July 6, 2025 Sermon - Galatians l 6:1-16 - The Law of Christ: Sowing Grace, Reaping Life”
When you hear the word law, what comes to mind? Maybe it’s a courtroom drama, a flashing red-and-blue light in your rearview mirror, or that one time you tried to talk your way out of a parking ticket.
For some of us, law feels like a list of rules—external, rigid, and maybe even a little intimidating. For others, it’s the structure that keeps society from unraveling.
But what if I told you that in the kingdom of God, law doesn’t start with rules—it starts with relationship?
Today, we’re going to explore something called the law of Christ.
And spoiler alert: it’s not about legal codes or loopholes. It’s about a governing principle that’s not written on stone tablets, but on hearts.
It’s a law that doesn’t just tell us what not to do—it shows us how to live.
So if you’ve ever felt weighed down by religion, or confused by what it means to be a Christian and to follow Jesus, take a deep breath. This isn’t about adding burdens—it’s about lifting them.
Let’s dive in to our passage today. We're going to do a line by line study of passage:
6 Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted.
What is sin? It is missing the mark. Like shooting an arrow at a target and somehow hitting your neighbor’s barbecue. Sin isn’t just a little off—it’s “GPS said turn left” and you drove into a lake. It’s aiming for love, peace, and joy… and landing squarely on rage, envy, and that third donut you swore you wouldn’t eat.
In short: sin is spiritual bad aim. How do we sin? By missing the mark you were designed for.
You were created to live free; you were born again to live as a new creation in Christ, unshackled by the sin that so easily besets us.
Sin is any action that offends God. In short: sin is when we ACT like we know better than the Creator who invented galaxies...and still somehow trip over our own shoelaces.
And it is not just actions, because what we do starts with our heads.
It’s our thought life, in our imaginations. Some say that the Old Testament law is strict in condemning things like the act of adultery. But Jesus said: Matthew 5:27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
You could say that in the Old Testament the Law sought to govern and control and contain behaviours from the outside - the things that we do that offend God identified and restricted by the Torah. The motivating factor here is fear.
In the New Testament, the law of Christ instead seeks to transform us from the inside out, so that we are not just prevented from doing evil because of the fear of the consequences of it - we learn to love doing good as a way to please God and as our expression of love and devotion to God.
This was God’s intention all along.
This is prophesied in the OT prophet Jeremiah 31:33: “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.
Even earlier in Deuteronomy 30:6 it says: “The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.”
Ezekiel 36:26–27 says: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”
So this theme of internal transformation by God, leading to heartfelt obedience, is clearly intended in the OT.
God by His Spirit will in the future initiate inner change to empower our obedience, not just regulate our behavior externally.
You could say that the OT Law was a kind of prison that held us in place until the Lord Jesus Christ was to come.
Kind of like spiritual house arrest—with ankle monitor included. It didn’t set you free, it just kept you from completely torching the place until Jesus arrived and we could place our faith in Him, Who alone fulfilled all the requirements of the Law.
Galatians 3:23 Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. 24 So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. 25 Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.
Jesus didn’t come to crumple up the Law and the Prophets like a rough draft—He came to fulfill them, perfectly and completely. He was the one the whole story had been building toward.
All those sacrifices, feasts, and rituals? They were the trailer, not the main feature.
Hebrews says they were “only a shadow of the good things that are coming”—glimpses, not the substance.
Like holding a wedding invitation and thinking, “Wow, this is beautiful,” but knowing the actual wedding is where the real joy begins.
The tabernacle and the temple? They were sacred, yes—but also temporary. “Copies of the true things,” Hebrews says—God’s early visual aids pointing toward something greater: Christ Himself.
The Law had a shelf life because it was never meant to be the final destination.
It was a divine placeholder—guiding, correcting, restraining—until the New Covenant arrived with Jesus at the center.
He didn’t cancel the story; He brought the long-awaited plot twist that made everything finally make sense.
So...back to the passage: 6 Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted.
Being restored by those who live by the Spirit is to do with, alongside the love and support and patience of our brothers and sisters in Christ,
by the Spirit of God learning to tame our imaginations, tame our thought life, control our desires that conflict with God’s will.
James 1:14-15 says: “...each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
You’d expect that, like with most things, we would consistently act in ways that serve our best interests—choosing what’s good for us rather than what causes us harm.
But that’s not always the case. When our behavior strays from the goodness that reflects Jesus Christ, it’s a sign that something in our thought life has gone off track.
Our actions follow our thinking, and when our thoughts derail, our conduct often follows suit.
But we have all, at one time in our lives, or maybe recently, or maybe today, we have all gone off the rails in our imaginations. That’s where sin always starts. And that’s where sin always lands us, in a place of feeling disconnected from God, in a place of disconnect from our brothers and sisters in Christ.
So if one of us is “caught in a sin”, we who are not currently caught up in sin, and as a result we are living by the spirit, we should restore the one who has fallen gently. And notice the caveat, put in plain and simple terms: V6 “watch yourselves, are you also may be tempted”. So that’s the rub. At any given point any one of us could be tripping on ourselves, we could be struggling with sin, we could be missing the mark.
So we need each other and we need to pray for each other. This illustration might help to explain.
[Back to V6]
And what we need in those cases is not judgment, it’s not condemnation.
It’s generally judgement and condemnation that keeps us so quiet and private in our sin, so that we suffer longer and deeper than necessary. What we need is to be restored.
2 Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. So very closely connected to this in the book of Galatians is the call for us to carry each other’s burdens.
We should help each other, we should not be shouldering our struggles on our own. Of course when we’re really struggling the normal thing that we do, again against our best interest, is to isolate ourselves and cloister ourselves the way.
When we have burdens, we need to learn to share them with trusted fellow followers of Jesus. When we do this, when we carry each other’s burden that is us fulfilling the law of Christ. What is the law of Christ? I’m asking! The law of Christ is the law of love. Jesus himself fulfilled the Old Testament law, so we are not obliged to conform every aspect of the 613 Old Testament laws.
But we do have an obligation to each other, to fulfil the law of Christ in simply loving each other, and the love that God calls us to is both FILEO [Fee-li-oh] love, which is brotherly and sisterly love, but it is also AGAPE love, self sacrificing love, putting others ahead of ourselves love.
3 If anyone thinks they are something when they are not, they deceive themselves. Verse three carries a warning. It’s a warning against pride. If we think that we are something, if we think that we are awesome, if we think that we are somehow above others,
if we think that in the exercising of our gifts, in our presentation to the church, in our engagement with each other that we are really something, we need to be really careful. Because we can very easily deceive ourselves. And then, having deceived ourselves, we can imagine that we are better than our other brothers and sisters,
and that of course will show up in our treatment of one another.
4 Each one should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone, without comparing themselves to someone else,
Verse 4 encourages us to focus our “testing” not on others, not on judging the actions of others, not on imagining the intentions of other people, but rather we should test our own actions.
You might not agree, but I believe that all energy expended on criticizing others and judging others is worse than completely wasted.
All of that energy needs to be put at evaluating our own actions, and of course that means evaluating our thought patterns, what we are doing with our mental energies, our imaginations.
And this is interesting, when we do test our own actions we can, avoiding comparison to others, we can take reasonable and un-sinful pride in our own accomplishments and in the exercise of our gifts to the glory of God.
5 for each one should carry their own load.
In Verse 5 we are encouraged to carry our own load. Now of course if we’re walking together, and you are injured, I’m going to help you with the load that you are carrying.
If you can do something, if you can carry your own load, then you must. People are sometimes surprised when I say that we commit a significant sin when we do things for other people that they are able to do for themselves,
or when we act in ways that create dependency on us rather than helping people to become interdependent. I truly believe that, and it’s been born out over decades of experience.
6 Nevertheless, the one who receives instruction in the word should share all good things with their instructor.
And then of course, verse 6, it’s good to share and reflect back to those who instruct us or teach us the good things that we are learning.
Actually, that is one way that I locate future leaders in the church.
When I see someone serving or sharing, in a Bible study for example, or really in any context, and they are sharing in a way that is helpful to other people, that can really stand out.
And sometimes that leads to such folks being asked to serve in teaching roles at this church.
7 Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. 8 Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.
Here is a sobering reality: I see this as logical consequences to our actions, or simply the basic law of cause and effect. Sowing and reaping.
There's nothing we can do to deceive God to try to bend the fabric of reality to our benefit. We can't get away from responsibility. We can't avoid reaping what we sow.
Although it is true that we received massive grace, which is unmerited favour from God, and tremendous mercy, which is not getting what we deserve from God, nevertheless it’s very truly that in the natural, in our relationships, in our actions we will face consequences.
And we will for sure, if we try to please our flesh, if we don’t learn how to delay gratification, that will cause all kinds of chaos in our lives.
Taking responsibility is essential. In fact, when we try to avoid responsibility, we’re actually avoiding the very thing that helps us live with purpose and direction.
Owning our actions—and caring for others, as a parent does—is not a burden, but a profound blessing. It shapes our character, strengthens our relationships, and brings order to our lives. If we neglect responsibility—whether for our choices, our well-being, or our role in the lives of others—we will face the consequences.
And being a believer, being a Christian, does not exempt us from this truth. Faith does not shield us from the outcomes of our actions; rather, it calls us to live like Jesus, responsibly, with integrity and intention.
In fact the way we choose to take responsibility for ourselves and then for others is an expression of how seriously we take our own walk, our relationship with God.
Sowing and reaping. It is cause and effect and what we would call logical consequences to our actions: If we focus on pleasing our flesh, satisfying the desires of the flesh, never learning to delay gratification, we suffer in our flesh.
When we “sow to please the Spirit”, Do those things that please God, and live in a way that brings glory and honor to Jesus Christ, that will manifests itself always in good things
9 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
Here we have a good and necessary caution. It is quite possible to become weary in doing good. It is quite possible that in trying to help others, we can exhaust ourselves.
We can become cynical, because people don't change at the rate that we wish they would change. But of course if we’re honest, we know that we can barely change ourselves.
It is incredibly hard to fix our bad habits, to keep our own thinking aligned with the Word of God, when voices around us and our own hearts are continually trying to lie to us and drag us down.
And of course the promise here is that if we persevere, if we remain faithful, God will cause there to be fruit from our efforts, God will cause a harvest, but this is contingent.
It is contingent on us not giving up.
10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.
As verse 10 says, we’re called to make the most of every opportunity to do good to others—especially to our fellow believers, the family of God, the body of Christ. I love the Church. My vision of the church is as a place of healing, a place of learning to live the truth of the Bible. We are growing in our love for God, recognizing that there is nothing greater than knowing and loving Him.
To truly understand ourselves and our purpose, we must take both God and our identity as His beloved seriously.
Loving Jesus means giving Him our whole hearts, loving others—including strangers—and walking alongside them in life.
It calls us to be open, welcoming, and ready to embrace everyone, especially the poor and marginalized.
Living the gospel means being people of good news, ready to explain our love and care as a reflection of God’s love through Christ.
As a church, we exist not for ourselves but for those outside our walls—those who have yet to hear and experience God’s love.
We are called to be a missional people, agents of grace and transformation in our city. And as we grow in numbers, we also grow in depth—strengthening our worship, our friendships, and our impact for Christ in the community.
I see the church as a kind of training ground. It’s here that we learn to bless one another, to grow from one another, and yes—even to make mistakes and then practice grace by making things right. This shared life of worship, learning, and community gives us space to grow in love and humility.
And in doing so, we’re being prepared to engage with those outside the faith—people who don’t yet know Jesus.
Whether it’s in our worship gatherings, our Bible studies, or even just our casual conversations with one another, we’re being shaped into people who can carry to others the good news with both truth and love.
Through this kind of gospel-shaped community, others may come to know Christ through us. \
11 See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand! We see here some evidence of Paul's age, as he is writing this letter himself but having to use very large letters in order to see what he's doing. I love these little funny random comments that we find in scripture.
12 Those who want to impress people by means of the flesh are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ. 13 Not even those who are circumcised keep the law, yet they want you to be circumcised that they may boast about your circumcision in the flesh.
Here, Paul briefly returns to the central theme of his letter to the Galatians: confronting those within the Church—
likely Jewish believers from a Pharisaic background—who were insisting that Gentile converts must be circumcised and observe the entire Mosaic Law in order to be saved.
This was a distortion of the gospel, and Paul consistently pushes back against it.
He knew how dangerous this teaching was and wanted to reinforce, again and again, that salvation comes through faith in Christ alone—not through adherence to the law.
This was the primary pressure the Galatian believers were facing, and Paul refused to let it go unchallenged.
14 May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which[a] the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 15 Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation. 16 Peace and mercy to all who follow this rule—to[b] the Israel of God. 17 From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus. 18 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. Amen.
This is quite poignant and very beautiful.
Paul, the former Pharisee, the former religious leader who, as a young man, used all of his strength and passion to attempt to destroy the Church of Jesus Christ, who had himself been captured and captivated by Christ and who had then become the main evangelist and church planter in the Christian Church, he makes this very personal statement:
“May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world”.
This, in my mind, refers back to the symbolism of baptism where we, in going under the water...we die to ourselves, and then and coming out of the water we rise to new life.
This remained a powerful reality for Paul. He never stopped being immensely thankful for the cross of Jesus Christ, for the suffering of Jesus Christ on his behalf.
For the mind-expanding grace and love that Jesus expressed when he went to the cross and suffered for Paul's sins, suffered for my sins, suffered for your sins.
And then he says that nothing human counts. No human ritual, past history no past failures, None of those things that we sometimes are at risk of defining ourselves by.
None of those matter. All that counts is the new creation. All that counts is the fact that we are new creations in Christ. The old has gone. The new has come.
And then he ends with the beautiful phrase: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. Amen.
“So, what do we do with all this talk about law?
We remember that the law of Christ isn’t about red tape—it’s about redemptive love. It’s not a checklist to earn God’s approval; it’s a compass that points us toward Christlikeness.
It’s a law that doesn’t weigh us down—it lifts us up.
It lifts us to love when it’s easier to judge. It lifts us to serve when it’s easier to scroll past. It lifts us to forgive when it’s easier to walk away.
And the best part? We don’t live this out alone. The same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is the one who empowers us to live this law of love.
If you sow grace in every step, you’ll reap life in places you never expected.
So if your brain’s still intact after this expositional journey through Chapter 6 of Galatians—congratulations!
But more importantly, if your heart is stirred to love more deeply, serve more freely, and walk more closely with Jesus… then you’ve already begun to fulfill the law of Christ. Let’s go and live it.
