No Other Gospel

August 27, 2017 ()

Bible Text: Galatians 1:6-12 |

Series:

No Other Gospel | Galatians 1:6-12
Brian Hedges | August 27, 2017

Good morning! A couple of nights ago my family went to the Notre Dame stadium to watch the movie Rudy. How many of you have seen the movie Rudy? Okay, most of us in this room probably have. We actually had never seen it before; we’ve lived here for almost 15 years, had not seen this film, and of course it’s kind of a classic if you live in Notre Dame country. It’s about a guy who really had an ambition to play football at Notre Dame and his story and how that happened. So it was fun to get to see that film actually in the Notre Dame stadium.

It’s kind of interesting; this is a PG film, so there’s a few mild curse words in the film, and of course Notre Dame’s a Catholic university, so they were editing as they went, trying to mute some of the curse words. It was kind of funny, because sometimes they missed, and the kids on the field especially were laughing about it.

But it just made me think that sometimes we actually try to edit the Bible when we come to church, and there are places in the Bible that use actually really, really strong language, and yet you don’t hear a lot about that in the church.

One of the places where that language is the strongest is in the letter to the Galatians, Paul’s letter to the Galatians. When you read this letter you get the idea pretty quickly that Paul’s upset. He’s really angry about something, he’s concerned about something, he’s anxious about his friends the Galatians, and he writes this letter, and he’s so severe that he actually calls down curses upon certain kinds of people who are threatening the gospel. That’s what we see in the passage we’re going to read this morning, and we don’t want to edit Paul at all; we want to let Paul speak with his full voice, with all the seriousness, with all the urgency, with all the concern that he actually has.

So let’s read the passage together, and then try to understand what Paul is actually saying about the gospel and those who would try to distort it.

Galatians 1:6-12: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”

This is God’s word.

This is a passage that is obviously all about the gospel. The word “gospel” appears 13 times in Galatians; 6 of those times, almost half, compressed in these verses that I just read to you. This passage expresses Paul’s shock, his concern, his astonishment that his friends the Galatians are abandoning the gospel, that they are in the process of defecting from the gospel. “I am astonished,” he says. “I’m shocked that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel.”

Now notice that he says they are turning to a different gospel, but in doing that he says, “You are abandoning not just the gospel, not just the doctrine; you are abandoning Christ. You are abandoning God.” The word “desert” carries the idea of a turncoat, someone who was fighting for the army, a soldier, and then runs. He defects; he deserts. It’s the word for a turncoat, a deserter. He says, “You’ve deserted him who called you into the grace of Christ.”

So Paul is shocked. He’s astonished, and Paul, as we saw last week, is on a rescue mission to stop his Galatians friends from their apostasy from the gospel. That’s what he’s wanting to do in this letter, and that’s why he confronts them so seriously here.

Three things I want you to see as we work through this passage. I want you to see the nature of the gospel; we just need to understand what the gospel is, first of all. And then I want us to consider for a few minutes this distortion of the gospel. He’s concerned about those who are distorting or perverting the gospel of Christ, so what’s that? And then thirdly, the implications of the gospel.

I. The Nature of the Gospel

Number one, the nature of the gospel. So what is the gospel? Let’s just try to unpack it.

(1) First of all, the gospel is good news. It’s good news. That’s what the word euangelion, the Greek word for “gospel,” means. It means good news; glad tidings. And news, as you know, reports events. When you watch the news, if it’s good news it’s going to report events. It’s just going to give you the facts of what happened.

And the events in the good news of the gospel are the events of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. That’s abundantly clear in Paul’s letters, especially 1 Corinthians 15, where he essentially defines the gospel as, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, he was buried, and on the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures.” You also have it here implicitly in his opening to the letter; in verse 1 he mentions the resurrection, in verse 4 he mentions Christ giving himself for our sins.

So that’s the gospel; it’s good news, good news of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

(2) Secondly, the gospel is good news of a divine rescue. We saw this last week. “Christ gave himself for our sins to rescue us from this present evil age.” And rescue, of course, presupposes a couple of things. It presupposes that we’re in great danger and that we’re unable to help ourselves.

So, as an illustration, you might just think of a situation where you might need to be rescued. Let’s say that you’re in your house and the house catches fire, and it’s going to burn down, and there is a wall of fire between you and any possible exit.

Not only that, let’s say that you’ve already passed out from the smoke. You’re being asphyxiated, you’re about to die, you’re about to either die of asphyxiation or from burning to death. What do you need in that moment? It’s not going to do you any good if someone calls you on the cell phone and gives you advice about how to fireproof your house and avoid getting your house on fire. You don’t need advice; you need a savior. You need a fireman to come through those doors and try to put out the fire and get you and rescue you and bring you to safety. That’s what you need.

So the gospel is about a rescue. It’s not good advice about how to live a better life or how to be a happier person or how to make yourself into a better person. It’s a rescue. It’s good news about the rescue, what God has done for us.

We sing this, don’t we?

“Guilty, vile, and helpless we,
Spotless Lamb of God was He.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!”

Not, “Hallelujah, what a good moral teacher.” It’s not, “Hallelujah, what a wonderful counselor!” Or, “What a helpful analyst on the best tactics for sin avoidance and moral improvement.”

Now that doesn’t sing. “Hallelujah! What a Savior!” That’s what sings.

Well, that’s what the gospel’s about; it’s about salvation, it’s about a rescue.

(3) And then, thirdly, the gospel is good news of grace. Notice that Paul says, verse six, “You are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace—” some manuscripts also say “the grace of Christ”— “and are turning to a different gospel.”

So it’s all about grace. What is grace? The most common definition is “unmerited favor,” that’s fine, that’s good. Commentator F.F. Bruce says, “Grace is God’s unconditioned goodwill towards mankind, which is decisively expressed in the saving work of Christ.” That’s even better.

Here’s maybe my favorite definition, the acronym GRACE, :G-R-A-C-E: God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense.” That’s grace. God lavishly pouring out his love, his favor, his goodwill, his riches upon us, and he does it when we don’t deserve it; he does it because of what Christ has done for us. The gospel’s all about grace. “Grace,” Timothy George says, “is like a scarlet thread running through this epistle from start to finish.”

So that’s what the gospel’s about. The gospel’s about the good news of the divine rescue through grace, and how God rescues us from our sins through the grace of Christ. So, in the gospel this is what we see. We see that God is the one who take the initiative. He is the one who calls. God takes the initiative, and Christ is the one who does the work! He’s the one who does the rescuing; we just respond in faith, and therefore God is the one who gets the glory.

Now that’s really what’s at stake. I mean, really all of this is at stake for Paul. The very nature of the gospel is at stake because of the distortions of the false teachers, and therefore the salvation of people is at stake, whether they believe the true gospel or a false gospel, and the glory of God is at stake.

II. The Distortion of the Gospel

So having seen here the nature of the gospel, let’s think for a few minutes now about this distortion of the gospel. The distortion of the gospel. Look at verse 7. Paul says, “There are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.”

Now this is Paul’s first direct reference to the false teachers themselves, and he says two things about them. He says they want to trouble you. They trouble you. “There are some who trouble you.” It’s a word that carries the idea of unsettling, of causing turmoil, of throwing into confusion. The false teachers were literally troublemakers in these Galatian churches. They were agitating, confusing the people.

And then they wanted to distort the gospel of Christ. That word carries the idea of changing; to distort is to change, to alter, or to pervert or twist into something different. John Stott observes the word can even mean to reverse the gospel. He says they’re not just corrupting it, they’re reversing it; they’re “turning it from back to front and upside down.”

Stott continues with this important statement: “The two chief characteristics of the false teachers are that they are troubling the church and changing the gospel. These two go together. To tamper with the gospel is always to trouble the church. You cannot touch the gospel and leave the church untouched, because the church is created and lives by the gospel. Indeed, the church’s greatest troublemakers now, as then, are not those outside who oppose, ridicule, and persecute it, but those inside who try to change the gospel.”

Now here’s the problem. You have false teachers troubling the church by perverting and twisting the gospel, and Paul is upset about this. He’s really concerned about this.

Now, what was this false teaching? What was the Galatian heresy? I said a little bit about this last week, and as we work through the letter in detail we’re going to see different features of this. Let me try to give you just a brief, quick summary. We could say that there are three basic features to the Galatian heresy.

(1) First of all, legalism. They taught justification by works of the law. This is clear throughout the letter. Let me just give you one verse to put alongside of verse 6. In chapter 5, verse 4 Paul says, “You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen from grace.” You see how that parallels those who are turning from the gospel and deserting the one who has called us in his grace? To lose the gospel is to lose grace.

Now that’s what’s at stake here. When Paul says that if you’re going to justified by works of the law, you fall from grace. You lose grace. You don’t get grace if you’re trying to be justified by your works.

So it was legalism. I mean, they were actually teaching that people could only be saved if they would keep the law.

(2) Secondly, there was an element of ethnocentrism. These were, as best we can tell, Jewish teachers—probably Jewish Christian in some way. They seem to have believed something about Jesus the Messiah, but they were changing the basic message. They were Jewish Christians who were wanting to force the Gentiles to become Jews, and they were doing this by imposing the ceremonial laws onto the Gentile Christians.

These laws were viewed as “boundary markers” to the people of God. These boundary markers were things like circumcision, the covenant sign of God’s people in the Old Testament; things like the food laws, eating kosher; and then the Sabbath and the Jewish feast of festivals. Paul refers to this in chapter 4, verse 10 when he mentions “days and months and seasons and years,” how people were wanting to observe these things.

And they were insisting that the Gentiles had, essentially, to become Jewish in their culture, in their religious culture. They had to adopt these practices. The males needed to be circumcised, they all needed to eat according to the Old Testament Jewish laws, and they needed to keep the Jewish feasts and festivals and Sabbaths and so on, and only if they did that could they be accepted as the true people of God.

So there’s an ethnocentrism here. There’s a narrowness to the cultural understanding of what it means to be God’s people. That’s part of the problem.

(3) And then there’s what we might call nomism. Nomism. This is a term derived from the Greek word for law, nomos. It’s a term that scholars have coined to refer to the beliefs of Jewish people during this time period. Now this relates to what has been called the “new perspective on Paul,” or the “new perspectives on Paul.”

I’m not going to go into detail on this, but essentially there are some scholars who believe that the Reformers kind of read into the book of Galatians the merit theology of the Roman Catholic church and wrongly have read legalism into this letter. So these scholars say, “You know, Paul’s not really battling legalism; he’s battling nomism,” because they say, “The Jews of that time didn’t really believe in salvation by works, they believed that you actually got into God’s covenant by grace, but the way you stayed in was by works of the law.” You get in by grace but you stay in by keeping the law. That’s called covenantal nomism.

Now I’m not convinced of that perspective, because I think it’s pretty clear, when you get into the details of this letter, that Paul is concerned about legalism. He’s concerned about that. However, I do think those guys are probably right about some elements of this idea of Jewish thinking that they stay within God’s covenant through law-keeping. So I think they’re basically wrong in what they deny, but right in what they affirm.

So we could put it this way: the nomists believed that it was through the law that they stayed within God’s favor; it was through keeping the law that they became godly; it was through keeping the law that they got what we might call sanctification. They were relying on the law rather than on the Spirit. This becomes a big part of Paul’s argument in chapter 5 especially. He emphasizes the work of the Spirit, over and against the law. It’s the work of the Spirit that actually leads us into a life of love and the fruit of the Spirit, against which there is no law.

Now, all of that scholarly part here is done now, okay. All of that feels fairly far removed from us today. Most of us have never heard of covenantal nomism, most of us (at least on the surface) are probably not particularly legalistic, but you know what? There actually are distortions and perversions of the gospel that are very contemporary.

I want to just give you several of these, several examples of this, some contemporary false gospels—ways that we also corrupt the gospel, pervert the gospel, distort the gospel. I’m somewhat indebted to Tim Keller here, although I’m going to mostly paraphrase him at this point.

Let me give you three examples of contemporary false gospels.

(1) Here’s one: right beliefs plus right behavior equals salvation. Now this is really subtle, but there are a lot of people who basically assume that the way you’re saved is by believing the right doctrines and by living a moral life. So good behavior: keep the Ten Commandments or follow the Sermon on the Mount, love your neighbor as yourself, live by the Golden Rule. That’s what you have to do to become a Christian. You become a Christian by believing right doctrine and keeping your nose clean; living a moral life.

Now, of course, Paul would say, and we would say, “of course Christians should live moral lives.” Of course, the Bible teaches in all kinds of places that there are moral guidelines for disciples of Jesus. Scripture teaches that there is real transformation that happens when we come to Christ and give our lives to him. The problem here is that these people get the order wrong. It is not right beliefs plus right behavior that equals salvation. Salvation, justification, is not conditioned upon what we do, it’s conditioned upon what Christ has done.

So it reverses the order of the gospel, you see. It reverses the order of the gospel to say that it’s only by doing the right things that you get saved. The gospel, rather, teaches that “to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Romans 4:5).

This is what Luther called, using the Latin phrase, he called simul justus et peccator. Simul, the word from which we get our word “simultaneous.” Justus, the Latin word for justice. Et, as R.C. Sproul likes to say, is the past tense of “eat”— “I et this morning.” No, the Latin word et means “and.” And. So, simul, the same time, simultaneously; justus, just or righteous, and peccator, sinful.

Here’s the idea. Luther says we are at the same time sinful and righteous. Why? Because of grace, you see. Because of what God does for us in Christ. He saves us while we are ungodly! And then he begins to make us righteous, of course. He begins to sanctify us. But you see, he saves us first. The right behavior comes after the justification, not before. So that’s a subtle false gospel.

(2) Here’s a second one. The second one is that beliefs don’t really matter, you just have to be a good person, and then you’ll be saved. This is kind of what really liberal people tend to think. Theologically liberal churches tend to think this, and relativistic people in our culture tend to think this.

They think, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what you believe. It doesn’t matter what church you go to, what denomination; it doesn’t even matter that much religion you are. We’re all trying to get to the same place, we’re all trying to live good lives; if you’re just trying to be a good person, you’re worshipping God to the best knowledge that you have—if you’re just doing that, then of course you get saved, of course you get eternal life, or whatever happens after this; you’re going to be okay.”

Now on the surface that seems really tolerant. It seems really tolerant. It’s a very popular belief. It’s becoming increasingly popular among even professing Christians, evangelicals. Very inclusive of other religions.

But as Keller observes, in reality, though it seems to be tolerant, it really undercuts grace, because what it means is that salvation is really only available to good people. It’s really only available to good people. It takes away all the hope for a bad person, a wicked person, an evil person, a person who’s totally messed up, who hasn’t actually lived a good life at all. Where’s the hope for them? And of course, it subverts the exclusive claims of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

(3) Here’s one more contemporary false gospel: those who say, essentially, “You have to be like us in order to be saved.” “You have to be like us.” These would be those Christians who would say things like this: they would say, “Well, of course you have to believe in Jesus, but if you’re really a Christian you’re not only going to believe in Jesus, you’re going to believe in Jesus and you’re going to dress the way we dress, you’re going to abstain from the kinds of things we abstain from—” you get into all the secondary issues, all the gray matters, right? You go to theaters, not go to theaters; you play cards, not play cards. Do you drink alcohol or not drink alcohol.

Now, it’s fine to have your personal convictions about those things, and my guess is that in this room we have people all over the map on those issues. That’s fine. The problem is when you say, “You have to believe in Jesus and you have to live according to these standards that I have to be considered a Christian.”

You see, the problem here is, “Jesus plus fill-in-the-blank equals salvation.” That’s where the problem comes from. It’s when you add something to what Jesus has done, you distort the gospel.

In fact, Paul says it’s really not a gospel at all. It’s really not a gospel at all, because when you add to the work of Christ, you actually subtract from the work of Christ, and there’s no good news left.

III. The Implications of the Gospel

Okay, so we’ve seen here the nature of the gospel, we’ve seen the distortions of the gospel, now what are the implications of this? Implications of the gospel and implications of this passage in particular, and I want to give you three as we move to a close.

(1) First of all, it’s pretty obvious, beware of false gospels. Beware of false gospels. Paul, very intense, very urgent in warning them against false gospels. The reason we should beware of them is because when you turn to a different gospel you actually forsake the God who called you in his grace. You forsake Christ.

(2) Secondly, this passage shows us that beliefs have eternal consequences. Beliefs have eternal consequences.

Look at verses 8 and 9; this is where you get to the curse. Paul says, “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.” Now that’s kind of a hypothetical statement. He’s saying, “If even an apostle should preach another gospel, even if an angel from heaven should preach another gospel, let him be accursed.” And then he says something more definite in verse 9. “As we have said before, so now I say again: if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.” He’s actually looking at the situation they’re facing. And he says, “Let them be accursed.” Anathema is the word.

It’s a word that in the Greek Old Testament basically meant “to be devoted to destruction.” To be devoted to destruction. Think of when the children of Israel, when they are going to the Promised Land, and they conquer these pagan kingdoms and these cities and so on, and there were times when God would say, “You can’t take the spoils of war; those spoils of war must be devoted to me,” and they would burn them. They would destroy it. God didn’t want them to profit from the war, so they would burn it. And the word that was used there for that was this word, “devoted to destruction.” It was really strong language.

Paul says, “If someone preaches another gospel, a gospel that’s contrary to the true gospel, let him be under God’s curse.” To hell with him, Paul says. Let him be damned. It’s hard to imagine Paul being more impassioned than that. It’s hard to imagine him saying anything stronger than that. He actually does say something every bit as strong, maybe a little more coarse, as we’ll see in chapter 5.

Now why is Paul talking like this? Because beliefs have eternal consequences. Who and what you believe and trust matters. Now of course we read this and our initial thought is, “This is so intolerant. It is so intolerant to say someone, if they preach another gospel, they believe something different, they’re going to hell! It’s intolerant. Why does Paul talk like this?” And I’ll grant you, it is intolerant. But Paul is intolerant the way an oncologist is intolerant of cancer.

Several years ago, my wife Holly had a little spot on her forehead. It just looked a little bit off. It just didn’t look quite right. The shape was a little different, the color was a little different. I noticed that one day and I said, “I think you better get that looked at.” She went to a doctor, and sure enough, they said, “Yes, we have to take that off.” It was melanoma. And when it was done, the doctor said, “It’s a good thing you got that looked at. That could have killed you.” Very serious cancer. But it was just a little spot! It just looked almost like a freckle, almost like a mole. But you see, it was lethal. It was lethal.

That’s why Paul is so concerned about this. He’s concerned, he’s intolerant against something that he knows if people desert Christ, if they abandon the true gospel, they turn to a false gospel, it will take them to hell. So he says, “A curse be upon them.” Beliefs have eternal consequences. What you believe, who you trust matters.

(3) And then here’s the third implication: we cannot base our beliefs on human authority or even on spiritual experience, but only on divine revelation.

Look at verse 8 again for a minute, and just think about this. Paul says, “If even we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.”

Now you think about this. Let’s say that the godliest person you’ve ever met, maybe the person who led you to Christ, maybe even a parent or a really good friend, maybe your favorite pastor, preacher, and they come to you and they say, “You know, everything Jesus did is great, but you’re missing this one thing. You need to add this. You can’t be sure that you’re saved unless you add this on.”

Paul says, “It doesn’t matter who it is. Even if we—” I mean, let’s just change the scenario. Let’s say it’s an apostle. Let’s just say that archeologists discovered a lost letter of the apostle Paul. We think 2 Timothy was the last letter; what if there’s one more letter, they find the lost letter of the apostle Paul, and through all their analysis they believe it’s really true, and Paul in that letter contradicts what Paul says in this letter.

He says, “You know, my theology’s developed a little bit. This was written early in my career, but in my mature years I think they were actually right. I think you actually do need to keep the Old Testament law in order to be saved.” Paul says, “Even if we should say, even if an apostle should say this, let him be accursed.”

What about this scenario? Let’s say you had a powerful, indisputable spiritual experience. You have a vision. This isn’t something you just dream; you see this with your waking eyes. You see light fill a room and a being appears to you, radiant in white garments, emanating light, and this being says to you, “What Jesus did is absolutely crucial and wonderful, but you must keep the Sabbath day if you want to be a Christian.” You come away and say, “I saw it. I mean, I experienced it. A supernatural being, an angel, told me.”

Well, Paul imagines this scenario. He says, “Even if an angel from heaven should preach to you another gospel, let him be accursed.” You see, he’s getting at the basis of our authority. Why do we believe what we believe? We don’t believe what we believe — Paul says we don’t receive the gospel — we don’t believe or embrace the gospel or any message because of the human person it comes from or even because of a spiritual experience.

What’s the basis of our authority? Look at verses 11 and 12. “For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”

Here’s the source. It’s divine revelation. The gospel, you see, was not a human invention. The apostles did not invent it. Paul did not invent it, and he’s making the claim he didn’t receive it from a man, he wasn’t taught it by anyone else; he wasn’t even taught it by the other apostles. It came directly from the risen Christ, a revelation of Jesus Christ. That’s our source of authority: divine revelation.

Now you might just say, when you hear this, “That’s all good and well for Paul, because he personally met the resurrected Christ on the Damascus road. How do I know? I mean, how do I know what divine revelation is?”

I think the answer to that is the gospel itself is self-attesting, and the Spirit of God through the gospel attests to the reality of the gospel. Paul says, 2 Corinthians 4:6, that “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” He says, 1 Corinthians 2:12, “Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given to us by God.” The Holy Spirit is the one who convinces the heart of the reality of the gospel. That’s a divine gift.

Okay, so let me conclude. We’ve seen this morning the nature of the gospel—good news, the divine rescue, through God’s gracious gift, Christ, in his death and resurrection. We’ve talked about distortions of the gospel; essentially, when you add anything to the work of Jesus, you distort the gospel. “Jesus plus fill-in-the-blank equals salvation” is a false gospel.

And we’ve now seen some implications of this. Beware of false gospels, because what you believe and who you trust matters, and the only solid basis for our trust is the divinely revealed gospel itself, divine revelation.

To conclude, I just want to ask you a question and then give you a quotation. Here’s the question: what are you trusting in this morning? Let me rephrase it: who are you trusting in this morning? Are you trusting in Christ, or are you trusting in yourself? Are you trusting in grace, or are you trusting in works? It really comes down to that.

It’s one way or the other. You’re either looking to Christ to declare you righteous, and then his Spirit to produce righteousness in you, or you’re constantly looking at yourself, trying to muster it up, prove that you’re good enough, earn God’s favor, find assurance through your own behavior. It’s one way or the other. It’s either grace or works. It’s the only two ways.

Now listen to Martin Luther, and then we’ll close. Luther says, “It is an absolute and unique teaching in all the world, to teach people through Christ to live as if there were no law or wrath or punishment. In a sense, they do not exist any longer for the Christian, but only total grace and mercy for Christ’s sake. Once you are in Christ, the law is the greatest guide for your life, but until you have Christian righteousness all the law can do is to show you sinful and condemned you are. In fact, to those outside of Christian righteousness the law needs to be expounded in all its force. Why? So that people who think they have power to be righteous before God will be humbled by the law and understand they are sinners.

“Therefore, we must be careful to use the law appropriately. If we use the law in order to be accepted by God through obedience, then Christian righteousness becomes mixed up with earned moral righteousness in our minds. If we try to earn our righteousness by doing many good deeds we actually do nothing. We neither please God through our works righteousness, nor do we honor the purpose for which the law was given, but if we first receive Christian righteousness then we can use the law, not for our salvation, but for his honor and glory, and to lovingly show our gratitude.”

Here’s the key question: “So then, have we nothing to do to obtain this righteousness? No, nothing at all, for this righteousness comes by doing nothing, hearing nothing, knowing nothing, but rather in knowing and believing this only: that Christ has gone to the right hand of the Father, not to become our judge, but to become for us our wisdom, our righteousness, our holiness, our salvation. Now God sees no sin in us, for in this heavenly righteousness sin has no place.

“So now we may certainly think, ‘Although I still sin, I don’t despair, because Christ lives, who is both my righteousness and my eternal life. In that righteousness I have no sin, no fear, no guilty conscience, no fear of death. I am indeed a sinner in this life of mine and in my own righteousness, but I have another life, another righteousness above this life, which is in Christ, the Son of God, who knows no sin or death, but is eternal righteousness and eternal life.’”

No guilt in life, no fear in death, because we’re done with the law! The law cannot condemn you if you are in Christ. If you’re trusting in Christ, if he is your righteousness, you’ve been rescued by him, then you’re free.

So brothers and sisters, it’s as simple as this: at the end of the day, there are only two ways to be saved: either by Christ’s righteousness or your own, either by works or by grace. If you try to do it on your own, you will fail.

So here’s the application: trust Christ.

Let’s pray.

God of mercy and Father of grace, we give you thanks this morning for this gospel, this good news that is almost too good to be true; that “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For as it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’” Because Christ bore our curse, we are now counted righteous in him through faith. Thank you. Thank you, Lord. We give you thanks, we give you praise, and the effect of this gospel on our hearts is to make us want to just give everything we are to you; not to earn anything, but in sheer gratitude and delight and joyful thanksgiving to you for your grace.

And Father, that’s what we celebrate as we come to the table this morning. We celebrate the fact that Christ gave his body for us, that he shed his blood for us, that he did it for us. So as we eat the bread and drink the juice this morning we pray that we would do so with robust faith, with hearty consent, sincere trust in our hearts, trust in Christ. So work that in our hearts by your Spirit, and continue to minister to us as we come to your table today. We pray it in Jesus’ name, Amen.