Galatians 5 : 1 – 6
When Jacqui and I came to St Christopher’s in the early 2000s, I came across a book by Henri Nouewn called ‘The return of the prodigal son’
It was a book based on the author’s experience of seeing this painting, (PowerPoint slide of painting), Rembrandts “return of the prodigal son”.
And it profoundly influenced Nouewn’s journey with God.
And as I read that book I too was really impacted by the love of God…it opened out the parable and helped me to see God’s love in fresh and new ways.
And as I was preparing this week for this talk on Galatians, it led me to think I wonder what happened to the Prodigal son after he returned home?
Did he stay at home with his dad?
Did he have occasional forays back into the old country of sin that he came from?
Did he become like his older brother?
We don’t know, because Jesus stops at the celebration, when they all go into the house to enjoy the party.
One thing we do know is that the Prodigal son would never have forgotten the embrace of his father and the love that he experienced after returning from the foreign country of sin.
And as I thought about that picture it struck me how relevant this parable of Jesus is to this series on Galatians.
Before the Galatians met Paul, they would never have known God as the Father who longed to embrace them with His love.
They would never have known that the Father sent his Son into the world to draw them out of that distant country of slavery to sin, and welcome them home.
But now they had met Paul, they come to know that they were 100% loved and accepted by God through the sacrifice of his Son Jesus on the cross.
They had come to know God’s amazing love for them.
But if we come back to the picture, we can see that it’s not just the father embracing his son.
On the right of the picture is this rather stern looking figure, looking down on the scene, and we know this is the older son of the father.
This is the son that had stayed at home with the father and followed all the rules…
He was very resentful that his father should love someone who was so undeserving as this younger brother who had taken his dad’s inheritance and spent it all on wild living…
Why should he get this welcome home treatment?
He’d done nothing to deserve his fathers love.
And in some ways, what seems to be happening with the Galatians, is that they had taken their eyes off their father, and started to listen to the elder brother.
They started to think they had to DO particular things to earn his approval/love.
We see it starting to happen in Galatians 4: 8-10, when Paul says: (Read)
# Sometimes on Sunday mornings, we can come out of a church service willing ourselves to try harder to love others…believing that our efforts to love will make our faith work.
Which brings us to the key thought in our reading from Galatians 5:1-6 this morning…
…v6 which says “The only thing that counts is Faith expressing itself through love.”
As we’ve seen in previous weeks, The Galatians had begun their lives with the grace of God….
…. but now had been tricked in believing that God worked in their lives in relation to how well they performed…
….or how spiritual they were….
….or how well late measured up to a certain religious standard.
The older brother had crept into their lives, almost unnoticed…
And so Paul says to them in Galatians chapter 3 versus 1 to 3….(Read)
“You foolish Galatians. Who has bewitched you? Did you receive the Spirit by keeping the law, or by hearing and believing the Gospel? You started in the Spirit by trusting in the finished work of Jesus and God’s grace alone. Are you now going to end up in the flesh trusting your own efforts and performance?”
# So our question this morning is what does “Faith expressing itself through love really mean”?
The answer is very simple because the gospel is always simple.
It’s the do and don’ts of religion that tries to make things complicated.
The word for love in Galatians 5:6 is the word ‘agape’.
Agape is a supernatural love…it’s a love that comes from God alone…it’s not a human love, in the way we think about love.
Unlike the Hollywood movie with the 2 lovers racing towards each other on an empty beach with the sunset behind them, God’s love is seen in a dying Figure on a cross…
….that is agape love…God’s love..
So what this verse tells us is that our faith is expressed when we open our hearts to receive Gods love…
Some translations of Galatians 5:6 say:
‘The only thing that matters is faith working through love’
It then becomes easy for us to think ‘I must work hard to express my faith’
That’s not what the original transaction says…
The word used for work or expressing is actually the word energeo from which we get the word energy.
It’s faith that energises us.
Faith isn’t a work, it’s a gift…and faith comes when we look at Jesus and hear His words from the cross: ‘It is finished!’
That’s what energises us!
It’s that knowledge that all the work needed for our salvation has already been done for us.
The problem with religion is that it focuses on our work…
…it always says ‘Do’..
But agape love comes to us and says ‘Done’
It’s as we come back to Jesus, come back to the cross,
So Faith works when we realise how much we are loved by God.
His love for us is unconditional, it is not based on our performance, it is constant, it is totally independent of what circumstances we are currently facing.
So when my faith doesn’t seem to be working, isn’t expressing itself, isn’t energised, what do we do?
We simply come back and once again immerse ourselves in the love of God.
What did the Galatians need to do?
They needed to remind themselves of the parable Jesus told about the Prodigal son…
They needed to stop looking at the older brother and come back to the embrace of God the Father…
So let’s just focus on that picture again, and the 3 figures in it to understand these 6 verses in Galatians 5.
Firstly, the Father.
In 5:1, Paul says:
‘It is for freedom that Christ has set us free’
Before time began, God the Father devised a plan to redeem a world that had become enslaved to sin.
It’s there in Galatians 4:4 (Read)
Amazing! God came to earth in His own Son to set us free from the demands of the Law…
As the hymn says:
‘There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin
He only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in.’
Why did God send His Son Jesus?
Because He loves us!
John 3:16…”God SO loved the world that He sent His only Son,That whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.”
Notice the verse doesn’t say that ‘whoever does good works, performs the right rituals, or in the case of the Galatians here, get circumcised….’
…It says ‘whoever BELIEVES in Him, that is Jesus, will not perish but have eternal life…
We cannot add to Jesus…
It’s Christ alone who saves us…
Why? Because He has been sent by His Father to die for us on the cross and open the way for us to become children of God…
When my children were young I didn’t say to them, “as long as you do this, this, and this, I’ll love you.”
“If you do you homework properly, if you stay away from those rowdy friends of yours, if you tidy your room….I’ll love you”
No, I love my children because I love them as they are…
I’m their dad, and they’re my children…
And God the Father sent His Son so that we can become His own children.
He loves us this morning as we are…not because we’ve followed all 613 commandments of the Mosaic Law.
My problem, Our problem is that we so often fall short in obeying even the summary of those laws in the 2 commands:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart soul and might…
…And love your neighbour as yourself…”
Every day, I, we fall short of that standard.
Which is why God sent Jesus.
Our problems come when we think we have to add to what Jesus has already done for us.
Imagine visiting the Louvre in Paris and stopping to gaze at probably the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci…
As you’re looking at it, one of the tourists steps out from the crowd with a red pen, goes up to the painting, and adds a bit of lipstick to the lips of the smiling face…
“That’s better” he says…
But of course we know that what he’s done is not made the painting better, he’s destroyed it!
It’s just like the temptation of trying to add something to the finished work of Jesus on the cross…
It’s Jesus plus.
For the Galatians, it was Jesus plus circumcision…
…Jesus plus Jewish rituals and Jewish laws.
Which leads to that second figure in the picture…the older brother.
When Jesus told the story of the prodigal son, He was speaking to the Pharisees.
They represented the older brother, the finger pointing, judging hand of the law in the Old Testament.
It was not that the Law itself was bad as the Law was given by God.
The problem was the way the law had become an exercise in self righteousness.
It had become a way of getting right in God’s eyes…
And I think that’s why Rembrandt paints this picture with the older brother seeming to be about 10 foot tall…
He’s looking down on everyone, his younger brother, and even his father…
And what seems to be most lacking in him is love…
He literally does not have the love of the father in him.
It’s as though he can’t stand the scene of those 2 figures in front of him…he looks on disapprovingly…
And I have to ask myself: Are there times when I’m like that?
When I point the finger, rather than love?
How quick am I to pick up on others faults rather than seeing my own?
We live in a culture, don’t we that loves to see the faults in others… the politicians who are caught by CCTV in compromising positions…
….the daily papers that show pictures of erring celebrities…
…documentaries that specialise in fault finding…
And just as we point one finger at them, we find 3 pointing back at ourselves…
The older brother is in all of us…
Because the older brother thinks he’s right and everyone else is wrong…
He thinks he’s okay…
What he doesn’t realise is that there has ever only been One Who is perfect, Only One Who has fulfilled the Law perfectly, and that is Jesus…
Only Jesus has Loved God with all His heart, soul, and might…He showed that by His life on earth and by going through the agony of the cross.
….And only Jesus has loved us perfectly, by leaving heaven to come to this earth and save us…
At the cross we don’t find a finger-pointing God…
…but we find 2 arms outstretched in love….
And that offends us.
Because it tells us all our self righteousness is like filthy rags…
It tells us that the only way we can ever be righteous in God’s eyes is by humbling ourselves and coming to the cross to be cleansed from our sin and clothed in the perfect righteousness of His Son…
Which brings us back to that 3rd figure in the picture, to the the prodigal son himself, who has come to realise that all he has to offer is filthy rags…
In Galatians 5, the older brother in the form of those Judaizing bullies were telling the Galatians that their filthy rags weren’t enough…
They had to add something more, they had to follow the Old Testament Law and get circumcised.
Their faith in Christ wasn’t enough.
They needed to add to it.
Like the older brother, these Judaizers were pointing at the Galatians and saying: “you think it’s just your faith that’s going to get you to heaven?”
….“No – you need more…you need circumcision to show you’re a proper follower of the law and of God…”
And how tempting it is, isn’t it, to think we need more than “just Jesus”
We need to do this, we need to stop doing that, we need to….the list is endless…
Last Wednesday at our home group, we were looking at the parable of the sheep and goats…
It’s an incredibly challenging scene at it looks at Jesus coming as Judge and separating the sheep from the goats…
But what is so striking about that scene is that nowhere is there a mention of do/don’ts…no mention of laws..
It’s not about the number of times we’ve sworn in our lives, or the amount the lies we’ve told, or whether we’re prone to outbursts of anger…
It’s simply about whether we’ve loved…
Whether we’ve loved those who are hungry, or those who are sick, or those in prison…
And before we turn that into another to do list, have a look ahead in Galatians 5:22 and see where this love comes from…
It’s the fruit of the Spirit…it’s Gods love being produced in us.
(Read)
# So It’s back to that little word agape…Gods love for us filling our hearts…
And just like the trunk of a tree produces branches which bear fruit, we need to keep coming back to the Source of love.
That’s why I want to finish this morning with the prodigal son…
I do wonder what happened to him after the story ended.
Did he keep coming back to this scene?
Did he keep reminding himself of his father’s incredible love for him?
I wonder if he was like that woman at the well who encountered Jesus with life changing consequences.
She left her water jar and couldn’t help herself, going into the town and telling everyone about this amazing encounter with the Messiah…
….Just like the prodigal son, she met with a love that transformed her life…
Let’s just pause for a moment as we finish, to have an opportunity to ask God to once again show us His great love for us.
Listen to these wonderful words from Paul in Ephesians 3:16-21 (Read)
Category: Sermons , The Bridge
Tags: sermon, The Bridge
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