Remember This
Remember This by Rev. L. John Gable
May 29, 2016
For the next several weeks we are going to study Paul’s letter to the Galatians and I believe his first and greatest concern for the people in the churches in that region is that they had lost their minds, they had forgotten to remember, they had become spiritually distracted and demented; subsequently he fears they have become lost.
Remembering is an important part of life, of knowing who we are. Knowing our past gives us a sense of place and meaning in the present and a direction and destiny for the future. Without a sense of memory, of “re-membering”, the word itself defines what it does, it “re-members”, it re-joins and connects disparate pieces, so without a sense of memory we lose our sense of identity and hardly know who we are.
That is true for us as we consider our individual identities as well as for nations and cultures (“those who don’t remember their past are destined to repeat it”), and even for the Church. It is incumbent upon us to know the story of our faith and the foundations on which it rests lest we become distracted or demented, or deluded, forgetting who we are, and as a result, lost, without either direction or identity.
First a little background about Paul and the Galatian churches. This cluster of churches was founded by the apostle during one of his early missionary journeys and is located in central Turkey, near modern day Ankara. Since Paul was the founding pastor he is writing to people he knows and loves, so he is able to speak openly and honestly about the concern he has for them.
The letter begins in the traditional form, opening first by identifying the sender, “Paul an apostle”. I wish we still did that today. There are times when I start reading a letter or a note I have received and I have to jump to the end to see who it is from in order to make any sense out of it. Yet what is interesting about the opening to this letter is that we can hear immediately that Paul is taking a severe, perhaps even a defensive, tone. “Paul, an apostle, sent neither by human commission or human authorities but through Jesus Christ and God the Father.” It seems someone in Galatia is questioning his authority, and of even greater concern, the authority of the Gospel Paul is preaching. For this reason Paul dispatches with any of the niceties he would normally use when writing to one of his churches. Nothing here about “thinking of you fondly and holding you close in my prayers.” Instead he gets right to his concern. “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the One who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel – not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the Gospel of Christ.” Paul is accusing the Galatians of having spiritual ADD or ecclesiastical dementia. They had already forgotten their spiritual roots. They were abandoning the foundations of their faith.
As we will see in the coming weeks as we study this letter more closely those who were “confusing” those Galatians were a group called Judaizers who believed that in order for one to become a Christian one must first become a Jew and adopt all of the Mosaic Law, including the myriad of dietary laws and restrictions, not to mention circumcision. Likely these Judaizers were Jewish converts so their line of reasoning makes sense. They were relying on 2000 years of tradition in the Law and they had come to faith in Christ by that path, so it makes sense, at least to them, that others should have to do the same. They didn’t oppose the teaching of Christ, they just felt it was insufficient and needed to be supplemented or augmented by continued obedience to the Law; but Paul would have none of that, even to the point of saying that anyone who attempted to preach or teach or practice the faith in that way was “accursed” and not to be listened to.
So what is the big deal? What is at issue here? It was more than a mere practical concern that it was unlikely that any Gentile converts would want, or even be willing, to submit to the regiment of Jewish laws. For Paul it was more a theological concern. He is plainly arguing against anyone who would suggest that salvation requires anything more than trust in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. He will argue throughout this letter, and elsewhere, that we are saved (made right with God) by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, period, nothing more and nothing less. What the so called Judaizers were proposing was that it was faith in Jesus Christ PLUS obedience to the Law or something more which implied that Jesus’ sacrifice for our salvation was insufficient. But Paul was adamant about this, so much so that he said that anyone who follows this line of teaching has abandoned not only the Gospel, but also the God who gave it.
This argument is worthy of our consideration still today and was not an issue in the first century alone. Consider your own understanding of the faith. If someone were to ask you, “What must I do to be saved?” I think it is safe to say that we here, any of us who hold to a Reformed understanding of the faith, could comfortably say “we are saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone”. But here is the catch. Even as you hear yourself saying those words do you find yourself wanting to add a “BUT” or an “AND” to it? Do you find yourself wanting to say “AND” you have to say this particular prayer or believe this particular doctrine in this particular way? I am not talking now about those who come to our doors and try to teach us a completely different religion based on good works or special activities? I am talking about those who name the name of Jesus, as do we, yet want to add “something more” from their tradition or their understanding of the faith as a condition of salvation. “Accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, yes, but you must also….be baptized in this particular way – sprinkled, dipped or dunked, recite this particular creed, read and understand this particular passage of Scripture in this particular way, have this particular kind of experience with God, and so on? Can you hear how easy it would be to fall in to the trap the Judaizers fell in to by saying that salvation comes by grace through faith in Jesus Christ AND… Certainly this is the stuff of Church fights and divisions and the creation of an untold number of denominations.
But, Paul was so insistent on this understanding, “salvation by grace through faith alone” that he calls this the “Gospel”. Recall, when Paul was writing there were no Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. There was no New Testament. There wasn’t really even a Church. So the Gospel was not a book or a text or a body of thought, much less an institution; it was an understanding of what God has done for us and our salvation by His grace through Jesus Christ. This is the Gospel message. This is the “Good News”! This is “the essential” of our faith; everything else is secondary, an add-on, a non-essential.
Paul will continue to build on this understanding of the Gospel throughout this letter. He will carefully lay out the difference between the Law and the Gospel basing his teaching on the authority of Scripture and God’s call in his own life. He will explain the inclusive reach of God’s grace to all people, Jew and Gentile alike. He will speak passionately about our enslavement under the Law and the freedom we have in Christ, and he will even give clear instructions on how we must live our lives without abusing or misusing the freedom we have been given. Friends, it will be worth our while to listen carefully to these teachings in the coming weeks.
But for today I would like for us to consider what the essential Gospel is that we must remember, or remember not to forget or abandon or be distracted from when some other new teaching comes along.
Of course we can turn to the confessional statements of the Church. The Apostle’s Creed, written in part to address the kinds of heresies and false teachings Paul was dealing with here. The Creed will remind us of the essentials of our faith: One God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit; the exclusive claim that Jesus is God in human flesh, fully human and fully divine, and the one and only means of our salvation. It will speak of the communion of saints (the Church); the promise of the forgiveness of our sins; the hope of the resurrection of the body and the assurance of life everlasting; all worthy for us to remember and retain.
As evidence of our faith we are instructed to rely on the authority of Scripture as God’s Word to us and the call to discipleship and obedience as we seek to live in God’s way according to His will.
Without question all of these are important aspects of our faith, but none of these is as important as the essential Gospel which Paul is giving us in this letter to the Galatians where he clearly states this “Good News” which “comes from God our Father, through Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins to set us free, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory forever and ever.” Friends, these are not just truths or facts we need to know about God, much less a set of rules and regulations we need to follow. This is the Gospel message, stripped down and unadulterated, with no additions or deletions. The “Gospel” is the message of God’s love and grace given to us in Jesus Christ.
John Newton, former slave trader who then met Jesus Christ and was radically changed, author of the hymn Amazing Grace, was an old man, near death, suffering from memory loss and illness. One day he was visited by his friend William James and said, “I have forgotten many things, but I have never forgotten Jesus Christ as my Savior.”
Friends, as distracted and demented as any of our thinking ever may be, let us never forget to remember this: we are saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, nothing more and nothing less, no ifs, ands or buts about it. This is the Gospel. This is the Good News. Amen.