Thank you very much. Thank you. Now this passage speaks to us about the terrible danger of turning away from the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. This opening of Paul's letters of Galatians is quite different from the other letters. If you're familiar with these letters, you'll know that with the other letters, he often opens with thanksgiving to God for the believers, talks about their good points, talks about how they are serving him well and so on and so forth. But here in this letter, having pronounced, having said who it's from, the apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, having said to whom it's addressed, the church in Galatia, and having given them a benediction, grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, and having spoken about what the Lord did, has done for us. He then goes straight in to a very strong and very forceful rebuke to the believers in Galatia that they were very they were so quickly turning away from the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and so this is recorded for us in scripture that we too should take heed and we too should watch out for the danger of being led astray to false gospels. Now the first thing I want you to notice from this passage is that it is not just unbelievers who are in danger of false gospels. We know that unbelievers are going to believe false gospels. You know, you talk to, you know, you can expect that somebody who's not saved, of course they're going to believe a false gospel. They're not going to want the true gospel. Of course they are going to want a false gospel. I mean, that is just to be expected. But here, the Apostle is addressing not unbelievers. He is addressing believers. And he's saying to these believers, I am astonished that you are so quickly, verse 6, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ. And I'm turning to a different gospel. He is talking here to believers who have been called by the Lord. Now, you know, we know that they are addressing believers because he said in verse 2, to the churches in Galatia. This is a letter to Christians. And he also says that, you know, he talks in verses 3 and 4, Grace and peace to you from God, our Father, talking to the Christians there, and the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age. So he's talking to Christians here. He's not talking to unbelievers. He's saying to these Christians, you are turning away from the gospel. You're deserting the truth of the gospel. Now, here is something which surely must be very sobering for us. We would expect there to be false preachers in terms of people who deny the Trinity, people like Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses. You can fairly easily identify them, can't you? Because, you know, a Jehovah's Witness, well, he always gives you a Watchtower magazine. A Mormon, well, it's always an immaculately dressed man with a suit, dressed in a suit. He's got an American accent. I know these are caricatures, but these are... And a Muslim, well, he will have, if he's a man, he'll have a big beard, and if he's a woman, if he's a woman, then she may well be here wearing a head covering of some description. So you can identify those who are, if you like, outside of the Christian fold. But here he's saying it's possible for those who, for people to come into the very orbit of the church, false teachers, to actually become recognized as pastors and elders in Bible-believing churches. or those that have been known as Bible-believing churches and the whole church be led astray away from the gospel. You say that's unthinkable. It's not unthinkable because it's happened. It happened in Galatia. I mean, I don't know when this letter was written. If I'd have done my homework, probably I would know better. But it wasn't very long. It wasn't very long after Paul had been there. But so soon after he'd been there, so soon after he'd preached the gospel, they'd heard the true apostolic gospel. But so quickly, they were turning aside to a different gospel. Now, in this case, It was, we know from the context in the letter, it was a false gospel of Jesus plus Jewish ceremonial law. So this false gospel is saying that if you're going to be a real Christian, yes you believe in Jesus, but you've also got to be circumcised and you've got to keep other aspects of the Jewish ceremonial law. Now that may not be necessarily a problem for us, that particular aspect of false gospel, but there are plenty of other false gospels out there, many of which come dressed in Bible-sounding language. I was talking with somebody today, and he said, you know, he said he appreciated the sermon, and he said, you know, that it's very, very true that we need to accept Christ as our personal Saviour. So I thought, I said, what do you mean by accepting Christ as your personal Savior? He said, what that means is you've got to start keeping the Ten Commandments. I said to him, well that's not accepting Christ as your Savior. That's salvation by works. But you see this man had picked up the language of being saved, of accepting Christ as your Savior. But what he understood from that was totally different. It was a different gospel. And there are many false gospels that are clamoring at the door of Bible-believing churches ready to sweep in. Whether it be a sacramentalist gospel of Catholicism, whether it be a liberal and ecumenical gospel of liberalism which puts reason above scripture, whether it be a sort of charismatic gospel that puts experience above scripture, whether it be a prosperity gospel that puts present happiness and prosperity above what the scripture says about being willing to take up your cross and follow Christ. There are many many different false Gospels that are ready to come in. And as I've said, these are ready not just for false churches, liberal churches or cults and sects. These Gospels, these false Gospels are ready to come in to Bible-believing churches and into the lives of Bible-believing Christians. So that's the first thing I want you to notice. I want you to see that this is a warning addressed to Christians. Now the second thing I want you to see is that, this might sound a very negative sermon by the way, because it's all about deserting the gospel. So I hope you don't think, oh dear, dear, dear. But the thing is that it's here in the passage, that's what the passage is about, it's about deserting the gospel. So we have to say what the passage is saying, but hopefully we'll see the positive lessons that we get from it. Deserting the gospel, so this is the second thing to see. Deserting the gospel is deserting God. Deserting the gospel is deserting God. Verse 6, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the One who called you by His grace, sorry, by the grace of Christ, and are turning to a different gospel. So, There, He says, you are deserting the One who calls you by His grace. How are they deserting the One who calls them by His grace? They're deserting God who calls them by His grace. How are they deserting God? They're deserting God by deserting the Gospel. To desert the Gospel is to desert God. If you lose the Gospel, you lose God. Now, of course, what they would have said is, oh, we haven't given up on God. It's just Paul we've given up on. We've seen better of Paul. We still believe in God. They'd say, we're really keen on our relationship with God. We're very keen on our service to God. They would say, we serve God more keenly now than we ever did before. But what Paul is saying to them is, actually, By deserting the gospel, you are deserting God. Now, there's a criticism that's often levelled at Bible-believing Christians. And that criticism is this. They say, it is said, you Bible-believing Christians, you're always going on about doctrine, always going on about being sound. You're always reading the Bible, and you're always teaching the Bible, and you're always bringing out these great, these doctrines, and you're always insisting on these doctrines. You're always so precise. You always have to define so precisely justification by faith alone, by, you know, the penal substitution of Christ, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity. Why are you always going about these doctrines? Why can't you just, you know, just have a bit of, you know, just just talk about experiencing God. Why don't we just talk about having a relationship with God? After all, isn't Christianity all about being friends with God? Well, of course, yes, Christianity is all about being friends with God. But according to Scripture, according to this passage and many other passages, you cannot divorce the knowledge of God from the knowledge of the truth. It's through knowing the truth about God, through knowing the truth about Christ, that we come into a true knowledge of God. And if you believe falsehoods about God, you're not going to truly know Him. Now, of course, just knowing the truth in an intellectual way doesn't guarantee that you're saved, and doesn't guarantee that you have a proper and warm relationship with the Lord. Of course it's possible, as I've warned on other occasions, to be absolutely as sound as a bell in your doctrine and yet have no true living relationship with God. Of course that's true. But what is definitely not true is if you have to say, oh, I don't care about the Trinity, I'm not interested in penal substitution, I'm not interested in salvation by grace alone, by faith alone, I'm not interested in all these doctrines, don't confuse me with all these doctrines, I just love Jesus. That's a nonsense. You can't love Jesus if you don't know the truth about Jesus. And if you don't believe that truth. So to desert the real gospel is to desert God. Now the third thing I want you to see is that desertion from the gospel can happen astonishingly fast. Verse 6, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you. by the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel. False teaching is something which can overtake a church, overtake an individual, very, very quickly. I was trying this afternoon to remember a case that David told me about. He tells me so many cases, I can't quite remember all the details of them. But there's this person who's brought in, I think if I remember correctly he was saying, It was, he recognized the symptoms of a particular, I think basically this person had a particular bug that was inside him, was blowing up his leg, basically. And this person would have died within hours. And basically, the decision had to be made to amputate the leg. And to save the man's life. Here was a disease which was spreading incredibly fast. And very radical action had to be taken. And sometimes false teaching can spread incredibly fast, can sweep through and completely ruin churches. If you go back to about 1860 in this country, Biblical Christianity was really really strong both in the Church of England and also in non-conformist churches. There were biblical ministries up and down this land. And it's estimated by some statisticians that 20% of the population or more were true evangelical Bible-believing Christians, and perhaps 90% were attending churches. Christianity was very, very, very strong. But then what happened was there were two things, two false teachings that came in. In the Anglicans, The high church Tractarian movement took off under John Henry Newman and people like him, and large segments of the Anglicans were moved over to a position which was almost identical to that of the Roman Catholic Church. And on the other hand, among non-conformists, Baptists and Presbyterians and Congregationalists, liberalism took a halt. And many pastors who had held to evangelical doctrine started to say, well the Bible isn't really the Word of God and it's not really infallible and you have to allow there might well be mistakes in the Bible and we can't really teach that Christ died as a substitute for sinners. And within a generation, false doctrine had taken hold of a very large proportion of Bible-believing churches. And then also there was the sort of, in the early 20th century there was another movement of the social gospel, which in a sense was the social application of liberalism, whereby the gospel was defined simply in terms of doing good to the poor. And so evangelicalism, Bible-believing evangelicalism, to all intents and purposes, died towards the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th century. And of course, the result of that was that churches closed, churches died. And you can go through London, you see big, big non-conformist chapels which are now turned into mosques or whatever, and you can look at those chapels and you can see the names of great preachers who were once in those churches. You say, could that happen to Pope the Baptist Church? Yes, it could. all too easily, very quickly. Spurgeon's tabernacle after he died, there was a very severe declension doctrinally in the church which took place and there were one or two good ministers including Archibald Brown for a short while, but overall there was a very severe decline, declension that took place. It's really quite frightening. Of course, now, thank God, there is a very strong ministry there under Peter Masters. But, you know, these things can happen very, very, very quickly. You might say, well, we're evangelical, we're sound, we're Bible-believing, it couldn't happen to us. Well, it happened in the New Testament and it's happened through the history of the Church. Now the next thing I want you to see is this, that a false gospel is no gospel at all. Verse 6, I'm astonished that you are so quickly turning, deserting the one who called you by the grace of God and are turning to a different gospel, verse 7, which is really no gospel at all. A false gospel is a non-gospel. A false gospel is bad news. Now, I'm sure you'll know that the word gospel is the old English word. It's a shame really that we use the word gospel because because what it means is just good tidings, gos, spells. Gos means good, spell means a tale. That's what it means, a good tale. So that's really what it is, it's a good tale. It goes right the way back to the sort of 15th century, that's the way they would, they must have got a good message for you, they'd say, I've got a gospel for you. And now it's become like a technical term. But that's what it means, it's good news. Some tribal translations do translate the word good news, and that really is the accurate translation, it's good news. But if you speak a different message, you're not speaking good news anymore, you're speaking bad news. A false gospel is a bad gospel, it's bad news, no gospel at all. It's bad news because if you don't believe this message, remember what the message is. Let's just remind ourselves, verse 6, God who called you by the grace of Christ. That's the real message. It's salvation by grace. That's what we were hearing this morning. It's not through works. It's not sort of saying, oh God, I've done this and I've done that. It's saying, God, I'm a sinner. And it's not man reaching up to God, it's God reaching down to man. It's not man saving himself, it's God saving man. It's not through works, but it's by undeserved love, by grace. God reaches down and He saves you. It's not through you paying for your own sins, through your own works, it's God paying for your sins by putting them on Christ. It's not you working up a righteousness of your own, it's God giving to you a righteousness that you don't have. And you're accepting as a free gift from God the righteousness that he's providing to you. Now if you turn away from this message of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, then you've got bad news. Because now, if you don't believe this message, well, for a start, you don't know that your sins are forgiven. You're always thinking, well, if you're thinking, if you believe a message that it's through works, well then, You'll always be thinking, have I done enough works? You'll never know if your sins are forgiven enough. So you'll be living in perpetual fear. You won't have any assurance of salvation. There's no gladness about this message. There's no joy about a message of salvation by works or salvation by ceremonies. Moreover, There's no power in a message that involves salvation by ceremonies or by works. No power to live a new life. Paul describes in 2 Timothy false believers who are going to rise, people whose lives will be characterized by all sorts of sins and he says that these people will have the form of godliness but deny It's power to Timothy 3 verse 5. And that's exactly the point. False gospel is a bad news because there's no power there. There's no power to live a life that's pleasing to God. It's bad news because it leads to slavery. If you believe a false message, you are enslaved to different traditions, different human ideas, and you're enslaved to your sins. It's bad news because it leads to lack of love. So a false gospel is no gospel at all. Now the next thing I want you to see is that to preach a false gospel puts you under God's curse. Paul says, I'll just read verse 7 and then on to verse 8 and 9. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach a gospel other than the one we preach to you, let him be eternally condemned. As we've already said and now say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel other than the one you received, you accepted, let him be eternally condemned. Now, that word when it says eternally condemned, it's the word anathema. It's come into the English language hasn't it? That's something that's anathema. That is something really terrible. something cast, something which is despicable, beyond the pale. I'll just give you the instances where it's used in the New Testament, three other instances, and you'll perhaps just get an idea of what it means. Romans 9 verse 1, Paul says, Sorry, verse 3, he says, I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race. See, he said his desire is for the salvation of his fellow Jews is that he would wish that he could be cursed so that they could be saved. But that's the word that's used, cursed, cut off from Christ. And then 1 Corinthians 12, verse 3, Paul says, therefore I tell you that if anyone speaking by the Spirit of God says, Jesus be cursed, No one who is speaking by the Spirit of God can say Jesus be cursed and no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Spirit. You see, if you have the Holy Spirit, you're not going to be cursing the name of Jesus. And then 1 Corinthians 16, verse 1, I've got the wrong reference there, I do apologize. Verse 22, if anyone does not love the Lord, a curse be on him. So, he's saying, look, if someone preaches a different gospel, if somebody comes along or somebody comes into the church and they starts to declare a message that is other than the true gospel of salvation by faith, by grace alone, through Christ alone, anybody who preaches that puts themselves under God's curse. And the Apostle Paul pronounces this in the name of the Lord, with the solemn authority that he has as an apostle. And he even says, even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than what was preached to you, let him be accursed. Again, if anybody is preaching you a gospel other than what you've been told, let him be accursed. It's a very, very strong term. Now we see from this that messing around with the gospel is not just like a little bit of a game. You know, some people think they can just, you know, they can, I've read commentators who sort of say, who quite blandly say, oh of course that's what Paul says, but of course Paul is wrong. Who are you to say that about what the Apostle Paul has written? Oh, well I couldn't possibly believe, you know, sometimes you talk with people and they say, Oh, I couldn't possibly believe that God would send people to hell. Oh, I couldn't possibly believe, you don't expect me to believe that it's only through trusting in Jesus that a person goes to heaven. You can't expect me to believe that Jesus, that God would actually punish his own son for the sins of other people. You can't expect me to believe all that, can you? But if we tamper with the message and especially not only privately entertain reservations about it, but actually publicly declare a different variation from what God has actually said, we are treading a very, very dangerous course. because this is God's gospel, God's holy gospel. It's not ours, it's not ours. We're not free to tamper with it. We're not free, you know, some of you seem to get the impression that you think, well, you know, just find out what people want to hear and then, you know, give them what they want to hear. You know, if they want to hear something about this or about that, well, let them have what they want. But who are we to just change the message just to make it a bit acceptable to people? It's not ours to do that. And there are terrible penalties. are attached to this. Now, of course, I'm not saying that you can lose your salvation. That would be wrong to say that somebody who has been a true Christian has been truly saved. If they start to preach falsehood that they're going to lose their salvation, that cannot mean that. But it might mean that somebody who preaches falsehood has never been truly saved. They might have made a profession that's false. And certainly somebody who preaches falsehood is not going to know the blessing, the true blessing of God. Now this has application, doesn't it, to the whole area of the ecumenical movement. You know, we sometimes say, well look, why don't you join up with Why aren't you part of churches together? It's something we get asked this question. Usually it's about schools. On the school form it says here, tick the box if your church is part of churches together. I said, Henry, is our church part of churches together? I said, no. Why are we part of churches together? Well, you see, this is the reason. Part of the reason. Because how can we say, oh yes, we are Christians together, with Catholics and liberals and others who completely deny the gospel. How can we say that here is this man who says that through going to Mass, you'll go and through following the Catholic religion of rituals and so on and so forth, you'll be fairly certain of having a place in heaven? How can we say that this person is a true preacher? Which is effectively what we're doing if we join churches together. How can we do that? It also has application in terms of, you know, in case, if you have become a Christian, perhaps you've become a Christian, you've been involved in the Catholic Church, or a liberal Baptist Church for that matter, or a liberal Anglican Church, or a high church, Anglican Church, it's a church that is not preaching the Gospel. How can you, you know, I put it to you, how could you continue in such a church, so-called church, where you have somebody who is speaking who is under the curse of God. How is that going to do you any good? So, we've seen a number of things tonight. We've seen how Even Christians are in danger from false gospel. We've seen that to desert the real gospel is to desert God. We've seen that desertion of the gospel can happen astonishingly fast. We've seen that a false gospel is no gospel at all. We've seen that to preach a false gospel puts you under God's curse. The last thing I want you to notice is this. To preach a false gospel is the easy option. And of course that's why people do it. Verse 10. Am I now trying to win the approval of men or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I was still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ. What's driving Paul? Is he wanting to get good approval ratings? Well, if he was after approval ratings, the last thing he'd be doing would be preaching the gospel of Christ. Preaching the Gospel of Christ, the true Gospel of Christ, does not go down well. It never has gone down well. It didn't go down well in the New Testament time. What happened to pretty much every city you went to? You'd end up being thrown out of the city, often under a shower of stones. No. Preaching the Gospel is not popular. It never has been. It wasn't popular in the New Testament. It's not popular today. apart from the welcoming of the Spirit of God, nobody wants to hear the real gospel. All they want is something nice. You see, the thing is that a false gospel, that's not a problem at all. If you say to somebody, now listen, God doesn't think you're that bad. You're a fairly decent sort of person. All you've got to do is just put your socks up a bit, start coming to church a bit more, get involved in church life, Do a few ceremonies, fast, pray, put money in the offering, and then you've got a decent chance of going to heaven. People say, oh, that sounds a good deal. Yeah, I'll have that. So, they start going along to the church, they start to pray, they start to fast, start to put money in the offering, get involved in the service of the church. And that's fine because nothing has really challenged them. There's been no attempt, there's been no challenge to their pride and self-righteousness. So, basically, that's a perfectly acceptable message. The message that these false Judaizers were preaching, you know, get circumcised, keep the Old Testament law, that's fine. It's a bit painful getting circumcised, yeah, sure, if you're a man. You know, no anaesthetic, of course, in those days. But never mind, go through a bit of pain, And then, you know, it's okay because it doesn't really affect, doesn't really challenge your pride. But say to somebody, like we're saying this morning, you're a sinner. You can't save yourself. You're on your way to hell. You can't do anything to stop yourself from going to hell. God has got to save you. People say, no, I don't want that. I don't like that at all. Because that message is offensive to the human pride. And this is the paradox of the gospel. It's such an easy thing to be saved. All you've got to do is just admit you're a sinner and ask to be saved. It's as easy as pie, if I may use that expression. It's easy. Dead easy to be saved and yet it's the hardest thing in the world to be saved. Because nobody will want to be saved unless the Spirit of God moves them to. Because of human pride. And so we've got to watch ourselves as Christians because of course The desire to be accepted is there in all of us, isn't it? Who wants to be a pariah? Stick your hands up if you want. No, I won't ask you to stick your hands up. But, you know, who wants to be an oddball? Who wants to be thought of as a nutter? To be ostracized? Well, none of us wants to be ostracized. None of us wants... We all want to be accepted, don't we? Of course we do. And so the pressure will be on us to modify what we believe and to modify what we say. And you know, you talk to your family, you've been converted, you start to talk to your family and you get this furious reaction. You talk about salvation by grace alone, through faith alone and you get this terrible reaction. You think, where did that come from? I was only telling them good news about Jesus and they've blown me out of the water. Why? because of the naturalness of the Gospel. So the temptation is to say, OK, well, I'll change my tack. I won't talk about hell anymore. I won't talk about the fact we're sinners anymore. Just talk about it from a different angle. But if we're going to be real Christians who stick to the real gospel, then we have to be prepared to be ostracized. We have to be prepared to be counted as different. And the person whose approval we need to be thinking about, the approval rating we need to be looking for, is God's approval rating. If we're worried about men's approval rating, we're bound to be led astray. But if we're thinking I'm going to have to answer to the Lord for what I've said to my non-Christian friends and to my family and for what I've believed. Then that will keep us on track. And you might say, well, this has been a very negative message. Well, I hope you don't feel it's been a message. Because the thing is, here it is. It's a warning about a false gospel. But the wonderful thing is we have a true gospel, a real gospel, of good news, of salvation, being rescued from the wrath to come through what Jesus did for us on the cross. But let's hold on to that gospel. Let's not move from that gospel. Let's stick to it. And in the UK maybe we might, you know, we might be just a small little church that not many people are interested in coming to. Well, so be it, that may happen. Maybe the Lord might send a revival and we have thousands coming. Great. But if not, then let's not allow ourselves to be tempted to shift in order to try to make things a bit more popular or acceptable, let's hold on to that real gospel that has been revealed. Well, we'll sing a hymn and then we'll give just opportunity in case anybody's got any questions, either from this morning or from this one this afternoon, the talk this afternoon.