“It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm, and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.”
I want to begin today by communicating to you what a privilege it is, to be preaching here at Calvary Baptist in Delta, and to be worshiping with the folks here and from Solid Rock and Mountain Valley. And it is a double honor, because I have never preached on the fourth of July before. I can’t promise you ‘fireworks’…
…but I do have some pretty liberating news for you today, if you come with a heart prepared to hear God’s voice and receive His word.
When Pastor Roger called me a couple of weeks ago and asked me to preach, something of note happened. You see, as the folks of my own congregation would confirm to you, I don’t do theme sermons. By that, I mean if you come to my church on Father’s Day, you will not hear a Father’s Day sermon. And if you come on Mother’s Day, you won’t hear a Mother’s Day sermon, and so forth.
In short, I don’t plan my sermons by Hallmark’s calendar.
So when Roger asked me to preach and then suggested I preach something on freedom, I balked a little. The immediate reaction in me was a determination to stand my ground. To stick to my guns and say, ‘no, I don’t do theme sermons’.
But my second thought was, ‘well, it will actually be on July 4th; and besides, there is a kind of freedom that is really one of my very favorite subjects to preach on. That is the kind of freedom that Christ has purchased for us. And as I was thinking this, he was saying it.
So it was easy for me to acquiesce to Roger’s suggestion, and so here we are, looking at Galatians 5:1. Let’s see what we can glean from it today.
SET FREE FOR FREEDOM
The generally accepted dates for the writing of the letter to the Galatians are between A.D. 48 – 58. Some narrow it down to the years 48 – 51, which would place Paul on his second missionary journey, and probably staying in Corinth at the time of writing.
Apparently some emissaries had been sent to him from the Galatian region to tell him of problems creeping into the churches there. Those called Judaizers, were coming in after Paul and teaching that to be saved they must believe in Jesus, yes, but also be circumcised, and hold to the traditional Jewish feast days, observances of the new moon, certain worship rituals and so forth.
So the purpose of Paul’s letter to them is to respond to these things, and to set their doctrine back on track.
We get a sense of the urgency he felt in his straightforward approach in verses 6 & 7 of chapter 1.
“I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel; which is really not another; only there are some who are disturbing you, and want to distort the gospel of Christ.”
So by the time he gets to what we call chapter 5 verse 1, he has addressed these errors and once more established that salvation is by grace through faith in the shed blood of Christ alone. We’ll have more to say about that today also. But I want our focus to be primarily on verse 1 of chapter 5, not only because Roger asked me to preach about freedom, but because the context of the verse says some things to us that I believe very many Christians in our time and culture need to hear.
Things that Christians in our own association need to hear.
And you need to hear them, not only with your ears, but in your spirits. I encourage you, as we go on, to just say a brief prayer in the quiet of your own heart and ask the Lord, by His sanctifying Spirit, to awaken your spiritual understanding today, to better comprehend what Christ has done for you.
The first thing I want to point out then, because it will become the basis for everything else I say today, is that Paul said, “It was for freedom that Christ set us free”
Now, I don’t know if that has ever jumped out at you before, as it did me when I sat down to study for this sermon. So just pause for a moment and let it sink in. It was for freedom that Christ freed us.
Whenever I see a word used twice in a verse I look it up in my concordance and my dictionary of New Testament words, just to see what I can find. What I found in this instance, was two different Greek words.
Not a whole lot different, but enough to mention. The second use of the word, where Paul says, “…Christ set us free…” means very simply to free from bondage or slavery.
I imagine them using this word in reference to letting a dove out of a cage, for example; or opening a cell door and telling a man he can go home.
The first one, where he says “…for freedom…” can also be translated ‘liberty’.
Well, in our language there’s not a great deal of difference, is there? If we were playing a word-association game and I said ‘liberty’, most of you would counter with ‘freedom’.
Some wiseguy would probably shout, ‘statue of!’ But for the most part I think the majority would think of the word freedom.
So here, instead of referring to a physical act of freeing someone, it is about a position, a state, a state of mind. Liberty.
But here is the point you must get right off so we can build on it. We’re told in quite a number of places in the New Testament epistles that Christ has freed us. Or that His atoning work on the cross freed us. Freed us from death, from sin, from bondage to sin, and so forth. A few of these are in Romans. 6:14, 18; 7:4-6; 8:2 says, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death”. The same word is used there as in Galatians 5:1 So that’s a pretty well established point and I don’t think I need to defend it further here. But here is the primary point of Galatians 5:1.
Christ didn’t set us free for some other sort of bondage!
Christ set us free for the sake of freedom. He set us free for liberty’s sake.
I think we miss that many times, in the church, and as soon as we find out we’ve been set free from sin and death, we start looking around for something else to bind ourselves up with.
So today I want to discuss some things Jesus freed us from, because some of you may be bound up by those very things, and you may need to know that Christ set you free so that you could be free.
First, just in case there is someone here who has not heard it before,
CHRIST SET YOU FREE FROM SIN
Now I have to qualify that right off the bat. Christ set you free from sin, if you are a Christian. Christ potentially set you free from sin by dying on the cross and paying the penalty for your sin. But it is now up to you to come in faith, turning your back on sin and your sinful way of life, and appropriate to yourself this free gift He gives you; new life and freedom from sin.
If you have not come to Him in that sense, if you have not heard and believed what we call the ‘good news’ of Jesus Christ, then you are, according to the Bible, dead spiritually because of sin. If you go through your life and die apart from Christ, then you will die eternally.
Now that doesn’t mean you will pass into oblivion and not know or be aware of anything at all. What it means is that your soul will enter eternity dead to God, and you will eternally suffer separation from God, in the place reserved for the devil and his demons.
I have to assume, since you are here today, that you do not want to enter into that kind of eternity. If you do, that is, if you’ve told yourself you don’t care, and you are only here to scoff, or because grandma or Aunt Mathilda dragged you here because it’s the 4th of July, then you’re a ninny.
Listen to the truth, submit to the Holy Spirit of God, turn your heart from sin and self and believe the good news and be saved forever. Today is your opportunity and it could be your last. Don’t let it slip away.
Christians, Christ set you free from sin. I want to talk about the implications of that.
One of the first things Christians come to understand after they have believed and been born from above and given the Holy Spirit to help them understand, is that they are now free from the penalty of sin.
That is, they will not have to pay for their sin because Jesus paid for their sin for them on Calvary’s cross.
At least, I hope most Christians are taught that very early on. A church would be very neglectful of her duties if the leadership did not teach that fundamental truth.
The thing I think does get neglected sometimes though, is the truth that all of your sin was paid for on Calvary’s cross. Many Christians live and express themselves as though they think that when they became a Christian all of their past sin was put away, but now if they sin they are expected to beg God’s forgiveness, do some kind of emotional penance or something.
Christians, when Christ shed His blood and died on the cross, He paid for every sin you would ever commit. For example, if you are here today and you are 10 years old, and you have believed the good news and asked Jesus into your heart and life, and if you live to be 99 years old, and on the last day of your life you sin in some way, say, yelling at your nurse for spilling your chicken broth, that sin is already paid for.
The grace of God, extended to you through Christ’s atoning work, is sufficient, Christ’s blood is sufficient, His one sacrifice for sin was sufficient, believer, and that is why we sing “Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe; sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it, white as snow”
Now here is where some will say, ‘but if you teach that all of our sins are already paid for, even the ones we haven’t committed yet, then that might give someone license to go ahead and sin all he wants because Jesus already paid for it’.
I want to be very clear here, that I am not advocating some kind of Roman Catholic, live like hell all week, confess on Friday and be good to go for Saturday morning mass - thing.
If you think you can sin because Jesus paid for all your sins, or even if you think teaching this kind of grace is dangerous because young or weak believers might take it as license, then you do not yet understand God’s grace.
Let’s approach this more systematically.
If you are a Christian, you have died to sin. Notice I did not say that sin died, or sin died to you. You died to sin. How do I know? Because the Bible says so. In Romans 6:2 Paul said, “…how shall we who died to sin still live in it?”
He’s asking a question, but the wording of the question makes a statement, and that statement implies our previous knowledge and understanding of its truth. “how shall we who died to sin”. “we who died to sin”. “who died to sin”. “died to sin”.
Paul presupposes that his readers have been taught this, and believe it as a fundamental doctrine. When we came to Christ for salvation and were given new life in Him, we died to sin.
Sin was our master. Sin was our evil taskmaster. Sin cracked the whip, and we obeyed. But Jesus took the wrath of God for all sin for all time into His own flesh on the cross, and bore our sins away forever. And when we identified ourselves with Him for salvation, God reckoned us as having died, as Christ died, and raised us to life in Him.
Here’s something that may help you understand the implications of what has been done. And I want you to listen carefully. I’m not coming up with some new, strange doctrine, I’m just pointing out a scriptural truth.
Are you aware that in the entire New Testament, the Christian is nowhere admonished to ask God’s forgiveness?
Stay with me now…
The first thing that will come to your mind will be the Lord’s prayer. “Forgive us our sins…” That was taught by Jesus in light of our willingness to forgive. It is an invitation to God, if you will, to forgive our sins according to our degree of willingness to forgive others. It is not a teaching on the doctrine of our atonement.
So listen.
All of your sins and mine, as believers, for all time, were paid for by the blood of Christ on calvary’s cross. Because of His perfect atoning work, forgiveness of sins flows perpetually from the Throne of grace, pouring out on the repentant believer as he confesses that sin to God.
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Now I’m not criticizing anyone for saying, in their prayer, ‘Lord, forgive me for…’ , you fill in the blank. But doctrinally, what the Bible admonishes us to do is to confess our sins to Him, and thereby receive the forgiveness that He has already provided and desires to pour out, and then continue the work of sanctification by cleansing us from unrighteousness.
It’s all a part of the process Paul talked about in Romans 8 when he said the purpose of God for us is to conform us to the image of His Son.
So Christians, you have been set free from the power of sin. Sin is no longer your taskmaster.
What this means is, that when you sin, you make a deliberate decision to. That is, if you commit any sin knowingly and repeatedly. Christ’s atonement set you free from sin. You died to sin. So if you sin, it is your choice.
So don’t presume upon God’s grace. If you know that all your sin for all time has been paid for, and if you understand that His forgiveness is already purchased and flowing out perpetually to you from the Throne of grace, then that should bring two reactions from you. 1. A desire to live holy and blameless before Him, and 2. confidence to come before the Throne of love and grace to confess sin in your life and trust Him to make you more like Jesus.
Listen folks. If you have a WWJD bracelet or necklace or whatever it is, when you go home, throw that junk where it belongs. IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU! So stop trying to copy Jesus. What do you want? For people to like you more? For people to see you as being like Jesus? Don’t try to copy Him; just look at Him. Study Him. Want to know Him like you’d want to know your best friend and most trusted confidant. And ask Him to saturate you with a desire to be made more like Him.
Well, next I want you to know that,
CHRIST SET YOU FREE FROM RELIGION
We’ve all heard catchy phrases like, “It’s not religion, it’s relationship”. That’s true. But as I look around me I see an awful lot of people who just don’t get it.
I mean in the church. Not in the world.
Let’s stay with our own denomination for a moment. I won’t specifically talk about other denominations. When I get to generalizing I will also generalize about who is in the trap.
I know there are people in all other denominations with this problem too, but let’s not pick on them today.
Let’s begin with us. Do you know; are you aware; that there is idolatry in the Southern Baptist denomination?
Yes, my friends, there is. It is chained up in the hearts of many a Southern Baptist, so it won’t fall down; and it needs to be chained up good and secure because just like any other idol, it is dead and needs the idolator to give it some resemblance of life.
Do you know what it is?
It is being Southern Baptist.
About seven years ago the annual convention was held in Montrose, at the Pavillion. Some of you may remember it being here; may even have attended some of it.
My wife and I lived in Del Norte at the time and were chosen as two of our church’s messengers to attend the convention.
On about the second day we were there the schedule called for a sermon just before breaking for lunch. I don’t remember who the young man was that preached, and if I did I would not repeat his name here. I only remember that about 10 minutes into his so-called sermon I was so filled-up and fed-up with hearing how important it is that all of us be ‘good Southern Baptists’, I wanted to stand and walk out.
The only thing that kept me from it was my own conviction that it is a severe slap in the face to walk out on a speaker and disrupt the proceedings.
I have witnessed the same problem since, many times, and folks, I’ve seen it in our own association. Let me make this comparison.
The idolatry of the Jews of Jesus’ day was that it was all important to be a Jew and obey the Law diligently. The Law itself had become an idol. And today the new idol in our denomination has become just that; being a Southern Baptist, and the Baptist Faith and Message has taken the very place that the Jews placed the Law of Moses.
A few years ago, although I had just confirmed to a man that I had carefully read the Baptist Faith and Message, still, he handed me a copy he was carrying with this admonition. “If you’re going to be a Southern Baptist minister, be the best Southern Baptist you can be”.
He said it several times in the course of a few minutes, as though being a good Southern Baptist was more important that being a Christian and standing by the Bible.
More recently there has been a very heated and divisive debate within the SBC as to whether to accept the changes in the 2000 edition of the Baptist Faith and Message, over a previous one. It has caused a great deal of disharmony and hurt. Christians, when any document of men becomes the cause for such grief and damaged witness, it should be thrown in the trash. Christian unity and witness is far more important than any extra-biblical statement of men, no matter how accurate or well-intentioned.
I agree with the Baptist Faith and Message, and I don’t think the changes are significant enough to get in a tizzy over. If I disagreed with even one point of doctrine as presented there, I would not be Southern Baptist. But if you’re going to turn it into an idol, I have to chop it down!
It is one thing to be defensive and jealous for accurate doctrinal belief and presentation, but when it becomes a point of contention and strife, that is indicative of a deeper spiritual problem.
Now I’m either preaching to the choir, or seriously offending someone. Maybe a little of both. But I have an obligation before God and the purity of His word today, Christians, to warn you to flee from idolatry, seek from God a desire to know Him and not just His works, pursue Christ, devour His word, steep yourself in prayer, love the brethren actively, and stop being so all-fired concerned with being a good ‘ist’!
I’m running low on time here, so let’s just generalize a bit. Jesus didn’t set us free to be enslaved to a religion. A set of rules. Bound by a dogmatic chain. Repeating vain repetitions and rituals like ecclesiastical zombies, hardly knowing why we’re doing them anymore, if we ever knew at all.
Folks, I submit to you that the world has never seen the true church. And that is not because we haven’t shown them, it is because being dead in trespasses and sins they can’t see the true church. The church is spiritual, and must be spiritually discerned.
So when you hear those in the world criticizing the church and complaining about what they see coming out of the church, most of the time you are hearing about something other than the true church.
They think it’s the true church, but most times it is not. In fact in many cases they have just cause to criticize. But they aren’t criticizing the true church. They’re criticizing religion. Unfortunately, I think those within the church also see these things as being a part of Christianity, but what they are fighting for is religious rhetoric and the traditions of men. We should let them go and just go about the spiritual business of the real church.
During a Summer event near Columbine school a couple of years ago I was handing out little invitation cards for our church, along with other printed material.
One of the invitations begins by saying something like, ‘we don’t believe in dull, boring religion’. One man who was passing by picked one of those up and said, “I don’t like religion”. Then he looked up at me and I caught his eye and said, “Neither does Jesus”.
It turned out to be quite a conversation starter.
Friends, Jesus died to free you from religion. He set you free from ritual and empty philosophy, and the self-righteousness and self-flagellation that go with it.
Don’t wear Southern Baptist like a label of pride, and don’t, please don’t, be church members, warming a pew and insisting on having your ears tickled and your fanny patted. Be believers in Jesus Christ, who broke all your chains and set you free to follow Him.
Say with the song writer,
“The dearest idol I have known, whate’er that idol be,
Help me to tear it from Thy throne, and worship only Thee!”
Also see that,
CHRIST SET YOU FREE TO STAND FREE
He set you free so that you might stand free. Look again at Galatians 5:1
“It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery’.
So Paul is telling his readers here to do something. He has said what Christ did, and now he is saying that in light of and in response to what He has done, now they are to do something.
The first one he puts in the positive. Stand firm.
Stand firm on what? On sound doctrine! On the things Paul has been reiterating to them in this letter. Stand firm on the freedom, the liberty, He has brought you to.
The rock of solid doctrine is a simple one, people. We tend to make it a lot harder than it is.
You were declared right with God through faith in the shed blood of Christ and His resurrection, alone. Don’t add baptism to it, son’t add being Southern Baptist to it, don’t add good behavior to it, nothing of your merit whatsoever. God made it simple, keep it that way.
You’re not a good Christian. There’s no such thing. Please don’t tell anyone you think Clark Tanner is a good Christian man. As soon as you do that, you put a burden on me to rise to a standard; to maintain a standard; and you also imply that by some action or attitude of mine I could become a ‘bad Christian’ if I slip. And then I would have to ask you, "Am I a bad Christian in God’s eyes then? Or just yours?"
Do you know that at the moment you were saved, you were as acceptable to God as you will be in eternity future?
Are you aware that at the moment you became a Christian, you were as acceptable to God as His own Son, Jesus Christ?
It’s true, you know. Because the moment you were born again, you became a new creation in Christ, and from that moment God the Father has seen you through the work and the righteousness of Jesus Himself. And since His work was perfect, and since He is perfect, and since He has provided a perfect atonement, you became, at the moment you were saved, perfect in God’s eyes, as He sees you in His Son.
See? It’s not about you. It’s all and always about Jesus. He saved us to bring glory to the Father, and the life that we now live is for the purpose of bringing glory to Him.
Stand firm on that.
The second part, Paul put in the negative. “Do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery”
I sincerely wish I could remember the name of the man who said this, because I’d like to give credit where it is due. It was a black man who was set free by the emancipation proclamation of the 1860’s, and he was heard to say, “I will never again bend my back to a yoke that is not Christ’s”
Friends, Christ set you free from sin, and He set you free from empty religion, and He set you free from idolatry, so that you could truly enjoy liberty. The kind of liberty He brings.
That means you are now free, not to sin, but to say no to sin.
You are free, not to follow some set of rules and rituals, or to be bound to church traditions and men’s ideals of Godly living, but to walk in the victory He won for you on Calvary’s cross, and declare, “I will never again bend my back to a yoke that is not Christ’s”.
Stand firm. Stand free.
I’m going to make one final point and bring this to a close.
CHRIST SET YOU FREE TO SERVE
“For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” Galatians 5:13
I want you to understand that if you are still bound up by religion, and idolatry, and legalism, you cannot properly love and serve. Can’t do it. You have to appropriate Christ’s liberty to yourself first, before you can begin to be any use to the kingdom and your brethren in the Lord.
Baptists love to declare, sometimes a little too proudly as though they had some part in it; “Once saved, always saved!” I’ve found that in many cases if challenged to do so, they can’t even go on to define what that means from a Biblical perspective.
But I have a friend who once said to me, “People like to say ‘once saved always saved’, but they don’t seem to realize that being eternally secure also means eternally accountable.”
Christ has set you free, Christian. Use your liberty, not as license, which insults grace, but as a call to love and serve the brethren. Look around you today. You’re going to spend eternity with most of these folks. Even the ones you don’t like very much.
Serve them with prayer. Serve them with mercy. Serve one another by giving preference to one another in love. As you do, and only as you do, you will begin to experience the kind of liberty Christ set you free to enjoy.
I guess what it all comes down to is, it’s not religion. It’s relationship.
