Abounding Grace

Host (Male): Today on Abounding Grace, we begin a study of Galatians, which will emphasize salvation is by grace alone through faith alone.

Pastor Ed Taylor: So the issue that Paul is dealing with in the letter of Galatians is no small issue. It's very significant. You know how we use that phrase that we in some things or even in most things, we need to learn to agree to disagree or disagree agreeably? This is not one of those areas that we can disagree on.

When it comes to salvation, it's not what you think and not what I think, it's what God thinks. And it's not debatable. There's only one way of salvation, and it is not by works. It is by the grace of God.

Host (Male): Countless numbers of people today are living under the impression that they can somehow earn a spot in heaven. But the book of Galatians makes it clear salvation is not deserved but something God gives us. It comes to us by grace through faith, and that alone. Welcome to Abounding Grace.

In just a moment, Pastor Ed Taylor will introduce his new study of Galatians. In the days ahead, we'll go through each chapter and verse with you and hear a lot about grace and freedom in Christ. Here is Pastor Ed with the first of many studies in Galatians.

Pastor Ed Taylor: Open your Bibles, would you, to Galatians chapter 1. Galatians chapter 1 and I've entitled our Bible study today, "Jesus Has Set Us Free." Or you can say Jesus has set you free, or I can say that, or you can say Jesus has set me free, and that is the theme of the book of Galatians.

It's always exciting to start a brand-new book of the Bible, to start studying it as a church where we open up to the very first verse. We start in verse 1 and we're going to work our way through all six chapters verse by verse, chapter by chapter. We may even pause along the way to look at a word, to focus in on an important topic.

But over the next few months, our studies—and I would say the next few years—our studies will take us through five of Paul's letters. We're going to look at four prison epistles written in a Roman prison, starting with this one in Galatians that was not written in prison. Many people believe it was written in the city of Antioch. Remember, the new headquarters for the Gentile church?

But Paul takes pen in hand and writes to the churches in Galatia because false teachers had come in and troubled them, and distracted them, and confused them. Galatians was the first letter that Paul wrote, again, from Antioch. The other letters we're going to be looking at are Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon that were written in a Roman prison.

But many believe Galatians was written first, around AD 50, 51, 52, 53 in that range. There was an urgency in the heart of Paul to send this note to the churches, as Paul had established, remember, on his first missionary journey, Paul had established and planted these churches. And when you think of churches in the area—now Galatia is a region, not a city.

So there are many different cities in the region of Galatia, which happens to be modern-day Turkey today, a large area. He planted churches. They weren't huge churches; they were small gatherings, maybe like house churches, 10, 20, 30, 40 people spread out in that region. The letter isn't addressed to one church, but to many, even including ours.

And something horrible happened. Something horrible happened to the believers. A group of Jewish believers—if you're taking notes, you can jot it down; we've already met them—they are the Judaizers. These are the ones that followed Paul around and tried to ruin his ministry, tried to undermine his ministry.

As soon as he left the Galatian region and the churches there as he established them, these Judaizers, Jewish believers, came in and corrupted the message of the gospel. They tried to add to it, warping it severely. The Judaizers were undermining the authority and the teaching of Paul, and they demanded that the Gentile believers keep the Mosaic law in order to be saved.

So the issue that Paul is dealing with in the letter of Galatians is no small issue. It's very significant. You know how we use that phrase that we in some things or even in most things, we need to learn to agree to disagree or disagree agreeably? This is not one of those areas that we can disagree on. When it comes to salvation, it's not what you think and not what I think, it's what God thinks.

And it's not debatable. There's only one way of salvation, and it is not by works. It is by the grace of God. Let me show you. Turn over to Ephesians. We'll get to Galatians soon enough, but turn just over to the right to Ephesians chapter 2. This is the very essence of salvation, which brings us to the place where we're thinking, man, I wonder if the Judaizers were even saved.

And you really need to call into question their salvation in relation to what they were teaching. Because notice, in verse 8 of chapter 2 in Ephesians, it says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast." Salvation is thoroughly a work of God and not of your own work.

So a way to say that—and we'll get into that when we study Ephesians—but a way to think of that is this: you are saved not by good works, but for good works. There are works in life that come out of us, but that's not how you're saved. And you'll remember the Judaizers really narrowed it down to one thing for the Gentile believers, for the male Gentile believers, and that was if you want to be saved, you have to be circumcised. And you're like, whoa, slow down.

Slow down. That's the old covenant. In the new covenant, that's not a requirement for salvation. You can't even keep the Mosaic law. So if that was the requirement for salvation, nobody would ever be saved. Because the law doesn't save you; it reveals the need that you need to be saved. And we'll get into all that in our future studies.

What these men did is they brought in organized religion. They replaced relationship with religion. And if you're taking notes, there are always three Rs related to organized religion that you want to watch out for. Number one, there are rules to follow. Secondly, there are regulations to keep. And thirdly, there are rituals to practice.

And they were bringing in their rules that you must follow, and they were bringing in their regulations that you must keep, and they were bringing in their rituals that you must practice in order to be saved. And that's the key. Because in and of themselves, rules to follow, rules aren't bad. Rules are very healthy. They define relationship.

In life, God says, "Hey, these are the rules. This is how our relationship is defined. This is how I want you. I am God, and this is how you relate to me." In and of themselves, rules are not bad. I mean, when in the top 10 commandments when it says, "Do not steal," that's not bad. And don't lie, that's not bad.

It becomes bad when it is a religious expression in your mind to say, "I must do this in order to be saved." The alternative is no, you do it because you are saved. You desire to please God. Regulations in and of themselves are not bad. Rituals, I mean, we have rituals here at this church. We have regular religious rituals.

I'll give you one right now. You have a ritual that on Sunday mornings, you show up to a particular building for worship at a particular time. That's a ritual. That's not bad in and of itself. It would only be bad if you go, "Hey, are you saved? Are you born again?" and you would say yes, and I would say why, and you would respond, "Well, because I go to church every Sunday." That would be bad.

You're not saved because you go to church every Sunday. You go to church every Sunday because you are saved. It's the other way around. We read the psalm together. That's a ritual that we have in our church where we open our Bibles together, we stand, and we read together the Bible. That is not a bad thing. Reading the Bible is a good thing.

It becomes bad when it's a religious expression, when that is the way you relate to God, where you measure your own goodness and righteousness by your behavior. That is where it becomes bad. And Paul, he's upset and he's frustrated and was even personally hurt to see the church hurt. And that makes sense. He should be upset.

Any good pastor, any good leader should be upset when the people that he serves are taken advantage of, when the people that he serves are lied to, when the people that he serves are being fed a false teaching and they believe it. He should be upset. He's looking at them and he says, "I need to correct this. I can't go there, but I can write a note."

And it's true, you know, the Galatians, they were fickle. We know in Acts chapter 14, at one moment they want to worship Paul and Barnabas, at another moment they're stoning Paul. They're fickle, so they've got ears that are itching and they're listening to different people. But still, it still hurts any pastor that would see their church hurt by false teaching or being taken advantage of should be hurt and frustrated and have an emotional experience.

So Paul takes his pen in hand and he begins to write a letter to them. Galatians is known as the Magna Carta of Christian liberty. We're going to learn a lot about freedom in Christ. We're going to learn a lot about grace and the importance of grace and how it's accessed through faith.

Paul will lay out a beautiful picture of the believer's justification by grace through faith. That technical word that we studied many years ago in Romans will come up again now in Galatians, justification by faith. Notice with me, Galatians chapter 3. We will get to chapter 1 eventually, but again, this introduction's going to lay a long foundation for all of our future studies.

So notice in chapter 3 verse 11, it says, "But that no one is justified," or some of your Bibles might have a note, "declared righteous." Nobody's declared righteous, nobody's in a right relationship with God, nobody is justified. And another way to remember the word justified is to think of it "just as if I never sinned." That's the declaration of God over your life through the blood of Jesus Christ.

He sees you just as if you never sinned. You are cleansed and you are washed by the blood of Jesus Christ. No one is justified by the law in the sight of God. He says, "For the just shall live by faith." A very important truth. This is a quotation directly from Habakkuk chapter 2: the just shall live by faith.

It's repeated again in Romans chapter 1 verse 17, and we learned it and studied it in depth when we were in Hebrews chapter 10 verse 38. It's a powerful truth that a person, a man or a woman, is saved, brought into a right relationship with God, declared righteous, justified not by works, not by the law, but by faith. It's a powerful verse.

If you believe that one truth, it'll revolutionize your life. It changed the life of a man that might be familiar to you, a man by the name of Martin Luther, the father, one of the fathers of the Protestant Reformation. He's reading along, moving along in his religious experience, works, and being taught that he's justified by works and he starts to read his Bible and he sees this and he goes, "This is amazing."

And it stirred up in him such a tremendous desire to see this truth lived out that he launched the Protestant Reformation. It transformed another man that's more familiar to you from our recent study. It transformed a man by the name of Saul, Saul of Tarsus, who was on his way to Damascus, breathing in murders and breathing out threats in his life.

This verse transformed him. It took Saul of Tarsus and transformed him into Paul the Apostle. And it can transform you as well as you learn to live by faith. It'll bring a radical change in you as you fully realize and recognize the blessing of a faith relationship with Jesus. The just shall live by faith. Not by rituals, not by rules, not by regulations.

As we go through our study in Galatians, we'll be reminded on more than one occasion that it seems to be a little easier to live by lists. Some of you are list people, and you would just like to know—you're a newer believer or you've been walking with the Lord for a while—you'd just like to know, "What do I do, Pastor? I just want to know what are the things."

And if I had a list already ready for you to say, "Okay, I have an answer to that. Here are 10 things that you should do the rest of your life," you know what that would make you? It would make you a list follower. That's all you would care about. Number one, number two, number three. "Oh, I didn't do number four. What a horrible person I am." Number five, number three, number one.

All you would pay attention to is a list. I would be creating in you—I would be a poor leader if I gave that to you—I would be creating in you now a relationship with a list instead of a relationship with the Lord, as he leads and he guides. That's the kind of freedom that you experience by grace. You live by faith, not by lists. You live by faith, not by rules. And Paul will make that abundantly clear in our study in Galatians.

Let me give you a couple of outlines if you're taking notes. Just different couple different angles of how to look at this book, what it might be, and I'll outline it for you. The first one is chapter 1 can be seen as Paul's reception of grace, where he got it. He's going to explain where he learned the doctrine of grace.

Number two: Paul's presentation of grace, where he now will reveal in chapter 2 how he presented it and how he's teaching it. In chapters 3 and 4: this is Paul's instruction on grace. He's going to give the doctrinal support of where grace comes from in the word. And then the final chapters, chapters 5 and 6: Paul's application of grace.

Now what do you do? Now that you've learned something, what do you do? And by the way, you're going to notice a shift in our teaching because for the last many years, we've been studying the book of Acts, and the book of Acts is known as narrative. It basically, when you read Acts, it just says they did this, they did this, they went here, they went there.

And as a pastor, you teach through narrative and you're just kind of following along with them and you're digging out from what they're saying and what they're doing the doctrinal points. We're shifting gears now away from a portion of the Bible known as narrative, now to a portion of the Bible known as epistles or letters.

And the epistles and letters are more—and you might want to jot this down; it's a fancy word but I'll explain it to you—the epistles and letters are more didactic. Didactic. That word just means teaching. They're much more doctrinal. And usually the letters are split in half or close to half, where the first part is very doctrinal, explaining the substance behind the teaching, and then the second half is applicational.

You have to train yourself because we are more—we are attracted to action before doctrine because it just is easier. "I want to do something because I love God," but I don't really need the doctrinal support of it. But the Bible says, "I want you to understand why before the what." And that's what the letters will do. You're going to understand the why before the what. And that's why Paul ends with application.

Here's another way, an outline, another way to look at it. And this is in three sections. Chapters 1 and 2 are personal. Paul gives his own experience with the gospel and the gospel of grace. Number two: chapters 3 and 4 are doctrinal, and that is the biblical explanation for grace over legalism. And then chapters 5 and 6 are practical. Personal, doctrinal, practical. Now how is your life changed by grace and how are you to live it out?

In Galatians, Paul will warn against abandoning the gospel for a fake gospel. He will uphold the significance of grace. He will teach us the real reason for the Mosaic law: that none of us are saved by law. And finally, Paul will make sure that we understand this—because it was once said that if a pastor teaches grace properly, then there will be that sense where you also need to explain that grace doesn't equal permission to sin.

And Paul will make that clear. Because if you're thinking, "Well, if I have freedom," and this thought is very prevalent in the church, especially in the Western church, but I think all the way across the board: "Well, if God does—if God forgives, and he does, and if I confess he'll forgive, and he will, and if the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses me from all sin, past, present, and future, then I can just sin all I want and just ask God to forgive me."

And that would be a wrong application of the doctrine of grace. Because the wages of sin is always death. Sin is always going to separate you from God. It's always going to harm you. It's always going to wreck you. And so grace doesn't give us permission to sin; it actually motivates us to stay away from sin when we think of all that God has done for us. Okay, chapter 1 verse 1.

"Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead, and all the brethren who are with me, to the churches of Galatia." Now you know when you're writing a letter, how you usually start with "Dear so-and-so," and then you write the letter and at the end you sign your name, "Sincerely," or "Best regards," and then you sign your name.

In the ancient days, they did just the opposite. They signed the letter first. And that's why Paul starts with his name. I want you to know as you're opening this letter, it's coming from me, Paul. And then he identifies himself as an apostle. As he's writing, Paul opens his letter with a predictable opening, his name, but then he addresses himself as an apostle.

Which is interesting because in his other letters, he would often refer to himself not as an apostle, but as a servant. Paul, servant of the Lord, a doulos, a willing servant, a joyful servant of the Lord. He would do that in Romans chapter 1, he would do that in Philippians chapter 1. But here in Galatians, because his authority was being undermined and his authority was being challenged, he wants just everyone to know: "I'm writing to you, this is Paul, and I'm an apostle."

And it's important. Now if you're writing in your Bible, you want to circle the word apostle. It's the Greek word apostolos. A-P-O-S-T-O-L-O-S. Apostolos. When you have the word apostle in the English, this is known as a transliteration. All that means is they took the Greek word and they just made it English. That's it.

Because what you're reading right now in the Bible, those of you that are new to the Bible, in the English, you're reading a translation of the original language. In the New Testament, starting with Matthew all the way to Revelation, the New Testament was written originally in the common modern-day Greek of the first century, known as the Koine Greek.

The Old Testament was written originally in the Hebrew language. Today we have a translation into the English, and this is a transliteration of the word apostolos. Another word that we do that with that's pretty common is baptism. The Greek word for baptism is baptizo. And so they couldn't find an English word for it, so they just tried to call it as close to the Greek as possible.

This word has two meanings. In a broad, general sense, the word apostolos means messenger. It means someone that's sent. In the first century, it was used to describe a messenger who was sent from a king. He was representing a king with the king's message. So in a very generic and broad sense, it describes a believer, all of us, someone who's sent by God. Every single one of us could say that we are one sent; we are apostles in the general sense.

But in a very strict sense, this word is used in the New Testament to describe 13 people. Thirteen people. You'll remember there were 12 apostles following Jesus, minus Judas and the addition of one. Now there's debate on who that 13th is, but I fall on the conclusion that Paul was the 13th apostle. And in the strictest sense, these 13 have the capital A apostle.

There are no apostles in the strict sense today. There are no apostles on the earth. The qualifications for an apostle is that you had to see the risen Christ. There is no one today that has seen the risen Christ or have authenticating signs and miracles and were with him. There have not been apostles like that since, and no one would qualify today.

There is no such thing biblically as apostolic succession, where it continues on now 2,000 years ago, someone can say today, "I'm an apostle just like those apostles that were with Jesus." That doesn't exist today. There are no apostles today in the strict sense. There's no one on the earth speaking with apostolic authority, even though there are many today that say they are.

And you need to understand this. This is very popular in a whole segment of the church today, where there are many today that claim to be apostles. But it's not biblical. You'll hear people on the radio, on church, on YouTube, on TV, on X, on Facebook, Instagram, all over the place claiming to be an apostle speaking with apostolic authority. But they are not. It doesn't exist.

Host (Male): Pastor Ed Taylor clearing up some confusion within the church regarding apostles. This is Abounding Grace. Today we introduced our new study of Galatians. Now this first message in the series goes by the title of "Jesus Has Set Us Free," as Pastor Ed mentioned, that is the overall theme of the epistle.

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And thank you in advance for helping us reach people with the love and truth of Jesus Christ, here on the radio and the internet. We'll cover more ground in Galatians chapter 1 next time on Abounding Grace with Pastor Ed. Hear more about Paul's reception of grace as you join us then. Abounding Grace is brought to you by Calvary Church, Colorado, here in Aurora.