Faithful to God, Not Man

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Transcript:

Turn with me to Galatians chapter 1. Galatians chapter 1. We started talking last Sunday night, if you were not here, just to bring you up to speed.

We started talking about the book of Galatians, and we’re not necessarily going to go through the, in detail, verse by verse. Now we will read by the time we’re done. We will have read every verse in Galatians.

We’re not necessarily going to discuss every verse in Galatians in great detail, but we’re going to go through here kind of passage by passage and look at the major themes of the book of Galatians. As I told you, it’s one of my favorite books of the Bible, and it really is about two major themes, one being freedom and the other being faithfulness. We’re told in the beginning chapters of the freedom that we have in Jesus Christ that was a completely different idea than God’s people had ever known before.

Yes, there was freedom in following God, but they were also bound by the ordinances. They were also bound by the sacrifices and the observances and things that they had to do. And as laid out in Galatians, the intent of the law, God’s intent with the law, was never that man actually fulfill and follow it perfectly.

You see, before the law was ever handed down in written form, we had already sinned against God. And the Law was a very large way of making the point that we fell very, very short of God’s holiness, that we fell very, very short of God’s standards. And when man realized we couldn’t keep the law, and some people even in Jesus’ day still hadn’t gotten that point, when man realized we could not keep God’s law, we realized at that point that we could not meet up to God’s standards.

And we had already fallen short of God’s standards even before the law, even before the five books of Moses were written. And yet in the book of Galatians, they’re told, they’re given this new, seemingly new idea to them that it was not in adherence to the law that they would find acceptance with God. It was not in adherence to the law that they would find salvation.

It was in justification by faith, which we’ll get into in the next few chapters. That we go from this idea that we are trying to be justified by the law into the idea of being justified by grace. Completely different concepts.

There is nothing on this earth that parallels that there’s, well, I don’t know if that’s the word I want to use. There’s nothing in this world that’s quite like God’s grace. We hear it said all the time, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Christians said the other day, oh, we get free dinner at church. So they’re having pizza down there for the Iwana kids. Oh, we’ll have free dinner at church Sunday night.

I said, oh, no, there’s no such thing as free dinner. Somebody paid for that. You go to a restaurant and they give away, well, that wasn’t free.

The restaurant paid for it. Folks, we know there’s no such thing in our world as free anything. Somebody had to pay for it.

And folks, even in terms of grace, it wasn’t completely free because somebody had to pay for it. Jesus Christ had to pay for it. But in terms of us paying anything, grace is completely free to us.

It’s not given to us because we deserve it. It’s not, as a matter of fact, just by the very fact that it has to be given to us, we wouldn’t need it if we could deserve it. But since we can’t deserve it, we need it.

And so this grace is freely given to us. And people in this day were still trying to wrap their minds around it, as so many people try to wrap their minds around it today. And even those of us who believe it, that it’s completely by grace, through faith, without works, lest any man should boast. Even those of us who believe it.

Folks, I still don’t completely understand God’s grace. I never will completely understand how such a holy and awesome and just God could do what He did for my pardon. It boggles the mind.

And yet we believe it because it’s what the Bible taught. what the Bible teaches, excuse me. But in this day, as in Jesus’ day, there were people that were trying to wrap their minds around it and just couldn’t come to any sort of understanding of how this grace could be free to them.

And they would mix it with the idea of, we still have to adhere to the Old Testament law. We still see religions saying that today, that Jesus Christ wiped the slate clean as far as our inherited sin, our sin nature, And now we just adhere to the law to deal with our individual sin. Well, folks, that doesn’t work either.

Paul made it abundantly clear that grace with any mixture of works or law is not grace at all. And so we have this idea of freedom in the earliest chapters of Galatians, being free from the law and being free from sin at the same time. But it doesn’t mean freedom to just go and do whatever we want.

As Christians, our desire should not be to just go and do whatever we want. Somebody said in Sunday school this morning there’s a change in the want to. We’re told in the later chapters of Galatians about the theme of faithfulness.

You see, we’re not just freed so that we can go out and live our lives completely as we please with license. We’re freed so that we can follow God, so that we can follow Jesus Christ, so that we can serve Him without fear that we are going to go to hell because we mess up at some point. It’s freedom from the insecurity that comes from being bound under the law and under sin.

You see, there’s nobody in this world that’s really free to just do as they please. Folks, we are either slaves to sin or we’re slaves to Jesus Christ, but the idea that we’re free agents unto ourselves, no, there’s somebody in our lives that’s calling the shots, and it’s one of those two. But there’s a freedom in Christ to be faithful and to serve Him without fear of the hammer falling on us, so to speak, that if we don’t keep the law to the letter, if we don’t keep these ordinances, These five books that I started reading through some of them the other night, reading through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, there were laws in there that I had never heard of.

Laws that if you see such and such, you’re not supposed to look the other way. Laws about the way you care for your animals. I mean, to the letter of daily life, it had to be difficult to keep the law in its entirety.

And what Galatians tells us is that we are free to follow Jesus Christ. We’re free to be faithful to Him without fear. And tonight I want to talk to you a little bit about this faithfulness. As I told you last week, the book of Galatians is probably Paul’s earliest letter.

As far as when pen was put to paper, or papyrus, whatever they used in that day, as far as when it actually was written down, Galatians is very likely, in my estimation, the second oldest book of the New Testament, preceded only by the book of James. And what we have here is then Paul very early on in his ministry, just coming on the scene, and there being questions about Paul and his ministry and what he was doing. And we’re going to start in verse 10 and we’re going to read through the end of chapter 1 and we’re going to look at God’s call on Paul’s life, how the beginning of his ministry worked out, and what we can learn about faithfulness ourselves from Paul’s example.

Galatians chapter 1 verse 10 says, For do I now persuade men or God? And again, if you remember back to last week, he had just kind of straightened them out from the get-go about the false gospels that had invaded their church, or their churches, several churches in Galatia. He straightens them out.

He gets them back to the idea that it’s all grace. It’s all the gospel of Christ and His grace. And then he says in verse 10, For do I now persuade men or God?

Is it my job to persuade men or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I yet please men, I should not be the servant of Christ. He tells them, If it was my job to go around and tell you things that were going to make you happy, and just please you and make you feel better, he said, I could not be the servant of Christ at the same time.

Because what we as human beings, what we want in the flesh, is not the same thing that Christ wants in almost every circumstance. Our desires are 180 degrees opposite of what God’s are. And so what he tells them is, if I was seeking to please you, I could not then be a servant of Christ. Verse 11 says, But I certify to you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man.

For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. It’s a remarkable statement and unusual for somebody to be able to make. Because if you look at most of us throughout the history of Christianity, I can tell you I heard the gospel several times, but I was actually led to Christ by my mother. January the 25th, 1991, I was led to Christ by my mother at our kitchen table.

I can tell you that my mother was led to Christ by her pastor at the time, a man by the name of Dan Thompson. Now, I can’t tell you, I didn’t know him. I can’t tell you who led him to Christ. But the gospel I heard and received, I received from the lips of man.

The gospel she heard and received, she heard from the lips of man. And probably so on and so on back down through the years. The same is true for, I’m assuming, all of us.

We have all, at some point, it doesn’t make it a false gospel because we heard it from man. If it’s the true gospel, it’s the true gospel. And people are supposed to hear it from man because we’re supposed to tell people.

And other people are supposed to tell people. But all of us have heard it from somebody else. And what Paul says here is that even in that day it was unusual because these churches in Galatia had been started by somebody else who’d come through and preach the gospel and organized churches.

And Paul says, you question my authority, you question my teaching. He said, what I’ve heard, the gospel that I came and brought to you, he said, I did not learn it from men. Nobody sat down and gave Paul the gospel and converted Paul.

If you remember Paul’s story of conversion, he heard it directly from Jesus Christ. He was converted after a direct experience with Jesus Christ. That’s not something that happens every day. That’s pretty out of the ordinary. For Christ to step down and meet Paul on the road to Damascus was incredible.

And so he tells him, what I have told you is not just something I heard second hand. Again, it doesn’t necessarily make it wrong that we’ve heard it second or third. We’re probably in the hundreds now.

But he says, what I am telling you I heard directly from the lips of Jesus Christ. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. It came to me by revelation of Jesus Christ. Verse 13, for ye have heard of my conversion or conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion. Conversation, the word that’s used, when we see the word conversation used in the King James English, It can mean a lot of different things, and very few are meaning what we mean by conversation today, talking. There’s one place in Philippians, I believe it is, where it says our conversation is in heaven.

The word we might use there, if we were translating it today, would be citizenship. A conversation in that day could mean citizenship as well, but meanings of words change over time in the English language, as you well know. When it says my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, it doesn’t mean my method of talking the way I talked.

It doesn’t mean citizenship either. It means my way of behavior, my way of carrying myself. And he says, you all are well aware.

You’ve heard of my conversation, my behavior, my lifestyle in time past in the Jews’ religion. In other words, he tells them, you know what I used to be like in the Jewish religion. How that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God and wasted it.

His work was devastating to the churches at that time. I believe it’s the book of Acts, chapter 6, I want to say, maybe 7, talks about him breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the church of God. He was not a good man as far as the Christians were concerned.

How that beyond measure, the zeal with which he persecuted and the violence with which he persecuted the church was beyond measure. Persecuted the church of God and wasted it. Verse 14, and profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.

He says, you look at the zeal of those around me, and I was more zealous than they were in the Jewish religion and traditions, and profited in the Jewish religion above many my equals in my own nation. He said, of all the people who were doing well at Judaism, I was better than all of them, Paul says. And he tells the churches in Galatia, you know it.

Paul was from an area called Tarsus, which, if memory serves correctly, was very close to the region called Galatia. And so it’s very likely that many of these people had heard of Saul of Tarsus. They knew his testimony.

They knew where he came from. Verse 15, but when it pleased God. Some of the best statements in the Bible start out with the word but and involve God.

Because God at some point comes in and changes the whole story. Comes in and changes somebody’s life. But when it pleased God who separated me from my mother’s womb, that doesn’t mean separated him from his mother’s womb.

That means separated him, comma, from his mother’s womb. That means from the time he was in his mother’s womb, God had chosen and called Paul out, not for salvation, not saying I choose you as opposed to choosing some others, but saying I choose you for a specific task. God called Paul with a specific task in mind and set him apart for that when he was in his mother’s womb.

He separated Paul unto God, unto himself, from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace. to reveal His Son in me that I might preach Him among the heathen, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood. He says, The God who separated me, who set me aside for a purpose from the time I was even in my mother’s womb, when it pleased that God to reveal His Son in me, to call me by His grace and reveal His Son in me that I might preach Him among the heathen, He said, when it pleased Him to call me into that grace so that through that I could reveal the Son of God could be revealed by my preaching.

He said, I conferred not with flesh and blood. In other words, when God called him, when God saved him, and when God called him and set him apart for that purpose, and he recognized the call of God on his life, he didn’t have to sit down with a committee and talk about it. He didn’t call everybody together and say, well, what do you think about this and take a straw poll?

He said, immediately, I conferred not with flesh and blood. Neither went I up to Jerusalem, to them which were apostles before me, but I went unto Arabia and returned again unto Damascus. What he says is when he recognized the call of God in his life, he didn’t get a group of people that he knew together and ask them their opinion.

He didn’t even go up to Jerusalem. He did not go and seek the blessing of the apostles on him. Folks, why would he need everybody else’s opinion?

And why would he need the apostles’ blessing when he already had the clear calling of God? And what I’m telling you is not that it’s a bad thing to ask godly counsel of other people around you. It’s not a bad thing to talk to the church and get guidance when you’re not sure what to do.

As a matter of fact, I would recommend that we all do that, that we have brothers and sisters around us that we can say, this is what I’m dealing with. Would you pray for me in this? Would you give me some godly counsel in this?

But a lot of times we will use that as an excuse not to do something that God has already clearly called us to do. There’s nothing wrong with seeking godly counsel when we don’t know what to do in a situation, But when God calls us to do something, we should not, as an excuse not to do it, get a group of people together and say, well, what do you think? When the only one who really matters has already given his opinion, if I can call it an opinion.

So he said, I didn’t go up to the apostles. I didn’t confer with flesh and blood. He said, instead, I went to Arabia and returned unto Damascus.

And the prevailing belief is that he went to Arabia and spent time alone with God, spent time alone with the Scriptures, and got to know the Savior that he had only just been introduced to. Paul was already a man who knew the Scriptures. And yet we can tell by the way he persecuted the church, persecuted Christians, that he had not been reading the Scriptures the right way.

Because had he interpreted the Scriptures the right way, he would have known Jesus Christ for the Messiah. And so he took time down there in Arabia, and he got to know Jesus Christ for real. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter and abode with him 15 days. And what he’s telling us here is not that there’s anything wrong with the apostles.

There’s not anything wrong with conferring with them. There’s not anything wrong with getting their blessing. But what he’s telling us is that his calling didn’t come from them.

His calling came from God. And he says he spent three years down in Arabia and then went to Damascus. Actually, I don’t know if it was three years in Arabia, but he went down to Arabia.

He went back up to Damascus. And then after three years, he shows up in Jerusalem. And it says, yes, I spoke with Peter, and I was there about 15 days, a little over two weeks.

He says, but other of the apostles saw I none save James, the Lord’s brother. And the point he’s trying to get across here is that as important as these men were, as godly as they were, they did not call him to the ministry. God had called him to the ministry.

Ladies and gentlemen, if I as your pastor call you to do something in ministry, you don’t feel under any obligation to answer that call. I can offer you advice. I can offer you godly counsel, I hope, as to what God wants from you.

But folks, any calling, really, I think should come from God. Now, that’s not to say you can’t fill in in Sunday school. What I’m talking about is you embark to do something from God, you better make sure the calling is from Him.

Not from me, not from the deacons, not from some committee, but that the calling comes from God. I hear people talk all the time about preachers who are not God called, but their mama called. I was not one of those.

My mother was hoping that after I made my first million, I’d buy her a big house. I told her she’s going to be waiting an awful long time. I’m glad.

My parents have been very supportive, but it wasn’t them who called me into ministry. I felt very clearly God’s call. And you know what?

As much as I love my job, it’s too hard a calling to do if you didn’t know God was calling you into it. At the same time, just as you don’t want to go into ministry because somebody called you into it, somebody pushed you into it as a preacher, as a pastor. Folks, when we step out and think, okay, there’s a ministry here to do, I’m not trying to talk you out of doing things at the church.

We need everybody to be involved in some area of ministry. What I’m telling you is, don’t let me be the one to push you into it. Don’t let anybody else here be the one to push you into it.

You make sure it’s what God’s calling you to do. Otherwise, we’re not going to accomplish anything for Him anyway. But He tells us, I didn’t go see anybody but Peter and James.

Verse 20, Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God I lie not. As though they needed to be told that, and yet he reassures them. The things I’m telling you, I don’t lie.

He says, before God. Kind of like, so help me God, when we testify in court. He says, before God, I lie not.

Afterwards, I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. Syria being Syria today and Cilicia being another part of Turkey. And was unknown by face to the churches of Judea which were in Christ. The believers in Judea, he said, did not know who I was by face.

They may have known him by reputation, but he had not spent a great deal of time at the churches in Judea. But they had heard only that he which persecuted us in times past now preacheth the faith which he once destroyed. Verse 24, and they glorified God in me.

So as somebody who’s very new in ministry, there was a reason I repeated the thing about this being a very early letter. It wasn’t just useless trivia for you. This being probably Paul’s earliest letter, he is for the first time in writing, as far as what we have preserved today, for the first time in writing, giving his testimony and defending the call that God has placed on his life.

Several times throughout his letters, you will see him defending his call to ministry because people questioned it. And usually it was people that he had called out over their immorality or their false teachings, and they didn’t like it, they didn’t like the biblical reproof, and so instead of dealing with their sin, they called him into question. We still see that going on today.

But in this case, he’s really telling them for the first time, if you want to talk about my call, you’re wondering who is this guy writing to you? Under what authority does he write to you? I’m going to tell you, my calling came from God.

I wasn’t just some hang around that was called by the apostles and sent out to do their bidding for them. He said, I was called by God. God separated him from his mother’s womb, set him aside with a special purpose, and called him into his grace so that the Son might be revealed in him when he preached him to the heathen nations.

Paul was, as we all know, faithful to God’s call in his life. Paul did more for the spread of Christianity than most other people will ever dream of. And yet it started with the simple call of God that not only did Paul get saved, but he realized God had called him for a special ministry.

And folks, I firmly believe that he calls each of us for a special ministry. Maybe at different times in our lives, different stages in life, He calls us for different ministries. But I believe God has something that He wants each of us to do.

I can’t necessarily tell you what that is for you. But I believe God has something He wants to accomplish. It’s not going to be the same for all of us.

How many of you would feel comfortable getting up and preaching a message? Show of hands. Not everybody.

That’s okay. I’m fairly comfortable doing this, although there’s a little fear in the preparation because of realizing the gravity of the task. But as far as getting up here and sharing with you what I know to be God’s Word, I enjoy that.

I sing sometimes occasionally here too. That scares the daylights out of me. And yet some of you get up here and just do that effortlessly.

I’ve heard Brother James ask people, can you sing this morning? Oh yeah, I’ll do it. Oh my goodness, I need at least a week of mental preparation.

That scares me to death. I’ll do it. I enjoy it sometimes.

Not really my ministry, not really the thing God’s called me to do. That’s what I’m saying. We all have a different ministry and a different role to fulfill.

But God has a calling, I believe, on each of us. And so many people wonder why they don’t see any fruit, why they’re not accomplishing anything in their Christian life. It’s because we’re so busy doing what we have on the agenda that we never stop to give a second thought to what it is that God hopes.

Can I say God hopes? God desires to accomplish in and through us. And if we give even half as much concern to God’s will and God’s purpose for our lives, as we do to our own desires, we might accidentally accomplish something for him.

Even if that, it shouldn’t be half as much as our own desires. And we all have, as Christians, we all have what I think is a universal calling to be faithful. Can we agree on that?

We have a universal calling as Christians to serve him faithfully, to follow his teachings and his precepts, to obey him in whatever he’s called us. I think we have particular callings that yours may be different than mine, But we all have a universal calling for faithfulness. Folks, Paul was faithful in his particular calling.

And he illustrates the difference here in being faithful to God and being faithful to men in about four ways that I noticed as I looked through the text today. At first, he points out, I believe, our service is to God and not to man. Our service is to God and not to man.

I didn’t get any amens on that, but you may easily say amen to something like that. Thank you. I wasn’t asking for it, but thank you.

You may easily say amen to something like that, but it’s a lot harder to actually believe it to the extent that we actually live like it. Our service is to God and not to man. I told one of the ladies downstairs, we were talking about this morning’s message.

I walked out of here this morning so worried about the possibility of having offended somebody. And not because anything I say, not because anything I said was unbiblical, but just the way it’s presented. You know, if the Bible offends somebody, that’s not my problem.

But if I offend somebody, that’s a little different story. And I worried, not because anybody said anything or gave me a look, but I worried so bad this afternoon that if there was somebody in the congregation that was divorced, they were going to think I was picking on them. I hopefully made it clear this morning I was not, and that was not my intent.

But there are days that I leave here and I’m so worried about what so-and-so thought, or how did it come across, you know, was it just right to. . .

And folks, I think whether you preach, whether you teach Sunday school, whether you work with the kids, whether you clean the building, whatever it is we do for our form of ministry, I think sometimes we can get wrapped up in the idea of what do people think about it. Were they pleased with my job? Were they.

. . Folks, I want you to leave out of here having gotten something from the message.

I want you to leave out of here being encouraged and being challenged. And I don’t mean this rebellious when I say it, but when I preach, when I do any kind of ministry, it’s ultimately not for you. It’s ultimately for Him.

Now, I hope you’re blessed by it, just like you all hope each other are blessed by your respective ministries. But folks, if I’m more worried about, did I upset somebody, than did I please my heavenly Father, my priorities were off just a little bit, weren’t they? He says in verse 10, if I can flip back to it, For do I now persuade men or God, or do I seek to please men, or if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. And what he says is, if I’m focused on pleasing people, If I’m focused on doing what people want, I cannot serve Christ at the same time.

And I’m not telling you, I’ve met preachers that they don’t think they do a good job unless they’re not asked back somewhere. I don’t think there’s any need in purposely offending people. I want you to feel challenged and encouraged when you leave here.

I want you to feel like we serve a great God and now I need to go do something because of it. But at the same time, I can’t be so worried about what everybody thinks that I lose sight of that I do a good job for Him. Folks, in the things that you do, you cannot be so worried about what I think, about what anybody else in this church thinks, that you lose sight of the fact that we’re doing it for Him.

Our service is to God, not man. If our service is to man, we can hardly call ourselves faithful to the call that He gives us. Secondly, our teaching comes from God, not man.

Our teaching comes from God, not man. In verses 11 through 13, He lays out the fact. We’ve already talked about it.

I won’t go back through it at length. But he lays out the fact that the gospel he received and preached, he did not receive from man, but it came by direct revelation from God. And I know I’ve already talked about the fact that we heard the gospel from somebody else’s lips, or we read it from somebody else’s pen, or heard it from the radio, where somebody, yes, we’ve heard it from people, but it’s still not a human teaching.

It’s not something that somebody one day sat down and said, oh, I think I’ll write up a new teaching today and came up with the gospel. Our feeble minds are not capable of coming up with something so simple, yet so deep and so effective as the gospel of Jesus Christ. The idea that God would send His only Son to willingly die on the cross, to satisfy not only the demands of God’s justice and the demands of God’s wrath, but also make provision for His mercy and His grace. Nobody could have come up with that except God Himself.

And the things we teach, if we stick to the Bible, the things we teach run so contrary to human nature that nobody sat down and said, oh, I think I’ll make up love your enemies today. I think I’ll make up whoever tries to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Folks, from a human standpoint, those things do not make sense.

And the message that we teach, as long as it comes from the Bible, the message we teach is God’s message, not man’s message. Our teaching is God’s, not man’s. The implication there, what we can take from that is that we should not be intimidated when somebody says, well, that’s just your opinion.

No, it absolutely is not my opinion. It’s God’s opinion. What we teach is from God.

And if we get concerned about pleasing men, then after a while, we’ll begin to teach man’s message. And if we teach man’s message, we’re not teaching the gospel. And then we run back into the beginning of chapter 1, where he says, being replaced with another gospel, which is not a gospel at all.

No, what we teach is not from us. It must not be from us. If we’re going to be faithful, our teaching must be things that come from God, not man’s imagination.

Third of all, our calling is from God, not man. I’ve already talked about this a little bit, but verses 14 through 16, he talks about how it was God, not the apostles, not the churches in Judea, not his mama, who called him into ministry. It was God.

And if we are going to be faithful to the calling that God gives us, it’s got to be because our calling comes from God and not man. We can do a lot of church work and not accomplish anything if we just do th