Well good evening everyone and welcome to my fifty ninth episode. Tonight, I want to present you with a sermon that I gave live at my church. The text is Galatians chapter 6 and the message is what steps you need to take after turning from a life of sin and placing your faith in Jesus Christ. Please enjoy.
So last week we talked about leaving a life of sin and coming to Christ. We used the story of Zacchaeus, who was a corrupt tax collector. Zacchaeus climbed a tree so he could see Jesus as he walked by. Then Jesus called out to Zacchaeus by name and told him that He must stay at his house tonight. Zacchaeus took Jesus in and Zacchaeus repented of his sins. He arranged to give half of his wealth to the poor and pay back the people whom he extorted money from. We finished that message with an illustration of the 12 step method given to people who are recovering from alcoholism. So now we know the importance of repentance and the value of taking the initiative to begin putting your life together. But what do we do after that? What’s the correct course of action once we’ve repented of our sins and committed our lives to Christ? The topic of today’s message is going to be these next steps that you will take in your walk with God. The text we will be using is Galatians chapter 6. If you have your Bibles, will you please turn to Galatians chapter 6 – beginning with verse 1:
6 Dear brothers and sisters, if another believer[a] is overcome by some sin, you who are godly[b] should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path. And be careful not to fall into the same temptation yourself.
Here’s an instruction from Paul for Christians to take up the responsibility of helping each other course-correct when overcome by sin. Notice he’s saying overcome by sin. So this is a situation where the person has become enslaved to their sin. The sin would have so much power over them that they would be unable or unwilling to repent of it on their own. This is the person who is addicted and needs intervention. This is the person who is running with the wrong crowd and consistently degenerating into evil. The Bible says that we have the capacity to recognize when someone suffers like this because we have the mind of Christ.
So we must work humbly and gently in helping them to get back on the right path. The key here is repentance. We want to get them to repentance. There’s an eternity of difference between a person who sins and repents versus a person who sins and doesn’t care. In order to accomplish this, the first step is for us to be steadfast in our moral absolutes. If we compromise on what is considered sin, then we forfeit the ability to re-calibrate people to true north because we ourselves will no longer know where true north is. The Bible says that whoever brings a person back from wandering will save that person from death and bring about the forgiveness of many sins.
Paul is telling us to do this humbly and gently. The key to remaining gentle with someone who is given over to sin is acknowledging that the person’s sin does not define who they are. Even the worst of sinners are still human beings made in the image of God. So you can hate the person’s actions or ideas while loving the actual person. If you practice trying to see through to the person behind the sin instead of focusing entirely on the sin itself then what you will see is a person who needs your help and who needs your prayer.
You must be shrewd as snakes and harmless as doves when doing this work. Often, you have to meet this person where they are and that means meeting them in an environment that is full of temptations. You might think that you won’t succumb to temptation the way they did – but guess what – you’re bound to the same fallen flesh as they are. So don’t be so certain of yourself. It’s unlikely that you can march into the lions den without God and expect not to be eaten.
This idea really hit home with me when I toured Torrance State Mental Hospital. I’d never been to a psychiatric facility like that before. I expected to see monstrous people who were nothing like me. But what I found was a facility full of people who made the wrong choices or who were exposed to other people who made the wrong choices. I saw people, many of whom simply suffered the consequences of sin so severely that the tentacles reached into their structure of belief and modified it until they became stuck with a pathological view of reality. I saw people who looked how I could have looked if I didn’t have people in my life to care about me and notice when I went astray. Care for your brothers and sisters. Pay attention when they go astray. And do it with gentle hearts. Okay, let’s look at verses 2 and 3:
2 Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ. 3 If you think you are too important to help someone, you are only fooling yourself. You are not that important.
You are not that important. Paul means this in the sense that you are not too important to help your brothers and sisters. He doesn’t want you to elevate yourself above others. In 1 Corinthians 3:18 he says:
18 Stop deceiving yourselves. If you think you are wise by this world’s standards, you need to become a fool to be truly wise.
There is perhaps nothing more foolish than a naturally intelligent person who refuses to listen. This person spins off horrible psychopathology and they are notoriously difficult to treat because they have the intellectual capacity to be very creative with excuses and reasons why treatment won’t work for them. Really the only thing that prevents this person from being a dictator is the lack of a standing army. Smart people who will not admit their ignorance and will not admit their need for dialogue with others will never achieve wisdom. So humility is the thrust of Paul telling us we are not that important. And remember, humility is not thinking less of yourself – humility is thinking of yourself less often.
But let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment and imagine that you’re just useless and worthless. Let’s imagine that there is no God and that you are just a random collocation of atoms floating around on a speck of dust in an unimpressive galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of the universe. Your life is meaningless in an ultimate sense and what you choose to do is inconsequential for the rest of the world because after you die you will be abandoned to the ash heap of history. Why would anyone choose to believe that? I’ll tell you why: because it absolves you of responsibility. It liberates you from accountability. It gives you the knowledge of good and evil and makes you the judge over which is which. It allows you to trade your soul for a spot on the throne of the Most High. That’s the temptation. That’s the deception.
But that’s not what God says about you. God says that you have infinite value because inside of you is a spark of divinity. God says that you were fearfully and wonderfully made. God says that you have the terrifying responsibility of loving your neighbor as yourself. God says that you will be accountable for every idle word you speak. And God says that He loves you so much He gave his only begotten Son so that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but should have everlasting life. What you do here matters. The butterfly effect of your life will reach out into the world and shape the course of history. This world would not be what it is at this moment had you never lived. And if your heart is still beating, you still have work to do. That’s a scary thing to think about, but understanding it is the secret to living a life that is lit on fire with meaning and purpose.
Jesus said, “Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” Let’s move on to verses 4-5:
4 Pay careful attention to your own work, for then you will get the satisfaction of a job well done, and you won’t need to compare yourself to anyone else. 5 For we are each responsible for our own conduct.
Paul’s words are very intentional here. He’s saying to pay careful attention to your work. This means a narrow focus on your job or on your mission. Why is it a bad idea to compare yourself to others? One reason is because you’ll crush yourself when you see someone doing better than you. But that’s actually not the worst thing that can happen. No, the sneaky part of your evil little soul will allow the standards of everyone else to justify you not doing the best that you could do. It’s like, “Well, I know it’s within my capacity to get this job done but that guy over there hasn’t done anything today so I can probably just get away with quitting.” This is why when you introduce a bad employee into a pool of good employees, the good employees do not lift up the performance of the bad employee. The bad employee actually diminishes the performance of the good employees. This is also why at the beginning of this message Paul warns you not to fall into temptation yourself when helping someone else out of it.
Paul says we are each responsible for our own conduct. Now, I’ve thought a lot about this in combination with Jesus saying that we will be responsible for every idle word we speak. This is actually right at the core of what it means to be salt to preserve that which is good and light to guide the world. There’s no way to know just exactly how far the ripple effect of your action travels. Both good and evil.
Four years ago my Dad helped me move all of my stuff out of my apartment in Pittsburgh. I gave him very little notice and to this day it has not rained more in a 9 hour period than it did when we moved all of that furniture. We looked like drowned rats. It was so bad that a guy who was walking passed just gave us his own ratchet straps out of pity. Everything I owned was soaked through. It couldn’t have gotten more wet if I had thrown it all into the Allegheny River.
But I had to move that night. I had hit a low point and the little voice inside my conscience turned into a white hot scream. I often think that was the moment for me. If I had chosen to rebel against that scream in that moment then I may have shut off my capacity to hear it ever again. So I decided to get out of there like right now. I got out of there as fast as Joseph got out of Potiphar’s house when Potiphar’s wife seduced him. But I could only do it because my Dad was there to help me that night. He was ready to work. If it had been someone else and they had told me, “Well you know, I don’t really have time to do that or you can just wait until next week.” Then there’s a pretty good possibility I wouldn’t be standing here in front of all of you right now. Maybe because my nine lives would have run out and God’s grace would have been withdrawn from me. Or maybe because I would have discovered a particular flavor of evil that I actually enjoyed. And then, then I would be using all of my God given gifts to wage war on Being itself. Through my lifestyle I would have leveled as much destruction and caused as much useless misery to as many people as had the misfortune to encounter me. That’s what was at stake on the night we chose to act when it would have made perfect rational sense to say maybe another time, or maybe let someone else do it.
You might say that sounds like a dramatization. But I can tell you that there are people out there right now who are bent on evil and who are aiming down. They are marching toward destruction and they are leaving absolute hell in their wake as a consequence of their sin. The ripple effects of your conduct can cause unimaginable amounts of pain in another person’s life. But they can also cause unimaginable amounts of good. And your capacity to do good is stronger than any amount of suffering you will go through in this life. And that’s because it is God’s will that you be made in the likeness of His Son and that is a version of yourself who is very good. Let’s look at verse 6:
6 Those who are taught the word of God should provide for their teachers, sharing all good things with them.
You know I’ve spent almost two years now obsessively studying the things of God. Two years and still I feel mostly useless and ignorant compared to Jesus Christ who is my personal standard. The good thing about having God as your standard is that you’ll never achieve it and so you’ll have something to do for the rest of your life. None of this would be possible if I didn’t have good people backing me up so that I have the time to do it. The most important difference between the theologian and the baby Christian is time. So wherever you go, remember that if you want good teaching you’ve got to support your teacher. Okay, let’s move on to verses 7-8:
7 Don’t be misled—you cannot mock the justice of God. You will always harvest what you plant. 8 Those who live only to satisfy their own sinful nature will harvest decay and death from that sinful nature. But those who live to please the Spirit will harvest everlasting life from the Spirit.
So I’m working through an in-depth study of the book of Isaiah right now. I just made it through chapter 13 and for any of you who know your book of Isaiah you know that some of those chapters are brutal oracles of judgment against wicked nations. And so I’ve had to wrestle with God on this and try to figure out how a loving God could mete out such punishment. Then I started thinking, you know, fallen reality is a pretty brutal place. I can think of at least four specific cases of human activity in the last 100 years that far exceed the perceived harshness of anything described in the Bible. It’s impossible to take the fullness of Scripture without coming to the conclusion that God is way more patient and way more compassionate with us than we deserve. That’s why it’s called grace.
So it’s no mistake that Paul is using natural language here. He says you will harvest what you plant. If you went outside and planted a flower you wouldn’t be upset and confused when it failed to turn into a cactus. God’s justice works the same way. It just is and it never changes. So if you try to bend and twist the fabric of reality it’s going to snap back. If you jump off of a building, you don’t break the law of gravity. You break yourself and prove the law of gravity.
We can’t escape God’s justice. Paul says that those who only live to satisfy their sinful nature will harvest decay and death from that sinful nature. This is why I don’t think it does any good to blindly shovel resources at individuals who have given themselves over to sin and dysfunction. All that happens is you elevate their capacity to satisfy their sinful nature thus increasing their harvest of death and decay. It’s no favor to that person. It’s far better for you to invest your time in that person to guide them to the right path. And it takes a lot of time. But the reward is great. Remember Ananias in the book of Acts. As far as we know, he only ever evangelized one person his entire life. But that person was the Apostle Paul who went on to write one third of the New Testament.
When it comes to helping a person be restored to a relationship with Christ, your time is worth more than your money. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 9:6:
6 Remember this—a farmer who plants only a few seeds will get a small crop. But the one who plants generously will get a generous crop.
Now, this knife cuts both ways: Do you want a generous crop of death and decay popping up in your life? Stop planting the seeds of your sinful nature. Take a good hard look at who you are today and then allow God to show you just exactly who you could become if you surrender your life to Him. And then pick up your cross of suffering and follow Jesus. There is no resurrection without the crucifixion. The narrow path to joy and everlasting life runs through the suffering of the cross. But God has shown us by His own example that we are strong enough and brave enough to make it out on the other side. That by His grace we will transcend the suffering and enter into newness of life as the fully developed persons He planned us to become before we were even born. Ladies and gentlemen there is a huge difference between walking through your suffering with God versus taking up residence in your pit of misery without Him. Verses 9-10:
9 So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up. 10 Therefore, whenever we have the opportunity, we should do good to everyone—especially to those in the family of faith.
It’s hard to say what the world would be like if everyone took these verses seriously. I’ve thought a lot about how abusing the compassion of others might be worse than committing overt criminal acts. It’s because there’s an element of deception at play. When someone is up front and honest about their criminality – at least you know what to expect, you know where they stand. There’s something less insidious about that than the person who deceives and manipulates the compassionate. The Italian writer Dante Alighieri, who wrote the Divine Comedy, thought that the deepest circle of hell was reserved for betrayal. He named the deepest part of the deepest circle Judecca, after Judas Iscariot – who betrayed Jesus with a kiss.
The reason I reference Dante is not for theological substance – he was not an inspired writer. But it’s to put a bold outline around the danger of abusing someone’s compassion. Deceiving people who are trying to do good is probably one of the best ways to spread cynicism and stop them from doing good in the future. So not only are you yourself a net negative on the world – your abuse actually prevents further net positives on behalf of the other people. We can warn others about this, but Paul is telling us that it is our job to resist becoming cynical when this happens to us.
And Paul lays out this idea that at just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we do not give up. I can tell you that in your walk with the Lord you are going to hit what feels like a wall. Fear is going to creep up inside of you and all of a sudden you are going to question whether you are good enough and whether your prayers have just been launched into the empty space of a nihilistic universe. But that’s the deception. The truth is, that terrible wall is not there. That wall never existed. The storm is not too severe for you to survive. Just keep going. God pushes us to these moments in our life because it is only in these moments that we let go of our own devices and move forward on faith alone. See, once you’ve repented of your sins and began your walk with Christ – trust is the key to making it last. Trusting Jesus enough to shoulder the responsibility of marching into the unknown is the key to ultimate meaning in this life. It is the key to a life filled with the Spirit which is a life filled with love, peace, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.
So Paul’s final word of advice to the churches in Galatia includes a warning against depending on religion instead of depending on Christ. It’s a warning against using your religiosity to make yourself look better than those around you. So he’s saying do not cast yourself as a “holier-than-thou” type. He says that ultimately religious ritual means nothing if we have not been transformed into a new creation. I cannot find words to speak Paul’s closing statement better than the Scripture itself. So if you would please bow your heads and fix your mind on God as I read to you the words of the Apostle Paul – and this will function as a closing prayer for this message.
11 Notice what large letters i use as i write these closing words in my own handwriting.
12 Those who are trying to force you to be circumcised want to look good to others. They don’t want to be persecuted for teaching that the cross of Christ alone can save. 13 And even those who advocate circumcision don’t keep the whole law themselves. They only want you to be circumcised so they can boast about it and claim you as their disciples.
14 As for me, may I never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of that cross,[c] my interest in this world has been crucified, and the world’s interest in me has also died. 15 It doesn’t matter whether we have been circumcised or not. What counts is whether we have been transformed into a new creation. 16 May God’s peace and mercy be upon all who live by this principle; they are the new people of God.[d]
17 From now on, don’t let anyone trouble me with these things. For I bear on my body the scars that show I belong to Jesus.
18 Dear brothers and sisters,[e] may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
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