Galatians 6. The Book of Galatians, as
you've heard already, in some ways is the book in the Bible, that's the book
of the gospel par excellence. Oh, not that you don't have the Bible in
every nook and cranny giving you the gospel, not that Romans isn't a more
fulsome exposition of the gospel, but there's no other book that is as
conscious of the role of the gospel in the life and ministry of the Christian.
There's no other book that talks about how important it is that the gospel be at
the very center of the Christian's life, not just simply something that the
non-Christian uses for salvation, to get salvation, but it's in the
middle of the Christian's life. In Martin Luther's commentary in
the Galatians, in Chapter 2, verse 4, he says something that, I think,
summarizes very well the point of the book of Galatians. Martin Luther says in that
one spot, he says "The truth of the gospel is also the principle article of all
Christian doctrine, wherein the knowledge of all godliness consists. Most necessary
it is therefore, that we should know this gospel well, teach it to others, and beat
it into their heads continually." That's a very Luther kind of thing to say. And that
is pretty much what the Book of Galatians is about. Now, when you
get to Chapter 6, and I have to admit that I was in this boat up until
very recently, like three days ago, you look at Chapter 6 almost
like a set of detached statements. When you get to the end, it almost looks
like Paul's just saying a number of different things he wants to say. They
almost seem like standalone proverbs. And I have to admit that when I've preached on
it before, that's how I've looked at it, just a set of discrete statements about
bearing one another's burdens and God is not mocked. But as I have
been reading this and studying it, getting ready to talk to you
about it, I actually think that Chapter 6 hangs together pretty well, especially if
I cheat here, and read the last verse of Chapter 5, which many commentators, and I
would agree with them, think should have been the first verse of Chapter 6. That
it actually holds together pretty well. Because the first part is talking about a
heart condition that needs to be addressed at the behavioral level and the last part
talks about how that heart condition can be solved by the gospel at the identity
level. Let me read it to you, and then we'll go through it, but I'm going
to start at Chapter 5, verse 26. "Let us not become conceited, provoking
one another, envying one another. Brothers, if anyone is caught in any
transgression, you, who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of
gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one
another's burdens, and so, fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is
something when he is nothing, he deceives himself, but let each one test his own
work and then his reasons to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor,
for each will have to bear his own load. Let the one who is taught the word share
all good things with the one who teaches. Do not be deceived, God is not mocked, for
whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh
will, from the flesh, reap corruption, but the one who sows to the spirit will,
from the spirit, reap eternal life. "And let us not grow weary of doing good,
for in due season, we will reap if we do not give up. So then, as we have
opportunity, let us do good to everyone and especially to those who are of the
household of faith. See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own
hand. It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you
to be circumcised and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross
of Christ. For even those who are circumcised do not themselves, keep
the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may
boast in your flesh. But far be it from me to boast, except
in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been
crucified to me and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts
for anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as for all who
walk by this rule, peace and mercy upon them and upon the Israel of God. From
now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen." Now,
the reason I think that this actually holds together is up until now, Paul's had
two basic concerns, a doctrinal concern, a situational concern. The doctrinal
concern, of course, is a fear that the readers were losing a grip on the
doctrine of justification by faith alone. On the other hand, the
situational concern is for their unity, that they wouldn't be biting and devouring
one another, that they'd be living together in unity. And of course, he's
using the gospel to bring about that unity and he fuses those two concerns here
at the end. Because starting at 5:26 and through the first part of Chapter 6, he
is calling for a kind of relationships. He talks about a heart condition that
needs to be resistant at the behavioral level and then solved at the identity
level. Now, what is that heart condition? Chapter 5, verse 26, which I read
"Let us not become conceited, provoking one another,
envying one another." Now, here I'm following the old
stalwarts, people like F.F. Bruce, John Stott and Donald Guthrie, people you
might say I teethed on when I was a new Christian and reading their commentaries
on Galatians. And what they say, is that word conceited isn't a particularly
helpful English way to convey the word there. Probably the older English word
vain glory or vainglorious is a better way to get it across. It's the Greek word
kenodoxia, which actually literally means "empty of glory." And the old English
word vainglorious literally renders it, but it's not of much help to contemporary
English speakers anyway. But what it means is, I'm relying on
F.F. Bruce, to be empty of glory means that you are desperate for recognition and
affirmation, that you sense an emptiness and you're trying to fill it with other
people's affirmation and recognition. You're desperate to prove yourself.
And what that does is this. How do we do that? That's a heart condition. That's
a natural human heart condition. I do know that... We all know that there's
such a thing as an insecure person, right? But because Paul is saying to all of his
readers, "Let's not have this condition in our lives anymore," I think we have
to interpret this at a theological level, not just a psychological level.
Romans Chapter 1 and 2 tells us that all human beings know that deep down inside,
we know that we were made to serve God. We were made to serve God. Romans 1 says
"We were made to serve and honor God and nothing else." Which means every part of
your being needs, has been created for, has been designed to hear God say to you,
"Well done, good and faithful servant." The approval of God. The recognition
of God. "Well done, good and faithful servant." That is what you need. You've
got a cave, a cavity, a God-shaped hole, as it were. I know Augustin talks about a
God-shaped hole. I'm being a little more specific than that. What you
need is the recognition of God, as it were. The well-done of God.
And because we don't have that, because we've turned away from God, we are
desperately trying to fill that cavity at the expense of everyone else. In other
words, we go out into all of our relationships, instead of going out
to serve, we go out to use people. We go out into all of our relationships,
in a sense, with a logic of the market, which is "How can I profit from this
person? How can I profit from this relationship? How can I bolster my
fragile sense of being a good person? How do I build myself up at your expense?"
John Snott says if you take a look at the verse it says, "Let us not become
conceited, provoking one another and envying one another," and he says "Well,
envying one another is the inferiority complex. You're comparing yourself and
you're angry because you feel like you're inferior to this person so you resent
it." Provoking actually means, in a sense, to compete with. It's
a word that means, in a sense, to be aggressive, but the way John
Stott reads it is, here's a person with a superiority complex who says "I could beat
you," and the envying person...here's the person with the inferiority complex, which
is "I can't beat you and I hate it." But the fact is you're going into every
relationship not to serve, but asking "How does help make me feel?
How does this help me or not help me bolster myself? How does it help me fill
that emptiness, so I feel like I'm an important person, so I feel
better about myself?" So we go out into every situation and
we're comparing ourselves constantly and therefore, we're actually going out to
use people and to exploit people, not to serve people and not to love
people. Now, what you have in verses 1 - 5 and 6, really. What you have there is you
have, in a sense, Paul saying "Here's how I want you to live instead. Here's how you
resist that condition at the behavioral level." Look, he says, "Brothers, if
anyone is caught in any transgression, you, who are spiritual, should restore
him in a spirit of gentleness, but keep watch on yourself
lest you too be tempted." Now, by the way, "You, who are spiritual."
Almost all commentators think he's really trying to say "You with the Holy Spirit,"
so he's not talking about elite spiritual types. He's talking about Christians. But
notice when he says "If anyone is caught in a trespass, restore them. This is
not Matthew 5 or Matthew 18. This is not saying "Restore the
relationship." He's not talking about someone who sinned against you. It says
"Restore him." And it says, "Only if the person is caught or trapped in a
trespass." What's that? A transgression. If you look at a person who obviously has
a bad habit, has a character flaw and it's pulling them down, maybe they're always
blowing up relationships because of their abrasiveness. Maybe they can't keep a
job because of their irresponsibility or whatever. You look at a person and you
see, here's a person who's in trouble. Here's a person who's constantly screwing
up. Here's a person who actually is caught in some kind of character flaw. What
does it say? If you have a right attitude towards yourself, It says if you're
humble, if you are not self-righteous, in other words, if you have the
proper attitude toward yourself, you can move in that
relationship to serve him. Now, if you actually are a vainglorious
person, you look at someone like that and you say "Just get me away. I'm not going
to get anything out of this relationship. A vainglorious person goes into every
relationship, like I said before, with the logic of the market. You add it
up on cost benefit. "Am I going to get as much out of this relationship as I'm
putting into it, at least, or more? Is this person going to help me
meet other people I want to meet? Is this person going to make me feel
good about myself, you know?" sometimes you do get into relationships,
they are called enabling.... Pardon me The old AA group...
The old AA approach was right about sometimes we actually do want to get into
a relationship with somebody who's a mess because we can constantly rescue them so
they need us and that makes us feel good about ourselves, but that's vainglorious.
You know why? Because we don't want to restore them. We want to keep them
dependent on us. Or maybe we just don't want to have anything to do with them
because we're too busy trying to reach our goals. We don't want to spend a lot of
time with a person who's kind of a black hole. You give and you give and they
just don't seem to get any better. If your attitude toward yourself is
right, if your weren't vainglorious, you would move out into relationships as
a servant, not using the person, either by keeping them dependent on you and not
restoring them or by not getting involved with them at all because they're a wreck.
He's calling for a kind of relationship that takes a unique sort of heart, a
unique sort of identity, one that's been healed of the vain glory, which is
the characteristic of all sinners. The need to use other people to bolster
your inner sense of your self-worth to cover over the feeling you actually do
have that you're alienated from God to try to make up for the fact that you don't
have God saying to you "Well done, good and faithful servant." So you're out
there trying to find everybody else to tell how great you are, and you can either
use a person by keeping them dependent on you or you can use a person by going to
find somebody else who's not a mess. So in verse 2 when it says, "Bear one
another's burdens," usually we talk about that almost as a standalone, but it's
almost certainly talking about verse 1. And that means... Here's the metaphor. If
somebody is struggling with a 100-pound load and they can't get it, if you come
to help them, how do you help them? You can only help them by taking... "If
you take that end, I take this end, now you've got 50 pounds on you and... I
mean, the reason why the two of you can carry it, you grab this end of the chest,
he grabs the other end of the chest, is because you're both actually carrying
50 pounds now. You're not really carrying 100 pounds. It's not all on you. If you
had to pick the whole thing up, you'd have 100 pounds. If two of you
pick it up, you've got 50 pounds. If four of you pick it up,
you've got 25 pounds each. So, the metaphor is, you can never help
somebody without some of that person's burden falling on you. And that's the
something that a lot of us don't want to happen. Jonathan Edwards has a great place
in his great essay on helping the poor where he deals with objections, that when
he has preached to people and said, "You need to help the poor," very often
people give him objections. And one of the objections was, "I cannot
afford it. I'd love to help the poor, but I cannot afford it." And Jonathan
Edwards, as usual, puts it like this. He says, "If we're never obliged to
relieve other's burdens, but when we do it without burdening ourselves, how do we
bear our neighbor's burdens when we bear no burden at all?" What he's trying to say
is, when you say "I can't afford it," what you mean is "I can't afford it
without burdening myself." He says, "But that's the whole point.
Galatians Chapter 6, verse 2. When you see someone in trouble, in this
case, financial trouble, there is no way to help that person without some of that
person's financial burden falling on you. It's called a sacrifice. Paul is talking
about a kind of relationship here that we are actually not really capable of. We can
only help people when it helps us feel good about ourselves. Those of us who go
out raising money for various charitable purposes, ministry purposes, helping the
needy and the poor in our community and all that, you know how people do that so
often. You know that they're giving so that they can feel good about themselves.
You know that they're doing it to the degree that it doesn't burden them but
simply builds them up because they're vainglorious. Paul says, "I
want a whole different kind of relationship." Even verses 3, 4...
Listen, I'll just be brief because we need to get to the meat of this. but even like verses three and four
are often read as standalones and I think it's supposed to be one idea.
He says, "For anyone who thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives
himself." That is not a standalone. It's true, of course. Of course, it's a
proverb. It's a standalone proverb. Anyone who thinks you're better than you
really are, you're in self-deception. Okay. But he's connecting it here and he's
really saying, "You're never going to live this kind of servant life. You're never
going to move out into relationships where you're really trying to serve and not
using that person to build up your self-image, unless there's
a humility about you." I love how categorical the Bible is about
this. Paul says, "Now don't forget, as a Christian, remember what the gospel
says, you're nothing." I love the drive-by that Jesus does in Luke 11. It's a
drive by. He's talking about prayer, remember? In Luke 11, to his disciples and
he's trying to say "My father will give you things if you ask for them." But at a
certain point, he says, "After all..." he says to his disciples, his apostles he's
talking to. He says, "If you who are evil give good gifts to your children when
they ask you,, how much more will my Heavenly Father..." You who are evil."
He's talking to the apostles. Oh, by the way, you're evil. You're evil. The
apostles, "You're evil." That's half the gospel. "You're evil." That's half
the gospel. "You're nothing." And the way to overcome that is not by
getting out there into relationships that only make you feel good about yourself.
That's desperate. That's sad. That's pathetic. But for you to move out
into every relationship basically figuring out, "How does this person's dependence or
independence, how does this person...my relationship. How does this build up my
flagging, fragile, sense of self-worth, which is flagging and fragile because
I'm not related to God like I should be. And therefore, I've got to fill that hole
with the acclamation and the applause and the accolades if everyone else in the
world, it will never do it. Nothing will heal your heart except God himself looking
at you with the light and saying, "Well done, good and faithful servant."
It just isn't going to happen. Even verse 4, by the way, and 5, every
commentator, I'll just say something about this. Every commentator, every preacher
I've ever heard, always takes these two verses a little bit differently. He says,
"But let each one test his own work and then his reason to boast will be in
himself alone and not in his neighbor, for each will have to bear his own load."
It's a little bit of a side...almost a footnote. But Paul's trying to say "If you
really, really were healed in your heart, if you need to always compare yourself to
other people as a way of bolstering that fragile ego you've got, then, you still
could have a sense in which you make progress. You can still feel like "Hey,
I'm making progress, not because I'm better than him or better than her."
But rather it says, "Every person knows you've got your own load to bear." The
word load there is not the same as the word burden. The word burden is a word
that gets across the idea of a crushing weight and the word load is more of a
cargo, a luggage, something that you have to take on a trip. The best way to explain
this is something somebody years ago, an older pastor helped me. I guess I must
have expressed a certain amount of irritation with somebody. This was
somebody in my church and they were professing Christians, but they were very
flawed people. It was a very flawed family. And one minister
put it like this. He said, "Well, you know, there's common
grace, there's special grace and some of us, because of God's common grace, have
had great families and we got a lot of love growing up, and we have a fair amount
of self-control and we're kind of well adjusted. You come in, you might say, on a
character scale from zero to 10 and when you become a Christian, you may come in at
a 3. At five years of growing in Christ, you've come to about a 3.5. But then,
here's this family, and they've had a... both the husband and wife come from
terrible families themselves. At the common grace level, they come into the
Christian faith, they give their lives to Christ, they come in at about a zero.
They're wrecks. And after five years in the faith, they're now 1.5. They really
have made some changes, but you look at them and you say
"I'm twice as loving and self-controlled as you are." You're forgetting...
Look, they've got their load and you've got your load. Why is it
that when Jesus says to Peter at the end of John, he kind of hints at... "Guess
what? You're going to die for your faith." I don't know whether Peter quite gets what
Jesus is saying, but Jesus basically says to Peter "You know, there's some bad stuff
that's coming." And Peter looks at Jesus, then he sees John walking along and he
says 'What about him?'" And I just love how Jesus says "What is that to you?
Follow me." And I'm almost sure that C. S. Lewis had that in his mind when he
had Aslan constantly in the <i>Narnia</i> <i>Chronicles</i> say to people "I only tell you
your own story. Don't ask me about that person's story. That person,
they have their own load." So you see, what Paul's doing here is
he's saying "Get your eyes on God. Don't keep looking at everybody else. Stop
using everybody else." Another way... Here's the principle behind this first
part of the book of this chapter. Some years ago I read a meditation by Tom
Howard. Tom Howard is a Catholic Writer. He's a brother of the famous missionary,
Elizabeth Elliot. And Tom Howard wrote a little meditation that really made a
difference to me. He was saying, "Look at the temple. What is
in the middle of the temple?" You know, God architected every little
detail about the temple or the tabernacle and everything is laid out just according
to his specs. But when you get to the center of the temple, which in a certain
sense, is the center of the universe, the center of reality, what do you get? No
image. There's no image to bow down to. In fact, what Tom Howard says,
"There's really not a person, there's an event because at the
heart of reality, is a gold slab, the mercy seat." Oh, on the top of the Ark
of the Covenant, over the law, where the blood is sprinkled. And Tom Howard said,
"God is saying to us that the very heart of reality, the very heart of actually
creation and redemption is, my life for yours." What sin does,
is it makes us operate everything on the principle "Your life for
me. I'm gonna make you sacrifice for me, for my interest, for my self-image, your
life to serve mine. You will sacrifice your needs to serve mine." But Jesus
Christ came into the world saying, "My life for you, my life to serve you, my
life poured out for you. I sacrificed for you." And he says, those are the two
ways in which you can live your life. And every single day, every hour, you
can decide on which of those operating principles to work. Parents, you
have this wonderful plan for the day and then your kid gets sick, has a
need, melts down, and you really need to spend time with your child. Which is it
going to be? You can die and say "My life for you." You can have that child grow up
feeling loved. And even though in a sense you sacrificed, that child... In other
words, you died so the child will live. Or if you never sacrificed, if you've
never died yourself in your parenting life, if you constantly say, "Sorry, I've
got my needs, I've got my schedule, I've got my goals, you can't get in the
way," your child will grow up broken. You know that. All love, all real love is a substitutionary sacrifice. My
life for yours. Heart of the world. Heart of the universe. And Paul says,
"Look, you can live life that way and you can go into relationships that way or
you can go the old way, you know, the vainglorious way, not my life for
yours, but your life for me." Well, okay, that's wonderful. What a lovely
picture. But how do we get there? How do we fill that cavity? And that's
what the last part talks about. And here, of course, it says "It is those
who want to make a good showing in the flesh, who had forced you to be
circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross
of Christ. For even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the
law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they
may boast in your flesh. But far be it from me to boast,
except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been
crucified to me and I to the world for neither circumcision counts for anything
nor uncircumcision, but a new creation." Now, right here at the end, this is like a
summary, but I believe this is where he's fusing the doctrinal and the situational.
And essentially, he's saying, you're a whole new person, a new creation, a whole
new person if you learn to boast, not in anything else, but in the cross of Christ.
What is a vainglorious person? Someone who is always boasting in all
kinds of other things. If you learn to boast in Christ, that really makes
you essentially a new person, a new creation and that's what heals you.
and then the world can't control you anymore. Let's break this down.
That's what he's saying. It's amazing. Let's break it down. First of all, here's
what he's saying. If you want to have this deep healing that the gospel can do to
your very heart and your very identity, number one, you've got to understand
the doctrine of the cross. See, when he says, "God forbid, or far be
it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ," what does
it mean to boast in the cross?" Before we get anywhere else. Before
we talk about boasting or anything, we got to realize he's saying you've
got to understand the cross, which means that's a doctrine. Your life
will not be changed, the world will not be changed unless you understand the doctrine
of the atonement. Before you get anywhere else, before you do all the psychological
moves, before you talk about whatever else, you've got to understand the
doctrine of the cross. Doctrine comes first. You know, when
Jesus says to Peter in Matthew 16 "Who do you say I am?"
and Peter says "Oh, you're the Christ, the son of the living God," Jesus is
rather happy about the answer, and he says "Peter, that's a revelation from God.
Flesh and blood did not teach you that." And then, Jesus immediately starts
talking about what? The cross. It says, he immediately started teaching
that he had to go to Jerusalem and suffer and be tortured and be killed and rise
again. He starts talking about the cross. Immediately, Peter starts to get very
upset about this and he starts to rebuke Jesus. I loved you... "You're the son of
God. That's pretty good," Peter says. "And you're a great teacher and you're
the Messiah, great." But as soon as Jesus starts talking about the cross,
Peter says "No, no, no. Wait a minute. I don't get that. I don't get that. What
are you talking about?" And he starts to rebuke him. And Jesus does not say,
"Get thee behind me, Peter." Remember? He doesn't say, "Get thee behind me,
Peter." He says "Get thee behind me, Satan." You know why? Because when you
get the doctrine of the cross wrong, you're in the grip of Satan. When you
get the doctrine of the cross wrong, you are doing Satan's bidding. You
are Satan's missionary, not mine. Wow. There's a lot of
people in the world, including in the church, that get the
doctrine of the cross wrong and yet it's the basis for everything. Jesus says,
"I can't deal with you until you get the doctrine of the cross right and not only
that, you're doing Satan's will." So it's extraordinarily important. If you read the
gospels and if you think of them as biographies, you start to read them
and you say "This is kind of nuts. why would the gospel...
If these are biographies, why would they give 30%,
40% or even 50% of the entirety of the book to the last week of Jesus'
life? That doesn't seem like a very good biography. And the answer is, they're not
really biographies, but you know why they give...most of the book is the last
week of his life? Because of the cross. Jesus Christ came to go
to the cross. It's central. So unless you understand the doctrine of
the cross, none of the other things we're about the say, none of these incredible
things...there's no new creation, there's nothing else, number one. Number
two... By the way, and to understand the doctrine of the cross, you've gotta be
willing to embrace, accept and feel the offense of the cross. You do not get the
cross, you do not understand the doctrine of the cross, you have never really, truly
come to grips with it unless you feel the offense of it. I'm even talking to those
of you who were raised in the faith and you never remember a time in
which you didn't really believe. But I'm still saying look, in verse
12 it says, "Those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would
force you to be circumcised and only in order that they may not be persecuted to
the cross of Christ." He's saying the same thing he said back in Chapter 5,
verse 11 when he says "Brothers, those who preach circumcision, they want
to remove the offense of the cross." Now, he's talking about people who are afraid
the Jews would reject them if their converts weren't circumcised,
the gentile converts weren't circumcised. But it's bigger than
that. The cross is not just offensive to Jews. The cross
is offensive to everybody. You know, Alfred Jules Ayer who was a
very prominent British philosopher in the 20th Century. Bertrand Russell, also a
prominent philosopher. These are what these men said. These were British
philosophers. Here's what they said about the cross. Alfred Jules Ayer said, "The
doctrine of the atonement of Jesus Christ on the cross was 'intellectually
contemptible and morally outrageous." This is just typical. Bertrand Russel says that "No one who is profoundly human can
really believe God would punish sin like that," and he called the cross, "The
doctrine of cruelty." That's typical. But let me get down to earth.
You know what the doctrine of the cross does? A lot of people in the world
think religion's okay, not bad. Morality, religion is good for us.
The doctrine of the cross, offensive. "Are you saying," they say to us, "that
those of us who have worked our entire lives to keep ourselves out of the gutter
are in the exact same place spiritually as the people who are in the gutter? So that
we both have to be saved in exactly the same way? How dare you? Or they say to us,
"Are you saying that good people in other religions who have lived good lives and
are extremely moral in all these ways, if they don't believe in the cross of
Christ, they're lost? How dare you?" The cross of Christ is offensive in all sorts
of ways. And if you haven't come to grips with it, if you haven't felt it, if you
haven't ever struggled with it, I don't think you get it and, therefore,
it's not going to change you. But how does it change you? Thirdly,
you got to boast in it. Now, one of the things I've found really
interesting over the last few years is... In fact, just last year, when I was
preaching to my own Presbyterian General Assembly on I Corinthians 1, I came to
realize that so many of the great Pauline passages about the cross or about
the gospel, like Ephesians, pardon me, like Philippians 3 or 1 Corinthians 1 and
2 or Romans 3 and 4 or right here, the end of Galatians. Every time it seems like
Paul starts talking about the cross or the gospel, he starts talking about boasting.
Actually, it was fairly recently I began to realize the boasting thing. Wait a
minute. What's this boasting thing? Because he brings it up all the time. And
here, he's actually saying if you boast in the cross, that's what turns you into a
new creation, and if you boast in anything else, that's what makes you vainglorious.
Well, what's boasting? First of all, originally, a boast was
part of warfare. How do you get people to charge into almost certain death? How do
you get soldiers to go, "Let's go?" You start with a boast. A ritual boast was
where the captain or the general or the king got up and said, "Our hands are
strong enough, our spears are sharp enough," and everybody goes "Yeah," and
they charge. It was a ritual boast. I mean, actually, the Bible talks about it
quite a lot. Exodus 15 says "Egypt boasts. We will pursue them and draw our
swords and destroy them." 1 Kings 20. "One who puts on his armor should not
boast like one who takes it off." Which is a great little proverb. 1 Samuel 2,
Hannah talks about "I will boast over my enemies." A boast was how you got yourself
ready to charge, how you got yourself the confidence to charge. Now,
there are very different kinds of boasts. There's a Shakespearian
boast, you know, where Henry V, the St. Crispin's Day speech, fairly
eloquent. "And gentlemen, in England now a-bed will think themselves acursed they
were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speak, who fought
with us on St. Crispin's Day." Then, in "Ghost Busters," there's Bill Murray
saying "This chick is toast." And they're basically... Remember? Yeah, one is a
little more verbose. And now if you're English, you probably like the first
one more. If you're American, you probably like the second one more. But
essentially, a boast is getting you to say "We've got what it takes. We've got
the cannon, we've got the spears, we've got the champion, we've got
Goliath." That's always a big help. We boast. Now, Paul
is saying everybody has to actually boast of something. He takes a
military idea, which is what it is, and he begins to say "Well, now wait a minute.
You need to stop boasting in other things and start boasting in something else."
Jeremiah 9, a very famous place, it says "Let not the rich, wise man boast
in his wisdom or the strong man boast in his strength, or the rich man boast in
his riches, but let him who boasts, boast about this, that he understands and
knows me." There's no sense in that verse that there's such a thing as not boasting.
You had to boast in something. What does that mean? Well, you see,
a boast at a sort of psychological, theological level is your identity. What
do you look to that validates you, strengthens, you and makes you confident
to face things? Where does your confidence come from? Where does your strength come
from? Where does your validation come from? Everybody has to boast in something.
You see what a brilliant metaphor this is? Paul takes, as it were, something from the
military world and brings it on into our life and says, there's a certain sense
which everybody has to boast in something, which is a way of getting an identity
because everybody's got to find their confidence in something. Everybody's got
to do something that says "I can do it. I can do it." Well, what
is it going to be? You know, Martin Luther was extremely
canny about this because in his preface to Galatians, his epistle on Galatians, he
actually says that when the chips are down we almost instinctively point to something
that is our confidence. Say, "Well, I'm a good father." Or, "I'm a good
mother." Or, "I really worked hard." In other words, when something
comes... he says when Satan accuses us, we turn to
whatever we boast in, and he essentially says the devil will always outflank you if
you do that because you can say "Well, I do this." Or, "I do this," but the fact
is our righteousness is as a filthy rag. There's holes in it. Deep down inside,
it's fragile. The modern self-esteem is all about boasting. You
tell yourself you're beautiful. Tell yourself you can do anything you set
your mind to. Social media is filled with boasts. But what does
the Bible say? What does Paul say over and over? Philippians 3:3.
"We boast in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh." 1 Corinthians
1:31, 2 Corinthians 10:17. "Let one who boasts boast in the Lord." In
other words, Paul takes the Jeremiah 9 passage and applies it to Christ. What
does it mean to boast in the cross? It means three things, let's say. Number
one, it means you're seeking the applause of God. In fact, you know, Paul says
when he's also talking about boasting in Romans. In Romans 2:29, he says, "Those
who are circumcised in the heart by the spirit and not by the written code, such a
man's praise is not from men but from God." And the word praise there is
actually the word for applause. And C.S. Lewis does a bit of a riff on
this in his <i>Weight of Glory</i>, where he says "Let's sit down and imagine
what we're talking about here, that when you become a Christian, because
you're in Christ, God looks at you and doesn't see your sin, doesn't see your
flaws, but sees you as perfect in Jesus Christ. That's what the gospel is.
And as a result, he looks at you, sees you in Christ and applauds." And
that's what Paul says. Here's what Lewis says, "It is written that we shall stand
before him. The promise of the glory is the promise almost incredible, and
only possible by the work of Christ, that we shall please God. It seems
impossible. A weight of glory, which our thoughts can hardly sustain, but
so it is. It means good report with God, acceptance, response, acknowledgment
and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we've been knocking
all our lives will open at last." All your life you've been knocking
on a door. "Affirm me. Love me. Tell me I'm okay." You've been sucking it
out of people, trying to get it out of people. You've been exploiting people.
You've been working all of your relationships so that you can somehow
steal self-acceptance from other people. It never works, but in the gospel, the
door on which you are knocking will open at last. He's got a future reference
to it. I think that's fair because justification by faith well means, right
now I know this, but on the last day I will actually experience it fully.
It means good report with God, acceptance, response, acknowledgment,
welcome into the heart of things, the door on which we have been knocking
all our lives will open at last. It means at least one more thing, I
said it means applause with God, but it also means this: It means seeing
what Jesus Christ did to get this for you. See, the boast in the cross is not
just to boast in our justification. He doesn't say that, though certainly,
there's no reason why we can't. But the boast in the cross means to look
and see what Jesus Christ did to get that for you. Look, he was beaten and
mocked. They hit him and they said, "Prophesy, Christ. Who hit you?"
They spit on him, they jeered at him. They jeered at him when
he was on the cross, right? Robert Murray McCheyne, maybe a little
fancifully, thinks that when Jesus Christ was on the cross, maybe, and he cried out,
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me." Maybe he really did actually hear
God say the curse. Maybe he actually heard God say to him, "Depart from me ye cursed
into everlasting torment. Maybe a little fanciful, but here's the point, Jesus
Christ was jeered so we could get the applause of God. Jesus Christ heard
"Depart from me," so you and I can hear, in Christ, God say to us "Well
done, good and faithful servant." To boast in the cross is not just to boast
in the fact that in Christ "I finally... The only two pair of eyes in the
universe whose opinion counts, God, looks at you and sees an absolute
beauty." Finally, the door on which you've been knocking all your life has been
opened at last. You know, it's not just to revel in that, but also to see what Jesus
Christ did for you and that will enable you to move out into all relationships
saying "My life for yours." And when it says "The world is crucified to be and eye
to the world," Donald Guthrie says "That doesn't mean the world's been put to
death. It means it's been put to death to you." Donald Guthrie says, "It means the
natural world has ceased to have any claim on you." Who cares what they think?
Money is no longer an identity. It's just money. Now you can
give it away, you see. Even love relationships are not like the
very breath of life to you, and therefore, you don't melt down when somebody has a
problem, you know? You realize ultimately your affirmation, your recognition,
and your glory, as it were, comes from God and you're not trying to
suck it out of everybody around you. Criticism doesn't kill you.
But by the way, we need to end like this. It's not true that boasting in the cross
is only something you do inside. You also need to do it outside, and
so many of us are in ministry here, so let me close with an exhortation to
you. What does it mean to boast in the cross? In your ministry, it does mean to
remember that ultimately, you're only boasting in the cross and you're not
trying...well, let me give you an example. A lot of people, by the way, say to me
"Gee, I'd love to preach like you." I say "Why? What do you mean?" They say,
"Well, you quote so many great books. And I don't know how you read so much. I
wish I could quote so many great books." Look, I've got a good memory and I want
you to know this, that's no virtue at all. I didn't cultivate it. It's something
you're born with or you're not. It's not a fruit of the spirit. Okay, I
gotta a good memory. That's great. I sound smart. Okay. If anything, I have
to watch about that. I have to make sure I don't believe what people say about
me...the good things, too much. But here's what you have to be careful.
That's not boasting in the cross. That's boasting in how much you've read.
That's boasting in your end notes and footnotes. That's boasting in
"Look how much I know." Now, look, Billy Graham...I heard an old
Dick Lucas sermon. Dick Lucas was a minister in Helen's Bishopsgate some years
ago for many years, actually. I listened to a sermon in which he told this story
at the end of it. He said that in 1955, Billy Graham came to Cambridge to do the
university mission. He was preaching every night at Great St. Mary's in Cambridge.
And he got a lot of criticism in the press before he got there, in the London
press. Saying "What in the world is this backwoods American fundamentalist
doing coming and talking to our best and brightest?" Well, that intimidated Billy
Graham to some degree. And so, the first several nights, he boned up on his
Kierkegaard, his Nietzsche, and his Sartre and he had all kinds of these quotes and
he was trying real hard to not look stupid. And according to...I'm
getting this from his biography as well as what Dick said in that sermon. He didn't do very well the first four
nights. And the last night, he decided he was just going to preach
about the blood. He was just going to preach about the blood, forget about
everything else. He was going to boast in the cross. This is what Dick said.
This is what I got off the tape. He said, "I'll never forget that night. I
was in a totally packed chancel, sitting on the floor with the Regis
Professor of Divinity sitting on one leg, the Chaplin of the College who
was a future Bishop on the other. Now, both of these were good men in many
ways, but they were completely against the idea that we needed salvation
from sin by the blood of Christ. And that night, dear Billy got up and
started Genesis and went right through the whole Bible and talked about every
single blood sacrifice you can imagine. The blood was just flowing all through
the Great St. Mary's. Everywhere for three-quarters of an hour and both my
neighbors were terribly embarrassed by this crude proclamation of the blood of
Christ. It was everything they disliked and dreaded, but at the end of
he sermon, to everybody's shock, about 400 young men and women
stayed to commit their lives to Christ. By the way, at that time, there was a
student body of about 10,000 people. 400. And Dick remembers meeting a young Curet
some years ago, a Cambridge grad. He was at Birmingham Cathedral, and
over a cup, he said to the man, Dick said, "Where did Christian things begin
for you?" "Oh," the guy said. "Cambridge, 1955." "When?" "Billy Graham."
"What night?" "The last night." "How did it happen?" He says, "All I remember
is I walked out of Great St. Mary's for the first time in my life thinking,
"Christ really died for me." And Dick said, "It was unbelievable to
the Dons and the Professors, that a man like that, preaching a sermon like that
could have totally changed a life of a young person like that and so it did."
Don't be ashamed of the cross. Boast in the cross, not just in your
inner being, but in your ministry, and watch mountains move. Let us pray. Our
Father, we thank you for this remarkable, remarkable promise, and maybe we should
say to the degree that we can boast in the cross, to that degree the world will be
crucified to us and us to the world, and we will really be new creations. Now,
Lord, the reality is we so often...we have an old self and a new self. We go back
into the old ways of getting glory and honor. We go back. We don't live
my life for yours. But we pray, Father, that because we've sat here and opened
your word and your word has come home to use through the Holy Spirit, that more and
more we can say, "In the cross of Christ I glory and I boast in nothing except that
cross." Make us new creations thereby. We pray in Jesus name, Amen.
