WHO IS YOUR MOTHER?
Galatians 4:21-5:1
S: Freedom
Th: Grace-Full Living
Pr: AS CHILDREN OF PROMISE, WE ARE BORN TO LIVE FREE.
TS: We will find in our study of Galatians 4:21-5:1 the significance of being “children of promise.”
Inductive
I. Background (History)
II. Interpretation (Analogy)
III. Application
RMBC 7/30/00 AM
INTRODUCTION:
ILL “Are You My Mother?”
Here is a delightful children’s book by P. D. Eastman entitled Are You My Mother? Let me read the first part of the book…
When we come to the end of the story, the little bird he learns that a kitten, hen, dog, cow, boat, plane and steam shovel are not his mother. His mother, as you might expect, is a bird.
I do have a question for you this morning…
1. Who is your mother?
Some of you have your mothers here.
Others don’t.
It is interesting, though, to observe what we have gotten from our mothers.
What did you get from your mother?
ILL Notebook: Mother (Too Hard on Mom)
A father and his son were talking together when the father asked the son what he wanted for his birthday. The boy said he wanted a baby brother. Soon, his birthday wish came true—he got a baby brother. Prior to his next birthday, his father asked his son again, “What would you like for your birthday?” The little boy hesitantly told his father, “Dad, what I would really like is a pony, but I’m afraid that would be too hard on Mom.”
Well, we all get something from our mothers.
And thankfully, they do not all come in the same way.
But we all do get something from our mothers.
It is a heritage.
2. How would you describe your heritage?
In what ways are you physically like your mother?
Are there ways that you think alike?
How about emotionally?
And how many of us as adults find ourselves saying, “I can’t believe it, I am acting just like my father.”
“I am acting just like my mother.”
We act shocked, and yet, it is absolutely normal.
TRANSITION:
We come today to the end of chapter 4 in our study of Galatians.
It is a significant point in the letter, because it is here that…
1. We come to the Paul’s final theological argument against those that distorted the gospel and misled the Galatians.
And it is not only his final argument, it is my contention it is his best.
He saves his best for last.
He comes with a creative and an unexpected approach.
Paul has been arguing for the superiority of grace and the gospel of grace that he has presented to the Galatians.
He was opposing the Judaizers who had said that grace was fine, but you had to keep the law to make your salvation complete.
Paul has been arguing that they were adding to the gospel, and as a result, were nullifying it.
Now, on this final argument,
2. Paul speaks to the heart of the Judaizer’s pride.
The Judaizers were proud to be children of Abraham.
He was their father.
They were recipients of God’s blessing because they belonged to Abraham.
But Paul asks, in effect, a more crucial question:
Who is your mother?
Paul makes them take one step further and reminds them that if they insist on making all believers come through the family tree of Abraham that they certainly need to remember that Abraham had two sons!
And it is here that he has caught them, for their handling of Scripture has been more than sloppy.
So…
3. Paul lays down a challenge regarding their spiritual roots (21).
Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you not aware of what the law says?
Paul, in effect, says that they have been missing an essential ingredient to all of this.
He goes to the story in Genesis (for even the historical accounts were considered the law) and reminds them that Abraham’s relationship with the Lord is based on God’s gracious promise, not Abraham’s obedience to the law.
So, the family line the Judaizers want the Galatians to follow does not actually lead to Abraham the way they intended.
Rather it led right back to the path of unbelief through Ishmael.
There is a profound irony in what Paul is saying here.
The Judaizers, like the Pharisees with whom Jesus dealt, were very proud of their ethnic heritage.
They were Jews.
They were the true sons of Abraham.
But Paul says, “You guys are sons of Abraham, all right, but your mother is Hagar, not Sarah. Yes, physically, you may be descendants of Isaac, but spiritually, in the way that really counts, you are descendants of Ishmael.”
Now, from a Jewish perspective, being called an Ishmaelite was not a very nice thing.
Ishmael was the physical ancestor of many of the Canaanite and Palestinian peoples that had opposed Israel for centuries.
But Paul stresses here what he has said throughout this letter.
The true descendants of Abraham and Sarah are those, not with Jewish blood flowing in their veins, but rather all those, both Jew and Gentile, black and white, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Hispanic, French and Italian, who trust in God as Abraham did.
So Paul appeals to the…
ANNALS (22-23):
…the recorded history of the nation of Israel.
(22) For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. (23) His son by the slave woman was born in the ordinary way; but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a promise.
1. We sometimes think that God needs our help in solving issues.
Here is how the story illustrates this…
Abraham and Sarah believed the promise that God had made to them.
God was going to give them an heir.
So they waited and waited and waited.
You know what?
This was taking a real long time and they were getting old.
Abraham began to worry.
Sarah began to worry.
For some reason they couldn’t have children.
And as Abraham began to get old, he began to seriously worry about God’s promise to him of a great nation coming from him and his children.
And so, as everyone who gets impatient with God is wont to do, Abraham and Sarah decided to take matters into their own hands, to sort of “help God out,” since He was being so slow about keeping his promise.
Sarah had a female Egyptian slave named Hagar and she came up with this scheme for Abraham to father a child by Hagar and in that way fulfill God’s promise to him.
It was sort of a surrogate mother situation.
She even said to him, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
Unfortunately, Abraham went along with her scheme, slept with Hagar, and what do you know…fathered a child.
It was a boy.
Abraham now had a son, and they named him Ishmael.
So this solved the problem, right?
No way.
It made it worse.
And here we see human nature at one of its low points, for…
2. When we make it worse, we deflect the blame away from ourselves.
It can’t be our fault.
It must be someone else’s.
Now, it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out what life was like in that household after this happened.
You have to remember that in that particular culture, sons were prized possessions.
If a man didn’t have a son, then he wasn’t a real man.
Well, here was Sarah…she’d been a faithful, dutiful, and loving wife for many years and had no son to show for it.
She had no children at all.
And in those days a woman’s self-esteem was deeply tied in to her ability to have children.
Now comes along Hagar and she bears a son for Abraham.
Naturally, Sarah became jealous of Hagar and Ishmael and of the time and attention that Abraham gave to his son.
She was bitter and she took it out on Hagar.
Hagar, in turn, returned the bitterness and fought back.
Now, can you imagine what life was like in that household?
No fun for anyone, you can be sure of that much.
Sarah was mad at Hagar.
Hagar was mad at Sarah.
Abraham constantly trying to make peace, while the two of them probably blamed him for the whole mess.
There was no peace.
And here is another lesson for us…
3. What we need to discover is that our efforts are incompatible with God’s activity.
This is not good news for those of us that like to do it our way.
This was the lesson that Abraham and Sarah had to learn.
Their “help” was no help at all.
They made it worse.
Ishmael was not the child of promise.
But God did keep His promise.
When Abraham and Sarah were very old, they did have a son.
He was named Isaac, which means “laughter,” because, perhaps, there is nothing funnier than a 90-year-old woman miraculously having a baby.
So now God had fulfilled his promise to Abraham on His terms and on His timetable.
Everything should be right with the world, correct?
But there was still one fly in the ointment, or maybe two flies: Hagar and Ishmael were still around.
This bothered Sarah to no end, especially when Ishmael began to tease and mock his younger half-brother Isaac.
This was her son, Abraham’s true heir, and she would not have Ishmael around abusing the child of promise.
There was not room in the household for both of them.
Finally, a decision had to be made and Hagar and Ishmael were cast out and sent away.
Abraham did as his wife wanted and so Hagar and Ishmael were turned loose to fend for themselves.
Great story, right?
No, it is a sad story, filled with tragedy, caused by sin.
Now, Paul takes this story and applies it to the situation with the churches of Galatia.
He draws an…
ANALOGY (24-27):
Paul takes this literal and historical account and sees even more.
He sees it as analogous to and illustrative of the following spiritual truth.
He sees within this story a complementary meaning.
(24) These things may be taken figuratively, for the women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves: This is Hagar. (25) Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. (26) But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother. (27) For it is written: “Be glad, O barren woman, who bears no children; break forth and cry aloud, you who have no labor pains; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband.”
In this section, Paul wants the Judaizers, the Galatians and us to look deeper into the past, for…
1. We need to understand our roots…
There are…
1.1 Two Mothers: Hagar Sarah
Paul’s argument is that one is the picture of promise and the other one is not.
Sarah is the mother of promise.
But because of Abraham and Sarah’s impatience, Hagar entered into the picture…
ILL Notebook: Waiting (slippery interchange)
Henry was caught speeding on a Georgia highway by a police officer hidden from view. The trooper approached the car and said, “Son, I’ve been waiting for you all morning.” The young man responded, “I got here as fast as I could officer.”
I think that gives us an insight into Sarah and Abraham.
When the promise didn’t seem to work, they got there themselves as fast as they could.
And it worked.
For now there were…
1.2 Two Sons: Ishmael Isaac
Ishmael was the product of their hurry and self-reliance.
When Abraham had relied on his own power and ingenuity to get a son, Ishmael was the result.
When God relied on the promise alone, and stopped trying to do it himself, Isaac was the result.
It was, simply, a contrast of the natural versus the supernatural way.
This demonstrates the…
1.3 Two Conditions: Flesh Promise
Abraham had operated on the wrong assumption, a fleshly assumption if you will.
He began to believe that the promised heir would be his responsibility to get, but it was not.
Isaac was not born according to the flesh because his birth was the result of God’s supernatural intervention in fulfillment of his own promise.
So Abraham had learned his lesson.
The only acceptable response to God’s merciful promise is trust in that promise, not works of the flesh that try to bring down God’s blessing with our efforts.
This, then, shows the contrast of the…
1.4 Two Covenants: Law Grace
Abraham learned, finally, to live by grace.
He lived by faith and obeyed God, not because he had to, but because he wanted to.
He did not live by law, which was to demonstrate the foolishness of our own effort (which he proved quite well).
He finally got it right, which led to the…
1.5 Two Results: Outcast Heir
Since Ishmael was not accepted as an heir he was no better than his mother, a slave.
He became the outcast.
Isaac on the other hand, was the true promised heir, which came about, not as a result of human effort, but because of faith and trust.
Finally, Paul makes a contrast between the…
1.6 Two Jerusalems: Enslaved Free
Paul points to the geographical location of Jerusalem because this is where the Old Covenant given at Mt. Sinai continued to be upheld, propagated and exemplified.
The holy city was also the location for the consummation of the New Covenant in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus.
But because the people rejected that New Testament in blood, the present Jerusalem, like Mt. Sinai, is where Hagar still figuratively lives in slavery with her unbelieving children—self-righteous, Christ-rejecting, grace-ignoring Jews.
When Paul says in the text that “She corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children,” it is a direct attack on the Judaizers who have come from Jerusalem.
They are the children of Jerusalem and they are slaves to the law and to the demonic forces of the world.
So you can see Paul’s point.
Don’t follow these false teachers!
They may show you how to become sons of Abraham, but beware!
With them you will be an Ishmael, not an Isaac.
You will become a slave, not an heir.
2. Who is your mother?
The Judaizers were in trouble.
They had made wrong assumptions about Abraham.
They had assumed his position of favor with God was the result of his obedience and the Law.
So, they applied this principle to the believers in Galatia.
They needed a measurable standard to determine spiritual growth.
Rules and regulations gave them their apparent solution.
But just as all that Abraham and Hagar produced on their own was a son who would not be the heir, all that Israel produced when they tried to keep the law on their own was a legalism that would inherit nothing.
And when the Israelites took the law upon themselves without trusting God for gracious enablement, they became slaves because they have no freedom to do the law from the heart.
Their unbelief locks them into disobedience and excludes them from the inheritance.
So, the Judaizers were sons of Abraham, but they were not the sons of Sarah.
They had the right father, but they had the wrong mother.
APPLICATION (28-31, 1):
How about you?
Who is your mother?
Hagar or Sarah?
(28) Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. (29) At that time the son born in the ordinary way persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It is the same now. (30) But what does the Scripture say? “Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.” (31) Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman. (1) It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
According to Paul, Ishmael’s treatment of Isaac was paralleled by the treatment of the Gentiles by the Judaizers.
Just as the flesh wars with the Spirit, so Ishmael, a child of the flesh, was at odds with Isaac, a child of the promise, born according to the Spirit.
The Gentiles were not only bewitched by these false teachers, they were actually being mistreated.
It was time for them to wake up.
They were not to be flattered by the zealous pursuit of the Judaizers, but to recognize their zealousness for what it was—persecution.
We too, are not to fall into the persecution of legalism.
Yet…
1. We too often live in “church” law.
The Judaizers could point to their ritualism and exclusivism as evidence of their religious zeal, but they were empty inside.
On the outside, perhaps it looked great.
But on the inside, they were empty.
You know, we have our own Christian Subculture that can be legalistic.
We have our own standards of what it is to be spiritually-minded and righteous.
It can be busy-ness.
It can be the appearance of self-control in all circumstances.
It can be the ability to always have a verse for every situation.
It can be our political views.
It can be the translation we use.
And the list could go on and on.
But the truth is that much of what we consider godliness is merely “sin management” as we look for ways to change the behavior without ever having a true change of heart!
ILL Notebook: Work (new company policy)
This was part of a memo to the employees at a certain business:
You cannot work a job that is rated higher than your current competency level. You cannot be rated at a higher competency level until you have worked at a job rated at that level. You cannot improve your competency level through training.
Now, if we went slower with that, you would see how foolish those statements were.
But they are a great illustration of legalism.
Because it is the goal of the legalist to keep us under control and away from where we want to be, or more importantly, what we ought to be free to become.
So listen to Paul’s solution to the legalist…
2. Those things that prevent us from living by the Spirit are to be deliberately cast out.
“Get rid of it.”
“Don’t put up with it”
Just as Hagar and Ishmael had to go, so do the Judaizers.
The Galatians were to get rid of them.
And the same is true for us.
Those things, those principles, those ideas, and those people that prevent us from living by the Spirit must be removed from our lives.
We are children of the promise.
We are not in bondage to the law.
Rather, we live freely in the Spirit.
For you see…
3. AS CHILDREN OF PROMISE, WE ARE BORN TO LIVE FREE.
Why aren’t Ishmael types free?
They are not free because they lack the desire to rest in God’s promises.
They lack the desire to show their own resourcefulness.
It’s not that they desire to reject God.
They simply want him on their own terms.
But when we do rest in God’s promises, we are truly free.
4. Freedom is when you have no lack of opportunity, no lack of ability and no lack of desire to accomplish what will bring joy forever.
God offers us freedom.
He offers the freedom of opportunity to do what we can.
He offers the freedom of ability to do what we desire.
And He offers the freedom of desire to do what will bring us ending joy.
But not everybody has this kind of freedom.
A lot of professing Christians try to keep the commandments of God, but they do it out of a sense of obligation.
They don’t really delight to do them but they feel uncomfortable constraints like social pressures or fear of hell or desire to impress someone.
So they go through outward motions of obedience but the desire of their hearts is fixed somewhere else.
True freedom, though, leads to joy.
True freedom leads to life, not destruction.
There are some also that claim freedom and delight in sin.
They pitch themselves out the window of sin and exult for a season in the exhilaration of free fall sex or free fall greed, or free fall drugs or free fall luxury.
But they are going to land into destruction.
That is not the way to life.
Ishmael-types are not free because they lack the freedom of desire to rest in God’s sovereign grace; and therefore they lack the freedom of ability to understand God’s will, and finally, they lack the freedom of eternal joy because the life they have chosen leads to destruction.
The essence of Christianity is the miracle of new birth.
The hallmark of the Isaac-types is that we have been converted, changed, transformed at the center of our lives so that we desire to rest in God’s sovereign grace.
We don’t slavishly labor under the burden of having to do what we don’t want to do.
We are free to do what we love to do and to do it forever in perfect joy.
So I encourage you today, live as children of promise.
Reject self-effort, and enjoy the freedom of being energized by the Spirit of God.
BENEDICTION: [Counselors are Rich & Bee Phillips]
Be a child of promise…believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, trust your life to Him, and know the blessing of being a true child of Abraham and Sarah;
Be energized by the Spirit…and reject self-reliance; find the way to live and reject the way to destruction;
Be free…know the freedom of opportunity, ability and desire that brings unending joy.
Now to him who is able to establish you by the gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen.
