So then those who are have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. So what's an Abraham?
An Abraham is a man just your normal average run of the mill pagan that God showed up and said hey Inna, make something out of you. I wanna bless all the nations of the world in you. And he started a relationship with Abraham and Abraham's sons and grew that one family into being a giant nation. And he gave that giant nation a set of laws. Have you heard of them?
The ten Commandments. The ten Commandments were just the warm up. There were hundreds of them. There's a whole legal system. Okay, and that's, that's concerning.
Is that concerning? To know that one of the ways that God revealed his character to humanity was that he gave him a legal system, he gave him laws to follow. Cause that's what I think of when I think of like religion and stuff. That's what I think of when I think of the Christian faith is like I gotta have, I gotta do things. What are the things I gotta do?
That's one of the things that keeps people away from trusting Jesus is like, he's gonna make me do things I don't wanna do. Like okay, well maybe, but if you are dead, it's not gonna matter very much either way. So there's a distinction seemingly in the scripture between Abraham's kids and what's known as not Abraham's kids, which are called gentiles. Okay, so gentiles is the name for anybody who isn't, like, related to Abraham. Okay, does that make sense?
Like, we're actually talking genealogical relationship. Okay, so if you weren't born in the right family, you can't have a right relationship with God? Well, that doesn't seem fair. I didn't have any control over my mom and dad. I might have picked different.
I know my kids would have.
So doesn't that then mean, like, if we are now made children of Abraham by our faith in the God of Abraham, that now we're required to follow the laws that the children of Abraham had to follow? Hmm, I didn't even think about that. That sounds like not a light yoke. So I'd like for. I would like to show you.
Well, I'm out of order, but it's fine. Inna show you. In Acts 15. In Acts 15 is the very first generation of Christians. Now, the very first generation of Christians were Jewish.
They were descendants of Abraham. They were born from the right family. And so when Jesus is ascended into heaven, everybody who trusts in Jesus is a Jew, okay? And Jesus says to them, you're go goingna be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samarian to the ends of the earth. And they're like, cool.
And then they just hang out in Jerusalem with one another and tell other Jews about Jesus being the Messiah. Because Messiah is a Jewish word. It's a Hebrew word. And so if you don't know Hebrew, it doesn't really apply to who doesn't. So along the way, God begins to pour out his spirit on people who are from a different family.
He goes to Romans and a centurion specifically, and pours out the Holy Spirit on him as he hears the message of Jesus and believes him for salvation, which the Jews, like the first generation of Christians, were not anticipating. They said, it's a Jewish Messiah and only Jews can be saved. That's the kind of their mindset. But then they start seeing Gentiles. People who are from the wrong family begin to trust Jesus and they're like, what's the deal?
And the first impulse of the people was, if they're gonna be saved by the Jewish Messiah, then they have to follow under the Jewish law. Like, you have to practice the law of the Jewish Messiah if you're go going toa be saved by the Jewish Messiah. Doesn't that logic makes sense? All right, okay. Except guys, you should know first on the docket is circumcision, like if you have to be circumcised in order to be able to practice your faith.
So now the cost of following Jesus just got a little bit higher, didn't it? Like really? I didn't really wanna answer that question before, but now I'm a little bit interested because initially that first generation said, okay, if you're gonna follow the law, then that means that all the males have to be circumcised. Like, ok, okay, we should probably address this question. So they convene a council, they get all the pastors together in Jerusalem to kind of answer this question.
And Paul is there and he's sharing what God's been doing in the Gentiles. And as those people finished speaking, James replied, now this is James, the half brother of Jesus. Now if you're still skeptical about Jesus, here's the deal. When he died and rose again, his half brother who lived with him his whole life decided actually he's not just a crazy person, he's not just a stuck up snob. He actually is God and worshiped Jesus as God.
Now I don't know like your sibling relationships, but I don't know that my sibling relationship would assume that I actually am holy and righteous and come down from heaven, right? So this is James, Jesus half brother. And he writes so in response to all of this. ### brothers, listen to me. Simeon Peter has related how God first visited the Gentiles to take from them a people for his name.
And with this the words of the prophet agree, just as is written. So he's gonna quote Old Testament scripture. After this I will return and I will rebuild the tent of David, a Jewish king that has fallen. And I will rebuild its ruins and I will restore it that the remnant of mankind. Mankind may seek the Lord and all the Gentiles who are called by my name, says the Lord who makes these things known from an Old.
So he's saying in the Old Testament scriptures they had an idea that perhaps Gentiles would also be saved. Therefore, my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God, but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols and from sexual immorality and from what has been strangled and from blood. For from ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him. For he has read every Sabbath in the synagoguesay. So first generation, the question is, do you have to become a Jew practicing the law in order to be a Christian?
Significant Question the Jews as they pray. And when they write the letter, they say, it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to give you no more than these instructions. So what's are import of the law from the Old Testament? Abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from what has been strangled, and from blood.
It's kind of an odd list. Does that strike anybody else's odd? I'm not sure that that's what I would put on the list. There's lots of stuff in there. But notice there's nothing about shrimp.
There's nothing about pulled poork.
The dietary restrictions are related to eating or drinking blood. Like strangulation is the idea that the animal hasn't been slaughtered properly and so retains some blood and its meat. And so they want toa drain the blood out. But that prohibition actually comes from Noah, who is before Abraham, because coming off of the ark in Genesis 9, 4, God says, you guys are not supposed to eat or drink blood. Don't touch blood, because that's mine.
Okay. Which is fine. Like, we're like, cool. I don't really care about that. But in the Greek world, that was part of the thing that they did.
It was whatever. So what has been strangled in from blood? That's like the whole of the dietary restrictions. There's still a lot of things on the table on. Aren't there?
Okay. And then he says, from sexual immorality. What does that mean? Well, it's anything that's outside of sexual practice between a husband and a wife inside a marriage. So.
Okay, well, what about inside? Well, inside, that's fair game. You guys do what you like. Okay, but like abstain from sexual immorality. So idea.
The idea that, well, you, you Christians are hypocrites because you say that we ought to be sexually pure. But then you also eat shrimp, and shrimp is also in the law is kind of a misnomer, isn't it? Have you ever heard that criticism? If you're gonna wear a garment that is mixed polyester and cotton, then you're a hypocrite. How dare you.
Because the law says that you're not supposed to wear mixed fabrics. And so don't you tell me what to do in the bedroom because you're wearing that polyester their shirt. Which sounds silly, but people say that. People have said that to me. I said, here's the deal.
Of all the things in the law. Sexual purity is actually distinct from dietary restrictions. And the dietary restrictions are concerned with blood and things polluted by idols. So this is the idea of idol worship. And idol worship, that was common cultural practice.
So it's not unusual for pagans to offer meat to an idol and then sell the meat in the Market, and it was usually cheaper. It was really, really common practice for people to get their meat from an idle thing. So, like, abstain from idolatry, Idolatrous practices, even the ones that are common in your culture, like, cool. Well, we don't really do that today. Oh, we have all kinds of idolatry.
And so how then do we live?
Flip with me. In Galatians, I want to show you just a couple of verses and we'll close this out. Galatians 4. Look at verses 8 and 9. I want to read this because this is the turn.
Galatians 4, 8 and 9. I'm 8 and 9. Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods, false idols. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world whose slaves you want to be once more? He says, if you trust Jesus and you've been set free from the life of sin, then why on earth would you return to your former slave owner who was.
Was killing you with your practice? That's kind of the idea. And our big idea for the morning that I should have told you before we got to this point, but I was talking, is that when we follow Jesus, he transforms us completely for a fruitful life. When we follow Jesus, he transforms us completely for a fruitful life. Now on the next page, Galatians, chapter five.
I'm gonna begin reading in verse 13. This is all kind of the outflow.
For you were called to freedom, brothers. Amen. For you are called to freedom, brothers only. Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love, serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word.
You shall love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh. For these are opposed to each other to keep you from doing the things you want to do.
But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident. Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, Enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. They're sitting at the wrong table.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
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. I'll stop there. Says he starts off with, you were called to freedom. Brothers only, do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh.
What if everything was free?
If everything was free, I would lean into all of my favorite appetites, beginning first with pie. With what? Pie. Pie, yes. Rather have pie than cake.
Brothers, do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. We're still in a fallen world and we still operate from a fleshly center by default. But what Christ is training us to do by the life that Christ is living in us is to stop living out of our des for the flesh and be surrendered to the desires of the Spirit. And he gives a list that sounds a whole lot like an expanded list of the things that James said that we should avoid, doesn't it? Avoid all these things Instead, you should know that the fruit of the Spirit, the singular fruit, and then he gives a list of multiple things.
The singular fruit that the Spirit is growing in us is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. That if you want to know what it looks like to follow Jesus or what it looks like to be a physical representation of Jesus on the earth, you would be defined by these characteristics. These are the characteristics that are pouring out of you.
Freedom from sin can be used in unprofitable ways. But the goal of what God is doing in us is to be like Jesus, who loved us to his own death. And so if we choose to follow Jesus, we serve others at our own cost.
There is no way to practice or to see the evidence of the fruit of the spirit. If you are isolated from every other person on the planet, you cannot be a loving person. If you just loving you, you cannot be a peaceful person. If I'm only peaceful. As long as there's nobody around, you cannot exercise patience if you're alone.
All of the fruit of the spirit gets identified in how we relate with one another.
I don't know that I like that. I thought we could just be right with God and everything would work itself. No, like, we are not teleported off this earth. And we are here together to be ministers of God's grace to one another. And here's the thing.
If you're gonna minister God's grace to somebody else, if you're gonna serve somebody else by showing them God's mercy, they're going to not deserve the grace and the mercy. Because if someone deserves a gracious response, it's not grace. It wouldn't be grace if there wasn't an offense.
Which means that we're goingna continue to sin against one another and continue to need to extend grace to one another. And my friends, we're not able to do that in and of ourselves. We're dependent on God every step of the way for salvation. And when we follow Jesus, he transforms us completely for a fruitful life. How does he transform us to do that?
Well, he tells us, this is what I'm doing in you.
I don't feel like you're doing that. Well, that's okay if you don't feel like it. This is what I'm doing in you. This is what I'm growing in you. And so now that you have heard that, then believe me that I am doing this in you.
Well, I'm just too impatient.
Sure, but if you're starting from the place that you believe you're impatient, then you'll continue to be impatient. But what if perhaps when the Lord of all the earth says, I am making you a patient person, we just took him at his word.
And when that impatient wells up in us, we say, God, I can see that there's things in me that are not in the right place because you are making me patient.
And that's a very different conversation of there. Like I've got to be persient today before these people wr their necks.
I'm glad we can laugh.
So look at Galatians, chapter five. You ve got a whole list of stuff that's in there. What works of the flesh are we still practicing? What are the things that we continue to embrace that we're still practicing? What version of idolatry, whether it's self idolatry, of treating myself as though me and what I want is God overall, like what works of the flesh are we still practicing?
And know Friends, that the works of the flesh are destructive to you and they are destructive to your neighbor whom God loves. But know too that the fruit of the Spirit is health and its life connected to God because he is the one who brings those things and places those things in us. So what works of the flesh are we still practicing? But what fruit of the Spirit have others seen grown in you in the last yeara Wait a second, Michael. We usually do.
We usually do like self reflective questions. This is things that I need to think about for myself. What do you mean? What fruit of the Spirit have others seen grown in you over the last. I don't want to ask that question.
What if people haven't seen any growth in me? Here's the deal. You will be more generous to yourself than you deserve. Likewise, you will be harsher to yourself than you deserve. And so I suspect that Jesus in his wisdom has placed us all together in the body so that other people can identify the work that the Spirit is doing in you when you cannot see it in yourself.
And Wenna think that we can just kind of like pull off in our own little closet and hide away and trust that God and he's saying, you are part of my body and I have made other people to speak into your life. Who will see sin, sure, but who will see growth? Who can look you in the eye and say, I cannot believe how much more gentle you are today than when I met you. Or how much more self control you've demonstrated when stuff got really really hard and you just wanted to run back to that addiction that used to soften the pain.
You won't see it in yourself very clearly. But I can tell you that when you trust the body of Christ and ask them, they see growth in you that you haven't seen in yourself. So what fruit of the Spirit have others seen grown in you over the last year?
And you should know that that in and of itself is an idea, a theological idea of that relationship of individual believers to one another is the thing that we call the church. You're like, I have more questions about that. Lovely. Next Sunday, if the Lord wills, we'll have a conversation about the theological term ecclesiology. What does it look like for the church to work together on the mission of Christ?
Does that make some sense? I've got a chart and I should pray and close, but I wantn to show you this chart and so maybe I'll just put it up and we can kind of look at it together. We each have a temptation to go to one Side or the other of like, I either want to earn everything that God has already given to me for freely we call that legalism, or I was never that bad to begin with, and that's a form of liberalism. And the gospel is actually both of those things. So this chart comes from Tim Keller in a book that he wrote on Galatians, a Romans, Excuse me.
And I found it so, so, so helpful. And so I'm gonna put this up here and we'll pray together. And I give you some time to reflect on this and then to reflect on some of the questions that we've talked about today. But let's pray.
Lord, I thank you for your word. I thank you for the ways that it challenges us, Lord, for the times that it is direct and harsh. Lord, I pray that it would not be overbearing. But Lord, as we're shaken from our dependence on our flesh and our own perspective and the way we've always done things, Lord, I pray that you would show us your way for true life.
Jesus, if there's somebody who is hearing my voice right now and they know they have not orrendered their heart to Jesus, they've not asked him to justify them or whatever it is. However, they would say that, Lord, I pray that today would be the day that they make that choice.
And God, this message to me feels insufficient. It feels like we have not said enough. So, Lord, I pray that your spirit would do the work that only you can do, that you would give us what we need for the day, Lord, where your word has been clearly communicated. I ask that that would bury itself in our hearts and that you would be working it in, that we would hear of your grace and believe you. And Lord, if there's something that I've said, this has been my own opinion that'just be forgotten real quick.
Jesus, would you shepherd your sheep here this morning?
As we take this time to make a space that's quiet, would you bring to mind the things that you have for us this morning, Each of us, would you lift our heavy burden?
And Lord, help us to walk and step with you as you lead us forward. It's in your name I pray. Amen.
