Michigan Camp Meeting 2022: Knowing the Time

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Experiencing Jesus Through Galatians

Jay Gallimore

01 Experiencing Jesus Through Galatians

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2022 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

We think about the Apostle Paul who gave just everything he could give and in all the midst of his challenges he wrote these books for us and so today we want to understand the message and so we pray that Jesus will be our teacher here and We thank you for your presence here.

Now I really want you to be able to, if you have a question, please don't be afraid, raise your hand, we'll get that question.

If I get too many, of course, sometimes I might have to shepherd us along because we do want to get through the material.

If we can, particularly I want to get through the first 4 chapters.

Now we've got 6 sessions to do that, and so I'm hoping that we can get through all 6 sessions, all 6 chapters.

So if you have your Bibles, you will need your Bibles, 1 form or another, and so if you open them to the book of Galatians, we'll get started.

And by the way, I'm not trying to sell books, but if you're interested, ABC has it.

The reason I wrote these 2, I have 1 on Romans and 1 on Galatians, and the reason I wrote them is I want people to get into the Word.

So it has my notes, and it has the answers in the back, but I want you to be able to get into the Word and wrestle with the Word.

It's 1 thing to listen to somebody, it's another thing to read it and to understand it on your own so that when you talk to somebody, you can talk to them and have confidence.

All right, so to get started, who, we'll just start, and you probably know the answer to some of this, but the introduction is important.

Now if you got French blood in you and Belgian blood in you and that area, Britain, you probably got some Celtic blood in you.

Some people say Celtic, Celtic, however you want to say it.

But they had spread out across Europe, and you have the Celtic Wars with the Romans and so forth.

But A group of those Celtics actually settled in what we call today Turkey, and a place called Galatia.

There were 4 churches connected there, and I don't know if I remember each 1 of them.

So When this letter is written, it's written to all 4 of those churches, and all 4 of those churches read that letter, and maybe they discuss it among themselves.

They actually were politically in control.

The Galatians continued to be politically in control even when Paul was writing this, even though it was under the Roman empire.

So that's just a little bit of setting a background.

Now these folk also have connections all across Europe.

We know that we know the gospel got to Britain very early, long before Papal legate showed up there and papal missionaries showed up the gospel already been entrenched in fact Who was the great missionary there Columba and there was 1 before him st Patrick st.

Patrick by the way was an early Christian who kept the Sabbath and Also Columbi our Columbia.

Patrick and they had the gospel early there and they had been teaching it and a lot of Britain had been converted to it.

So that's just a little bit of background.

But Galatians not only had an impact on the early church, it also has an impact bringing us out of the dark ages.

In fact, Martin Luther would call this book, he said, I am married to this book I loved Galatians and along with Romans of course the Galatians was written very early in in Paul's ministry Romans written there at the very end You can kind of see the difference.

But you get things out of Galatians that you don't get in Romans, or at least it's not as evident there.

And I say this with sweet kindness, the Reformers got the basic message of Galatians.

They understood the basic message that we're saved by faith.

You'll hear me say this sometimes, several times, maybe more than several times, plus nothing.

We're saved by faith in Christ, plus nothing.

They understood that, but what they didn't grasp, and actually I think it's been left till now, till Adventists came along, they did not, and I say this kindly, we're not better than anybody else, so I'll underline that, but Revelation understanding as the Puritan pastor watched people head for America from the shores of the Netherlands, he said to them, he was English, but they were coming to America, it wasn't working out in Netherlands for them, and he said, there is more and more light to burst from the Word of God.

And so what they didn't get is they did not get the connection of Galatians to the heavenly sanctuary.

But it's there and it's very powerfully there.

And we'll get into that, particularly as we get into chapter 4.

Now, because of the setting that we're in, sometimes it's a little difficult for people to grasp everything that's there, but I don't really think it is if you keep looking at the context.

But Galatians, after I did the 1 on Romans, then I did the 1 on Galatians, I almost like Galatians better than the 1 on Romans just because there's something about Galatians that Paul is so passionate in Galatians, and you'll hear that as we go through.

There have been many convoluted positions or teachings by Christian entities that I want to say are frankly embarrassing.

They're embarrassing, and I say this to apologize for my evangelical friends.

I mean, they go around sometimes and they say, you know, God's law, His 10 Commandments have been done away with.

You don't have to keep the 10 Commandments, and then they say, well, no, 9 of them are okay, but there's 1 of them.

Either the 10 Commandments stand together or they don't.

So our evangelical friends do that, and like I said, it's awkward.

And our Roman Catholic friends, they just do it different.

You know, 1 is disingenuous and the other 1 boldly comes and says, we just took God's place.

You can never throw the law of God out of the gospel otherwise you don't have a gospel you don't need a gospel why would you need a gospel if you don't have a law if you don't have a law there's no guilt and we all have a guilt problem so we we need Galatians and Romans and the gospel.

Really, all Paul is doing is reflecting the gospel that Jesus taught, but maybe more on that later.

And of course, today, it's very popular for people to put all world religions in the same basket.

And of course many religious leaders today, they say, oh, there are many roads to heaven.

And if you follow their rituals and their maxims and their rules, they promise to give you eternal life.

And we can also add to that the cult of individualism.

So people, I run to it all the time, people say, Well, you know, I believe a little bit of what the Adventists teach and I believe a little bit what the Baptists teach and I like this part about the Catholic and I'm not going to belong to anything but I just kind of put my thing together.

But they don't test it by the Word of God.

I was just texting somebody this morning, and I'd mentioned to them in the texting that 1 thing that my father left me, which is a wonderful legacy for me, was a love for the truth as it is in Jesus.

That's the greatest legacy you can give to your children and that's what the world is lacking a lot of today.

And so we want, I'm giving you this introduction just so before we actually plunge into it.

So at the heart and the issue that is at the heart of Galatians is the world's of brokenness.

Our world, we go around sometimes we say the world is a mess, you ever do that?

Another way of saying this is the world is broken.

Every time you pass a cemetery, you're given the evidence that the world is broken.

02 Experiencing Jesus Through Galatians

You've not left us in this dark world without light and love and goodness.

Thank you for its crystal focus on putting our faith in you.

So Lord, as we continue to study, We pray that the Holy Spirit will be our real teacher.

We praise Your name for Your promise to be here.

All right, we're in chapter 4 of the book of Galatians, and we're at verse 6, I believe.

There's not any part of Galatians that I just...

I was sitting contemplating it, just reading it and thinking about it, and you see new angles.

And the problem is that when you write a book or a workbook, then those new angles aren't…you can't put them back in there.

You know, it's Like I said yesterday, there's always more and more light to burst from the Word of God, and we can thank the Lord for that.

Paul is at this point is still telling to the Galatians in this letter, again reaffirming who he is, that he is an apostle.

He's not somebody that's just made this up.

He spent 3 years with Jesus through revelation.

So he's got the same training as the other 12 apostles.

Now he's gone at least once to see Peter.

He's gone back up to see John and James just to make sure that they're coordinated together and that they are not teaching something that they are not in harmony with.

We had Titus yesterday, and the reason we know the apostles for sure were in harmony is because they did not force Titus to be circumcised.

If they had forced that, then they wouldn't have been in harmony, but they didn't, and he's a gospel preacher who's raising up churches, ordaining people, all those kinds of things.

So that's kind of where we left off yesterday, And we left off going through the whole issue of the circumcision, and somebody asked me about that quote that I gave you.

That is in that book, and it's not a quote from Ellen White.

It's just what the good Lord put in my head to help explain that because a lot of people just don't understand it, it's a little bit of a sensitive kind of a subject.

So but if if some of you want me to I can probably isolate that and send it to you email or something if you'd like to have it that way.

And he just got through with Titus, verse 4.

And this occurred because false brethren secretly brought in, who came in by stealth, we talked about that a little bit yesterday, to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus that they might bring us into bondage.

So what is this liberty and what is this bondage?

Now if you talk to your friends sometimes, the evangelicals, they will tell you, oh, that bondage is the 10 Commandments.

Well, how in the world can keeping God's 10 Commandments be bondage?

I think there's freedom in telling the truth.

There's freedom in all of those 10 Commands are really the laws of freedom, and I'll get more into that as we go into it.

But this whole thing is a misunderstanding.

So what he's talking about simply is that these Judaizers who are Christians, who believe in Jesus, but they have not been able to let go of that earthly sanctuary with all of its rituals.

And for them, it's Jesus plus These rituals, particularly circumcision, which was the gateway into being Jews.

The other thing you have to remember, these Pharisees, you have to remember the thing they're operating in, these Christian Pharisees, and that's who they are.

Christian Pharisees, they are being persecuted and pushed away from their former brethren and they want to win them and they have got it in their head that they'll never be able to win them unless they can convince them that Christianity is a legitimate form of Judaism.

So the way into Judaism for Gentiles is by means of circumcision.

So that's why they are so adamant about this and missionary about it.

These guys are traveling around following the Apostle Paul.

How would you like to be the Apostle Paul and have him do that to you?

Some of us who do evangelism know what that's like sometimes.

But the point is that they were pretty zealous about this.

And so Paul is helping the Galatians to know that he's already dealt with these folk, he dealt with them in Jerusalem, but now of course they've shown up in Galatia and he's trying to make sure that they get it cleared up.

So this liberty is the liberty that we have in Christ who number 1 forgives our sins, justifies us, empowers us, and we do not have to do anything to earn justification and his salvation.

If you think that you've got to do X, Y, and Z in order to gain salvation, What are you going, if you're zealous, what are you going to do?

You're going to work at it and work at it and you're going to say, did I get it right?

Am I going to be, that's exactly the mindset that these people went through, this Judaism, and that's why they wouldn't carry a handkerchief on Sabbath.

They had to sew it to their garment because they were trying so hard to make sure that they qualified.

Much of the pagan world is under that bondage.

We'll see it's really all the same kind of thing.

They run across hot coals hoping that somehow, even in Christianity, there are many people who just feel like, you know, somehow I've got to qualify.

Listen, the only thing that will qualify any of us is our faith in Jesus and what He's done for us.

And He doesn't leave us just there, He also empowers us.

Now the law is important, don't let anybody tell you that.

God gave it Himself, It's important, but it's how it functions and even even as precious Seventh-day Adventist that I've talked to Through the years I had somebody I don't know year 2 3 ago somebody came up to me and they were struggling with some kinds of lifestyle issues.

And they just were worried about whether they could ever get qualified.

If I were your pastor, I'd preach on a lot of stuff about lifestyle.

I had a large church 1 place and I loved them all.

But they wrote a poem about me when I left.

But they told me how much they loved me and then they told me how much I stepped on their toes.

So qualification for justification and salvation gives us a liberty, and praise God, we don't want to return to bondage all right let's let's go let's go ahead here and let's look down at verse at verse 5 I did there.

To whom we did not yield, to these Judaizers while he's in Jerusalem, we did not yield submission even for an hour that the truth of the gospel might continue with you." You could say, Paul, you're kind of hard-headed, aren't you?

He thought, I'm not going to bother with it.

I didn't fool around with these guys even for an hour.

And earlier he said, you know, if you preach a different gospel, if an angel from heaven shows up, Or if I show up and preach a different gospel, let him be anathema.

03 Experiencing Jesus Through Galatians

Gracious Father in Heaven, I thank You again for Your love.

I pray as we plunge into this today that You will be our Teacher, the Holy Spirit will be here, and we thank You for it.

I don't know, I've got background noise here.

I guess they got it figured out and that was good.

It's hard to listen to 2 people at the same time.

You know, 1 thing that just drives me nuts is if you're trying to listen to some talk show and they talk over each other and they're trying to out shout each other, it drives me nuts.

Have a little civility and wait your turn.

But anyway, it's the world that we live in nowadays.

So, all right, back to Galatians, the last chapter.

We're getting to the third chapter today, and we're getting to the heart of some really big issues.

We ended yesterday, we're ending yesterday with Galatians 2.20, that marvelous 1 that says, for I have been crucified with Christ.

Remember that I talked about the 2 systems, how 1 system motivates you to earn a reward.

And that's the system that's prevalent because it's very easy to motivate people to get a reward.

1 thing I didn't say about that reward was, by the way, you can motivate people to get a reward.

People all around the world are being motivated in order to earn salvation or to have salvation or to have justification.

You find it all over the world in every pagan religion and in big chunks of Christianity today.

So they can be motivated that way for sure.

Let's say they're like the Apostle Paul before he found Christ.

That he was a Jew of the Jew, outwardly a Pharisee, he did everything possible correct.

But the prize they But the prize they offer, the prize they can offer, is not worth having.

So the only system that works is to be motivated by this marvelous Jesus whom we love.

And when you love Him with all your heart, you will be motivated to be good.

That's why the law can only be established by faith in Christ.

It can never be established with the system that motivates people for a reward.

So that's why this text is so important, for I am crucified with Christ.

Now I know that we motivate people in the workplace and we motivate kids when they're growing up and there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm not talking about that kind of thing.

Johnny and Mary have to learn to work and they have to learn the rewards of work.

We understand that and that's a good thing, a cause and effect.

But that's not applicable to the desperate situation that we have because you can't get yourself out of the situation that we're in, is know what you cannot pull yourself up by your bootstraps on this.

You might in the workplace, you might earn a million dollars pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but you won't do that here.

People, you know, and I say this with sweet kindness, sometimes people that are successful in business, not all, sometimes people successful in business think that they can apply the same principles to the church or to salvation.

It won't work because you can't get yourself out of this.

For I'm crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.

I was talking to somebody this morning in the parking lot, I think you're here, and she said to me, she said, you know, and I'm paraphrasing, forgive me if I don't get it quite right, but she said to me, you know, I've learned, I know now, that Christ our righteousness is having Jesus in my heart.

It's why we call the book Experiencing Jesus Through Galatians.

It's this living Christ that has to live in your heart and my heart.

It's amazing that the Holy Spirit can bring this.

And people say, well how can Jesus live in my heart?

Well I'll get into a little bit of that later, but listen, if you have the Holy Spirit, since there are 1, there are 3, but there are 1, But if I get the Holy Spirit, who else do I get?

If I get the Father, isn't that wonderful?

So if the Holy Spirit comes in, even though Jesus physically is in the heavenly sanctuary, He actually comes into my heart by means of the Holy Spirit.

That's why the Holy Spirit is so precious.

And that's why if the church makes the Holy Spirit a matter of small concern, It's like denying a plant water.

Alright, I want to go back to the last verse.

And it says, I do not set aside the grace of God.

So I ask the question, why is he not willing to set aside the grace of God?

For if righteousness comes to the law, then Christ died in vain." Now, you think about why he wrote that statement.

I do not set aside the grace of God because if you set aside the grace of God, what is left?

If the Messiah died in vain, then we are all lost.

So he says, I'm not setting aside the grace of God.

I'm not going back to that old system of being motivated by reward.

I'm not going back to that because I have the grace of Christ and I'm not going to give that up.

There's something I don't know what there is about this that I like, but Paul can get away with this.

I mean, you wouldn't normally say that to most people, but he can say this.

Oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?

That word bewitched is a word that means to charm, and I think 1 of the best illustrations that I have of that, and let me change spots here, and I didn't get even into the introduction.

Well, maybe I'll get back to some of that as we get into chapter 3.

The way to understand this bewitching, and we have to ask ourselves what does this mean?

It means that somebody charms you into doing something that is actually not in your best interest.

Have you ever had anybody...don't raise your hand.

Have you ever had somebody sell you something that was not in your best interest?

Because they just want...now flash back to me with me to the Garden of Eden.