Galatians 5:7-15

Can you imagine back in 1790, after our Founding Fathers had gone through the War of Independence, the struggles with the Articles of Confederation, and all the struggles that they had with forming the Constitution, that the Founding Fathers would have said, "This is just too much. Let's go back to Britain?" Can you imagine them doing that? After they had received their liberty, fought tooth-and-nail for it, having the internal struggles that they'd had and now finally coming to some resolution, would they have said, "Forget it. We don't want this liberty anymore?"

That is what Paul has been talking about here in Galatians . He begins this passage in verse 7, "You ran well". He's saying that you had it, and yet now you've given up your liberty. Is that not what he has been talking about through this entire book? Now Paul is summarizing, coming to conclusions, and he is getting ready to give us some practical insight as to how we are actually to live.

We see Paul, in verses 7 through 15, moving towards a particular phrase and then a movement from that phrase towards the practical outworking of the things he has taught. That phrase in verse 11 is "Then the offense of the gospel has ceased." It is that whole idea of the offense of the Gospel that we need to remember. We need to remember that the cross is the very place in which we start, and yet it is the cross that is attacked because people take offense at it. Yet we who have not taken that offense need to remember that we live with the cross and because of the cross. So let's look at those ideas.

The Cross Is The Start Of Our Spiritual Journey

The cross really is the start of our spiritual journey, where we come to life. Paul here tells them, "You ran well." You were doing fine. When I was there, when I came and brought the Gospel to you, you embraced it by faith and you were doing just fine; you were doing very well. Notice that Paul uses a metaphor. He is looking at the Christian life in terms of a race. Maybe he had just seen a race through Corinth, or the Corinthian games were going on, or they had just been staged, or they were coming up, whatever the case may be, and he uses this metaphor. He tells the Galatians, "You ran well. You were in the race. You were going and you were striving and you were running well." That was when they first started. Paul had brought the Gospel and they understood the Gospel. They were obedient to the truth unto salvation. They understood that it was by grace in Jesus Christ alone. They took the cross as the point of exchange, and they relied on Christ and not themselves. Paul is saying they ran well.

But hindrances came. Look at the rest of verse 7 through 9: "Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion does not come from Him who calls you. A little leaven leavens the whole lump." Now notice what he is doing here. He's saying you ran well, and now somebody has cut in front of you. And what did you do? You went along with them; you followed them. Who hindered you from obeying the Truth? They were obeying the Truth, and somebody cut in front of them, using the racing metaphor, and stopped them from obeying the Truth. They were doing it; now they are no longer doing it. And Paul continues to use persuasion, this new doctrine that has come to you, is not from God. It never was from God. It didn't come from Him. And so he is trying once again to say, Look, go back to where you started. Think of what it was when you started out. What was Truth? How you were liberated from all these ceremonies and laws. It is God who saves us, and it is God through Jesus Christ. And then he puts this little proverbial saying, "A little leaven leavens the whole lump." My son has been making some sourdough bread periodically, and you can taste the sour dough. You know that the sour dough has gone through the entire batch of bread. You can see when we use yeast and leavening agents that they cause the dough to rise, and you know that it has been permeating the entire lump, because it isn't just one little spot that pops up, it is the entire thing. Paul is saying that this hindrance, the sin that has come in, is going to affect not just the individual who is teaching them; it is going to affect everyone, everybody there in Galatia. Because they have taken hold of this, you can see that that leaven is working in their midst.

Think about this leaven in our modern day. We have those churches that have rejected the Word of God. They have embraced instead a social gospel. Because of higher criticism, they've said, We can't believe this part of the Bible, we can't believe that part of the Bible, so they've reduced the size of the Bible to just a very miniscule part. Anything supernatural we can't believe, and so on and so forth. Are there true believers within some of those churches? There may be. Do you think that that teaching has affected them? I believe so. Look at the issue of homosexuality within these churches and we see the struggles, these massive struggles, within these denominations. But they didn't lose the battle just now when homosexuality is being pushed and thrown at them. They lost the battle when they lost their Bibles, That yeast, that leaven, has simply permeated their thinking, and they have embraced so many other things along with it.

What about ourselves? Our culture affects us. We think in cultural terms. We are taught in a cultural manner. How our families operate and function has a large bearing on how we function and operate. Perhaps we're rejecting the way things were done in our families. Interestingly enough, often we will become exactly like the one that we tried to reject and do the things we vowed to avoid. For example the son of a drunkard may reject alcohol but become obsessed with gambling instead. Think of the four soils in terms of hindrances. The one was so hard that there wasn't a hindrance because there wasn't any faith, it was just outright rejection. But the middle two-no deep root, the cares of life, and those sort of things-those become hindrances in our spiritual continuation and walk.

But as we see here in verse 10, we can return. Listen to Paul's hope; listen to Paul's confidence: "I have confidence in you, in the Lord, that you will have no other mind; but he who troubles you shall bear his judgment, whoever he is." In that first section, listen to that confidence of Paul. It's not confidence in the people; it is the confidence in Christ that He will work in these people to bring them back. They have a different viewpoint, and Paul is saying, I am confident that you will come to understand and to embrace my viewpoint, what I am trying to tell you here, that our faith-and it's faith alone, not by anything we can do, it's not by doing various ceremonial things-but rather our faith in Jesus Christ. Paul is confident that the Lord will bring them back, and it is possible as we repent, as we turn away, to be brought back to obedience to the Truth. Because we depart doesn't mean that we are lost forever but rather that we can come through repentance, understanding what the Word, the Bible, says, using it as a mirror to show ourselves all the ugliness of our sin.

The Cross Is An Offense To Some

The cults prey upon Christians, at least those who claim to be Christians. They look rather similar, but without knowing more, without having a firm grounding in the Truth, when the cults come to knock on their door, these people fall for the line that has been brought to them. And what may have looked like a good beginning comes to a sad and horrible end. But that's because, like those who bring these hindrances, the cross is an offense to some. In verse 11, we read that phrase, "Then the offense of the cross has ceased." Remember the context. Paul is saying because he preaches the Gospel, not circumcision, he is persecuted. And that persecution is because of other people taking offense at the cross. He's using the word cross to signify the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The true Gospel is an offense, as we also read in 1 Corinthians. It is an offense to the Jews who cannot get over the fact that the Messiah would have to die on a cross, become a curse. It is a curse to the Gentiles because it is intellectually unsatisfying, and how can we deal with this supernatural thing that we cannot even get our minds around, and so they reject it outright. The cross basically chips away any confidence that we can have in ourselves. The Jew and the Gentile who don't want to embrace it, come to understand that at some level. They may not understand it consciously but they do understand it at some level. And so to preach anything but the cross is to preach a human doctrine, not God's doctrine. If we preach human doctrine, then other human beings who do not believe the Gospel will tolerate it.

Do we see that in our day and age? Madeline Murray O'Hare could not tolerate prayer in school because prayer in school was still done in the Name of Jesus Christ with reference to His cross, to the Gospel. She could not bear it, and she persuaded enough people-the right people-so that prayer was stripped from our schools. We see today that little grade-schoolers cannot take a Bible to school with them; that is an offense. You cannot have teachers that read with some Christian reference to the cross, because that is an offense. But you can have all sorts of other things, and while those things may offend Christians, the rest of the world tolerates those things.

It is those who take the offense that persecute. Verse 11: "And I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why do I still suffer persecution?" Notice that conditional clause, "If I still preach circumcision." In other words, he's saying he doesn't preach it. The false teachers tried to argue that he did, but he is saying, I don't. And if that's the case, why would you still persecute me. If I preached circumcision, why do the Jews still continue to persecute me? You see, it's someone who takes offense that persecutes, those who cannot bear the truth, those who cannot or are not willing to admit their own guilt before God-they are the ones who persecute. They persecute the preaching of the Gospel. They refuse, as it were, to remove the fig leaves of their own self-deception. They try and cover themselves, and the Gospel strips those things away. They try and make themselves look good, and the Gospel strips it all away. Therefore they take offense.

Those who continue in this way will be judged. Notice the last part of verse 10 and 12: "But he who troubles you will bear his judgment, whoever he is. I could wish that those who trouble you would even cut themselves off!" Judgment is waiting for those who do reject the cross, who reject the Gospel, who take offense at the Gospel. Justice. These Judaisers that Paul is talking about here are trying to remove that offense, and in removing an offense, they remove the Gospel, and they will be judged. In fact, Paul was so upset here that basically he was bringing a curse upon them. He is talking about circumcision and removing a little bit of skin, and he's saying they need to go the whole nine yards-why don't they make themselves eunuchs. They will be judged in God's good timing, not ours.

Think about the persecution that's going on around the world today. Yes, there's persecution here in this land, but there is persecution in China, Saudi Arabia, Colombia. . . the list goes on and on. Why? Because people take offense at the cross. Government persecution comes because the government cannot bear that there is Someone before whom they must bow-Jesus Christ. They cannot bear that they cannot control something, as in China under the Communist system. It becomes an offense to them. Just as today we have Atheists within our culture who are now beginning to scream and rant and rave. You know what? I'm glad they rant and rave, because as they do so, people see them for the ineptitude that they have. If you listen to some of their argumentation, they would seek to obliterate all religion, and yet their focus is on destroying Christianity. Yet they have a religion themselves, a religion with man or themselves as the center.

The Cross Is What Gives Us Our Liberty

"For you, brethren, have been called to liberty." (5:13) The believer's call is to liberty. Christ has given us freedom. He is the one who has set us free. We have freedom for a price, because He is the one who sets us free. We have His liberty, the freedom to be what we were made to be. Isn't that marvelous? Think about it. Instead of struggling to be something that we aren't, we can simply, through Christ, be that which we were meant to be, to have fellowship with our God, to care, and to be His stewards over His creation, to love Him, to love our brothers and sisters in Christ and those around us. We are free from the bondage of guilt, free from the bondage of sin, free from the bondage to Satan and to this world. Instead, we have freedom to serve, not as duty-bound, but freedom to serve with joy, our God and our fellow man. That is true freedom. It's not freedom to do whatever you wish to do-that is bondage. It is freedom to be what we were created to be, in the service of our God, to have a marvelous and wondrous relationship with Him.

And so, in this liberty, we need to be careful that we do not take an occasion to sin. "So you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another." (5:13, 15) We need to be careful not to presume on this liberty that we have in Christ. That has happened in the past. People have said, Well, Jesus has paid for all my sins, so it really doesn't matter how I live. They are all taken care of, they are all gone. And that is providing opportunity for the flesh, because if we aren't careful, we are going to go the direction our nature takes us-into sin. And the only one we have deceived is ourselves as we have taken this opportunity to sin. The opportunity for the flesh is sin, and if we indulge in the opportunities of the flesh, we will then begin to destroy one another. It's not strange that he put verse 15 there-after verses 13 and 14. Our sin will ultimately push us into self-centeredness; our self-centeredness will push us to the point where the only desire we have is for ourselves. And thereby we will start pushing back against other people, because they want what we want; we want what they want, and we begin to devour one another, consuming one another, destroying one another.

Instead, we need to take this liberty as an opportunity to serve. The last part of verse 13 and verse 14: "But through love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" Our freedom is to serve not ourselves but to serve others. That is what our freedom is all about. We are no longer bound by this inevitable collapse as we become more and more self-centered, but rather we become free to look beyond ourselves and to serve others. Because we know that God will care for us, that God will provide for us. Because we know that God is the one who calls us to do it, and we marvel and wonder at what He has done. If we huddle and grow inward, we become darker and darker. It is only as we begin to look outward that things become brighter and brighter. That is what our liberty is all about.

Love is the fruit of our liberty. Love is where our liberty should take us. Because we are free, because we are free from our sin, because we are free from trying to hide from God, we have peace with God. We can then look to others and seek after them, to love them, and to love our God. And you know what? That's what happens in the Persecuted Church. Think of China. They care for one another. They love their God because of what He has done, and they continue to seek to share with one another, to share with those around them, even their enemies. As one of the hymns puts it: "The martyr first, whose eagle eye Could pierce beyond the grave, Who saw his Master in the sky, And called on Him to save: Like Him, with pardon on his tongue In midst of mortal pain, He prayed for them that did the wrong; Who follows in his train?" It is speaking of Steven as he prayed for those who were stoning him. He was at liberty; he had freedom.

At the 2008 Olympic Games, in the men's Four by One Hundred Relay, if you remember, if you watched it, I believe it was the semi-finals, they started off really well. That first guy took off and away he ran with the baton. He passed it to the second guy, and he ran, passing the baton to the third. But when the third tried to pass the baton to the fourth runner, they dropped the baton. Disqualified. What hindered them? These were four of the fastest men on this planet. They ran well to begin with. What hindered them? They dropped the baton. You're not supposed to drop the baton.

How about us as we run the race-as we run the race for ourselves, but also for the next generation, as we pass the baton. Are we keeping true to the Gospel? What are some of the things that are hindering us, that will then hinder the next generation? A little leaven leavens the whole lump. Let us look at ourselves. What are some of those things that are hindering us from obeying the Truth-the Truth that Christ has given to us that we might serve Him with joy and thankfulness, in full liberty? In this New Year, let us love the Truth and obey it.