Well, I haven't read the text today, so let me do that. We're in Galatians, chapter two, and I'll be going through verses one through ten. And this is this is the word, then after 14 years, I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up because of a revelation and set before them, though privately before those who seemed influential, the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. in order to make sure that I was not running or had not run in vain. But even Titus, who was with me, was not forced to be circumcised, though he was a Greek yet because of false brothers secretly brought in who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Jesus Christ so that they might bring us into slavery to them. We did not yield in submission even for a moment so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you. And from those who seem to be influential, what they were makes no difference to me. God shows no partiality. Those, I say, who seemed influential added nothing to me. On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised, for he who worked through Peter, for his apostolic ministry to the circumcised, worked also through me for mine to the Gentiles. And when James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they be circumcised. They too, and they too, to the circumcised. Only they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do. Let me begin by asking you a series of questions. What is the mission of the preacher? What is the content of his message? Why is it that he stands up week after week to speak to you? Why do you come and what do you come to hear him say? What makes his words different from those you might hear at a seminar or a half time in a football locker room or on a television or radio talk show? What is the default message that people want to hear? What temptations do they have when they approach the text? What do they tend to make it do? Let me offer some suggestions. The mission of the preacher is to preach Christ. Now, that sounds good, but which Christ are we talking about? This is one of the temptations people face, which is to create Christ in their image. The content of his message is the passage that is before him that he's supposed to be preaching from. Now, that also sounds good, but this is likewise has a temptation to make the text say something other than what it says, because it isn't interesting enough or exciting enough or pragmatic enough for our fancy. Why does he stand there week after week preaching? Because this is the spiritual food that keeps you alive. But this, too, has a temptation, which is to preach only fun passages, to feed people only steak or candy, but never broccoli and spinach. What makes his words different from those heard in other places? Obviously, there's a lot of places you can go to hear somebody say something. Generally, people go to seminars to get tips, hints, helps, aids, techniques, programs, formulas for better living. At a halftime, the boys hear the motivational speech, depending on the circumstances, it can be full of anger and emotion. People listen to talk radio often to hear political talking heads or to enter into some kind of a new ongoing conversation. Is this why the preacher preaches? Not really. You may get some of that, depending upon the circumstances of the text that he's in. But preaching is something altogether different than that. He preaches a message others do not even know. Unless they are believers, too, and even then their message isn't going to be the same as his because they have a different calling. As we're going to see, Paul is quite concerned in Galatians that other Christians know that he is preaching the same message that they are preaching, even though he has never even really talked to any of them personally. What is the default message that people want to hear? This is easier. We want to hear things about us. Let's be honest, we like to hear about ourselves. We like to know how we can become better people. We like the preacher to take our tired eyes because we didn't get enough sleep the night before and awaken them up. Propping our chins up with his kind words about us. Or masochistically, I think there's a tendency in all of us to sometimes want to have the preacher beat us upside the head in order to reinforce publicly how we already feel about ourselves in private. Either way, it's still about us, isn't it? What about the temptations we have in approaching the text? This, too, is easier. We always seem to want to make the text tell us how to do something. Again, it's about us, we like ourselves. Even if the apostle is giving us something like what we're in here, an autobiography for the purpose of extolling Christ, we want to hear not about him, but about us. How does his story apply to me? We always ask. In and of itself, this is not a bad thing to want to find yourself in the Bible story. It's actually a very good thing. The temptation comes not in wanting to find yourself in its story, but in making it your story. That is why the great trend is to make every passage we read be about law. I saw this at seminary and I can tell you firsthand how it works out in the world. Even if there isn't a command within five chapters of where you're preaching, we always seem to wish that there would be one because we come to church expecting to hear about us. We feel like if we don't come away being told to do something that we haven't really gotten our money's worth. So command us, pastor, give us our marching orders, tell us what to do. The saddest thing of all is when we reformed Christians think like this, Because above all people, we're supposed to know that no matter what we're told to do, we can't do it perfectly anyway, which is why we need Christ. We need to hear about him and we need to feast upon him. But that's too much like the old spinach sometimes, isn't it? This, in my opinion, is exactly where the Galatians find themselves right now. The apostle has come to them preaching a message of absolute freedom in Christ. They naturally take this to mean, as so many of Paul's listeners do, freedom from obedience rather than freedom to serve, because it's so very difficult to understand what freedom in Christ, apart from law, could possibly mean. It doesn't strike them right. It's too freeing, it's too easy to something. This is why, when the opponents of the apostle came to them with their own version of the gospel, they were so eager to abandon what Paul had been saying. And for what? For the law. Like so many people today, they said the gospel is for the unconverted, but the law, that's for the Christian. And I'm going to have a lot more to say about this particular temptation in chapter three. In fact, one of the reasons why I chose to go through this letter three or four weeks ago when I was deciding. Today, we get a bit more specific about the nature of this legalistic temptation, the temptation to turn away from grace back to the law, the temptation is to say Christ isn't enough. He isn't practical. Give us something to do. Tell us what we have to do, Mr. Apostle, give us something to do, because we want to be good little Christians. We want God to be happy with us. The most incredible thing about this particular temptation in view today is that the people were actually being tempted by it. That sounds like a strange thing, but what is the temptation? Well, these were Gentiles. The temptation was that they had to be circumcised in order to be good Christians. That is, they had to do some law and a biblical law at that if they really wanted to reach the higher life and become victorious Christians in their walk. But this particular law. Was incredibly painful to obey, and I'm not quite sure that it was probably not a small bit embarrassing as well. It is tempting to think that maybe it was the women who were being tempted more than the men by these false teachers, because they didn't have anything to lose. Literally. It's always easier to follow the law if it is your friend who has to do it instead of you, isn't it? But that's just a guess. Maybe these men were masochistic. I don't know. What we have before us, then, is the story of the Apostle Paul traveling to Jerusalem some 14 years after he first met Peter there in order to make sure that I was not running or had not run in vain. What in the world is going on here? Up to this point in the letter, we've seen a completely God-centered Paul prove several things. First, his calling and election was from God, not his own free will. Second, his calling to be an apostle was from the direct summons of the personal risen Jesus. Third, his message was revealed to him through the teaching of this same risen Lord through an apocalypse. In other words, Paul wasn't looking for Christ, he wasn't seeking Christ, he wasn't in this to make money, he was trying to kill Christians. In short, there's nothing about his personal experience that made him want to proclaim this message to anybody. It was only by the grace of God in showing him the message that he came to this conviction. That leads me to an application. It was when he understood the message that he wanted to tell the message here that. It was when he wanted is when he understood the message that he wanted to tell the message, a lot of people have a basic understanding of the message. And it causes them to turn, but they never get around to telling anybody else about it. Particularly, this is due to fear, but fear is very often overcome by learning the message better. A lot of times the fear people have is not of rejection, but of confidence in knowing what they're supposed to tell somebody. But how can they ever know what to say if they're never told about this message again after they're saved? This is why it's astonishing to me that so many preachers give up preaching the gospel message to Christians. But you, my dear friends, like the Galatians, need to hear the good news and you need to believe it. I say, believe this message every week. And I say it for a reason. It's because I do not believe that belief is a one time event in the past, like so many of you have been taught. And maybe that's part of the problem some have when they are told to believe, they say, look, I've already believed, so what am I supposed to do now? But this is to see salvation as an Arminian. And faith is something like walking an aisle and raising your hand. If you do that at some point in time in the past, then you're in. My answer to the question. Is to believe that's what you're to do. Belief is ongoing. It's like a race to use Paul's metaphor here. You don't stop believing you press on in faith. You do all of your running through trust in the good news. You understand that any willing or working or running that you do is always through faith in Christ. Belief and understanding is what opens your mouth and moves your feet. And if you're having problems obeying, it's because you're having problems believing and having one way or another turned away from the good news to the temptation of works. And so you need to get back to the good news. If you're not looking at the good news and really understand how good it is, how freeing, how come how comforting. If you did understand, then good works would necessarily follow because they are what Christ predestined ahead of time for you to do. Now, that was my application, but here's an interesting thing, given what I said at the beginning, even here. What I said is still pretty much about you. This isn't the altruistic goal of simply hearing about Christ for Christ's sake. I pray that all of God's people would reach that kind of a goal. How blessed would any church be when all who came wanted to hear a message about Jesus and learn What he has done simply so that they could leave the church saying glory be to God in heaven, praise be to his son for his salvation wrought in history for us. If that's why we came, we would change the world. That should be our highest desire when we come into the house of God, because it is the chief end for which we were made, isn't it? to worship God. Everything else, the things about us, it's icing on the cake, part of God's magnificent love, mercy towards those whom he has called. The fact that we are able to enter into his story personally is by the sheer grace of God. What Paul is doing is putting forth a very powerful argument that the gospel not only comes from God, it's independent of man's evaluation. Think about this. Paul went the first seventeen years after his conversion, preaching from Jordan to Turkey and everywhere in between, facing taunting, mocking, ridicule, whips, stones, imprisonment. And all without ever having met with the group of apostles whom Jesus called when he was here on the earth and in order to consult with them about it. What he tells us is that 14 years after meeting with Peter, he went back to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus. Barnabas is the son of encouragement and a great figure of personal faith in the Bible, although later on in this very chapter, You can see that he, too, is a sinner. Titus is a young Gentile. Who was probably converted by one of Paul's sermons when he was. Traveling up north. And he's going to come up again in a moment, so I'll save any more talk about Titus for later other than to let you know that he's got a book of the New Testament named after. Paul says that he went to Jerusalem because of a revelation and he set before them the gospel. That is, he spoke to the church in Jerusalem filled with apostles and leading men of prominence, men like James and John and Peter. And he spoke to them about his gospel. This is all Paul really ever seems to want to talk about when you read his letters, because he loves it so much. I'm going to take the minority of position in this sermon. When you read the commentaries, at least today's commentaries that the time frame. That we're looking at here when he goes to Jerusalem is the so-called Jerusalem Council of Acts fifteen and they're telling the same story. That's a minority opinion and I don't want to get into all the reasons for why scholars say one or the other. The other option is that what Paul's talking about here is an earlier episode that you read about in at eleven twenty seven thirty. Which would put. This story somewhere between forty four A.D. and forty six A.D. when Herod Agrippa died. But as William Hendrickson I think pretty convincingly argues that date seems impossible for this reason you do the math and it says. Fourteen years ago, and then before that, it says three years ago, you've got seventeen years. Now, if this took place in forty four AD, seventeen years before that would mean that Saul was converted on the road to Damascus somewhere around twenty seven to twenty nine AD. Either before or during Jesus's earthly ministry, which doesn't seem possible to me. So because this talks about the time frame of the Jerusalem Council, I'm going to have to say a little bit about that as we're going through this and next week, probably as well. What does it mean, then, finally, that he tells the gospel to the church in Jerusalem to make sure that he was not running in vain? But what he does not mean is that he sought the stamp of approval of the Jerusalem church. He wasn't trying to do that, didn't go down there in order to get them to say, Good job, Paul, we we approve of what you're saying, so keep on doing. That would undermine his whole point, his whole point is that Jesus taught him this and didn't get it from any man. Why he goes down to Jerusalem is because he knows that there's a growing rift in the church over the place of the law. He goes down to Jerusalem to make sure that they know that he's not responsible for this rift. And to confirm publicly that Jerusalem and Paul are in one accord. There are so many scholars that like to split up what Paul taught from everybody else in the New Testament, and it's just absurd. Paul and Barnabas had been in Antioch, which is north of Israel in Syria, along the Mediterranean, when this issue erupted in the church of there. Now, after a long discussion, Acts 15 tells us they were sent down to Jerusalem to the apostles and to the elders to discuss this question. Luke says they were warmly welcomed by the church there and they began discussing all the things God had done through them for the Gentiles. Paul seems to have met with a small group of prominent men prior to a larger public meeting, but once they were out in the open, the same group of legalists that were in Antioch also seem to be present down here in this church as well. In other words, this was an epidemic that threatened to destroy the church was an incredibly serious matter. So the first church council was called over this issue of circumcising Gentile Christians. What is frightening about this is how easy it is to say this today circumcision. That issue is dead and buried. We no longer attempted like they were. So what is the point of a passage like this? Well, that's the subtlety of the devil. He makes you look at the issue rather than the principle of the thing. The principle before us, when all is said and done, is basically this. Is Christ enough? Is it enough to hear about him and what he has done, or do we need more than that? That's the reason for the first ten minutes of this sermon. We are utterly tempted to turn away from Christ to the best of things, to take our eyes off of him, putting them, no matter how secretly and deceptively to ourselves upon us. Some might be tempted to say, well, the issue was about how a person got saved, it was about justification. Obviously, we are not saved by our works. But this response completely misunderstands the book of Galatians, who is being tempted here? Is it Christians or non-Christians? Who are these Galatians? When Paul says later in the letter, do we begin with the spirit and finish with the law, is he referring to how we get saved or what we do after we are saved? Again, I have more to say about that when we go through chapter three. Let me get back to the issue. Titus was mentioned because he serves as a case study of this issue of circumcision. As a Gentile, of course, he was not circumcised, but he became a Christian. He had the option to become circumcised, and a lot of people need to remember that he had the option. He could have done it if he wanted to, but he opted out. But remember, Timothy, which is interesting, occurs beginning at sixteen, which is right after this. We're told all had Timothy be circumcised when he left this place to go back up north in order not to offend all the Jews that were in the places where he was going. Point here is that Paul did not force Titus to do anything. Now, none of that would have been a problem, except for the false brothers were brought in secretly to spy out Christian freedom. I have a feeling there's a whole sermon there of false brothers coming into the midst of a congregation, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it. It's difficult to know exactly what it means. It probably refers to a deliberate attempt to put on a Christian facade. to join a fellowship and then to begin to create havoc once they were respected and had some measure of authority. In other letters, this kind of a person is called a wolf who breaks into the sheep pen and guess what he wants to do. This raises the ugly problem of how some.