Rat Poop Cookies

 Read Galatians 1

Who likes cookies? Who likes homemade cookies? Who wants a cookie?

Here’s the recipe for chocolate chip cookies.  If you don’t get it all down, don’t worry there are one or two million recipes on the internet. Let’s go.

1 1/2 sticks         Butter, unsalted

1/3 cup      Granulated Sugar

2/3 cup      Brown Sugar

1       Egg

1       Egg Yolk

1 1/2 tsp    Vanilla Extract

2 cups        All-purpose Flour

1/2 teaspoon      Baking Soda

1/2 teaspoon      Kosher Salt

1 11 Oz bag of chocolate chips

I had all of the ingredients except that I could only find an 8 oz bag of chocolate chips.  You can’t short the chocolate chips in chocolate chip cookies.  What to do?

So, I’m 3 oz short, but I was cleaning up behind the stove and found 3 oz of rat poop.  So, 8 oz of chocolate chips and 3 oz of rat poop equals 11 oz.  All is good.

How are your cookies now?

Seriously, I didn’t put 3 oz of rat poop in your cookies.  It was only 2 oz, maybe 1 oz.  Are they still tasting good?

OK.  There is no rat poop in the cookies that I gave you.

What if you needed to borrow a gallon of gasoline because your car was a few miles down the road?  I have about a half-gallon in my gas can.  I’m not sure if that will get you to the gas station or not.

So, before I give you the gas, I go out behind my house and run some water into my gas can and make it nearly a little fuller.  I can’t put too much in there.  Your car won’t run on water, but what would a little hurt?

We don’t want anyone messing with our cookies.  We don’t want someone watering down our gas.  Paul says don’t let anyone corrupt the gospel.

God loved you so much that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.  God did not send his Son to condemn the world but to save the world through him.

Salvation comes from Christ alone.

Your salvation is a gift of God that you receive by faith.  You believe in Jesus.  He is Lord. He is the Son of God.  God raised him from the dead.

In that simple belief is life and life everlasting with your loving Father and with Jesus and you have the deposit of the Holy Spirit with you now, so you know the promise is real.

It’s not, I believe in Jesus and circumcision for my salvation.

It’s not, I believe in Jesus and total obedience to the Law of Moses for my salvation.

It’s not, I believe in Jesus and will attend all feasts and festivals of the Lord for my salvation.

There is no Jesus Plus Gospel.  It’s all Jesus when it comes to salvation.

So, we can keep on sinning and just get more grace? That’s not the deal.

In response to grace—mercy, forgiveness, and favor that we didn’t deserve, we live as Christ’s disciples.  This is our response.  This is our act of worship.  This is our act of service, but it is in response to God’s saving grace.

Salvation comes in Christ alone.

Probably 90% of what I preach to you on a regular basis is discipleship.  I’m preaching to the saints, those who have received Jesus as Lord and Savior.

But on occasion, we need to be reminded that salvation is a gift of God that we receive by faith in Christ Jesus.  There is no other gospel than that of life in Christ Jesus.

My knee has already bowed and my tongue confessed that Jesus is Lord.  I am certain of my salvation.  Don’t come at me with another gospel.

Enjoy your cookies.

Amen.

No Other Gospel

 Read Galatians 1

Where is Galatia?  It’s generally modern-day Turkey.

Where are the churches to whom Paul wrote?  That’s still being debated.  Some think they are in northern Galatia and some more to the south.

If he was writing to the southern churches, it might have been before the Jerusalem council that we read about in Acts 15.  If he was writing to the northern churches, it was a few years later.

In either case, many from these churches had been influenced to abandon the gospel that Paul preached to them in favor of one that we might call Jesus Plus.

Who were the Galatians?  Most history points us to Celtic mercenaries from Gaul. They remained in Asia Minor and settled and were known as good warriors.

The Romans gave them special status for a while, then when a few personalities changed in the political arena, Galatia became a Roman client state with a Roman governor.  That’s the political side in a nutshell.

As far as faith goes, they were mostly pagans.  There was some Jewish influence, but many had converted from pagan worship to the worship of the one true God and they came to their salvation by way of Christ Jesus.

They were truly strangers in their own land.  They couldn’t go back to pagan worship and they were not welcomed in the synagogues, unless they professed the Jesus Plus gospel, which Paul noted was no gospel at all.

Realize that from the beginning, Paul is writing to a hornet’s nest of problems.  Paul is not happy that the Galatians have given up what was given so freely to them.  Salvation lies in Christ alone.

To discredit the gospel of truth, those who we will call the Judaizers sought to discredit the one who delivered the gospel.  Paul begins this letter noting that the gospel he gave them came from God through Christ Jesus.

It was not from man or of man. It was the true gospel and it was not to be altered.  Paul noted that even if an angel showed up on their doorstep with a different gospel, they were to kick him to the curb.  Actually, tell him to go to hell would be more accurate.

Paul said that if he showed up with a different gospel, to tell him to go to hell. 

There is no other gospel except that salvation comes through Christ alone.  Let no one mislead you or pervert the truth.  Stay the course!

We will get into Paul’s direction as to the law and feasts and festivals and even circumcision, but the message in this first chapter is clear.  There is no other gospel.

Paul was somewhat terse in his letter.  Normally, after his salutation and greeting, Paul offered some degree of thanksgiving for the work of the church to whom he was writing.  Not here.

Paul jumps directly into his admonishment—his chewing out of the Galatian believers.

Paul personalizes his appeal that is sandwiched into his admonishment. I’ll paraphrase.

If I was in this just for me, I would not preach the gospel of truth but I would have stuck to being a Pharisee of Pharisees.  I was on the fast track.  I was rising to the top, thinking that I was doing God’s will.  I was so going to be the number one pharisee of all time.

I was going to be the GOAT—the Greatest of All Time—at least as far as those who uphold and enforce the law go.

I was so zealous that I persecuted the church that I now serve.  Only after receiving the truth from Christ Jesus, did I realize that I was making incredible progress but headed the wrong direction.

There were so many things in God’s directives and his law that I had not understood.  It took some time in the wilderness to get my head around grace, but when I did, I shared it with you.

I came before you on behalf of Christ Jesus even after persecuting his church.  There are a whole bunch of people who hate me.  It would have been easier to stay the course of being a pharisee and persecuting the church.

I was blind, but now I see and what I see and have shared with you is that there is no other gospel than salvation in Christ Jesus.

Understand that I am the apostle that persecuted the church and now I proclaim the truth—that Jesus is Lord and the only way to salvation.  I do this to the glory of God.

Paul will consistently send a message to many churches that we are no longer a slave to sin or to the law or governed by death.  If we are to be a slave, it is to Christ Jesus, to righteousness, and we are to live fully in the light and by love.

Paul will describe how he met with church leaders, sometimes butted heads, but that the gospel remained unchanged.

How is this relevant to us?  C’mon, these were a bunch of pagans who came to salvation in Christ Jesus and now are being tempted to add some things to the gospel that saved them.

We are Americans.  We all have at least three Bibles.  If you live in Burns Flat, you have several copies of the Gospel of John.  If you don’t, you will!

How many times do we look at others and condemn them?  They can’t be saved.  They wouldn’t be doing that if they were really saved.  They had better produce some good fruit if they want their baptism to count for anything.

They are smoking and drinking and having sex before marriage.  He’s got two sister wives. She’s peddling dope when she’s not using. And the language that he uses is atrocious.  They can’t be saved unless they start changing their ways.

How often do our minds put conditions on what Christ has made absolute and unconditional?  We are saved through Christ alone.

Does that mean that it’s ok to go on sinning?  By no means.  Our response to our salvation that came completely from the love of God through Christ Jesus should be holy and righteous.

Only God knows if we have truly professed Jesus as Lord.  We see things that we might take as evidence of salvation, but we also miss things that professed Christians wrestle with every day.

Coveting, lust in one’s heart, desires for carnal things may never manifest themselves in visible actions, but we are blessed that we have a Savior who knows the human condition and our struggles.  His salvation is not contingent upon our performance but our belief.

Our salvation lies in Christ alone, not Christ plus circumcision or Christ plus the Festival of Weeks. There is no other gospel.

As we navigate these letters, we will see that the law was not abolished.  We need to understand our relationship to the law and to customs and sin.

It will be hard for most of us to empathize with the participants.  Most of us never worshiped idols.  Most of us didn’t grow up with mom sending us to the corner store to get a god for the harvest and get a bubble gum for ourselves.

We also didn’t grow up memorizing much of the Torah as the guide for good living, perhaps the only guide we thought we would ever need.  We might have thought of Messiah from time to time, but we formed him in our own image.

And there are the new Christians who had Paul’s teachings but Paul was off to share this gospel with other parts of the world. And Paul didn’t leave them with a whole Bible, not even a Gospel of John.

We will attempt to understand different perspectives here, but we must focus on the central message.  There is only one gospel and it is salvation in Christ alone.

Understand that there is a whole bunch more to discipleship, but we must never permit the gospel that we know to be corrupted.  You are saved by the love of God that we know in Christ Jesus.

Jesus is Lord.

I believe in him.

I believe God raised him from the dead.

I have passed from death to life. This body may perish but you will live because of the one who said, “I am the resurrection and the life.  The one who believes in me will live even though he dies.”

We must know that we are saved in belief in Jesus Christ our Lord. There are a whole bunch of things that we should do in response to this great love, but we must know that we are saved by grace through faith.  There is no other gospel.

Paul’s letters present a different model than we found in the Proverbs.  There are not a dozen or so different quips of wisdom to consider.

As we proceed through these four letters, we will see churches with different circumstances, different challenges, different attitudes, as well as different geographies.  What we must bring to each part of these letters is the understanding that salvation comes only in the grace of God that we know in Christ Jesus.

There is no other gospel.

Amen.

 

No other gospel

Read Galatians 1

Going forward…

We are going to be spending some time with the Apostle formerly known as Saul.  He is responsible for writing most of the New Testament.  He is responsible for much of our church age theology.  Paul is perhaps the only Apostle with a resume.

Certified Jewish Heritage.  Tribe of Benjamin.  Circumcised the 8^th day.

Pharisee, and a good one.  That means that not only did he know most of the scriptures by heart, he had also produced commentaries on them—a midrash is you will.      

Ambitious.  Was on what he thought was a mission from God by trying to wipe out these blasphemous followers of Jesus until his road to Damascus experience where he met the resurrected Jesus and received his real mission from God.

Roman citizen.  That would come in handy.

And handy enough that he could earn a living making tents.

Paul would later say that he became all things to all men so that some might be saved.  In the weeks ahead of us, we are going to spend some time reading letters that Paul wrote to specific churches and groups of churches.  To begin, you will need to remember these words:  Go Eat PopCorn.

Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Collosians.

To apply what we will study to our lives today we need to put one thing into perspective:  circumcision.  It was a big issue at the time and pervaded much of Paul’s verbiage, but we need to understand it was not the issue at all.

That’s good news for us.  Circumcision is not a big deal for us in this 21^st Century.  Of all the things that people come to me to talk about or seek counsel or just have someone to whom they can vent, circumcision has never come up.

Money, sex, drugs, music, kids, alcohol, pity parties, loss of loved ones, anger, hatred, forgiveness or the inability to forgive, guilt, shame, prison, tattoos, homosexuality, faith, prayer, hope, love, marriage, shacking up, and even homework have come up many times, but nobody comes to see me to discuss circumcision despite how much Paul talks about it in some of his letters.

And that’s just fine because what Paul is talking about really is not about a ritual procedure but  protecting the freedom that we know in grace.  Procted it from what?  Protect it from slavery to the law.  Why?  So that we may use our freedom to fulfill the law.  The law of love—that we love one another—is our fulfillment.

We understand something of freedom or liberty as Americans.  It was gained at quite a price.  It has been retained at a very high price.  We hope and pray that we will retain the blessings of liberty not only for ourselves but our posterity.

We understand that our salvation came at a price.  We did not pay it.  It was and is a gift.  God’s grace is a gift but we must fight to hold on to the freedom that we know in this gift.

 To proceed, understand that the law divides and the Spirit unites.  The law would divide Jew and Gentile but the Sprit brings all of God’s children together.  The law given by God and fulfilled in Jesus becomes a burden and a master of its own when made a condition of salvation.

But living fully by grace and walking with God’s Spirit, the law places no yoke upon us and becomes the guide to good living that God originally gave his people.

Only living fully by grace can we be certain in our relationship with God and certain in our relationship with the law.

So we come to this letter to the Galatians, and they did not quite understand any of this.  They were off to a good start but were not sure enough of their foundation and became susceptible to one of the main infiltrators of early Christianity—Judaism.

As we look west in Paul’s journeys, he must contend with such things as idols and meat sacrifices to idols and other issues of the gentile world.  But here in Asia Minor, it was the Jews that had claimed to accept Jesus as Lord and as the Messiah, who thought that grace alone was not enough.

The good news was too good for them.  It needed some rules and regulations.

These infiltrators came along and convinced these new Christians that the good news is too good to be true, and some restrictions apply.

Paul’s reply, and if you have not read Paul’s letters much, you might note that this letter is something of an admonishment, his reply is that there is one gospel and no other.  He gave it to them.  It is from God and not man or man’s understanding.

There is no other gospel.  The way to life is Christ alone.

You remember the proverb, Trust in the Lord with all of your heart but apply your own understanding when it takes you out of your comfort zone.

What?

That’s not the proverb but that was what was happening.

C’mon guys.  This Jesus stuff is good.  I am a believer too, but there have to be some rules.  There at least has to be a sign in the flesh.

                  Sign says you’ve got to have a membership card to get inside.

Paul tells these Galatians who seem to be giving up on the uniqueness of the gospel that there is no other gospel.  The gospel is not one commentary among many.

Pharisees wrote commentaries.  Some were surely better than others but generally all seemed acceptable to their contemporaries.  Rabbi’s had some flavor in how they taught the law, each with his own uniqueness, but the gospel is stand alone unique.

It is a one and only.

It is not deficient.  It is not man made.  It is not subject to modification.

Jesus Christ is the Son of God.  He died and took away our sins.  He atoned for our sins.  He paid the price in full.  Once we accept this gift we must also accept that we need do nothing else to obtain our salvation.

Now how we live is our response to this gift.  That is our discipleship but for this moment we need to be of one mind that our salvation is a gift from God.

Paul is telling this church and all others who would one day read this letter that there is one gospel and that gospel is that life comes from Christ alone.

It is not Christ plus circumcision.

It is not Christ plus a Saturday Sabbath.

It is not Christ plus never making a mistake again.

It is not Christ plus enough good works.

It is not Christ plus speaking in tongues.

It is not Christ plus your voter registration.

It is not Christ plus wearing a coat and tie.

It is not Christ plus anything else.

The gospel—the good news—is Christ.  He has come and has redeemed us.

And we need to stick to our guns on that.  We don’t need to be susceptible to persuasion on this matter.  Are there disputable matters in the Bible?

Absolutely!  We will hear what Paul says about disputable matters a few weeks down the road, but we must make sure that we repel all attempts to corrupt the gospel.

There is no other name by which we may be saved.  It is Jesus and all Jesus.

Let’s revisit something we covered early on.  We must protect the freedom that we know in grace from slavery to the law or any other condition that anyone, including ourselves, places upon our salvation.

The gift is 100% from God and we need to be 100% certain and accepting of this point.  Jesus paid it all but it is my responsibility to protect the freedom that I know in grace.

I must not let anyone—again I include our own thoughts and understanding—invade and corrupt the freedom that we know in this gift.

If you ever made an offering out of guilt or participated in a ministry because you thought your salvation was at stake, then you let someone invade and corrupt the gospel you were given.  That person was probably you, but sometimes others can be convincing as well.

Jesus paid it all.  His sacrifice and your acceptance of this incredible gift took care of your salvation.

                                               

If you were to analyze the close to 1000 sermons that I have preached in the last decade, you would find that I spend very little time on salvation when I am preaching.  Witnessing and counseling and general interaction with the world is a somewhat different story, but when I am speaking to the saints, most of what I talk about is discipleship.

Why?

The foundation has been laid with you.  I don’t need to build another foundation each week.  Most of what I proclaim from the pulpit has to do with discipleship.

But Paul was writing to a church that was listening to people tell them that their foundation was cracked.  Paul said it just isn’t so.  There is one gospel.  You heard it.  You received it.  There is no other.

The question for 2016 is, are we ready to go forward sure of our foundation?

The world is not going to make more sense in the year to come.  It will go from crazy to bizarre and probably beyond by this time next year.

Your faith will be challenged by the world.  Have you received the one and only foundation that will withstand whatever storms the world sends your way?

We not only want to weather the storms of the world; we want to put the words of Jesus into practice in the middle of the storm.  To do that, our foundation must be certain.

There is only one gospel.  It is good news of life in Christ, but we must do a better job that the Galatians did of protecting our freedom that we know in this grace for only then will we be free to fulfill the law.  Only when we are certain in the gospel will we truly be able to live the law of love and love one another.

I challenge each of you to affirm that you have no other gospel that that of Christ alone.  I challenge you to fight off any attempt to corrupt this gospel, modify this gospel, or compromise this gospel.

Let us go into 2016 certain of our salvation in the love of God that we know in Christ Jesus so that we can truly live the lives we were made to live.

Amen.