Boast in the Cross

Sean Couch

Christiansburg Baptist Church

Galatians • Sermon • Submitted 10 months ago • Presented 10 months ago

Galatians 6:14–16

0 ratings

· 87 views

Notes

Transcript

Have you ever been proud of something that you later figured out wasn’t that big a deal?

Let me give you an example out of my own life. Some of you know that I got on this kick for a few years about taking cold showers.

I heard some people talking about it on a podcast, and it sounded fascinating, so I decided to give it a try.

For at least two years, I almost exclusively took cold showers. They were supposed to help me be more resilient and recover from exercise and be better for my skin.

I talked to people about it and even felt a little proud when people would say things like “Oh, man. I could never do that.”

The research continues to show that it all those benefits may be true, but do you know what I figured out when I had been doing that for a while?

I hate cold showers.

One day, I decided to start turning the hot water back on in the shower, and I quit.

Maybe some time, I will go back to taking cold showers, but in a small way, I came to realize that the thing I was proud of wasn’t really that great after all.

In our final message from Galatians, we are going to talk about the one thing that you and I should boast about.

This is now our seventh week of hitting the high points of Paul’s letter to the churches in the region of Galatia.

We are turning to Galatians 6:14-16 this morning, so go ahead and open your Bibles there.

The point we want to make this morning is quite simple.

As we think back over what God has done over the years, and as we look forward to what he will do in the future, I want to challenge us all to adopt the attitude we see in Paul here: boast only in the cross.

Read these verses with me...

The only thing I can boast in this morning is not my good works, not my deeds, not my righteousness.

As we talked about last week, none of that is actually my doing anyway—God is the one who strengthens and enables me to be and do all he has created me to do, so anything good that I do is actually his work.

Because of that, the only thing I can really boast in is that Jesus, the Son of God, is so good, so kind, so loving, so gracious, that he would give himself for me.

Some of the scandal of that statement is lost on us.

We are so familiar with the imagery of the cross, and we wear beautiful crosses around our necks and have them scattered throughout our churches and homes.

Keep in mind that the cross was an instrument of humiliation, torture, and execution.

To be put to death on a cross was a shameful thing that dishonored your legacy.

Yet, because of what Jesus did in dying in our place and rising from the dead, that very humiliation is exactly what we can boast in today!

The false teachers in Galatia were telling people they should do good things so they could brag about how good they had been.

Instead, Paul says that our real boast as Christians is in Jesus’s death on the cross, not in what we can ever accomplish.

The greatest thing I can share with you today is that Jesus died on the cross to pay my sins and yours. If you today will stop trusting in what you can do to save yourself and make life meaningful and instead surrender and submit to God and living life the way he tells you to live, you can find a relationship with him that you will never find in any other way.

Let’s explain that a little more as we look at two two reasons we can boast in what Jesus accomplished for us on the cross.

We see the first one at the end of verse 14...

1) The cross severs my connection to the world.

Paul grounds his boasting in the cross in a powerful statement: The world has been crucified to me through the cross, and I to the world.

In some ways, he is repeating the ideas he expressed earlier in the letter:

Galatians 2:20 CSB

I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

When Jesus died on the cross, he took our old way of life with him.

Part of me died on the cross with Jesus.

Here, Paul explains it a little differently: the world is crucified to me, and I am crucified to the world.

To get a better sense of what this means, think for a moment about someone being crucified.

You may have seen The Passion of the Christ or something similar and could get an idea of the horror that someone would endure as a part of crucifixion.

The body would be beaten and bloodied, almost beyond recognition.

The sight and the smell would have been terrible—there was nothing appealing about a body that had been crucified.

Also, crucifixion was decisive way to end someone’s life.

Someone sent me a quote from A.W. Tozer that expressed it this way:

“You knew one thing about a man who was carrying a cross out of the city…You knew he wasn’t coming back.” (A.W. Tozer)

So if someone was crucified, there was no longer anything attractive about them, and they were dead and gone.

Bring that picture back to Paul’s statement here: The world is crucified to me through Jesus’s cross, and I to the world.

In other words, the world—all that my eyes could want, all that my pride wants to be, all that my body says it needs like food or sex or comfort or whatever, that is all dead to me and no longer has the same appeal.

Before a person comes to Christ, they are enslaved to all of that—they are trying to find significance and peace and value, and they are creating it on their own, only to find it more and more empty.

However, in Christ, the world has been put to death to me, and me to it! While I still struggle with sin and temptation, it doesn’t have the hold over me anymore. I don’t have to give in, I don’t have to go there or do that or be enslaved to myself anymore.

Not only that, but everything else I could brag about means nothing!

Paul had a huge list of things he could brag about if he wanted to, but here’s what he said about that when he wrote to the church at Philippi:

Philippians 3:7–8 CSB

But everything that was a gain to me, I have considered to be a loss because of Christ. 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

The world has been crucified to us, and we to the world, so we cannot boast in the things the world tells us to brag about—they are dung!

We don’t boast in our strength or our education or our money or in how good our family looks or in how many good things we have done or how we look or how much others respect us or anything because that is all worthless in the end.

We boast in Jesus and his cross alone.

Let’s think about this for a minute: What are you proud of this morning?

If I sat down with you over coffee or if I was around you at work or if I scrolled through your Facebook or Instagram or Tik Tok feeds, what would it look like you boast in?

Would I see and hear you bragging on Jesus above everything else, or are you still trying to live the way the rest of the world is calling you to live?

Paul said it’s all dung; the world is dead to me and I to it. The only thing I can boast in is the cross.

“But Sean, aren’t we supposed to do good things? Didn’t you say last week that we are supposed to work for the good of all, especially out of the household of faith?”

Absolutely.

Remember, though, that just like we said last week, it isn’t those works that save us or keep us saved.

Instead...

2) The cross makes me a new creation.

The point God has made repeatedly throughout this letter is that your salvation is not a result of your works.

Paul sums it up succinctly here in verse 15...

If you aren’t familiar with the Bible, this seems like a really weird statement, so let’s try to explain it.

The false teachers God is correcting in this letter are ones who said that the way you were right with God was by doing all the ceremonies and external things that God commanded Israel to do in the Old Testament.

If you remember back to the beginning of our Genesis study, you will remember that God commanded Abraham and his family to practice circumcision as an outward, physical symbol of his descendants’ unique relationship with God.

The false teachers said that you still needed to do those things in order to be right with God.

However, Jesus fulfilled all those obligations and started a new covenant with us.

While circumcision or other outward actions never saved anyone, Jesus’s death and resurrection make it even more clear that our salvation isn’t dependent on any external religious duty; it is dependent on Jesus making us a new creation.

If I have come into a relationship with God through Jesus, then the Bible says that I am a new creation:

2 Corinthians 5:17 CSB

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come!

Do you get this? You are a new creation! You have been changed and transformed and made new.

You didn’t renew yourself or reinvent yourself; God did that by taking your old life and putting it to death on the cross.

Jesus didn’t stay dead but rose from the grave, and so now, he makes you alive and gives you new life when you trust in him alone for eternal life.

You still have the same personality, you still like certain foods and dislike others, but you are a new creation in Christ.

As I look out across this room, I see face after face after face of people whose lives I have been privileged to walk alongside over the years.

I see evidence of the fact that you are a new creation.

For some, I have had the privilege of walking with you when you became a new creation and surrendered to Christ for the first time.

For others, I have had the privilege of watching you grow in Christlikeness, learning to rest in and demonstrate the fact that Jesus has made you new.

I have seen God help you overcome sin, become bold in your faith, repair relationships, and demonstrate the Spirit’s control in your lives in so many ways.

Anything of significant, eternal, lasting value, God has worked in your life.

It was through the cross of Christ that you became that new creation. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t you—it was always Jesus.

As we move into this next chapter, that same God is still with you. He is still working, he is still growing.

He has a plan to enable you, your family, and this church body to grow more and more to live like Jesus and lead others to do the same.

We have a lot to celebrate that we have seen God do. We have a lot to anticipate about how God will work in the future. As we do, may we always boast in the cross.

My prayer for you, then, is found in verse 16...

As you boast in the cross, as you recognize that your connection to the world has been severed by Jesus’s work on the cross, and as you learn more and more to rest in and live out the reality that you are a new creation, I pray God will grant you a great sense of his peace and mercy.