Galatians 2:16-21 | Who Do You Trust? | Don Romano

Well, good morning, Pastor Alex and Andrea are at a conference this weekend. So you have the great joy of hearing me. I mean, I have the great joy of speaking to you this morning.

That was kind of awkward, wasn't it? Awkward.

What's the most awkward thing, you know of?

Taxes? Kind of awkward? Yeah. No, to me, it's the word awkward.

Because when I think about it, awkward. A W, K, W, A R, D. Where did that even come from?

Do you know that there are only eight words in the English language that have that construction with a wkw in them like that? There are only eight. You don't have to think about it. I will list them for you.

Here they are. Awkward.

Awkward.

Awkward. Est. Awkwardly. Awkwardness.

Awkwardnesses.

All right, that last one shouldn't even be in there, right? Because that's just a plural. It can't even really count that one. So maybe there's seven. And actually all the rest of them are just adverbs or adjectives or noun forms of the word awkward.

So there's like three. Like one plus the two I didn't mention yet. The two I didn't mention yet are this. Hawkweed.

Hawkweed, And. Where's the other one? Here?

Hawkweed and some other form of hawkweed. Hawk, weeds, plural. So you can't count that one. So that means there's two. Hawkweed and Awkward.

See, this is. This whole thing is awkward, isn't it?

Yeah. You know what? I kind of agree. I think this went through your head when you heard me say awkward. That's probably more awkward than awkward.

But, you know, according to Merriam Webster, awkwarder is a word. My sense is I say more awkward because awkwarder is awkwarder than awkward.

Yeah. So that's kind of nuts. So what we've done by disqualifying five words out of the eight is, you know, we've come down to three, and we got rid of the hawkweeds, plural. So what are we left with? Hawkweed.

Which isn't that awkward. But awkward is awkward and awkwarder is awkwarder.

You know what? That's even worse than all of the words in the English language that have this construction in them. Qi.

Qi. There are 32 different words in the English language that have that construction with a Q followed by an I. Almost everybody here thought that Q is always followed by u, but it's not followed by me. It's followed by I sometimes. So, okay, so I have something that's awkwarder than the word awkward.

Imagine if Alex stood here one Sunday and he taught something And I came in the next Sunday and I taught that what he taught was wrong. And it's really this way now. Don't worry, I'm not going to do that.

Although he's not here. It's the perfect time. Nah, not going to do it. So it's just. Yeah.

If that happened, if Alex taught one thing one day and I taught the different thing about the same passage the next week, who would you trust? Don't answer that.

It's just an illustration of what awkward feels like. Yeah, Actually, that's exactly the situation that the Christians in the area known as Galatia faced.

Yeah.

Actually, that's why Paul wrote the letter to Galatians. So before we dive into all that, we need to pray.

Because in my thinking, the only thing awkward than awkward is today's passage of scripture. It's Galatians 2, 1121. If you've read through it, you know we need to pray. So stand with me if you will, if you can. Don't feel obligated.

It's okay to sit down while we pray.

Heavenly Father, you made no mistake when, by the Holy Spirit, you spoke through Paul in this portion of the written word. Actually, there's really good reason why it appears the way it appears. And I'm confident that you will ring out of it the moisture that you desire for us to take away today. So, Holy Spirit, we are dependent on you. Please show up this morning and speak into each of our hearts, quicken our understanding and help us to muddle through what it is that we have to get through this morning in order to be able to walk out of here later and be better followers of Christ in whose name we pray.

Amen. Okay, you may be seated. So that was. That was tough. That was hard to get through.

I practiced that for a few seconds and. Because I wanted it to feel awkward.

Today is the third installment of a series that we're calling when the Gospel Advances. This morning we are in Galatians, chapter 2, verses 11 through 21. Fortunately for you, I'm not going to read it to you, but I've told you what it is so that you can go and figure it out.

When the Gospel Advances is the series, but the title of this message is, who do you trust when leaders drift? Who do you trust when leaders drift? So thus my question. If Alex did this and I did that, who would you trust?

You got to trust the word of God, because Alex may drift in one direction and I may drift in another.

So that blows your answer out of the water. Right? Okay.

When the Gospel advances, that is, when the good news of salvation through faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary and his subsequent resurrection as news of that goes out into the world as if it were the only way to be saved, it flies in the face of any other teaching of what salvation might be or how it happens. To tell you the truth about me, and I don't have the privilege of going here in the book of Galatians, but over the next several weeks, Alex will unpack Paul's masterful argument as to why faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary and in his subsequent resurrection is the only way to be saved. There you go. So he gets that benefit. I have to wade through this mud, and I'm really kind of excited about it because I kind of think this way that Paul was writing, and I'll get to that in a second.

But this series, when the Gospel Advances is kind of an exploration as to how Satan resists the gospel getting out into the world. It's amazing to me that in this book of Galatians, which is probably the first letter written to any of the churches in the New Testament. In this letter, it deals with doctrinal issue that arose only a handful of years after the resurrection. And so much of the rest of the New Testament is also about dealing with corrupted doctrine, corrupted teaching.

That actually is strong evidence that the enemy has employed the same tactic since the Garden of Eden.

He has always attempted to steer people away from God from the very beginning, and he does it with the same methodology. Do you recall the tactic that Satan used in the garden with Eve?

Has God really said, you shall not eat of any tree of the garden? Those were Satan's words in questioning Eve. But do you see what he did there? He successfully used the phrase, you shall not eat from any tree.

What God actually said was, from any tree of the garden you may eat freely, except for one. See, Satan took what God said and said the opposite words. Even though he phrased it as a question, he planted this seed of doubt.

So who do you trust?

Even Eve knew that you trust God, for she answered Satan, saying, from the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat. But from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, don't eat of it or touch it, or you will die.

Now, Satan is pretty crafty.

He saw his mistake. He misquoted God intentionally. But the way he did it let Eve answer in God's defense.

So Satan Being crafty, did not make that statement again or that mistake again. He simply inserted a lie as a statement, not as a question. His exact next words were, and I'm going to go backwards and read the end of Eve's response and then say what Satan said. Eve said, God has said, you shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die. Satan's next words were not die.

God knows that in the day you eat it, you will be like him, knowing good and evil, not die like God.

A false teaching, a lie.

Since Eve did not understand what a lie was, for she had not eaten the fruit from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she just kind of trusted. She responded by accepting the new teaching as true and rejected the actual truth and the truth teller since Eve. Let's see with it. That's exactly what was going on in Galatia, by the way, Pastor Alex has been talking about it for the first two messages in this series. That brings us to where we are in Galatians 2 today, verses 11 through 21.

And like I said, I'm not going to read it. I'm just going to kind of summarize the activity that's going on there because basically it's this.

Alex has mentioned that we're dealing with a bunch of guys who are called the Judaizers. They're basically people dedicated to the law of Moses and they are making arguments as a lawyer would make an argument. So Paul being a Pharisee of the Pharisees, which puts him like in the top tier of lawyer argument making, he responds in like way. He makes this big long argument the way a lawyer would make an argument. And us poor mortals aren't in on it.

So it's difficult for us to follow his reasoning. It's not impossible, it's just difficult. After all, we're not trained in the law. We today are trained in grace.

So these false teachers who had crept into the church in Galatia.

Were teaching some things. And when they were teaching these things, Paul identified two characteristics which Alex has pointed out. The first one is he saw danger. He wasn't in danger. The people in Galatia who Paul loved were in danger.

The false teaching that was creeping in was actually keeping people from being saved.

Now the false teaching that was creeping in basically said, salvation is all good, but you need to know how to get there. And you get there by keeping the law.

Yeah, Paul saw that and he goes like, wait a minute, this is a false gospel. This is not the gospel. And he actually goes on to speak to the Galatians and say, how come you're falling for this? This is not what you heard from me at the very beginning. And Alex has already made the argument that Paul made.

What I taught you is not something I made up. I received it directly from God in a vision. And I waited a long time before I went down to Jerusalem and talked to the apostles and said, hey, this is what I'm teaching. And the apostles said, yeah, that's right. That's our testimony too.

So when these guys, these judaizers were saying, hey, you have to keep the law and actually kind of become a Jew before you can get saved, Paul is saying, wait a minute, that's not the gospel. What I told you before is the gospel.

That was a major problem because it was actually keeping people from. From coming to Christ. Who wants to turn toward all of the requirements of the law of Moses? Nobody I know of.

So what these judaizers were doing was they were kind of adding something to the gospel, saying that, oh yeah, faith in Jesus is good if you follow the law. So they were actually doing the same thing that Satan was doing in the garden. They were bringing in some false teaching and kind of making it sound like it made good sense, when in fact it didn't.

The second thing Paul saw going on was that the Galatians had no way to test this new teaching. And so two weeks ago, Alex told us how Paul proved that the original message was the true message. He talked about three witnesses. He said, find two or three witnesses that confirm one another. And he identified, Alex, identified these three witnesses for us.

The first one was the activity of the Holy Spirit. I mean, if the Holy Spirit is there and people are speaking in tongues and miracles are happening and people are being saved, you can tell that's the true message. The second witness, divine revelation, actually he said them in the opposite direction. Divine revelation. What God has revealed, said or done, like Jesus said about himself, along with the activity of Holy Spirit, these are powerful evidences that a thing might be true.

But these two things can be imitated. They might not really be saying what we think they're saying. So let's bring in a third witness and in this case, its alignment with the apostles teaching. So when Paul told the Gospel to the people of Galatia, they responded in faith. They were saved, they were baptized.

The Holy Spirit was working. This was a great thing, but it didn't quite prove what was the true message and what was the lie. So Paul had to make this whole argument about the apostles supported what I said. And he spent the last chapter and a half of this book indicating that there was danger that appeared in the form of false teaching about salvation so that some might not be saved. So that brings us right up to chapter two, verse 11.

And that whole thing about false teaching creeping in would be bad enough. If false teachers were distorting the Gospel, that would be bad enough. But something worse was going on. Of the three witnesses. Remember the three witnesses?

What if one of them had changed his mind? Worse yet, what if the one that changed his mind was one of the apostles?

That would be a bad thing. That would be awkward.

But that's exactly what happened at Galatia. Peter, you remember Peter, right?

If everybody falls away, Lord, I won't fall away. That guy.

So here's what's going on in this passage of Scripture. The same men who were teaching that you must first become Jews before you can be saved, they were teaching that Christians should observe all the requirements of the law. And one of the ways they measured, if you were really Jewish, is that you would keep the requirements of the law. Like, don't eat with Gentiles because that makes you ungentiles are unclean. They don't have the law of Moses.

They can't figure out what they need to do in order to be clean. They don't make the sacrifices. They're just Gentiles.

We are the chosen people of God. We have his word. We have the law. We are not sinners like them.

So if you ate with unclean Gentiles, you were obviously not keeping the law of Moses. And you could not be saved because to eat with the unclean made you unclean. And this is what they're teaching. Never mind that Peter had joined them. He used to eat with Gentiles.

But when these guys showed up, the passage today says Peter was intimidated. And he kind of slowly moved away from eating with Gentiles to refusing to eat with the Galatian believers. In fact, in Acts chapter 10, just to tell you where Peter had originally come from, In Acts chapter 10, there is a long story about how God moved Peter. Peter, to understand that Gentiles could be born again, just like Jews.

Peter actually had dealings with a Roman named Cornelius. Remember that name.

Not only that, with Cornelius, whole family. Paul had a vision before he ever met Cornelius. In fact, like maybe earlier that day or the day before, had a vision in which he was on the top of a house, which was a common place to be. And he was tired, so he took a nap. And while he's napping, he has this dream about a sheet being lowered down from heaven.

It opens up and there's all kinds of unclean animals in there. And he hears a voice, okay, Peter, rise up, kill and eat. He goes, no way. Nothing unclean has ever entered my mouth. And the same thing happened again.

The message was what I have considered to be clean. No longer consider unclean. Next day, he met Cornelius. Actually, he met some guys who were sent by Cornelius. And they said, come with us.

Somebody wants to talk to you. Peter was hesitant, but he realized because of this vision, I need to go with these guys. That was part of the vision.

So Peter accompanied them to Cornelius House.

He preached the gospel. And in Acts 10:44, while Peter was still speaking the Gospel, the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who were listening to the message. So there you have it, the first two witnesses, right? You have what God declared you have the actions of the Holy Spirit.

The circumcised believers, it says, who were there were amazed because Gentiles had received the Holy Spirit just as Jews had.

That's an amazing thing. It's kind of awkward.

And then Cornelius did this interesting thing. He said, stay with me a few days. So Peter did. He stayed with Cornelius a few days and returned to Jerusalem to tell the story about how God had saved some Gentiles and the Holy Spirit came down and just. It was the same thing Peter said as what happened to us in Acts 11, 17, 18.

Here's Peter's conclusion. Therefore, if God gave to them the same gift he gave to us also, after believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I, that I could stand in God's way?

When they heard this, they quieted down and glorified God, saying, well, then God has granted to the Gentiles also the repentance that leads to life. Kind of a half hearted acceptance. Well, then, okay, God knows what he's doing.

Well, that was Peter's original teaching about what the Gospel is. Believe in Jesus Christ and you will be saved.

By the time Paul wrote Galatians 2:11, Peter had drifted away from that vision and that experience and that teaching.

He slowly retreated from his original position and began treating Gentile believers as unclean, making a division in Christ. It was a terrible thing. It was an awkward thing.

Peter stopped eating with the Gentile believers. He acquiesced to the men who came in, teaching the Gentiles must become Jews before they can be saved, the Judaizers. This was a big deal. This was a really big deal. Because what it did was it changed the Gospel message.

Peter had to be confronted, because this was actually the same thing that Satan had done regarding what it means to eat fruit in a garden. He perverted what God said and led Eve astray. So if that's going on with the gospel, how can people ever be saved? I think this was the enemy's strategy in sending these Judaizers to Galatia. He wanted to do the same thing he did in the garden with Eve and plant this idea and allow it to bear its own fruit.

Well, if that's what's going on here, then we need to ask the question that we ask every single week. So what?

So what? I mean, how does that apply in our lives today? And so I ask you the question, who do you trust?

There are many voices out there today claiming to be bringing the truth.

You can find them all over the radio. You can find them all over the Internet. You just find them out there.

Some of them are truly followers of Jesus. And just like Peter, some of them have drifted away from the Gospel or from any of the rest of the doctrines we discover in the New Testament. On the other hand, several of them have not drifted away from the Gospel or from the New Testament doctrines, which are basically the Old Testament acts. So it's the teaching of Scripture. So what do we do?

How do we make sense of these things that are out there? Some people who are not saved, obviously telling you this is what God means. Some people who are saved but have kind of drifted away from certain doctrines and other people who are saved and not drifting.

By the way, that thing in the middle where people are born again and drift away, don't think that these people aren't saved just because they. They've made an error. They're doing exactly what Peter had done. They're no different from Peter in that regard, except for this. Peter saw it and he knew he was drifting away from it.

But here's the thing that happened to Peter afterwards. Paul confronted him. He uses these words. Paul says, I confronted Peter because he stood condemned.

Paul thought, I have no option. Nobody will ever be saved again. If the gospel is distorted. I have to confront this. This is serious stuff again.

So I confronted Peter because he stood condemned. And he uses this language. He goes along later and says he wasn't walking straightforwardly. I told my wife I wouldn't say this, but I'm going to say it anyway. That term walking straightforwardly, that's a medical term that refers to orthopedics today.

It basically says, your body's out of alignment. You can't walk the way you were designed to walk. Peter is not walking in the faith he originally started walking in.

Well, you know, the good thing about this is that Peter, once he was confronted, he repented, and he turned back to the original truth of the gospel.

And if you think that, well, maybe Peter just kept on drifting away. No, that's not what happened. Check it out. I recommend read 1st and 2nd Peter and see what he says there. And although it's not in Scripture, it's in traditions outside of Scripture.

Explore Peter's death.

You'll figure it out. He repented. He absolutely went back to the original gospel. Well, at this point, in Galatians, at the end of chapter two, moving into chapter three, Paul, in order to address the Galatians and say all of this stuff that I've told you, you have to deal with it. In order to address the Galatians, he does this.

He pulls out his best Pharisee. I mean, he was a Pharisee before he was saved. He pulls out his best Pharisee, he reverts back to thinking and arguing like a Pharisee, like a lawy. That's what he was. By training, he was a lawyer.

And so because he was dealing with guys who were making arguments about the law, he goes like, you want to talk about the law? Let me tell you about the law, okay? Because I was ahead of my peers, I was like, when it comes to being a Pharisee, I was a Pharisee's Pharisee.

And he comes out and he starts making this legal argument, which we have a really difficult time just reading through and trying to comprehend. But it's a masterful argument about the gospel not changing from what it was at the very beginning.

He even starts this way, you foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, who has so grabbed onto your thinking that somehow you're looking at this lie and thinking it's that original truth? Are you blind? Are you bewitched?

So for us, we have to know how to recognize false teaching and how to avoid it. But most of all, we need to understand how to call people who have drifted back out of their false teaching to the true gospel.

How do we do that? First, we can only do it if we know the true gospel ourselves. So when it comes to so what if all these things are true? What does that mean for us? That means we have to know the true gospel.

We have to know God's word. In Second Timothy, Paul said this. Second Timothy 2:15, diligently study to show yourself approved as a workman of God. Who accurately handles the word of Truth. He says, go back.

Go back to the source, learn the source, and then move forward.

People may change.

God and his Word do not change. It's written down. What's written is written. It does not change. Second thing we need to do is when we hear false teachers, especially if there's somebody we know is great, but maybe drifted a little bit in one point or another, we have to do the awkward thing and talk to them.

Actually, we have to do the awkward thing.

We have to call them back to the truth.

Third thing, Peter needed the approval of other people, the Judaizers. We have to avoid that.

We need the approval of God. It is better to have a clear conscience toward God than to be accepted by people, by humans. And the fourth thing is we need to remember that the primary goal of all these things is reconciliation. We want to be at peace with one another and with God. That's what God wants, too.

Just read John 14, 17, especially 17, and that will tell you Jesus heart as he's talking to the Father about unity among believers. And then he, you know, later, earlier he had said this. This is the way everyone will know that you are my followers if you love one another. So if we love one another and we see each other, you know, drifting off course a little bit, what are we going to do?

No, we're gonna go over there, grab on, say, hey, wait a minute, I've been noticing, and let's get back together onto the main course. Don't just rail against those who have drifted.

Reject the lie, but love and be winsome toward the person. That's our job. Remember James 15. I'm sorry, James 5, 19, 20. There are not 15 chapters in James.

Remember James 5, 19 and 20. My brethren, if any among you strays from the truth and one turns him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

That word for sins at the end, that's about error, missing the mark, going off course.

If you turn someone who strays back to the course, you cover it for them.

And that's really it. That's the what ifs. Let me just quickly review them for you.

Know the gospel yourself. Study, work at it. It isn't easy, but do it. When you hear false teaching, engage it.

Avoid needing the approval of people. Seek the approval of God. And fourth, remember, the goal is reconciliation. Actually, the goal is bigger than reconciliation because of what Jesus said. This is the way that everyone will know that you're my followers because you love one another.

That's the goal. The goal is that. That everyone may have this awareness that you are my disciple, which comes with the gospel.

And the gospel is faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary and in his subsequent resurrection.

And in doing so, we will satisfy the purpose for which God saved us.