NOT A REAL CHRISTIAN
Have you ever had someone tell you that you’re not really a Christian or not saved? Maybe because, they said, you don’t belong to the right church or you celebrate the wrong holidays or whatever.
When I was returning from the mission field, I had the good fortune of sitting next to another missionary on the plane. I had the misfortune of it being a Christian who didn’t accept I was actually saved. The bone of contention was that I didn’t speak in tongues.
Now, I’ve spent some time in Pentecostal churches and classic Pentecostal doctrine teaches that tongues are the evidence that you’ve been baptised in the Spirit. That doesn’t mean you’re not saved or even that you don’t have the Holy Spirit because they’re separate things. Normally you’ll get saved and be born again in the Holy Spirit, and then be baptised in the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues later. Spirit-baptism supercharges your Christian life.
That’s not what this man was saying. He was saying that you had be baptised in the Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues in order to be born again. According to his doctrine I wasn’t even a Christian.
BACKGROUND
The church in Galatia faced a similar situation.
Galatia was a Roman province in modern day Turkey and you can read about Paul’s first in Acts 13.14-14.23. It was a spectacular trip with signs and wonders. He and Barnabas were worshipped as gods and then stoned almost to death in the same city. They faced fierce opposition from the Jews, and many people coming to faith.
Not surprisingly, then, it seems that Paul had a special place for the Galatians in his heart and his passion really overflows in this letter.
Reading between the lines, it seems that a group of probably Jewish Christians had arrived from Jerusalem, possibly claiming to come with the Jerusalem Apostles’ authority but certainly undermining Paul’s apostolic authority (we’ll unpack this over the next couple of weeks). They were teaching that all those Gentile Galatian converts weren’t really Christians until they were circumcised.
Now, that might seem outrageous to us (and it is) but to be fair, Christianity was still a Jewish sect, and these Jewish Jesus-followers were still trying to figure out what to do with the Gentiles. Jesus was a Jew, as were his Apostles, and they were all Torah observant so it followed that to be a genuine Jesus-follower, Gentiles should be Torah observant as well. And that included circumcission.
A DIFFERENT GOSPEL
Paul took this opposition to him and his message very personally and his indignation immediately evident. In v. 6 he says, " I am amazed that you are so quickly turning away from him who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel."
Let that sink in. Paul says that, in listening to these interlopers (regardless of how genuine and well-meaning they were), the Galatians aren’t just rejecting him, and not even just rejecting the gospel, although that was true. But they were turning away from God himself. What these so-called ‘Judaisers’ were offering was not just an alternative interpretation of the gospel, or an alternative Christian tradition, it was another gospel altogether. The Galatians were committing spiritual treason! Paul said that even if an angel preached such a so-called gospel, a curse on them!
Paul will identify this ‘other gospel’ later, but in these opening verses he signals two important themes in Galatians.
PAUL DEFENDING HIS APOSTOLICITY
The first is a defence of his apostolic authority. Apparently, his opponents accused him of not being a genuine Apostle – which was an easy charge to lay since he hadn’t even met Jesus (they thought). The real apostles were in Jerusalem and Paul’s base was in Antioch in Syria.
Nevertheless, Paul claims that his apostolic commission wasn’t from any human but from God himself, and this will be his argument for the rest of this chapter.
PAUL DEFENDING THE AUTHENTIC GOSPEL
The second theme is a defence of the authentic gospel.
What is this Gospel?
Paul states it in brief in v.4: "[Christ] gave himself for our sins to rescue us from this present evil age."
That’s fairly straight forward, although very brief. Paul, of course, sees Jesus giving himself on the cross so we can be freed from the power and penalty of sin and be made right with God.
The crux of the issue is how do we get in on that salvation? Essentially the Judaisers were saying, ‘By becoming part of the Covenant through circumcision,’ but Paul will argue, ‘by faith.’ Paul says that there is only one gospel and that we are saved by trusting in Jesus. If we say that we have to do something else to receive the Gospel, then it’s not really the Gospel.
Say you want to get to Sydney by train. There’s only one way to do that – on the Indian Pacific. But someone might say, there is another train you can catch – The Australind. Yes, it’s a train and it even leaves from the same station, but it takes you to a completely different place! There’s only one way to get to Sydney by train.
There’s only one train that gets you to the Gospel – faith. If you want to take a different train, you wind up at a different location, a different gospel, a fake gospel that can’t save you.
IT'S ALL ABOUT JESUS
And I think a big part of the problem with these other gospels is that they take our eyes off of Jesus. Because the gospel is all about Jesus.
When I have to do something to come to Jesus, I keep my focus on that thing. Am I doing it right? Am I doing it enough?
But let me tell you another way of saying what faith is. It’s fixing your eyes on Jesus.
How do we get saved? We fix our eyes on Jesus.
Experiencing doubts? Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus.
Feeling pressure to compromise? Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus.
APPLICATION
It’s so easy to distort the gospel by adding bits until, one day, we discover we’re not even on the same train. We believe something different. Usually, these additions come from a genuine desire to be faithful to God and they might even be biblical.
MODERN GNOSTICISM
Like the missionary who said I needed to speak in tongues to be saved. Speaking in tongues is biblical. I pray in tongues now and it’s really helped my prayer life, but it doesn’t make me any more Christian. In fact, if I read Galatians right, for that missionary, I think Paul would say he wasn’t a Christian at all. He didn’t preach a gospel of salvation by faith, it was a different gospel. It was more akin to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism that said you had to have a secret revelation or experience of God to be saved.
But what other ‘different gospels’ are out there?
DAYS AND DIETS
Maybe you’ve come across people who say you have to keep the Sabbath or some other ritual, or you’re not a Christian. Paul says elsewhere that the gospel makes these things irrelevant. You can observe special days or not as long as they’re not overtly idolatrous. Just don’t demand other conform to your views.
More often, people will not judge your salvation by these things, but they will judge your maturity or seriousness.
PROSPERITY GOSPEL
I think there are a couple of more insidious teachings in the church.
One is a transactional gospel. If I give to God, he’ll bless me. My finances, my family, my whatever. If I have enough faith, I’ll get that healing or breakthrough I want. If I pray the right prayers in the right way, they’ll be answered. You might know it as the prosperity gospel. It leaves us with a terrible burden. If I don’t get what I ‘believed’ for, what does that mean? I didn’t have enough faith? That I didn’t make a big enough sacrifice?
The problem isn’t that it teaches another path to salvation, it’s that it redefines salvation altogether. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the poor and woe to the rich,’ but prosperity doctrine reverses that. It almost borders on witchcraft sometimes – manipulating God rather than the simple trust and reliance of faith.
SOCIAL GOSPEL
In a funny kind of way, it’s twin is at the other end of the spectrum - the social gospel. The gospel does have a social aspect – a life of justice and righteousness – but very often the social gospel divorces this from the cross and makes it about what we do for God. Like the prosperity gospel, it makes salvation more about this world than the Kingdom. Often it denies the human condition – sin and rebellion against God – and looks to human fixes rather than the deep sovereign work of God that needs to happen in the human heart.
Social transformation does happen through the gospel but if we divorce the preaching and power of the cross from social change, we’re just another hashtag movement creating the world in our image rather than God’s. We may even be doing good, but if Jesus isn’t the solution, then it’s not the gospel, it’s another gospel.
IT’S ALL ABOUT JESUS
Of course, there is a way to live in the Kingdom of God. It’s not lawlessness as critiques might argue. But it’s a lifestyle that flows out of the gospel because of Jesus. It begins and ends with him.
The problem at Galatia was that they were making the gospel about what they had to do to be saved and become part of God’s people, rather than what God has done in Christ.
It’s insisting on a spiritual experience or certain practices in order to be saved. Or subtly shifting the focus of salvation away from Christ and onto creating a better world, whatever that looks like.
But the gospel life is a life of grace and peace from God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ and, as we’ll see, by the Holy Spirit.
Is Jesus the centre of your religion? Is he the centre of your life?
