Breaking Free! (Galatians 1:1-5)
Tony Campolo tells the story of a town where all the residents are ducks. Every Sunday the ducks waddle out of their houses and waddle down Main Street to their church. They waddle into the sanctuary and squat in their proper pews. The duck choir waddles in and takes its place, and then the duck minister comes forward and opens the duck Bible. He reads to them: “Ducks! God has given you wings! With wings you can fly! With wings you can mount up and soar like eagles. No walls can confine you! No fences can hold you! You have wings. God has given you wings, and you can fly like birds!”
All the ducks shout, “Amen!” And then they all waddle home. (Tony Campolo, Let Me Tell You a Story, Word, 2000)
How many times do we as God’s people -- say “Amen” to such rousing rhetoric and then go home to live such dull and dreary days? We can fly, but we waddle around like we’re tied to the ground. Spiritually, we can soar to great heights, but we continue to wallow in the muddy puddles of this world.
What will it take for us to fly? What will it take for us to soar to the heights for which God has designed us? What will it take for us to really break free from the habits and attitudes that keep us grounded?
That’s the question I want us to explore in the next several weeks as we study what many have called “The Magna Charta of Christian Liberty.” If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to the book of Galatians, Galatians 1, where we have the introduction to this great, spiritual “Magna Charta,” which tells us how to fly free as believers in Christ. Galatians 1, starting at vs.1 (read to vs.2)
Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— and all the brothers with me, To the churches in Galatia:
If we want to fly free, then 1st of all we must LISTEN TO WHAT GOD HAS TO SAY. WE MUST PAY ATTENTION TO GOD’S WORD AS PAUL PRESENTS IT HERE IN THE BOOK OF GALATIANS.
Paul begins this book by identifying himself as the author. But he is no ordinary author. He is an apostle – one who has been sent by God Himself. No man sent Paul to speak to us today. No man authorized Paul to say what He had to say in this book.
I stand before you today, primarily because at one time you asked me to be your preacher. Oh, I have no doubt that God called me to preach, but I am here, behind THIS pulpit on Washington Island, because on February 23, 2005, 34 of YOU voted “yes” to extend to me a call to become your pastor.
Even though I believe with all my heart that GOD led me here to preach His Word, that leading came through human agency. It came through many of YOU. If you would not have called me to preach, I would not be here this morning.
Well, that’s not the way it is with the Apostle Paul. He is sent directly by God, the Father, through God, the Son. There is no human agency involved at all. No man authorized Paul to say what He had to say. No! He gets his authority directly from God Himself.
In Acts 26, Paul describes His experience with the Risen Lord Himself. “About noon,” he says, “as I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, blazing around me and my companions. We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’ Then I asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ the Lord replied. ‘Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you” (Acts 26:13-16).
Christ Himself showed Paul the very words to say.
Therefore, we better pay close attention to what Paul has to say. We better listen very carefully to His words, because they are not his words; they are God’s Words.
Stuart Briscoe, author and long-time pastor of Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, tells about the time he traveled to Poland during the cold war. He was involved in several weeks of itinerant ministry, and one winter day his sponsors drove him in the dead of night to the middle of nowhere. Briscoe walked into a dilapidated building crammed with one hundred young people.
It was a unique opportunity, and through an interpreter he preached from John 15 on abiding in Christ. Ten minutes into his message, the lights went out. It was pitch black.
His interpreter urged him to keep talking, and so he did. Unable to see his notes or read his Bible, he continued. Then, after he had preached in the dark for twenty minutes, the lights suddenly blinked on, and what he saw startled him: everyone was on their knees, and they remained there for the rest of his message.
The next day Briscoe commented on this to one man, and the man said, “After you left, we stayed on our knees most of the night. Your teaching was new to us. We wanted to make sure we were abiding in Christ.” (Marshall Shelley, Changing Lives Through Preaching and Worship, Random House, 1995, p. 147)
That’s the kind of attention we must give to God’s Word. That’s the kind of attention we must give to this word here in the book of Galatians. Let’s listen on our knees as if we’ve never heard it before. & Let’s listen on our knees, asking God to give us ears to hear what HE has to say to us.
In his book Ghost Soldiers, Hampton Sides tells the story of a dramatic mission during World War II. On January 28th, 1945, 121 hand-selected Army Rangers slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines in an attempt to rescue 513 American and British POW’s who had spent three years in a hellish prison camp near the city of Cabanatuan.
Sides describes the first effects of liberation as chaos and fear. The prisoners were too mentally brittle to understand what was taking place. Some even scurried away from their liberators.
One particular prisoner, Bert Bank, refused to budge, even when a Ranger walked right up to him and tugged his arm.
“C’mon, we’re here to save you,” he said. “Run for the gate.”
Bank still would not move. The Ranger looked into his eyes and saw they were vacant, registering nothing.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Don’t you want to be free?”
A smile formed on Bank’s lips as the meaning of the words became clear, and he reached up to the outstretched hand of the Ranger.
The Rangers searched all the barracks for additional prisoners, then shouted, “The Americans are leaving. Is there anybody here?” Hearing no answer, they left.
But there was one more POW—Edwin Rose. Edwin had been on latrine duty and somehow missed all the shooting and explosions. When he wandered back to his barracks, he failed to notice the room was empty and lay down on his straw mat and fell asleep. Edwin had missed the liberation. But there was a reason. Edwin was deaf.
Four Americans died in the rescue; two Rangers in the firefight and two prisoners who perished for reasons of poor health. The freed prisoners marched 25 miles and boarded their ship home. With each step, their stunned disbelief gave way to soaring optimism. Even Edwin Rose made it. He finally woke up and realized liberation had come. (Van Morris, Mt. Washington, Kentucky, source: Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers (Doubleday, 2001
If you and I want to be truly free, then we too must wake up and listen!
We must listen to the Lord, and BELIEVE HIS WORD. WE MUST BELIEVE IT WHEN HE SAYS, “C’MON, I’M HERE TO SAVE YOU.” “I’M HERE TO RESCUE YOU.” “I AM SETTING YOU FREE!”
Oh, dear friend trust the Lord to do what he says. Depend on Christ to set you free from your sinful habits and desires.
vs.3 (read to vs.5)
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
God Himself is setting us free. God Himself is rescuing us from this present evil age. God Himself is saving us from bondage to our destructive habits.
Notice, in vs.4, it is Christ who paid the price for our freedom, not us. HE is the one who “gave Himself for our sins,” verse 4 says.
When I was serving the Lord as a pastor in Ellsworth, Kansas, I had the opportunity on several occasions to visit specific individuals who were in prison at the Ellsworth Correctional Facility. One young man was in disciplinary segregation (or solitary confinement) when I first visited him. It was a place the inmates affectionately called “the hole,” and he was there because he bucked the system. Eventually, he settled down enough to come out of “the hole,” and after several visits, I had the opportunity to lead Him to faith in Christ.
I visited him on a regular basis for about a year before he was paroled and allowed to go home to live with his mother in Kansas City. Now, in the months before his meeting with the parole board, he was very careful to be a model prisoner. He was very careful to be on his best behavior. He didn’t start out well at the prison, but he was going to make sure that he ended well. Why? Because he knew that the parole board would consider his behavior as they decided whether or not to give him parole. Their decision was based on his behavior.
That’s the way parole boards work, but that’s not the way God works. God doesn’t base His decision to release us on our behavior. If He did, none of us would ever be released, for “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Romans 3:23 says.
God doesn’t base His decision to release us because of something WE did. No. He bases His decision to release us because of something CHRIST did.
Christ “gave Himself for our sins” verse 4 says. That is to say Christ was punished instead of us. Christ served our sentence. Christ died in our place on the cross.
John Stott says, “The concept of substitution lies at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.” (John Stott, The Cross of Christ, Intervarsity, 1986)
That’s what Jesus did when He died for us on the cross. & That is the only reason God chose to set us free – not because of something WE did, but because of something CHRIST did for us. Christ paid the price for our freedom.
In fact, our freedom is not even our idea. It is GOD’S idea. Our rescue is “according to His will,” verse 4 says. If it were up to us, we would remain in bondage, because we enjoy our sin too much.
The Bible says, “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God” (Romans 3:10-11).
We aren’t even looking for the freedom God provides. Instead, God has to come looking for us.
New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof chose two Cambodian prostitutes and attempted to buy their freedom from their brothel owners. He selected young women who were there against their will, willing to tell their story, and actually wanted to leave prostitution.
The first woman, Srey Neth, was a simple transaction. For $150, Kristof left with the girl and a receipt. Her Mom’s situation proved more difficult, since the brothel owner demanded more money. Kristof writes:
After some grumpy negotiation, the owner accepted $203 as the price for Srey Mom’s freedom. But then Srey Mom told me that she had pawned her cellphone and needed $55 to get it back.
"Forget about your cellphone," I said. "We’ve got to get out of here."
Srey Mom started crying. I told her that she had to choose her cellphone or her freedom, and she ran back to her tiny room in the brothel and locked the door.
With Srey Mom sobbing in her room and refusing to be freed without her cellphone, the other prostitutes—her closest friends—began pleading with her to be reasonable.
Even the owner of the brothel begged her to "Grab this chance while you can," but Srey Mom hysterically refused to leave.
Srey Mom only stopped crying when Kristov agreed to buy back the cellphone too. Then she asked for her pawned jewelry to be part of the deal.
Kristof reflected upon the complex emotions making the decision to leave the brothel so difficult.
I have purchased the freedom of two human beings so I can return them to their villages. But will emancipation help them? Will their families and villages accept them? Or will they, like some other girls rescued from sexual servitude, find freedom so unsettling that they slink back to slavery in the brothels? We’ll see. (Nicholas Kristof, Bargaining for Freedom, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/21/ opinion/21KRIS.html?th, 1-21-04)
Sometimes we’re like that woman. Christ has purchased our freedom, but we want to hang on to the little trinkets of this world; & we prefer the familiarity of our bondage over the unsettling prospects of freedom.
That’s why God had to take the initiative to set us free. & That’s why it is “according to God’s will,” not ours. Jesus, God’s Son, paid the price for our freedom, not us. It was all God’s Idea.
And God, the Father, Himself, does all the work. Verse 5 says, “to whom be glory for ever and ever.” God gets the credit for our freedom, not us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, imprisoned by Hitler during World War II, writes to his fiancé about one of the many lessons he learned from life in prison:
“A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, does various unessential things, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside is not a bad picture of Advent.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Letters and Papers from Prison; in a letter to his fiancee, Maria von Wedemeyer from Tegel Prison in Germany, November 21, 1943)
When you are in prison, there is nothing you can do to open the door to freedom. Somebody has to open it from the outside. So it is when we are in bondage to our own sin. There is nothing we can do to open the door to freedom. Somebody, and that “somebody” is God, HE has to open the door from the outside.
Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”
God is the one who sets us free, and it is not because of anything we have done. We have nothing to boast about when it comes to our freedom. God does all the work, giving us our freedom as a free gift.
Then, and only then, are we free to do all the good things God designed for us to do. The very next verse says, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).
You see, we’re not just talking about a ticket to heaven in the future here. We’re talking about the way to a life of goodness and holiness today, in the present.
Look again at Galatians 1:4. “Christ…gave himself for our sins to rescue us (PRESENT tense) from the PRESENT evil age.”
God will not only give us heaven in the future when we die. God is in the process, right now, of rescuing us from this present evil age.
GOD is the one who makes it all possible. God, the Son, paid the price for our freedom. God, the Father, had the idea. & God, the Father, is doing all the work!
All that remains for us to do is BELIEVE. All we need to do is trust God to complete His work in us. All we need to do is live in daily dependence upon the Lord.
Stop trying to work your own way to heaven. And dear friends, stop trying to work your own way to holiness, as well. Instead, trust Christ for heaven. AND trust Christ to help you live a holy life. Trust Christ to rescue you from your present struggle with sin.
Now, I think most of you have come to the point in your life where you are trusting Christ to take you to heaven when you die. But there are some of you who are still trying to work your own way to holiness. You are still trying in your own strength to live a good life. You are still trying in your own strength to break free from the evil influences around you.
In fact, there are many believers who read their Bibles like a rule book, rather than a love letter.
I remember, years ago, a believer telling me, “I hate to read the Bible anymore, because every time I do, I find something I’m supposed to do, or not supposed to do, and I can’t keep up with all the rules.”
That’s how many believers treat the Bible. Then, as if that’s not enough, they go to seminars and Bible studies, adding more rules to their list. Then they try to do everything on the list and wonder why they fail, and wonder why they’re frustrated and feel guilty all the time. Don’t live your life like that.
If you want to be truly free, then simply listen to God’s Word, and believe it when he tells you, “I am setting you free!” Listen and believe! That’s all there is to it. Listen and believe that God is setting you free! Listen and believe that God is right now in the process of rescuing you from this present evil age.
The silkworm makes an amazing journey to becoming a moth. At one point in the journey, the worm spins about itself a remarkable cocoon. The little sack is composed of 400 to 800 yards of silk fiber which seals it from the inside as it waits for metamorphosis. When that happens, the adult moth will break the cocoon, tearing apart the fine silk cords that bind it, and fly free.
But the silkworm farmer, interested only in harvesting the silk, does not allow most of these worms to become adults. At a key point in the cycle, he steams the cocoons to keep the moths inside from maturing. That way they don’t break the fine threads that bind them and ruin the silk.
That’s not what we’re about as a church. We’re not about keeping you trapped in a cocoon made up of the fine silk threads of rules and regulations. No. We’re in the business of teaching people how to fly free!
To be sure, that takes a whole lot more time and trouble than just letting them crawl around in their own cocoons. Or as Chuck Swindoll put it, “A room full of moths is certainly a bigger challenge than a box full of worms.” (Swindol, Growing Strong in the Seasons of Life, p.242)
Are you up to the challenge? Am I?
If we are, then let’s not waddle out of here like we came. Instead, starting today, let’s begin to fly! Let’s believe God for the impossible. & Let’s break free from this world’s restraints to soar like we never have before!
