Not Making This Up
(Third in a series on Galatians: Living by Grace)
Text: Galatians 1:11-24
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church, UT
April 30, 2023
This sermon series from the letter to Galatians is about living by the grace of Jesus Christ. Grace is a slippery thing. It is like holding onto a wet bar of soap. Sometimes we have it and sometimes we don’t.
Our awareness of our own failures, and the failures in our world, easily cause grace to slip out of our hands.
Do you know who Martin Luther was? He was the guy who got the whole Protestant Church going. You are sitting in a Protestant church this morning. Presbyterians are part of the Protestant tradition. Martin Luther led what was called the Reformation in the 16th century. In his reading of Galatians Luther said about himself,
“I know how I sometimes struggle in the hours of darkness. I know how often I suddenly lose sight of the rays of the gospel and of grace, which have been obscured for me by thick, dark clouds. In other words, I know how slippery the footing is even for those who are mature and seem to be firmly established in matters of faith.”[1]
Even though we have believed in the grace of Christ and have long followed him, we can still lose sight of all Christ has done for us. We can easily start to spiritually mope about how bad a Christian we are, how God must just be so disappointed in us, how weak and inadequate our faith is. We have great expectations of ourselves. We are too hard on ourselves and we disqualify ourselves with God.
Or we discount the grace of God for others; those we see as so far and opposite from God. I struggle with it, and I am sure you do to.
That is why Galatians is a good book for us. It reminds us of the essence of the Gospel, the power of the cross, and the depth of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The first two chapters of Galatians are largely Paul giving his spiritual autobiography. What is your spiritual autobiography? When did God first become real to you? What were the struggles and blessings in your coming to faith? Who were the people you encountered who formed you? What events were significant? Where have you come from and where are you now?
Paul spends so much time laying out his spiritual autobiography because there are people who are doubting him and the message he was giving. There were questions about whether Paul could be trusted. And, truth be told, it wasn’t unreasonable to be suspicious of Paul.
Before he was Paul his name was Saul. He was a violent persecutor of the church. His goal was to destroy it. When Stephen, the first deacon in the church and the first Christian killed for his faith, was being put to death it says Saul approved of their killing him.[2]
We read in the book of Acts that “Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison.”[3] What does that look like? Saul was carrying out a scorched-earth policy on the church.
He was on another hunting trip for Christians, having secured permission from the Jewish high priest that if he could find any men or women who belonged to what was called “the Way” (before it was known as “Christianity”) he could bring them bound to Jerusalem. It was on that journey that he was confronted by the living Lord Jesus himself.
In Acts 9 we read that a light flashed around Saul and blinded him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice speak to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply was, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”
This led to a powerful and rapid conversion where Saul’s life was turned inside out and his heart emptied of all the hate, anger and bitterness that caused him to suppress the name of Jesus. He became not only one of Christ’s followers, but an apostle and spreader of the message.
It was not an easy process as people did not trust this man who became known as Paul. When he began to preach Jesus instead of try to kill Jesus, people who heard him said, “Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem among those who invoke this name?”[4] and they thought he was faking it in order to find out who the Christians were so he could arrest them. But Paul was a changed man and now an instrument for Christ Jesus. He had to establish trust.
And so he says, “I want you to know…” He wants the Christians in Galatia to hear it from him. And he writes, “You have heard of my previous way of life…” He knew they knew.
Two things about the way Paul speaks about his conversion in this letter:
First, he doesn’t deny or try to cover up the horrific stuff of his past. He admits and owns up to it. It is also part of the power of his story. Some of us may have things in our past that we are ashamed of and we are glad we have left those things. But they are part of our story.
But, as the late pastor and writer Eugene Peterson said, “In the story of a changed life, nothing is wasted. Our former lives…are raw material that is used in the work of art that is freedom…That which took place in the years before our acceptance of Christ’s love is not rejected but used. Nothing is wasted in the free life of faith.”[5]
God wastes nothing in our lives. We may have some bad marks on our record of life, but God can use it all to make us testimonies of his grace.
Second, notice how Paul says this transformation happened. He says, “But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me…”[6]
He didn’t say, “When I decided to become a Christian” or “When I accepted Christ” but “when God
… in his grace
…was pleased
…to reveal his Son to me”. His transformation was all God. God’s grace. God’s pleasure. God’s revealing.
Our coming to Christ – however that may happen, and there are a thousand ways that does happen – is an act of God’s grace. Who we are, who we are becoming, who we will be in the Lord Jesus Christ is by his grace.
Paul even understood his calling to be from the time he was in his mama’s womb. God has designs on us long before we even know.
If it was about us finding God it would be by our work and not his grace. God doesn’t just start working in our lives once we get clear on his Son. He is moving even before then, in spite of whatever resistance, rebellion, apathy, or cluelessness we might have.
So don’t see your Christian life as necessarily beginning with your understanding and comprehension of it. I know we are often led to believe that it is up to us to seek, pray, work, put forth the effort and eventually come to God on our own. God revealed himself to hard-hearted Paul as a gift of grace.
There’s a lot of mystery in how it all works. Why some people seem to understand God’s revealing to them more clearly or faster or easier than others can’t always be accounted for. However God chooses to do it, it is always by his grace. And that should give us a certain freedom. The burden to know Christ isn’t necessarily ours. It isn’t necessarily about getting with the right program like some diet or exercise plan.
God comes to us, finds us, reveals himself to his by his good pleasure and grace. So let’s be thankful.
Paul knows people are telling the Galatians that Paul can’t be trusted. That his message is false. Paul says, “Look, you know what I used to be like. How do you explain that I would go from being a killer of Christians to being one myself? What else could bring about such a radical change than a message that is the real deal? How could I be like this unless I have really seen and heard Christ? I am not making this up.”
Paul wants them to know that he could not have made this up given who he was. Nothing could account for the change of his life than a supernatural encounter with Christ himself. He says, “I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie.”
And so the message he proclaimed wasn’t given to him by people, nor did he have any teachers. He claims it came directly as a revelation from Jesus Christ himself.
He then describes the years after his conversion. Instead of rushing to Jerusalem to meet with the apostles and get educated by them, he says that he went to Arabia for three years. We get no details about what he did or what happened there. But it seemed to be a period of learning, grooming and formation.
Arabia is desert. Perhaps Paul spent great deals of time in prayer and solitude. It was a place he could sink himself into this new life that had come upon him. It was only after that that he met with any of the apostles, and that for very brief times.
We don’t know how he received it, what he saw, or how Christ made it known to him but Paul says he had a direct revelation from Christ himself. His teacher was the Lord himself.
How do we know the gospel is true? How do we know this message we stake our lives on is the real deal? Because there are people who say our faith is really a myth, made up out of the imaginations of the early Christians, who put words into Jesus’ mouth, and made him out to be what they wanted him to be years after the fact.
I suppose you can believe that, but I think it was a lot for Christians to be arrested, tortured, lose their livelihood and sometimes their very lives for something that they just made up. I also don’t think there is much hope or power in that.
We believe this message is true because there were people who saw it all happen, told it, and wrote about it. And we have believed the testimony of the apostles.
But another reason for believing that the gospel is true is the changed lives of people, which is what Paul is arguing for in the latter part of chapter one here in Galatians. I know we live in a day when many people turn from the message of grace because of the bad examples some Christians can be. But the other side of that is people who come to Christ because of the true examples of grace they see. Our lives when marked by grace can be arguments for Christ as well.
I once read a story by Matt Fitzgerald who was a pastor in Chicago. When he was a young pastor he was also an aspiring writer and had been asked by a magazine to do a story on an inmate on death row in Ohio. This prisoner was in his twenty-first year of waiting for execution because of a brutal murder that he committed.
Matt Fitzgerald and this inmate sat across from each other at a small table. The pastor wanted to know what this convicted killer thought about God. The pastor admitted that he was uncomfortable with the way this convicted man easily spoke of God, often referring to God’s mercy and grace.
Fitzgerald wasn’t sure that he could trust what he was hearing, and that maybe this was just a guy trying to use faith and “Christianese” to get people to think he was really changed. He suspected this man had too easily come to God’s grace and didn’t really understand the weight of what he had done, kind of wanting a cheap forgiveness.
When Fitzgerald asked him about this, here was what this man on death row and wearing chains said:
“The gospel requires us not simply to be sorry, but to be transformed by our sorrow. For me, this is a daily transformation. I’ll never forget my crime. It is always deeply, deeply disturbing to me. But there has to come a point where you receive forgiveness and then forgive yourself – not in order to justify your actions, but in order to accept God’s love…I’m not letting myself be restricted simply because I’m wearing shackles and handcuffs. I’m a person, and I’m a person who is loved and forgiven by God.”
Some of us who haven’t done anything like this man need to be able to see this very thing.
Fitzgerald was shocked that this murderer was also a man who was loved by God. And when he heard him say these words he was so shocked that he got up and left the room.
But as he left he realized how bothered he was that this man on death row had claimed exactly what he as a pastor had preached. Fitzgerald was awakened to the fact that he’d been trying to contain God’s grace, as if it were for certain people and not for others. He realized that God’s grace is “something that’s out of control: the power of God. It’s a surging and crackling energy, a wildness that the church hints at but doesn’t own.”
He was absolutely taken that a murderer would and could grab hold of the same love he had been given.
Fitzgerald wrote, “He’d claimed the love of God as his own, and that claim threatened me. I never would have guessed that the most unnerving thing I would encounter on death row was the grace of God.”[7]
I suppose many a person had similar thoughts about Paul, who had done plenty of damage, caused plenty of pain, and ruined many a life and family.
Is the gospel of grace real? Is it something just made up? Paul insisted that it wasn’t. He challenged people to look at him. And many of those who did praised God because of Paul. They knew this doesn’t happen without a Higher Power, if you would. God in his grace is finding all kinds of people who don’t deserve any of it. And isn’t just the other guy or gal, but it’s you and I as well.
Our conversion probably isn’t as radical as Paul’s. For some of us our coming to faith might have been very uneventful, slow, and, quite frankly boring. How God reveals his Son to us – whether through the slow, gentleness of a Sunday School teacher, or the power of a vision of the risen Lord - is not the point. Everyone’s story is different.
The point is that we stand as living examples of God’s grace. Like Martin Luther said, “I know how often I suddenly lose sight of the rays of the gospel and of grace, which have been obscured for me by thick, dark clouds.”
Let’s pray for the clouds to disperse so that we can see the grace of God in Jesus Christ each day for others and for us. Don’t lose sight of that grace.
Prayer: Jesus, your grace is bigger than we know. You turn the most violent into the most peaceful. You turn those opposed to you into those who are your servants. And we thank you that your grace has come to us. Thank you for claiming each one of us. Amen.
[1] Lectures on Galatians, pp.63,64
[2] Acts 8:1
[3] Acts 8:3
[4] Acts 9:21
[5] Traveling Light, p.55
[6] V. 15
[7] Matt Fitzgerald, “Shocked by Grace”, Christian Century, http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2014-01/shocked-grace