yes, but not all things build up.

So when freedom ran amok, which it wasn't in Galatia, but when it did run amok, and corrections.

So reading Paul's letters is like reading somebody else's mail.

It's not addressed to us, it's not addressed to DS and Michaels and Kelvin.

We need to know as much as we can about the first recipients in order to make sense of what Paul says.

We'll never know as much as we'd like to know because we don't have access to the original recipients.

But I stressed over and over again in our talk that Galatians is so highly polemical, so exaggerated in its anger and its resistance to their position.

Why was the law given at all if it just makes people fail? And what does that mean for those such as Jews or Muslims or perhaps kind of earnest secular Democrats who seek to abide by

Praise to Christ the Lord.

Well, good morning.

We're reaching the end, not quite the end now, I understand, the end of our journey through Galatians.

I've been here for every sermon, I'll talk about you.

rigorously opposing pressure being put on Gentile believers in Galatia to accept circumcision and Torah keeping as a necessary part of their commitment to Christ.

He's insisted that God's grace in Christ brings radical freedom from the law and any attempt to smuggle it back in through the back door effectively cancels out Christ.

Listen, I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you.

of

Bless the words of Chris's mouth.

So if you were here last time, you would remember, you probably won't remember, because I don't remember, but if you were here last time, we saw how Paul, at the beginning of Galatians 3, used three arguments to dissuade his hearers from relying on circumcision and a life defined by Torah obedience.

He pointed to Galatians' own dramatic experience of liberation and transformation through the work of the Holy Spirit.

which had nothing to do with law keeping.

He then used the example of Abraham being declared righteous and receiving a promise of blessing on the basis of his faith, again, nothing to do with law keeping.

And then he warned against the dark side of succumbing to the law, of falling foul of the curse of judgment by relying on law keeping as though it would be the key to righteousness.

So the argument goes on now into the first part of chapter 4 where it seems to me that Paul offers a kind of before and after comparison of life under the law.

[laughs]

Um, which if I'm gonna be brutally honest, I don't think is a, is, it's, it's, it's quite a f- it's quite a fitting name.

There's, there's not too much around here, to be honest.

There's, there's not too many inhabitants.

[laughs] There's not too many villages.

It's very, it's very dry.

It's very sandy.

Chris, just give us a quick word about the stage itself.

And so what was that like for you between 16 and 23? Like, what did life look like?

I remember that first drink the same way people remember the first time they met their partner or the first time they had sex or the first time they started a job, right? That moment for me was such a big moment because before...

Before then, I had completely made this decision to not consume alcohol.

I knew I had seen it in my grandfather a bit and in my my dad to some extent.

And I knew that alcohol changed who you were.

And I did not want to do that.

I knew that it was something I just had this feeling that whenever I did have a drink, it would it would end the way that it ended.

Um, When you, you know, as you went through high school, was it just more of the same, your drinking style with your friends?

Amen.

Good morning, everybody.

I kind of feel we should be giving out chocolates at this stage of the series.

You keep going back.

We've got a couple of weeks to go yet, but I hope you're enjoying this journey through Paul's epistle to the Galatians.

So far, Paul has used his own experiences, his conversion experience, his apostolic commissioning, his engagement with the Jerusalem leaders, his confrontation with Peter at Antioch, which he talked about last week.

He's used his own experience to defend his understanding of the gospel against those who were, his word, perverting the gospel by encouraging the Galatians to add something additional to their faith in Christ.

[laughing]

Today's text falls into two parts.

In the first half, Paul recounts a fiery dispute with Peter.

This is Peter, you know, the prince of the apostles, the rock on which the church has been built.

A fiery dispute over what Paul considered Peter to sh-be showing, which is rank duplicity.

And in the second half of our passage, he unpacks the fundamental principles that led him to resist Peter and the other Jews who joined him in his hypocrisy.

He summarizes this painful episode in Antioch because he sees it as an exact parallel to what is going on in Galatia.

[laughs]

Have you

struggling in Galatia against the influence of Jewish Christian opponents who had come in his footsteps into the church after he'd left and were insisting that the Gentile believers in Galatia needed something extra to belong.

These opponents were very hostile to Paul and his influence, so they sought to undermine the confidence that the Galatian believers had placed them that, you know, Paul is not really an apostle of Christ.

He's actually a fraud.

He's a self-appointed pretender.

He's not really endorsed by the most important leaders of the Jerusalem church, Peter, James and John, the three pillars that Paul refers to.

I call them the big three.

sleep.

beginning at verse

13

This is the gospel of Christ.

Praise to Christ the Lord.

for the beginning of what could be a work of endurance to get through the whole six sermons.

So I'm grateful for the chance to have this opportunity, but you might not be so grateful.

So Galatians is not a long or involved epistle.

It's only six chapters.