Galatians 4:8-11
Notes
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
You may be wondering how this connects to a Mother’s Day message:
How many of your mother’s, out of love, may have had to have a stern talking with you? It was because they want the best for you and see you excel in everything. That is exactly what the Apostle Paul is doing here in this text.
In 33 days, it will be the 4 year anniversary where you, the church, confirmed the calling on my life to be the pastor here at MSBC. I hope that you have seen my dedication and labor for you, even in navigating through the uncharted waters of a pandemic as well as the long and hard process of revitalization (which we are still on), as nothing less than love and devotion to the Lord and to you. Therefore, over the next few weeks, as we walk through these verses, I will be applying it to our personal context here at MSBC as a loving parent or under-shepherd would for the ultimate and sole purpose of growing us closer to the Lord and to each other. The question is are we going to listen to the Lord or still believe that we are always right?
A good way to know if this is where you are in your walk with God is if you already have “checked out” because you don’t want to hear it. That is what I did as a child when my parents would say we needed to talk. But Paul said 1 Cor. 13:11 “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put aside childish things.” and then in 2 Timothy 4:3 “For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, will multiply teachers for themselves because they have an itch to hear what they want to hear.” (basically have their ego’s stroked).
This is where God wants us and I whole heartedly believe it. God confirmed it again as we were leaving Dollywood on Wednesday evening after the park had just closed at 7pm talking with a couple. After talking about the crowd being a lot worse in India and mentioning I am a pastor; she mentioned that her church in Northern Georgia and her son’s church in South Pasadena, Florida were looking for pastors and did I want a new scenery. There was no hesitation at all, because this is where I am supposed to be as your pastor and I am here to stay!
So with these verses, please hear my heart as your pastor who is dedicated to go through the trenches with you to fight with you against the enemy who is actively trying to destroy you personally, your family, your marriage, and this church. Matthew 16:18 “And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.”
This morning, I hope that you will see and hear the deep emotional burden for the personal and corporate growth of every believer and church. May this section mark the pages of MSBC history where we started either digging for a new well or dig deeper in our walk with the Lord and we see lives, marriages, relationships, this church, and our community change. May this be our “ebinezer stone!”
Example: A POW who is free and then wanting to return to enslavement.
RECAP: It’s Time to Grow Up
He explains their adoption (1-7)
What we are: children of bondage (1-3)
What God did: redeemed us (4-5)
What we are: sons and daughters (6-7)
He laments their regression (8-11)
He seeks their affection (12-18)
TEXT
TEXT
8 But in the past, since you didn’t know God, you were enslaved to things that by nature are not gods. 9 But now, since you know God, or rather have become known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elements? Do you want to be enslaved to them all over again? 10 You are observing special days, months, seasons, and years. 11 I am fearful for you, that perhaps my labor for you has been wasted.
12 I beg you, brothers and sisters: Become as I am, for I also have become as you are. You have not wronged me; 13 you know that previously I preached the gospel to you because of a weakness of the flesh. 14 You did not despise or reject me though my physical condition was a trial for you. On the contrary, you received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus himself.
15 Where, then, is your blessing? For I testify to you that, if possible, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me. 16 So then, have I become your enemy because I told you the truth? 17 They court you eagerly, but not for good. They want to exclude you from me, so that you would pursue them. 18 But it is always good to be pursued in a good manner—and not just when I am with you. 19 My children, I am again suffering labor pains for you until Christ is formed in you. 20 I would like to be with you right now and change my tone of voice, because I don’t know what to do about you.
From 3:6–4:7 Paul developed a tightly woven and carefully crafted argument for the doctrine of justification by faith. He offered an analysis of redemptive history centered on the true identity of the children of Abraham. Writing to largely Gentile congregations besieged by the false teaching of Jewish Christian missionaries, he argued primarily from the Old Testament Scriptures, drawing on texts from Genesis to Habakkuk, while also bringing in illustrations from Roman legal practice and Hellenistic culture (e.g., the pedagogue, the young heir awaiting legal instatement, adoption). At this point in the letter, Paul interrupted the probatio section of the epistle, his “proofs” from Scripture, to address the Galatians personally and directly.
EXEGESIS
EXEGESIS
Galatians 4:8 “But in the past, since you didn’t know God, you were enslaved to things that by nature are not gods.”
Proverbs 2:6 “For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.”
Phil 3:8 “More than that, I also consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Because of him I have suffered the loss of all things and consider them as dung, so that I may gain Christ”
{Do we consider everything to be a loss in the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord? What is valuable to you? What do you think about the most, spend the most amount of time and energy in? What do you invest in the most whether that is physically, financially, or emotionally?}
This refers to the demonic spirits that controlled the Galatians’ former religious practice (cf. 1 Cor. 10:20).
The gospel transcend temporal and cultural boundaries, so only the incomparable components of a culture needs to be rejected and replaced. The problem is that many believers in different cultures have failed to make a clean break with cultural practices that are oppose to the Lordship of Christ. The lure of synchronicity causes believers in some parts of the world to hold onto their pre-Christian fear and obedience to the spirits. In the west, there is a growing movement among cultural Christians, who have a low view of biblical authority to combine the gospel with the leaves from traditional religions or spirit magic. In addition, materialism as a growing entry point of demonic influence in the west.
This is a clear indication that the Galatians were pagans before entering gods family in Christ. Paul, marvels as he does in 1:6 that they should wish to revert to the slavery brought on by fear of cosmic powers – such as the star deities that once rolled their lives – by imposing a regimen of observing special days when good luck may be expected for an enterprise.(Charlotte’s birth day to line up with auspicious days. Their interest was in what days were good for business or travel or marriage, and which seasons were favored by the guards to produce fertile ground for harvest yield. (Farmer’s Almanac)
Jews often regarded Gentile gods as nonexistent, though some viewed them as falsely worshiped humans of the past. Most ancient Jewish and all ancient Christian sources regarded the spirits worshiped by Gentiles as actually demons (1Co 10:20). by nature. Greek thinkers also evaluated beliefs by their correspondence to nature; Jewish thinkers responded that it was against nature to worship what is created.
“but then” stands in contrast of “but now.”
Conversion to Christ meant breaking completely with the idolatrous religion and false gods of the surrounding culture. The centrality and finality of Jesus Christ is at the heart of the Christian message.
The comedian Flip Wilson is famous for the phrase: “The devil made me do it.” We may not use those words, but we have had the feeling: some power controlled us and made us act in a way that is not our true nature. “I was not myself,” or “She was beside herself,” we say.“The-devil-made-me-do-it” idea can never be an excuse for lack of accountability. We are not delivered from responsibility no matter what may influence us.
Galatians 4:9 “But now, since you know God, or rather have become known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless (beggarly KJV) elements? Do you want to be enslaved to them all over again?”
Personal—Knowledge of God is preceded by God’s knowledge of us. To “know God” is to be first “known by God.” As the apostle John says, “We love because he first loved us,”
We can know God only because He first knew us, just as we choose Him only because He first chose us (Jn 6:44; 15:16), and we love Him only because He first loved us (1Jn 4:19).
The slavery that the Galatians are in danger of embracing again is not just a matter of forfeiting sonship but of abandoning the true God.
If we were created to please, God, by knowing and enjoying him, we will never be whole and complete, unless we orient our lives around him, and define ourselves in terms of our relationship with him. The more serious, we are about our heavenly calling, the more we become aware of the tension caused by the allurements and entanglements of our earthly condition. Many believers have inadvertently resolve this tension by compartmentalizing their lives. They do this by treating their relationship with Christ as a component of their lives, along with other components, such as family, work, and finances. This compartmentalization fosters a dichotomy between the secular and the spiritual, so that the spiritual becomes something we do on certain occasions, such as church, Bible studies, and devotional times. The assumption is that the more of these things we do, the more spiritual we are. By contrast, holistic, spirituality stresses, the centrality of Christ and his relevance to every component of our lives. The biblical alternative to a compartmentalization mentality focus on the implications of Christ, Lordship over every aspect of life in such a way that even the most mundane components of life can become an expressions of the life of Christ in us. In this way, the various secular Arenas of life become spiritual to the extent that we surrender them to the lordship of Christ.
While salvation is the free gift of God (Ro 5:15, 16, 18; 6:23; Eph 2:8), it brings with it serious responsibility (cf. Lk 12:48). God requires believers to live a holy life because they are children of a holy God and desire to love and worship Him (Mt 5:48; 1Pe 1:15–18). That obligation was to the unchanging moral and spiritual principles that forever reflect the nature of God; however, it did not include the rituals and ceremonies unique to Israel under Mosaic law as the Judaizers falsely claimed.
To know” is not used in any mundane sense of either “to perceive” or “to acquire knowledge about,” but in the biblical sense of “to experience.” For in being “sons of God” (3:26) and having “the Spirit of his Son” (4:6), Galatian Christians had come to experience God in the intimacy of a family relationship. Thus here, as elsewhere throughout Scripture, experiential relations between God and his people are set out in terms of God’s initiative and mankind’s response. Relationship with God does not have its basis in man’s seeking (mysticism) or doing (legalism) or knowing (gnosticism), but it originates with God himself and is carried on always by divine grace.
“How can you turn back?” is a rhetorical question that puts before the Galatian Christians a dilemma: Knowing God the Father in the intimacy established by Christ and the Spirit, how is it possible for them to want any other relationship?
{Turning your back on God, in the words and tenses that Paul is using them, is basically saying how can you commit adultery against God. That sounds harsh but that is exactly what Paul is saying. We have chased after other things to satisfy us. It is like Paul is saying you come to the “house of the Lord” and then go out living a lifestyle of adultery thinking God doesn’t know. That we find our identity and satisfaction in something/someone else}
What is the name of the person who you have used to replace God with? Here are some of their names: Money, Fame, Status, Entitlement, Pride, Self, Sports, Events, Full Calendar
Tim Keller lists these 10 idols in the modern church: Identity, Money/Material things, Jobs/Status, Physical Appearance, Entertainment, Sex, Comfort, Phones/Technology, Family/Children, Influence/Fame.
The verb ἐπιστρέφω (“turn around,” “turn back”) is a technical term for either religious conversion (cf. 1 Thess 1:9; also Luke 1:16; Acts 3:19; 9:35; 11:21; 14:15; 15:19; 26:18, 20; passim) or religious apostasy (cf. 2 Peter 2:21–22). Its use here in the present tense indicates that the Galatians’ action of apostatizing was then in progress (cf. v 10; also Comment at 1:6 and 5:2–4).
An apostate is someone a person who renounces a religious or political belief or principle.
Martin Luther (taking up the imagery of one of Aesop’s fables) is true to Paul’s thought here when he speaks of one who desires to supplement faith by works as being like “the dog who runs along a stream with a piece of meat in his mouth, and deceived by the reflection of the meat in the water, opens his mouth to snap at it, and so loses both the meat and the reflection” {By opening our mouths to fill in something in addition to Christ, we lose both. Golf ball analogy}.
“To know” God in this kind of experiential intensity implies a divine-human encounter in which the total self, not merely the mind or thought processes, is claimed and transformed.
John 6:44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
John Newton, the former slave trader, wrote the famous hymn “Amazing Grace”: He was an only child and lost his mother when he was seven years old. He went to sea at the tender age of eleven and later became involved, in the words of one of his biographers, “in the unspeakable atrocities of the African slave trade.” He plumbed the depths of human sin and degradation. When he was twenty-three, on 10 March 1748, when his ship was in imminent peril of floundering in a terrific storm, he cried to God for mercy, and he found it. He was truly converted, and he never forgot how God had had mercy upon him, a former blasphemer. He sought diligently to remember what he had previously been, and what God had done for him. In order to imprint it on his memory, he had written in bold letters and fastened across the wall over the mantelpiece of his study the words of Deut 15:15 “15 Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you; that is why I am giving you this command today.”
Paul is consistent in his teaching about idolatry. Accepting a creed, obeying a law, eating a sacrament, keeping an eye on the stars, looking for guidance in a horoscope, trying to compel or cajole the gods of fortune and fate-are all in the same category of substituting lesser gods for God. Paul is astounded at the Galatians as he would be at many of us.
{By doing this, we are telling the Father the same thing that the prodigal son told his father prior to leaving.}
Galatians 4:10 “You are observing special days, months, seasons, and years.”
The presence of the Jewish teachers in Galatia makes it likely that the special days were Sabbath observances, while months and seasons had to do with longer seasons of the Jewish calendar (e.g., the time from Passover to Pentecost). Years would be sabbatical years or the year of Jubilee. Since those in the Galatian churches were back where they started before Paul arrived—enslaved spiritually—he feared that his best efforts had been wasted.
The reference to days and months and seasons (v. 10) indicates that the Galatians had worshiped fertility gods connected to the movements of the sun and the moon. But Paul is not suggesting that the Galatians were now turning back to these idols; rather, they were turning to a new slavery expressed in Jewish annual feasts such as Passover and Booths, as well as new moon festivals and weekly Sabbaths.
They observe the special times, thinking that they would thereby gain additional merit before God. But Paul had already made it clear that works could not be added to faith as grounds for either justification or sanctification.
Before their conversion, Gentiles observed festivals for their deities and regarded various days as lucky or unlucky. But Judaism also had its own special calendar of holy days, new moons, sabbatical years and so forth. By returning to a ceremonial, calendrical religion regulated by heavenly bodies they once regarded as gods, the Galatians return to pagan bondage under these spiritual forces.
The Judaizers had persuaded the Galatians to observe the Mosaic calendar. These seasonal events included special days (weekly sabbaths), months (new moons), and seasons (Festivals of Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles). The Galatians kept these festivals to gain God’s favor.
Obviously Paul was concerned that the Galatian believers would be drawn into a religious system where adherence to certain cyclical celebrations was regarded as obtaining or maintaining a favorable standing with God. This is a recurring temptation for believers in all ages of church history. In medieval times Roman Catholics were taught that the ritual of annual confession and Easter communion was a minimal requirement for being a member of the church in good standing. Today in many evangelical churches thousands of “nonactive” members throng to worship services at Christmas and Easter assuming that such semiannual pilgrimages are all the Lord requires of them. Whatever the context, a religion of “days, months, seasons, and years” can never lead to liberation from the weak and beggarly elemental spirits whose grasp can only be escaped through faith in the one who came “in the fullness of time.”
{Our inactive roll triples our active roll. I am sorry if this offends you but if the last time a person attended this church was before my birth, they shouldn’t be on any church roll. Our offending them at the sake of being accountable of God is not a good or valid reason at all.}
Galatians 4:11 “I am fearful (afraid KJV) for you, that perhaps my labor for you has been wasted.”
It would be as if they had never even heard the gospel from Paul (v. 11). For these Gentile Galatian Christians, turning to the Jewish law would be like returning to their paganism.
Lit. “I have labored to the point of exhaustion.”
Wasted is the same word rendered for nothing in 3:4
It could mean that the Galatians were true Christians but that Paul’s efforts to spur them on to spiritual maturity in Christ were not fruitful. Or it could mean that he feared that not turning from their legalism could indicate that they were never Christians in the first place.
What could the heretical interlopers of Galatia possibly do to Paul that the Jews, the Romans, not to say other false brothers, had not already done? No, Paul was not afraid for himself, but he was deeply concerned for the Galatians.
APPLICATION
APPLICATION
Here
NOTES:
If you won’t go to church because you don’t like the atmosphere, style of music, style of preaching, etc. then what we are basically saying is that it is all about us. The Lord revealed that if that is us, we will hate heaven.
The charge here from the Apostle Paul, in a loving way, to the christians of Galatia is the same every pastor has who actually cares about the flock he is entrusted to under-shepherd. Paul is basically saying, “it’s time to grow up.” Around the world, especially in the “Westernized countries,” we have raised up, in recent days, generations who hate God and his bride the church. We have trained and groomed the church to put traditions and the church above the Word of God and the movement of the Holy Spirit.
April’s story getting her glasses.
We have created an unhealthy environment where our preference of sermon type, music type, and many other things are what is sacred. Then the church finds a pastor that meets their criteria rather than the biblical criteria. Then they sit on pastor search committee’s and “the board of leadership” protecting personal values rather than biblical ones. The end result: no one knows what they believe.
Galatians (3) The Danger of Turning Back (4:8–11)
The remainder of chap. 4 can be divided into three literary units. Verses 8–11 are an exhortation in which Paul reminded his Galatian converts of their former way of life, the great transformation that had happened to them through their adoption into God’s family, and his deep concern that they were about to exchange their spiritual heritage for a mess of pottage. Verses 12–20 extend the theme of Paul’s fear for the Galatians in the form of a personal expostulation. He recalled the endearing bonds of friendship and love he and the Galatians had enjoyed in days past and pleaded with them to remain faithful to the one and only gospel he had first preached among them. The final section, vv. 21–31, contain the allegory of Hagar and Sarah whose sons, Ishmael and Isaac, are taken as representative types of spiritual slavery and spiritual sonship.