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Welcome back to our look together at Galatians chapter 2, day 4 today, verses 15
to 19. In these verses that we're going to look at today, Paul introduces the
truth that he's going to come back to again and again in the following chapters
of the book. They are the truth that will set you free.

Set you free from yourself and set you free to love God and set you free to
serve others. So let me read for you Galatians chapter 2, verses 15 to 19. We
who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners know that a man is not justified
by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.

So we too have put our faith in Christ Jesus so that we may be justified by
faith in Christ and not by observing the law. Because by observing the law, no
one will be justified. While we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes
evident that we ourselves are sinners.

Does that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not. If I rebuild what I
once destroyed, I prove that I am a law breaker.

For through the law, I died to the law so that I might live for God. This is one
of those sets of verses that when I read it, it's sort of hard to follow. Did
you notice that?

It's one of those long sentences that Paul writes. So let's just sort of break
it down and go through it little by little. Here's the argument that Paul is
confronting here.

He's going to confront all for the book of Galatians. The argument that the
false teachers were making was something like this. The law is perfect.

So if we focus on a perfect law, then we will be perfect. All we got to do is
focus on the perfect law. And they were also saying that saying I'm a sinner or
focusing on my sin, that only promotes sin.

I don't even want to think about sin or say I'm a sinner. I just want to think
about law and look at that which is perfect. We have a version of this, by the
way, today if you think this is goofy thinking.

Our version today is a mixture between faith and positive thinking. And it's the
positive thinking idea that you don't think about your sin. You don't think
about the wrongs in your life.

That will only bring negative thoughts and negative thoughts just bring you
down. So just think positive thoughts about how God wants to do things for you
and how you can do great things for the world. But there's a problem with this
way of thinking, whether it's the law way of thinking in Paul's day or the
positive way of thinking in our day.

If that's all you have, it traps you into a me powered way of living a life
that's powered by me. There's something interesting about this life that's
powered by me. Initially, it might get you even more done in a day.

You do better with your schedule. You get more done. You get more completed.

But the problem is you're getting more done. You might be even doing greater
things in the world's eyes, but you're getting further and further from God.
Because the more you focus on you as the solution to your problems, the more you
focus on you as the sole energy that's needed for your problems, the more you
focus on you as the keeper of the law, the more enslaved you become to you and
what you can do.

But here's the good news. The more you focus on Jesus as a solution to your
problems, the more free you become. Now as you walk through these verses, this
is what Paul is talking about when he talks about justification.

He says, "We're not justified by the law, but by faith. " Remember the word
"justified" means "declared not guilty. " I'm declared not guilty by God.

That can't happen by the law. The law declares us guilty. I'm justified by faith
in God, who's the only one who can declare me not guilty.

He did that by what Jesus did for us on the cross. That's why we have put our
faith in Christ, Paul writes, because he's the only one who can declare us not
guilty. And he says clearly, "By observing the law, no one can be justified.

" How can you be justified by that which declares you guilty? It's absolutely
impossible. It's through Christ that we're justified.

Now he uses a phrase here that confuses us when we first see it. It's sort of
tongue-in-cheek. He says, "We who are Jews by birth are not Gentile sinners.

" He's not putting the Gentiles down there, he's talking about how the Jews
often talk about the Gentiles. Oh, they're just sinners, they're just Gentile
sinners. And Paul writes, "Even the Jews by birth are not those people you call
sinners.

We know that we're not justified by observing the law, so why are we asking them
to be justified by observing the law when we know it's not even true? Jews by
birth who've tried to follow the law all of our lives, why would we put a burden
on them that we've never been able to bear in our lives? " Paul writes through
this idea of justification, and he goes to another thought that they were
struggling with in that day, and he says, "If in looking to Jesus we see that
we're sinners, does that mean that Christ promotes sin?

" That phrase that Paul uses makes a lot of us scratch our heads. What is he
talking about here? Well, something the false teachers were saying.

They were saying that by realizing you were a sinner in order to be saved, Jesus
was actually promoting sin in your life because he was making you think about
your sin. They'd rather have you think just about the law, which was perfect.
They were saying there was a problem with Jesus because he brought out the truth
of sin in people's lives, that he promoted sin.

What a ridiculous thought. Paul says, "Absolutely not," because it's such a
ridiculous way of thinking. It's like pointing out to someone that they have a
smudge on their face, and they're mad at you because you pointed out the smudge,
and they say, "I would have never known it if you haven't pointed it out.

I would have been just fine. " Well, they would have certainly been noticed for
the smudge on their face. Pretending something isn't there doesn't mean it's not
there.

We look at this way of thinking that they had, and we think it's ridiculous
because it's their problem, it's their way of thinking, but we fall into the
same ways of thinking. We ourselves want to pretend that we don't sin, want to
ignore the fact that we sin. We want to build ourselves up and make ourselves
feel better about ourselves.

We want to make ourselves closer to God by our own means, our own works, our own
church attendance, our own Bible reading, our own baptism. We want to feel like
I did something to get myself closer to God because that appeals to our pride.
That's really the issue here.

It appeals to our pride. And Paul says, "No, it doesn't make Jesus someone who
promotes sin. Jesus is the one who forgives sin.

" And then walking through this, he says in verse 18, this phrase that many of
us wonder, what in the world is he saying here? He says, "If I rebuild what I
once destroyed, I prove that I am a law breaker. " What is Paul talking about
here?

Paul is saying that keeping the law to make up for your sin. If I rebuild what I
once destroyed, if I put the law back into place in my life as a means to make
up for sin, Paul is saying that's still a part of the pattern of sin. I'm just
proving I'm a law breaker.

Let me give you an illustration. If I disappoint my wife in some great way, and
then I spend the next week trying to make up for it, she knows that the
motivation for that following week is guilt and not love. I'm doing it to make
up for something.

I'm proving my guilt by all the good things that I do. And Paul is saying here,
by trying to reinstitute the law into my life or anybody else's life, you're
just proving our guilt, you're proving our need. If I try to keep the law to
make up for my sin, it still declares that I'm a sinner.

And a sinner can't be saved by the law. A sinner can only be saved by grace. So
that's why Paul says in verse 19, and this is the verse where things become
clear to us, "For through the law, I died to the law so that I might live for
Christ.

" Now, by the way, that doesn't invalidate the place of the law. The Old
Testament law, Jesus said he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. The
law does have a place.

Through the law, we're going to talk about this in the following chapters to
great degree. Through the law, the law was my teacher. Through the law, I saw my
need.

And through the law, I saw that the law could not meet my need. A list of rules
and regulations will not get me closer to God. It can't.

And maybe right now you're trying to establish a relationship with Christ
through a list of rules and regulations. If I go to church enough, if I say
enough prayers, if I read enough Bible verses, or maybe you're someone who
already has a relationship with Christ, but you're trying to not establish your
relationship, but grow in your relationship through just rules and regulations.
Jesus has some Bible verses for you to read, and he wants you to be in church
with other believers.

But if I try to get there by my works, if I make reading the Bible my work, if I
make going to church something I'm doing to get closer to God so that it appeals
to my pride, it's not going to work. No, I do it out of response to him, not to
get a response from him. Paul is writing here about the law, and he's saying
through the law, I died to the law so that I might live for Christ.

He's not invalidating the place of the law. He is validating a choice that he
had to make about the law. And that was that through the law, he could not be
saved.

He couldn't find God's grace. And that was not an easy choice for Paul. He had
lived his whole life for the keeping of every detail of the law in the Old
Testament.

As a Pharisee of Pharisees, he says in the book of Philippians, he had found
through all his efforts to keep the law that the law was a terrible taskmaster.
It enslaved him. And so he says, I became dead to the law.

He's not talking about living a sinful life. I became dead to the rules. I
decided I could do all the bad things that the Old Testament said I shouldn't
do.

He still lived a life of integrity. Paul still lived a life of holiness before
God. He's talking about a choice.

He's talking about the choice to live a life not by rules and regulations, but
by grace and relationship with God. The law here represents a life that is
self-powered, a life that ends up in patterns of guilt and works and pride. And
God's grace, that's a life that's God-powered.

When I'm motivated by God's love and not my guilt. When I'm all about God's work
in me and not my work for him, that's the God's grace kind of life. That's the
kind of life that God has for you.

That's the kind of life he has for you to live today. Jesus Christ, we spend
just a moment now asking you to help us to live a grace-powered life. Not by
rules, not by regulations, but by grace, by faith.

Help us to live out the life that you have for us today. Jesus, if we've gotten
caught up in a pattern of guilt and works, I do bad things and I do good things
to make up for the bad things and I'm enslaved by that. Help us to see today
that you want to get us free.

You have good work for us to do, but it grows out of a response to your love,
not a response to our guilt. Jesus, help us to see today through these verses
about justification and law that we've had to wade through a bit today. Help us
to see that you want to set us free.

We ask this in Jesus' name, Amen. Well join us tomorrow as we end our look at
Galatians chapter 2. We're going to look together at what I believe to be one of
the most personally powerful verses in all of the Bible.