Position/Condition

So today we're still in Galatians and probably will be for a while. And primarily we're dealing with Paul addressing the Galatians about whether they were sort of leaking back from grace to legalism. And there was this really wonderful group of guys called the Judaizers who had come down from Jerusalem to teach them that they had to be under the law. So that's what he's fighting against. So what we're talking about today, we're going to expand on the verses we talked about last week.

So maybe to put it in context, last week we talked about the fact that we were all sons of God, all believers, through faith in Christ. We talked about the fact that we were all baptized into Christ and that we had clothed ourselves with Christ. And in Christ Jesus, there's no Jew, there's no Greek or Gentile, there's no slave, there's no free man, and there's neither male or female. We're all one in Christ. All one. All earthly distinctions go away in our position in Christ.

And if you belong to Christ, or since you belong to Christ, you are Abraham's descendants, and heirs according to promise. So what Paul is going to do in the first few verses is talk about, expand on this issue of heir of an infant child and an heir who's an adult. And what he's going to do is make the connection between if you're under the law, you're considered a child, If you walk by faith, you're considered an adult.

And what we've been talking about the last month or so, and that's why I have this slide up here, in our body of believers here, we talk a lot about, we kind of have, well, you know, in any kind of an office or any environment you have, you have what you call shop talk. I know what you mean, because you and I work at the same place. My son John, when he was in Texas five years, he said, Dad, let me tell you how shop talk is in Texas. He said, do you have any idea what this following phrase means? And I said, what? He said, y'all mean? I said, what does that mean? He said, do you all understand what I mean? He said, y'all mean? So sometimes in our body of believers here, we have shop talk. And we use terms that I think occasionally we need to explain what they are. And that's what this slide's about.

We talk a lot about the principle of position and condition. So I thought we would just quickly review. The principle of position is a comprehensive and fundamental law or principle, a doctrine or an assumption. The laws or facts of nature underlying the working of an artificial device. Let me give you an example. A positional truth in the real world would be the gravity. If I drop, let go of this thing, where is it going? Down. It's going to do that every time, every time.

So the principle of the word principle means that there's a there's a law or or a doctrine or an assumption that works the same way every time. OK, now let's relate that to the word position. Position, according to the definition, is to lay down or to put in place. The act of placing or arranging or the point or area occupied by a physical object.

We just talked about last week and talk more today about being a son of God. That's a position that every believer has in Christ. I'm a son. I'm an heir. I'm entitled to all that is required in the Word of God to be an heir. I'm not going to be. This is a principle that's true of me right now.

So you will see as we study the Word of God, there are a lot of these positional truths that are principles under the heading of a principle. They're always true. And it doesn't really matter whether we believe them or know them or not, they're true because the Word of God has told us. All spiritual growth, all of it, is based on the principle of position. We must know who we are, what we have, and where we are according to God's Word.

But it's summed up. If you want to use a word to sum all this up, the word is source. What is the source of our position? The source of our position is a point of origin procurement beginning one that originates the point of origin. What's the point of origin for us? It's the Lord Jesus Christ himself who has been crucified, buried, resurrected, and is now seated in the heavenlies. And the Word of God says in 147 places in the epistles that we are in Christ. My position, your position, is in Christ.

So as you read through, especially the New Testament, you should probably say to yourself, I wonder if this verse I don't quite understand. I wonder if it's a positional truth or not. And if it's a position, then it's the focus of what my faith is going to be. The second part, or the last part, is condition. Position and condition. My condition is what we are in our Christian walk. in which we develop from infancy to maturity. My condition probably as long as I'm on this planet will never line up with what God says my position is.

But I do know a guy that knows that right now and that's Jack McBride. After 91 years He went to glory in his position. He's had this position almost his entire life. Well, now he's experiencing it. He knows what it is because he's face-to-face with the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me give you another aspect of how this works.

Everybody in this room were born into your human family, right? I don't think anybody snuck in any other way. That family that you were born into is your position. And there are the sources in which you derive your characteristics. At the memorial service that Thursday, there was a fellow here who hadn't seen my son in a long time, and he was looking to see if he could spot him. And he said, I noticed the profile. He looked a lot like you from a profile standpoint.

We are all products of our position from a physical standpoint. All of us are. It's the same in spiritual birth. When we were born again, the risen Lord Jesus became the source of my Christian life. He became my position. In Him we are positioned forever before the Father.

And Acts 17.28 says that in Him we live and move and have our being.

In Ephesians 2.10 it says, for we are His workmanship, created or born anew in Christ Jesus. Our source is Him. We can also say that our position is absolutely perfect. That our position has been eternally established in the Father's presence. When we received the Lord Jesus as our personal Savior, the Holy Spirit caused us to be born into Christ. He's now our source. He recreated us in a position that was established through Christ's work at Calvary.

Second Corinthians 517, a really interesting verse. Therefore, if any man be in Christ, if I'm in Christ and you're in Christ, what's the consequence? He's a new creation. Second Corinthians 517. What's that mean? That means that I now belong to, come from, my source is the resurrected glorified Christ. That's who I am. Can't tell by looking at me, but you can tell as we grow spiritually the life of the Lord Jesus is to be manifested more and more through each one of us. That position that we have is the source of my life, my Christian life. And you know what it's based on? It's not based on a promise. It's based on fact. Not a promise. It's a fact.

It is how God sees me. He sees me in Christ. And because God is immutable, which means He can't change, I'm never going to change. It doesn't mean in my condition I can be just as crazy as I was before I was saved, but it does not affect my position. It's really interesting. We think that our walking around condition can change how God feels about us, or how He looks at us, or how He thinks about us.

But God eliminated our feelings and emotions and sins and all the rest of it by doing what? He put us in Christ. And oh, by the way, every single sin you ever commit has already been paid for by the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. Every single one of them. Because did He leave anything for you to do regarding your sins? If He did, you're in big trouble. You're in big trouble, I'd be in big trouble because I can't live up to that. He did it all.

And that's why our position is so important. Our position is the object of our faith. That's where our focus should be. And that focus is on the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And you know what? It's exactly the same for everybody in this room. Your position in Christ isn't better or worse than mine, or different than mine. We're all in Christ, all perfect in Him. That's how God sees us. Well, that changes the way we function, I think. We begin to learn that we live under this system of grace, rather than I've got to perform to show God that I'm better than I really am.

Well, if I'm already positioned in Christ, then I don't have anything better to accomplish. I don't have to prove to Him in any sense that I'm a better Christian than I was last week. But in my Christian walk, I'm developing, and the Spirit of God is developing me when I'm saved and I'm a babe. I'm an infant.

Those of you who have young children and grandparents who have young children, you watch them grow. and you watch them have mature. Roger comes over once a week and for at least the first five minutes he's got to talk about his grandkids. How wonderful they are, how they're growing, how they're doing this and doing that. That's great.

Actually, I'm a little envious because I don't have any. So our position remains unchallengeable, but our condition varies all the time. Through the exercise of our faith and what we know to be true of us, which is the source, it affects our daily condition. It affects how we live. But on the other hand, our condition in no way affects my heavenly position.

I've had people say, well, I can sin my way out of salvation. Really? Whose idea was salvation to start with? And who did it? He saved me. A guy told me one time, you know, if you don't make it to heaven, it's God's fault, not yours. I thought, well, that's kind of... I don't like the sound of that because it doesn't leave anything for me to do. He said, that's right. God saved you and it's up to Him to keep you. And as you read Paul's epistles, you see that over and over again.

Colossians 3.1 tells us, since we've been risen with Christ, fact, what are we to do? We are to seek. We're to go after the things that are above and not of the things of the earth. Why? Because in the things above is where the Lord Jesus is. And the Spirit of God's job is to reveal Christ to us, not in your circumstances. We're to seek Him there. We're to seek His things. We're to learn and grow and know in Him as we live our lives.

Ephesians 6.10 says that we are to be strong in the Lord, be empowered through your union with Him. My union with Him. and you draw your strength from Him.

Now, in most cases, a believer is more aware of his condition than he is his position. And the reason that we talk a lot about position is because it's important for us to know what it is. We need to know who God says we are. Otherwise, we're stuck in that morass of, how am I doing every day?

There's a reason, and this is the reason why there's just so much failure in the Christian life and stagnation and all kinds of other things. If we're to grow and become fruitful, our faith has to be anchored in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ and His cross and His resurrection. Anchored there. There is no basis for faith in our unchangeable and our finished condition. Anybody who trusts himself or trusts God to get himself going has got misplaced faith.

First Corinthians 2.5 says, your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

Every believer has been positioned forever in the risen Lord Jesus by his spiritual birth. But only the believer who knows about this can grow, because you don't have an object for your faith. It is faith in the facts of our position that gives us daily benefits for growth in our condition. If the believer isn't clearly aware of the specific truths in the Word of God, what happens? He can't exercise the necessary faith for his growth and service. He can only seek his resources in the realm of his self-life, his own ability.

Some of the wonderful positional truths are set forth in our faith and scripture illustrations like the grain of wheat, the vine and the branches, that kind of thing. One of the interesting things, the reason I bring that up is because it fits so well with what we're doing in Galatians. In verse 3 that we're going to study, it's going to be all about position and condition. Hopefully you'll be able to see it.

When the Galatians were identified with Adam, they were infants without understanding, conditionally. They were under the elements of the world. They were under, like if you were a Jew, you were under the corrupt Jewish system. If you were a Gentile, you were under some various religious system that really was heathen-based, and that is like today.

I mean, we have religion upon religion upon denomination upon a denomination upon this upon that, and it's all based on human wisdom. The Word of God is the only thing that you can rely on, because it's His Word. The problem with being under an earthly or perverted law system is that you become a slave. You become enslaved or in bondage to that and to the elements of the world. Or maybe put it, we all have this wonderful thing called the sin nature. We end up in bondage to that.

If you're not, you're an inheritor and you begin to understand what it means to be an inheritor and it's a full inheritance. Someone said to me, well, how big is this inheritance? Is God going to cut it up like a pie? And if I do well, I get one eight millionth of a piece? No, you get the whole thing. Each one of us gets the whole thing because we're in Christ.

We are free positionally from the slavery of sin. We are free positionally from the elements of the world. But if we abide conditionally in our old Adamic nature, what happens? Even though we are sons positionally in Christ, in God, we're abiding, we're living, we're functioning out of that sin nature.

We're abiding under a lost system. The default position is a lost system and not grace. Both Jew and Gentile believers, every denomination, if you function Out of your sin nature, out of the world, you're in bondage to either your sin nature or to the world system. So where are you? You're back in slavery.

So let's take a look at these verses. Verse 1 and 2 says, Now I say, as long as an heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave. Although he is owner of everything, but he's under guardians and managers until the day set by the Father." So Paul's continuing this argument that he started in the previous verses of the inferiority condition of being under the law and using an illustration in contemporary life. So in order to understand the argument we've got to look at some of the words and sort of define them. The legal illustration of an heir.

The first word he uses here is the word child. That word is made up of two words that are put together and it means one that doesn't speak or the word refers to an immature person intellectually and morally. So if I say as long as you're a child You're an infant. You're a minor. You're simple-minded. That's what this word means. You're simple-minded. Or we'll put it a nice way. You say we're just an immature Christian. But you're a babe.

So Paul uses this word to describe people who are under a lost system. He is, by God and the Word of God, treated as an immature person. An adult, for instance, is old enough to govern his own actions, but a child must have restraints put upon him. Positional truth says that you're old. Positionally, you're an adult son.

You don't need law anymore. But that's a problem, because how many of you think that grace is powerful enough to control your conduct? Ever think about that? Oh, God has got to tell me what to do, otherwise I don't know what to do. But in Romans 6.14, listen to this verse. Sin won't have dominion over you any longer. And then it tells you why. Because you're not under law, you're under grace. Grace was given so that sin wouldn't have dominion over us, not law. Law causes sin. Grace allows us to be free from it. So, in the spiritual world, Israel, under a law system, was treated as a minor.

So the word servant, or slave here, is the next term, and it's that Greek word doulos, we're fairly familiar with that word. And basically it means a bond slave. The term is used of a slave who is in servile condition. Somebody else is controlling where he goes and what he does.

So the miner was legally in much the same position as a slave. He couldn't perform any act except by his legal representative. This person's legal representative, who in this case is turned a guardian, was, in the case of a minor, whose sanction was necessary for the validity of contracts undertaken on his behalf. He's a minor, but he can't sign anything that's legal because he isn't of age.

Now, the word Lord, or Owner, is used in the sense of just owner. He's the owner of everything, but he can't function and control his own property. Now these next two words are really interesting. The guardian and the managers. You could introduce tutor or governor. Each one of these guys.

It designates a guardian for a minor who's an orphan. The governor or manager, that word comes from the word the manager of a household, and it refers to the steward of one's property. So you could say the tutor was the guardian of the child's personhood. The governor or the manager was the guardian of the child's property.

So you get these two guys under law. Now, interesting time here, but the guardians and managers until the date set by the father. Let's talk about that. A time appointed. The father is the one that decides when the adulthood is going to be. It's a Greek term that really refers to an appointed time for the termination of the minority. The father is the one who determines this.

So if I say, if I were going to expand the translation here, I would say, Now I say that as long as the heir is in his minority, he doesn't differ one bit from a slave. He can't make decisions, he's controlled by somebody else, even though he owns everything, but is under guardians and stewards until the previously fixed time by his father.

Verse 3, so Paul says, so also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elementary, elemental things of the world. Now he's talking, remember he's writing this letter to Gentiles in Galatia who have been subverted by the Jewish Christians who said you must, it's okay to believe in the personal work of Christ, but you must be circumcised and put yourself under the Mosaic law. So when he uses the word we here, he's talking about himself, the Jews, and the Gentiles together. So now the children here just says when we while we were children just means when we were immature ones.

And he's relating the immaturity to the fact that you're under the law. So the elements, the word elements is of refers to any first thing from which others belonging to some series of composites. In other words, its first principles. Competition. Would somebody show him how to turn that off? You know what? He's never going to live that down. So, children held in bondage under the elementary things of the world. The world here is the word cosmos, which has to do with worldly understanding.

But it's the same word that's used in like John 3.16, that God so loved the world.

It's the same word used in 1 Corinthians 6.2, where Paul says, and do you not know that the saints will judge the world? We're saints. We'll judge the world. If the world is judged by you, are you not competent to constitute the smallest law courts? In other words, you don't need to get a lawyer and go to court. You're going to judge everything.

First Corinthians 11.32 says that, but when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord. so that we will not be condemned along with the world.

This word world has to do with all of humanity and its mindset. If you want to see how the world operates, turn your television on. There it is. Look at the news. You want to see how death functions? Watch the news. It walks up and down Colorado Boulevard every day. But it's death because it's separated from God.

In the case of the Jew, to the symbolic and ceremonial characteristics of Judaism and its legal enactments. In the case of the Gentile, it has to do with ceremonial and ritualistic observances of pagan religion. So he pairs up the idea that religion is of the world. A guy said to me one time, he said, you know that word religion comes from a Latin word that means regulation. It doesn't have a lot to do with grace. By the way, I might stop a little early because of what's going to happen here. I've got about one more minute. I wanted to talk about this word because it's in verse four.

But when the fullness of time came, God sent forth a son born of a woman, born under the law. So God did two things under grace. He sent his son and he sent the Holy Spirit, who is the spirit of his son. Isaiah 7.14 says, Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call his name Immanuel.

Isaiah 9.6 says, For the child will be born to us, a son will be given, and the government will rest on his shoulders, and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Prince of Peace.

So what I want to talk about here, and I'll come back and review a little bit next week, this word is really neat because it's the word that is translated sent forth. We get the word apostle out of it. If you look at it, it has to do with a person being sent forth with credentials, not just said, go, he's got credentials. And if you break it up and you see Ex Appostello, the appo means that the person was sent is to represent the sender. Represent the sender. He is an ambassador and every single person in this room is an ambassador of the reconciliation. Our Lord is called the Apostle and High Priest of our confession.

In Hebrews 3.1 says, Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider Jesus the Apostle and High Priest of your confession. But here's another interesting point about this word.

It is not only that the Lord was sent off, the Lord Jesus Christ was sent off by the Father, but he was sent out from the presence of the Father. He didn't get a text message. He was sent from his very presence. And it means that he sent out from his presence.

John talks about that the Lord Jesus came from the bosom of the Father, right here. That's where he came from. And when he comes out from that spot, and he grabs a hold of us, and places us in Christ, and then he goes home. Where does he go home? Oh, we say, well, he goes to heaven. No, he goes back to the bosom of the Father. Where do you go? You go in the bosom of the Father.

Why? Because you're a son. And you're a son already and a son by His fiat and by His determination. And it will never, ever change. So let's close. Father, how we thank You for Your Word. How we thank You how gracious You are to us in terms of what You've already done. And that what You require of us is that we know and believe in all of the aspects of the position you've placed us in that we might be able to rest by faith in who we are in your Son, the Lord Jesus. And we thank you. We pray in your Son's precious name. Amen.