So open your Bible if you haven't already and turn with me to Galatians chapter 5, Galatians chapter 5, and we will read verses 1 through 6. It was for freedom that Christ set us free. Therefore, keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery. Behold, I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you. And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision that he is under obligation to keep the whole law. You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by the law. You have fallen from grace. For we, through the Spirit by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything but faith working through love. Our Father, we pray today that you would help us to understand our passage. And we pray that it would move more than just a simple understanding. but that you would transform our hearts by this, that you would give us an unshakable trust in Jesus our Savior. Help us, Lord. In Jesus's name we pray, amen. So as we look into Galatians 5, we see some things that are rather obvious. First of all, Paul is getting close to the end of this great letter that he wrote to the Galatians where he's dealing with the problem of all the false doctrines, specifically the doctrine that you needed to be circumcised or you needed to keep any of the law in order to know God and have the hope of heaven. He understands that these things aren't just preferential issues. This isn't just a different view of things that might be held by another Christian denomination. That what is at stake here is the gospel itself. And Paul, through prayer and through this written letter, inspired by the Holy Spirit of God, is fighting for the lives of these Galatian believers. And so, it really is with that that he comes to verse 1. He's doing his best here to defend the doctrine of faith and Christian liberty to the false teachers. He's pulling out all the stops, if you will, and he's casting out very thundering words to beat down the Judaizers and their teaching. And he wants to utterly vanquish them, wrote Martin Luther. He's telling the Galatians to get rid of their horrible doctrine. And they need to get rid of it as though it were a dangerous poison, a pernicious teaching. And he's laying forth warnings, but he's also setting forth clear promises. And so we see Paul in verses one through six saying things like, verse four, You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law. You have fallen from grace, he says. To begin this section, He opens up with what I call, this kind of sounds like a big word, but bear with me for just a moment, an indicative summary. An indicative summary. Galatians 5.1, it was for freedom that Christ has set us free. Christ has set us free so that we would be free. He didn't set us free so that we would go back to what we were doing before He set us free. In the Galatians context, He did not set them free so that they could go back to the ceremonial observances of the law. whatever that was, a circumcision and the keeping up of the law, thinking that through those things they would become righteous and therefore be then acceptable to God or more acceptable to God. The main idea that I want to set forth from this text is quite clear and I think quite obvious. By trusting in your works of the law, You cut yourself off from Christ and from salvation. By trusting in your works of the law, you cut yourself off from Christ and from salvation. The whole point here is Jesus has set us free. And this is something that he has done that is historical. that is apart from us. This verse here summarizes a main key of the book of Galatians, is that we have Christian liberty. We have freedom from the law, freedom from our sins because of Jesus and all that he has done for us. This statement of freedom, I want you to notice that it has no law or requirement that we need to keep up with. We would say that there's no legal maintenance here. He's given us everything. This truth requires nothing of man, And remember, it cost Jesus Christ, the God-man, his life. So think with me for a moment about the purpose of Jesus' death. The purpose of Jesus' death. We are in such a wonderful location here, Prineville Community Church in the park. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a beautiful bike path out here, and there's lights along the bike path so you can walk at night. The Ochoa Creek Park is gorgeous. There's lots of people out here. If we were to say, all right, everybody, let's take 20 minutes, and I want you to head out in the park, and I want you, everybody just find one person and ask that person, What is the purpose of Jesus' death? Why do you think Christ died? Now, we would get a variety of different answers. Some would say his death on the cross was a wonderful example of humiliation and love. And the purpose for his death is so that we could live like that too, a life of just sacrifice toward common man. That was the only reason that Christ died. Another response would probably be, Jesus died on the cross to pay for sins, but that really isn't enough for your salvation. That's not enough to go to heaven. That your works are also required. in order for you to be saved and have the promise of heaven. So really, you're cooperating with God when it comes to your justification. It is God's grace and his works. Grace plus works equals justification that leads you to be saved and to go to heaven. However, Both of these examples are dead wrong. Both of these examples lack what God is teaching us here. They lack freedom. If Jesus is only an example to us, He has not redeemed us from the curse of the law. He has not done anything to remove the shackles of the law and the shackles of sin so that we might be free people. And if Jesus' death only gets us halfway to salvation, the Romanist view, the Roman Catholic view, and that we make up the rest on our own, then we're still enslaved to the law. Neither of these faulty examples sets us free from the yoke of enslavement that is the law of God. Neither of these faulty examples sets us free from the dungeon of sin and death that we were born into. as sons and daughters of Adam, fallen human beings. So then I ask you, Christians, why did Christ die? Why did Christ die? Why did Jesus Christ free us by His death? And here God says something that is just absolutely wise and extremely profound. Please look at your Bible with me. It was for freedom that Christ has set us free. It was for our freedom that He died a cursed death on the old rugged cross. It wasn't to lead us to a new law for us to be enslaved by. It was for freedom. And we know that God the Father sent him at the appropriate time. We remember then Christ came after the law, but let's never forget John 8, 36, in conjunction with this text. In fact, this is a good verse to just mark in the margin of your Bible or your notes. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. Now I think it's difficult for us who talk so much about the five solas and preach so much on the gospel and the forgiveness and the freedom that we have there. It's hard for us to put ourselves into the sandals of the Galatian Christians, if you will, these Galatian Gentiles. We remember that these Jews from Jerusalem, we call them Judaizers, who had mixed the teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ, also with the Old Testament ceremonial and ritualistic laws, came and they were teaching, no, your men must be circumcised. You know, Abraham was circumcised, David was circumcised, so they need to be circumcised too. And Paul says, absolutely not. Paul says, if you are going to teach that they are required to do anything, you're leading them to hell. It's just that simple. You're leading them not to freedoms in Christ, but you're leading them to really, it's a new type of law. Now, I doubt any of us have ever been a member of a church that required that you be circumcised in order to go to heaven, in order to be a member. Raise your hand if you have. But some of us have been exposed to Baptist fundamentalism. When I mean some of us, I mean moi. And They do have the gospel, but I will say they also tend to put their people under a law. They have their own yoke of slavery. Now, I say this, and some of my Baptist brothers, I love them very much, and there's been many, many people who have come to Christ under them. But when you give people in your congregation a list of things that they must do in order to be good Christians and to be members of the church, You are putting them into slavery. One such church, my wife probably doesn't know about this, but there was a young woman from California who was a Christian, who was a member of a church like this, who I was interested in at one time. I've made her laugh, so. And we were having just a casual conversation on the phone. I was trying to get to know her, and I had come to understand Calvinism, the doctrines of grace, a few years before, and loved it. It's totally scriptural, and to study my Bible, and understanding the grace of God, right? And she says, yeah, you know, this is our church. She's talking about it in the ministry. She says, you know, we have a family. that we're hoping will join the church, but they have a problem with our church's doctrine. So here I am, I'm a theology student. I'm all ears. Oh, really? What's the problem that they have with the church's doctrine? My mind is going a lot of different ways. Are they holding to the doctrine of modalism? That God really isn't Trinity or Triune, but he goes into a different mode depending on where you read in scripture? He's not really three in one. No, it's not that. Is it the gospel? No, but kind of. What? Well, what is it? Well, our church constitution says that you cannot go to the movie theater. Okay, and what does that have to do with matters of salvation and grace? That sounds like, I mean, depending on what kind of movie theater it is, it sounds to me like it's a sanctification issue. But it sounds to me like if these folks love Jesus and want to be a part of your church, even if they have some perceived worldliness in their lives, you want them to become members, you want them to join, you want them to grow. We can't enslave them. And we have our own rules too, don't we? I have thought about a lot of the things that I have emphasized, and one of the troubles we get into is emphasizing things like family worship too much. Now, I love family worship. I will pray for you and encourage the men to do family worship every night in your homes. But if we're not careful, and I'm speaking from my perspective as a pastor, We can begin to put the yoke of a new law onto our people and begin to bind their consciences in ways that the Word of God wouldn't have us to do. What about Bible versions? Oh, I would love it. I would love, love, love it if everyone converted to the New American Standard 1995 version. In fact, I've got a stack of them down there in my study. I'll give you a free one if you want to switch. And I could talk with you about why I think the NASB is a superior Bible version. But I cannot put you under that yoke and say, in order for you to be saved, you must read from the NASB, or even say, in order for you to be a faithful part of our church, you must use the New American Standard. But I was in a church once that required me to have the King James Bible. They put everyone under that yoke. Another issue, too, and this isn't just beat up on Fundamentalist Day by Pastor Chris, Another issue, too, was the tithe. Pastors would keep track of everyone in the congregation to see who was tithing and who wasn't. And if you weren't, you would get warned. Wow. And maybe I've overreacted by, I don't want to even know who gives what. We have a box in the back. It's between you and Jesus. But there are these things, guys, we have to be so careful. And it isn't just when the church is gathered. It's also in our homes. Brothers, we must be very careful that we're not putting our wives under our law of cleanliness, or our law of punctuality. As much as we wanna be on time, as much as we want things to be clean, et cetera, et cetera. or somehow our laws of holiness in certain ways. You know, something that our dear brother Dan has said numerous times. He said that the sins that we should be preaching against and striving to cut out of our lives are the ones written in the Bible. And I think that's a beautiful and wonderful point. Now, what Galatians is gonna do for us is Galatians is gonna show us after we finish with the freedom in Christ and the justification, he's gonna shift gears in a few verses here and show us what obedience is. Because this is this piece I think all of us are asking. Okay, we get it that Christ, we're freeing him, we're justifying him by faith alone, but then he's gonna show us that obedience comes, how? Not by this religious adherence to the law, but who causes us to be holy? Who motivates us to obey God? Who motivates us to want to come to church on the Lord's Day? Who motivates us to want to confess our sins? Who motivates us to want to fellowship with other brothers and sisters in Christ? Who motivates us to do, as Joe read the call to worship this morning, to love each other, to forgive each other? Who, who, who? The Holy Spirit of God. The Galatian theology, the Galatian believer is a spirit-saturated theology and a spirit-saturated believer. And the Spirit never leads us to do anything that is contrary to what is written in the Bible. Never ever. The Holy Spirit in you is making you more like Christ. And at times, I have to warn you, the Holy Spirit is going to be your biggest enemy when you're wanting to do your own thing and to follow a temptation. So it was for freedom that Christ, notice, has set us free. Past tense, written in stone, locked in, unchangeable. It is my heart's cry, it is God's will, brothers and sisters, each of you, that you have freedom. We don't want you to be yoked with the impassable mountain of obligation that is the law or man's requirements, feeling like you need to do more in order to be acceptable before God. The truth is, you couldn't make yourself acceptable before God, even if you were successful at keeping the law. Imagine, can you think of anybody, no sin, no deviation from the law from the moment they were born to the moment they die? Does that describe any of you? It describes one man. Who is that man, that God man, Jesus Christ? No deviations. his act of obedience. The law makes no one righteous. We gotta get this through our thick skulls, because we still will fall back to that. We think that our law keeping, our rule keeping is gonna make us righteous. It might make us look better to our friends or the other folks around the church, but it doesn't make us righteous. Law keeping makes no person acceptable for God. You cannot keep the law in order to earn grace. Grace is a free gift, then it becomes not a free gift, it becomes not grace, it becomes law and reward. So you cannot earn what you cannot earn, right? You cannot earn what you cannot earn. Were you born into this world by your mother because you were a good person? No, you just were born. And your mom, you know what? As bad as you might be and have been, she loves you because she loves you. She's your mother. And the same thing is true of your father who is in heaven. If you're in Jesus, he loves you because he loves you. And he knows your sins, he knows your faults, he knows your weaknesses, and he still loves you. This is grace. Paul in Romans chapter 6 speaks of this freedom. Verse 22, but now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit resulting in sanctification and the outcome eternal life. You see what he's doing here, right? We've been freed from sin. We've been taken away from the tyranny of the law. Oh, but We've become slaves of another. No, we've been enslaved to Christ for His doings, do laws. And by this, you are becoming holy. And because of this great work of God, you're given eternal life. And he sums it up very nicely here with one of our favorite verses, Romans 6, 23. For the wages of sin is death. But the free gift of God is eternal life in law keeping, in not going to the movie theater, in not doing these things that we like to tell everybody to not do. No, you tell me, in who? In Jesus Christ. Your eternal life, a free gift in Jesus Christ our Lord. period, exclamation point, three times. And it is from this point of freedom, first idea, the freedom we have in Jesus, it's from this point of freedom, by our freedom in Christ that we can stand firm. As I was preparing this passage, I thought, okay, so everybody that wants to do something with their salvation, this has gotta be good news for those of you, because here he's telling us something. And so the apostle will do this. We call it, it is an imperative that follows the indicative. The indicative, Christ has made us free so we could be free. That's the whole purpose. Freedom for freedom. And then because of this incredible truth, he says, you must do this. And it follows it with two of these imperatives, that is a command. So because Christ has died, because Christ has set us free, we must stand firm and not be subject again to a yoke of slavery. In His gracious cross, death and resurrection, and by virtue of the Holy Spirit who has united us to Jesus, He makes us able to stand firm. We don't stand firm in the gospel in our own strength. We stand firm in the gospel by His strength. by grace, by the Spirit. 1 Corinthians chapter 7, 22 and 23, for he who was called in the Lord while a slave is the Lord's freed man. Likewise, he who is called while free is Christ's slave. You were bought with a price, therefore do not become slaves of men. This concept here of purchase, is rather interesting. The term used here in the ancient world is the same term that was used. They had slavery. It was the same term that would be used when a slave was being purchased off of the auction block. The death of Jesus Christ He has redeemed us and set us free by making us His people. He's our master, we're His slaves, setting us free from the law and from sin unto Him as Lord, not unto ourselves, unto Him. He paid the penalty for all His children's sins at the cross. And it is here, in this redemptive transaction, whereby he satisfied the wrath of our holy God, for our sins we are set free. Now, I want you guys to know that I love the United States of America. This is an example, by the way. Paul didn't write about America. For example, when I was a child, I remember my mom reminded me, and she did this more than once or twice, Chris, you are one of the most fortunate children in the world. I think, okay. Because you were born in the United States of America. and we are a free nation. In our country, you're free to follow whatever vocational path you believe the Lord has gifted you for and is leading you to. In our nation, you can vote for those who are in charge of the country. We have rights as Americans that many other nations do not have. Capitalism is wonderful and beautiful. I even think it's biblical. You know, I believed my parents. I believed my school teachers who taught us this. And the idea here is... I didn't think for one second that I needed to do anything to make my freedom in the United States of America better or more secure. I never thought for one second that I needed to do anything to secure my rights and privileges as an American citizen. The wars had been fought, the Revolutionary Wars and other wars. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights had all been written, ratified, voted into place as our governing documents over our nation. And so friends, when we gather on the Lord's Day, we need to remind each other, when it comes to God's gift of eternal life, it's already been paid for. That war is finished. Satan has been defeated. God has taken away from him his ability to kill people for all eternity because now they come to Christ. And it's official, it's unchangeable. When it comes to our freedom from the law and from sin, the price was paid for every single one whom the Father chose before the foundation of the world. It was paid at Jesus' cross. Your freedom in Christ, which was purchased 2,000 years before you were born, of course, it's locked in. There's nothing you do to earn it. Faith, of course, came to you later. The Spirit came to you later, when you heard the gospel, and He regenerated you in Jesus. But what a beautiful and wonderful thing it is to be free indeed in Jesus Christ. You think, well, how do I stand firm in that? Here's one thought. You wake up in the morning. Before you do anything, you think about the Lord. And that makes you think about the cross of Jesus. And that reminds you, you say to yourself, Jesus has indeed set me free from myself, the law, my sins, and I love him so much. We begin every day and throughout the day Be mindful of the cross, be mindful of Christ and the ways He has saved you and rescued you. Be thankful that we don't live in the times before Christ came, where we're having to take animals up to the priests for our atonement in Jesus Christ. Remember, it's once for all, says Hebrews 10. Once for all. We look to the cross. And from there, we're pardoned. So it is in this freedom where we've been set free by Jesus that we were called to keep standing firm, okay? Keep standing firm. Notice the implication here, too, guys, just with the ING on the standing firm, teaching us that this isn't just a one-time thing. No, it's a daily thing. It's an ongoing thing in our lives. Okay, be standing firm. Yes, okay, but how? How do we keep standing firm? Well, he's gonna tell us. Don't be subject again to a yoke of slavery. Again, this classic example of him giving the reason for the command, the freedom that we have in Christ, and because you have that freedom, don't be yoked into slavery ever again. So because we have been set free, we are commanded to live in our freedom. We're commanded to, get this, enjoy our freedom that we have in Jesus Christ. And to stay free, you stay free by not going back, not going back to the law, not falling back to live in such a way where you're thinking that you need to do this, that, and the other thing to impress the Lord, to keep up with God's good graces. No, it's been taken care of. Remember, the law was the pedagogue or the tutor that Galatians teaches us to bring sinners to Christ. But those who leave Christ to return to the tutor would, like Esau, ultimately you don't find any place for repentance, even if they sought it carefully with tears, writes the old Scottish Baptist James Haldane. It doesn't matter how sensitive we may feel ourselves to be or how many tears we might shed, if we've departed from Jesus and trying to find God and the law, we will find nothing there. Well, with this commandment, Paul then writes, a scathing warning. Behold, I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you." We need to hear what God is teaching us through the writings of the Apostle. In dealing with the heart of the Galatian situation where the Judaizers are teaching them that Christ plus something brings you to a right standing before God. And however we think that in our minds, I will continue to use the scripture, for instance, from Psalm 119 to remind you that you need to daily be reading the Word of God. But if we think that through our daily reading of the Word of God, that that somehow puts us in a better place in God's eyes, we're wrong. We've failed. I sort of think a lot about Martin Luther as we're working through this and reading Luther's commentary. And one of the things that Luther did, and I don't necessarily think I would ever preach this or say this, but he would tell people that seemed to be so hung up in this way on the law that they needed to go out and sin a little bit. Go out and sin a little bit. So once again, you'll see who you really are, and you'll be brought back to seeing your need for Christ. What was the point there? For us to think that we need to add more to what Jesus has already accomplished is not only utter heresy, but it is a fatal flaw. Christ plus anything equals nothing. Christ plus anything equals nothing. Any attempt to add to His finished work, what that does is it implies, it shows that we don't believe that Jesus and His work is perfect. That we really don't believe that Jesus is God the Son who has satisfied the wrath of God on our behalf. It doesn't really matter if we're resorting to one aspect of the law or another or some sort of a fundamentalist type of law that we've created for ourselves. If Christ is not our only ground of hope and confidence, then, let's be honest, we are unbelievers. Be sure that you hear that, guys. If Christ is not our only ground of hope, then we are unbelievers. There's no other way to say it. And the consequence is that we have no part in him. When the Bible says that we conclude that man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law, it is excluding the deeds of the law. It's excluding things like circumcision and every other act of obedience. And I know that you might be thinking in your mind, well, Doesn't God want us to obey? I've had a number of people stop me after we've been preaching through Galatians and they said, wait a second here. What about the law? What about God's requirements for obedience? I said, yeah, we're gonna have to wait a little bit in Galatians to see that. Those are spirit motivated, but they have nothing to do with your justification. And a few of them kind of scratched their head and gave me this deer in the headlights look. And I said, who has died for you on the cross and paid for all of your sins? Well, Jesus has. And he's the only hope you have, right? Well, I don't know. I remember witnessing to someone and was talking to this person. I was walking down the street and they were road construction, smoking a cigarette, having a break, and just walk up and start talking about Jesus. And they said they knew Christ, and I said, well, I wanna invite you to church. He said, well, I'd like to do that, but first I need to stop smoking. Why? God loves you, I mean, if you come to Jesus, you let him do the cleaning you up, we don't mind. I mean, we're not gonna let you smoke in the building, but that is the mindset that folks have. And so we need to remember that what happens is he begins to work his work in us by grace, and he cleans us from the inside out. He saves us, he justifies us, and then the process of our sanctification, of growing in holiness, the confession talks about this being a slow process to growth. And see, this is the problem with the laws and the lists that we want to impose upon people, sometimes in churches, is it skirts around Jesus in the Gospel. It's impatient. It's wanting its own way and its own way now. Now I'm not saying that we should give people licenses to sin in ways that are just despicable and terrible and devouring the church and the family, no way. That's why we have church discipline. But what I'm saying is this, we have to understand that we have two different categories here. We have the category of justification and then we also have the category of progressive sanctification. John Murray put it this way, that you had positional sanctification is how he put it, he's speaking of justification, and progressive sanctification. That's our slow growth in holiness where he is sorting us out from the inside out and cleansing us and moving us to obedience. Not living with Christ as our only ground of hope, we forfeit Christ, we forfeit freedom, we fail to stand firm as he's commanding us here. And as we move into verse three, it becomes clear that it isn't just that you lose the benefits and blessings of God's grace and God's freedom in Christ. Now you've put yourself under the entire law. You notice what he says there in verse three. Every man who receives circumcision that he is under obligation to keep the whole law. He's saying something similar to what he said in Galatians 3.10, cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law to perform them. Deuteronomy 27.26 is what he quotes there. He's saying, okay, If you decide you wanna put yourself and your family and your church, even under just one bit of the law, and that's gonna now become your ground of hope. No, no, no, no, you need to realize it doesn't just stop after you get circumcised. It doesn't just stop after you begin to do some of those old ceremonial things and you haven't done. No, you gotta keep every bit of it. But the sad reality and the sad part of this is it ignores the Savior. It ignores the fact that Jesus Christ stood in our place in His active obedience. That Jesus Christ, He did not deviate from the law one iota. from the moment of conception to the moment of his death and ascension and even up right till now, he is free of sin and he offers for all of us who would believe to come to him and he will give us the righteousness that he has and we then become acceptable to God through him. He is our savior, our redeemer, the one who stood in for us. And our only hope, he goes even further. It isn't that you just have to be perfect your whole life. I mean, that's impossible. Nobody can do that. I wrote a piece for the church and then I revised it for the paper this week for the faith column. And I said just that, I mean, nobody in the world is going to say that they've been perfect from birth to death, or that they could be. So it's impossible to know God except through Jesus. Verse four. So Christ is no benefit to you if you trust circumcision, verses two and three. And now, verse four. Justification by law moves you outside of grace. Works and gospel are what we say are mutually exclusive. They cannot coexist. They cannot go together. Not in terms of our salvation, our justification, all right? They're like water and oil. They cannot go together. In Sunday school class, Paul referred to Romans 4 in teaching justification to show us that David was justified by faith and to show us that Abraham was justified by faith. These men who are living under the old covenant, these men who are the heroes of all of God's people, they themselves were not relying upon their good works because they were sinners. They had no good works apart from Christ. So justification by law would have moved Abraham and David outside of grace, and it moves you and I out of grace. Notice what he says. You have been severed from Christ. You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by the law. You have fallen from grace. That may be one of the harshest warnings in all of scripture. the longing that they had to go back. You know, we wonder, why would anybody think this? Well, Satan is a great, great deceiver, and Satan will use Scripture and twist Scripture. He'll use passages and twist them around to make you think it says you need to do something in order to be saved. But another thing is the attitude that we saw in the wilderness generation, in the book of Numbers. Remember, God had miraculously delivered the children of Israel. He freed them from their 430 years of slavery in Egypt. They've been brought out of Egypt by none other than the hand of God and His power. And this is what they say. But we remember the fish we used to eat freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, and the onions and the garlic. Moses, we want to go back. We want to go back. Can you spread the waters of the Red Sea so we can go back in the other way and go back into slavery and captivity and forsake all the freedom that God gave us? Numbers 11.5, Numbers 14.3. They grumbled and complained. Why is the Lord bringing us into this land? To fall by the sword? They're on their way to the promised land that that generation wouldn't receive because they had this attitude. Our wives and our little ones will become plunder. Would it not be better for us to return to Egypt? There are some days, I think, where our flesh is powerful It makes us think, remember the good old days, when we didn't really have to worry about the Lord. We just sort of did whatever we wanted to, and we thought we were free. Remember the good old days, and Satan will whisper that in your ear. Remember that sin that you used to love so much, not realizing. the slavery that was there before Christ, even though we didn't realize it, we were held captive by the law and its demands. So these folks, they may have been, they were a part of God's community of people, they were born into the church, we would say, but they didn't trust God. When life got uncomfortable for them and their freedom, They wanted to go back to slavery. It's as though they were so institutionalized by slavery in Egypt, it took faith to really break them free and to break them forward into the freedoms. You have been severed from Christ. Well, how do we understand this text? You who stop trusting in Jesus then lose your salvation? No, I don't think so. You never knew Jesus Christ to begin with. But it isn't so much that Paul is teaching them that by doing this that you're now gonna be doomed to hell. He's doing his best, and he believes that they're saved. He's doing his best to show them that if you're seeking to be made right before God, that is justified by anything in and of yourself, you are going not the road of grace. You are going not with Jesus, but you're fighting against Jesus, and there is no hope whatsoever in the way that you're going. Jesus plus anything equals nothing every single time. And if you think even more carefully about verse four, and I know that we're getting close on time here, why in the world would we want to sever ourselves from Christ and the gospel? We wouldn't. It shows us here, we're not better than the Galatians, we're not better than the Judaizers, but it shows us the level of Satan's deception at times can be so high and so powerful to convince us that we need to do something just to make Jesus' work a little bit better, to guarantee our place in heaven and with him. Truly, if we choose to go the route of the law and of works, we don't need grace. We don't need Jesus. We just need ourselves. And maybe we could find some other cheerleaders to help us with that. For we through the spirit by faith are waiting for the hope of righteousness. I know you want to be holy and righteous, but there's coming a time when you will be glorified. But you're going to have to wait. It's when Jesus returns and He eradicates all sin out of us. Verse 6, He says, Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love. We need to be mindful here what Paul is not doing. He is not saying that any case of circumcision is wrong and you should never do it at all. You're going to go to hell if you're circumcised. Paul is the one who coached Timothy and led Timothy to be circumcised so that they could have a ministry there among the Jews. We need to remember that. But his circumcision there was him becoming all things for all people so that he might reach some. It wasn't to give him a better standing before the Lord. And my guess is most American men have been circumcised for the reasons our parents chose, okay? But he shows us it doesn't really matter if one chooses to do this or not do this. Everything has to boil down to faith, trusting Christ, And that, working through a love, a love for God and a love for others. I think at the end of the day, when we look back on this hypocrisy that had invaded the Galatian church, it has a lot more selfishness and a lot more pride than they were able to see, and it had no love. But when Paul came to them, There was love. You notice He loves them. He's not putting them under a law. He's freely preaching the gospel to them. And they loved Him. They loved Him so much, they were willing to pluck out their own eyeballs and give them to Him so He could see a little bit better. They treated Him as though He was Jesus Christ. It was incredible. And so in the church, We see faith working through love, faith in Christ, faith in the gospel, faith not in ourselves and what we can do, but faith in God and God alone. Friends, let's pray together. Our Father, we thank you for the Word of God that you've given us. We thank you for preaching. We thank you for the songs that we've been able to sing and worship this morning. And as we prepare our hearts now for the Lord's table, we ask that you would help us to sing and help us to remember the Lamb of God who has taken away the sins of the world. Bless us now, Father, we pray as we sing this song in Jesus' name, amen. Well, stand with me and the song is printed in your bulletin. If I can find mine.