Galatians Copyrighted material Leading the Way Through Galatians.indd 3 11/21/12 1:39 PM This publication contains The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. The ESV® text appearing in this publication is reproduced and published by cooperation between Crossway and Harvest House Publishers and by permission of Good News Publishers. Unauthorized reproduction of this publication is prohibited. The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV) is adapted from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. All rights reserved. English Standard Version®, ESV® and the ESV® logo are trademarks of Good News Publishers located in Wheaton, Illinois. Used by permission. Verses marked niv are from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Verses marked Phillips are from J.B. Phillips: The New Testament in Modern English, Revised Edition. © J.B. Phillips 1958, 1960, 1972. Used by permission of Macmillan Publishing Company. Cover design by Harvest House Publishers, Inc., Eugene, Oregon Cover photos © iStockphoto/ kBarcin, BrianAJackson Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth & Associates., Inc. Leading the Way Through Galatians Copyright © 2013 by Michael Youssef Published by Harvest House Publishers Eugene, Oregon 97402 www.harvesthousepublishers.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Youssef, Michael. Leading the way through Galatians / Michael Youssef. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-7369-5166-1 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-7369-5167-8 (eBook) 1. Bible. N.T. Galatians — Commentaries. I. Title. BS2685.53.Y68 2013 227'.407— dc23 2012031473 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 / VP-KG / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyrighted material Leading the Way Through Galatians.indd 4 11/21/12 1:39 PM To all faithful preachers, teachers, and Christian leaders who seek to accurately expound the Word of God from pulpits or in Sunday school classes or in home Bible study groups. Copyrighted material Leading the Way Through Galatians.indd 5 11/20/12 1:41 PM Acknowledgments I want to offer all my thanksgiving to the Father in heaven whose Holy Spirit has laid on my heart the writing of this series for the glory of Jesus. I am also immensely grateful to the Lord for send- ing me an able and gifted editor and compiler of my material in Jim Denney. Special thanks to the entire team at Harvest House—and espe- cially to Bob Hawkins Jr., LaRae Weikert, and Rod Morris, who shared my vision and made this dream a reality. My expression of thanks would not be complete without men- tioning the patience and perseverance of Robert and Andrew Wolgemuth of Wolgemuth & Associates, Inc., for managing the many details of such an undertaking. My earnest prayer is that, as I leave this legacy to the next gen- eration, God would raise up great men and women to faithfully serve their generation by accurately interpreting the Word of God. Copyrighted material Leading the Way Through Galatians.indd 6 11/20/12 1:41 PM Contents Introduction: Paul’s Declaration of Liberation . 9 1 Liberated in Christ—or Slaves to Ritual? . 13 Galatians 1:1-9 2 The Uniqueness of Grace . 33 Galatians 1:10-24 3 Freedom from Performance . 49 Galatians 2 4 The Answer to Unfulfilled Needs . 69 Galatians 3:1-14 5 The Long Arm of the Law . 85 Galatians 3:15-29 6 Until Christ Is Formed in You . 99 Galatians 4 7 Liberated in Christ . 117 Galatians 5:1-14 8 Keeping the Supply Line Open . 135 Galatians 5:14-26 9 The Law of Sowing and Reaping . 153 Galatians 6 Notes . 169 Copyrighted material Leading the Way Through Galatians.indd 7 11/20/12 1:41 PM Copyrighted material Leading the Way Through Galatians.indd 8 11/20/12 1:41 PM 1 Liberated in Christ— or Slaves to Ritual? Galatians 1:1-9 ohandas K. Gandhi led the Indian nationalist movement in MBritish-ruled India in the early twentieth century. His example inspired nonviolent freedom movements across the world, includ- ing the civil rights movement in the United States. Gandhi was a Hindu, but he was also an admirer of the words and life of Jesus Christ. There’s a saying often attributed to Gandhi, and though I cannot confirm that he actually said it, it is certainly consistent with other statements he has made: “I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” If only Christians would be more like Christ! Even one of the world’s most scathing atheists has expressed a reluctant admiration for the Lord Jesus. Though biologist Rich- ard Dawkins regularly accuses Christians of hypocrisy, in The God Delusion he writes: “Jesus, if he existed…was surely one of the great 13 Copyrighted material Leading the Way Through Galatians.indd 13 11/20/12 1:41 PM LEADING THE WAY THROUGH GALATIANS ethical innovators of history. The Sermon on the Mount is way ahead of its time. His ‘turn the other cheek’ anticipated Gandhi and Martin Luther King by two thousand years.” 1 As Christians, let’s not be defensive and let’s not be hypocritical. When people outside the church call Christians “hypocrites,” their criticism is all too often true. None of us can claim to always live up to the teachings of Jesus—and many of us have to admit that we regularly fall far short of the Lord’s teachings. Look at our hypocrisy as Christians: We are offended by profan- ity and obscenity (as we should be), yet we wink at the sin of pride (especially our own). We condemn lust and sex outside of marriage (as well we should), but we eagerly engage in gossip, slander, and backbiting and justify it as “telephone ministry.” We condemn the sins of passion, yet we rationalize the sins of a bitter disposition. We speak the language of heaven on Sunday, and breathe hellfire the rest of the week. We speak of the sweetness of knowing Christ, yet we walk around looking as if we’ve been baptized in vinegar. A friend of mine, a former pastor of a prominent church, told me that he once moved the doxology from one part of the worship service to another. He didn’t leave out the doxology and he didn’t change the wording of the doxology—he simply moved it to a dif- ferent place in the order of worship. He received twenty-four let- ters of complaint! We claim we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus alone, yet if the pastor makes the slightest change in our churchly rituals, we treat it as the vilest form of heresy. And we wonder why the world tells us that the church is no longer relevant—and why the two fastest- growing worldviews in America today are Islam and atheism. The world views Christianity as a culture, if not a cult, of hypoc- risy and legalism. We are more interested in enforcing certain legal- istic rules than in enjoying the liberating presence of the Holy Spirit. 14 Copyrighted material Leading the Way Through Galatians.indd 14 11/20/12 1:41 PM Liberated in Christ—or Slaves to Ritual? As Paul told the believers in Corinth, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthi- ans 3:17). Instead of the Spirit of the Lord, the spirit of hypocrisy and legal- ism reigns supreme across much of our evangelical culture today— and this spirit is hindering the work of the Holy Spirit. God doesn’t want to see his people bound up in legalistic rules and rituals. Jesus warned against the hypocrisy and legalism of the scribes and Pharisees when he told the crowd: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger… But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in” (Matthew 23:2-4,13). Like the Lord Jesus, the apostle Paul warns against religious hypocrisy and legalism. As we will see in Galatians 2, trying to save ourselves through legalistic rituals has the opposite effect: it nulli- fies the grace of God, because “if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose” (2:21). In other words, if we were able to save ourselves through our own observance of rules and rit- uals, then Jesus died in vain. I can’t imagine any more horrible thought than that Jesus might have died for nothing. What a terrible sin we would commit if we canceled out God’s grace and rendered the death of Jesus on the cross meaningless—completely null and void.