Galatians 4

--- Today, we're studying Galatians chapter four in our women's Bible study that it's called Finding Grace. This lesson is built on before and after, and the most important after in a person's life is how we end up relating to God. Do we end up relating to him as a father, or do we relate to him as a lawgiver and as a judge? I want to begin by showing us something from the Old Testament, something from the book of Psalms, because I think it's a little bit common for us to think that God had two personalities in the Bible. In the Old Testament, he's the lawgiver, judgy God, and then in the New Testament, suddenly he turns into like abounding in love. So I want us to start with Psalm 103 that shows us that this was God's character all along, his unchanging character. I'm reading from the NIV, these select verses.

If you struggle with that word fear, then pull out of the New Living Translation, revere him or honor him. The Lord has always desired a relationship with his kids based on grace. So personally for me, the high point of this chapter that we studied is verses six and seven. Let's take a look. God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father, so you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. So what we need to figure out is what the apostle Paul is saying about being moving from a slave to a son. I want to start by a phrase that we often use. We will say to somebody, we will say, stop being such a big baby. We don't say that to our six-month-olds because we expect babies to be babies. That phrase is said to someone who is supposed to be a grown-up, but is acting like a baby. We want grown-ups to act like grown-ups. In your journal, if you went through this passage, you marked with a small letter H those words that identified the less mature spiritual relationship and a capital H with those that represented the mature relationship. Paul was trying to reason with the Galatian Christians here because they had already moved from the small H relationship to the capital H relationship with God. And now the legalists were persuading them to go back to the small H relationship, which didn't make any sense. What Paul wanted to reason with them is they had the privilege now of continuing to grow up in their relationship and not grow down. So chapter three ended with this statement, if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. And we go right into chapter four. It begins this way, verse one, I mean that the heir, as long as he has a child, he's no different than a slave, though he's the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. We can see the association here of the words child and slave. They're interchangeable in this situation because they illustrate a similar station in life. In the same way that a slave does not have a free relationship with his master, a child in this culture, in this context, neither has a free relationship with his father. He's been put under managers, under tutors, under schoolmasters in order that would tell him how to do things, when to do them, how to learn, what to learn until he grew up and then had that free relationship with his father. So in their spiritual life, all the Galatians, they were formerly under some kind of a guardian as well that they answered to just like a slave or a child. They didn't have that free relationship with God until Jesus had come. Now for the Jews, Paul said that the law had been their guardian. We read this last week. Let me show this to you again. Chapter three, verse 23, 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. Okay, so that was the case for the Jews, but what about the Gentiles? They weren't under that law, but who was their guardian? All right, let's go on. Verse three in chapter four, in the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. That is the starting point of all people, enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. The RSV says this, slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe. Paul gave us more insight. If we go to Ephesians chapter two, verses one and two, he talks about our former condition. You were dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked following, look what he says, the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that's now at work in the sons of disobedience. All right, we want to reason this together because this chapter is about before and after. Before we believed in Christ, we followed the course of this world. What does that mean? It means that we were all born into a demanding world. We were all born into a situation that carried demands ruled by the elementary principles of the world. Before Christ, our natural guardians were things like fear and cause and effect and superstition. Now, if you just look through history and if you look at cultures around the world, this is super easy to identify because we've said before that all other religions are based on following the rules. You do it right. You follow the rules. You will be rewarded somehow. No other religion is based on getting what you don't deserve. Man-made religions are based on performance. Even people who say that they don't follow a religion seem to naturally follow a naturalism that if you treat nature properly, it will reward you. And if you treat it recklessly, it will punish you. There's an innate fear of cause and effect or a pride of cause and effect if you think somehow that you got it dialed in and you checked off all the boxes. Today, people might call it karma. If I do good, I can expect to get good things back from the universe. If I do bad, I can expect payback at some point. My actions determine my fate. But also my astrological signs somehow determine my fate too. Those are the basic principles of the universe, the spirits that are at work in our life. Even seemingly Christian religions have superstitions that seem to be attached to them that are, you know, icons and charms and saints that if we pray to them in the right way at the right time with the right repetition, somehow it will bless us instead of the curses that we deserve or the bad things that we deserve. So the point is, we are born into slavery to the elemental spirits of the universe. It is based on fear. There is no relationship of love and acceptance with the universe. It treats us as we deserve. So Paul's reasoning that before the grace of God came in Christ Jesus, both for Jews and Gentiles, they all operated under some kind of guardian. They were either under the guardianship of the law or they were under the basic elemental principles of the world. Same thing for us. Before Christ came, we were all functioning under some kind of innate demands and we felt it and we understood this. And there is no freedom in that. The guardianship of demand is not freedom. So that was the before. Now verse four, we get to the after. Verse four and five, but when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son born of woman, born under the law to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. This is such a wonderful Christmas time verse. I always love this verse at Christmas that shows the before. for and after situation. God came to redeem those of us who were sinking under the demands of the law and lift us up into a place of sonship, a different relationship. Remember, in Psalm 103, remember how the psalmist said, as a father has compassion on his children, the Lord has compassion on those who fear him. So verse 6 goes on to say, and because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father, we're no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. So now the possibility exists for a different kind of a relationship, not a demanding relationship based on that get what you deserve sort of experience, but a family relationship with an inheritance and a father. We are to be heirs. Don't you love those British movies? And the women would always say, oh, for he is to inherit. That's us. For we are to inherit. That is the relationship. Look at how Paul expressed that in Romans, Romans 8, 15.

The problem that the Christians were having is that this contrary gospel tempted them to go back again into fear, into a relationship with fear, pointing them back to the guardian of the law, the guardian which was the law. And you know, if you go that far back, if you go to the law, it's only a skip and a hop to get back to the basic elemental principles of the world. So look at verse 8. Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. But now that you've come to know God, or rather be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world whose slaves you want to be once more? What a sad and damaging thing to turn back, to fall back into fear, to fall away from grace. It can happen to us as well if we lose our grip on grace. So how do we hold tightly to grace? At the end of our last lesson, we mentioned three things. And I think I'll just go over them again. If you missed that, go back to chapter 3 and listen to that. But first, protect our understanding of grace. That's what we're doing in this moment by studying this. We're protecting our understanding. We're reasoning it through. Second of all, praise God for His grace. Thank Him on a regular basis. Talk to Him about it. And just say, I am so glad that I no longer have the weight of getting what I deserve. But I can just have the freedom of my relationship with you. And then promote God's grace in our actions and in our words. Verse 10 tells us what some of the signs were that Paul saw in the Galatians' lives that told them they were going back. Look at verse 10. You observe days and months and seasons and years. I'm afraid I may have labored over you in vain. They were settling back into a formalized relationship with God rather than a family relationship. They were making it more formal, more external. There's total freedom in a family relationship. You can reach out any time you want, day or night, and talk to your family. This happened to us just yesterday. Somebody in our family got a new-to-them car. And they were excited. And let's come show you. And somebody else texts and says, OK, I'll get the pizza. And it's not formal. You don't have to put it on the calendar. You just do it. You connect when you want to connect. But a formal relationship observes days and seasons and years. At the next full moon, we will have a convocation with God. And if we bring the right food and wear the right clothes, somehow we'll have an audience with him. It is not what God intended. But yet, they were reverting back to that. And I presume if this was the Jewish festivals, there's another layer of unreasonableness in it. Because the Jewish days and festivals were all put in place to point to the coming Messiah. You know when you have those little blocks or little thing that says 17 days until Christmas, 16 days until Christmas, 15 days? It's always pointing to Christmastime. Do any of you put out those little things and say, it was 12 days ago was Christmas. It was 13 days ago. No, that's dumb. We wouldn't do that. You don't look back on things like that. You're always looking forward. And that's what these things were supposed to be in the first place. If I spend quite a bit of time in my kitchen, both cooking but studying too, and my husband's in the den, and I don't write a formal letter and send it with recipient acknowledgment or something and send it to him, no, I just call out to him. That is a family relationship. I don't need proof that I communicated with him. We do text sometimes from kitchen to den, but that's a different story. OK, we're going to move on to the middle section of this chapter now. And what I want you to do is I want you to think back about your own teenage years. Because certainly, there was some situation where one of your parents had to get after you for something. In my case, it was after a basketball game in my sophomore year. And I went away thinking that the conversation with my mother went something like, sure, you can go to your friend's house after the basketball game. And she went away with an entirely different perspective of that conversation. So there I was at my friend's house, midnight, and we were having a great time watching a terrible grade B movie. And her mother, my friend's mother, says to me, your mom's on the phone, which right away gets your heart, like you have a sense of guilt that just jumps up into your throat. Well, when we were finally in the same space, what do you suppose that conversation was like? If you're a mother, you've had these conversations, right? It's like, well, I thought you were dead on the side of the road. I thought you got kidnapped. You know, I was stressed, all these kinds of things. And we just, you know, have you ever done that where you both want to wring your kid's neck and hug them at the same time? And eventually in those conversations, there comes a point when the decibels go down and the smile comes on and the parent says, it's just because I love you so much. I can't just, I worry about you because I love you. Like I would never want anything bad to happen to you. That's where we're at when we start verse 12. Look at this. Paul's decibels go way down. He goes, brothers, I entreat you, become as I am. For I also became as you are. You did me no wrong. For it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first. And though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but you received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus. What then has become of your blessedness? The NIV says, what has become of your joy? For I testify to you that if possible, you would have gouged out your eyes and given them to me. Paul loves them so much. And so he's recounting the good old days when they shared that relationship. He goes, it's just because I love you so much that I'm writing this to you. What's become of that relationship we had where you would have gone to great lengths for me? We can't live in both the living room and the courtroom at the same time. The living room is a place of warmth and joy. And the courtroom is a place of fear and guilt. God went to great lengths to allow us to live in the living room relationship with him. And yet, shockingly, somehow we can be convinced to go back to a courtroom relationship. And if we do that through the demands of the law, we have to remember, what was the law for? It was only meant to prove our guilt. And that's what we feel in a courtroom relationship. We feel the guilt. It's not really very different from the fearful demands of the world either, where it's all up to me. I gotta do it the right way. And the pressure mounts and the joy decreases. So look at verse 16. Paul says, have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth? And every mom has said that also. It's like, I am not your enemy here. And verse 19, he says, my. little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth, until Christ is formed in you. I wish I could be present with you now and change my tone, for I am perplexed about you." All right, the remainder of this chapter is a little bit different. Paul is reasoning again. He's the great reasoner, and it requires an understanding of Jewish history. It requires an understanding of the players in God's plan of redemption. I want to give you another little tool for a Bible study that's often very useful. When we run into situations that are challenging to us, we want to go big and go old. Okay? We go big and we go old. Here's what I mean. By going big, you step back and you try your hardest to look at God's entire unfolding plan of redemption all at one time. And by going old, we try to step back into God's plan of redemption, because he put in that, for the Old Testament, or for us, the Old Testament, he placed in there types and shadows and analogies and allegories that help us. That's what Paul is doing for the rest of this chapter. He's going big, and he's going old. So, verse 21, he says, 21. He says, tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? You're so interested in becoming sons of Abraham, do you not listen to this? And now, as I read these next verses, what I'm going to do is we're going to fill in the chart that's also in your study guide. And so, we'll put the chart on in a minute, and just listen. As I read these, we'll try and make sense of it in chart form. Verse 22, for it is written that Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, one by the slave woman, Hagar, and one by a free woman, Sarah. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. Now, this may be interpreted allegorically. These women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, which we know as the Old Covenant. Bearing children for slavery, she's Hagar. And of course, the other represents the New Covenant. Now, Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia. She corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. Now, you brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. That is our spiritual reality because God has given the spirit of his son into our hearts. And it's those final two rows that are going to tell the story, whether we embrace and rely upon the law, which appeals to our flesh, or whether we embrace and rely upon God's grace, which is of the spirit, the promised spirit. So this chapter is all about before and after, going from slavery to freedom, going from the left hand of the chart to the right hand, and never reverting back. Because verse 29 says, just as at that time, he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the spirit. So also it is now. But what does the scripture say? Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman. Do you see that? There is no inheritance through the son of the slave woman, which illustrates there is no freedom of relationship. So brothers, verse 31, we're not children of the slave, but of the free woman. And I just have to take us right into the first verse of the next chapter here. For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Paul would not have said, do not submit again to a yoke of slavery, if it were not possible to do so, to go from the right column back to the left. Is it possible for us to return again to a system, to a formalized relationship, to either the law or the fearful principles of the world? Absolutely. Even if you say to me, I have never once been tempted to go back and follow the laws of Moses. It's like, that's fine. But I want you to look again at the last two columns on our chart. Put them back on the screen for you. Look at those last two columns. Law, grace, flesh, and spirit. Even though you enjoy the freedom of that right-hand column, I guarantee you that a temptation exists to look back into the left column from time to time, tempted to turn our back on the grace-filled relationship in favor of a formal relationship, tempted to turn from the freedom of the spirit in favor of the flesh. Now, we know through this study very well by now what grace is. Grace is God's undeserved kindness and favor toward us. What is the opposite of grace? That helps us understand things sometimes, is to say, well, what's the opposite of that? The opposite is trying to deserve God's kindness and his love. Okay, so we have a word for that. And the word that we use is legalism. Grace and legalism are opposites. Now, sometimes we use the word legalism, I think, inappropriately. We will use it in speech to mean a level of strictness that we don't agree with. And in that case, it can be all over the board. We would say, well, 10 o'clock bedtime is a little legalistic, don't you think? Or I should say curfew time. 10 o'clock curfew time is a little legalistic, don't you think? Well, it might be to you, it might be to you. But that's really not the best use of the word. The best use of the word legalistic or legalism is trying to be innocent by doing something, by following the rules in order to be acceptable to God. This is much more common than we think. This is much more comfortable for us than we want to believe, because this is much more convenient than walking by the Spirit. And we are all susceptible to this. Walking in the Spirit requires humility, and it requires faith, and it requires patience, and it requires a release of control in many ways. So we can see that wanting to revert to something of the law eliminates, it appeals to our pride, it eliminates humility, it doesn't require the waiting, and it maintains a faux sense of control. So you can see why it can be easy for people to be persuaded. Legalism is a step back into childhood, and like we said at the beginning, nobody wants to be around a big baby. So we want to stay in our grown-up situation. Jesus came to bring us the life of freedom so that we are no longer under the, dogged by those fearful expectations, the demands of either the elements of the world or the law. We've been set free to walk in the Spirit, and that is where we're headed in this Bible study. The last two chapters are all about our freedom now to walk in the Spirit. And it's the best part of the study, just like you have an appetizer and a main dish and a dessert, what's your favorite part? The best part is the dessert, right? That's the same thing in this Bible study. We are coming up to the best part. Walking in the Spirit, what it looks like now for us to be free to follow the Lord in walking in the Spirit. Father, I just thank you for all the elements of this particular chapter. And Lord, I thank you that you remind us that we are not impervious to these things coming along. We are not impervious to a desire to formalize our relationship or to rely on the things that we can do, and that we need to protect that understanding of grace in our lives. I pray for each one doing this study and listening, that each would protect that understanding of grace, that living room relationship with their Father, whereby the access is open all the time, a free relationship to come and to cry out, Father, I want to talk. Lord, thank you that you have truly bestowed on us things that we don't deserve, for we are to inherit. And I am so grateful for that. Thank you for our time, Lord, and pray that you would bless each one as she studies. In Jesus' name, amen. Thanks for watching! ---