If you want to turn in your Bibles to the book of Galatians, chapter one. What a sweet time of worship this morning. Praising the Lord and remembering him. I appreciate so much the wisdom, Justin, that you gave in explaining communion. I've been, I've told some of you, I've been listening to this church history. It's a five volume series. I own the volume, so I can look at it now and then as well, but I've been listening to it. This idea of the bread and wine being turned into the actual body and blood of Christ, this didn't develop until a thousand years after the church was established. We had some strings of that strange doctrine, but it did not come from the Bible. or from Christ himself. And that's so important. Because I want to begin by talking about how the gospel is the DNA of the church. It's the genetic information that informs, that makes Christians, that creates Christians. It's what God, the Holy Spirit, uses to regenerate so that we are born again and we are given a new nature and new affections and desires. It's the key to how God changes us. And the gospel, you know, as Paul tells us here, as he mentions it in 1 Corinthians 15, verses 3 and 4, he says, for I deliver to you that which also I received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. That's the gospel. And it is the DNA of the church. It's the genome of the Christian life. the shared life of the church body. It's the basis of all of our philosophy of ministry. Every ministry of the church must be based upon the truths of the gospel and a reminder of the gospel. In fact, long before I get up to preach on Sunday mornings, you should be well acquainted with the gospel just by the things that are done in our worship. because Christ is held forth in our communion. Christ is held forth and his accomplishments, his works, his persons, as we sing the songs, as we read the scriptures, as we pray and confess our sins, as we are called to worship, Christ is held forth. So even if I never made it to the pulpit, You should know what the gospel is just because of what we do and how the gospel informs everything that we do. The gospel harmonizes all the beliefs of the church. It's not some scattered amalgamation of different ideas from the Bible and a handful of Bible verses here and there. It is the doctrine of the gospel that is taught throughout Scripture, the one story of Scripture. And so it harmonizes our faith, the faith, our teaching, our worship, our evangelism, our fellowship. The gospel message shapes the whole life of the church. It regulates the life of the church. So the gospel is vital. The gospel is Jesus Christ, right? We need to keep that in mind. The message is the message of the person of Christ. And faith is in the person of Christ. The good news is the good news of Jesus Christ. and we want to keep him above everything. We want to keep Christ on the pedestal. We want to give him the preeminence, the highest place as the one who is the revelation of God. Well, this morning as we look at Galatians chapter 1, I want to begin by reminding you of something we began to talk about last week, and that is that Paul received the gospel by revelation. So let's go ahead with the first slide here. Yes, and so hopefully you'll be able to see some scriptures as we go through this passage. So Galatians chapter 1 and verse 11, I would have you know brothers that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel. For I did not receive it from any man. nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers. But when he who had set me apart before I was born, who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me." You notice earlier he said in verse 12, I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. He's speaking here of his Damascus Road conversion. He said he was pleased to reveal his son to me in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles. When Paul was saved, he was also called to be an apostle. He was entrusted with the gospel, the gospel was revealed to him, and he was called. And God said to him from the very beginning that you are my chosen instrument, you shall stand before the nations, you shall take the gospel to the Gentiles. You can read about his testimony in Acts 22, Acts 26, as well as Acts 9 where these things actually took place. Paul refers to it here. He says, I did not immediately consult with anyone, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia and returned again to Damascus. The gospel was revealed to Paul and it did not come through any human agency or angelic mediation. It was the Lord Jesus himself who revealed his person and work to the Apostle Paul transforming his life. Now that's the gospel revelation. But now number two is the gospel affirmation. the gospel affirmation. So as we're looking here at verse 18 of Galatians chapter 1, I hope you're following in your Bibles as well. Paul has already started preaching. He started preaching right away when he was in Damascus after he was converted. As soon as he was able to, he took a little food, was strengthened, and he was baptized, and he went straight to the synagogue and began preaching the gospel to the Jews there, and he was proving that Jesus was the Christ, and they were scratching their heads saying, isn't this the guy that was killing people who believe this? And here he is, he's persuading us, and nobody could resist the wisdom with which he spoke about these things from the Old Testament, showing them from the Law and the Prophets that Jesus is the Messiah. He's the Savior that was sent by God the Father into the world. And so all of that came by revelation. Now, there is an affirmation here. He says, Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord's brother. And I'm not lying about this, he says in verse 20, the Lord knows. Now, I want you to notice in verse 18, he's giving us a little bit of a timeline here. So after his conversion, three years later, he has not met or talked with any apostles. He goes to Jerusalem and he visits Peter. Now this word visit, I would underline it in your Bibles because it is an unusual word. It is the word historio, historio. You can kind of hear our word history. The noun, a histore, was a person who was commissioned by a king to go out into a new land and to map the land, to find out its resources, discover its rivers, discover its mountains, to bring back some sort of a graphical representation of the land that they would like to conquer or that they wish to take or inhabit or whatever it might have been. That was the work of a histor in the service of a king. This word doesn't just mean visit. It means to examine, to ask questions about. In other words, when Paul spent 15 days with Peter, he was doing the work of an investigative reporter. You can imagine all the questions he had because Peter had been with the Lord from the beginning. And so he was listening. They probably talked into the night. I used to do that. I can't do it anymore. Now if I'm awake at night, it's because I don't want to be. But I used to stay up at camp work. My friend Jim Stewart and I, we'd teach all day, stay up all night talking. I remember his wife coming in the living room of the house we were staying in. She said, you guys are still, you know it's 3 a.m. And Jim said, well, I was coming to bed, but Bob won't stop listening. We had such fellowship. I am sure these guys talked as much as they could. What amazing fellowship they must have had as he listened to Paul's story of his own conversion, which I'm sure that he had heard. as well as the revelations that he was receiving from the Lord, because Paul frequently received revelations from God, and we read through his letters, you can read about that. And Paul was there investigating the stories of Christ in his incarnation. And he was all tying together everything that the Old Testament teaches about the Messiah. The mind, that great analytical mind of the Apostle Paul was drawing the lines of Scripture from beginning to end, from creation to Christ. from the line of David to Christ, from Abraham to Christ, from the priesthood to Christ, and he was seeing how Christ is the very center. Now he knew these things, but it was affirmed, right? So his time with Peter was a time of gospel affirmation. And he tells us then in verse 21, of chapter 1, then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. He's preaching the gospel in these places. He no doubt suffered and was beaten in these areas. He gives us a list of his beatings in 2 Corinthians chapter 11, I think. And when he gives that list, it's much more than is contained in the other stories. It's very likely that he experienced those things and perhaps shipwreck as well because he experienced those. He suffered for the sake of the gospel. And he tells us that he was still unknown to the churches in Judea. He had been to Jerusalem, but they did not trust him because he was known for deceiving people into thinking he was a Christian just so he could bind them and put them in prison or have them killed or stoned like Stephen. But anyways, the Apostle Paul tells us here, he says, those churches were hearing that the one who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith. Did you see that in verse 23? He's preaching the faith, the gospel, The faith, the same thing. Sometimes Paul will use the expression, the truth. He means the same thing. The gospel is the substance of the faith that we believe, the doctrines that we hold to and cling to. And it is the substance that he preached. He preached the faith. And they said he's now preaching the faith that he once tried to destroy. And notice this in verse 24, they glorified God. because of me." They didn't meet him, they just were hearing. The one who was the enemy is now a gospeler. Then we come into chapter two and here we see gospel authentication. We have two or three slides on this. We want to look at some of these verses. Here we see Paul's gospel not only corroborated by Peter, but for the first time, he meets more of the apostles. Verse 1 in chapter 2, then after 14 years, finally. I mean, he is called as an apostle. He's verified as an apostle. He's been preaching the gospel. He and Peter compared notes. His gospel was affirmed as he walked through that process with Peter, but now he finally goes to Jerusalem and he's meeting the apostles. Finally, that's what I wrote in my Bible, finally. I went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas taking Titus along with me. Very important. He says, I went up because of revelation. God told him to go up. And I sat before them. And you know, if I was going to translate this word for set before, I laid it out. That's what he's saying. I laid it out. I told them. This is what God told me. He says, I laid it out. I set before them and I did it privately. before those who seemed influential. These are leaders. He says, I set before them the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles in order to make sure I was not running or had run in vain. Now Paul has the greatest confidence that he is preaching the true gospel, but he still meets with these apostles and he is wanting for the sake of the church for his message to be authenticated. Because there were people coming through the province of Galatia and telling the churches that Paul, he's not preaching what they preach at Jerusalem. He's changed the message and it's not Jewish anymore. It's a Gentile message and he's abandoned Moses and the law and he's not teaching them, they have to keep the law, because they were teaching a false gospel. And so here he tells us, hey, I went to Jerusalem, here, 17 years after his conversion, and he says, and I met with those influential apostles there, verse three, but even Titus, who was with me, was not forced to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. So you see there's an accountability here and this is important. You need to hold me accountable for preaching the doctrine of scripture. Listen, the teaching of God's word is how we remain pure as a church and how we keep the main things the main things. And if we abandon the doctrines for some other message, or for some watered-down form of the message, then it will gradually be leaven that leavens the whole ministry. That's why we want to keep Christ at the center, and we want the gospel to inform. It's the DNA. It's the genome. And so he says, I want you guys to know in Galatia that I took Titus with me. He's a Greek and the apostles did not circumcise him. They do not believe that circumcision is necessary for salvation. That's what the false teachers were saying. You must be circumcised and keep the law. You must keep the commandments, the traditions of the father. Celebrate the feast of Israel. You must do these things in order to be saved. And he said, if you go that direction, he warns them, listen, Christ will profit you nothing. If you add to Christ, then Christ profits you nothing. It has to be Christ alone. And incidentally, if you want to know about the gospel, Over here, you can see the five solas represent the doctrines that are implicit in the message of the gospel over here. And as we're coming up on Reformation Sunday, the last Sunday of October, we want to take special note of what we have received from the apostles and the reformers, and that we cling to it and pass it on. And so he tells them that even Titus, And then he says, yet because of false brothers, yet because of false brothers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery, to whom we did not yield in submission for even a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you. When this took place, Paul was not, he had not yet gone on his first missionary journey. The churches in Galatia didn't exist at this time. But when he met with the apostles, there were those present who were Judaizers, who were attempting to corrupt the gospel, who were trying to enslave people to keeping the law as a means of being saved. And Paul says that we, me, and Peter and James and John and the other elders and apostles in Jerusalem. We did not have Titus circumcised and we did not submit for one moment to these false teachers. We rebuked them, we withstood them, we fought against them, we were a unit. We battled false teaching together. The other apostles and myself stood together against the false teachers that are trying to infiltrate and destroy your faith." He says, they and I teach the same gospel. See, that's the point here of gospel authentication. The gospel he preached is the gospel the apostles preached in Jerusalem as well. And he says, we didn't yield to them In fact, he says, everything we talked about did not add anything new. They didn't nuance Paul's gospel. They didn't inform Paul's gospel in any way. The gospel that Paul preached was the complete gospel, and it matched perfectly with the gospel being preached by Peter in Jerusalem. And then he says there in verse 7, On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, the nations, the Gentiles, 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, Cephas, who's Peter, and John, who seemed to be pillars And before I forget, I need to just point out that word pillars, because he's describing the church as the temple of God. In visiting the church, he visited the spiritual temple of God, and these apostles were pillars in the church. Christ is the cornerstone, he tells us. But these men were pillars, the apostolic ministry in the church. They laid the foundation. And that's what we read in Ephesians. And so he says here, they were pillars they perceived, they discerned. The gospel gives us discernment so that we know the truth when we see it, and we also recognize what is false. In the last few years, we have a new pastor that had come into this area. He's in a church that I would regard as preaching a false gospel, but there are some saved people in it as well. He wanted to get in on some of the Bible studies that we were doing here, and he wanted to talk with me and so forth. And I did talk with him, and we spent a little time together. But I recognized right away that his doctrine was strange, and it had been infiltrated by this same kind of idea that Christ plus something, in his case, Christ plus baptism. And I told him, I said, I do not want you to come to any Bible studies at Anniston Bible Church. I do not want to give him a voice to talk to our congregation, to the sheep that God has put under the care of the elders here. And just our last pastor's fellowship, I found that he'd been visiting some of the other guys as well. And for some of them, it took two or three times before they said, no, no, you are teaching something different. And I said, that's what I told him as well. The gospel gives us discernment to know the truth and to know what is false. to be able to tell the difference. And so he says, they perceived, because they had gospel mindset, he says, they 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 to the circumcised. Only they ask us to remember the poor. There was a tremendous famine in the land in Jerusalem at this time. the church was suffering there. And we read in the book of Acts how Paul and Barnabas carried relief to them, I think at the close of chapter nine it is. And so he carried relief to them. He was very much concerned for helping the church there that had been suffering. And he says, they gave us the hand of fellowship. They said, your ministry is Christ's ministry. Your ministry is like our ministry. Your ministry is from God. Your message is from God. We authenticate your message. You know, what the Lord did here was so marvelous. I would like for us to look over here at Ephesians as you look, because Paul is describing for us here how the gospel shaped the church of Jew and Gentile. And I think this is an important passage for us to read. So if you'll turn to Ephesians 2, we're going to look at verse 11, chapter 2 and verse 11 of Ephesians. Paul writes, therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands, doesn't make anybody a believer. They had confidence in it, but it doesn't make anybody believe it. Made in the flesh by hands. Verse 12, remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise. Having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off, Gentiles, outside of Judaism, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. for he himself is our peace who has made us both one. He has made Jew and Gentile one and broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility that existed between Jew and Gentile." There was an actual wall in the temple confines that separated the court of the Gentiles from the court of the Jews. And he says that Christ, by his blood in his flesh, so he's speaking about the cross here, he has broken down this wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances. Be circumcised. Keep the law to be saved. That he might create in himself one new man. He's talking about the body of Christ, the church. In place of the two, no longer Jew and Gentile, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body, how? Through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. So this Jew-Gentile question is something that was settled at the cross. But it took the church years to apply the cross to the relationships between Jew and Gentile. All this is very important to the story that we're into. And he came and preached peace to you who are far off. and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one spirit to the Father." They have the one spirit, they have one father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, members of the household of God. built on the foundation of, yes, the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God, the Holy Spirit. God has formed the church through the person and work of Christ into a spiritual temple of which Peter, James, and John were pillars there in Jerusalem. The apostles were part of the foundation of this temple that God was building, and he had made out of many peoples. He had made one people, the one people of God, Jew and Gentile. He had destroyed the hostility. He had removed the dividing wall. All of this was accomplished by the carpenter on the cross. Colossians says that he took the writing of commandments that was against us, that is all the demands of the law, and he nailed it to his cross. That's what it says. If you wonder when Jesus did a carpenter thing, he nailed it to his cross and took it away. I love that song, Wood and Nails, if you've not heard it, Wood and Nails, how he built the church and he did it with wood and nails. Marvelous what Christ accomplished. Now, that brings us back to Galatians because, man, look at this. Isn't it great? One body, one family, one Lord, and the apostles are united. They stand strong against the false teachers. I mean, everything is settled, right? I mean, it is so good. It can't go wrong here. which is gospel altercation. An altercation is a public disagreement. Now before I tell you about this, he tells us that Peter came to Antioch. So after this story has been told that we have went over about Paul's life, Peter comes to Antioch. Now you need to know a little bit about Antioch. So Antioch, had a real mix of Jew and Gentile. Many synagogues there, and many Gentiles, non-Jews, had been converted to Judaism. And in fact, it was cosmopolitan. It was one place where it seemed like Jews and Gentiles were fairly well connected because of this. And when Stephen was killed, Paul didn't know he was serving the gospel at that time. But Stephen's death caused the saints to be scattered all over, and some went up to Cilicia, and some went to other parts, and when they came to Antioch, they preached the gospel not only to Jews, but also to Gentiles, where there was a real mix here. And they were saved. And the church began to be formed from the very beginning out of Jew and Gentile who were born again. They heard about it in Jerusalem that Gentiles were being saved. They sent Barnabas up, and Barnabas saw the grace of God. He was just amazed at what God was doing there among Jews and Gentiles. After he ministered there for a while, he knew he needed help. So he went to Tarsus and got Paul and brought him, and he and Paul labored there for months and months and months. They were teaching in the church, they were building the church. This was the great missionary church, Antioch. Well, Peter came up, and man, Peter is on fire with this too. We're all gospel people. and he is enjoying table fellowship. The Jews and Gentiles are eating together, and he is not following Jewish dietary laws. That has been abrogated, fulfilled in Christ, right? And you can read about that in numerous places in scripture, Mark chapter seven. You can read it in 1 Timothy chapter four, the first five or six verses there, and other places in scripture. If you can imagine this, They're sitting down to eat, and Peter is saying, I want another helping of that bacon-wrapped shrimp, right? Amen, yeah, I got you, Michael, on that. He is eating this food that only Gentiles would eat, and he's eating it with Gentiles, which was not allowed under the traditions of the Jews, that you had to be separate. And so he's having a great time. But then there are some messengers that come from James, whether they actually brought a message from him, they represented an opinion. And they came up to Antioch as well, and they're shocked by this throwing away of the Mosaic law, this casting aside of the distinction between Jew and Gentile. They are shocked by this. And they are warning Peter that the people in Jerusalem are not going to like this. They may have told him, you're going to lose your ministry with them by what you're doing. They may have said that. They may have said, you are abandoning something that you kept your whole life. Whatever it was, it was fear, we read, fear of the circumcision. They were the circumcision party. You can read about them in Acts chapter 15. They were the circumcision party. They came up, and their presence there caused Peter to withdraw from the Gentiles. He's not ordering bacon-wrapped shrimp anymore, and he's eating kosher, and he's only eating. And in fact, his presence there, his influence there, causes other Jews to withdraw as well. The church is starting to crumble apart. And not only that, but sweet Barnabas. This is important, but it's a lesson for Bob. A lesson for Bob, a lesson for you, because Barnabas did not have the gospel discernment that Paul had about this situation. He should have. He should have, but he was carried along by people he respected. And no matter how respected people are, we need to make our decisions based on the gospel. We need to be wise in the gospel and in its application. And he's carried along too. Sweet Barnabas separates from his brothers and sisters, and the church is divided. And Paul is not having it, so he says, Verse 11, but when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles. But when they came, he drew back. He separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. It was the fear of man. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him. So even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, if you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force Gentiles to live like a Jew? He says, Peter, you have got this all backwards. And what you're doing here is doing great harm to the one body of Christ, to the one family of God. You are rebuilding the wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile. And of course, we know that Peter took this rebuke to heart and repented, and that Barnabas repented, even though he does not mention it here. And he goes on to give us the doctrine of justification by faith, which I will do in the coming days. But here's the lesson. The gospel is the DNA of the church. The gospel gives us discernment. The gospel helps us to understand. If there's a person who denies Christ, he's out. If a person confesses Christ and believes the gospel, he's in. Whose sins are forgiven? Whose sins are not? The gospel draws the line because it identifies who is the church. And everyone who has been received by Christ must be received by the church. Amen.