We're looking on Sunday mornings at Paul's letter to the Galatians and this morning we come to the passage that was read earlier in our service, chapter 2, verses 11-16, page 824 in the Pew Bible. Some of you here, I'm sure perhaps many of you, can look back to a period of your Christian life when in a short space of time you made very rapid progress in your understanding. Perhaps you had been a Christian for a number of years and already familiar with the contents of the Bible. and you imagined perhaps that you understood it very well. And then you began to read certain books, to have long conversations with a certain Christian, or to listen to the preaching of a certain minister, all of these things combined. And what an impact. On one hand there was the humiliating realisation of how little you really had understood, or how much you had missed. And on the other hand, what a rapid growth in understanding. It's as if a light had been switched on and you could now see things, wonderful things that you had never seen before, or had only seen but dimly. That's often how it is when believers are first introduced to Reformed theology, the distinctives of Biblical Calvinism. There is a rapid and extraordinary progress in understanding, and the believer feels as if he or she has gained more light in a few weeks than in whole years before. Well, it was like that with the Apostle Peter. He would have known the Old Testament Scriptures from his infancy through the teachings of the synagogue. And on top of that, he had the extraordinary privilege of being personally tutored by the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And yet, right up until the time of Jesus' death, what a block in his understanding For all that he had been taught, he was nowhere near being ready to be the New Testament evangelist and the New Testament church leader that so soon he was going to have to be. And then the Savior rose from the dead and appeared to Peter and the other disciples opened their minds to understand the scriptures. And then, over the next 40 days before the Lord ascended to heaven, he spoke to these men about the Kingdom of God. You can read about that in Acts chapter 1. And then finally and climatically on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit was poured out upon these men and the result was that Peter and the rest of the apostles took a great leap forward in their understanding. came to see things and to understand things in these few weeks after the resurrection that transformed him from a man unset to be a leader, to a leader who in his evangelism and teaching was able to perfectly reflect the mind of Christ. And yet, and yet, for all this rapid and massive progress that there was in his understanding, Peter remained an imperfect, sinful man. Now he was doubtless sanctified by the truth. You look back to that period in your own Christian life when you made such rapid progress in your understanding. There was more to it, wasn't there, than just a growth in head knowledge. Christians who experience that kind of thing in most cases are made better Christians by it. It was a time of growth for you, wasn't it, in your spiritual life? You came to have more of a heart for God and more of a heart for the lost and a greater zeal for the Kingdom and greater prayerfulness. And we can be absolutely sure that that's how it was with the Apostle Peter. but it did not make him perfect. Apostle as he was, authoritative guide to the church as he was, weakness and sinfulness remained and here in this incident that is before us this morning we have a melancholy proof of it. Galatians chapter 2 verses 11 to 14 When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles, because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, you are a Jew, etc., etc. One writer says of Peter in his personality, Peter seemed to possess a strange mixture of impulsive courage and shrinking timidity. We see that in his denials of Christ as prior to the Lord's crucifixion and here at Antioch we see the same thing again. He has a fear of this circumcision group and it causes him, apostle as he is, to act in a way that is clearly wrong, out of line with the truth of the gospel, hypocritical in a way that is damaging. to others. And it leads me to make an appeal that as you pray for Christian leaders, and especially for those who are in leadership in this assembly, that you would ask that the Lord would make us men of courage. It is sadly the case that leaders can go astray and their doctrine And we hear so often, don't we, of leaders falling into sexual sin. But these are not the only areas in which a Christian leader is vulnerable. The apostle Peter here was neither astray in his doctrine nor guilty of sexual immorality, but he was guilty of conduct so serious that it merited a public rebuke from a fellow apostle. And it was all because his courage failed. He lost his nerve. And so I ask you, brethren, as you pray for the men of this assembly who are in positions of leadership, that God would make us men of courage. Men who will not allow ourselves to be pressurised into doing what we know to be wrong out of fear of those whom we do not want to upset. And that can be a very real temptation in church life. and it's one that must be resisted. Well let's try and come to grips with what this incident is all about and we're going to do so by gathering our thoughts not around the Peter who lapsed but rather around the Paul who opposed him and in particular I want us to think about Paul in terms of two distinctive qualities that we see exhibited in him here The first is discernment, and the second is courage. First of all, the Apostle Paul displays discernment here. Discernment, boys and girls, is all about being able to see things clearly, not with our eyes, but with our minds. A discerning person is the person who is able to pick up clues to what a person is really like, for example, or what's really going on in a particular situation. Your parents, for example, would like you to be discerning when it comes to choosing friends. We want you to see clearly what a person is like and to judge wisely be discerning as to whether or not that particular person will make a good friend. Now it is always a blessing to a church, and especially when false teaching is making its inroads, when there are men who are discerning in leadership. And by discerning leaders, I mean men who can see the tendency of things, the implications of things, the consequences of things, the inconsistency of things with Holy Scripture and the danger that they pose. It's a blessing when it comes to doctrine. A leader who is discerning is able to see that a particular doctrine being taught is unscriptural. and be able to point out to those who are less discerning why it is unscriptural, and what the consequences are of embracing it, and how it will affect other things if the church holds it to be true, and what damage it will do if nothing is done to check it. And then there is the whole broad area of Christian practice, and here too a discerning leader is a blessing to the church, For a discerning reader is able to see how a particular practice is unscriptural, and is able to point out to those who are less discerning why it is unscriptural, in what ways it deviates from the truth, and what the consequences are of continuing with it, and what damage will be done if nothing is done to check it. Now in both of these areas, doctrine and practice, the Apostle Paul was a discerning man. And here in this incident at Antioch we see it in regards particularly to a matter of practice, namely the refusal of Peter, as a Christian Jew, to eat with believers who were Gentiles. Now in opening this up, I want us to notice in the first place what Peter's practice was at the beginning. Verse 12. Before certain men came from James, Peter used to eat with the Gentiles. The scene is Antioch, chief city of Syria, a place where the first Gentile church had been planted and where the disciples were first called Christians. And the believers have got a distinguished guest. The Apostle Peter has come to visit and at the outset he is perfectly happy to eat with Gentile Christians. He's happy to sit with them at their common meals, he's happy to sit with them at the Lord's table, and these two things so often happening concurrently, he was happy to do both. Now without question This willingness on the part of Peter to eat with Gentile Christians was evidence of nothing less than a revolution in Peter's thinking. In days gone by, he would have said as a conscientious Jew that to eat with non-Jews was a wrong thing to do. You see, those Gentiles might be eating things that were unlawful for a Jew to eat. things that were forbidden in the Old Testament scriptures, things that were unclean and which rendered those who prepared and ate them unclean. And therefore if you as a Jew shared a meal with such people eating such food, you would be made unclean. And so the devout Jew just wouldn't do it. He wouldn't have anything to do with table fellowship with Gentiles. Well, in the case of the Apostle Peter, all these notions had been effectively quashed by a vision that he had been given three times over in Acts chapter 10. You are very familiar with it, I'm sure. God wanted to teach this man that all these old distinctions between clean and unclean food were a thing of the past. And that he was not at liberty, therefore, to consider people unclean on account of the things that they ate. And so he was given this vision three times over and it taught Peter the lesson. When he was directed by God immediately afterwards to go to the household of the Gentile Cornelius, he went quite happily. And now here he is in Antioch and he's equally happy to eat at the same table as Christians who are Gentiles. So there's his practice At the beginning it did not however, and this is our second point, it did not however remain his practice. Verse 12 again. Before certain men came from James he used to eat with the Gentiles, but when they arrived he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision party. Now if these visitors to Antioch were the same ones of whom we read earlier in Acts 15, they had come, and Luke tells us this later on in Acts 15, they had come to Antioch without apostolic authority, James or anyone else's. They were Jews who professed to be Christians. And in their opinion it was wrong for Christian Jews to eat with Gentiles. They were probably members of that party in the church that was beginning to cause trouble by insisting that if Gentiles were to be saved, they needed to be circumcised and obey the law of Moses. They needed in fact to become Jews. and to live as Jews, part of which meant that they could only eat food that, according to the Old Testament law, was ceremonially clean. And until they did so, they considered it improper and defiling for a Jew to eat with them, either at their common meals or at the Lord's Supper or both. Well, that's what they were saying. And amazingly, Peter gave in to them and began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles. Had he changed his mind? Not at all. This wasn't a matter of conviction on the part of Peter. Paul charges him with hypocrisy. He did it because he was afraid of these men. Now we know from Acts 11, something that happened prior to this, that members of this circumcision group had criticised him for eating with the Gentile Cornelius and perhaps Peter was just reluctant to encounter their criticism again. That is so like human nature, isn't it? People criticise us and we are stung. And so we try to please them afterwards so that we won't incur their criticism again. But whatever the reason, he was afraid of them. And as a consequence he altered his practice and drew back from those men with whom before he had been perfectly happy to eat. And as you can see from verse 13, he wasn't alone in this. The other Jews, that is the other Christian Jews in Antioch, joined him in this hypocrisy so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. Now it is here that we see how discerning a man the Apostle Paul was. Look at verses 14 to 16. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, you are a Jew. Yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it then that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? We who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So too, we have put our faith in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law. Because by observing the law, no one will be justified. This withdrawing from Gentile believers was no small issue. It was conduct, verse 14, that was out of line with the truth of the gospel. That gospel which declared, verse 16, that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. God willing next Sunday morning we will be returning to these words verses 15 and 16 and looking at them in some detail. This morning we're only going to glance at them in order to see what Peter is really doing here. The Apostle Paul is reminding Peter of something that they both knew. They believed it. They had experienced it. They gloried in it, they preached it to Jews and Gentiles alike. How does a sinner come into a right relationship with God? How does a sinner come to be justified? By observing the law of God? No, emphatically no. But rather by faith in Jesus Christ. That is the way of salvation both for Jews and it is the way of salvation for Gentiles. It is the way of salvation for you and me. Now these Gentile Christians, they had embraced this. That was the gospel they had believed. And because of that, they had become Peter's Christian brothers. They had been accepted by God in the same terms that Peter had been. Justified by faith in the same great saviour they were now, Gentiles and Peter, heirs together of eternal life. And Paul wants to know how that being so, Peter can do what he has just done. Doesn't he see it? By withdrawing from these Gentile believers, Peter has aligned himself with men who are denying the Christian standing of these Gentiles. He has aligned himself with men who are saying that they needed first to become Jews and live like Jews in obedience to the law of Moses before there could be any recognition of them and fellowship with them as Christians. Paul is outraged. How can you do that, Peter, when you believe, and I know you believe, that God has already justified them through faith in Jesus Christ? He has accepted them just as he has accepted us. They are as fully Christians, Peter, as you are. How then can you withdraw from them? and insists that they adopt Jewish customs and live like Jews before you can recognise them and have fellowship with them as Christians. Peter, your conduct is out of line with the Gospel. Now I dare say that all of this seems rather remote from us, and in a sense it is. But there is a basic principle here that it remains important that we grasp and which remains important that we live out, and it is this. Our conduct in relation to our fellow Christians is to be shaped and determined by our doctrine of justification. If we are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, we have been justified. God has so altered our standing in relation to himself that sinners as we are, we are now righteous in his sight and heirs of eternal life. He has pardoned us, accepted us, freed us from all condemnation through our faith, our believing, in Jesus Christ. Not all who are justified, however, are alike. There's a truth in them. They may be a different colour from what we are. They may belong to a different race. They may be people who differ from us in terms of their culture. There may be many cultural differences and there may be differences too in points of doctrine. They may belong to a very different ecclesiastical community from the one that we do, one that we could not perhaps in all good conscience join, one that we would wish in all good conscience that they would separate themselves from. all kinds of differences. Nevertheless, if they are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, they are justified. And according to Acts chapter 2, our relations toward them are to be shaped by that reality. John Stott in his exposition of this passage puts it like this. If God has accepted them, how can we reject them? If he receives them to his fellowship, shall we deny them ours? He has reconciled them to himself. How can we withdraw from those whom God has reconciled? Our doctrine of justification is to shape and determine the way in which we relate to all these different brethren. One writer on this passage gives us an interesting historical illustration. He tells us that William Carey, the great Baptist missionary When he arrived in India in 1793, Utterly refused to compromise with the Hindu caste system. Brahmins who professed conversion to Christ were not accepted as genuine converts unless they broke bread with all, including those of lower caste. Later Indian missionaries, as I read somewhere else, would put this question to candidates for baptism. Do you renounce in your baptism Hinduism, idolatry and caste? Caste divided Indian society as deeply as colour has divided other societies, this society. But for converts to Christ, there could be none of it. A common blessing of justification by faith in the same great Saviour had made them one. And it was rightly insisted upon by these missionaries that they give practical expression to that by fellowship at the Lord's table with all, nor refusing to eat with those who were justified by faith in the same great Saviour. And that must be our principle as well. Whatever the differences, and there may be many, between ourselves and other Christians, our shared blessing of justification makes us one. And in our relations with one another, I'm thinking here particularly about the Lord's Supper because it's the thing that most clearly cogently connects with this, in our relations with one another we are to give practical expression to that reality. And so, unless the individual concerned is under the discipline of their local church, we ought to welcome any communicant member of any church if they are justified by faith in Jesus Christ. I said a moment ago that they may belong to an ecclesiastical community very different from our own. One that we could not in all good conscience join. One that it's a mystery to us that they remain in, although they may have good reasons for it. But they are justified. They are justified. And if they are justified, they are to be welcomed. And if they are not, then we are acting in a way that is out of line with the truth of the gospel. If I can put it to you like this. Justification by faith in Jesus Christ is not just good news for needy sinners, though it is wonderful good news for needy sinners. And it is not just a truth that is to comfort the hearts of God's people, though it is a truth which, when felt in power, does comfort the hearts of God's people. It is a doctrine that is to profoundly shape our relations with fellow Christians, with all of them. For it tells us that God has accepted every believer in Jesus. And it challenges us to make that visible by doing the same. So he displays discernment. Secondly, we're looking at this much more briefly. The Apostle Paul displays courage here. It's not always easy for a church leader to deal with a situation that really needs to be dealt with. There may be any number of things that will incline him to shrink back from confrontation and to be silent when he knows in his heart that he ought to speak out. Another reason why Christian leaders need courage. Not only Can we find ourselves being pressurised by certain groups or individuals as Peter was? We can find ourselves like Paul in a situation where, for various reasons, we're in a delicate and difficult position which we can't ignore. And so we need courage. And here at Antioch, that was the very thing that the Apostle Paul displayed courage. Notice firstly that he opposed Peter to his face. It's the note on which the text opens, verse 11. When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he was clearly in the wrong. Paul wasn't content to criticize Peter behind his back. and say to others, what a terrible thing Peter has done. It's all too easy to do that. He opposed him to his face. And you can understand how important that was on the fact that Peter was an apostle. This was one of the church's pillars. One of its principal leaders. And you know how serious a thing it is when a leader goes astray. when a leader goes astray, he will often lead others astray, as was evidently the case here. He may lead a congregation astray, many congregations, entire denominations, even a significant section of the Christian church as a whole. That is certainly how it was with Arius when he denied the deity of Christ. That's why Athanasius, who was his principal opponent, could famously say that he was against the world. Because Arius carried so many with him. It's a very dangerous thing for the church as a whole when leaders go astray. And that being so, We can be thankful to God for Paul's courage in opposing Peter to his face. And not only for his courage, we are thankful to God for the courage that he is giving to men who are doing the same today in local churches, denominations, seminaries, in the Christian church as a whole. They're raising their voices against leaders who in their doctrine and practice have gone astray and who by their errors are doing harm and there are plenty of them and some of them by their writings are very influential. But they're not going unchallenged because they have their Paul. men of discernment and courage who were opposing them openly and we are thankful for their work. So Paul opposed Peter openly and secondly he did so publicly. Verse 14. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel I said to Peter in front of them all. You see his courage? I am perfectly sure that it would not have been an easy thing for Paul at all to rebuke Peter even privately because Peter after all was one of the twelve and he had been in the company of Jesus and he had never done the terrible things that Paul had done. I am sure that Paul esteemed Peter highly and would very much have preferred not to rebuke him at all. But he wasn't wrong. And he was leading others astray. And he needed to be rebuked. And since the offence was so public, so known to all concerned, it was appropriate that the reproof should be similarly public. So I said to Peter, before them all, and then we have the words of reproof. Paul did not shrink back from a public confrontation and again we are thankful to God for the courage of those who have been prepared and who continue to be prepared to do the same when it's necessary today. There are times when the actions of errant leaders demand a public confrontation. That is certainly the case when the errors in question are put in print and widely read. It is right that able men should take up the pen and write against them and publish their writings. And in congregational meetings, and in seminary faculty meetings, and in presbytery meetings, and in association meetings, and at General Assembly meetings, it may be necessary to do the same. And what a blessing it is to the church to have Pauls, men of discernment and courage, who can see the error and the consequences of it, and who have the boldness to speak out. Do you know what it is that will put such men on their feet, or send them to their computers to write? It is zeal for the gospel. That was what burned in Paul's heart as he wrote to these Galatians and tells them all the things that he did. Zeal for the gospel. And it is a like zeal that will bring men forward today to oppose those who are in the wrong today and who by their errors are doing so much harm. But then finally this. And it's a question that we naturally ask. What was the outcome? How did Peter respond? Well, Galatians doesn't tell us, nor does any other part of the Word of God. There are, however, two things that to me are very telling. The first is that at the Council of Jerusalem, which may well have been precipitated by these events in Galatians chapter 2, Peter and Paul stood shoulder to shoulder against the Judaizers. Whatever lapse there may have been here at that critical council, you can read about it in Acts 15, Peter was publicly on the side of Paul and the Gospel. insisting, along with his brother, that the yoke of the law was not to be placed on the necks of the Gentiles. The defection was temporary and there is no evidence that it was ever repeated. And then secondly, years later, Peter wrote a letter in which he referred to Paul as our beloved brother Paul. We find the reference in 2 Peter 3 verse 15. Not only was there no further defection, there was no personal resentment to this man who had publicly rebuked him, our beloved brother. Isn't that exactly how it should be? What should be the outcome when a Christian is opposed because he is in the wrong. The very things that we trace in Peter. No further defection and no personal resentment. That's a model response, isn't it? God grant that if we are ever in Peter's shoes, that will be our response. Let's pray together.