Complex and Misunderstood
Texts: Galatians 4:8-20
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church, UT
June 18, 2023
Relationships can be tricky and not always easy. Someone said being a Christian would be a lot easier if we never had to deal with people.
I remember that prayer that goes, “Lord, I have been absolutely loving today. I have been patient, full of faith, and have not done anything to offend you. But now I have to get up and out of bed…”
The reality is that faith is lived out with and amongst others. Life is full of relationships: with family, neighbors, co-workers, friends, and church folk. And just because we are among Christians doesn’t mean everything is simple. Church relationships can be wonderful, but there can be challenging relationships in churches, too.
Sometimes you hear someone described as “complex and misunderstood.” I tried to get a good definition of what people mean when they call something or someone “complex and misunderstood” and I had little success.
I found the term used to describe such wide-ranging topics as Country Western Music, Malcolm X and treatments for kidney stones. Apparently, the character “Pearl” in the novel “the Scarlett Letter”, and eating disorders, and tax legislation are also all complex and misunderstood.
We sometimes refer to people as being “complex and misunderstood” when we aren’t quite sure what to make of them. We want to give the benefit of the doubt that their erratic behavior or thinking is the result of something more than just shear foolishness and stupidity, so we say that they are “complex and misunderstood.”
To say someone is complex and misunderstood is to say, if we ever could see into their minds we would understand them better. But for now, we don’t want to judge them too harshly. It’s just too hard to pin down.
People can be complex and misunderstood. Churches can be “complex and misunderstood” places.
Paul might say the Christians in Galatia were complex and misunderstood. Paul’s relationship with them was not simple. He has expressed his astonishment that they, who had turned to the Lord under his watch, have so quickly deserted the Lord.[1] He has called them “foolish” and has said they are “bewitched.”[2]. In today’s passage, in 4:1, he says, “I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted.”
Paul and the Galatians once had a great relationship but he says now the goodwill is gone. And he says that he is perplexed about them. It’s like parents who see their children and say, “We didn’t raise you that way.”
The people Paul is writing have kind of been all over the map in terms of their faith.
Before they knew God they were worshippers of pagan gods and goddesses. They may have followed astrology or some of the ancient gods of Greece. Maybe they made periodic visits to the Temple of Zeus which wasn’t far away. And then there were various Roman imperial cults, the state religion you might say.
Paul came to Galatia, preached Christ, and people left the superstitions and sketchiness of all those religions and came to Christ. But new teachers had come after Paul convinced them that they had to keep the Jewish laws and ceremonies in order to be right with God.
They had so eagerly received Paul and joyfully embraced the gospel that after learning that they no longer were living by the grace of God Paul scratches his head and asks, “what happened?” “I didn’t raise you this way.” Somehow, they were convinced that they needed to live a rule-heavy religion that was full of various rituals and ordinances.
Here’s the thing: If relating to God is a matter of keeping particular rituals and certain rules, we always know where we stand. If we do these things we can believe we are more acceptable in God’s eyes. But it also puts us in control. We no longer have to live by faith, trusting God to accept us in mercy. Religion by rules only offers us a security system in which we do not have to live by faith, in which we do not have to trust in God, but can instead trust in ourselves.[3]
The Galatians seemed to be doing this, exchanging their freedom in Christ for the rule-heavy structure of a Christianity that also had to keep the Jewish law.
When Paul had first come to their area they welcomed him like an angel, even as if he were Christ himself. He says they were so passionate, loyal and enthusiastic about Paul that they would have torn out their eyes and given them to him, which was probably an expression like giving the shirt off your back. But now they look at him as an enemy.
What gives? Paul says, “I am perplexed about you.” “I don’t know how to deal with you.”[4]
We all have our good days and bad days. We all have seasons of strength and seasons when we aren’t so strong. But there are those who sometimes just flat out confuse us.
You know, those people with whom nothing is easy or simple. They embrace Christ, and soon after go to something else. Then they might return to Christ, and then they are off again. We yearn for them and so desire that they could just rest in Jesus and in relationship with him.
I guess it is somewhat refreshing to hear Paul’s frustration and exasperation, because it gives us permission to feel the same about some of those complex and misunderstood relationships in our lives. If you are going to try to be a faith influence for Christ it won’t always be clean and easy.
Complex and misunderstood.
Just lay this aside for a moment. I want to take a small detour and speak to something Paul says that I think is worth attention. Paul says that the Galatians know God, and then stops, and almost as if to correct himself, says, “or rather are known by God.”
It is a small detail, but it is loaded: the difference between knowing God and being known by him. We often speak of knowing God. We ask when someone came to know the Lord. We ask, “do you know the Lord?” One of the best-selling Christian books in the past fifty years is the book “Knowing God” by J.I. Packer. It has become a classic and the title speaks for itself. It has sold well not only because J.I. Packer is a keen mind and the book is good, but people want to know how to know God and who he is.
Throughout the Bible we read about knowing that the Lord is God. God does things so that people will know who he is. In Jeremiah, God speaks of the new covenant he will make when, “No longer will they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,” for they will all know me…”[5]
But Paul brings up another side to consider. We can easily start to credit ourselves and imagine that knowing God is a result of our faith efforts and spiritual clairvoyance, that it is something we do and achieve.
One time Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’”[6]
Can you imagine hearing Jesus say, “I have no idea who you are”, “I never knew you”? For those who proudly presented their resume of great deeds to the Lord and assumed this was authentication of their knowing God, Jesus counters that while they did many spiritually flashy and impressive things, that isn’t what puts someone in relationship with him.
It can happen that someone becomes so impressed with their own work, their own successful ministry, their own devotion that they believe they know Jesus when he doesn’t really know them. Its more about what they do than what God does for them.
They live by their efforts not by grace.
Jesus also said this once: “…no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”[7] We need the Son of God to allow us to know him.
Paul said that he was called by God’s grace, and the only reason he knew God was because God was pleased to reveal his Son to Paul.[8] In I Corinthians he writes that love is the key to being known by God. “…anyone who loves God is known by him.”[9] In another place it says, “The Lord knows those who are his.”[10] Jesus, the good shepherd, said, “I know my own, and my own know me.”[11]
Martin Luther said that “…our knowing [God] is more passive than active; that is, it is more a matter of being known than of knowing. The only work we are to do is “to permit God to do his work in us; He gives the Word and when we take hold of this by the faith that God gives, we are born as sons [and daughters] of God.”[12]
If it is more a matter of being known than knowing, then a lot is taken out of our hands. We aren’t in as much control as we thought.
If our relationship with God is based on him choosing to reveal himself to us, and not us working for this relationship, then it is a matter of grace. Knowing God becomes a gift. It isn’t what we do, but what God does for us.
I don’t discount for a moment how evangelical faith has emphasized accepting Christ. We have choices to make. We need to respond. But if that is the whole picture, we easily begin to think that it is our effort that puts us in relationship with God. God becomes just another commodity for me to throw in the shopping cart of my life.
Might it be the grace and previous move of God’s Spirit first that puts us in a place to even consider accepting Christ? It’s not my decision, my choosing, my knowledge, my baptism, my faith, but God’s sending, dying, rising, choosing, decision, approval, appearing, calling, and knowing me that is primary.
Paul so badly wants the Galatians to see that they are known by the Lord, and not in need of trying to keep a bunch of religious regulations to earn their place with the Lord. He says, “My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you…”[13]
It’s like a childbirth for Paul. He suffers pains over the Galatians. He wants to see them fully born of God. Or like a mother he will go through the pain until Christ is formed in them. “Until” is a word of hope. Paul has hope that the Galatians will not always forsake Christ’s grace. He hopes they might change. He believes they might become different.
His goal is that Christ be formed in them. That is the goal for all of us: that the Lord Jesus Christ be formed in us, that we “take the shape of Christ”.[14] Becoming a Christian is a process of formation. The Greek word Paul used gives us our English word for morphing. We are to morph into Christ – be changed so that we become more like him as we live and grow.
Jesus’ life is being formed in us. We read the Bible, go to church, pray, serve, and give ourselves to various acts of Christian devotion not to win favor but to nurture the formation of Jesus’ life within us.
It has been a struggle for the Galatians. Sometimes we have to hang in there with others because it is a struggle for Christ to be formed in them. It takes patience, prayer, endurance, encouragement, and consistency, among other things.
Some of us are suffering birth pains for others. There are people for whom we long to see Christ formed in them.
There are mothers and fathers who have longed for Christ to be formed in their sons and daughters. Don’t quit. Keep praying, seeking, encouraging. Pray for the Lord to send people into your children’s lives who can be spiritual fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters to them. Believe in the “until” that Paul held for the Galatians.
Remember that maybe someone hoped, prayed, invested in, and hung in there with you, and that is why Christ is being formed in you today.
Relationships aren’t always easy. Someone may easily be complex and misunderstood. That includes faith relationships. But Christ is at work even amidst the mess. The goal is always Christ being formed in us, and every one of us being known by him.
Living by grace means bearing in those relationships, knowing the Lord also bears with us.
Prayer:
Holy Spirit, take what has been offered in this message and multiply it by your grace and power, so that Christ will be formed in us, and we can be of help to those who you want to know you.
Amen.
[1] 1:6
[2] 3:1
[3] Eugene Peterson, Traveling Light, p.128
[4] J.B. Phillips
[5] Jeremiah 31:34
[6] Matthew 7:21-23
[7] Matt. 11:27
[8] 1:15-16
[9] 1 Cor. 8:3
[10] 2 Tim 2:19
[11] John 10:14
[12] Galatians, p.401
[13] 4:19
[14] New English Bible