Children of Promise

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0:00 Glad y'all made it here this morning. I don't know about you, but it didn't seem right till the seven o'clock in the morning and still dark out. I don't know if you were up at seven. I was set back a little bit this morning getting out of the house. Of course, I don't get the luxury of like claiming that I didn't know because my time is like somehow synced to the time of the world or something. It automatically goes forward. Remember when that wasn't the case. We're in our third Sunday of Lent, all of us together.

0:36 How's your Lent going? Getting time to reflect or consider. We you may remember we have made these little purple pages that are in the back here. They're available online too, but for families it can be a family prayer for Lent to set off your time, maybe before dinner. It's made for before dinner. It's short. Just set off your time to say this time is marked for a time to prepare for the celebration of the resurrection of Easter.

1:12 So I hope that you're having some time to consider your need for Easter, your need for a savior, the reality that Christ came for you to save you. We were talking about that last week a little bit. The reality that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of creation and life, all throughout the story of his interactions with humans is saving them from peril,

1:45 which means that no matter how comfortable you feel, how entertained you are, no matter how good things seem to be going, you are a person in peril. Lent is a time to remember that there is real danger for you. There is evil inside and outside of you that small tendencies and nuances, patterns of behavior that have dogued you your whole life

2:21 are not without consequence. That the peril you find yourself in is so significant that it requires the movement of God to save you. That your life, no matter how comfortable or entertained or provided for or safe required God to come and save you from the danger in it. And we looked last week. In fact, God does save you from every danger.

2:57 With that confidence during the season, we are able to look at the danger in us and outside of us squarely in the face. You can look at your own tendencies for evil without hiding your eyes. You can look at the evil in the world, the injustice, the lack of mercy, the lack of equity or love. You can look at the problems in the world squarely. You don't have to shade your eyes

3:29 because you know that God, the God of the world rescues from peril will rescue you and will rescue all of us together. That's what we look at during the season of Lent. And we've been using as a guide for that meditation, the the lecture, the readings from the scriptures that the churches youth over generations and the epistle reading, the New Testament reading that they assigned for us today is from Paul's letter to the church in Galatia. If you want to look there with me, that would be cool. It's in Galatians.

4:03 There's a particular theme in Galatians that's important to understand for this section. Galatia is a region of ancient Minor. It's a collection of small grouping of towns. And like most of the letters in the New Testament, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1st and 2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, like most of the letters in the New Testament, Galatians is a letter written by Paul back to a group of churches addressing some specific

4:38 questions or challenges that have come up to the faith. Remember that the nature that the believers find themselves in the 1st century, they have this historic teaching and grouping even culture and way of life that has risen up over generations and generations around the teachings of Moses. And then Jesus comes along and this thing happens in Jerusalem and Galilee.

5:09 And then people start coming out from Jerusalem in response to persecution. They start fleeing Jerusalem and moving out into the Roman Empire. And Paul and a group of his people come through the small towns of Galatia and explain to them that there is a new king, one who is the king of all kings, who died, defeated death, rose from the grave, ascended into heaven and is returning to claim zone. And they have the opportunity now to live under his authority. This is what had come to be called out of the followers and Antioch Christians

5:42 or little Christ, followers of the way originally. And so you can understand why they would be writing letters to Paul wherever he had moved on because there's nothing written down. They're still formulating the apostles' creed even. There is no New Testament, there's no compendium of the teachings of Jesus yet. And so as they're trying to work out what does it mean to be a follower of the way of Jesus? What does it mean to be a little Christ in the world?

6:12 Questions come up and they write letters to Paul and he writes them back. And when he writes them back they're enamored with how good it is. As a matter of fact, it inspires them to more faith. When they read the letters in front of small gatherings of people, new people, lights turn on in new people where they realize Jesus is the king that they can follow now and find love, joy, peace, patience, kind of students, faithful, general, self-concomer. So they save the letter, they make copies of it and send it to other churches. That's how we have this letter to Galatia. And one of the particular challenges that the churches in Galatia wrote to Paul about and he

6:46 wrote them back about was this idea that if we're going to be followers of the way of Jesus, do we also have to be partakers of this Jewish tradition? What's come to be called the Jewish tradition? The Israelites, the people, the Israelites had come to be called Jews as they returned from the Babylonian exile because all that was left was a remnant of the tribe of Judah. And so as they came back, they got called Jews for sure. And much of the way that the Judaism was practiced

7:19 in the first century developed in the intertestamental period, in between Old Testament and New Testament, there was a lot of cultural markers around what it meant to be Jewish. So that it was distinguishing, so that as they were an occupied country, they still maintained their own identity. And much of the way they maintained their own identity was the cultural rituals and practices, even the way that they dressed and carried themselves, that would mark them off as Jewish. And one of the

7:50 questions that the followers of Jesus had in Galatia in the first century is, do we need to become Jewish in order to be followers of the way of Jesus? All those cultural norms and practices were given significant way. You had to follow these rules precisely in order to stay in right standing with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. These of course culminated in practicing sacrifices the right way, but not only that, following food laws just the right way. We saw that it happens sometimes with Jesus washing your hands before the meal in just the right way, eating all the right foods

8:25 and not eating the wrong foods, taking the right proper 10% of all of your things, handling burial exactly the right way. There were all these cultural norms that kept you clean and pure and Jewish. And the people of Jesus wanted to know, do we need to be Jewish in order to be Christian? And when they said that, they mean, do we have to follow all these rules in order to have our right standing with the God of creation in life? That was a lot of context, but it's important because

9:01 you can see how this question, of course, Paul says, no, you don't. And it goes, he explains the no, you don't in several different ways in Galatians. And we're going to read one that he explains it. But I just want you to consider the way that this idea of that you are worthy or holy or acceptable to God because of the way that you behave, because of the way that you look,

9:33 because of the people that you associate with, is an evil refrain amongst the people of God from one generation to the next. Paul very systematically and with persistence in his letter to Galatia tries to break down, you are holy and acceptable to God because of who God made you to be, not because of what you do or how you look or who you associate with.

10:04 And he does it with a metaphor in this text. This is an example of the reason that you pick, you follow a lecture, so this is not a text I would have picked because it's confusing. So I just would have not done it because I thought I don't need to bother these people explaining all this backstory and risking misinterpretation. But the lecture is why you follow a lecture, because then you don't get the text I picked, you get the text the church for generations has assigned people to read for this Sunday. And if in Galatians chapter 4 starting

10:40 at verse 21, there's a heading on mine that's not in the scripture the publishers added it that says an example of Hagar and Sarah. Raise your hand if you are familiar with the story of Hagar, this is not even close your eyes so you don't feel guilty, I'm just curious. Okay cool. In order to remember the story of Hagar, you have to get first the promise to Abraham,

11:18 Abraham's old old man in his 80s, God says I'm going to give you a kid, he is wife Sarah, I have never had any kids before, Sarah, I have never had any kids before, they have a barren womb. But it says I'm going to give you land, you're going to have so much land, you're going to build a nation offering more numbers from stars in the sky and stay it on the seashore and that nation's going to be a blessing to the whole world. We're going to launch something through you, Abraham, even though you've never had any kids before. And so Abraham says cool and God says he believed and so is counted to him as righteousness and so he and Sarah go off to claim their land

11:52 and their children and build their nation and they don't have any kids and they don't have any kids. And Sarah kind of thought it was a joke from the beginning, she thought I have a barren womb and I'm old, there's no way I'm going to have a kid. And so finally she says I've got this slave, it's normal custom that anyone born of the slave is also part of the household but let's make this slave an equal wife so that she could be an inheritor. The slave is called Hagar. Now it's debated whether that was actually her name or just what they called her because Hagar might be

12:24 an abbreviation of the other and the scriptures tells that she was an Egyptian and of course Abraham and Sarah were not Egyptian, they were from Mesopotamia of the group of Huron people from there so it could be that they just called her the other one, should be derogatory for a woman from Egypt. But Sarah is doubtful that she's never going to have a kid and she's trying to figure out how to make what happen, instead of waiting for God to give she's going to take and instead of trusting that God has her best interest of heart and can

12:56 give her the things that he promises she figures he knows better the way to make it happen and will go do it on her own. And Hagar is caught up in Abram and Sarah's lack of faith in God. She has a baby and then of course resentment builds between Hagar and Sarah and then of course a little bit later God does do what he promised he would do and gives the baby Sarah and so Sarah now completely resents Hagar and her son Ishmael and so she sends them out into the desert

13:28 and leaves them there. With Abram, Abram sends her out as well, God thank them, sends them out. This is tragic because for all Abram knows he's sending his son and his wife out to die in the desert. Of course God is good. He has met Hagar on two separate occasions. We're not sure that Abram and Sarah know that that happened though it's written in the story of Genesis. But she actually gets to name God. She says you're the God who sees or who has seen me

14:03 and God promises to give a nation to Ishmael. So this is a the reason I wouldn't use this technically because this is a really tragic story where Hagar got caught up in a bad situation. There's some elements of racism probably in there the way they call her the other and she's from Egypt and they're from Mesopotamia and then they just leave her in the desert. Of course God is active through the whole thing but it's a bummer that our patriarch and matriarch Abram and Sarah

14:34 are caught up in this story. There's an evidence of their lack of faith, a weak spot in their lives. Paul is going to use this story as an allegory and it threw me off for about three quarters of the time that I studied this text because I couldn't get my head out of the rooted in the story. But there was a tradition of interpretation at the time of Paul and going into the first couple centuries where you would take an Old Testament story and make an allegory out of it. It's important to remember when you make an allegory out of a story much of the original context is

15:08 lost and you abstract them and then you build one-to-one correlations. This person now it doesn't represent themselves, they represent this thing and this person doesn't represent themselves, they represent something else. And much of the argument that Paul makes throughout the whole letter of Galatians is that the reason you don't have to become Jewish in order to be a follow the way of Jesus, the reason your identity is no longer tied to what you do is because this old covenant, this covenant that's set up Israel at Sinai has been completed and done away with and the birth,

15:41 life, death, resurrection, ascension of Jesus has launched a new covenant that we now live under which supersedes the old covenant and this covenant is based completely on the work of God and faith, and he leaves our works out of it. And he's trying to make that analogy several times in his letter of deglation. He's about to use the story of Hagar and Sarai to make that connection. Let's look at it and hopefully we can get through Galatians chapter 4 verse 21. I haven't read the text yet.

16:13 That's too much talking, Mike. Sorry about that. Chapter 4 verse 21, tell me who you desire to be under. Tell me who you desire to be under the law. Do you not listen to the law? Question Mark. Okay, I got to stop one more time here because Paul says, tell me you do not desire to be under the law. Why would anyone desire to be under the law? Of course they desire to be under the law because then they can look at how good they are and compare it to how good the person next to them is and feel better that they're holier than this person. This is why the refrain of what I do,

16:48 how I look, who I associate with, makes me holy, comes back over and over and over again in the church because it's just easier. When I look right and act right, I know I'm right. And when I look more right than him and act more right than him, I feel great because I know I'm better than him. And this was happening in Galatia as you're trying to become the church for the first time.

17:20 There's all this fighting. Other teachers coming in and saying, look, I'm much better than you. You ought to act like me. I do much better things than you. I look better than you. I look the part. I associate with people who look the part. I behave appropriately. You should behave like me. And there's something that's really appealing about that when we're honest. If we say, I know I'm a part of the right crew of people because I say the right things,

17:51 I do the right things, I look the right way. Those people look wrong, I'm just better. And so they're writing Paul and saying, shouldn't all these dudes get circumcised like us? Shouldn't all these dudes not eat the food the way that we're not eating the food? Like we go to the market and make a big deal about making sure that the food is separated the right way, then everybody knows how holy we are. And then they know how unholy these jokes are.

18:23 Shouldn't they be eating the way we are? I mean, it's a lot of work for us to do that. And really, we'd like to just eat like them, but we also like the feeling of being holier than everyone else. So shouldn't we just, so Paul starts out and says, hey, tell me the ones of you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law question? For it's written that Abraham, he's going to go into the allegory here, for it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. This is Hagar and Sarai. But the son of the slave was born according

18:58 to the flesh. Well, the son of the free woman was born through the promise. He uses this flesh and promise to be like the work of striving humanity and the work of God. You also sometimes go that you have life according to the flesh and life according to the spirit he'll do in the next chapter. But he wants to say that that that Abraham had one child according to the flesh, striving to accomplish through human works what only God can accomplish. And he had one according

19:33 to the promise. Great gift given by God. Right? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and one by the free woman. But the slave was born according to the flesh and the son of the free woman was born according to the promise verse 24. Now this may be interpreted allegorically. Okay, we're leaving reality and going into the metaphor. I had to underline it so that I could pay attention. Now this may be interpreted allegorically. These women are two

20:03 covenants. They no longer represent themselves. They represent the two covenants. Hagar represents the covenant at Mount Sinai. He's about to say which is where God said if you do this, then you'll be this. If you keep these 10 words, then you'll be for me this treasured possession here in this place. It's a conditional covenant based on two things being done at Mount Sinai. Israel doing what they say they're going to do. Then God lets them be this particular person in the world. He picked

20:36 them to be Israel. Now they stay Israel by this covenant at Sinai. And then Sarah will be the new covenant of promise which says just let me give you good things with you. One is from Mount Sinai bearing children for slavery. She is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai ready. She corresponds to the present Jerusalem for she is in slavery with her children. But Jerusalem above is free and she is our mother. For it is written rejoice, O barren one. This is Isaiah talking

21:07 about Sarah. I rejoice, O barren one, who does not bear, break forth and cry aloud you who are not in labor. For the children of the desolate will be more. Okay. Verse 28. Now you brothers like Isaac are children of promise. Now you are children of promise.

21:44 You are children of the promise of God. When I internalize that immediately I feel rest. You don't have to strive or work to become children. You don't have to huffle to prove your value or worth in the family of God.

22:25 You don't have to justify why your father would lavish care and love upon you. You don't have to apologize for the space that you take up in the family of God for the resources that you require. You don't have to feel downtrodden or worthless because you require the movement of God on your behalf. You don't have to apologize for being children. You are children of the promise. There's

22:57 nothing you have done that can make you children. There's nothing you can do in the future that can unmake you as children. It's the promise of God that brings you into his family irrevocably. You are God's. In comfort and hardship. In blessing and lack. In abundance and in hunger. You are the children of

23:31 God. Forever. Paul says now you are children of the promise. You are children of the promise. Verse 31. So brothers we are not children of the slave. But of the free. Look at the next verse. They didn't give us this one but you can't not read it. Chapter 5 verse 1.

24:05 For freedom Christ is sent us free. Stand firm therefore and do not submit again to the yoga of slavery. It is a sneaky lie that you are only as holy as your last mix up. Your last misstep. It is a sneaky lie that you are defined by the sum of your worst choices rather than by the prerogative of God. It is easy to define your holiness relative to the people around you.

24:42 But Paul says it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Not to be burdened by our by our by our failures. It is one other way that this allegory works. Because he says here verse 29 but just as at that time who he was born according to the flesh.

25:16 Verse 1. Oh wait but what is this group? There is a part in there. I am not going to find it for you now. I think my word for it. Where Paul says that the one born to a slave will always be a slave. And that threw me off for a long time until I thought of it this way. If you get your holiness if you get your sense of worth and value from what you do you'll always be chasing better

25:54 works and wondering if you've done enough. That when you understand your son's ship or daughter's ship to be based on the choices that you've made you'll always be wondering if you've stacked up enough good choices. That when your son's ship is based on an old covenant that is based on works your righteousness will always be based on works. And you'll never get

26:27 off the treadmill of doing more and more good works and it will break you down. But if you are born of the free of the child of the free woman is free forever. There's one other verse I want you to see is in Romans chapter 6 because when I start thinking about this this like freedom that where my holiness

27:00 rights this is not tied to the works that I do I start wondering well then and if I can't make myself unholy that that I'm a child of the promise not a slave to my righteousness then I wonder what doesn't matter what I do. You could probably guess the answer but the logic in the answer is important. Romans chapter 6 gets to that. Paul has just outlined how however much

27:31 sin that you stack up in the world there is more grace than it. So you're never so far gone that God can't pull you back. This is the virtue of being a child of the promise that the promise who proceeds any actions or choice that we made. Romans chapter 6 what shall we say then because grace is so big are we to continue sinning that grace may abound are we just supposed to live however for children the promise should we just go on living however we want doing whatever we do

28:02 and Paul's answer here is very telling it tells you that he gets these two new covenants these two different covenants and believes them wholeheartedly and it's helpful for me because I might think him to say how like if I say Paul if I'm forgiven every time what does it matter how I live can I just go do whatever I want I might expect him to say well you can't do whatever you want that would be wrong. Don't do the wrong thing do the right thing but Paul let's look at what he says are we to

28:36 continue sinning that grace may abound by no means how can we who die to sin still live in it. He goes on to unpack it but what he's saying is how could you go on sin that's not who you are anymore children of the promise live a certain sort of way their lives just look different they just are different people from the inside out the further you recognize and believe that God

29:07 has called you and made you his own forever the deeper your behavior your life your affirmations your choices begin to change and look like those the people of God. I hope that this season that you have the courage to look at your own failures with the deep realization that they do not define you that they are an aberration in the life of a child of promise when we believe understand and

29:46 the see that we are children of the promise we can let go of the aberration of sin in our life okay. Cleaning to the to the hope that it does not will not cannot define us or dog us forever let me pray. Hey Lord thank you for the gift of your son that launches us into the new covenant a covenant of promise from you he just had a live there today and in the weeks to come

30:27 and in this week Lord give us courage to look our sin squarely and then receive your forgiveness and let it pass away it does not stick to us or define us in Jesus name we pray