I need to make some announcements about as we get started. You can go ahead and turn to Galatians 6. I need to make some announcements about the preaching schedule starting next Sunday. we will start the traditional Christmas messages, or Advent messages, or depending on where that finds you. If you don't celebrate Christmas, you'll start the four messages about God, the doctrine of God sending His Son into the world, however you want to look at it. But traditionally, we only had four. We're going to have five, and the reason for that is Christmas Day falls on a Sunday and so that put The final of the Christmas messages, too terribly far away for some, they were not able to agree with that. And so they wanted one closer to Christmas, so we'll cancel the Wednesday service of that week. And we'll meet on that Thursday for a fifth message, so that Thursday, and we'll cancel that Sunday. morning. As far as Wednesdays go, of course, most of us know we're three messages into the Ecclesiastes series, and so if you're feeling too upbeat and encouraged and you want to come, be discouraged. We offer that to you. You want to make sure you avail yourself of those discouraging messages. Ironically, they've brought lots of laughter to lots of people, lots of joy to many. But speaking of vanity, we come now to the last, the fortieth and final message on the book of Galatians. And it would be vain, the definition of vanity is to have no profit in something. It would be vain if we spent 40 sermons in the book of Galatians and had nothing to show for it. And when I started to think about this, it reminded me of a time back when we were meeting in Holmes. I told Alexa about this. a week ago, I think, or something, and it had been reminding me of that as I saw the last message coming. They had put in Maymay in some dance, was it dance or gymnastics or something, isn't it one of those? And anyway, there was one Wednesday night, and they were like, show them what you learned, Maymay, or whatever. And she just did a flip. On the couch, she just flipped over. And then Liam, who had no dance classes or anything, got up and did the flip. And it was just this kind of funny joke of, like, after all the dance, like, that's what they had to show. She could do a flip, just like a kid who hadn't been through the dance class. We don't want to be in the same position as we would have been in had we never even gone through. We want to have something to show for it. And that's really what chapter 6 is about, as Paul lands the plane, as it were, in Galatians 6. What he's really focusing on is what your life should look like, what you should have to show for having gotten this gospel into your soul, if you've been paying attention to any at all. And so the first sermon in 6 is what it will look like if the gospel has hit you, sort of the nerve of your soul has been tapped like a knee tap and a jerk reaction. The first is, in the first sermon, verses 1 to 5, is you'll become a restorer, and a gentle, humble, selfless one at that. In the second message, we saw verses 6 to 10, that you'll become a giver, and a generous, consistent one. That it's impossible to worship God for giving His Son and not becoming a giver. yourself. And then in the third one, verses 11 to 15, we saw that you'll be a boaster, but not just any boaster like the one we just sung about, an accomplished boaster, a skilled boaster. All men boast, but you will find yourself saying it is vanity to boast in anything other than Christ. And now we come to the final difference today. And that is you will respond by walking the gospel line, verses 16 to 18. Let's read it together. Verse 16 to 18. And those who will walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God. From now on, let no one cause trouble for me, for I bear on my body the brand marks of Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brethren. Amen. Let's pray. Lord, I have one simple prayer, and I know You like it because You inspired it through Paul right here at the end. That all that I do and say, all that we listen to, it might be to that end, and at that end might be effectual. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ may be with our spirits. In His name I pray, Amen. I Walk the Line is a song written by Johnny Cash in 1956, as some of you know. It uses the idiom, walk the line, which comes out in a lot of different ways depending on who you're speaking to. It can refer to towing the line, straightening up, behaving yourself. keeping the rules, adhering to some form of law, some form of standard of morality, staying within bounds. It was Cash's declaration to do so. So I wrote this song. And if you know the rest of his story, you know that, sadly, he did not walk the line, but transgressed it. in many ways. I bring that up not to beat up on Cash, but to say if you know your own story, you know that you too have had similar moments in your life where you resolve to quote walk the line, but you didn't. You too have gone the way of cash because you have a conscience that tells you you need to walk the line. You can't get it out of you. You can't cut it out of you like Katniss's tracker. It's there. It doesn't matter how many drugs, how much sleep, how much sickness, how much alcohol, how much religion. It does not get quenched. It's an unquenchable fire in which all the waters are the works of men. Never put out. It is there, there, there, there, there. And you have it. And the way you know you have it is you have a guilty conscience. And if you've ever hidden anything, you have known a guilty conscience. And all men have it. So what was behind Ellen DeGeneres' People's Choice Awards speech, which we began this series with, was the point of being human, she said. And of that much, her theology is accurate. It is the point of being human that we ought to do what is right and we ought to not do what is wrong. But it is the problem of being human nowadays that you have not done what is right, and you have done what is wrong, and you are left with a guilty conscience. You set out to walk the line. Maybe you wanted to be a good dad. Maybe you wanted to be a good wife. Maybe you wanted to be a good parent, a good grandparent, a good employee. It may not even have been religious at all, but you set some line up for yourself, some Romans 7 experience where this is how I'm going to live, and you found that It is indeed not how you lived. And what we've been seeing in Galatians is summed up for us in this one final message is this, there is another line you can walk. There are two ways of keeping the rules. One is you can walk the moral line. The other is you can walk the gospel line. And that's what we have before us in verses 16 to 18. Paul sets this before us in two parts. The first part, the very beginning of verse 16, focuses on the response of walking the gospel line in the rest of the text, the results of walking the gospel line. So we'll take them as we typically do in that order. So point number one, the response of walking the gospel line. Just notice the idiom first of all. He mentions walking this rule or those who will walk by this rule. Now, the word rule is the Greek word canon, and so we get canon from that. We talk about the canon of Scripture, the rule of our faith and practice. Really, the word comes from a stick or a rod and is similar to our word cane. And so we'll refer to a cane pole, but the word cane actually comes from the Greek word canon. It's spelled with a K, not a C. But it just refers to a rod or a stick for measuring. So we talk about measuring up, or like Johnny Cash did, walking the line, keeping the rules. That's the idiom. So Paul is saying here at the end, odd way to end a letter about freedom. Those who follow the law, may they have peace. Strange thing to say. So what rule do you think he's referring to? You'll get a reward for that one day, Monique. So what rule is he suggesting we follow? I said it's an odd way to end the whole beginning of this thing, as y'all are going the way of law, y'all are departing from the gospel, and then the ending is, peace be upon those that follow the rule. So we have to ask, what rule is he speaking of? Well, he refers to it as this rule. And those who will walk by," notice the definite pronoun, this rule. That implies it is a definite rule, a specific rule, as opposed to other rules. And secondly, it implies it's something he just got through saying. And those who will walk by this rule. So we go to verse 15. What did he just get through saying? Well, in verse 15, he just got through saying that neither circumcision is anything nor uncircumcision but a new creation. What he just got through saying was being religious or irreligious is nothing but new creation. Or to say it differently, he just got through saying neither human working or not working means anything but a new creation. Or to say it differently, he just got through saying whether you grew up in church and you have a church background or not, it means nothing. Or he's saying if you walked morally upright outwardly in WWJD and all of this for 15 years, and you don't even know, like when you heard the word Job, you thought it was job. You don't know anything about the Bible. You and this guy are equal. That rule, that one, that nothing, neither human working or not working matters. And so he puts it not just working and not working to say human behavior, human energy, human effort is 100% absolutely excluded. from salvation. Your cells and the protons and neutrons in your body have zero, and the emotions and the affections in your soul have zero to do with salvation. They are not in any way the foundation of salvation. As a matter of fact, The works that were needed and necessary to send you to heaven or to hell were done before you were ever born, before you were ever even here, because they were done by one of two men, Adam or Christ, both of whom lived and worked and finished their works before you were here. So he's saying, neither working nor not working matters, but new creation. And we said, well, what was that? Well, you go back to verse 14, it was the new creation brought about by the cross work of Christ. So what Paul is saying when he says, those who will walk by this rule, he's being ultra-sarcastic. That's why he's ending a letter on freedom saying, this rule. He's saying, you want a rule to follow? Here's the rule. This is the rule of Christianity. Working and not working mean nothing but a new creation brought about by the cross-working of Christ. That's the rule for Christianity. And those who walk by that rule have peace, mercy, stability, and grace. So how do you walk by this rule? It means you talk about it. That truth, that whole statement of verse 14 and 15, it means you sing hymns like the ones we just sang. It means if someone asks you, how do you know that you're saved? Nothing of you comes out of your mouth. What comes out of your mouth, it baffles me, so many people have been in church so long, and how do you know you're going to heaven? And if anything of you comes out of your mouth, you are lost at worst. or fell on your head on the concrete on the way to the meeting at best. Something is wrong. Because in Philippians 3, Paul assumes every single Christian puts no confidence in the flesh and glories in Christ Jesus. And these are the true people of God. And they carry out Jeremiah's forecast of these people all the time. Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord. And so Paul says, may it never be that I would boast, because his human works didn't do anything. And so we said the cross is like the wardrobe. It's like the portal into the new creation. You can do whatever you want to do here in this meeting. You can have a buzz if you like. You can cry if you like. They cry at the theater. It doesn't bring about a new creation. There's only one work. that ever actually changed the trees, and the leaves, and the stars, and the cucumbers, and the snails, and the whole creation, and it was the work of Christ. You can have however many great meetings you want. Paul had no place for it if it didn't change reality. Only, only the work of Christ brings about new creation. and therefore circumcision or uncircumcision, religious or not, working or not, means nothing. Means nothing. So, that's the rule to keep. You want a rule to follow? Follow the rule that rule keeping and rule following mean nothing. That's the rule. But only the rule keeping of Christ matters. Now this is good news. for everyone, like I said, who's not been able to walk the line. But I want you to go to Romans 3. It's been about a decade since we've been in Romans 3. And I want you to go to Romans 3, and I want to show you what even makes this better good news. is that this is for people like David. This good news, this work of Christ, this rule to follow, is even for people like David. If you turn to Romans 3, verse 21. In Romans 1, 2, and 3, all the way up to 3, verse 20, Paul's basically been sinking the titanic ship of man's attempt to achieve righteousness before God. So he does that first so that they'll reach out for the lifeboat of Christ in verse 21. So, but now, now the light at the end of this dark tunnel, apart from the loss, apart from your working, same thing, the righteousness of God, that's what you need in your conscience. You know you don't have it, you have the unrighteousness of men. That's what you have. You need the righteousness of God. It has been manifested. It's appeared. It's been witnessed by the Law and the Prophets. Moses talked about it. He covered his face. He said, look at what's coming. Those verses. Even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ. So that's how you get it. For all those who believe, there's no distinction. If you've got a church background, you know, 323, for all have sinned, fall short of the glory of God, and you're being justified, declared righteous as a gift through His grace. And you're like, where is David in this? Just keep reading. Through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation. There. Start right there. Now, propitiation is not in the urban dictionary, I know. So probably most of us have not just been rolling it off our tongue all week. Propitiation means to satiate, to satisfy, to turn away the wrath of someone. To be propitious is to be favorable towards someone. It's to smile. It's to be happy towards someone. The Greek word is helasmos. We get hilarious from it. It's not a hilarious word. It's a holy word, but that gets you kind of in the feel when you're in a mood of hilarity, you're not mad. And that kind of gets you in the ballpark, but we need to get to the certain seat. To be propitious, it means that Christ died mainly for God, not simply for men. And if you've never heard that distinguished, you've never understood the cross. He died for God in order that He might be offered to men. In other words, the problem of religion, this is why only Christianity is true, the problem is not you. The problem is there is a being in the universe who made you who is angry. And he's called the Almighty. And he says in Ezekiel, when He puts you in hell, though you scream and cry out, He will not listen, He will not have pity. And Paul therefore says, behold, the kindness and the severity of God. Both. People all the time say, baby is born, God is good. God is good. Yes, He's good. But because He's good, He's severe. He is severely good and infinitely good. And that is the problem precisely, that He's good. How can I dwell? As Isaiah said, who can dwell with the everlasting burnings? Who can ascend the holy hill? You will ascend it. You will go. Amos says, prepare to meet your God. You do have a meeting with Him. are Hebrews, the author of Hebrews, causing Him with whom we have to do. So there is no fleeing. There is no running. There is no calling for rocks to fall. There is no hiding from the face of Him who sat upon the throne. You will go. And so the problem is there, and therefore Christ died not to appease the Romans, not to appease the Jews. He died to appease the wrath of God. And you're still asking, where is David in this text? Notice what he says after this. If that's the way He died, if that's the way Jesus died, why did He die? This is His work. Now stay with me. We're talking about His work. And over in Galatians, we're saying this is the rule in Christianity, to glory in His work, none in ours. Okay? So we're looking at His work. And one of the glories of it is that it's for people in the past, like David. Notice it here. This work, verse 25, was to demonstrate His righteousness. So God needed to demonstrate that He was righteous. Why? Because in the forbearance of God, He passed over the sins previously committed. For the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just. and the justifier, the one who has faith in Jesus. So what do you mean he passed over? So here's why I say it's good news that this is for David, for you today. David, who was David? A man after God's own heart. Yes, right. But what else was David? An adulterer and a murderer. And what Paul is saying is Christ died under the wrath of God, to pay for the sins previously committed, so that God would not only be the justifier, but be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. So what makes it unjust? Oh, simply this, David is, and we read it in the prayer meeting, all these promises like, David is God's man. He's after His heart. How? How? How is God just? And by the way, the point of this is this trumps the bad week you had, I promise. This trumps the bad parenting you had, and all of that. So we could just put all this away. Christians all the time saying, I'm the worst person ever. You know, I burnt supper. David committed adultery and murder. Okay, so no, you're not, just stop that. You're not even JV on the team of the most wicked people who ever lived. David committed, and some of you are saying, well, I got adultery, but you don't have murder. That's a significant step. Right? Adultery, murder, big step. David has both. God says, yes. I mean, think of the devil. Really? David? David? The adulterer? The murderer? And what would David be able to say? Yeah. Yeah. See the cross of Jesus Christ for His wrath. That's the answer. You're this, this, this, and this. They silence the accuser with the blood of the Lamb. See the cross. Yes, see the cross. And so this is Christianity. This is Christianity. Kevin Williams tells this story of one preacher who was going on and on, emphasizing this and that and the other about suffering and everything. He tells this story about people suffering in the Roman Colosseum, and this little girl getting thrown to the lions. And sometimes this happens, and I've been there and done that, and sometimes some of you have. You get into this, like, Ignatius mindset. This is a church father who just wanted to be ground up, like the wheat for Christ or something. You get into this mindset where you just put yourself in front of the train of persecution, almost. You're just happy about it. And no one who's not suffering as much as you are, they're all lost, and they don't know God, and you get into that mindset. So this guy's in this mindset, and he's telling these stories about these Christians who've suffered in Rome. And then he gets through in his sermon telling an illustration, he looks at the audience, and of course a bunch of Westerners in sight. So, what is your story? And he says, you better have a story. And Kevin Williams says, if he was in the audience at that time, he would have said, Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine, heir of salvation, purchased of God, born of the Spirit, washed in His blood. This is my story, and this is my song, praising my Savior. All the day long. So when someone hits you with rules, you're not keeping this rule, you're not following that rule, you stepped out of bounds there, Paul would say, but those who walk by this rule, this is the rule. So I call it walking the gospel line versus walking the moral line. And that is how we're to respond to the book of Galatians, walk the gospel line. Now what would be the results? Well, look at the rest of the verse. Peace, four things, peace, mercy, stability, and grace. First, peace. Those who will walk by this rule, Those who will glory in the cross that way. Those who will not tolerate anybody putting upon them something they have to do to please God, but they'll continue to glory in Christ. Those human beings will have peace. And the Greek word peace means to join, and it has a word picture with it. It's two people together in harmony, facing each other versus having enmity and strife with each other. That's peace. And so always in Paul's letters, he's writing grace and peace, grace and peace. This is something God wants us to get a hold of. And it's not simply the peace of God like Philippians 4.7. There's a difference between that and peace with God in Romans 5.1. Therefore, having been justified by faith, We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. That's different than saying, and may the peace of God guard your heart. Let me illustrate it to you this way. Suppose cops are chasing, in a high-speed chase, a criminal, murdered somebody, whatever, they're chasing him down. And suppose the guy all of a sudden stops after all the damage he's done. He's like, you know what, I'm going to give up. He gets out of his car and he says, I surrender. I'm not going to do it anymore. Or the cops are just going to say, oh, OK. Get in the car and go the other way. No, no. The problem is two-sided. The problem of religion is two-sided. Just for the sake of argument, even if Christ had never come and died, even if you repented and believed, you would still go to hell. It is not what we do. The problem is the anger and wrath of God that must be put away. And His gun is out. Or put it in biblical language, He has bent His bow and pointed it at your head. Today, the wrath of God on those who do not believe abides upon them. Today, when you sleep, wrath is abiding upon you. Until you're in Jesus Christ, wrath is abiding upon you. Every day, in the deer stand, at the family gathering, when you're putting the food in the plate about to eat, the wrath abides upon you. Always, always, always, every day, angry with the wicked. Every day. But Paul is saying, those who've come under this rule, those who believe that, they get Noah's blessing. Remember the rainbow? Do you know what that's supposed to look like? Do you know why it's like that? Because a bow would hang on the wall like that. It's meant to be a picture of a literal bow. God has put away His bow. And there's peace. That's why it's called the rainbow. God used rain as a bow and did damage with it. And so when you walk by this rule, you will know objective peace with God. God is no longer angry. God is propitiated. His wrath is put away and I have peace with God because of the work of Christ. Second thing you'll have is mercy. He says, those who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God. The little term Israel of God is not a literal term, but it's just the same as calling you the seed of Abraham, all the things we've seen in Galatians, that by believing in Jesus Christ, being united to Him, you become the real true people of God. But He says you'll have mercy. Mercy refers to pity. Mercy is pity. Pitying someone in a helpless state. So the idea is not that you pursued Him. It's not that you'll have this idea that, you know, I pursued Him and it seemed good to me. And the good news about this is like when we were praying in the prayer meeting, we were talking about like remember who we were. If you would have told people at my high school that I would be a preacher, they would have all fell out of the chairs. Every one of them fell out of the chairs. My poor mom, I beat people up in church camp. Like, that was who I was. They had to come get her in the lunchroom because I was just beating some guy up at church camp. And when they had true love weights, I was like sitting in the back like, I'm not signing that. Like, in the youth meeting, that's who I was. Okay? And so what happens is God had mercy on me. I wasn't predisposed towards it. I wasn't kind of had a little twitch of life like a lizard that was almost dead. I was dead. And He had mercy. Listen to these verses. Look at Titus chapter 2. Listen to how He describes it. Titus 2. Look at Titus 3. Titus 3 verse 3. So I just want to encourage you today, if you're foolish and disobedient and enslaved, and you don't know any verses, and you can't get it right, and you can't walk the line, listen to this. Titus 3.3, For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice, in envy, hateful, hating one another. If you want to do good parenting, you at some point sit down with your child and you say, do you know the mommy and daddy that you look to? And you think, man, they're so good. No, at one point in time, I was hateful, hating others, spent my life in malice. That will encourage the child to not have this law to like be the mature Christian you are as a parent. They're trying to be that. Tell them, no, I wasn't always this. Get out from under that law. I was not always this. And that's who I was. But look at verse 4. But then they all got their life together, turned over a new leaf and cleaned up. No. But when the kindness of God our Savior And His love for mankind appeared. He saved us. Not, and He wants you to get it, not on the basis, it would have been enough just to say, He saved us. But man wants to grab something. So he says, I'm going to get descriptive. And I'm going to have points to my sermon. The sermon, He Saved Us. Point one. Not on the basis of deeds, which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy. There it is. Mercy. When you're not relying on what you do, and you're just saying, I was in the back, not wanting to sign true love weights, and He just saved me, like I was the guy that hated those Christian t-shirts. Hated them, you know, like... The one like, Real Men Love Jesus, and True Love, all the stuff we had, WWJD, and The Lord's Gym t-shirt. Y'all remember those? And then it's like God just decided one day to say, Yeah, Jeffrey, here's your Lord's Gym t-shirt. Saved you. According to His mercy. by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He trickled, no, poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that I went from not caring to being the person who would have torn off the roof to get to Christ. That's what he does. And so that's mercy. Ephesians 2 puts it in another way. Ephesians 2, look at the mercy there. He talks about the mercy of God there. Ephesians 2, 1-3, he basically says, you were dead, demonic, and doomed. Dead, led around by Satan, and doomed under the wrath of God. And once again, They all got really resolved. They all went to the AA meeting. They all saw how bad sin was for them. And they got their life together. No, but God being rich in mercy. because of His great love with which He loved us even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ." And then he says, pause on the video, he gets the remote and hit pause, and he says, by grace you have been saved. So it's not the picture, sometimes the preachers preach and they say, well the picture is, You know, you were really in a bind, and your boat was down in the river, and you were falling and taking on water, and God threw you the rope, and by faith, you grabbed the rope. He pulled you to the side, and He saved you. No, no, no, no. You were going and taking on water. You fell in the water. You died. and sunk to the bottom and lay dead. He dove in, breathed into your breath and nostrils the breath of life, and you came alive and came up. That is grace. That is mercy. That is what the people who don't rely on their own works will enjoy, peace and mercy. When you walk, By this rule, you will know mercy. You will sing songs like Christ hath regarded my helpless estate and hath shed his own blood for my soul. You'll say with Ezekiel, he passed by and saw me squirming in my blood. and said, live. He saw you not caring about morality. He saw you like tormenting your mother like I did. You had nothing. There was nothing. There was no vital signs. And He just said, live. Made you alive. That's mercy. And those will enjoy this. But they'll enjoy two other things. I say stability because of what he says in verse 17. Let me show you why I say stability. He likes stability. I thought he was talking about brand marks. Well, look at verse 17. Paul says, from now on, let no one trouble me. No one cause trouble. So back in 1-7, he talked about this, these false teachers were disturbing you. And remember it was the word terrasso, to shake back and forth. And so there's an image of your soul, the waters being real calm and peaceful, and just like someone does a cannonball into the swimming pool of your soul. and shake it up. They throw a rule in, and it's just shaking up. And you lose your assurance. And I talked about riding with Trevor that day, and his driving like this, and I just wanted to throw up. And that's what it is in the spiritual realm. And trouble here in the end is used to that woman with the alabaster jar. Remember, he's like, Judas, why do you trouble her? And the man in the parable who's in his bed and he's waking up and he says, don't trouble me, I and my children are asleep. Or the unrighteous judge whom the woman troubled because she troubled me. It just means to bother, just kind of make the Christian life Hard. Like Paul got tired of having to go back through this. Quit troubling me. This is how it works. It's not like this. It's like this. And sometimes you just build through a sermon like this a sandcastle of truth. And some false teacher comes along and just wipes it away. And there's the people wondering, does God set me or not? Like Paul was tired of the false teachers. And so he says, no one trouble anymore. And so what it does when you're focused on your performance, your assurance is a rollercoaster. And some of you have lots of dips in one day in your rollercoaster. Like you did good in your first class and it's up. Second class, it goes down. First sale went good, it goes up. First half of the day is bad, it goes down. all the way throughout the day. Instead, we should sing the song, I Dare Not Trust the Sweetest Frame, but wholly lean on Jesus' name. What that means by the sweetest frame, I've said before and I'll say it again, like in Philippians 3.1, it's no trouble for me. I like it. I love to tell the story to those who know it best. Seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest. But here it is. When he says, I dare not trust the sweetest frame, he means when I preached good and I endured good and I was meek and lowly of heart and I did the best I did, he's saying, I'm not even going there. Glory in Christ. Because that is going to change. I don't care how good a day you had today. I'm happy you had a good day. It's a good day. It's a terrible idol. Just let it be a good day. Don't let it be an object of faith. And so when you walk by this rule, you'll have stability. Your assurance will be as solid as a rock which does not change. And then Paul gives a little proof. So I do want to make a small comment about his proof. He says, four, I bear on my body the brand marks of Jesus. Now these scars, there's been lots of medieval crazy people, like you have this stigmata that goes on, it's a Greek word, stigmata, where people start having these crazy wounds appearing on them, just like Jesus and all this kind of stuff. That's not what Paul is talking about. He's talking about like in 2 Corinthians 4 when he says, always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus. He means his sufferings that he endured as a Christian. And he's being very sarcastic again. He's saying, you want a mark on the body to prove you belong to the people of God? You want to be hung up on circumcision? Here's the mark that proves I'm following the Crucified One. by scars. And so it's used of slaves and stuff, like branding a cow. These marks, it shows someone. You have an image of this on the movie Gladiator where the slave trader sees the marks on his arm right here, spore, and he knows he was from a legion of soldiers. We've seen in Galatians over and over again. If you glory in the cross, somebody in this world is not going to glory in you. If you glory in the cross over against human performance, if you start talking like that, if you start saying, neither your church service is anything, that's not how to win friends and influence people. And you can't change it. Unless you think you're more holy than Christ. But He said you're not greater than Him, you'll suffer. And so there's nothing you can do about it. You can't smile big. You can't say it in assault. There is the bottom level where you go, where you're being as gentle, and loving, and soft, and meek, and not breaking a bruised reed, and putting your hand around the wick, and it blows up on you. It happens. Christ was crucified not because He sinned, but because of what He said. So you're going to get something. It's like wearing a Boston Red Sox uniform to a Yankees game. To glory in Christ. in the midst of a world full of pride, it's not going to be looked at good. It will get at least a raised eyebrow at the family dinner. At worst, a raised fist. but something. So over and over, Paul has said this. Galatians 5.11, But I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted in the stumbling block? The cross has been abolished. So test yourself here. What scars do you have? Has anybody ever been crossed with you because of the cross? Ever? ever, a raised eyebrow, an aggravation, something. If they have, you're branded. You must really be gloried in the cross. And you can take that as a sign of your salvation. that you're glorying in it. And so what you need to ask is not, sometimes in suffering you're like, yeah, all these sufferings, and I know the sufferings of Adam can be sanctified for the Christian and used for God's own good purposes, but at the moment, we're not asking about sufferings you got from Adam. Like diseases, and skint knees, and tears, and somebody died. We're asking sufferings you got from Christ. Any brand marks from those. Any enemies from that. Any people that's been aggravated with you from that, if you don't, then you simply have not opened your mouth and gloried in the cross in this fallen world. Because in this fallen world, you will have scars. So you can't be like, yeah, he's preaching about peace and mercy and grace. Yeah, for those who say, may it never be that I would boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. For those, It's not just a little neat message for anybody who happened to walk in here, but only for those. So the last one, grace. He says, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brethren. Amen. That's a deep prayer wish, isn't it? that it be with your spirit, that it get down in you, that it be well with your soul as we sing. Grace, what is it? We've learned from this book it's to be thought of as the opposite of law. Chapter 1, verse 6, I'm amazed that you're so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel. So there's grace in this other gospel. Chapter 2, verse 21, I do not nullify the grace of God. For if righteousness comes through the law, Christ died needlessly. Again, grace. in law. Chapter 5 verse 4, you who are seeking to be justified by law have been severed from Christ, you have fallen from grace. Grace in law, opposites. So when He says, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, He means something opposite of law. He means you to think of it that way. He gave us that analogy in 3.15 to 3.18 of an inheritance. And He's saying what God gave to Abraham is like a grandfather that passes away, and you find out then, Pawpaw left me all this stuff. I didn't even know. He just said, I want, you know, I want Jeffrey to have this. And I'm like, look at all this stuff I get. And he says, no one stands up in the family gathering and says, yeah, he wanted you to have that, but you got to make straight A's until you get out of high school to get it. Nobody does that. Nobody says, I don't care what Paul Paul wanted, I'm adding a rule to this, and you've got to do this, and you've got to be this, this, and this, or you can't have what. Who dishonors a person like that? Well, how much more God, who just gave it to Abraham by means of a promise. Paul said, he didn't come later with Moses and say, now make straight A's or you can't get it. No, He just did that so that you would fail and be a miserable wretch like the end of Romans 7 and say, who will save me? So He did that to point you to the promise He gave Abraham. So it's the difference between an inheritance received and earned. That's the difference. That's the way he wants us to think of it. Law is a way. This is it. There are two ways to walk the line. There's a moral line to walk. There's a gospel line to walk. There are two approaches to God. You have to get this. There is the religion of law. It is a religion of man. It is a religion of effort. Is it a religion for the strong, the strong-willed, all their efforts and all their works? It is a religion of thou shalt and thou shalt not. Over here is a religion of God, of grace, of promise, of I will, I will, I will. Over here is performance. Over here is promise. Over here is do. Over here is done. Over here is start. Over here is it's finished. Law says do. Grace says it's done. And when you walk by that rule, you'll know grace. So when you walk by that rule, you'll have peace, mercy, stability, and grace. This Friday, we watched a new movie with Annabelle. She came in there Thursday and said, Dad, I got a surprise. You want it tonight or tomorrow night? I'm like, well, I want it tonight. She said, well, let's play rock, paper, scissors for it. And I lost all three times. It was two out of three. She just did the third one just to run the score up. And I didn't even win that one. And then she's just like her grandmother, can't keep a surprise. And so she gets to beat me. She says, I'll give it to you anyway. So she just couldn't handle. And it was Finding Dory. That was the movie. So we always watch a movie on Friday night. And that was the one we were to watch. And as you know, Finding Dory found its way in the sermon. Dory suffers from short term memory loss. It's a little fish in this movie. It opens up that way. Hi, I'm Dory. Suffer from short-term memory loss. And of course, because of that, she gets lost from her parents and the whole movie is about her finding her way back. to her parents, and the last way she found her way back into all the journey, at the very end, at the end of herself, she noticed something that her parents always said they would do in case she ever got lost. They put shells in a line so she could follow them, and she's done all that she could, and she looks down, and she sees a shell, and then there's another shell, And then she notices they're in a line, and her little tail speeds up, and she goes fast, fast, fast, fast, looking at all the shells, and she comes up, and lo and behold, there are her two parents. And they had been, every day, sending out lines from their house in every direction through the whole ocean of shells, just working, adding more and more shells, so that if one day she saw that she could find our way back home, and I thought, thank you for the illustration. The Koran of Galatians, the reason it was written is, if you're a Christian, you too suffer from short-term memory loss. You might even forget this sermon before the day is over and be back under law in your mind all over again. Forgetting. And so you too can get lost. Remember, the whole series is called Deer Recovering Pharisees. We're former Pharisees, but we're not out of the woods all the way. There's some of the Pharisees still left in us. And so, Galatians, they started well. They got entangled. And that is the danger for the rest of your life. You can forget. and be lost and find yourself away from the warm, loving embrace of your Father, and the peace and mercy and stability and grace, and find yourself aggravated and biting and devouring one another, like Paul says, and where then is that sense of blessing in your soul? You're not praising your Savior all the day long. You're mad and angry and keeping the rules, and who's not keeping my rule? All of that can happen. And you can find yourself lost, or you can fall into sin, and you can need to be restored. Wherever you find yourself for the rest of your Christian life, having gone through the book of Galatians, Wherever you find yourself in the ocean of life, you ought to be able to find the line of shells and find your way back to the peace, to the mercy, to the stability, and to the grace of your heavenly father. He himself has left a line called the gospel line. Those who will walk by this rule. whatever kind of week you had. Can you see the shells? Can you just stop and look down and see the truth and see the shells and follow them back? And before you know it, you'll be back in your Father's warm embrace, back to the peace, back to the mercy, back to the stability, back to the grace. So I'll end the book of Galatians the way Paul did. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brethren. Amen.