Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:08] Happy Thursday. This is Pastor Chuck Allen, and welcome back to another weekday podcast. I appreciate you letting me ride along with you today or walk along with you today, even if you're on a treadmill or maybe just having a cup of coffee. Thanks for letting me join your day as we talk a little bit about Galatians chapter three, and the concept that we didn't get here on our own steam.
[00:00:33] So I want to tell you about a time, and it was brutal. I. I went to Ikea. I tried to assemble this piece of furniture, and I was certain that it was so simple I didn't need to read the instructions.
[00:00:45] Wildly overconfident. And I had this idea that what it was supposed to look like. So about an hour into it, I mean, I'm trying to find, why aren't these parts all here? I'm looking at the bookshelf, and I'm thinking, you know what I'm. What I can do is I can use my own nail gun. I can use my own wood glue. I can use my own screws. I can make it work. I mean, I had all these parts left over, and I just gave up. I went and found the instructions, I started over, I followed them, and you know what? About 20 minutes later, perfectly square.
[00:01:19] Turns out I'm just not as smart as I thought I was. And the answer was right there in the box, right the whole stinking time. I bring that up because Galatians chapter three is the Apostle Paul basically handing a bookshelf, building church instruction mind.
[00:01:37] And it was where a church in Galatia had totally tossed it aside.
[00:01:41] And Paul's pretty worked up about this. The believers in Galatia had started so good. They had trusted Jesus, received the spirit of God, tasted real freedom. And then somebody came along and convinced them that trusting Jesus wasn't enough, that they needed to add something to it.
[00:02:00] So they felt like they needed to add this list of religious rules to really be right with God. So Paul opens up the chapter in Galatians 3, and it feels like he's pulling his hair out. He says, how foolish can you be after starting your Christian lives in the Spirit? Why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort? Now, that question isn't just for folks in Galatia in the first century.
[00:02:27] That's a question most of us need to be asked every single day. Here's the trap. We start with grace. We come to Jesus knowing full well we didn't earn our way in. And then somewhere down the road, we started grading ourselves.
[00:02:42] Did I spend Enough quiet time this week? Am I in good enough mood at church? Did I keep my temper in check on 285? Did we slide right back into building the bookshelf without the instructions and using our own strength when the answer was really freely given to us from the start?
[00:02:59] So Paul takes them back, way back to Abraham. He says, look, before there was ever a law to keep, there was a man named Abraham who simply believed. In verse six, he says, consider the example of Abraham. He believed God, and God counted him as righteous. And listen to this, y', all because of his faith. That's it. Not his performance, not his flawless track record. And Abraham's track record was far from flawless.
[00:03:28] His faith. God looked at a man who trusted him and called that righteousness. Paul's whole argument is that if it worked that way for Abraham, the father of the faith, before the law even existed, then it was never going to be rules that kept people right with God. It was always going to be faith.
[00:03:51] And then Paul lands the whole chapter in Galatians 3, 26, 7, 8. He says, for you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ like putting on new clothes. There is no longer Jew or gentile, slave or free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. I just love that image. Putting on Christ like new clothes, not earning new clothes through years of good behavior. You put them on the way you'd put on a coat that somebody hands you at the door because they saw your cold. And once you're wearing it, well, every wall we normally use to rank ourselves against each other. Things like background, status, our gender, whatever. It doesn't define who's more in with God. You're not more accepted because you look more put together than the person next to you. You're accepted because you believed, just like they did. Here's what I want you to kind of wrestle with today.
[00:05:04] If you've been quietly grading your own spiritual performance, trying to earn back into God's good favor after a difficult week, stop building the bookshelf without the instructions. The instructions were never try harder. They would trust him. That's it. That's the whole assembly manual. So today, however, you might be feeling that you fell short somehow. Don't reach for more effort, Reach for more faith. Let that settle you before you try to fix all the things.
[00:05:37] Okay, friends, I guess that's all I got today. Trust more, strive less, and I'll see you back tomorrow on Friday. So we can talk a little bit more about this thing called Grace. God bless you, friends. Thanks for joining me. Bye, now.
