Galatians 3:26-4:7 | A New Family | Alex Culpepper

Well, if you don't know me, my name is Alex. I am the lead pastor here at Renovation Church, and it is my joy every Sunday to open up God's word with us. And so if you don't have a Bible with you, we do put the scripture passage up here on the screen. We want you to be able to follow along because we believe that in God's Word is life. He has given his word to us for a reason, and he intends for us to understand who he is.

And so we're going to be walking through scripture this morning. And as we do that, I just say maybe you can relate to this a little bit. I grew up with a little bit of family baggage. Maybe you grew up with some family baggage as well. Can I talk to all the Italians in the room for just a second?

I know you all grew up with some family baggage. That's right. Be careful. Here we go. Y' all are loud when you get together.

I just want you to know that. Right. And it can be a lot for people who are not used to that. It's just like, I want to share with you transparently that that's the experience. Some families.

What? Preach it. Oh, yeah. He says, preach it over here. So he's like, yeah, yeah, okay.

You know, sometimes there are some families where it seems like maybe there's a lot of fighting and loud conflict and that kind of stuff. Some families. Some families, you know, they make a nice outward veneer, right? But then under the surface, you know that there's just, like, a bunch of stuff bubbling all the time, like issues and problems and stuff like that. I'll tell you, my family baggage, my small town baggage, is that.

So I grew up in a really small town, which means everybody knew everybody, which means that for at least 30% of the time that I get together with my parents, we are talking about who died recently and what house they lived in. Right. And so. And like, who was their neighbor? Was their neighbor this person?

Who did they live across the street from? And my wife will attest to you. Like, we spend an inordinate amount of time having this kind of conversation. It seems morbid to you, but. Right.

It's baggage. So that's what we're admitting here. So you don't get to choose the family that you're born into. Right. That's just a reality.

You inherit your family, and you inherit your family's name and its history and the strengths and weaknesses that come with that family and the dysfunction that comes with that family. And for most of Human history, your family basically determined everything about your future. Like, it said the most significant stuff about you. But what if I told you actually that the most important thing in your life is not the family that you were born into, but it's actually the family that you've been invited into? So today we're finishing up a series called Grace Through Faith.

And in this section of the book of Galatians that we're walking through, the Apostle Paul, who. Galatians is an area in what we understand to be Europe today. But in this area, the Apostle Paul has gone around and he has. There are several churches here where he has proclaimed the Gospel to people. And those people have believed and they formed and shaped into bodies of believers throughout this area called Galatia.

And so he's writing a letter to them shortly after. He just finished kind of walking through a missionary journey to these people. And what he's doing is he's making a positive case for what is the Gospel of Jesus. And he's doing this because there are these false teachers called Judaizers who have come into the church and they have taught these Galatians after Paul has come through. These were non Jews, and again, non Jews had no context for who the God of the Bible was.

But Paul comes along and tells them who the God of the Bible is and tells them how gracious he is, how loving he is, how invitational he is, to invite all tribes and all tongues and all nations and into his family. And many of these Galatian people, they believe and they receive the Holy Spirit, right? So this is an amazing thing. Like God is saying, yes, these people belong to me by virtue of their very belief. And these Judaizers come along, and what they started teaching these people in this area of Galatia is you need to perform the Jewish laws and practices in order to really be saved by God, right?

That it's not enough for you to simply believe in Jesus, but here we're going to pull the Jewish law out of the Old Testament and put it over you and say, you actually need to submit to this as your way of life in order to truly have salvation. And so the Apostle Paul, he has a problem with this, right? And so what he's doing, he's challenged that. And we've looked at the challenges and in the weeks past. But what he's doing here is he wants to say, well, this is what the Gospel is, right?

I've used this illustration before, but we talk about counterfeit money. And the way that you learn to recognize counterfeits is not Looking at all the different kinds of counterfeit dollars out there, you really learn what the true thing looks like. And by learning what the true thing looks like, you're able to recognize things that are false. And so the Apostle Paul is saying, well, here's the gospel. Here's what the true, pure gospel looks like.

And he's been talking about this in terms of God's grace. And so God's grace is God's generous power to do what you can't, right? And that's the definition we've been working off of. That's what we've been grounding ourselves in. So in the first week, we talked about justification, how Christ died on the cross, and in his dying on the cross, he took from you your unrighteousness and gave to you his moral perfection, right?

So that when you stand before God, God does not see you as one who is unrighteous, but he sees you as one who shines like his Son. That's justification. You receive Jesus righteousness. And then in week two, we talked about the promised Holy Spirit, right? How the Apostle Paul, when he preached and the Galatian people believed that they received the Holy Spirit, that miraculous work they experienced, the miraculous work of the Spirit among them, they experienced, like the Spirit testifying to them that they belong to God.

All of this is what happens when the Holy Spirit comes. And in today's passage, Paul emphasizes God's gift of the family of God, what it means to belong to God's family. And so in Galatians 3, 26, 27, it says this, for in Christ Jesus, you all are sons. Or we could read that children of. Now, the reason I think it's important for us to continue saying sons is that when we, when we read the word sons, we are people who live in this culture.

We treat that with very gendered language. And I get it right? And so I want to say something about this, which is when it says sons, it's saying sons and daughters, right? All of us who belong to Jesus. And we need to note that.

But there's a very specific reason that we're talking about being sons of God. And we're going to get to that in just a second. So you all are sons of God through faith. For as many of you were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. So the first thing we have to ask is, why does Paul speak of baptism here?

Like, what is the deal with baptism up to this point? He has been making a point throughout the letter to the Galatians that salvation comes through faith alone. Right. By simply believing in Jesus, we find salvation. That's what matters.

And so is Paul here now saying, well, yeah, it's not faith plus the Jewish law, it's faith plus baptism. Is that what Paul's now saying? And that's not what he's saying. Many have taken this verse to mean that Paul, in fact, did consider baptism to kind of be like the New Covenant replacement for circumcision, what the Jewish law considered to be circumcision, which is your entry into God's people. In the Old Covenant, Circumcision is what made you a part of God's saved people in the New Covenant.

These people would say that, well, now baptism is the thing that makes you a part of God's saved people. But Paul's point the whole time through this book is that faith is what makes you a part of God's saved people. So Paul's point here, and this is what faith is. We've talked about this too. Faith is belief exhibited through active trust.

In fact, Paul mentions to them their experience of the Holy Spirit as evidence of God's saving work. And when you read what the Book of Acts tells us about when Paul proclaimed the gospel to the Galatians, it was not he proclaimed the gospel. They were baptized, and then they received the Holy Spirit. It was Paul proclaimed the gospel, they believed, and they received the Holy Spirit. That's the order that we see.

And so we know that these Galatian believers probably at one point were baptized. But the Book of Acts doesn't even go out of its way to. To say that these Galatian believers were baptized. We can trust that because we know that Paul and Barnabas went and trained elders how to administer the church. And we could probably assume that they performed some kind of baptismal rites, but we just don't have record of that.

What we have record of is they proclaim the gospel, then the Galatians believed, and then they received the Holy Spirit. And so the point is that their baptism is not the first, first or even the most significant evidence of God working among them for them to be saved. So why does Paul mention baptism? Look at the text again with me. For in Christ Jesus, you all are sons of God through faith.

For as many of you were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. So he uses a very important phrase here, and the phrase is sons of God. Up to this point in Paul's letter, the only person who has been called a son of God is Jesus, right? So he is identifying Jesus as the Son of God, but here he changes and he says, well, the same privileges that are attached to Jesus sonship are attached to you. You have the same privileges of being a son of God that Christ himself has.

So what are the privileges then of being a son of the Father? Well, the first thing is that you can know that you are God's child, right? That's, that's significant, that God is your Father, that He loves you as if you were his own, right? You add to that, you gain authority over the evil one. If you were to read the letter from the Apostle John, he speaks of being God's children, and he attaches being God's children to overcoming the evil one, right?

So that's a privilege of being a son of the Father. What is another privilege? Well, you gain authority to declare the presence of the kingdom of God, right? Which means that all ground that you set foot on in the name of Jesus and according to his will is placed where the kingdom can come. You get the joy of eternal fellowship with all who love God, Right?

There's this place in the book of Hebrews where it says that Jesus, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross. That's nuts. How is the cross joy? How could he endure such a thing? How could he look at that and see joy on the other side of it?

Well, it is that he gets to be joined to all those who will love him. That's the joy on the other side of the cross for Jesus. And so for the joy that was set before him, he endured it because he saw people who he loved, who he longed to be joined to him. What else is a privilege of being the Son of the Father? Well, the Son has privilege to access the Father.

Jesus, when he's speaking of prayer, says, you know, whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give it to you like he, you know, it's not like you're going to go up to him and ask him for, like if you ask him for bread, he's not going to give you a stone, he's not going to give you a serpent. How many of you would do that for your own children? How much more generous then is the Father to His children who come to Him? All of this are privileges of what comes with being a son of the Father. Ephesians chapter two says it like this.

It says, but God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, made us alive together with Christ even when we were dead in our trespasses, right? He says, by grace again, there's that generous power thing by Grace, you have been saved in verse six and raised us up and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Which means that wherever Jesus is sitting on his throne right now, those who believe in Jesus have been raised up to sit with Jesus on his throne as well. So whoever you think you are, if you have faith, the Father considers you in a place of high regard, as if you were. As if.

Sorry, as if he were a king and you were a prince or a princess in his kingdom, right? Paul says that that's what you are through faith. You were formerly associated with everything that was bound sin. That was your association. And as a result, you are condemned by the curse of the law.

But you know what? You can have a new association. You can be as Christ a son or a daughter of God. So again, let's look at the text. So, for in Christ, you all are sons of God.

We now know what that word sons of God means through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. So remember, Paul's point is that you are formally associated with dead things, and now you're associated with life, right? You were formerly associated with sin, and now you're associated with redemption.

So if his point is a change of association through the simplicity of faith, then his point cannot also be that baptism is a doorway to faith. He's not somehow turning this into an equation of faith plus baptism equals salvation. What he seems to be doing instead is speaking to those who are baptized about their baptism as an illustration of the new association that they have through faith in Jesus. He's using baptism as an illustration. Now, let me tell you how I know this.

In ancient baptismal rites, it was common practice for people to change their clothes for baptism, right? So you would put off your old clothes, and then you would put on baptismal clothes. That was a common practice. And so what he's referencing here seems to be like this public declaration of, I'm putting off my old self and I'm putting on Christ. When I go into the waters of baptism, I'm saying that my life is not my own.

I do not belong to me. I do not identify with my old way of life. I. I belong to Christ and my association is with Him. He's using baptism as a symbol of taking off an old identity and putting on a new one. It's a symbol of putting off an old father and taking on yourself a new father.

So he's writing to people who have faith in Jesus. And in this group of Galatians, we can Assume that there are two groups of people. There are people who have been baptized, and that there are people who are soon to be baptized, but not quite yet baptized. So it makes sense here for Paul to use baptism as an illustration, because those who have a belief exhibited through an active trust in Jesus will, by that same active faith, obey Jesus, command to be baptized, and they'll make a public declaration of their new association with Christ. But imagine with me, and this is like a game that we like to play, imagine that between the moment that you have faith in Christ and receive the Holy Spirit and the moment that you are baptized, some tragedy would befall you and you would not make it to your baptism.

Well, guess what? You're still saved. Right? That's the point of what this is saying. The faith is the thing that saves you.

And so it goes on in verse 28 and says, There is neither Jew nor Greek, there's neither slave nor free. There's no male and female for you, all are one in Christ Jesus. This is the result of the new association that we have in Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. For what it's worth, this is one of those verses that people love to pluck out of its context without considering the words that surround it.

And so I want to make sure that as we consider any verse of Scripture, that we consider it in its context, in its literary context. So the point is, in the world, we had ways of identifying ourselves previously, right? We identify ourselves with our ethnicity or our national identity or maybe our economic status or our social clout. Those are old ways of identifying. Those are worldly ways of identifying.

But you know what? The cross of Jesus is the great equalizer, right? Right. The high and mighty are humbled by the cross of Jesus, and the humble are exalted by the cross of Jesus. Now, this doesn't mean that Christ erases the reality of diversity, because it's still important in the Book of Revelation that we realize that people from every tribe, tongue and nation have been redeemed by Christ.

So he doesn't erase the reality of diversity. But what it means is that the identifying mark, the thing that is most significant about us is not our ethnicity or our social clout or anything like that, but it is that we have put on Christ.

Like in Christ's kingdom, no one of us has any more privileges with the Father than the other. Like when we come to the Father through faith in Jesus, he sees it as if his very son, Jesus Christ is coming to him. So it's interesting, you know, as we sing, like, hymns and especially older hymns that are written, like, about being a son of God, you might hear a line or two of some of these hymns, say something about, I am God's son. And what we can tend to do is we can tend to criticize that as a holdover of patriarchy. But you need to know that the hymn writers have no concept of, like, gender.

When they wrote that word son there, the writer reason they wrote the word son there is that they were writing about the wonder of being identified with Jesus, the Son of God. So there's this, my favorite hymn, in fact, Be Thou My Vision. And the second verse says, be thou my wisdom, and Thou my true word, Thy ever with me, and thou with me, Lord, Thou my great Father, and I thy true son. That word son is not a statement of gender. That word son is a statement of identification with Jesus Christ.

And so as we transition into chapter four, he kind of emphasizes his point, because this is the new identity that we have, identification with the son. He emphasizes his point by looking at how we used to be identified. So he says this in chapter four. He says, I mean that the heir, the one who's given an inheritance, the son, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave. Though he is the owner of everything, he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father.

This idea of guardians and managers is that rich nobles would hire people to raise their kids for them. And oftentimes you would find that the guardians and the managers were much more harsh even than the father was. And so think of it like this, like a really rich executive, right? And he has children. And as a really rich executive, he has a bunch of employees, right?

And the children and the employees are alike in this. They don't have freedom. Both children and employees of the rich executive don't have freedom. They can't just do whatever they want because the executive hires nannies and tutors to watch over and train the child. And the nannies and tutors, they tell the child what to do.

And so even though that child will one day inherit his father's wealth, until that day he's not truly free. And so Paul has already referred to this concept earlier in Galatians. Chapter three says, before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then the law was our guardian until Christ came. So this means that the law was playing an important role.

We talked about the important role that the Law plays It helps us understand God's holiness. It helps us understand what God values. It also preserved a culture within Israel of a remnant who would be able to recognize the Messiah when he came. Right. Those are all the good things that the law did.

And because of this, the law was important and necessary. But the problem is that the law, by its very existence also created a form of captivity.

He describes this captivity in verse three. He says, in the same way, we also, when we were children, which children means before we had trusted Christ. That's what he's getting at here. We also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. This phrase, elementary principles of the world, we like to translate it in ways that make us feel very smart.

And that's why it's written like that. But some people think of it like a philosophical term. But you just need to know that this like elementary principles thing, it is far more than that. It is a spiritual term for the highest level demonic spirits with inside, like Jewish cosmology, how they understand the way that the world works. The Greek word is stoicheon, and they're speaking of spirits who govern key functions within the sinfully broken world.

That's what the word actually means. The word there in Greek means these high level demonic spirits that control the systems and the processes of the world. And so what Paul is saying is that the law, while it had a valuable benefit, it also became a threat to humanity because it gave the evil spirits that rule the world permission to accuse and corrupt and curse and condemn humanity. Right? Like this is what the law did.

The law is a good thing. The law played a very necessary role. The law showed us how we needed to be forgiven. But the law also gave these spirits permission to accuse and curse and corrupt. We could say it like this.

God gave the law and the demons because they don't play fair. Right? They used the law to enslave us. Right? Because what does the law do?

The law creates clear categories for what God blesses and curses. It describes very clearly the things that God blesses and curses. And these spirits quickly saw that the whole human race all do things that God curses. And so they took advantage of that. And here's the thing about demons.

They are like lawyers, right? Sorry if there's any lawyers in the room, lawyers are not like demons. I just want to reassure you with that. Demons traffic in information and rules in order to use the rules to gain opportunity to steal, kill and destroy. And so the law created clear category for every human being before Christ to belong to the kingdom of darkness.

Now, I have a question. Was God surprised by this? No, God was not surprised by this. He knew that this was happening, that this would happen. In fact, it was a part of his plan that the law would create slavery for not just like one part of the human race, but actually the whole human race.

Because the law also revealed to us a need. And it was a need that we could not meet ourselves. Remember, the theme is God's grace, his power to do the things that we cannot. Right. The need for forgiveness and for cleansing.

The need for God's generous power to enact a transfer of ownership from one kingdom into another kingdom. So verses four and five, go on and say this. These are the most beautiful words in all of scripture, because Paul essentially told the bad news. He just gave, like the really dark part of the story. And then he says in verse four.

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law. Right? So. So we were identified with the curse. We were subject to the ruling spirits of this world.

But. But God had a plan that none of the ruling spirits saw coming right at the right time. He sent his son into a lonely, a lowly major in a bo backwoods village so that his son might, you know, grow up in secrecy and then develop this ministry in the last three years of his life and live a perfect life under the law and never be subjected to its curse and then die in our place for our sin. And his generous power is displayed in the blood of Jesus to do something called redeem us.

The blood of God in the flesh, who never sinned, was spilt to purchase. That's what the word redeem means, to purchase us out of our slavery. And get this, the purchasing of us out of our slavery is so that we might receive adoption as sons.

So you may have thrown yourself just all the way into Satan's camp, like all the way into darkness. You may have committed atrocity. You may have rebelled against God. You may have committed the most evil acts imaginable. Can I tell you something?

God wants you in his family.

Do you know how I know? Because Jesus willingly stayed on that cross until every last drop of his blood was spilt. And at the end, he said, it is finished, which means paid in full. The full price of what needed to be paid in order to free you from your slavery was paid by the blood of Jesus spilled on the cross for your sake. God paid to transfer you out of the kingdom of slavery, out of the kingdom of darkness, in order to clothe you with royal robes and sit you in the seat of high honor with his son, Jesus.

If you believe what that means is that he plucked you out of whatever circumstance that you were in to make you his own child. And so in the final verses, Paul summarizes all of this, all of the aspects of God's generous power, right? So the last three weeks of this that we've been walking through, it all kind of gets summarized. And this amazing statement in verse six, this remarkable idea. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts to cry from within us, abba, Father.

So you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. Abba is an endearing word for dad, right? Think of it like dada. Like when my girls, when they call me the title Dada, right?

They say Dada. Now, I'm not telling you to start calling God Dada, right? Okay, Just letting you know. But I'm just saying when my girls call me Dada, it is always, always, always, because they want to be close to me. Every time they use that title for me, they want to be close to me.

And that's what the word abba means, that I'm speaking to my dad, who I want to be close to, who I want to draw near to. That is what the Holy Spirit has come to do in you. Ultimately, it's to bring you to a place of relating to God like, he's your dad who loves you. And so we said that God gave the law, right? And demons used it to enslave us.

But the beautiful truth of this is that God gave his grace to make us his kids.

Now, some people in this room, you didn't have a good dad.

And so that experience of what it is for God to be a good father to you, it can be harder or more difficult for. For you to picture when you hear the title of dad or father applied to God. You might think of him as aloof because your dad was aloof. Or you might think of him as angry because your dad was angry. Or you might think of him as distant because your dad was distant.

Or you might think of him, well, he has more important things to work on, and he's working on those important things. And so I'm not as valuable. And so that's how you think of him, right? We can, you know, what we can actually do is like, we can imagine God as kind of the transcendent Almighty Father, who sits above all creation, who governs the heavens and who causes the sun to shine. But that's not why he's called Father.

Now. We can think of him that way. And he is that. He is the one who sits above the circle of the earth. He is the one who rules and reigns and is transcendent above everything.

But he's called Father because his desire is that we would want to be close to him. Like, he's our dad, who loves us like we're his kids. That's why he adopted us, right? Like, we were formerly associated with this group. But he has adopted us.

He has paid the price to make us a part of his family. So what, Number one, it's important to say now, you hear this phrase in vaguely religious language often you will hear people say something like, well, you know, we're all God's children. Okay? There's something in that that is true, right? And the true thing is God is the creator of everything.

Right? God is our Creator who loves us. But we need to be careful not to neglect another truth in saying the phrase we are all God's children. Because the reality is, because of our own sinful choices and our own brokenness and our own miswiring, and because of the things that have enslaved us, we actually like, even though God created everything, the Bible describes human beings as belonging to a kingdom of darkness. And so when we say we're all God's children, we actually decrease the significance of what it means that those who believe in Jesus are adopted by God.

So in John chapter one, John chapter one actually says it like this. It says, he came to his own and his own people did not receive him, that Jesus came to his own people and his own people did not receive him. And then it says, but to all who did receive him, he gave the right to become children of God. And so adoption is the only means by which we are able to become God's children. And adoption happens through faith in Jesus Christ.

And so my second, so what is this? You must become like little children. Matthew 18:3, Jesus says, Unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. That is not a suggestion. That's a requirement.

Right. It's not like simply, this is the thing that we can confuse. Like, we think, oh, like, maybe we start as a child and then we grow into maturity. Yeah, we do grow to Christian maturity, but we always have an attitude of being as little children with our Father. Right?

It's a call to live with the Lord in The place of being like a child. That doesn't mean we're childish or we're naive, but we are dependent on our Father. Becoming as a child is not about improving your life somehow to make yourself a acceptable. It's about trusting in Christ and taking His Word at face value. Because when a dad instructs their young children, the children just believe what the dad says.

Being a child is not about impressing God. It's about believing and resting in him as the one who provides everything that you need. Being a child is about believing that you have got the coolest dad in the world and you know his heart, right? And you know that your really cool dad is looking to adopt more kids. He wants more people to be in his family.

And so you're gonna tell people about your father because of the love that he has and because he adopted you and he wants to adopt them too. And if you're here this morning and you've never personally trusted Jesus to make right the things that you had no power to change, would you, like a child, choose to give your life to him and receive the invitation that he's giving you to become a part of his family? I invite you to pray with me, please.

Father, we thank you for the gift of being included in your family and of knowing you as a father.

God and I pray just in relation to Father wounds, of not understanding what it means that you're our dad. Because maybe we didn't have a good dad. Holy Spirit, I ask that you would just heal whatever that picture is and would you show that in those places where a father was lacking in some significant way, could you just reveal how you're a better father to them? Or would you reveal your care and your peace and your promise to those who need to know you and rest in you as Father God, as we turn our attention to the table and to the price that was paid for us to be associated with you, I would you well up gratefulness and thankfulness in our hearts. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen.