Grace for Recovering Pharisees

Pastor Bruce Brock of Faith Community Church in Tucson, Arizona, is a dear friend of mine. God has used him greatly in my own life, and over the last decade or so, we have taken something of the same spiritual and theological journey in discovering and embracing the doctrines of grace together. 

He kindly sent me his sermon notes for this last Sunday, based on Galatians 1:1-6. I thought others may enjoy reading them just as I did, so produce them here. Enjoy!:

Galatians is one of the earliest of Paul’s letters and an early defense of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. It precedes the Jerusalem Council where the early church leadership all got on the same page concerning salvation by God’s free grace – Acts 15:4-11. The churches in Galatia (Lystra, Derbe, etc) were from Paul’s first missionary journey – Acts 14. 

The false teachers were Jewish (Judaizers) and wanted to add circumcision, feasts, dietary laws, ceremonial laws to faith in Christ; they would add the Mosaic Law to the Gospel. Their logic was that Jesus is Messiah and He came in fulfillment of the Scriptures (OT), so it is reasonable to stay with what God gave us so long ago and simply add it to Christ.    Keep Reading>>>

Strive to Stop Striving

Galatians 2:17 is the five finger exploding heart death punch of Galatians 2: "But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not!"

As I studied for my sermon on Galatians 2:15-21, this verse gave me the most fits. It looks straightforward enough, but it is deceptively complex.

Getting Caught Up in Legalese

First, I am seeing Paul turning the language of the legalistic Judaizers on its head. There is an echo here of "Shall we sin all the more so that grace may abound?" The more I gnawed on Gal. 2:17 the more clearly I could see that Paul is sort of saying, "If justification is not by faith alone in Christ alone, should we circumcise all the more so that justification may abound?" (And in Galatians 5:12 he does kind of say that). Keep Reading...

Paul, to the Galatians

When Paul wrote to the Galatian Church to warn of the Judaizing heresy, he did not mention the fact that the Judaizers embraced Christ as Messiah and were probably in all other ways fully orthodox.

I am sure they believed all the Old Testament. Perhaps they would even affirm the true humanity and full deity of Christ. Perhaps even Christ’s substitutionary death for sinners on the cross, and even His resurrection from the grave… on and on we could go.

Yet the Apostle Paul never mentioned any of this in his letter to the Galatians. Why not? For the simple reason that there was no need to do so. That was because in spite of all the many vital doctrines the Judaizers would affirm, they added one thing to the biblical gospel (it happened to be circumcision in this case) and the gospel is not something anyone can mess with. Jesus + circumcision is not the gospel.

Paul’s reaction, and I might say, his Holy Spirit inspired reaction, was to warn of the false doctrine in no uncertain terms calling it for what it was, “a different gospel.”  Keep Reading>>>

The Judaizers: Know Your Heretics

The Judaizers were teaching that God still required everyone to observe certain rituals and statutes in order to be accepted by him as Father.
Paul, in recounting his confrontation of Peter before the Judaizers, gives us an insight into the teaching of this group (). Apparently, the Judaizers were attempting to force Gentile Christians to live under the regulations of the Mosaic Law.
They are also called the "circumcision party" (), because one of the specific elements of the Law that the Judaizers were forcing the Gentile Christians to live by was the practice of circumcision.
Peter had withdrawn himself from eating with Gentile Christians, fearing the opposition that would come from the Judaizers. Eating with Gentiles would have rendered Peter ceremonially unclean under the Old Covenant, by breaking an important element of the Mosaic Law. However, Paul said Peter's conduct was "not in step with the truth of the gospel" (). Read it all HERE