Crucified with Christ - Part 2
Galatians 2:20-21 · Randy Peterman · Apr 18, 2010
Galatians (2010), No. 16
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492620485729

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

We're going to go over the second half of Galatians 2.20 and then verse 21 as well. Last week I would have liked to have more discussion, but I realized that I hadn't pre-planned more questions, and by not pre-planning more questions... We'll take a look at Galatians 2.20 and 21. I'm going to go ahead and read 19 through 21 out loud here, and we'll dig in.

For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly."

Well, last week we talked about crucifixion, the need for crucifixion, and then our identification with Christ, and that we are to live this new life. And this week we're going to continue on and I want to talk about the faith life of the believer. Paul says, the life that I now live, I live by faith. And so we'll keep going with that. We'll talk a bit about reckoning. Then we'll talk about the benevolent love or sacrificial love that Christ had, and then how grace is not nullified. So hopefully we'll have time to go over these things.

But I have a feeling, just a sneaking suspicion, that it's rabbit trail season. And apologies for the Warner Brothers reference. But there is a likelihood of rabbit trails. I identified at least one that's there in your handout, but there's an opportunity for many others. Let's start by asking this, what is, remembering from last week, what is life? If death is separation, what is life? It's union, being back in fellowship with God.

So, with that as our understanding, we need to identify two things. Life does not come from man, so we can't self-cultivate a relationship with God. It's something that God has to bring because of the Fall. And life cannot be managed and controlled or directed by the flesh. So, two things that are important for us to recognize about life is that it's not something that we can do and it's not something that we can manage. If life cannot be manipulated or managed by mankind, then how does life come about? It's not works, it's faith. So life comes by faith.

And that's one of those things that Paul is emphasizing here, but it's one of the things that I have not heard enough in the church universal. People talk about faith and spirituality in this mystical sense, but it doesn't have a practical day-by-day, moment-by-moment appearance. But Paul writes about it as being, this is something that is the way we live. It's normative.

How many of you experience this pattern in your life where you went to church to get charged up for Jesus, And then you petered out throughout the week so that you could go back to church on Sunday and get charged up for Jesus. That was, in the charismatic church that I grew up in, that was normal. We didn't understand a moment-by-moment daily life that was being connected with our Lord and Savior. It was cyclical.

Now hopefully, I didn't see any hands raised, and I don't know if that's because nobody felt compelled to raise their hands, or if maybe nobody else experienced that, but that was my growing up experience, basically in legalism and not in grace. So faith as a principle for life is an important thing.

Hebrews 11.1, let's turn there, if you've got your Bibles. Can I say something? Doug, you can always say something. Well, I'll be quiet then. No, no. No, you can always say something. Go for it.

I'm using the word faith. I have a class outside of here, Bible study. We got to discuss faith. You know, we need to identify the faith, the real faith in the Lord. We talked about, I got faith to sit down in the chair. So I have faith. I think we need to define it first.

And that's what we were going to get into right now. Oh yeah, that was the next point in the lesson. No, don't be sorry at all. It just tells me that, hey listen, anytime somebody beats me to a point, it at least tells me that I'm probably not far off or at least I led up to the logical connection where the next statement was going to feel like I jumped to a conclusion. Tom?

Because this is all in the same stream of thought, let's jump to Hebrews 11. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. Our faith is in Christ and the things that he has put forth for us as believers. But that's part of it. Historically I would ask, what's faith? People would quote me Hebrews 11. Which is good, it's biblical, I'm not going to disagree with that. But there is a practical application of faith, and that's one of those things that I want to take a moment to look at.

Every human being operates by faith. There is not a human on the planet that doesn't operate by faith. The atheist and the agnostic both are equally faith-oriented, even though they don't say that they're faith-oriented. If they're not trusting in God, what are they trusting in? They're believing in humanity. They believe in the grandeur of the universe and the science that will help us explore it, but they don't believe in God. But they still believe in something, and with that comes faith. I have, as an atheist, I would have faith in humankind's ability to go out and explore and research and compile and compend all knowledge.

Sounds arrogant to me, but let's say the vastness of the universe is not so vast. You know, that's one of the things that often makes me chuckle is I've heard people ask scientists, how big is the universe? How big is the universe? Anyone take a stab at it. The truth of the matter is that God doesn't reveal how big the universe is, but he's bigger. He exists outside the universe. Mankind can't know.

Stan? I don't think you have an answer to that, because isn't it constantly expanding? Well, the problem is that you can't answer it definitively. One of the questions that I ask, and I mentioned this before in previous lessons, Do you believe in unicorns? Okay, so somebody will answer me yes or no. Do you believe that there ever were unicorns or ever will be unicorns? And they can only guess. But can you absolutely tell me without a doubt that there are no unicorns, there have not been unicorns, and there never will be unicorns from an evolutionary standpoint in the universe? You can't. So what are you doing?

You're operating by the other F word, by faith. You're operating in trusting the Lord. The atheist is glad to use profanity because they don't think it's profane. But when you use the word faith, that's profanity to them. And you come to the atheist and you say, you operate by faith. For the believer, we look at faith, and the more I understand faith, and Paul talks about it here so we get to, but the more that I understand faith, the more I understand that it impacts everything I do. Doug says I'm sitting in a chair by faith, but what else am I doing by faith every day? Every single thing you do. How about this?

Who sustains the universe? Colossians tells us someone sustains the universe. Jesus Christ. So everything we do is within the context of faith in Jesus Christ. Not to go back to science, and we'll move on here in just a second, but physicists have been looking for the Higgs-Boson particle. Anyone heard of that before? Also called the God particle. They're looking for the thing that keeps things together. Because they don't know why it's all sticking together.

I believe that biblically we have a good foundation for why that is. Stan? Isn't it stated in Colossians that Christ holds all things together? Yeah, absolutely. What are they looking for? It's right there. They just have to accept that. Anything but Jesus. Yeah, anything but Jesus.

It's the faith principle. But our life, our faith life is to be normative. That we would be walking in faith And that's why Paul can present logical imperatives. He can say, hey, go do this thing. And he's not being legalistic. He's saying, this is your faith life lived out. It's going to look like this. And that's okay. So the next thing I want to take a look at is reckoning.

Romans 6.11 is where we're going to turn. But it's not the least of the many verses that Paul presents throughout his epistles that talk to us about reckoning or considering ourselves dead.

Stan, would you mind reading Romans 6.11 out loud? Are you at an opportunity to do that? I'm not sure if I can find it. I'm going to put you on the spot there. Is that in the Old or New Testament? That's somewhere in between. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin. but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Why don't you stop there? Sure.

Well, I mean, the truth of the matter is that Romans 6 is an expanded version of Galatians 2.20 theologically, so we could read all of Romans 6, but because we're supposed to be expositing Galatians, we'll just read 6.11 from Romans. The word there, in my translation and what Stan has, Stan, you said count, right? Mine says consider, the King James says reckon. It is an accounting word and it does mean to count something to be such a way.

Reckoning is one of the many things that I myself wish that I had understood as a teenager. As a teenager, not married, full of hormones, trying to live under a legalistic system, I couldn't do it. I blew it miserably. Just my mind. My hormones were kicking in and I was looking at things lustfully and I would beat myself up. I'd sin and remember I'm on this up and down cycle that has to do with church on Sunday and then down for the rest of the week. I would find that my thought life would break really fast. Step out of the church doors and that would be that. And I had no concept of reckoning. But what are we reckoning?

When Paul writes this in Romans 6.11? Dead to sin and alive to Christ. As I confessed last week, I didn't have any understanding of my identification with Christ in His death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seating. None of that. So the idea of counting myself dead, that was just for it. It was this strange concept, surely Paul wasn't talking about me. He must have been talking about himself, maybe the believers even in Rome, but certainly not myself.

I didn't have a thorough understanding of that, but the faith life is applied in our daily lives through reckoning, or considering ourselves dead. Paul Paul reiterates this in Colossians 3, 1-5, in Ephesians 4, 17-24, and Romans 7 goes into it even more. So we're not going to go through all of those verses this morning because that's not going to let us cover everything with the time restraints that we have. But I think it's important to recognize that this life that he now lives by faith in the Son of God is also outlined further in the Principle of Reckoning. Paul's writing to Jews in Galatia. What do you think their mindset was about truth being applied and lived out? Because they're primarily Jewish. Probably entirely Jewish.

Stan? They're used to the law. And what do you do with the law? Do you debate it? Do you just discuss it? You comply. You obey. The Jewish culture took truth and applied it. If it's true, you do it. So Paul is writing to these Galatians with this, it's true, you do it, language. It's the life that I now live, it's in this flesh, and it's the life of Christ, and I live it by faith. And so 2.20 is a terse, short verse, and he speaks to them as Jews. Well of course you do it, of course you live by faith, you're a Jew and you're in Christ.

We have the severe disadvantage, if you will, of being Western and Greek in our thinking. But Paul was the apostles of Gentiles as well, so we have Romans 6, which can explain it to us in a Greek way, in a Western thinking sort of a way. See, the Greeks liked to learn truth and then do nothing with it.

It was kind of like the badge, and my dad has talked about this in the first letter to the Corinthians. Knowledge was a badge. You could puff yourself up with your awesome, I know this badge, and I was trained by so-and-so, so I must be intellectually superior to you badge. But it didn't affect their daily life.

It's true. I think about, if Bob were here he could probably testify to this, how many times as a doctor he can recommend, hey you should probably not eat something because it's been linked to this kind of serious condition that you're at risk of. And how many of us would take that advice and say that was really good advice until again you hit the door and the guy down the street is selling a bacon cheeseburger with, you know, two tablespoons of mayonnaise and whatever else and you got this giant burger, it tastes delicious and it's loaded full of things your doctor just told you moments ago not to eat. It's true!

But it doesn't apply to my life. So that was the Greek way of thinking and it's definitely American. Live within your means. I don't have to. I've got a credit card. Pick something. We figured out how to circumvent the truth of it, you know. What will fix the American economy will be a new health care bill. That will fix it. It's going to cost more money. But we'll just borrow more money.

You can't do that forever. It's illogical. We know that's true, but we don't apply it. On a federal level, on a state level, on a county level, and on a personal level in many of our homes. Well, hopefully not here at Holyhills, but in the church, hopefully not in a broader sense.

But the Greeks took truth and set it on the shelf where it belonged, right? That's where my Bible goes. I set it on the shelf. It's right by my bed stand. And maybe every night before I go to sleep, I might read it. Or maybe it'll just, through osmosis, absorb into me while I'm sleeping, right? It's next to my bed.

So anyways, we have reckoning. We have this principle of reckoning. One question, and I've got it here on the paper, is why is reckoning one's self dead such a foreign concept and I pluralized concepts for no reason, within some Christian circles. Why is reckoning foreign within Christian circles? Is it because Paul didn't write it enough times? I've given three examples here, but there's others.

Well, one is Galatians 2.20. Why is reckoning a foreign concept within so much of the Church? because they tend to race on ahead and say, no wrecking yield, and then they over-concentrate on yield and not pay attention to what Christ has put us in the place we are at and our position.

Okay. I want to make sure I understand, so I'm going to try to restate that and then you can correct me if I'm wrong. You're saying that they're concerned with results and not what is actually directed in the scriptures? So much for that, let's move on. And that leads me to a philosophical question here, so bear with me.

What do you think would happen in the church if we stopped trying to out-manage the church and just lived out God's management of the church? Just globally, not at Holly Hills, because I think we have a system that is entirely submitted to Scripture and complies with Scripture's direction for leadership.

But what would happen in the church if we didn't take corporate management structures and try to reach 15,000 people one Sunday, instead we just focused on a small body? What would happen? Do you think fewer people would be Christians? Do you think there would be fewer major leaders under scrutiny for sexual sins or any number of other things? I'm not saying this to be just absolutely critical of the church because it's still God's bride or Christ's bride. But one of the things we face in this country is that we haven't taken scripture at face value.

We've said, well, that's a really good idea, but I'm moving on to the next thing. Like Tom said, I need to reckon. Well, I tried reckoning once, and I don't know that I understood it, but it didn't work, so I moved on to the next thing. I got this really great psychology book, you should check it out. Reckoning as a principle is one of those things that the church doesn't understand it, in part because they don't understand identification. Well, Randy, I think they tend to make it a law, too. You need to reckon. totally lordship salvation. I can see that you're not reckoning. He's not Lord and therefore maybe you're not saved and so let's go back and start at square one again. So it becomes legalistic.

The next section I have here is faith in Christ alone. The object of our faith is the one in whom our lives are hidden. Colossians 3, 1-4 tell us that our lives are hidden in Christ. The flesh looks to draw our faith to anything else but Christ. But, just as our positional justification comes through faith in Christ, our conditional righteousness comes through faith in Christ as well.

Why is our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and not the Father of the Holy Spirit? This is a trick theological question. It's not really tricky. Why is our faith in Christ and not our faith in God or our faith in the Holy Spirit? First of all, God revealed through his prophets and evangelists and apostles that our faith needed to be in Christ. at least gives us a sense of direction where it's not like we just guessed. But our faith is in Christ because he is the one that died for us to redeem us, to make us his bride, to have a relationship with him.

Okay? So that's an important aspect of that. How many of you have run into people who say, my faith is in God. I believe in God. Oh, okay. Well, how does he communicate with you? I don't know, I do yoga, or I meditate, or I feel spiritual, or every time I run I get a runner's high and I think that's God. It's nonsense, but there are things that I've heard people say. Because they surely can't believe in the Bible, but they can believe in any number of other things.

But our faith is in Christ alone, and it is through Him that we're saved. Why can our justification only come from faith in Christ? Back to what Cheryl said, he's the one who we're identified with him. He's justified and righteous and so are we. So he's the only way it can come because of who he is. He's the son of God and he was sent.

Why can our sanctification only come from faith in our life with Christ? So justification has a positional aspect. sanctification in a conditional aspect, why is it also only through Christ? Tom? It is through Christ singularly. The thing that I think is interesting is that we say, okay, I'm saved by faith. Now go live a good Christian life. If you say that, This is by faith, but the rest of your life until the Lord comes or you die is not by faith, is inconsistent. Who did you die with? Christ. Who are you alive with? Christ. So Paul tells us that we need to live by faith and that he himself lives by faith is an example for us that we too may live by faith. Any other questions about the faith life?

We managed to not do any rabbit trails, which I'm impressed. Because I was expecting to at least bring one up. A lot of our rabbit trail people are not here. Yeah, they're not here. What a terrible, terrible thing. Except maybe for Tom. Tom, there you go. And Bud's here. I need some help.

I wonder why it is and why we can't dispense ourselves of any responsibility. Aren't we supposed to be responsible as Christians? For what? Not for working, but for letting Christ work through us. And why did that wind in the world, and I go back to that old tired verse, Why is that in there so much? And at first, John, I know it was written in Hebrews talks about the chastening of the Lord for those that don't follow him. The other ones say that we know that we died in Christ, was crucified on the cross with him and all that. But why did they put this chapter in there in regard to what a man that says, if we say we had no sin, the truth is not news. We all sin. Well, and you brought up the very rabbit trail that I was expecting to bring up. No, that's okay. Ready? Yeah.

Even in the law, the purpose of the law, like Bernd said last week in the service, the law is holy and good and true and righteous because it's a picture of God. Man sins, and the law showed who God was, what God was like, what his character was like, And so he gave them atonement. Well, atonement requires faith, doesn't it? And it also makes you realize that you made a mistake, that you sinned. So you take the sin on atonement day and you believe, by faith, that God is taking that sin away from you until you get the first bad thought, which is probably five minutes after that. It's not eternal. It's only a temporary forgiveness.

The problem was the Pharisees added to that law. They made it bigger and even more extensive so that people couldn't sin. Oops! That wasn't why it was there. It was there to show people that they did sin. So, when the Pharisees expanded it, the people then started to believe that if you followed the law entirely, then you didn't sin. That's self-righteousness. That's having faith in yourself to follow the law. That wasn't what it was intended for. It was to get people to know God, to come to God, to have faith in God.

It's the exact same thing that we're doing through identification because it's just a different covenant. That's what it talks about in Hebrews. The will and all that other kind of stuff. We went from the Old Testament covenant to the New Testament covenant. In the Old Testament we were looking to God. In the New Testament we're looking to Christ. But we still have sin in both covenants We're still depending on God or Christ to relieve us of that sin.

That's the problem. It's not the law. It's what man did with the law. And he started to look to it for his own righteousness. It doesn't come from the law. The law never made anyone righteous. The law was for sanctification to set us. To set Jews aside unto God, but it never was a justifier. That's why Jesus said the Pharisees were self-righteous. They had their righteousness in themselves.

The third section of this is going to be going over, Paul says, do I nullify the law, or I do not nullify the law. So we're going to go into that very specifically. One point, Randy, I want to really emphasize. They were both by faith. It's the faith. And I agree with the church today. The church is basically saying, come to this church, or if you go to church every Sunday, or all these other different rules and regulations that they're adding to the covenant that Christ gave us. What we need to do is put on a new self and live through faith that the scripture is teaching us.

Again, we're doing the same thing only in a different way. Because it's easy to depend on me accomplishing it. It's a similar result through a different system, a different operating system through grace. It's hard for me to believe in something. It's easy for me to go out there and just do it. And convince myself that I did it right when in fact I didn't anyway. Reckoning is non-meritorious because reckoning is faith. Faith is not meritorious. Reckoning is also not meritorious. It is by faith only. The sanctification is only a continuation of the life and work of Christ in our lives, conditionally, that reflects the positional truth of our having been made perfect in Christ with Christ's perfection.

Bud, did we even answer your question? I think people think I'm trying to laugh about it. I'm not really. I'm just not trying to nullify what the Bible is saying. And I take it from this example of John, 1st John says here again, when you read that whole chapter about none of us were not sin free, and even if a man says he has no sin, the truth is not in him, and we know we have the sin yet, in that sense of the term, because we all, I mean, maybe you guys don't, but I have sinned once in a while. And I say that all I see, I see that this John is relative only in the sense of the term. is the fact that if we agree with Jesus and God in the heavenlies, that if we confess our sin, He's going to be faithful and just forgive us actually. And He cleanses. But don't say there's a condition that if you do sin, well then you're going to go to hell or you're going to lose your salvation or anything else.

It just seems like it's an order that comes from the Word of God. That's our answer to the question. Keeping the law isn't the point. The point is being obedient to what God says. The obedience is by faith. And that's the part where we hear obedience and immediately our law radars turn on. Obedience by faith is the very life that Paul is talking about. The faith that I live by the Son of God. Margaret?

Well, and also we need to remember that our sins are already forgiven. Our asking forgiveness is only to restore fellowship. Because positionally, the Lord doesn't even see our sin at all. He only sees Christ in us. And so when we sin, it's just important from our perspective to restore that fellowship.

Sure. And that's why the Holy Spirit convicts us. Not to bring guilt, that's the flesh, but instead it's conviction unto relationship. in obedience to what God says. That's what I'm saying. And he says, confess your sin. And I will. I've already paid for it anyway. I ain't got nothing to confess to me about it. But confess your sin to me and I'm faithful and just to forgive you, see.

That's what I'm talking about. That's the only butler. Sponsored by only trail in the rack. Well, we want to just continue to make sure that we understand that as believers, if we're not reckoning, we're walking in the flesh, and that's where we have a life that is rooted in sin, or it's a death that is rooted in sin. But we should be abiding, and it should be normative for Christians to be beholding the Lord, as my dad's going to go over this morning in the main service.

Paul continues on in Galatians 2.20 by saying that his faith was in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me. And this by itself could be an entire class too, but as we've already discussed we've only got two, so we're going to make do with what we have. Christ loved the world. and gave himself up for the opportunity to be with the believer, willingly. And the willingness of Christ to give himself up, that self-sacrificial love is...

Emotionally, my response is to be overwhelmed, because I know my own frailties as a human being. I know that I'm a sinner. Hebrews 12, 2 tells us that for the joy set before him, he endured the cross. And when you read the gospel accounts of Christ's death on the cross, it is gut-wrenching. Humanitarian efforts today try to prevent people from being tortured and taken into slavery and any number of other things that come up that are problems. They're wicked. Christ endured being treated as a prisoner in his righteousness.

He was punished as though he were a liar and was lashed 39 times because 40 would kill you and suffered and had to carry his own cross and was so weak that Simon had to carry the cross the rest of the way up to the top of the hill and was then nailed to the cross and crucified on my behalf because he loved me.

And if you stop and you think about that, it's enough to just be, okay, I'm done. Let's be done with Sunday school. Let's just take a few minutes to just meditate on the awesomeness of love that shows itself like that. Christ's benevolent love from an earthly understanding is impossible. You can't explain it in an earthly context and say, yeah, that makes sense that somebody would do that. That's okay. Rabbit trails are welcome this morning.

You know I've been reading a history of Jews and what's so interesting is this exact teaching was so missed back in medieval times and all of this when the Jews were blamed and throughout history for Christ's death and how this has impacted the world and the political arena of the world, because the Jews were so maligned throughout history as being killers of Christ.

You know, and there it was in Scripture all the time. I mean, it was so obvious, and Paul told us over and over again. I mean, it was in there that Christ endured the cross. I mean, He was happy to go to the cross for us. our sins. And it was the Lord's will, and it's all in the scripture. And yet, all that time, the Jews were so maligned and blamed for killing Christ, when in fact, that was the plan. And it's very clear. God wasn't surprised by his son's death.

No. Just interesting. The pleader thought the supreme irony is that the people That's a very good point, Tom. Thank you for sharing that. I agree 100%. This love of Christ is just completely tremendous. As I was looking at this section, I thought, man, we could go to numerous verses in Paul's epistles and throughout the scriptures beyond that, talking about the kind of love and the character of the love that God has through Christ.

Just because of the sake of time, let's go to Romans 8, 38 and 39. I've got it in the handout, but you can turn there in your Bibles as well. And I've got a song that I'm not going to sing, but it's just these words in song form, and I love it. I learned it in the summer camp in junior high, and I think it was one of the staying things in my life, even though I was under legalism.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." And when you think about that's the kind of love that he had for us that would bring him to the cross, it's the kind of love that He continues to pour out in our lives from a day-to-day point, and it's the kind of love He's going to show us for all eternity. When we take a look at Ephesians 2, 4-7, and for the sake of time again, please read that at home, Ephesians 2, 4-7 tells us that God is going to reveal Himself to us for eternity, in part because of his love for us. So his love is shown in the past by his dying. It's shown in the present by this continual seeking for relationship with us and showing ways to show that love and will continually be shown to us in the future. And for me that's just a tremendous thing to think that this love is just completely reflective of God's character. It's infinite. I'm not going to be able to run it out. Just like Grace, I'm not going to be able to run it out. Doug, did you have a question? Or a statement? No? I thought you raised your hand. You scratched your head. It's just in the corner of my eye.

Why did Christ's love have to be, or death, have to be self-sacrificial? What if God the Father said, hey, I want you to go die so that I can be pacified. My wrath needs to be poured out for sin. Go die. And Jesus said, don't really want to, and he said, I'm the father, you're the son, go.

Why would that have been inadequate? Because in the omnipotence of God and pre-everything else, there was a plan, an original plan that was known. It's the eternal covenant from Hebrews 13. Hebrews 13, 18, 19. No, that's not... Hebrews 13, I've got it written down here and I've already... it's escaped my memory. 13, 20. Yeah, it's part of the Eternal Covenant.

But what would be the impossibility of this idea of God the Father sending the Son without agreement? It's the Trinity. He and the Father are one. They sent that way. But the thing is that the Son also, because He has the character of God, needed righteousness there too. The universe, which included Adam and Eve, was created through the power of Christ. John chapter 1, verse 1 tells us that, and other verses agree throughout Scripture. He was created through Christ. As the creator, he took responsibility for his creation in an ultimate way.

And so this right here, this doctrinally is just a Again, all these points, I just spent some time throughout the weeks just meditating on it, just stopping and thinking about it. It causes an emotional response, and I don't say that because we should walk around being emotional all the time, but there is an awe that comes in the character of God being revealed in these ways. What is it about things that are true of God's character that make them unique compared to their earthly analogues? Christ's love is infinite, was infinite, is infinite, and will be infinite. What is the human analog of love?

It has a start and eventually will have an end. It has a conditional response too. Can you say that the love that we are, of the flesh, able to cultivate could be even compared to Romans 8, 38-39? Death nor life? No. What are the things that we run into where you see marriages destroyed? You see relationships between fathers and sons and mothers and daughters and all kinds of families that are just destroyed because of things that the human love is frail often in the flesh.

If it's not frail, then they make a Hallmark movie out of it. They figure, oh, that's tremendous. That will get viewers and we'll make some money. But the truth of the matter is that it's a heavenly kind of love that causes us to be awe. We're going to keep moving forward because I can see by the clock that we're not going to have time to get through everything, but we'll keep moving.

Moving on to verse 21, he says, I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly. Grace is one of those things that we've already talked about in this class as a critical part of our doctrine and our understanding.

How many of you use the word null or nullify with any regularity. I happen to actually get to do it for work all the time because we in software development use null to define something that is empty or void of something and so I will check all the time is this null or is it equal to null which is funny because you're saying is nothing equal to nothing and it turns out that often it is but if something is null then it's not in operation it's not ready to go so Paul says I am not making or taking grace out of operation Don't misunderstand me in any way to be taking grace out of operation. It is the way that we operate. It's not nullified.

Christianity without grace isn't Christianity. If you try to take grace out of Christianity, what do you get? You get a really screwed up version of Judaism at best. We get what the rest of Christendom calls Christianity. Yeah, the broader sense of what is a Mormon. There was a doctrine, and fortunately the Mormons believe in progressive revelation, which means any time any one of their doctrines comes under fire, they can change it. But they used to actually believe in self-atonement.

Christ's blood was really good, but it was only effective for a certain percentage of your sins, and if you really blew it, you could actually die yourself and have yourself killed. I don't know how that fit under the federal laws for murder, but we won't get into that. And so some people actually did within Mormonism die, have themselves killed to just take that edge off, that extra little bit.

Because grace was not enough. Now obviously they don't believe in grace and the sufficiency of Christ and him being part of the Godhead the right way, but it's critical to understand that grace is sufficient and as I have here in the heading, we're swimming in it. It's an inescapable way that we live.

The concept here is that he is not taking grace out of the picture and he will never subject grace to anything else that grace is secondary. Well, grace is secondary to the law, or grace is secondary to any of those things. They're gone. They're not in there.

We'll close with this just because of time, but if grace can be presented positively as the unlimited, unmerited blessings of God due to the totally adequate work of Christ on the cross, how can we state it negatively to help emphasize God's love and man's need for salvation? How do you take the positive unlimited unmerited blessings of God due to the totally adequate work of Christ on the cross and state it negatively? And this is a weird exercise, but I want to do it with you. So work with me. Think outside the box. If you don't have God's unlimited unmerited, then what's left for you?

What is the negative statement of of grace, if you're presenting the same concepts. Okay. Which isn't grace. No, no. We're trying to keep this meaning, but state it in a negative way. Not trying to state all of these things in their negative forms. What I'm looking for is the gospel. The gospel message is simply the principles of grace stated in a negative way.

You cannot merit God's favor. You cannot reach the limit that is God's righteousness. You cannot achieve the blessings of God without the totally adequate work of Christ on the cross. And that's the thing that when Paul says, I'm not nullifying it, the consequences of nullifying it is to totally obliterate Christianity and remove any value from it whatsoever. Not only because God said he was going to do the things that made Christianity possible. So by taking those away, you're also taking away God's work.

And then we're still left with this need for a redeemer. But you cannot state the gospel without also stating what grace is. They're intertwined. So if you give somebody the gospel, and then as soon as they walk that one step after having received the gospel, you can't take grace away. Hey, here's this law thing you need to do. I know it says we're not under the law, but really, this 10% tithe, we can't keep the power on without your 10%. Just 10%. Okay, got that. Got my wallet out. I'm ready to go.

You got my 10%. well you know also you need to do this other thing and this other thing and this other thing and we tack it on just like Stan was saying we've got these other things to help you make sure that you're righteous it's just just this thing it listen you're saved you're already saved it's good but here's some other things that'll really help guarantee that you're righteous you know make sure you bring the organ to the baseball game on Sunday that way we can sing hymns between the innings It's also good for cheers and chants during the good events part of the game. We're going to sanctify the baseball game with the organ from the church. It's going to be good. We bring in these things and they're not there. We're swimming in grace. It's completely sufficient. It's completely able to take care of things.

Paul closes by saying righteousness simply cannot come from the law. The law never said that righteousness was going to come adequately. Justification was never going to come adequately from the law. If I am sanctified and made holy by God, and scripture says I am, and that has happened without the law, what does that mean is left for me to do? There's a four letter word, rest. Rest. If we read through Galatians chapter 2 verses 19 through 21, it should leave us resting.

I hope that this hasn't left you with 10,000 more questions than answers. I found that as I went through this, I wanted to study more things more, to continue to learn more about life, to continue to learn more about my identification to continue to learn more about those things so that I could rest in them more completely. It wasn't that I felt like I needed to work more towards grace or anything of the sort. But this has been incredibly edifying for me. I hope that it's been edifying for you in any form. That's the second bell. I'm trained like a Pavlovian dog to pray.

But we can keep discussing after that. Heavenly Father, we just ask that you would continue to draw to our minds throughout the weeks and months, if that's how long you, Terry, before us. And we just ask that you would draw these things to our minds so that we may rest in you and rest in the things that you have done. Thank you that we can reckon ourselves dead because we are in fact dead to sin through your son's death and our identification with him, but also because of his resurrection and our identification in his life. We ask that you would just allow us to stay focused on you as we go into the main service and that we may be setting our minds on things above. In Jesus' name, amen.