Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B:

Housekeeping Stuff & Announcements:

Housekeeping Stuff & Announcements:

Welcome guests to the family gathering, introduce yourself.

Thank the band.

Invite guests to parlor after service.

Last week, we had a special time of prayer for our friends T & J and the issues that were happening with their visas.

God has handled that issue, and they now have everything they need and are back together!

Praise the Lord!

Tonight, we will have the ordination council and service for Wayne Whitlock.

If you are an ordained man and want to be a part of the council, it will be held in room 205 at 4:30 this afternoon.

The service will follow at 5:30 here in the sanctuary.

Please plan to be a part of this time of setting aside Wayne for the task of being a deacon.

Silver Seekers, our monthly meeting for the senior adult ministry, will not meet this month until the SECOND Tuesday, November 12, due to the Scholastic Book Fair for the school this week.

Silver Seekers will meet at 10 am on November 12 in Miller Hall.

Mission New Mexico State Mission Offering thru September and October.

Goal is $8,000.

Received: $10,541.

That’s great!

Thanks, church!

Finally, the church will be providing Thanksgiving meal boxes for families in need.

We can do up to 12 boxes, and each box will contain a turkey or a ham (their preference) and all the fix’ns.

If you need a box for Thanksgiving, or if you know a family that does, please contact either Pastor Wayne, or the office and let us know as soon as possible.

Opening

In this letter which we call the book of Galatians, the Apostle Paul has been writing to fairly new believers about the problem of works-based righteousness: the idea that we can earn and keep God’s favor just by following rules, instead of by only by faith in Jesus Christ.

These false teachers, called Judaizers, have come in and are confusing the Galatian believers by insisting that they needed to basically become Jewish in order to be saved.

In the passage we looked at last week, Paul told the Galatians that they are either completely free in Christ, or they are not free at all: trying to justify ourselves through works was slavery to the law… an all-or-nothing proposal.

Instead, if we are in Christ, then we are free to serve God through faith as His Holy Spirit works in our lives, making us more like Jesus as we submit to His working.

In our focal passage this morning, Paul uses several word pictures to address the problem with these false teachers We will consider those same things, as well as why works-righteousness is so tempting, and what our perspective on it should be.

Let’s stand as we read our short focal passage:

Pray

We’re just going to dive right in this morning with our first point:

1) False teachers hinder.

As a young boy living in Tarsus, Paul would have had the opportunity to go to the gymnasium.

For us, we have gyms all over the place.

We have lots of choices.

We can go any time of day or night, depending on our choice.

But in the ancient Roman world, there would generally be only one gymnasium in a city, and even then, not every city had one.

But Tarsus did.

The gymnasium was the place where young Roman men were trained in athletics and combat.

Here in verse 7, we have what is likely Paul’s first athletic reference in his letters: a reference to a race.

This isn’t the last time that Paul would use athletic imagery.

In fact, Paul often made use of athletic imagery in his letters.

I guess you could say that in some ways, he was a sports fan.

When Maggie was a freshman in high school, she ran track for Eldorado.

Generally, she was a sprinter, so she ran the 100, 200, 400 (which she hated), and was on a couple of the sprint relay teams.

I really enjoyed watching her run.

In her races, especially the 100 and 200, lanes were clearly designated, and were permanent.

Maggie had to run in her designated lane for the entire race.

If she got out of her lane, she would have been disqualified.

And if someone came into her lane and slowed her down, there wasn’t really anything she could do about it.

She had to stay in her lane.

The Galatians started off in a particular lane.

That lane was called “grace.”

They were running their grace race well.

But then the Judaizers came in with their concept of somehow working to get God’s favor, and it’s like they “cut in” to the lane of grace.

I have to Greek out for a moment here, because Paul did something in this little passage that I think is really cool.

The Greek word here for “prevented” could also be translated as “hindered”.

Literally, though, it is a compound word formed from the Greek words en, meaning “in” and kopto, meaning “cut.”

To “cut in.”

It’s truly like a race: someone has “cut in” on the lane of grace that the Galatians were running in, and have thus hindered them from fully trusting in the truth of the Gospel of God’s grace.

Keep that word, enkopto in mind for just a bit.

This is what false teachers do.

They hinder people from believing the truth of God’s Word, of God’s promise, of God’s grace, of God’s Gospel.

They don’t trust it themselves, and so they teach others not to trust it either.

Jesus clearly called out the Pharisees and scribes for doing exactly that:

Jesus clearly called out the Pharisees and scribes for being a hindrance to the people:

luke

Back in Galatians, as we have already seen in our study, the issue with the Judaizers was that they thought that Gentiles had to basically become Jews in order to be saved.

A major part of that was circumcision.

Here at the end of this passage, Paul makes a very interesting word play:

Some translations are a little more graphic than the CSB in how they translate exactly what Paul is wishing on these false teachers.

What Paul is saying here is a double wordplay.

He is speaking of his response to their teaching on circumcision, so when he says “mutilated”, in the Greek, the word is apokopto.

Remember what kopto meant?

“Cut.”

Instead of en, or “in”, the Greek apo means “off.”

This is why the NIV and the ESV, for example, translate this word as “emasculate.”

So Paul says that these false teachers have “cut in” with the idea of circumcision, and now wishes that they would be “cut off” as a result.

A play on circumcision, and a play on cutting from verse 7.

But I like to see one additional possible grace-filled facet of this wish of Paul’s.

The Hebrew people, which the Judaizers were a part of, did not allow eunuchs to participate in the assembly of God’s people, according to .

They were to be “cut off” from the people of Israel.

The Judaizers were placing so much faith in the works of the flesh.

Perhaps Paul wishes that they would meet this fate of becoming eunuchs for that very reason: if they could no longer trust in their circumcision for their right standing with God, all they would have left is the Gospel of Jesus.

In a way, their trust in the works of the flesh was hindering even themselves.

So first, false teachers hinder.

But false teachers also lie.

2) False teachers lie.

These people had come in and told the Galatian Christians that they were telling them the truth of God’s word: that since the Jewish people were God’s people, then even with Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, you had to be Jewish to be right with God.

But Paul clearly denounces their assertion that they had come from God in verse 8:

3) False teachers contaminate.

They were lying.

They said that they came from God, when in fact, they hadn’t.

They claimed to speak for God, when in fact, they didn’t.

The fact of the matter, as we saw in chapter 1, is that they were preaching a “false gospel” that wasn’t good news at all.

Think about the Garden of Eden.

The adversary, the devil, came in and tempted Eve.

And what did he tempt her with?