I'll try to tell my elementary to teach you that, too. You have your Bibles. We're in Galatians chapter 2. We want to finish up the chapter, if we can, starting in verse 11. I'll read and then we'll have a little commentary and kind of get into the details, I think, of what the writer is trying to say, not only to the Galatians, but also to us at Grace Bible Fellowship. In verse 11, he says, But when Cephas came to Antioch, Cephas is Peter, okay? I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned, for prior to the coming of certain men from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they came, he began to withdraw and hold himself aloof, fearing the party of the circumcision. And the rest of the Jews joined him in hypocrisy, with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in the presence of all, if you, being a Jew, live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? We are Jews by nature, not sinners from among the Gentiles. Nevertheless, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but through faith, in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, since by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. But if, while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have also been found sinners, is Christ then a minister of sin? May it never be. For if I rebuild what I have once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor. For through the law, I die to the law, that I might live to God. Verse 20, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. In the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and delivered himself up for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly. We've got 10 verses here that finishes up our section, I'll call it the autobiographical section of Paul. Chapter one and chapter two, Paul has been laying out to the Galatians, his first letter he wrote, explaining a lot of the historical backdrop to how he got saved and how he got the ministry he got, how he got the education he got, how he got the authorization he got as an apostle, especially in chapter one. And then he gets into the historical outline and details of when he did take all of his education and all of his authorization and the gospel Christ taught him in Arabia and things of this sort, and he brought it to Jerusalem in the first 10 verses here of chapter 2, how it worked out. How when he came to those people, what happened? He said, we didn't have a clash. Because remember, the back story to all of this is you've got these Judaizers. Judaizers is a big fancy word. for Jewish Christians who are adding to the gospel. You add to the gospel, you fall underneath the curse of chapter 1, verse 8 and 9. It's a cursed thing to add to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a finished work. It's a complete work, finished and given to believers to stand perfectly holy and righteous in the sight of God. That's Paul's gospel. And so when he went to Jerusalem with it, hey, he found that there was a lot of camaraderie around that. He says that in verses one through 10, he talks about when they got together privately, because they knew, especially in Acts 15, in this council of Jerusalem, they were going to have, because Barnabas and Paul, after their first missionary journey, are coming back to Antioch. Remember, there's Jerusalem here on the globe of things. And then there's, you know, Damascus is in Antioch. And so Antioch's up here almost about ready to go into Asia Minor. And so they're making these trips up here, these excursions and preaching to the Gentiles, and the Gentiles are getting saved. And so Paul's up here in Antioch. And so Paul, when he goes down to Jerusalem in the first 10 verses here, because they're going to have this conference, because what's happening is there's this clash of worldviews, basically. Here are these Gentiles getting saved. I mean, getting filled with the Holy Spirit. There's this evidence, especially in the book of Acts, they're speaking in tongues. I mean, it's like, hey, these guys are just like us. We preach Christ, they get saved, they're on board, we're good to go. But then you got this other group that are Jews who get saved the same way. But they come in and they say, you know, they kind of need to come under the fold of Judaism. I mean, we came first, right? And so Christianity grew out of Judaism. And so they need to make some sort of inroad back into Judaism. So they need to be circumcised to show a link back to the Jewish religion. Well, Paul is saying, no, sir. They don't need that. And of course, the debate is going to be, well, why not? Because look at them. They're totally justified standing on their own two feet, perfectly righteous and holy in the sight of God without circumcision. Now you're going to add something to that. Is it some way, shape, form that's going to do what? Identify them with your group, but it doesn't make them any holier or any more righteous in the sight of God. So you can't add anything to the gospel. So Paul vigilantly, our freedom fighter here, because this is who he is in the book of Galatians, it's all about your freedom in Christ. In Galatians chapter five, verse one and verse 13, he talks about how we're called to freedom. And that freedom is found in the gospel. And that freedom is found in the gospel, standing alone in the gospel and not having anything added to it in order for you to be right with God or right with other people, things of this sort. And so these first 10 verses in chapter two, the people in Jerusalem, maybe in private, and then when they have their, their counsel and things of this sort, you can read it in Acts chapter 15. There's a lot of common ground. In fact, he even says that he submitted the gospel to him in which he preached in verse two in private. and they didn't have any problems with it. The false brethren who came in to sneak out our, you know, our liberty and things of this sort to bring us into bondage, we didn't put up with them. But the pillars, Peter, who was an apostle to the circumcised, James, John, those kinds of guys, they recognized the grace that had been given to me, verse nine, and they extended the right hand of fellowship. So what you have in verses one through 10 is you have this truth of the gospel phrase, and you have the two groups, they meet together, and they're of one mind. But now what you got in verse 11 is you don't have that. You got the truth of the gospel still, but it's in a different context. And what Paul is going to bring out here in verse 11, in this clash of the titans of Paul as an apostle and Peter as an apostle, and what Peter does as a big faux pas, and how it fights against the truth of the gospel. Paul includes this here for the Galatians to see. so that the Galatians would have confidence in Paul's gospel. Because Paul, after his missionary journey, is going to go back. He's going to go back to these places here. And they need to see Paul isn't going to bow the knee to anybody when it comes to the truth of the gospel. And even when you have a guy who kind of went off the rails, like Peter, and who brought the Jews with him and brought Barnabas with him into hypocrisy, Paul's the lone freedom fighter who stands up and says, hold on, this isn't going to work. Your actions run counter to the truth of the gospel. You can't do that. Just like you can't do that. Now, what's interesting here, what we're going to look at today, and we're going to look at, in Paul's rebuke, the five basic things that Peter denies that are fundamentals to the faith. Now, you would think Peter would have known this lesson. Now, think about what Peter did. He didn't get up there and talk about how Jesus isn't God or he didn't come in the flesh or with this huge, you know, deviation from the truth here. All he did was take his plate or basically move from one table to the next. It says here, he withdrew and held himself aloof fearing the party of the circumcision. He used to eat with the Gentiles. And he just wasn't, notice, the people, the entourage from James. Now, James isn't part of this group. This is a group that came from James. These were Judaizers, which James recognizes that should have rebuked him. But anyway, they came from Jerusalem. They came all the way up to Antioch. Here, Peter's been enjoying the time with the Gentiles, eating at the table with them, fellowshiping with them. You got to remember something in the Jewish mindset. When you fellowship and you eat at the same table with somebody, you're complicit with what they are and what they're doing. That's why that 1 Corinthians 8, 9, and 10 chapter is a big, big, big. When you eat with somebody, you're in harmony and camaraderie with them. I'll even say that when you go in a temple and you're going to eat your hamburger with the rest of everybody else and what they're doing with Athena, you're worshiping that God. Really, you're worshiping the demons behind that God. And if you're going to do that and take up the Lord's table, you're setting yourself up for destruction. because the Lord is jealous and he ain't gonna take that. So he's using that eating scenario of showing that I have something in common with the God I'm serving here with the rest of these people and with them. That was a common denominator when it came to eating. That's why it was such a big deal when the Pharisees saw Jesus eating with tax gatherers and sinners. They immediately associated him with gathering taxes, practicing sin with the sinners. They couldn't have a demarcation line of saying, well, he's just trying to affirm their humanity. They can't see that. So that's why God had to bring Peter on a crash course. And it started way back in Matthew 15 when the Pharisees rebuked him about washing the hands and all of this. He was teaching them even then, it's not what goes into the body, it's what comes out of the body that defiles a man. People are all bent out of shape about having your hands clean in reality. You're not talking, you're not thinking about your heart being clean. Started there. And then all of a sudden, you know, here's this great outpouring of the spirit in Acts chapter two and the Pentecost and Peter gives this, you know, great sermon. I mean, thousands get saved that day. I mean, we'll talk about a nice evangelistic crusade, but then something begins to happen all of a sudden after the persecution of Stephen, he gets stoned and The persecution begins to come after Christians in Jerusalem. People start fleeing, and they go to Samaria. Well, all of a sudden, in Samaria, you got some people getting converted. Well, Peter begins to recognize some of this. These people aren't Jews. They're Samaritans. And then it goes further, and he begins to realize there's other Greeks that are getting saved. Acts chapter 10, Cornelius, a Roman centurion. And how does God tell Peter to go to Cornelius? He tells him by showing him this big sheet coming down of what? Food, unclean food that Jews don't eat. Three times, and of course you see Peter responding in that vision saying, I can't eat that. And what is God teaching Peter? There's no such thing as unclean foods anymore. Which he makes the connection between the two dots. Go to Cornelius' house. and eat with Cornelius Athens, a Gentile. And so what does Peter conclude? You know, God is saving these Gentiles just like he's saving us. In fact, that's his speech in Acts 15 at the Jerusalem Council. In fact, he comes against the law and talks about it being a burden. It's a yoke. We can't put that on us. James comes to the same conclusion. So what's all this going on here in Galatians here? In other words, this guy's been educated. He knows. In fact, Paul calls him out saying, before these guys showed up here, what were you doing here, Peter? You're fellowshipping, hobnobbing with the rest of us, eating and things of this sort. I mean, here's Paul eating with them. Pharisee of the Pharisees, he says of himself in Philippians 3. Paul knows the gospel. And Paul knows that gospel, the truth of the gospel, and we're going to see these five truths of Peter's actions, of what it violates, is that here is a good lesson from a bad example. Now, he lays this out here for the Galatians to see so that when he gets to chapter three and really starts talking to the Galatians, that they begin to understand that, ooh, Yeah, you're right. We can't hold to this gospel of the Judaizers. We've got to hold fast to the freedom that we have in Christ and don't let anything get added to that gospel. That's the whole purpose of this book here. That's why he writes this. Now, the way he goes along, he kind of gives you the historical development of how he confronts Peter and pretty much brings out Peter's inconsistent behavior by, you know, hey, you used to eat over here with us and all of a sudden these guys show up and now you move over. And basically, hey, bro, If it's so bad that you can't, you know, fellowship with these guys, how come you fellowship with them last week? And now all of a sudden, now you're turning your back and you're doing something different here. That's how being a hypocrite be consistent. And so what he does, he takes opportunity in the last section here, starting in verse 15 through 21 is really. The heart of the message is he's trying to drive home to the Galatians. He can get into the specifics in three and four, doctrinally speaking, adoption, things, all kinds of stuff here. He's going to get into, but this little paragraph here is what the Galatians need to understand is basically, this is the message of the Judaizers. And this is what Peter has adopted by his behavior. You know, one of the first things you realize here that in Paul's rebuke was that, you know, it wasn't so much that Peter was just saying, hey, some guys coming from Jerusalem. Excuse me for a minute. I need to tell him, hey, this isn't that kind of situation. This is in the presence of Paul. He makes a move to move from a table where he was with the Gentiles and says, hey, I got to go to where the holy people are. where the righteous people are, the beautiful people, basically saying, by default, you're not that. And if it was just him, that'd be one thing. All of a sudden, other Jews who were eating like Peter at the table with the Gentiles follow Peter, even Barnabas. This missionary buddy follows Peter. Well, at that point, here, Paul's left at the table with the Gentiles, and he says, no, sir, this has got to be called out. Everybody sees what's going on here. You sin in public, you get rebuked in public. It says in one of those Matthew 18, well, if your brother sins in private, no, he's not sinning in private. And other people, the Gentiles, if I don't call this out, are going to scratch their head and say, gosh, maybe we need to be like them. Maybe we need to. you know, disassociating. I guess we're not really up to snuff to be able to fellowship with these guys. He's kind of broken fellowship with us and moved on. Talk about excommunication going astray. Here it is. You can withdraw and separate yourself from somebody and it'd be sent because you're making a statement. Back in the thirties, there was a, uh, I think it was the thirties. There was a, um, professional baseball team or whatever and I think the pitcher's name was Gibson and it was just that time where you had really good black baseball players that were integrating with some with the whites and there was a guy on there that was black and Gibson was a good guy you know one of his close friends and Gibson was drinking an orange soda and the black guy says to him he says hey can I have a sip of that and Gibson He looks at the can, looks at the black guy and says, I'll save you a sip. Now, if you were a Christian in that, I would have rebuked Gibson. You don't save him a sip, you give him a swig. Because basically what he was saying is, I'm not going to have black lips touch my can with my white lips. You don't do that. That's not the truth of the gospel. Because the first thing he denies in the gospel here is the level unity between Jew and Gentile. That's what he's going to say in chapter three. There's no male, female, Jew, Gentile, whatever. And when you make a distinction between people like Gibson did, you've denied the gospel. You've denied the fundamental equality of brethren at the foot of the cross. You cannot do that. We talk about the whole idea of, you know, we affirm people's humanity and we reject people's depravity. I will draw a line in the sand and say, no, you can't go to a gay wedding. That's celebrating depravity. The guy's got a flat tire. That's part of his humanity. I'll stop my car and help him out. He turns to me and says, well, you know, I'm gay. I'm gonna say, okay, so what? You got a flat tire, right? You need help, right? I'm gonna help you. I mean, you can be a Satan worshiper, but you're still a human being. In my directives, from King Jesus is to identify and become all things to all people and affirm their humanity. Now, depravity is a different ballgame. You want me to celebrate homosexuality? I ain't gonna do it. You want me to celebrate alcoholism? I'm not gonna do it. You can't do that on the depravity side. Ethnicity is not depravity. His first mistake is looking at him as Gentiles. These were brethren he was sitting at a table with. And he got up and moved. These weren't hell raisers at a table gambling and playing poker and talking dirty jokes. That's depravity. That's when you move your plate to another table. Of course, jesting and silly talk. But just the humanity of the people? So for us as Christians, learn the lesson from a bad example here. You cannot do that with people. You look at their humanity and you affirm it. Now this is what Paul is, of course, these were Christians. These weren't even just pagans out there at the marketplace. These were people in the room celebrating Christ. And he moves his plate to the next. So the first thing he denies in this thing is basically the unity of the church. And the little subtle thing, kind of like Gibson is, is to be rebuked, as it should be. The second thing, and you'll notice this as he gets into the weeds here a little bit, I'll call it, verse 15 on down, you'll notice what he says here. He's gonna say two things here that brings out the problem with the Judaizers. The first thing he's gonna say in 15 and 16, he says, we are Jews by nature and not sinners from among the Gentiles. See, that was the big mentality. We're Jews by nature. We're in covenant with God, man. These Gentiles aren't in covenant with God. They don't have the law, we have the law. They're sinners by nature. We're Jews by nature. So when you start off the idea with that little phrase, you know, like we use the phrase, my poop doesn't stink, but everybody else's does. Yeah, you got a problem already. You're not a human being or the human race. And so he brings this out in verse 15, we are Jews by nature, not sinners from among the Gentiles. Nevertheless, now this is how he rebukes it. He says, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, works of the law, going into the details of the law, obeying the law, keeping the law, keeping the specifics, that's not gonna justify a man. We've already made that decision at the council. You know this. But through faith in Christ Jesus, of the faithfulness of Christ, his righteousness, Even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, since by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. Got it. There's this big push you're going to see in chapter three and four, that the only thing that justifies a man is the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. It's this being declared righteous. Catholics call it legal fiction. Because they don't believe you can be declared righteous when you're living in a state of ungodliness. But that's exactly the only people that get declared righteous, are sinners. Romans chapter four, verse five. He justifies the ungodly. He doesn't justify the godly. In Catholicism, that's who he justifies, is the godly. But there isn't a creature on the planet that's godly. If he justifies the godly, nobody's justified. You ain't getting in. It's like the leper. Remember the leper? you were always put outside the camp when you had some leprosy on you. But if you were leprous from head to toe, you were considered clean. Remember that sermon back a while back? When you recognize I have no good thing in me, then you're at the spot where you can be saved. But if you're sitting there thinking, well, you know, I mean, I'm bad like everybody else. I mean, we're human. We all make mistakes. I got a little leprosy. You can be saved. Because you're never going to depend on someone to save you. You're always going to see the clean spots in you, not the lepers. And you're going to compare yourself to somebody else and say, well, I don't know. I got more clean spots in him. I'm a better leper than he is. There's no hope for you. God has to totally shut you down so that you can be saved. So he saves the ungodly. He just doesn't save good people, that kind of thing. Like he says in Romans chapter 5, having therefore been once and for all justified by faith, we have peace with God. It's a past tense. Having been justified, the gavel's dropped. It's an act of God. It says in Romans chapter eight, verse 33, it is God that justified us. The law reveals sin, but it can't redeem us from sin. It can only reveal, it's a flashlight, as we've said before. It can show us things. It just can't deliver us from those things. So in justification, We're declared righteous, not made righteous. I'm kind of going through a little bit of details here, which we'll get into chapter three about. And notice, it's not just simply forgiveness. Justification is not just simply being forgiven for something, because you can fall back and all of a sudden you'd be forgiven again. It's not a repetitious thing. And it's not a pardon. It's more than a pardon. When you get pardoned from something, you can still have a record. It is pardon. It's more than that. He has, when we say made us righteous, He has made us legally righteous in His sight. We don't have a record anymore. And our forgiveness is not just forgiveness from the past, it's forgiveness into the future. You are perfectly innocent and justified in the sight of God, past, present, and future. That's a glorious truth. That will liberate you. There's your freedom for you to walk in And you're going to have the devil and everybody else in his minions try to attack that. Cause they don't want you free like that. Cause when you're, when you're in that and you're free, you are dangerous. You are strong. The guilt can't stick to you. And trust me, guilt and discouragement is the number one weapon tool in the devil's toolbox. When you believe in justification, true justification, it eradicates all of that stuff from our inner man. So God doesn't, Or even forgiven, forgiveness only, or pardon only. But anyway, when he says we are Jews, we're different from the Gentiles. And of course, his first mistake is the unity of the church there. No, they have the same righteousness you have. Second thing here is this justification aspect. They get it wrong. You're going to add something to it? Now, what else does he say? He says that in 17 and 18, this freedom from the law. And what does he mean by 17 and 18? But if while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have also been found sinners. Is Christ in a minister of sin? May it never be. This is how the Judaizers would argue their point. They would say, all comes in, he preaches that Christ is our standing, our righteousness and everything. Good, cool, everything. But you know something, let me tell you what that also says. So when Paul preaches this, all of a sudden you've got these Gentiles here, who don't keep the law, right? Here we Jews, we keep the dietary rules and things of this sort. So I've got Christ now as my righteousness. And technically what's happening is I'm actually disobeying those commands that tells me not to eat this, not to wear this, not to keep this certain day or whatever. So Paul's gospel preaches a Jesus that tells us we can be right with God and then disobey these commands here. Because look what these Jews are doing. They're sitting at that table and they're eating what? They're eating pork. So what are they doing? They're disobeying that command. So Paul brings out in 17 and says, but if while seeking to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have also been found sinners in the sense that we're breaking the law, these dietary laws. Is Christ in a minister of that? Is he a minister to break the law of the Old Testament? See, they see them as breaking the law. Paul's going to talk about, no, the law's fulfilled in Christ. They can't understand the difference with Christ fulfilling the law and then giving his law to them, Paul, the law of Christ, versus they just see eating pork. And they see eating pork with a man who claims that Christ is his justification, his righteousness. Well, then that Christ who's giving you the liberty to eat that pork is telling you to break that law. So Christ must be a minister of sin. That's how their logic goes. That's why he's bringing it up here. So he goes in and he says, may it never be. He uses a little logic in verse 18. For if I rebuild what I have once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor. What is he talking about? Rebuilding what he wants destroyed. I said works of the law. If I think about this, if I come to Christ and I'm justified by faith and I got a perfect righteousness and I'm standing before God with But then I go over here and I eat something over here that Deuteronomy says I shouldn't eat. I accuse Christ as saying, hey, Christ is saying I can do this. Christ said as a minister of sin. The apostles say, no, that can't be, number one. Number two, if I need to get circumcised or I need to stay away from certain foods in this way and that way in order to walk with God, what is that now saying about the complete work of Jesus Christ? that it's not complete. That, yeah, we need that righteousness of Jesus, but you better stay away from the bacon. Because if you don't stay away from the bacon, the things that Christ did on the cross in that complete gospel are not complete. We need your performance a little bit here at the table here or at the circumcision night or whatever else. We need some complicity here on your part in order to make this thing go. And so he said, if I rebuild that, Paul says, if I start preaching that, it shows that I'm a transgressor. No, this is a whole thing. All or nothing. Either all the law has been fulfilled in Christ. Fulfilled now, not broken. That's why he says the same thing in Romans chapter three when he talks about the law. We don't nullify the law. We fulfill it. That's what they were saying. Got these Gentiles, got these Jews over here eating like Gentiles. You're teaching them to break the law, like it says in the book of Deuteronomy. Probably look at that and say, they can eat that. They're not breaking any law. Why? Because there's not any law in the book. It's been fulfilled in Christ. Well, how do you know they're supposed to be able to do that? Because they're under the law of Christ. They're not underneath that Deuteronomy law. But anyway, as he says this in verse 18, for if I rebuild what I have once destroyed, I prove myself to be a transgressor. For through the law, here's the catch. I die to the law. You die to the law, you die to all of it. Dietary, circumcision, the whole thing. That I might live to God. He says, you guys need to get a grip here. Look in verse 20. Here's the positive. Now flip side of this. I have died. I've been crucified with Christ. The life I live, I live in him. I don't live in him and in Moses. Him and Deuteronomy. It's him and him alone. Christ lives in me, the life which I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and delivered himself for me. Breaks the unity of the church, denies justification by faith, your freedom from the law. You go back to the law instead of having freedom from the law. And what else do you have? The very gospel itself is jeopardized. I mean, why did Christ die? He's going to get into the details of that in chapter three. We died with him. So in that death, and we're in that death, then I'm dead too. And if I'm raised, I'm raised too. And I've got none of the trappings around here with the law involved at all. That's how Paul's gonna bring in these whole different views on the law. The law comes in as a flashlight. You start putting it up there to help you with your sanctification, you're gonna find it's the power of sin in 1 Corinthians 15 or Romans 7. It's not meant to facilitate your sanctification. Zero ability to do that. Zero. It's going to take you down if you're looking for it to give you ability. It can give you knowledge. It can give you insight. It can't give you the ability. What was that saying that comedian said one time when he was writing his rights to remain silent when he was thrown out as a public drunk? He got the right to remain silent. He said, yeah, but I didn't have the ability. And so I talked and I went to jail. Exactly right. It cannot give you that ability. So it denies the gospel. The last thing we see here in the last verse is what? Notice what it does to the grace of God in verse 21. I do not nullify the grace of God for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly. So this little salvo here from 15 to 21 is aimed at the Judaizers. There are two-pronged problem here. First of all, the works of the law, thinking that somehow I can do these things And I can add that to my repertoire, my portfolio, being able to walk with God isn't gonna work. You can call it that, but let's call it for what it really is. You've departed from the gospel. And when you practice this, well, no, no, I believe in just the gospel, really? Well, let's see how you do on the unity of the church. Put your money where your mouth is. Let's see how he does with the Gentiles. Yeah, you start moving your plate around based upon ethnicity. Yeah, you got a problem. We're gonna call you out for it. Because if I bring a brother and say, is this guy a Christian? He's claiming to believe in Jesus Christ. He claims that Jesus Christ is his righteousness and that alone. Now, when you do something like that, that's it. Yeah, but he doesn't do this too. Is he a Christian or not? See, I always go back to, is Jesus Christ accepting him right now before the throne of grace or not? If you tell me he's not, then I want to know the sin that he's committing that's breaking fellowship. If you say he is, then why are we having this discussion about why we think he needs to do something else? Jesus Christ is the gold standard. And if he's accepted by Christ, then he has to be accepted by us. There's no other debate here. There's nothing else you need. Yeah, but he needs what? He needs what? See, at that point, I'm gonna start pressing you for whatever you think he needs as an addition to the gospel. Remember, Peter didn't get up here and deny the gospel verbally. He just moved from a table to another and made a statement in that action. about the unity of the church in the sense of everybody's level at the foot of the cross, but justification by faith means. And that when you did that fear and drew other people, notice how you influenced other people to follow with him. This is how you find, it's just how the Galatians got bewitched as he's going to say in chapter three. So for us, this is what we're called to be as Christians. We accept one another based on the gospel and the gospel alone. You believe in Jesus Christ, You have full access to them, full membership in the club med called the church. And you have access to Christ, you have access to us, and you have access to our fellowship. Your righteousness is no more holier or less holier than mine in Jesus Christ. And we have to look upon one another that way. We have to protect this gospel that gives us this kind of freedom. And if a brother says, you know, I really think, you know, I can do this, I can do that. Fine. If it doesn't contradict what, you know, obviously the scriptures say we can and can't do. If you're seeking the Lord, the Lord is going to show you. I'm called to be your brother. I'm not called to be your innkeeper. I'm not called to be a zookeeper to make sure the animals are in the cages. Okay. If I might disagree with maybe how meat should be eaten to an idol or something like that. Okay. We still have fellowship and you're still my brother. And we need to call it that. But many times when our little disagreements become higher than who we are and our identity is in the gospel, we fall into the same problem Peter did. And we make that the fellowship point instead of the gospel. You cannot do that. And then you begin to nullify the grace of God, which he's going to say a little bit later on in chapter five, where he says, you have been severed with Christ who are seeking to be justified by law. You have fallen from grace. You don't stand by grace anymore before God, you stand by law. And that's a dangerous spot to be in because you need to stand by grace, unmerited favor. We all do. And so it's very, very important for us to understand how the Judaizers in this very, very beginning aspects of trying to torpedo the gospel, we still have Judaizers among us in the religious world. They just go by a different name or they have a different MO or whatever else it might be. But you have to recognize you have to ask these basic questions. And the most basic is, is this man accepted before Jesus Christ right now before the throne of grace, based upon what he's testifying and confessing to? If you say he is, all bets are off on anything else you're going to put on the table to say he's not. And yeah, he might be doing something that's just out of kilter. When you talk to him, you pray with him, you try to help him out. But if he's really a child of God, I can tell you right now, the Bible says Christ, in your mind, Christ is gonna discipline him. Christ will bring him back into the fold. My job is to be his brother and to help him to see that. But to make sure he doesn't add anything to the gospel to make him come up to par and be a good Baptist with the rest of us or a good Presbyterian, none of that. I'm not gonna put that on him. It's just the gospel and the gospel alone. So we want to learn a good lesson from a bad example here. And this is with Peter. This isn't just some, you know, Christian preacher in Antioch who kind of fell off the wagon a little bit and kind of got lost in the details over here about circumcision. This is Peter. And Peter had some lessons to learn this from when it comes to acceptance of Gentiles. In a moment of weakness, when you have people come in who, you know, somehow he feared, that's why the fear of man brings a snare. That's what Paul says what he says in chapter one, verse 10. I'm not seeking the favor of men. Neither should Peter. He should have stayed at the table. And when those guys came in and pointed at things of this sort, he should have stood up with Paul and said, what are you pointing at? You want to join us at the table and eat with the Gentiles? Oh, we can't do that. We're Jews. No, you're not. You're false brethren. Call them for what it really is. Name the animal for what it really is in the garden. If you can't eat with the Gentiles, then you can't eat with anybody. And that's why it's very, very important for us that we accept into our fellowship those who've embraced the gospel, yet aren't exactly, you know, come from the background that we come from. I remember when Frank had his ministry there with Chime Street, sometimes on Sundays, Frank would bring in some of these folks that he had witnessed to and ministered to. Well, a little bit of the unsavory sorts, and maybe they had a little bit more of a, you know, a gothic, you know, blend or flavor. That's fine. They wanted to hear the gospel. We accepted them in their humanity. Because we eat with the tax gatherers and the sinners. We're called to be peacemakers. We have to go out of the world. We're not going to be around sinners. And so to deny them that is to not run the race effectively, as Paul would say in 1 Corinthians 9. Trust me, God will draw the lines between believers and unbelievers, as he says in 2 Corinthians 6, 14. And he labors to do that. I can't make fellowship where there's no fellowship. On the other hand, where there is commonality, take advantage of it. Preach the gospel. And if a person comes to the gospel, we accept them based upon the gospel, not the physical differences or whatever that they came to the table with. They're now my brother in Christ. I have to look past that. That's what Paul's going to say in chapter three. You've got to look past the male, female. You've got to look past the Jew, Gentile thing, rich, poor, Smart, dumb. You gotta look past that. So if God saves a transgender person and they come to our church, okay. That's my brother in Christ. Yeah, he might have a mutilated body. He's gonna live with that because of the ravages of sin and the bad decisions he made listening to the lies of the world. But that's my brother and I'm gonna take him wherever I go. Now if God is back and he should know that, I'm gonna tell him that. I'm not going to subsidize and agree with transgenderism, but I'm going to accept him as my brother because he's believing in the gospel. I've got to be able to do that because God saves those people. And he's going to save them through people like us who knows what to affirm and knows where the line is to deny. And Peter's drawing a line on the wrong side of the sand here. I mean, he just looks at them as Gentiles and says, no, notice he's looking at them as Gentiles and not brethren anymore. You can't do that. You got to look at them as brethren. That's why when you talk about, when I use that example, when me and Tom went to San Antonio, when we were dealing with the whole issue of identity, should you use the phrase, I am a black Christian, or I'm a Christian who's black? The first one is to put the emphasis on your race. I'm black. And now Christian is secondary. The second one is I'm a Christian who happens to be black. So I'm Christian. Now that's exactly what you're supposed to be doing. And they have some problems with that. And I said, if you don't put it on here, we don't have any fellowship. I'm gonna call you what the Bible calls you as a Judaizer. You're making this an element of the gospel and you're adding to it. This is the truth of the gospel now. That means you can't accept me unless I'm black. Or I gotta be secondary here. Or white or whatever else it might be. You can't do that. You have to accept me because I'm a Christian. Now whatever else I might come to the table with in my humanity, tough, get over it. Love me through it, love me with it. That's how God made me and that's how God has me in my humanity. For us as Christians, this is Christianity 101. This is the truth of the gospel as it flavors out into the world. That's why we're transnational and transcultural and we can go into all these ethnic groups and tribes and things of this sort because we know God saves all kinds. I know that I'm not better than that person. I might be better off providentially, off in the sense of circumstances, but me as a person, I'm different than that person next to me. Whether he's got a bone in his nose, he lives in the jungle, or he's up here in Oxford teaching some sort of progressive process theology. I'm not better than the person. As a person, I can be better off providentially. Lines have fallen to me in pleasant places. Great, that's the blessings of God. because you got to recognize a higher being, but it's just recognizing for what it is. Okay. God's blessed me with this. Okay. He's blessed me with it. They want to equate that. Well, because you're blessed, you think you're better than, I didn't say that. I just said, I'm blessed with this, with this gift. I never said I'm better than you. In fact, I'm not. That's one in three. There's none righteous. And we have to be able to hold that doctrine here, or we're going to lose the gospel and we're going to lose our freedom in Jesus. This is Paul's argument to Peter. Peter should have known better. That's why you don't do that. You don't segregate based upon something in their humanity. Stop it. You can't do it. Or based upon the law and how the law viewed them as Gentiles. It doesn't work anymore. You're dead to the law. You're in Christ now. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this glorious gospel that you have saved us in. Thank you, Father, that in Christ, in that righteousness. And outside that righteousness, Lord, we are mindful that there are lines drawn, that we have to separate from unbelievers. So help us, Father, to know the difference between when something is a gospel issue that's separating believers from one another, and we need to reject. And when something's being added to the gospel, keep us from We love you, we thank you for this time, we thank you for this message from Galatians to help us, Father, to learn from Peter's mistake. The same Peter, Father, that talks about Paul later in one of his letters, his writings are in Scripture, and he talks all about the grace of God, and we thank you for that. We love you and we seek to bless you in all things. Be with us now, Father, as we We'll eat together and we will discuss business. Help us on the to be it to be profitable. Christ would be honored. The brethren would be encouraged for sending your great name. We pray. Amen. Thanks. We are dismissed. Thank you, Mark.