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Falling From Grace
Galatians 5:1-15
THEME: Sanctification by
the Spirit; saved by faith and living by law perpetrates falling from grace;
saved by faith and walking in the Spirit produces fruit of the Spirit
Sanctification By The
Spirit (5:1)
Justification is by faith;
sanctification is by the Spirit of God. Scripture tells us, however, that
the Lord Jesus Christ has been made unto us sanctification -- that is, God
sees us complete in Him. Regardless of how good you become, you will never
meet His standard. You will never be like Christ in this life. Christ is the
only One about whom God said, "...This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased" (Matt. 3:17). But the body of believers, the church, has been put
in Christ. He is the Head of the body; those of us who are believers are His
body in the world today -- and we should represent Him, by the way.
The method of
sanctification is by the Spirit. In this section we see the Spirit versus
the flesh. Either it is a do-it-yourself Christian life or somebody else
will have to do it through you. His method is doing it through you.
In this section we see
liberty versus bondage. Any legal system puts you under bondage, and you
have to follow it meticulously.
Getting a ticket for
speeding is an illustration. It
will correct your future behavior.
You become bound to obey.
It hurts to have to pay a fine, and we don't want to hurt. It is an example
of legalism that we all understand.
Saved By Faith And Living
By Law Perpetrates Falling From Grace (5:1-15)
Paul begins on the note of
liberty which we have in Christ. This is what it means to fall from grace:
you are saved by faith, then you drop down to a law level to live. We will
see this illustrated as we move into this section.
Stand fast therefore in the
liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with
the yoke of bondage [Gal. 5:1].
He is saying here that not
only are we saved by faith rather than by law, but law is not to be the rule
of life for the believer. We are not to live by law at all. The law
principle is not the rule for Christian living. Paul is saying that since we
have been saved by grace we are to continue on in this way of living. Grace
supplies the indwelling and filling of the Spirit to enable us to live on a
higher plane than law demanded. This all is our portion when we trust Christ
as Savior. It is in Christ that we receive everything -- salvation and
sanctification. Don't tell me I need to seek a second blessing. When I came
to Christ, I got everything I needed. Paul tells me that I have been blessed
with all spiritual blessings in Christ Jesus. Let's believe Him and start
trusting. Let's stop trying some legal system of rules.
We have a liberty in
Christ. He does not put us under some little legal system. We can use the
Ten Commandments as a law of life, but we are called to a higher level to
live. That level is where there is liberty in Christ. I have a liberty in
Jesus Christ, and that liberty is not a rule, but a principle. It is that I
am to please Him. My conduct should be to please Jesus Christ -- not to
please you, not to please any organization, but only to please Him. That is
the liberty that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ. "Stand fast therefore in
the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again
with the yoke of bondage."
Behold, I Paul say unto
you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing [Gal. 5:2].
Circumcision was the badge
of the Law. A badge indicates to what organization or lodge you belong.
Perhaps Christians should wear a badge because that is about the only way
you could tell that some people are Christians. But Paul says that if you so
much as put on the badge of the Law, which is circumcision, then Christ does
not profit you anything.
Imagine a person claims
they found a miracle drug that cured all that ailed them.
They give a glowing recommendation for it, and then they say, "I also
took another medicine new to the market during the same time frame."
That last statement really blows the whole deal.
You know nothing!
Now notice carefully what
Paul is saying. If you trust Christ plus something else you are not saved.
If you go so far as to be circumcised, which is only the badge of the Law,
or if you go through some other experience and rest your salvation on that,
"Christ shall profit you nothing." How can He profit you anything when you
have made up a bottle of your own concoction rather than trusting Him alone
for your salvation?
The way Dr. Lewis Sperry
Chafer put it always impressed me. It was something like this: "I want to so
trust Christ that when I come into His presence and He asks me, 'Why are you
here?" I can say, 'I am here because I trusted You as my Savior.' If He
asked me, 'Well, that is commendable, but what have you done? I happen to
know that you were president of a seminary, and that you were baptized. You
were also a member of a church. You did many fine things during your
ministry,' then I would reply, 'It is all true, but I never trusted in any
of it for salvation. I trusted only You, my Lord.' " Is that the way you are
trusting Christ? Paul makes it very strong when he says, "if ye be
circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing." If you trust anything other
than Christ, you are not a Christian.
For I testify again to
every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law [Gal.
5:3].
You cannot draw out of the
Law just those things that you like. You cannot leave out the penalties and
a great deal of the detail. You must take the whole Law or nothing. I am
delighted that I am not under the Law. I have liberty in Christ! I must
confess that I have a problem of always pleasing Him, but He is the One I am
trying to please. I am not following some legal system.
Christ is become of no
effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen
from grace [Gal. 5:4].
If you have been saved by
trusting Christ, then go down to the low level of living by the Law, you
have fallen from grace. This is what "falling from grace" actually means.
Falling from grace does not mean falling into some open sin or careless
conduct, and by so doing forfeiting your salvation so that you have to be
saved all over again. It has no reference to that at all.
There are two mighty works
of God which stand between the man in his fallen condition and man in
service to God. These are salvation and sanctification. As we have seen,
salvation is justification by faith. That is all-important. Sanctification
means that after you are saved you are to come up to a new plane of living.
Now how does God make a
saved sinner good? Well, He gives him a new nature. Then he is to keep the
Law? Oh, no. Emphatically no. This doesn't mean he is to break the Law, but
he is called to live on a higher plane. There is no good in the old nature.
Paul found that out, and he also found out from experience that there is no
power in the new nature. As to salvation he said, "For I know that in me
(that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing," and he also found out,
"...to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find
not" (Rom. 7:18). And he cries out as a saved man, "O wretched man that I
am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom. 7:24). He is
not afraid that he is going to lose his salvation, but he is a defeated
Christian. God gives a new principle. We will find in this chapter that the
new principle is the fruit of the Spirit.
Living the Christian life
by this method for some Christians is as farfetched as living on the moon!
They never expect to live there. Perhaps they have never even heard about
the possibility. This is the life He wants us to live -- by faith. We are
saved by grace; we are to live by grace.
For we through the Spirit
wait for the hope of righteousness by faith [Gal. 5:5].
This is the only verse in
this letter that even vaguely sounds prophetic.
Jesus is that blessed hope we wait for.
But in a letter which has the goal of emphasizing walking in the
Spirit and not the flesh - you don't need much challenge about being
righteous, rather, you focus on trusting and waiting for the true
righteousness which is from above.
For in Jesus Christ neither
circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh
by love [Gal. 5:6].
No legal apparatus will
produce a Christian life. The formula is simple: "faith which worketh by
love." That is the way to live the Christian life. Faith will work by love.
Love will be the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
Ye did run well; who did
hinder you that ye should not obey the truth? [Gal. 5:7].
Paul chides the Galatians.
He is giving them a gentle rebuke. They were doing excellently until the
Judaizers came along. "The truth" is the gospel, of course, and the Lord
Jesus Christ in person.
This persuasion cometh not
of him that calleth you [Gal. 5:8].
It didn't come from Christ
but from a different source.
A little leaven leaveneth
the whole lump [Gal. 5:9].
In Scripture, both Old and
New Testaments, leaven is always used as a symbol of evil. In Matthew 13:33,
when the woman hid leaven in three measures of meal, the leaven was not the
gospel. It may be the kind of a "gospel" that is passing around today as
legal tender, but it is still evil. In fact, Paul says that it is no gospel
at all. The Lord Jesus warned His disciples of the leaven of the Pharisees
(see Matt. 16:6). I think we need to be warned today of the leaven of
legalism. It is an awful thing.
Legalism says that when
Christ died on the cross for you and me, He did not give us a full package
of salvation, but that I have to go through a ritual of baptism or seek
something else from the Holy Spirit or my life must follow a certain pattern
to get the rest of it. My friend, I received it all when I accepted Christ.
Now I may have experiences after I am saved, but that does not add to my
salvation. Christ is the One who wrought out our salvation. The Lord Jesus
said that the woman would take the leaven and hide it in three measures of
meal, symbolic of the gospel. In other words, leaven has been hidden in the
gospel -- and that makes it palatable to the natural man.
We all like bread rather
than crackers, right? Leaven
tastes good! And so it is w/ the
natural man.
I have confidence in you
through the Lord, that ye will be none otherwise minded: but he that
troubleth you shall bear his judgment, whosoever he be [Gal. 5:10].
Paul believed that the
Galatians would ultimately reject the teaching of the Judaizers. He says, "I
have confidence in you" that when you get your feet back on the ground, and
your heads out of the clouds, you will return to the gospel that was
preached to you, and you will see that the teaching of the Judaizers was an
intrusion, that it was leaven.
And I, brethren, if I yet
preach circumcision, why do I yet suffer persecution? then is the offence of
the cross ceased [Gal. 5:11].
This verse is important to
note. Paul asks, "If I preach circumcision, why am I persecuted?" Adding
something to the gospel makes it acceptable. The gospel, by itself, is not
acceptable to the natural man. Preaching the gospel does antagonize some
folk. Paul asks, "If I am including something else in the gospel, why am I
being persecuted?"
One way of knowing you
stand for the right is many will disagree, and you may sometimes have to
stand alone!
"Then is the offence of the
cross ceased." Actually, the cross of Christ is an offense to all that man
prides himself in. It is an offense to his morality because it tells him his
work cannot justify him. It is an offense to his philosophy because its
appeal is to faith and not to reason. It is an offense to the culture of man
because its truths are revealed to babes. It is an offense to his sense of
pride because God chooses the poor and humble. It is an offense to his will
because it calls for an unconditional surrender. It is an offense to his
self esteem because it shows the exceeding sinfulness of the human heart.
And it is an offense to the core of his being because it tells him he must
be born again. You know, that was almost insulting to the Pharisee Nicodemus
that night when Jesus told him, religious as he was, that he must be born
again. For the same reason, a lot of ministers who are preaching the New
Birth get in trouble with their congregations. Some members don't want to be
born again -- they feel like they're good enough as they are. It's an insult
to them.
I would they were even cut
off which trouble you [Gal. 5:12].
I wish these Judaizers were
removed from you.
For, brethren, ye have been
called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but
by love serve one another [Gal. 5:13].
There are three methods of
trying to live the Christian life -- two of them will not work. One is a
life of legalism, which Paul has been discussing. The other is the life of
license, which Paul discussed in Romans 6: After we are saved by grace, can
we live in sin? Paul's answer is, "God forbid." You can't live in sin and be
a Christian. Now you may fall into sin, but you will get out of it. The
Prodigal Son can get in the pig pen, but he won't settle down there -- the
pig pen won't be his forwarding address. He will leave it. The Christian
life is neither the life of legalism nor the life of license.
The third method of living
the Christian life is the life of liberty, and in the remainder of this
chapter he will give us the modus operandi for living by liberty. The life
of legalism includes not only the Ten Commandments, but a set of regulations
that Bible believers follow today. They tell you where you can't go, and
what you can't do.
It is grace, not law, that
frees us from doing wrong and allows us to do right. Grace does not set us
free to sin, but it sets us free from sin. You see, the believer should
desire to please God, not because he must please Him like a slave, but
because he is a son and he wills to please his Father. He does what God
wants, not because he fears to do otherwise like an enemy, but because he
wants to do it, for God is his friend. God is the One who loves him. He
serves God, not because of pressure from without such as the Law, but
because of a great principle within -- even the life of Christ that is
within him.
We serve God because we
love Him. The Lord Jesus said to His disciples, "If you love Me, keep My
commandments" (see John 14:15). I wonder if a disciple had said, "I don't
love You," would our Lord have said, "Then forget about My commandments"?
The whole basis of obedience is a love relationship to Him. The Law never
could bring us to that place. It was negative to begin with. It produced a
negative goodness -- which is the kind of goodness a great many people have
today. You can say, "I don't do this and I don't do that." But what DO you
do? My friend, all legal systems produce only negative goodness. They never
rise to the sphere of positive goodness where one does things to please God
for the very love of pleasing Him. He wants us to serve Him on that kind of
basis.
Now Paul is going to reduce
it to a simple statement, then he will amplify what he means.
For all the law is
fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself [Gal. 5:14].
Here the Law is reduced to
the lowest common denominator. This is the acid test for those who think
they are living by the Law. "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." The
"one word" is love.
But if ye bite and devour
one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another [Gal. 5:15].
I have always wanted to
preach a sermon on this text, and I would entitle it "Christian Cannibals."
Did you know that in many churches today the Christians bite, eat, and
devour one another? And the bite is as bad as that of a mad dog. There is
nothing you can take that will cure the wound. All you can do is suffer.
There are a lot of mad dogs running around today. They will bite and devour
you. Unfortunately, the world has passed by the church in our day, and I'm
sorry it has because there are many fine people in our churches and many
wonderful preachers throughout this country. But the lives of some
Christians are keeping the world away from certain churches. I personally
know examples of this. I know churches in which the Christians have no love
for each other, but they bite and devour one another. It is a terrible
thing! Aren't you glad for the
feeling of family and spirit of unity we enjoy?
It's all made possible by grace, and not the law.
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