Vineyard Church of North Grand Rapids

Ray Befus Galatians 6:1-10 The Time for Talking is Past         10 January 2010

Last September, when we first began our study of Galatians (and God’s amazing grace), I invited everyone to read Brennan Manning’s book The Ragamuffin Gospel.  Wow, what a book! I read it a year ago, and I haven’t been able to stop going back to it and thinking about it.  You can still purchase a copy at our information desk this morning.  A few weeks into the study (last October), one of my friends came to me with a concern.  He said that in focusing on God’s amazing grace, he didn’t think Manning put enough weight on sin and repentance. I responded that like the Apostle Paul, who wrote multiple letters (each one with a different emphasis), Manning has written multiple books, each one with a different emphasis. If my friend wanted hear Brennan Manning to speak more specifically and sharply to sin and repentance, he could try reading, The Importance of Being Foolish—How to Think Like Jesus. If The Ragamuffin Gospel offers a soak in a hot tub of grace, where everyone is naked and exposed together (relaxing in the healing warmth of God’s love), The Importance of Being Foolish offers a trip the operating room where a skillful surgeon ruthlessly cuts into his patients to expose the otherwise hidden cancerous growths in their character. As Manning greets his readers in The Importance of Being Foolish, he suggests that in everyone’s spiritual journey, there comes a point when the time for talking is over.  It’s a time for those who simply admire Jesus (but have no intention of actually worshipping him or serving him as their God) to pack up their things and go back home to their real gods, their idols (their job, their friends, their personal pleasures, rule-keeping). Likewise, there comes a time when those who’ve decided to trust and follow Jesus, to begin taking some personal steps. . . to begin living Jesus’ life in the real world, to begin making the Bible their very practical guide to daily life.  In other words,  you can’t talk forever about your belief in Jesus.  There comes a time when you have to start living Jesus’ life together with other travelers . . . not perfectly, but with honest intention and heart-felt persistence.

It’s just that time in our study of Galatians.  In Paul’s mind, the time for talking is over.  This morning we’ve come to chapter six and Paul has reached the point in his letter when the time for arguing against legalism and explaining grace is over.  If there are some in the Galatian churches who prefer the very real, predictable benefits religious legalism to the freedoms and risks of grace, then Paul might say, as the prophet Hosea said of God’s wayward, OT people, “Ephraim is joined to his idols; leave him alone” (Hosea 4:18).  Let the legalists go; the time for wrangling over their worries and fears is past. The time has come for you Christians in Galatia to move on in freedom from law-keeping, freedom from living like you have to perform for God’s forgiveness, acceptance, and blessing. Legalists sincerely believe that the path to God, the path to pleasing God, the path to heaven is faith, law-keeping, and safety; that is, trusting God for forgiveness for the past, law-keeping for peace of mind in the present, and playing it safe as we move into the future.  In five chapters, Paul has done his best to argue that the Good News—the Gospel of Grace—is that, since Jesus’ death on a cross, there is only one path to both salvation and spiritual growth, and this isn’t a path of law-keeping or safety.  It is the narrow path of trusting Jesus, loving others (as Jesus did), and walking in the Spirit (as Jesus did).  The way into the kingdom is the way on in the kingdom: faith in Jesus, love for others, and taking risks with the Holy Spirit’s leading.  

To live this way is anything but safe.  That’s why so many religious folks choose being “Nice” over actually picking up their crosses and following Jesus. Trusting Jesus and loving like Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit is anything but safe.  In Paul’s six chapter letter, we’re beyond the point of trusting Jesus.  Chapters five focuses on the priority of loving over law-keeping.  Chapter six focuses on what loving other people in the power of the Holy Spirit looks like in real life.   A generation ago, C.S. Lewis, wrote, To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to be sure of keeping your heart intact—you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal.  Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries.  Avoid all entanglements.  Lock it up safely in the casket of your selfishness.  And in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change.  It will not be broken.  It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The only place out side of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the dangers of love is in hell”. 

As he launches into chapter six, Paul wants to make sure we’re not just talking freedom and grace, talking faith and love, talking about walking in the Spirit without actually moving our feet, so he outlines how Spirit-filled Jesus-followers can take their first steps to live together in a community characterized by love.  Paul’s vision for the local churches in Galatia has always been that they live together like citizen’s of heaven—each local church in Galatia, functioning like a colony of heaven on earth—where people who’ve lost their way can go and experience a taste of heaven in relationship with people who are meaningfully loving each other as Jesus has loved them. As he ends his letter, Paul is fairly confident that he has won the theological battle with the agitators.  There is no life in legalism. He’s pretty sure the new Christians in Galatia will choose the freedoms of grace over law-keeping.  But Paul wants more than a decision to believe the Gospel.  In verses 1-10, Paul calls the Galatians to start walking out their talk in three specific, practical ways.  Let’s READ these verses together.

First, Paul informs the Galatians that men and women who love like Jesus start moving toward the people they know who are stuck in sin (v. 1). Love covers a mutltude of sins, so our normal response to all the sinning that is part of normal church life, is to suffer-long, forgive 70x7, and keep loving.  But when a member of your faith-family really seems stuck in a sin or pattern of sin, it’s time to shine your light on what’s happening between you.  Paul has in mind Christians you know who are disappointing you, frustrating you, hurting you, or creating a division in the community. In your mind you might have already labeled them weak, immature, or even hypocrites.  You may have decided that they are untrustworthy or irresponsible. You may have experienced them as selfish or harsh. Can you think of anyone in or around Vineyard North who is stuck in some sinful pattern that is disappointing you or even hurting you and is doubtless, hurting themselves and others who are even closer to them than you are?  Loving them like Jesus loves them would mean taking the initiative to move toward them, not withdrawing from them in order to protect yourself from more pain. 

Someone will object and say, “Paul, I don’t think I have any right to judge anyone else, as to whether or not they are sinning. I’m a sinner myself, so don’t ask me to judge anyone else!”  And Paul would say, “You’re right, don’t judge them.  But you recognize that they are stuck in sin, don’t you?  You can see that they’re falling short of Scripture’s invitations and instructions.  You can see that others are being hurt.  You, yourself feel some disappointment, even pain. Recognizing sin in one another isn’t judging.  Actually, when we recognize sin in another Christian and we silently withdraw from them, most often we are judging them in a passive-aggressive, self-protective manner. We’re silently judging that they aren’t worth the trouble they’ve caused us or may still create for us. 

This is very costly love. Who knows, if you try to challenge some of these sinful people, they (or their friends) may try to nail you to a cross.  It really is easier to go to church, sit by yourself, and just try to be nice to strangers while you look for your friends.  But to love others like Jesus loves us, is to get involved, to risk personal misunderstanding and even rejection to make a difference.  So, Paul says, go gently. Don’t fall into the sin trap by copping an attitude yourself, trying to shame them, or powering-up on them and forcing a decision. Just step in to their space and ask permission to tell them what you’ve experienced. You’re not God. You’re just a brother or a sister trying to live as someone who really loves when loving becomes difficult. Don’t try to be a Savior or a therapist.  Just tell them how you’re experiencing them. Don’t tell them what they should do. Just let them know that you’d like to be able to trust them, relax with them, be good friends, grow with them, and serve with them. But right now you feel very unsettled by their attitudes or actions, unsure of their motives, concerned about the trajectory of their life.  You might say to me, “No way. I’m not going to confront anyone about their personal life! What if I refuse to risk this kind of loving?  Well, we might wonder if we aren’t ourselves stuck . . . somewhere between legalism (privately earning our own points with God and feeling good about ourselves) . . . stuck between legalism and actually living like Jesus among real people in need of the kind of grace that risks to love.

Second, people who love like Jesus take personal steps to support other believers who are being overwhelmed by life’s pressures (vv. 2-4).  If you think for one minute that life’s playing field is level, that everyone is born with the same opportunities, same aptitude, and same support network you have . . . you must be a white, college-educated American living in the suburbs of a prospering city. You must be living in a very small, isolated world. Open the eyes of your heart!  If you are prospering with a good job, you have full medical benefits, your health is stable, your marriage is easy, your children don’t appear at risk, your retirement portfolio is growing, and you can’t decide what vacation options to choose in 2010, you’re living in an increasingly smaller slice of the sociological pie.  Most of the people sitting around you have a story that includes a great deal of difficulty, stress, and even stress-induced sickness. One has lost a home to foreclosure, another wakes up wondering if this is the day he will get a pink slip.  Another cares for a spouse with cancer.  A business owner wonders how much longer he can make payroll.  Another is sliding toward depression and addictive struggles as she endures protracted unemployment.  Another comes to church week after week, feeling like a failed parent, hoping that no one asks how her children are doing. Another, feels like he or she has just washed up on shore this morning, having barely survived a month-long rip-tide of grief over the loss of a spouse, just a couple years ago. Another wonders if there is any place in God’s heart for someone with his addiction, her prison record, his struggles with sexual identity.  Another wonders what would happen if he told the strangers sitting near him, that he was thinking about suicide last week. Welcome to a pastor’s world.

But this kind of loving isn’t limited to pastors (vv. 3-4). Paul now suggests that he’s met some Christians are self-deceived.  If someone thinks that they are too busy, doing stuff that’s more important than the burdens other people bring with them to a service like this, they are deceiving themselves.  They’re living in a fantasyland. Everyone of us who has decided to trust Jesus, love others, and walk in step with the Spirit should be able to look back on a week or a month or winter season and be able to identify Jesus-like decisions we made to step toward others in pain to help lift their burdens. It might have been going to someone’s home with a meal, or stopping by to pray with them about the crisis they’re enduring.  It might have been loaning someone a car or housing a single Mom in transition. It might have been joining a home group, so that a couple times a month this weary, stressed-out person would be able to walk into a living room with friends and be surrounded with compassion, worship, and prayer.  It might have been taking the time to host a support group for the unemployed, or mentoring someone coming out of jail, or volunteering at the Pregnancy Resource Center.  It might have been serving in Kids Church so that a tired parent can just sit with God and a few friends for an hour and a half on Sunday morning and be renewed to do it again next week.  But, we ought to be able to test ourselves, by looking back over a month or two and saying “Yes” I’ve made few decisions and invested some time and money in being Jesus to someone who is feeling overwhelmed and close to being swept away by life’s pressures.  Paul brings up this idea of holding ourselves accountable for our compassionate actions or testing ourselves when he writes his second letter to the Corinthians.  “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves.  Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless of course, you fail the test” (II Cor. 13:5). To trust Jesus and follow him, to love others in the kind of ways that Jesus loved, and to walk in step with the Spirit who empowered Jesus, is to become a man or woman who is for others in big ways—in ways that sometimes make the difference in another person’s survival, the survival of a marriage, the survival of a family.

Lastly, Paul tells the Galatians that this kind of love for others cannot be lived out authentically without generous amounts of money . . . giving away our hard-earned cash (vv. 7-10).  A genuinely loving life is marked by financial generosity.  So, when you hear about financial needs and you pray, “Holy Spirit, do you want me to give to this offering?  Do you want me to lead the way in generous giving?  Do you want me to give more than is comfortable? You can expect to hear the Spirit whisper, “Yes, take the next step”.  It’s so much easier to be nice than to pray!

Paul is painfully specific in how we should give.  First, do you have a pastor you look to for Bible teaching and personal guidance. Do you ever tell people on the outside, “This is my church . . . this is my pastor”? Paul could hardly be clearer:   loving like Jesus means sharing all the good things, all the increases in your life, with your pastor or pastors. This is what many of you are doing from week to week in your Sunday offerings. This is what Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church just did and made national news.  Facing, a 900,000 year-end short-fall, church members stopped by the church to give a little extra and gave $2.4 million dollars so that their church could start the new year in the black.  Second, Paul is aware that there are many spiritual causes in addition to weekly, Sunday offerings. Like our own facility renewal offering or next Spring’s international mission offerings.  In his own missionary journeys around eastern Europe, Paul has been raising special offerings for the impoverished, persecuted Christians back in Jerusalem—Christians in need, a world away from Galatia. In vv. 7-9, Paul envisions our financial giving to spiritual causes like planting good seed for a future worth having.  People who sow their money into self-centered ambitions, are living out of their sinful nature.  They’re living and spending like they are the center of God’s universe. They don’t share God’s heart. in grace, God has blessed us so that we can step into Jesus’ shoes in the power of the Spirit and become the answer to a poor family’s prayers for food and clothing, clean water and medical care, a house and an education for their children.  Sometimes the Spirit will open our eyes to needs next door, sometimes a world away.  And we shouldn’t expect an immediate payback.  It may take a long-time to see the harvest for this kind of Spirit-filled giving.  Don’t approach giving to spiritual causes like you might do a marketing, sales, and profitability study in your business. Don’t grow weary in giving—i.e., doing good—or in waiting. Payday will come around.  Proverbs 14:31 states, Whoever is kind to the needy honors God”.  Proverbs 19:17 adds, “Those who are kind to the poor lend to the LORD, and he will reward them for what they have done”.  So, Spirit-filled giving starts with your pastor and your church.  It extends to other spiritual causes outside weekly Sunday offerings.  Finally, Paul adds this clarification in v. 10: while there are a world of good causes out there, from political parties to the Humane Society, from the Lance Armstrong Foundation to Meijer Gardens, if your resources are limited, make sure that your giving starts with the needs of the fellow Christians right around you—your partners on this spiritual journey.  It’s like the rest of Jesus’ mission, start your giving in your city (your Jerusalem) with the needs you know among the people who are right around you. As you have more money, look to a wider circle of influence—i.e., your Samaria.  When needs in Samaria are taken care of, move on to the nations.

Many of you know Eugene Peterson as the pastor who gave us the refreshing modern Bible paraphrase called The Message. He’s also written a book on Galatians called Traveling Light. In his comments on Galatians 6:10, Peterson writes, “The freedom to give is often vitiated [i.e., perverted] by the moral disease of Afghanistanitus, the idea that the real opportunities for significant acts of giving are in faraway places or extreme situations.  Most of us want to be generous with our lives, but we are waiting for a worthily dramatic occasion.  Meanwhile our moral muscles atrophy and our capacity for living freely diminishes.  Paul has a remedy: ‘So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of faith’.” “‘Especially’, says Paul, ‘to the household of faith.’ Is that selfish? Shortsighted? No.  Paul doesn’t direct our attention to those who are close to home because they are more deserving but because they are there, and he knows that the biggest deterrent to the drudgery of caring for an everyday friend is the dreaming of helping an exotic stranger.  Giving from a distance requires less of us—less involvement, less compassion.  It is easier to write out a check for a starving child halfway around the world than to share the burden of our next-door neighbor who talks too much.  The distant child makes a slight dent in my checkbook; the neighbor interferes with my routines and my sleep.  In John Updike’s novel The Coup, a U.S. embassy official Don X. Gibbs is murdered in his attempt to deliver a great load of American junk food to the drought-ridden African land of Kush.  His wife later reflects: ‘I’ve forgotten a lot about Don . . . actually I didn’t see that much of him.  He was always trying to help people.  But he only liked to help people he didn’t know’.” (p. 181).

in everyone’s spiritual journey, there comes a point when the time for talking is over. Grace isn’t just a doctrine; it’s a lifestyle. Are we here because we admire Jesus, or because we’ve decided to trust and follow him? Of course not.  So then,  trusting and following Jesus in grace and freedom looks like this . . . moving toward people who are stuck and pulling them back into the circle of friendship . . . getting involved to support people we know who are being overwhelmed by life’s pressures . . . investing our money in supporting—financially—our pastor and church, the spiritual causes around us, and the fellow Christians nearest to us.

This is what loving people looks like. It’s way different than being nice.  This is what guests in a local church like Vineyard North ought to experience after a couple visits to Sunday morning services or mid-week home groups.  Let me say that I recognize that these are some stiff challenges.  In teaching that, since Jesus’ death on a cross for us, law-keeping is now irrelevant to our salvation and spiritual growth, you’ve never heard me say that grace leads to an easy or painless journey.  In the OT, God did hammer his people on the anvil of law.  He hammered, forged, strengthened and sharpened their character and identity on the anvil of commandments like the ten he gave on Mt. Sinai in Exodus 20.  That was the old covenant.  We now live under the new covenant, established through Jesus death for us. It’s a covenant of grace.  But, God still has a hammer in his hand, and he’s set on forging the character of Jesus in our lives.  But instead of the old anvil—law-keeping—God has chosen a bigger anvil next to a hotter fire.  It’s anvil of love and the fire of the Holy Spirit.  Let’s say you’re struggling in relationship with someone close to you—someone even in this room this morning.  Under the law, you would have gotten hammered with commands like “Do not murder him, do not covet what he has, do not commit adultery against her, do not steal from them.”  So, if you made the hard choice not to harm the one who hurt you, you could rightly go to bed feeling like a good boy or a good girl. 

But now, the cross has introduced a challenge that is much greater.  The command is no longer not to harm the one who hurt you; the command is to love them by serving them (even though they don’t deserve it), laying down your needs and interests to put him or her ahead of yourself (even though they’ve hurt you). The standard is much higher, the challenge much broader. Loving others—not being good—has become the anvil on which God has chosen temper our attitudes, to shape our character, and to transform our broken relationships.  So, trusting Jesus means that  instead of walking away from people who have hurt us or withholding our hearts from them, we will consult the Sermon on the Mount to search for what loving an enemy might actually look like in daily life.  Then with a couple painfully practical ideas in mind, we’re going to pray, “Holy Spirit, how do you want me to love this person today? What should my first step be?”  And as we hold that question quietly in our minds, we write down the thoughts that invade our awareness.  And with that subtle sense of the Spirit’s leading and the freedom to forget about ourselves, we courageously step out to love this person as God loved us while we were still his enemies.  

Happy New Year!  It’s that sort of time . . . time to stretch ourselves and test ourselves . . . time to leave arguments and opinions behind . . . and take a our first personal steps to trust and follow Jesus, to love the people around us by serving them, and to invite the Holy Spirit to empower us to move toward people in need like Jesus did. 

Paul wrote this letter to the Galatians sometime between AD 50-55.  Peter wrote his first letter perhaps about ten years later.  In the opening verses of I Peter, Peter greets the Christians living in Galatia.  I’d like to think that this study of Galatians will continue to live within my heart for the next decade. I’m hoping that in ten years, I’ll be able to look back on and test myself and be able to say, “by the amazing grace of God, I took one step of faith and then another step of love, and I found the Holy Spirit enlarging my heart and strengthening my resolve to continue living Jesus’ life together with you.

Let’s stand.  Lift your hands and receive the blessing Paul gave the Galatians: “May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters” (Galatians 6:18).

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