Galatians 6

Today, we're going to be studying Galatians chapter 6 in our women's Bible study called Finding Grace. We've been highlighting what it means to live by grace, what it means to walk by the Spirit, to be Spirit-led, asking ourselves the question, what does it look like in a woman's life when she is led by the Spirit? And as we finished up last week in Galatians 5, we hit the high point in verse 22, which was the fruit of the Spirit that shows us what can be expected when someone walks by the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. Those fruit, that fruit in our life begins small and it grows toward harvest. It allows us to resemble our Heavenly Father. You know, when we look at little babies, this happens all the time, you look at a one-week-old baby and somebody says, oh, you know, she looks just like her mother. No, she doesn't. Maybe you see that little nose or something and there's a comparison, but it's not until that child grows up that, you know, that you really see that resemblance there. And that's what happens in our lives too. It is baby steps with the fruit of the Spirit. These fruits, some of them relate directly to our relationship with God and many of them relate to our relationship with one another. And that two-word phrase is something that Paul uses six times in chapters five and six that I want to focus on as we go through our lesson today, one another. We might sum up this chapter with the statement, how a woman is keeping in step with the Spirit or how a woman who keeps in step with the Spirit relates to those around her. How does she relate to one another? So we're going to start back a couple of verses in Galatians chapter five. I'll start reading in verse 25 that begins this way.

Verse one,

So here in these verses, we have quite a bit of practical advice for loving one another, relating to one another in the body of Christ. I want to take these seven verses and I want to organize them into four categories. I'll put these on the screen so you can pause if you want to and write them down. But this is how I'm going to reorganize these verses. Restoring others caught in sin, a warning about conceit, envy, and pride, carrying one another's burdens, and really ministering and not just being around ministry. So let's start with restoring others who are caught in a sin, restoring them gently. Christians sin. This will happen. Do you remember my crazy little illustration about the zoo animals? We are in the Asian path. We are staying there and the penguins won't pop up out of nowhere. We had to cross a bridge in order to get there. We are all bridge crossers at some level, so we should not be surprised that someone is caught in a sin. Question is, what do we do? How do we handle that situation? Do we ignore it? Do we pretend like we didn't notice that they sinned? Do we mark them with like a scarlet letter like, well, I can't relate to you any longer because you're a bridge crosser and you sin and so I've crossed you off of my life. You know, how do we relate to them? Well, this passage teaches us that we are to restore them gently. And as we do that, we need to leave time and space for the Holy Spirit to minister and to bring a conviction of sin. The Bible teaches us it's God's kindness that leads us to repentance. And so we see the image of God there in his kindness and look at the fruit of the spirit, kindness and gentleness. When those things are at play, we are able to deal with others gently. There is a warning here, though, about conceit and envy and spiritual pride. The word pride isn't mentioned, but it is described and these are internal foes that we all have that hinder our ability to love one another. In fact, I would say that these probably hinder in direct proportion to our opinion of ourselves. And that's why we begin with the word conceit. So it's first mentioned in 26 of chapter five, and then it's described in the phrase in verse three, if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. Conceit is an excessively favorable opinion of one's own importance, abilities and wit. A person who is always confident in their own opinions and perceptions, sure that we are right. And Jesus did not say, they will know you are my disciples because you always have the right opinion on a matter. He said, they will know you are my disciples by the love that you have for one another. You can see, we can clearly see how conceit leads us to biting and devouring one another. This is how Paul described the situation in the Galatian church, the terrible thing. And it hinders us in keeping in step with the Spirit. So this week, try an experiment. If you are in a, if you have a difference of opinion about someone, try this. Just stop the conversation. Let them win. Let their opinion be the last word and see how easy that is for you. And that might give us some keys if we have this going on in our life. And then he talks about envy, and we all know what that feels like. Envy is always lurking in our relationships. We want to be preferred. We want to be honored when someone has something that we don't have, when someone is gifted in a way that we're not gifted, when someone is honored in a way that we wish we were honored or noticed. It is in our sinful nature for envy to come up in us. It's a natural response. And if we indulge the sinful nature, then we cross the bridge of envy. And the Bible teaches us that love does not envy. And so now we have an opposition to one of the fruits of the Spirit. So that's why we have the warning. And then pride tells us that we are invincible. I am confident that I can cross the bridge because I can handle it. She might not be able to cross it, but I can do this. I can cross bridges. It won't affect me. I can handle it. That is a spiritual pride. And Paul says, watch yourself or you also may be tempted. So we're warned that we're not impervious to sin. And we must be careful lest we indulge our sinful nature in the same way. So these words all help us to be sober-minded at how we truly see ourselves. And how we truly see ourselves should be sinners in the need of the grace of God to lead us in the way that we should go. Well, the third category that I had was to carry one another's burdens. And this is an exhortation to serve others. Now let's be careful. This doesn't say in the church you should expect people to help you carry your burdens because that is a focus on me and what my needs are. What he's saying is you should carry other people's burdens because this is looking outward on what I can do to help meet a need to be others-focused. So in order to do this, to bear one another's burdens, number one, we have to be around people. We have to be around the body of Christ. You cannot be isolated and expect to obey this command. This is one of the reasons we're all so anxious to gather together again, because you can't isolate yourselves and bear one another's burdens. And also we can't help everyone in every situation. And if we try to do that, it will build us toward spiritual pride and deceit, thinking that we're here to save everybody. What does the text say? It says bear one another's burdens. If you have a problem with wanting to help like absolutely everybody that crosses your path, you should probably write the numeral one there. This is our calling. Bear one another's burdens. And when we become adept at that, maybe we can move on to two. But if we try to bear everyone's burdens, we, number one, are wearing ourselves out. We will probably work ourselves up towards spiritual pride. And we are robbing those around us of their blessing to bear one another's burdens as well. Okay, the fourth category was really ministering and not just being around ministry. Now you might think there's a contradiction in these verses because it says, bear one another's burdens and each will have to bear his own load. And you think, well, that's two opposite things. So which one is it? Well, the key here is a phrase in verse four. Look at that. Test his own work. Give an account to God for his own fruit. That is the lens that we view each will have to bear his own load through. When you take a college class and you come in for a final exam, although there's probably some professor out there somewhere that will do it this way, but it is not your expectation that you will come in and all 26 of you are going to work on this test together and you can rely on how everyone studied and you'll all get the same grade. That is not the common expectation. The common expectation is that you come in to take the final exam and you will bear your own load. How you studied for it will show what kind of a grade that you get. You've got to pull your own weight. I find it interesting that right where we're at in culture right now, it is so easy for us as Christians in the church to run around and be busy in ministry, hanging around ministry, and somehow deceive ourselves to think that we are truly ministering because we're merely around it all the time. But we never stop and take this test to bear our own load, until now when ministry has ground to a halt. And now we look at ourselves and we say, huh, how am I ministering? Because the busy, busy, busy has gone away. And this really helps us right now to say, am I really bearing my own load or have I just been hanging out where ministry has been happening? So a couple questions. Are you just hanging around people who are ministering God's love? Or are you actively ministering God's love yourself? What is the sphere of influence that God has placed you in? Are you faithful with that? Are you influencing in your own sphere? Well, let's move on to part two. And we want to continue to look at what a life keeping in step with the Spirit may look like.

So I want to talk about two things from this set of verses. First, how it is that we provide for our teachers and other people in the household of faith. And then we're going to move on to talk about principles of harvest. But first, verse six says, let the one who's taught the word share all good things with the one who teaches. The way I see it, Paul is teaching a continuation here of the ministry that they were familiar with. And they were familiar with, because we've studied the Old Testament, a relationship between the people and the Levitical priests. The priests were to be provided for from the harvest of the people as they came in to bring up their grain and of their meat. It was God's intention that there be a codependent relationship between the priests and his people. The people needed the priests in order to enable them to fulfill God's commandments. And the priests needed the people in order to help them sustain their own living. A similar principle applies to the New Testament. The pastor or the teacher is to feed God's word to the people to enable them to understand the word and to fulfill the call to righteous and victorious living. And the people in return are to share all good things with the pastor teacher to provide for his living. Look at 1 Corinthians 9, 14. Here's how Paul expressed it to another group.

And then in Galatians, verse 10 goes on to say, and as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, especially to those who are of the household of faith. So if you were to take verse 6 and verse 10 and squeeze them together, you see the priorities. First of all, in verse 6, share your harvest with the ones who teach to you. And then as you have harvest left, share it with one another, especially those of the household of faith. So there is the priority for sharing your harvest. These verses have a lot of harvest-oriented words in them. Sowing, reaping, due season. I love, I love the gardening and the agricultural passages in the Bible. I think Jesus loved them too because he used many parables talking about that. But I always love an opportunity to, when we come to a passage and I get to teach on this and I've done multiple retreats using these, I just think it, we are so grounded into agriculture. I think it makes so much sense to us. So I don't want to leave this without just seeing, gleaning as far as we can in there. And so I want to inspire us with what I call the four spiritual laws of the harvest. And I'll put these four in bullet points here. Again, you can pause and write them down if you want to. The first spiritual law is that we reap what we sow. Next we reap in a different season than what we sow. We reap more than we sow. And finally, we can do nothing about last year's harvest, but we can do something about next year's harvest. So let's start with the first one. You reap what you sow. We know that when we buy a packet of radish seeds and we plant them, we will reap radishes or strawberries or whatever it is. The only exception to this is there is a certain brand of delphiniums that actually produce coleus. And I was the one that got that one packet this year. But anyway, that's not the way it's supposed to be. We know that if we sow to please the spirit, from the spirit, we will reap eternal life, an increase of fruit in our lives. And Paul told us, he goes, don't be deceived. God isn't mocked. This is the way it works. You can't trick God and God won't cheat you. This is how things work. The negative is if you sow to please your sinful nature, indulge your sinful nature, if what you do all day long is trying to get across the bridge, it says you will reap corruption. I kind of prefer a different word there, a synonym that I looked up was decay, because I think that that, to me, it goes a little bit easier with what happens to seeds when they don't germinate and produce a crop, either they decay or they dried out or something like that, ruin. So you say to yourself now with sowing and reaping, you say, listen, I thought that a life of grace was not about you get what you deserve kind of a thing. And that's true. This doesn't mean sowing and reaping here, or I should say grace doesn't mean that everything is OK. It doesn't matter what I do. Everybody gets an A. That is not what it means. Grace means that you have gotten an opportunity that you didn't deserve. And that is for a close personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, with all the freedom that you have to sow, however liberally or sparingly or so in whatever way you want to. That is grace. And so we have the opportunity to sow spiritually, however we choose to do it. The second point of the laws of harvest where we reap in a different season than what we sow. Of course, this is obvious. You know that if you plant a watermelon seed today, you're not going to eat watermelon tomorrow. You know, if you plant an apple seed, you're going to have to wait decades to eat a piece of fruit. Harvest requires patient endurance, but patience is hard. And we we know that we don't reap in the same season, but yet sometimes. like we expect it. We expect to reap right away, or we desire to reap right away. And if we don't, we kind of stop being faithful. And that's why Paul said this phrase is such a good verse, let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we will reap if we don't give up. And so we're always encouraging one another, don't give up, don't give up, we will reap in due season. Now the context of this passage is helping one another, but spiritually there are all kinds of applications to this waiting for the harvest. And in a woman's life, one of the biggest applications is in raising the next generation, whether it is our own biological children or spiritual children that we have sort of collected. You know, we invest, we sow in one season, but the harvest is quite a ways off. We are raising friends, we are raising the body of Christ, and it takes a while. So don't give up, we will reap if we do not give up. And there's all sorts of other applications in business and in prayer, praying for those to come to know the Lord. Do not grow weary of doing good. And then the third point is we reap more than we plant. And this is God's grace in agriculture. If you plant one zucchini, it'll probably feed a family of six all summer long. We reap more than what we plant. God designed it this way. I want you to look at Luke chapter 6 verse 38, and it says, give and it will be given to you, or maybe we should say they're so, okay? A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, or with the amount that you sow and plant, it will be measured back to you. We reap a harvest much greater than we sow, and that's because of God's grace. And then finally, the final point is we can do nothing about last year's harvest, but we can do something about next year's harvest. This speaks to regret in life. And we all have regrets, wishing that we had sown differently, wishing that we had sown more liberally, that we had sown more strategically. When we get to the harvest, the quality and the quantity is set. There's nothing you can do about it at that point. But we can make plans to improve the next year's harvest. And so this is both sobering, but it's also both, it's comforting as well, that today I can make plans and I can begin the process of faithfully sowing and cultivating for a future harvest. We all have a new future harvest coming. And if the Lord takes us or we go to heaven before that harvest is in, it won't matter to us. So always this constant season's coming. Don't worry about, you know, don't live in regret over how we sowed in the past. Another harvest is coming. So get busy today. All right, we need to finish this chapter. We're on verse 11.

So in the reprise of his letter here, he returns again to the point of the letter in the first place to the Judaizers who were causing the Galatians so much trouble. And in contrast to the Galatians who were born again and were trying to walk in the sense of the Spirit, were trying to sow to the Spirit to reap the fruit of the Spirit, the Judaizers were sowing to the flesh. What were they doing? They were sowing to the flesh by requiring an adherence to the law, circumcision. Why were they doing it? Well, right here at the end of the letter, Paul is going back to their motives and he was saying one of the reasons they're doing it is because they are fully protected in that left-hand side of the column from the illustration that we've used before, where there are the legal restrictions because no one persecutes people on the side of the law. And who were they trying to influence? Those standing in the column of grace, those who were trying to live in grace, those who were trying to live in the Spirit, to keep in step with the Spirit, to sow to the Spirit. So Paul has been using this entire letter to pull back the shades on these who are troubling them that we've called Judaizers to express their motives, their duplicity, and their lack of grace. And in that verse, he said, what is the only thing that matters? The last three words, a new creation. That is such a good summary. The only thing that matters is that we are a new creation, that we have been born anew, born of the Spirit, that we now belong to Christ. And so he finishes, verse 16, and as for all who walk by this rule that they are a new creation, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God. From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear in my body the marks of Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen. What a fantastic letter. What a great opportunity for us to just walk through this, walk through finding grace, walk through understanding grace, and living in grace. And it truly does bring peace. It brings a sense of peace and understanding to us that is just what we need. The Lord knows just what we need. So let's pray. Father, thank you that you give us just what we need, just when we need it. Lord, you are good. And help us remember that the only thing that matters is a new creation. Lord, I thank you that you have turned us into a new creation. And if there's anyone who's listening that doesn't have that understanding, I just pray right now that you would allow them to just pause and reach up, look up to you and say, I need to be a new creation. I need Jesus in my life. I need to be united with the Spirit of Christ so I too can have that peace and I too can have the fruit of the Spirit and prepare my life for a future harvest, a spiritual harvest that cannot be taken away from me. Father, we thank you for the Bible. We thank you for your Word. And we thank you for the time that we are able and the method that we are able to do this lesson together, to study together. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪