Who Are You Afraid to Disappoint?
"I'm astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed, as we have said before. So now I say again, if anyone preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed, for am I now seeking the approval of man or of God or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ." Galatians 1:6.
This is how the Apostle Paul begins the book. He's mad. He's ticked off because people are confusing others. They're making it more complicated. They're making it more difficult to follow Christ. They're putting laws and regulations on everybody, and all of a sudden people feel like they have to do all of these things to get to God. This had been the pattern of the Jews for a long time. You look at stories with the Pharisees, they had created laws that they put a heavy yoke on the people.
Jesus comes and he busts up the religious systems
and he says, "You know what? We're going to do this so differently. I'm going to show you how God means for you to follow him, and it is trusting in me." It is trusting in ultimately what later would become his death and resurrection. He would be the way to God, it wouldn't be in our works.
Anything we would try to do would be like we were whitewashed tombs that without the blood of Jesus, without a relationship with Jesus, we would be doing all these things, but we would still be dead inside.
Some of you know exactly what that feels like. You feel you have been working your tail off to try to please God, and it still feels dead and hollow, and you’re tired, the yoke isn't easy and the burden isn't light, you don't know that you’re doing this right.
You’ve got to remember this is a letter to a certain church. This is a church in Galatia that was growing and new and they were trying to get God right. This was before the New Testament was published. These letters were all sometimes what these little churches had to figure out how to follow Jesus, what it meant to follow Jesus.
Paul's really clear right off the bat- You guys are getting this wrong. You're hearing things that are contrary to the gospel. What is the gospel? And he's going to go on and explain that in the coming chapters. But the gospel ultimately is the sacrifice that Jesus made and trusting in that.
It would be through faith that we would be justified, that we would be made right before God.
He’s going to tell us that, that we would not have to add all these things to it to be made right before God.
But as humans, I think this is a really tricky one because we actually love to do it ourselves. I think about my daughter, Kate (my second born), who her very first sentence was: "I can do it by myself." And man, she tried, but she couldn't. She was barely talking. She's wasn’t even two years old. She’s trying to unbuckle herself and buckle herself and trying to put on her clothes, but that girl could not do those things yet. She was acting like she could do it all by herself. As humans, we're the same way. We can do it by ourselves. We can be like God. We can make our own way. And yet Paul is really clear, this is not how it's going to go.
God is going to make the way.
God is the way.
He's going to make the way, and the way is going to restore your relationship with him. AND the Galatians letter is going to go further- he's going to help you keep the way.
You're not even going to have to do that on your own. He's going to help you keep following him. He's going to help you become someone who is obedient and less sinful, someone who is kinder in the way that she speaks.
I think about when we were starting the church, one of the people who came to Christ was a woman whose husband was leading and the chef of a great restaurant in town, a very famous chef. And I remember she just came to God and loved him and wanted to follow him. She was getting baptized at our church, and he came and stood at the back and was watching it happen. Later he tells my husband, "At that point, I thought I lost my wife, but instead she came back home and was so delightful and so different and so changed that I had to know about this God too." And that's how this is supposed to go.
Not that we will ourselves into being more Christ-like, but that as we follow him, as we know him, the fruit of our lives is more joy, more peace, more delight.
I think we've really gotten this wrong, there have been lots of people who have probably added things to the gospel for you, they are contrary to God. God does not want your load to be cumbersome. If you feel like following God requires a thousand things from you, that is not the way he works. It is- we die to ourselves and we hand our lives to God, and as we do, and as we surrender, as we let go of our own way and our own life, he is able to work. He's able to speak. He's able to lead. He shows us how to love and how to change.
I think we get this wrong so often because we think that Christianity largely is our actions and behaviors, and it isn't that it isn't. It's that it's largely a relationship that affects our behaviors and our actions. You can't please man and God. We've often been people who try, and I bet all of us have been at times.
The grace here we get to have is:
To please God IS to trust him
To trust the story of our salvation, to trust in Jesus and the way that he is walking and we walk with him. That feels a lot easier. The reason the yoke is easy and the burden is light is because we get to trust him and allow him to change us and work in our lives.
This is so important because of everything we're going to talk about. We're talking about pressure, and I think for so many of us, the pressure we feel from God is real. It's heavy and it's deep. I've done a lot of counseling around this because candidly, I struggle with this. I tend to be someone who can real quickly put human mindsets on God and think he's probably disappointed in this, in me, or he is probably waiting for me to do blank, or maybe I'm not hearing him right, or maybe I should be doing this instead of this, and I'll question everything.
What I'm realizing is that's just not how God is. His ways and his methods of interacting with us are so different than oftentimes our earthly father's brokenness or the way that we couldn't measure up in our life.He's sitting there saying, "Hey, I made the way for you so that we could be in relationship. Will you come hang out with me? Let's go. Let's hang out because that's why I did this. I did this because I like you. I did this because I love you. I did this because I want a relationship with you. Why don't you, instead of trying to accomplish all these things for me, why don't you rest, kid, and come with me and I'll show you how it works. I'll show you my ways, my ways that are way more free and way lighter and way more easy because I like you and I want to be with you, and I want to walk through this life with you."
I don't know about you, but that is what I'm craving in life, right? I don't want to figure it out by myself. I don't want to walk alone. I want to be able to look to my left and just say, "Hey, are we going the right way?" And for him to be like, "Yeah, but don't worry so much about it. Just stick close to me. Just know me. Just walk with me. Just be with me. And as we do that, you'll know what to do. And if you're way off, I'll convict you." Now, the greatest way to do that is through the scriptures. It's why I love the scriptures so much is because it does reveal how I know God and who he is, and what he wants as we're walking together. But that's how it's supposed to be read- here's this God that I love, that I want, that wants me, that has pursued me, and this is the way he's calling me too, and he's in it with me and he's helping accomplish it.
It is helpful to remember that Paul was killing Christians before he was walking with God, and God picked him. God picked the person most, I would imagine, hurtful to God and fighting against God to turn and to be one of the greatest voices ever to live besides Jesus Christ, proclaiming him and proclaiming this gospel. Paul understood and knew forgiveness. He understood and knew there was nothing that he had done, in fact, the opposite. He had tried to hurt God and the people of God. Why would God come after him? What Paul understood down deep to his bones was that he was delighted and loved by God.
Not because of what he'd done, but because of God's unthinkable love, that it is so much better, and it is so much bigger than we can imagine. That grace that we're craving. It's there. We find it.
This is why I walk with God. Because I craved that approval so much. I wanted to know that I was approved of. I wanted to know that I was delighted in and loved and liked, and God was that for me. He is that for you. He is not a disappointed father. He is waiting for you to come to him and hang out and spend time with him. So today, the takeaway for today is:
