You Were Running So Well
Galatians 5:1-9 · Mike Doyle · Oct 27, 2019
Galatians (2018-20), No. 45
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261916441680

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. We have arrived at Galatians chapter 5, verse 6 and 7. And as we read this morning, there's some interesting things here that, number one, we as believers are in freedom, freedom from any kind of a performance system that would, we would think that we could perform something that would make us more pleasing to God.

And Paul is bold enough to say, if you do get circumcised, it won't benefit you anything. Roger pointed out a few weeks ago, it's like the ritualistic baptism. What does baptism do for you spiritually? Nothing. It's just a demonstration of what has already happened spiritually to you. And circumcision, if you insist on getting circumcised, then what do you do? You put yourself under the law system. And oh, by the way, you've got to keep it all. Every single tenet of it. Every one of them.

You can't, like some reformers say, well, we're going to keep the ceremonial law or not the ceremonial law. Or maybe we're talking about the moral part of it. and not that, you know, we're going to keep some of it. No, you can't. You have to go, you got to go all in. And if you go all in, if you know anything about legalism, if you go all in, you're in big trouble because you can't, you can't make it from here to the door without breaking one of them.

And that's like breaking a tempered glass. It goes in a million pieces and you can't put it back together. So the worst thing that can happen to a believer from an everyday walking around standpoint is to be severed from the principle of grace. To think that I can do something in lieu of God's grace towards me is just spiritual insanity.

So Paul is making a point that those of you who want to be under law, this is really, I would say it's a more dangerous thing than the sinners in Corinth. Getting yourself out from under grace and putting yourself under law. And then last week we talked about the fact that he says, well, you know, whatever you other Christians do, we Christians, the ones under grace, through the agency of the Spirit and on the ground of faith, we have a hope for righteousness that we are eagerly awaiting. In other words, we're not talking about my positional righteousness, we're talking about everyday walking around, conditional righteousness. And for in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision is of any power or uncircumcision, but faith coming to effective expression through love. Circumcision, in Christ is a non-starter. It just has no value at all.

So at this point now, he's going to break off his argument, and he's going to make an appeal to his readers based on a past experience. And his next words are pretty plain, and they're pretty practical. He's going to say, you were running pretty good, or you were running really well.

Who hindered you from obeying the truth? By the way, I've been messing around with learning how to do these overheads. Last week I had some that sort of faded in. Well, Roger, I was messing this week, and I sent them over to Roger. He said, well, you kind of got the bottom ones first. So he fixed them, hopefully. So we're down at verse 7 here.

So you were running well. Who hindered you from observing the truth? In other words, you were conducting yourself bravely, honorably, what's becoming of a believer. And running, we're running as in what we call the imperfect tense, which means in time past, this was a continuous action. You were doing this in the past. Everything was going really well.

And we've learned from verse 5 and 6 what it meant. what it meant to run well now it's interesting notice he uses the word running and we talk a lot about the word walking and so running well you run by faith and that faith is a dependence on the Holy Spirit that's really what it boils down to we are able to behold the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ in his word because of faith we see and seeing the truth, the glory of Christ comes through that word, which means that we are able to more and more manifest the glory of the Lord Jesus. But I ran into an interesting thing this week.

Chester McCauley says, when you see the word running, it doesn't necessarily mean living the Christian life, it necessarily means service. So I did a little digging back and forth, and I never did come to a conclusion. Walking refers to Christian conduct. Running refers to Christian service.

Well, I think if you're walking in the Spirit, whatever the service is that you're involved in is there, because you're walking by beholding the glory of the Lord Jesus. But notice he's talking about running a race in the New Testament. Now in the New Testament, this metaphor is used a lot.

In Philippians 3.14, I press towards the goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Paul's talking about the fact that he's moving and pressing towards this goal.

We looked at Galatians 2 and it said, It is because of a revelation that I went up and submitted them the gospel which I preached among the Gentiles. But I did so in private to those who were of reputation. Why? For fear that I might be running or head run in vain.

So he goes up, Paul went up, back when we were in chapter 2, Paul went up to Jerusalem, talked to Peter and did it quietly there and he laid out his gospel to those guys because he wanted to make sure not that he was making a mistake, he was solid on what he believed, but that they were teaching the same thing he was teaching, because he didn't want to run in vain or purposeless if they're not teaching the same thing he's teaching.

And then another verse is Hebrews 12, 1 and 2, therefore since we've so great a cloud of witnesses, surrounding us, let us lay aside every encumbrance of the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us." So we, the metaphors of our Christian life, like a run or a race, fixing our eyes upon the Lord Jesus, is everywhere in Paul's epistles, everywhere.

Some people are joggers and runners. I was one. As you can tell the way I walk around now, it really beats up your knees pretty bad. But there's a sense when you're in one of those races or they were racing, I was jogging, that you're all moving in the same direction. You're moving towards the finish line. One of the greatest parts of those races is when you come around the last corner, you look up ahead and you see finish. You pick up your step a little bit.

But that's what we are. We are running a race to glory from here to heaven. That's where we're going. At the end of his life, he wrote Timothy and he said, I fought the good fight, I finished the course, I saw the finish line, and I have kept the faith.

And then the last one is 1 Corinthians 9.24.

Anyway, 1 Corinthians 9.24 says, Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? So run in such a way that you may win. We are running to win. We're not running to finish second. You know why we're running to win? Because we already did win. We're just getting there. The word hinder. Interesting word. Who hindered you? This comes from, it means to, somebody cut in.

Again, back in the race, a lot of times, I remember we used to run the Cherry Creek Sneak every year. It was four miles, and there were like, I don't know, 10,000 people. And you'd go down University Boulevard, and it would take a right at, no, you'd go down Speer, and you'd take a right at University. Well, once you hit that corner, everybody squeezes in, right?

And people fall down. So that's a hindrance. So whenever I came up to that corner, I went to the outside and actually slowed down and paid real close attention to who was around me because I didn't want to fall down. I heard that pavement hurts when you fall on it. So somebody has cut in or they've made an incision or they've obstructed your progress.

And he uses this figure that suggests into breaking into a race course. cutting in on a runner by another runner also to slow up the process. And sometimes in those races, you know, you kind of daydream and you do cut somebody off inadvertently and you get told about it usually. So why the metaphor here? A marathon race in which the believers were progressing well, but now another runner had cut in and was causing them to veer from the course and were hindering their running.

That's what was really going on. Paul says, who is this person that hindered you? Who did that? Well, it starts with our archenemy. He's always trying to divert us off the track, to get us off the street, to get us moving in a direction that the Lord would not have. He does it very subtly by creating noise.

One of the experiences I had one time, and this was the first time I'd ever been to New York City, which was, I've been there three times, which is more than enough. And we were staying in Times Square on the 37th floor, I think, of the Marriott, right? And we were out with my daughter and we had dinner and down in the village and we came back and it's like two o'clock in the morning. and we shut the lights off and started to go to sleep, I could still hear the noise from the city. And the thought that hit me is that, oh, that's what Satan does.

He just makes it real noisy. So you can't pay attention and focus on where you ought to be. And that's what that big city is all about. Diversion. Lots of noise. So when Paul says, who hindered you? In other words, until you give an ear to a legalistic teacher, you don't really hear it. But he's creating all the time the noise to be legal in somehow, to think in your mind, if I do this, God is really going to be more pleased with me than he is today.

So here are the Galatians. They're making progress. They're running down the road. They're growing in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus. Their service is what it ought to be. And they're running the race well. And here come these Judaizers and they cut in.

And they start telling them things that causes them to start to slow up. You know, if your mind is going one way and somebody starts to talk, well, I'm not sure what you're thinking is right. What happens to your thinking? It slows down and you start to pay attention to this other suggestion that maybe there is some validity. Well, what happens? In the Christian environment, you begin to slow your progress. You begin to, you could use the word, becomes retarded.

When you accept a false message, you deliberately, a false message is a deliberate untruth. And these Judaizers were trying to convince them that what they needed to do was to perform legalism, Judaistic legalism, to throw them off the course. That's what they wanted to do. They wanted to get them to veer just a little bit.

And you know, if the finish line is there and I can bump you off here, by the time you get there, you've missed it. You've missed it. And it's small. It's small. It starts small. What was the result? The result was they had lost the fragrance of the Lord Jesus. They had lost that intimacy. They had lost that... there's a camaraderie as you're going in this metaphor of a race, and the intimacy is with the person of the Lord Jesus Christ himself. The enabling power of the Spirit for walk and service You lose that because you're not listening to him. It stalls your spiritual growth. And here's the key, you don't get any rest. The great thing about the Christian life and the walk and the run, you run restfully. If you've ever attended a competitive race, you find out that the guys that are in the front are always the ones that are running restfully.

We went to a race one time, I don't know if you remember this name, but there was a guy from Alamosa named Alberto Salazar, and he won an Olympic gold medal in the marathon. Well, there was a 10k at the tech center one day, and we just walked down, and when the runners came by, he was at least three blocks ahead of the field.

You know what's interesting about him? He couldn't hear him run. He was just gliding down, and he was restful. You look at him, and he's... The next guy was... Everybody behind him was chugging, not this guy. He was just gliding. He was resting in what he was doing because he was so skilled at it. So no rest. The question Paul asked is rhetorical. It's not informational.

Paul knew well enough who had slowed up their Christian growth, the Judaizers and the Galatians. And had they continued to believe and trust God, they would have continued to obey God. And we're going to talk about obedience here in a minute. Obedience of faith, it is only possible, it's the only possible evidence of a true-hearted believer is the fact that he is obeying. And we're going to talk about, as soon as I say the word obeying, I know you get nervous.

In the case of the Israelites, their disobedience is said to be the evidence of their unbelief, which Hebrews 3.18 and 19 says, and to whom did he swear, God's swear, that they would not enter God's rest. But to those who were disobedient, what were they disobeying? So you see then that they were not able to enter in because of unbelief. So you have to tie the words obedience and belief together. The important lesson here is that all, for us all, is that as long as we are obeying the truth, we're getting along well. We're running the race well. Obeying the truth. So, what is it? Obedience or obeying the truth.

The interlinear talks about, uses the word, you're running well, who have hindered you by the truth not to be persuaded. The word is belief, not believing, you're not confident. You're not obeying, obedient, you're not persuaded. The translation is really interesting, as you can see there. The interlinear, when you put the words in the Greek lineup, it says, you were running well. Who hindered you by the truth not to be persuaded? Understand what he's saying? It sounds a little different. English words that we use are trust and obey and confidence.

The word convince here is by argument of true or false. You can argue either side. In other words, the primary verb means to convince. And it doesn't mean convince one way or the other. It just means true or false. I can convince you either way. It's reflective in the sense that. I'm to believe, I'm to have confidence, I'm to be confident, I can even use it in terms of making a friend.

So what's the thing here? God in his word lays out the truth for us. As we read, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. So God reveals the truth to us through his word. Do we have an obligation? We're going to find out that we do. Oops, messed up. So let's talk about what biblical faith is. Biblical faith, as we look at the total picture of salvation, we see that we have the capacity built into us to believe.

You think that's true? Every single human being that comes into the world has a capacity built into him to believe. They believe something Everybody believes something. All of you who fly on airplanes believe that you're going to arrive at your destination. You get on an airplane by faith. That thing is really going to leave the ground. Oh, and it's going to return to the ground too.

But we also have the capacity built into belief, but we also have a responsibility about biblical faith. in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. Whosoever will may come. The gospel goes out to everybody. Do they have a responsibility before God about that gospel? Sure they do. Because if they don't believe it, what happens? They don't get saved. And they don't have an excuse before God.

Because Romans 1 is very clear to tell us that faith in the gospel of salvation will save us And he specifically says, man, you're without excuse, because what can be known of God, I've made it clear to you in my creation and in you, in your person, you know, you know. And that makes the responsibility, we don't like the word responsibility when we live under grace, but we do have responsibilities to believe the gospel for salvation.

If you look at the total picture of salvation, See if this comes up again. Yeah, there you go. Salvation is totally a work of God. It wasn't my idea, your idea. It was God's idea to save us. Faith is wholly the responsibility of man, so God's responsibility was to do the work of salvation. He presents that to us and he says, your responsibility is to believe me about that. Man does not contribute to his own salvation. God doesn't contribute to your unbelief. You see that? God isn't the one that makes you an unbeliever. God does not contribute to your unbelief. What He does is that He lays out the salvation, He accomplishes it all, and He says, look, you don't have to contribute anything. All you have to do is believe me. That's it. Nothing else.

So God alone must do the saving. Man must do the believing. Those who are saved have only God to thank, and those who are lost have only themselves to blame. What's interesting, I'll catch up. So No one will ever stand before God at the great white throne judgment and say I'm condemned because I wasn't given the gift of faith. They can't say that because faith is built into every human being. All men have a responsibility to believe it pleases God to save those who do. God has promised to save all who come to him through Christ And that's one of his absolute promises, and he never goes back on a promise, ever.

So, we could say personal biblical faith, but before we do that, I want to talk about unbiblical faith. Instead of trusting in the Word of God, it's a subjective trust. It's a subjective trust in the ways and wisdom of man. which is assumed reality and is uncertainty resulting in man's unrest. There's just thousands of examples of this in the Bible.

We were going over one on Wednesday night. Abram decided that because there was a famine in the land that he needed to go down to Egypt where the food was. The problem was he didn't check with God before he went. So on the way down there, he gets nervous and he gets afraid because his wife is beautiful. And he thinks, well, she is so beautiful that they're going to kill me to get her. So he tells his wife, you're going to have to lie about who you are. You have to lie about the fact that you're my sister, which she was. She was his half sister.

And so they get in the country and Pharaoh thinks she's beautiful. He puts her in his harem. He gives Abraham all of this property and animals and all this stuff. And then he finds out that she's married to Abram. And he really gets upset. So you know what he does? He deports her. He deports she and her husband, Abram, back to where?

Back to the promised land. And so what God does is He causes this, because of what Abram did something without checking with God and without believing Him first, He still blesses them and sends them back to the promised land, and they've got a lot more goods and stuff than they had before. But they missed. They missed.

So unbiblical faith is really, here comes a circumstance in my life. I'm a pretty smart fellow, got a lot of wisdom. I'm older now, had a couple of experiences. So I'm going to decide how this is going to go. And I think I'm going to come up with a plan, and when I get the plan together, then we'll pray and ask God to bless it. That's unbiblical faith. The object of this kind of faith is me, self. And if you listen to Christians talk about, this is where most of us are.

God needs to come and do something because I have a problem. Oh, did you talk to him about it before you got it? Will you trust him in the middle of it? No, he needs to fix it. When I pray, when I have a malady in my life, what do I do? I go to him and say, look, here's this problem and here's how you can fix it. And he says, no, I don't think I want to fix it that way. You're going to have to trust me through this whole thing.

So unbiblical faith, if believers are walking in unbiblical faith, we're walking in self. So there is such a thing as unbiblical faith, and we all are fairly familiar with it. We know what it's like. We try to figure out a plan. If believers are walking in unbiblical faith, we are walking in self, self-sufficiency, self-wisdom, self-esteem, self-obedience to a law system, you name it.

It's all the kingdom of a self. It's all about me, isn't it? It's like the cartoon I saw years ago that I still think is hysterically funny. There's a guy sitting in front of a firing squad, and the guys all have their guns and are ready to shoot him. I said, do you have any last words? And he said, yeah, in the end, it's still all about me, isn't it? Yeah, it is.

So what happens when we look upon the Lord Jesus and His Word and behold Him? personal biblical faith. Personal biblical faith that the object becomes is different. Biblical faith, as we talked about last week, it receives, it loves, it apprehends what the Father has revealed in his word and his thoughts about the Lord Jesus Christ in whom he has his rest. That's what the focus is. The obedient child of God has joy and peace in the Christian experience. Why? Because he has trusted God about what he believes.

He has rested. The subjectiveness is not about him anymore, it's about Christ himself. And there's a rest involved in that. All of us, I think, at times in our Christian life have not had the answer to a certain problem, but we've had a rest about it.

Because we've been to Him about it, and we trust Him. no matter what it is. That's where the rest comes from. It doesn't come from the fact that I got it figured out. It comes from the fact that I trust Him. The object of this faith is the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is personal biblical faith. Not what Christ can do for you, just Him. Just Him.

So, a believer who is being assaulted, or I wouldn't maybe say assaulted, but is walking and is interdicted by someone who wants to change them, needs to be aware of some things. He needs to be aware that there are attempts to hinder you. There are attempts in your life to get you off the trail. You should be aware lest the things of the world hinder you.

And they're usually little things that, oh, these are personal and they're really important to me. Or the temptations of the flesh. And we all have a lot of those. Health, wealth, and wisdom. And we should beware lest the fleshly performance hinder your walk. In other words, boy, I am really performing for the Lord today. You know, you get this idea that I'm going to really work for the Lord. That's a hindrance. And that's something we all need to be aware of. When we look upon the Lord Jesus in His Word and we behold Him by faith, what happens?

My favorite verse in all the Bible is 2 Corinthians 3.18, which is, Beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord. What's the mirror? It's the Word.

Beholding, I could spend the rest of this time talking about the word beholding, but it's just gazing at and being taken up with the Lord Jesus Christ. I'm beholding the glory of the Lord, and it, or He, transforms me from one state of glory to the next state of glory into His very image, and the Spirit of God is doing that. I'm beholding, He's transforming. I'm beholding, He's transforming.

So, that's why I can say that biblical faith receives, and it loves, it apprehends what the Father has revealed in His Word. and his thoughts about the Lord Jesus Christ in whom he has his rest. Think about this, the Father's rest is in the Lord Jesus Christ, mine should be there too. The Father is totally satisfied with who the Lord Jesus is as a human being. We should find our rest there too. So, the Galatians were being hindered in their spiritual life because of reverting in faith to the due religion the law, the due religion of the law.

Do this, do that, do this, do that. What's more important, what you are or what you do? What am I being wise or what am I doing? From God's perspective, which one's more important? It has to be what I am. I'm in Christ. I'm a son of the Most High God. All of the New Testament tells me these incredible blessings that are mine. My job is to stay where God put me, in Christ.

Verse 8, now, the Galatians were not led by the Holy Spirit into legalism because he says, this persuasion didn't come from him who calls you. Well, who's the him? The him's the Holy Spirit. The influence that was winning them over was not from God. The Holy Spirit calls men to Christ through the gospel of grace.

In Galatians 3, it says this only thing, and I think Roger did this verse, this only thing I want to find out about you, did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by the hearing of faith? Oh, it was by the hearing of faith. Are you so foolish that you have begun Having begun in the spiritual, now being perfected in the flesh, that makes no spiritual sense at all. So therefore, if you're now listening to another voice, having been deceived by the enemy, you need to know that this new doctrine that you got didn't come from the one who called you.

Any voice that seduces from grace is hostile to the truth of God. Any voice. Now, the word persuasion here is from, I can't say these Greek words, the verb of the same root meaning, which means to persuade, to introduce one by the words to believe. The word is used here in an active sense.

It refers to the act of these Judaizers convincing the Galatians to believe their preaching and not what Paul was teaching. This activity of the Judaizers, this activity of the Judaizers, Paul says, didn't come from the one who called you. It didn't come from the Spirit of God. This negative statement indicates the influence which was turning them away from grace, and away from grace makes them hostile to God, because He only operates on grace. And when you look at the word this that I have there in green, it's a definite article. before the word persuasion, and it identifies the persuasion as that which cut into the Galatians' progress. This persuasion is the thing that cut in. It cut in from the grace, the teachings of the Judaizers. God who called them, called them in Christ, freedom in Christ. Not to an enslaving system, but to freedom.

He's going to go on now, in the next verse, and he's going to talk about this persuasion didn't come from you, and then he uses this little, a little leaven, leavens the whole lump of dough. Leaven in the Bible is always the symbol of evil, always. Those of you who, some of the men don't know this, but I'm sure all the women know this, what is leaven? Leaven is yeast. It's a compound that goes into cooking that causes it to expand. The Jews before the days of unleavened bread would remove every particle of leaven from their homes all the time.

They wouldn't have it in their house. But now it's only over Passover. I've told you the story about my rabbi neighbor wanting me to buy all the leaven in his synagogue. And when it looked to me like if they didn't buy it back it was going to cost me $300,000, I turned him down. But I did buy one family's leaven. And leaven comes in the form of alcohol and baking. I mean, it's amazing. Everything that we consume has leaven in it.

So what they would do, let's say that a Jewish family had four bottles of alcohol in their house, wine, and it has leaven in it. If you're going to buy their leaven, because they can't own leaven during the Passover, when in fact they're not supposed to own it at all, you would rent the space in their cabinet and you would own the bottles that were there, which meant I could go in there any time and take them if I wanted. At the end of Passover, they would come back to you and they'd want to buy them back.

And so you actually signed a contract and shook their hand folded up a handkerchief in their hand and held it over their head and said a prayer and all that kind of stuff. These Jewish people, a handshake to them is sacred. In the diamond markets in New York, where a lot of these Hasidic Jews work, if you shake a man's hand on a price, that's the contract.

He's good for it. Anyway, leaven is such a symbol in the Bible that the Jews couldn't have it. And the reason was that it operates on the principle of fermentation. It's a really good symbol of moral and spiritual corruption. A very small, little bit of it permeates, over time, the whole thing. It balloons it up.

Our Lord used this symbol in Matthew 16. Matthew 16, I'll read this to you and then we'll close. He's having this discussion with the disciples and he'd gone over to the other side of the lake because he had done the fishes and the loaves. And Jesus said to them, watch out now of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

Of course, typically they don't understand what he means. So they began to discuss among themselves, saying, He said that because we didn't bring any bread over for us to eat. But Jesus said to them, You men of little faith, why do you discuss among yourselves that you have no bread? Do you not understand or remember the five loaves and the five thousand and how many baskets filled? full when you picked up? Or the seven loaves and the four thousand that we had larger baskets full when you picked up?

How is it that you don't understand that I don't speak to you concerning bread, but beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees?" Then they understood that He did not say to be beware of the leaven of bread, but the teaching of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

That is great advice for us today. Great advice for us today, because we listen sometimes. We listen. In 1 Corinthians 5 it says, Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump just as you are in fact unleavened for Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. The Lord Jesus is our bread. He's the bread of life and there isn't any leaven in Him. He's, maybe put it this way, He's all natural. He's spiritually natural. So, leaven can refer to immoral conduct, It appears in all kinds of parts of Scripture, but it always, always means something evil. It always refers to that.

Also, 11 here is in the present tense, which means it's going on right now. So you guys pay real close attention. You had made a lot of progress. 11 had made a little progress. You're beginning to hear what they have to say. And here's the thing, and I said this when we started, Paul is more alarmed over the insidious nature of legalism than over the sinfulness in the church. He realizes that legalism is eleven, and it comes in in little pieces and it begins to grow, and it begins to grow. So, what we see in contemporary Christianity is a lot of eleven.

The professing Christians in our churches today are unaffected, unaffected by the person and the work of the Lord Jesus. He's hardly ever mentioned. Lots of churches don't even use the Bible. Legalism has put them in such a position that they're unable to derive spiritual benefits from the risen Lord Jesus. Why? It's all about them. It's all about the law. their religious experiences disassociate them from the risen Lord Jesus. He has no effect on them whatever. They barely mention his name. Actually it's an awful thing that the sacrificial work of Christ on the cross and his bodily resurrection and his present ministry are meaningless to people who call themselves to be Christians.

It's everywhere. A little leaven leavens a whole lump. So beware in one sense. Pay attention to what's going on and listen for the grace. Listen and pay attention to the Word of God because it's always always gracious. It's never anything other than that. It's always gracious. Let's close. Father, how we thank you for your word. We thank you for you are the God of grace all the time, and that your whole purpose is to bless us every minute of every day that we might rest in the person and work of your son, the Lord Jesus, we pray in his precious name. Amen.