THE POINT OF DEPARTURE

 THE POINT OF DEPARTURE

"I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel” Galatians 1:6. 

Introduction

We live in the age of Relativism where the importance of a thing is measured by the individual. It’s a strange world indeed in which everyone gets to be the centre of the universe! This means that we live in a world where absolutes have been done away with. People fashion gods after their own perceived image. Almighty God is simply and blatantly ignored as if He doesn’t exist by some. While others over emphasize one or two of God’s attributes while ignoring the rest.

You don’t hear much of God as “a consuming fire” nowadays. Truth is no longer seen as absolute but relative to the individual. It’s common to hear people say things like, “Your truth is different from my truth!” We can be thankful that God is our Rock, our unchanging point of reference, and that His Word, which is truth, endures forever. His Gospel is everlasting.

We’re going to be talking a bit about the Gospel this in the following. Most, if not all, know that the word “gospel” means “good news.” The good news is not that Jesus Christ died and was resurrected. The good news is that Jesus died for sinners! But why is it that the ordinary “Joe” in the street responds, at best, with an “Oh that’s nice” when you present the gospel to him? Well, it’s to do with this age of Relativism that I was talking about. The Gospel is only “good news” for “sinners”.

People nowadays think a sinner is someone who runs around with an axe looking for someone to chop up! Most of us look pretty good when compared to an axe-murderer. But how do you measure up when compared to a holy and righteous God, a God who will judge the living and the dead by His Son Jesus Christ?

Psalm 7:11 says, “God is a just judge, and God is angry with the wicked every day.” But we live in an age when people don’t see themselves as wicked! They see themselves as innocent victims, as a people who have been sinned against. “It’s everyone else who’s wicked. Not me! And I deserve an apology.”

It’s true that some people are victims. But they’re also sinners like the rest of us. Most people will admit to being slightly less than perfect. “To err is human” they say. Yet God is going to judge us according to our errors. God calls our errors sin and wickedness!

The point I make is this: God hasn’t changed. He is still angry with sinners every day. But sinners have changed in the sense that they have little or no concept of a God who is angry with the wicked. They have no concept of what the Bible means when it says a man is wicked. Let me illustrate what I mean.

On July 8, 1741, a man named Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon in a friend’s church. He read his sermon word for word. He tried to read his sermon in a controlled tone of voice, so as not to unduly manipulate people’s emotions. The language and imagery he used was so vivid that the congregation trembled uncontrollably. People began to cry out to God for mercy, for salvation! The title of his now famous sermon was, “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.” The conclusion of his sermon contained a tender Gospel appeal to sinners.

“Five hundred people were converted in the community that day, sparking one of the most dramatic episodes of revival in the Great Awakening.” Jonathan “Edwards is looked upon nowadays as a stern and loveless preacher who delighted in terrifying his hearers with colourful descriptions of the torments of hell.” But the truth of the matter is that he was a warm and sensitive pastor. He was a loving husband to his wife and a caring father to his children.

We live in an age where God is proclaimed as a take him or leave him sugar-daddy. A Santa Claus in the clouds. The Great Psychiatrist in the sky. The Gospel appeal is no longer to sinners in the hands of an angry God. The gospel is fast becoming a course you take in order to build up your wounded self-esteem. “Do you feel as if the world has dealt unfairly with you? Then come to Jesus and He’ll make you feel on top of the world!” That’s not the Gospel. The Gospel is good news to sinners, i.e., to sinners! That’s what Jesus means where He says, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

The Gospel is not a quick fix for people who are having a bad day, a bad life. Oh, we have to rescue the Gospel from this present evil age. Jonathan Edwards preached his sermon in 1741. I don’t think I’ve heard any like it in many years. Nowadays they call that type of sermon “Fire and Brimstone”. However, I would call it accurately preaching the Word of God. Edwards lived in the 1700s. A long time ago. He knew what the gospel was, and he preached it. Charles Haddon Spurgeon live in the 1800s. He too knew what the gospel was, and he preached it.

Spurgeon gives us this wise counsel, “Avoid a sugared gospel as you would shun sugar of lead. Seek that gospel which rips and tears and cuts and wounds and hacks and even kills, for that is the gospel that makes alive again. And when you have found it, give good heed to it. Let it enter into your inmost being. As the rain soaks into the ground, so pray the Lord to let His gospel soak into your soul.”

The general gist of the following is summed up in these words: Keep your eyes on the grace of Christ so you don’t depart from it.

People who should have known better were turning their backs on God’s grace in Christ. They had it all. But they wanted to give it away! They were like the dog in Aesop’s fable, the dog with the bone in its mouth. It saw its reflection in the water and opened its mouth to snatch what it thought was a bigger bone. All it did was lose the bone it had as it sank to the bottom of the river. The dog ended up with nothing. These Galatians were doing something of the same thing. They were giving up the gospel they had, for a distorted image of it. They were losing their hold on grace.

We can be thankful that the Lord never loses His hold on us. He never moves from His position. The Lord is the immovable Rock. The Rock of Ages, unchanging. However, I’m sure you’ll agree that we sometimes move from Him. We’re all prone to backsliding from time to time, even whole congregations! Some people backslide to the point of proving they were never Christians in the first place. But let’s keep our eyes on the place where they should be.

Know What You Believe

What did the Galatians believe? Where were the Galatians to start with? What was their point of departure? Well, we are told in Galatians 1:6 that God had called them “in the grace of Christ”. So, what is “the grace of Christ”? First, we’ll need to figure out what the word grace means in this instance. In this case “grace” is undeserved favour.

If I see a mosquito biting my bare arm and I don’t swat it, that’s undeserved favour! If someone steals a loaf of bread from you to feed his starving family and you let him off with it, that’s grace! If people grab hold of your son whom you love and cherish with all your heart and soul and kill him, and you forgive them, that’s undeserved favour. If you were to give some of these people who were responsible for the death of your son a palace to live in, that is grace. The grace of Christ is that He has forgiven a sinful people who put Him on the cross. Not only that, He wants them to spend eternity with Him in a palace Paradise. That’s undeserved kindness, and favour, that’s the grace of Christ.

The Galatians know what the grace of Christ is. They understand the Gospel. They had learned all about the grace of God in the death of Jesus Christ. They knew that each of them had been like a mosquito biting the hands and feet of God. They knew that it was their sin that drew blood from Jesus on the cross. They knew that they had stolen bread from the Lord, when all they needed to do was ask and He would have given it gladly, for them and their family! Such is the generosity of the Covenant keeping God.

They knew that they were sinners deserving to be swatted off the face of the earth by God. But God had forgiven them. They had received the grace that God offers through His beloved His Son Jesus Christ. Paul had proclaimed the Gospel to them on his first missionary journey. And also at the beginning of his second missionary journey. But now the Galatians were deciding to depart from grace.

The Apostle Paul is amazed at how quickly the Galatians are abandoning the Doctrines of Grace. He’s having trouble getting his mind around what they’re doing. He’s been to Galatia. He’s met them in person. He knows they’re a Bible believing church. He knows they’re Evangelical. He knows they’re gospel base. He knows they know that they have been saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

Paul’s already paraded the crucified Christ on a placard, so to speak, before them. “Christ was delivered up because of our offenses! He was raised because of our justification! You Galatians know all of this stuff. So why are you turning your backs on it?” They were like a dog we used to have when we were kids. My mum used to feed it the best of food. It loved liver. My mum used to stink the whole house out boiling liver for this stupid dog because it loved it. And yet it would still go a tear up our neighbour’s garbage and eat rotten, maggot infested scraps of meat!

The Galatian know that they are saved by grace, undeserved favour. But now they’re acting like a bunch of kids playing with matches. Paul is attempting to put out the bushfire before it burns the whole crop. He can see that they’ve taken their eyes off the grace of God. They’ve begun to look at a distortion of the gospel, and like Aesop’s dog with the bone, it looks bigger and better. Some of them have been opening their mouths to swallow it.

The Judaizers had been adding to the gospel. They had been presenting a gospel with certain strings attached. Paul’s telling them to get their eyes off it and back onto the real gospel. He’s telling them to focus once again on the grace of Christ.

Keep Your Eyes on Christ

You must keep your eyes on the grace of Christ. If you know the Christ of the Gospel, then don’t take your eyes off Him. “I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him” says Paul. Turning away so soon from whom? From the One who called you to the great marriage Feast. The One who has poured out His love upon you. The One who fed you the food of angels, manna from heaven, the Bread of Life.

“Why? Why? Why are you going after the rotten, maggot infested scraps? Why are you departing from the Lord’s Table of Grace? The Lord has prepared a table for you, in the presence of your enemies. He’s anointed your head with oil. Your cup runs over. And you’re asking to be excused from the table? I marvel at you Galatians. What are you thinking about?” They had received God’s grace through trusting in Christ and His work on the cross. They had repented and believed in the gospel that Paul had preached to them. But now they were going after a distorted reflection of the gospel, a non-gospel.

God reveals His grace to you in His Gospel. You see His grace by contemplating what Jesus Christ did on the cross. You receive His grace by believing Jesus Christ died for your sins. You prove the reality of God’s grace by living a life of obedient gratitude to God.

You would be acting like an ingrate, by going after the bait of the enemy. You catch a fish by hiding the hook in some juicy morsel. “You Galatians! There are sharp hooks in what the Judaizers are feeding you. Can’t you see that it’s the devil who’s reeling you in?”

But there are no strings attached to the Gospel. There are no hidden hooks, no lines, and no sinkers. Nobody’s going to smack you over the head as your gasping for air. The Gospel is for repentant sinners, not stunned mullet. Keep your wits about you. Think things through. Don’t believe every fish-tale that people tell you.

Paul cares about the Galatians. He cares about the Lord’s Church. The Lord loves His Church. He loves His children. He doesn’t want to see His children led away by the big bad wolf.  So keep the grace of God before your eyes at all times. Therefore, keep reminding yourself over and over what the gospel is. The Gospel is that Jesus Christ has done everything that needs to be done to save you, a sinner, from your sins. He said and meant these words just before He died on the cross, “It is finished.”

At His death Christ had finished everything that needed to be done to save sinners. His resurrection was proof of “Mission Accomplished!” If Christ had not risen again from the dead, it would have meant His mission to save sinners was a failure. It would have meant, plain and simple, that He couldn’t even save Himself, let alone miserable sinners such as us. So then, Christ’s crucifixion was on behalf of sinners.

Jesus tells us in Mark 10:45 that He came “to give His life a ransom for many” not for “all” but for “many”. And who are these many? They are whosoever believes in Him. God, then, reveals His grace to those sinners who believe in His Son. Those who don’t believe in His Son are condemned already, and God’s wrath or curse is still upon them.

“God is angry with the wicked every day” Psalm 7:11. God is a consuming fire, but we can be thankful that God is also love. If God was simply a consuming fire we would see no mercy. If God were simply love we would see no justice. But God is both love and a consuming fire always and unchangeably at the same time.

God must punish sin to satisfy His justice. But praise His holy name that He is full of mercy and grace. We should pray along with John Knox, that great Scottish Reformer, “O Lord! be merciful to my great offence; and deal not with me according to my iniquity, but according to the multitude of Thy mercies.” The Psalmist says, “His mercy endures forever!” Therefore, the grace of God is revealed to fallen man in the Everlasting Gospel.

The Gospel is that Jesus Christ died for sinners. Are you convinced you are a sinner? I don’t mean by that that you admit you’re less than perfect. Admitting you’re a sinner means that you know that God is perfect. It means that you know God is Holy and Righteous. It means that you know He is a “Consuming Fire”. It means that you know how unrighteous you are because you know how righteous God is. It’s a relative thing -- you see how much of a sinner you are because you can see how holy God is. If you’ve never heard about a holy and righteous God you cannot possibly know how much of a sinner you are.

It’s not popular nowadays to talk about a righteous and holy God. But how else will we know we are sinners if we refuse to let God be God? To know you are a sinner is to know that God would consume you in your sins, were it not for the grace you have found in Jesus Christ. Admitting you’re a sinner is to admit that you are at the mercy of a God who detests sin. To admit you’re a sinner is to cry out to God for His mercy. It is to grovel at the feet of His Son Jesus Christ until He says that you may stand. To admit that you are a sinner is to keep on kissing the feet of Jesus after He has forgiven your sins.

Ask yourself, “Am I a sinner?” If you are such a sinner then I have good news for you. The good news is that Jesus Christ has died to save you from your sins. You will be saved from the wrath to come simply by accepting His free offer of grace in Jesus Christ His Son. But you won’t accept God’s offer of grace unless you see yourself as a lost, and helpless sinner.

Think about it, if I threw you a life-ring in the middle of the street, you would think I wanted to play a game of Frisbee or something. But if I threw you the same life-ring when you were going under the water for the third time, you’d know that I was trying to save your life.

We live in an age where it’s unpopular to talk about sin, the angry wrath of God, the fires of hell. But how are you going to see the grace of God offered to you in the gospel if we won’t talk about these things? To see the grace of God in the gospel you’ll need to see yourself as the type of sinner I’ve just mentioned. That is, the one who is willing to keep on washing the feet of Jesus with repentant tears. The one who is ashamed to lift his head in the presence of the Lord.

The Gospel means good news. So that must mean there’s bad news too. The bad news is that if you refuse to see yourself as the type of sinner that I’ve described, then God’s wrath remains upon your head. Therefore, you need to repent and believe in the gospel. That’s what these Galatians had done. Yet they were turning their backs on the grace of God! They were taking their eyes off the grace of Christ, and were thus departing from it. Therefore, the exhortation is: Never depart from Christ and His Grace.

Conclusion

Is it possible that we have departed from Christ and His grace? Is it possible that some people, maybe even you, go to church seeking to have their ears tickled? Is it possible you attended church hoping to have your self-esteem built up, only to be told you’re a sinner?

Is it possible that you’re one of those thinking, “Why is this guy giving us all this fire and brimstone stuff? Why doesn’t he write about the love of God? He just keeps harping on about sin and a holy God!” If this is the case, then I put it to you that like these Galatians. You have departed from the grace of Christ! But the Gospel remains the same. It is good news, but only to sinners.

When Jonathan Edwards preached his now famous sermon, “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”, five hundred people were converted because they knew he was talking about them. And they knew he was talking about the unchanging God. They didn’t sit there and give the sermon marks out of ten. Instead, they became “doers” of God’s Word. They cried out to God for mercy. And they found it. They found it in the grace of Christ. They heard about the grace of Christ in the unadulterated gospel. This is the gospel we need to keep our eyes on. This is the gospel we must never depart from. This is the gospel we must proclaim, i.e., that Jesus died only for sinners!

Are you a sinner? The keep your eyes on the grace of Christ and you won’t depart from it. Neither will He depart from you. I’ll close with these words of Spurgeon, “We want again Luthers, Calvins, Bunyans, Whitefields, men fit to mark eras, whose names breathe terror in our [foes] ears. We have dire need of such. Whence will they come to us? They are the gifts of Jesus Christ to the Church, and will come in due time. He has power to give us back again a golden age of preachers, a time as fertile again of great divines and mighty ministers as was the Puritan age, and when the good old truth is once more preached by men whose lips are touched as with a live coal from off the altar, this shall be the instrument in the hand of the Spirit for bringing about a great and thorough revival of religion in the land. I do not look for any other means of converting men beyond the simple preaching of the gospel and the opening of men’s ears to hear it. The moment the Church of God shall despise the pulpit, God will despise her. It has been through the ministry that the Lord has always been pleased to revive and bless His Churches.”