For generations now, people have enjoyed reading the Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol at Christmastime and going to plays or seeing some of the movies that have been made about this great work. And it really is, I wouldn't get all my doctrine from Charles Dickens, but it really is a marvelous story of repentance, and judgment, and of redemption, of the second chance, and that sort of thing. But I want to just kind of open, as we look at Galatians chapter 4, and continuing our series of the Christmas in the epistles, I want to open with a little scene from there, and you will recall it. I don't think I have to give you a spoiler alert. I think you've probably all read it or seen enough of The Christmas Carol to know what's going on, but Ebenezer Scrooge in his miserly manner has gone home, and he's lit his dark with just a few candles in order to save money, and he is visited by this ghost of his old business partner, Jacob Marley. And Jacob is, of course, covered with chains, and Scrooge recognizes him as Jacob Marley's ghost, and Marley is there to tell him that he's going to be visited by three more spirits that's going to show him the past, present, and the future. and will serve as a warning for him to repent. But one of the things Marley says here is as he appears to Scrooge, I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link and yard by yard. I guarded it all on my own free will and by my own free will I wore it. In life my spirit never rose beyond the limits of our money-changing house. Now I am doomed to wander without rest or peace, incessant torture and remorse." The sad thing about Jacob Marley is that he remained in bondage under the law. He was never adopted as a son of God and became saved. So he is doomed for all eternity to walk around covered by the chains of his own sin. But that is not the case for the Christian. We're going to see today in Galatians chapter 4. But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order that he might redeem those who are under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father, in faith we turn to your holy word. We believe that it is inspired by the Holy Spirit through the prophets and the apostles. We have a holy confidence about it, but we're also weak in our own nature. We sometimes wander about without hope and without faith, but I pray, God, that you would take this word and apply it to our hearts. Interpret it for us. Show us great truth. Give us hope. Give us faith. We want to be as those who walk in the joy of the Lord with a holy confidence that our God reigns. We want to be as those who walk as sons and daughters of the living God with the holy confidence that our Father loves us. So bless us now, we pray, in Christ's name. Amen. Please do turn to the book of Galatians, and we are going to look just at chapter 4. One of these days, we're going to go through the entire letter. I have not preached through Galatians yet. We have preached through Romans, and it's been said that Galatians is like Romans, only shorter, and Paul wrote it when he was mad. There's probably some truth to that. He calls them, you foolish Galatians, because what was happening here in the churches of Galatia is Paul had gone in and he had preached the grace of Jesus Christ and the liberty and the freedom that comes with that great position of being a Christian. But after he left the scene, people known as Judaizers, those people who were in some ways Christian, but they believed that you had to become a Jew first to become a Christian, they came in and they snatched away the liberty of the Galatians. And they said, the business of grace and all that stuff's good, but you also need to keep the Law of Moses. You need to be circumcised. You need to have your children circumcised. You need to keep all of the festivals of the Jews. And you need to be able to do these different things that were such a burden to the Jewish church. So Paul comes back on the scene and he reminds them they have fallen from grace. They have become legalistic in their approach. And He gives us some amazing doctrine to teach us about the position of the law in relation to grace. But we will pick up here in chapter 4. We'll look a little bit at chapter 3 as well. But here now, the Word of the Lord in Galatians chapter 4, and we're going to look at verses 1 through 7 this morning. Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave, although he is owner of everything. But he is under guardians and managers until the date set by the father. So also we, while we are children, were held in bondage under the elemental things of the world. But when the fullness of time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order that He might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. Now, you might be a little thrown off by some of the characteristics of this passage relating to the culture at the time, but I think if we can work through those things, you're gonna find this probably one of the most encouraging passages of all of Holy Scripture. It really explains the reason for Christmas and why we celebrate what we celebrate. And first of all, we're going to see here a preparation for the time there in verses 1 through 3. And he goes through this analogy here of a child who is an heir, perhaps of a wealthy family, but as that child is still childish and still young, he is being trained by a master who is often actually a servant. And he is being tutored by that person to be able to learn, to obtain an education, in order to be able to manage the household affairs, in order to be able to speak publicly and do arithmetic and keep books and be able to train horses and use farming equipment or whatever else would be involved with managing the household so that child can take possession of that household when they become of age and become a legitimate heir. So he talks about here this, as long as a child, you're a child, and he's kind of talking about here this relationship with the child and the slave, but he wants to make the point that That person is immature at the point. They're under guardians and managers, he says here. Now, you'll get more understanding if you go back to the previous verses to this passage. In Galatians 3, beginning in verse 24, Paul says, "...therefore the law has become a tutor to lead us to Christ, that we may be justified by faith." But now that faith has come, we're no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ. For all of you who are baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free man. There is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. If and if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise." So he speaks of the law as being like this guardian. The person that's training the child is like the law, and then he's going to compare the situation where the law eventually gets to where the person has learned under the precepts. They've come to grace, and then they are going to actually be the heir of the whole household. Therefore, the law no longer is their tutor. It has introduced them to salvation through Christ. And he really, again, he speaks of this in the cultural context, which is very clear to his readers, but maybe less clear with us. We have this thing now in our modern culture called delayed adolescence. And what that's a fancy way of saying, it just takes a long time to grow up in our age now. That there's an immaturity that's come into our age that's keeping people from being able to take responsibility early on. And you see that growing more and more. And perhaps it's partly because of the demands of modern education and the technical world and that kind of thing. But some of it is, and parents inadvertently protect their children from growing up. which is not unreasonable in some ways, but it really does create something of a problem. That wasn't the case in these ancient cultures. For instance, in Jewish culture, and this is still the practice today, at age 12 you would have your Bar Mitzvah, where a child would become a son of the law. And you actually have in the ceremony where the father stands up and says to the son, I now relinquish my my responsibility here. I am no longer responsible for this child. He is now of age where he takes responsibility himself, and that Jewish child will say, yes, I now claim the responsibility for myself. So that was the Jewish culture. In Greek culture, around the 18th birthday, there would be a festival of Apertura, And that's where a person becomes sort of a cadet in training for 2 years, and at the end of that time, their long hair that's been allowed to grow long during their childhood is all cut off, and then it's burned as a sacrifice to the god Apollo. And it's a symbol that they are now of age. In Roman culture, there would be a ceremony both for boys and for girls where they would take their toys and their dolls, and they would sacrifice those to the gods. That one's a real bummer to me. Of course, I have G.I. Joes in my study here at church, but the idea that you have to burn all your toys to the gods, but it makes the point, doesn't it? You know, Paul even says, I've done away with childish things. This is probably where he got that idea. So you have this idea of movement and culture. And I suppose we have, through our educational system, something similar. But there is a point where somebody has to get over what he calls the elemental things of this world. And there's probably a combination of thought in that. He gives us some more about that in Galatians as we go on in chapter 4, but also in Colossians. But it's probably a combination of worldliness, sex, power, money, combined with religious ceremony. And what he really is pointing out is these are false messiahs, that there's an immaturity. When someone is taking on a false messiah, they are grasping the elementary principles of the world, and that's what had happened with the Judaizers. The Judaizers had come in with some false ideas, some untruth, some religious ceremony that seemed to have some substance to it, but really didn't. And they were actually coming in and stealing away true Christianity under the guise of a religious system, based upon, perhaps, works and legalism and even human pride. Paul goes on in chapter 4, beginning in verse 8. However, at that time you did not know God, for you were slaves to those who by nature know gods at all. But now you have come to know God, or rather, to be known by God, how is it that you turn back to, then, here's that term again, that weak and worthless, elemental things to which you desire to be enslaved all over again?" What they're basically saying is that while you were a non-Christian, You were, in a sense, a slave. You were like a child under a tutor. You could not possess your inheritance, even though you were an heir. But now that you've become a Christian, you've become an heir. Why would you want to go back and live like a slave again? Well, it's a good question, isn't it? Why is it that you are fascinated by the old way of slavery? Why do you want to go back to Egypt when you've been given citizenship in the Promised Land? It says the same kind of thing in Colossians 2. See to it that no one takes you captive, there's that slavery talk again, captive through philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. There are so many competitors for your mind, so many competitors for your passions, so many competitors for your money, for your time, and they're all screaming And Paul's saying, you've got to be discerning. Some of these things are just empty philosophies. They're based on hubris. They're based on pride. They're based on so-called knowledge. But any knowledge that denies God is foolishness. It doesn't matter what your IQ is. So there's a warning here. He says that we were held in bondage. Why would we want to go back as slaves? at one point in time while Scrooge is talking to Joseph Marley, he looks out the window, and he sees kind of a terrifying sight. He sees hundreds of phantoms flying over London, and they're all moaning and groaning, and they're all covered with chains, just like Joseph Marley was. And Scrooge actually recognized a number of them. And one of the things that it said in there is that they're floating around, and they're in bondage over the weight of their sin. And then since they want to do good, but they can't. It even points out one particular phantom that was weighed down by a large safe, and he was trying to help a woman with her child, but it was impossible for him to help. It was too late. He had chosen bondage instead of freedom. So he was helpless to do any good. We don't want to be in a situation like that. The Galatian church was in danger of falling back into a legalistic slavery. Instead of doing things out of the love of Christ, they were doing things in order to get credit for eternal salvation. So there was a real danger here. And then we have the appearance of time in verses 4-5 that speaks so much about the wonders of Christmas. But when the fullness of time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order that He might redeem those who are under the law, that we might receive adoption as sons. So, even though the law held sway for so many, many years, there was a time appointed in history where God was going to reveal to us the coming of His Son, the coming of Messiah, that was going to make His great grace possible to us. So there's a time to be a slave, and then there's a time to be a free person, and that time has come. And the heir is little better than a slave while they're being under this tutor, but then when they get beyond the tutor of the law, they actually have possession of the entire household. But you know, one of the things about the fullness of time, there was a waiting period. There was a very long waiting period. And I said this in my prayer earlier, but you have received so much more than Isaiah received, than Jeremiah received, than even Moses received. Those men longed for the time for the coming of Messiah. Micah spoke of it. Zechariah spoke of it. They were longing for that time, but they did not come. We have this wonderful luxury of being able to look back 2,000 years and see it did come. It did come. We're surrounded by the symbols of Christmas even today. But you don't rush adoption. We have several families in here that have adopted people. They could tell you how lengthy that process is, how even expensive that process is. You just don't do it overnight. It takes amount of preparation, amount of time. You don't rush a birth. It takes nine months to be able to carry a child to full time. Well, God, in God's own timing, He was not in a rush. But that time did come in the fullness of times. What was He doing to get the world ready for the coming of the Messiah. Well, he was doing bunches of things. First of all, he was using the prophets to foretell that he was coming. He uses the prophecy of the virgin birth and the coming of the suffering servant in Isaiah. He uses the prophecy of Micah and that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem. He uses the New Covenant that we read earlier as part of our assurance of pardon from Jeremiah and Ezekiel. So he was preparing the Word to speak to people, to predict these things as proof of the coming of Messiah, the legitimacy of Jesus Christ. Finally, he also was working on the hearts of his people. You know, if you go back, and we're going through the book of Judges on Sunday night, and bless the people for coming on Sunday night, because Judges, you know, it's not Philippians. It's not the most cheerful of book. You have this repeated cycle of sin and despair and crying out and God raises up a judge and the judge delivers the people from their oppressors and then the people, they do real well for a while, then that judge dies and then the people fall back into sin. And what was the big sin? What was the big sin that they kept falling back into? Idolatry. They were worshiping idols. They were worshiping Baal and Asherah. And this continued to plague Israel. But finally, through the Babylonian captivity, when the king of Babylon came in, sacked Jerusalem, burned the temple, took everybody off as slaves, showed them a country where idols hold sway, the people said, we got it. We got it. And when they returned with Ezra and with Nehemiah, they never fell back into idolatry again. Do you realize that? They worshiped. They were monotheistic from then on. They finally, as a nation, as a people, as a religion, they learned their lesson about idolatry. So they were ready to worship the one true God. The Hebrews had a completed Old Testament through the work of scribes such as Ezra. He had prepared the people through an understanding of the law and the national statehood of Israel. He had prepared for the coming of Christ through the conquest of Alexander the Great. You realize that? You realize that Alexander the Great was a pawn in the hand of Yahweh? Because Alexander the Great was an evangelical for Hellenism, for the Greek culture. And he spread the Greek culture all over the Mediterranean world, and all down through Egypt, and over to Persia. And with that culture came trade, and with that trade came a desire to learn Greek. So you literally had almost a reversal of the Tower of Babel, where the whole Mediterranean basin could speak Greek. So you had a common language among very different kinds of people. So the New Testament was, of course, written in Greek, and everybody would be able to read it. Then you had the coming of the Romans. Well, that's bad news, right? And the Romans were kind of brutish. I mean, we've seen Gladiator, right? They're kind of cruel. Well, they also did a really good job with infrastructure. You know, we've got friends in England, and I remember we were up in the Lake District one time, and we were on this particular road, and I remember Pastor Aldrich was with me, and he says, now, there, you can see this is a Roman road. And I said, well, now, how do you know this is a Roman road? He said, because it's straight. as opposed to the, I guess, the roads that the Scots and the Saxons and the Normans built. They were to be all crooked. The Romans, they had it straight. There are people today in Europe using Roman roads, using Roman roads that were built by the Romans, using bridges that were built by the Romans. These folks could just build, and they built aqueducts, and they built Roman roads and things, so travel became easy. There was a Roman peace. So you could travel on the seas without having to worry about piracy. There was a common economic system. There was the merging of cultures were coming together. You had international trade. You had a Roman law system that was universal around the Mediterranean basin. Then you had another thing. With the Babylonian captivity, with the Jews being spread throughout the Mediterranean world, you had the rise of the synagogues. Whenever you would have, I think it was 12 Jewish men, they could form their own synagogue. In other words, that was the model for the early church. You didn't have to go to the temple to sacrifice. You could learn the Word of God in a local synagogue, which became the model for the local church. And, of course, wherever Paul went, he would start off at the synagogue. You also had the preparation of the messenger that was spoken of in the very close of the Old Testament in Malachi. and coming of John the Baptist. You also had the preparation of individuals of Mary and Joseph and others. So the coming of the fullness of time was perfect. It was a perfect time for the Son to come and to free us from the bondage, in a sense, So he speaks of this mystery of the Incarnation in two different phrases. It says, God sent forth His Son. This speaks of the preexistence, the deity of God, and how He came out in the emptying of the Son into human flesh. Then you had that He was born of a woman. Well, that makes Him just like other men, right? I mean, all men are born of women. He was human. So he had this deity, he had this preexistence, but he also was human as well. So those are those two things that are held together at Christmastime. He is both God, but he's also human. Then you had two purpose clauses in verse 5 here. Why we do this? And this explains the reason for Christmas. In order that he might redeem those who were under the law. You know, it's interesting. Again, I teach a class at Anderson University, and I think there's 33 students in there. It's a class on the Bible, and I threw this term out a few weeks ago. I said, what does it mean to be redeemed? What is redemption? And most of those children had grown up in church, and they had heard that word a million times, and they said, well, it means to be saved. Well, but what does it mean? Do you know what it means? It means to be called out of the slave market. That's where it comes from. The market, it means to be, it's a combination of ex-agorazo. Agora was the market, so you're called out of that market. So it's the term that would use when you had a, there was a slave in a market, and by the way, that's you, in bondage to Satan, in bondage to your sin, you're standing there, and you know in the old days, slaves stood naked so everybody could check out everything. to see if they wanted to spend their money, make sure they understood all the scars and the bruises and all the things, and they would just sit there and just bid over you like a piece of meat. And you're standing there in that market, and you were rescued, you were redeemed. One came up and said, I will take this slave. And he paid for it with his own blood. That is an amazing truth of Christmas. He brought you out of that market And not only that, we receive the adoption of sons. He takes you down off of that slave stand. He takes the chains out. He covers you with the old family robe. He puts the family rings on your fingers and says, you're now my son. You're now my son. The old Ben-Hur movie with Charlton Heston, I mean, again, it's probably one of those ones that y'all have seen a million times because there was a while there. There's only like four movies Christians could watch and Ben-Hur was one of them. There's that beautiful example, it's in the book, where the Roman admiral actually adopts Ben-Hur. He actually adopts a slave, and he becomes a wealthy heir of this admiral's estate. Well, in the new movie, they left that part out. The admiral was a bad guy. And it really kind of misses half the point, I think, of being her. Well, that's the way we are. We've been purchased out of the slave market. We've been adopted as sons. What an amazing thing that is. Our question, Mr. Confession of Faith, asked this question in 34. What is adoption? Adoption is an act of God's free grace whereby we are received into the number and have a right to all the privileges of the sons of God. Do you realize that? It's not that you just have the same last name. You are an heir. You have the right to all the privileges of God's kingdom. You're a prince. You're a princess. And an amazing thing it is that God has done this. And then, of course, there's the pledge of time in verses 6 through 7. And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. So He has put His Spirit into our son. The Spirit is like a down payment on this estate that we're to receive. I like what one commentator says. The Son's purpose was to secure for us the legal status of our Sonship. By contrast, the Spirit's purpose is to secure the actual experience of it. See, when you have the Holy Spirit inside of you, you agree with these things. You can see this is true. This is... Amen! We get it. I understand that. When you didn't have the Spirit, this would be theologically relevant, perhaps, but it might be of interest to you, but it didn't hit home. But the Spirit tells us that we're sons of God. The Spirit confirms this to a point we cry out, Abba, Father. Now, y'all, do you know what that means? Again, this is one of those cultural context things, but it's a term of endearment. If this was written in New Southern language, Paul would have said, you cry out, daddy, father. Daddy, father. The Lord of the universe, the creator of all galaxies, the one who sustains everything, as a child of God, we can call him daddy. Daddy. That's remarkable. That's how near we are. because he's adopted us into the family. We can speak to him as Christ spoke to him, his son. But we only can do that if we have the Holy Spirit. Paul says in Romans 8, 9, if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him. So the Spirit is one of these things that's a sign and a seal of the inheritance to come. And then he goes on and says, we are no longer a slave but a son and an heir through God. You know, it's... here's one of those things that is going to be lost in our... our culture is so sensitive about race issues and sex issues and stuff like that, there would be a lot of people who would want to go back and rewrite this text and say, son and daughter of God, or child of God, and they've already... and they have done that. But you got to be real careful changing the language that... the biblical authors use. There is a reason why he calls even women sons. Paul knows that women are going to read this letter. He's not ignorant of the fact that there are a great many women that are in the church. And if it's like our churches, there's probably more women than there are men in the churches. That hasn't been lost on him. He's deliberate about saying this. He could have said, and daughters, but that would have missed his point. You see, the sons had the inheritance right. Women couldn't receive the inheritance. So what he's saying here is that men and women are all treated legally as sons. Men are not offended when God calls the church the bride of Christ. We're not. I'm not a bride. That doesn't bother us. We understand Christ is the great groom. The church is the bride. We're wed together. It's a beautiful picture of love. Well, here's a situation where you don't want to go change these words. Women, you want to be sons when it comes to inheritance. You get an equal inheritance. This is actually one of the great promoters of femininity. He is saying that as women, you also are equal heirs with men. It's a radical departure from much of the conception or the ideas of men and women during the Roman period. But this is really the point. It's the point of Christmas. It's the point of your salvation. Sinclair Ferguson says this, The notion that we are children of God, His own sons and daughters, is the mainspring of Christian living. Our sonship to God is the apex of creation and the goal of redemption. God has been about the business the whole point of the Old Testament, the point of the New Testament, the point of Christ coming, the point of Christmas, the point of Good Friday, the point of Easter. is to adopt you into the family of God so that you're heirs of the promise. What an amazing thing. Amazing thing. Well, what do we do with it? What do we do with it? Well, one of the things, we cry on Abba Father, we worship Him, right? But we're also to act as heirs. We don't go back to the weak and elementary things of the world. We've been freed from our slavery. This is a big point in Romans chapter 6 where Paul says in the beginning of verse 11, "...even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts." and did not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourself to God as those alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace." You've been redeemed. You've been adopted into the household of God. You've been blessed among all the peoples of the earth. The Christmas Carol, you know, kind of closes with Scrooge. He sees these visions of past, present, and future, and at the very last, it's a very dark scene, he sees his own gravestone. And the future is that he's going to die lonely and wicked. and that he's going to be doomed to be like those phantoms going around with all the chains of his own making, of his own sin. So the ghost of Christmas future takes him to this and Scrooge begins to say, Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends to which if persevered in, they must lead, said Scrooge. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus, with what you show me, speaking to the Spirit. Good Spirit, your nature intercedes for me and pities me. Assure me that I may yet change these shadows you have shown me by an altered life. I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me, I may sponge away the writing on this stone." His own tombstone. And then you have this wonderful scene. Holding up his hands in the last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down to a bedpost. God had answered his prayer. He got saved. And he celebrates Christmas on his heart. Scrooge becomes a son of God. He's no longer a slave to his own sin, and everything is changed, and he won't wander around in pain and misery for all eternity. He will shine brightly as the sun in the palace of his father, the king. May it be so for you. Father, I pray that you would apply these truths, help us to understand the great import, the great privilege that we have as children of God, Christianity isn't something we just do. It's who we are. We bear the name of Christ. What a royal distinction that is. And yet we still sin and we thank you for the forgiveness that comes through Christ. And we ask God that you would just bless us, bless our church, bless our families with a zeal to live Christmas every day of our life. We pray in Christ's name. Amen. you