GALATIANS| Week 5

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Jesus!

You can listen to the podcast of this message here.

Galatians chapter 6 shows us how a life in the Spirit brings FREEDOM in 3 Key Areas of our life. When you live life outside of God’s Spirit you may drift in and out of these freedoms randomly, but the Spirit of God brings you the power to LIVE in these freedoms.

Galatians 6:1 Dear brothers and sisters, if another believer is overcome by some sin, you who are godly should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path. And be careful not to fall into the same temptation yourself.

 

The first freedom Paul talks about is the:

1. The Freedom to Walk Humbly

other options would be judging and condemning people. OR Ignoring and writing off people. OR Helping people fearfully or jealously.

• Gently and Humbly (with meekness). Our kneejerk reaction is usually “WHY did you do this? This is so easy and you screwed it up!”
• We consider ourselves immune to such a problem.

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.

• Your ego is not your amigo.
• The one who toots his horn the loudest is usually in the deepest fog.
• Love is bighearted not bigheaded.
• You impress others with what you know. You impact others with how you love. 

Galatians 6:4 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.

Social media has only exacerbated our need and ability to compare ourselves to others.  Pauls says, Keep your nose down. Work Hard. Don’t compare yourself to others.

Verses 1-5 talk to us about the FREEDOM TO WALK HUMBLY.

Verses 6-10 teach a whole new FREEDOM

Galatians 6:6 Those who are taught the word of God should provide for their teachers, sharing all good things with them. 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. 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.

Paul teaches us here:

2. The Freedom to Give Freely

The New Testament teaches several ways to sow into the Spirit. All of them point to one thing. Giving money away. Not randomly. Not emotionally. Systematically giving a percentage of your money into good soil.

Our local cotton, corn, maize farmers don’t wake up and think I want corn today, I will go throw some seeds out. They don’t randomly throw some here and then some here. They don’t plant some one year and then wait 3-4 years and plant some more. They go out every year and plant seeds. They sow seed. They systematically sow seed into the ground every year and then work hard in participating with the farming of the plant.

ONLY GOD makes the seed grow, but the farmer has to part with seed.

What Paul is teaching PromiseLand this morning in verse 7 – Don’t MOCK God by thinking you can do what you want with your resources and expect to be blessed and taken care of. No, he says, “You will always harvest what you plant.” Systematically, sow money into good soil, which in verse 6 says “The local church”. Where you are fed. When you do this, YOU WILL REAP A HARVEST OF BLESSING IF YOU DON’T GIVE UP.

Those of you that have put your faith in Jesus and are learning to trust him daily, make a decision as a family, we are going to sow seed into God’s kingdom. We are thankful for this local church, we appreciate what we see and feel here. We are going to start giving every month like clockwork. We are going to automate the important.

Make it first. Before anything else can get in and steal it. Sow your seed before you eat it or send it to place where it will be destroyed.

Let’s go back to scripture:

Galatians 6:12 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, 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.

3. The Freedom to Love Purely

Not only is our giving and our works important, but also our motives, are important.

Spiritual change is an inside job begun with the new birth and sustained by a new power—the Holy Spirit.