This sermon explores Galatians 6:14, emphasizing why believers should only boast in the cross of Jesus Christ. It delves into the nature of God’s glory, justice, mercy, and love as revealed in the darkest yet most beautiful moment in history.
Transcript
Well, if you would open your Bibles with me this morning to the book of Galatians chapter 6.
Galatians chapter 6.
I will begin reading in verse 11 and read to the end.
God’s holy and inerrant word.
See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. Those who desire to make a good showing in the flesh try to compel you to be circumcised, simply so that they will not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For those who are circumcised do not even keep the law themselves, but they desire to have you circumcised so that they may boast in your flesh. But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And those who will walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of God. From now on, let no one cause trouble for me, for I bear in my body the bond marks of Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brethren. Amen.
Let’s ask God to bless his holy word.
Father, we thank you for the richness of your grace in Christ Jesus and your wonderful love for us that you have expressed on the cross. We thank you, Father, that this morning when we reflect especially on the resurrection of Christ, demonstrates your infinite power and it demonstrates the truth that took place a few days earlier on that Friday when Jesus Christ suffered for us. We ask, Lord Jesus, Heavenly Father, that you teach us through the work of your son by the power of your spirit. Father, that you would teach us some of the grace that we have received. Help us to be able to see that day with more clarity, to understand the work that you have accomplished, and help us, Father, to know you better. We pray, Father, that you teach us who you are, that you guide us into your truth, and that you bless us as we study today. Open your word to us, we pray, in the name of our Savior. Amen.
I will read verse 14 again in the King James. I stumbled into it as I was reading accidentally. I am sorry. But Galatians 6:14 says,
“But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world.”
The False Gospel in Galatia
In order to understand this verse, we really need to understand why this book is written. The Apostle Paul had ministered to the people in the region of Galatia. This letter is going out to the Galatians, and that is not to one church, that is a series of churches. On Paul’s first missionary journey, he took the gospel message to them, and through much suffering, through much persecution that he endured, he brought the gospel to them and people came to faith in Jesus Christ. They formed churches. They were true to his gospel.
Time has intervened. In that time that has taken place, a group of people have come to these people, to these churches in Galatia, and they have begun to teach a false gospel. A gospel that mixes Jewish law with salvation, with the teaching of salvation. To get an understanding of the book, go back to the first chapter and let me read verses 3 and 4 to you, so that you can see how this book unfolds and so we can appreciate the verse and the words that I want to call attention to a little better.
In Galatians 1, verses 3, 4 and 5, it says,
“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins so that he might rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forevermore. Amen.”
That forms, those are not just an opening sentence. It is an opening sentence. It is the salutation to this letter. But it is far more than that. It gives the message that he is going to be talking about through this entire book. The book breaks down according to this. First of all, Jesus Christ gave himself for our sins. That is the doctrine of justification. We are justified through the work of Christ. Secondly, so that he might rescue us from this present evil age. So the first half of the book deals with our justification only through the blood of Jesus Christ. The second half of the book deals with our sanctification, which comes about completely and only because of the work of Christ and what he has done for us on the cross, what is accomplished by the life that we gain because of what Jesus did on the cross of Christ.
As we get to this end, he underscores this truth. People had come to this church, these churches, and they had said, “It is a wonderful thing to believe in Jesus. In fact, it is necessary for you to believe in Jesus. You cannot be saved apart from believing in Jesus. But in order to be saved, you also need to be keeping the law. You need to adhere to the Mosaic law. Believing in Jesus, you become a Jew and you need to keep all the laws of the Jews.” That was their idea.
Secondly, “The way we are made right with God, the way we are made right with God is through our obedience to God’s, to these Old Testament laws and practices. We have something to boast about. We have something to glory in before God if we are obedient to the law of Moses.” That is the teaching that they have.
They said, “Your children must be circumcised in order to be right with God.” The Old Testament practice of circumcision had to be practiced with the sons, the people in the Galatian church. That is what they are teaching.
At the end of this book, after dealing with this group of people in extremely harsh ways, Paul sees this false gospel as a terribly ugly thing, and he makes that clear through the book. He explains the motivation of these people. Why do they want you to be circumcised? Why do they want you to be converted to their way of thinking?
He points out that even though they are talking all this about the law of Moses, they are not keeping it. They cannot keep it perfectly. They offend it. Earlier in Galatians, he says, “If you offend the law, if you break the law, then you are under the curse of the law. You are under the judgment of the law.”
He says, “They want this. They want your conversion. They want to see your sons circumcised because then they have you as a convert that they can present before God as something to glory in. Look what we did, Lord. Look at all these converts that we have in your name.” That is the idea. Something to boast about.
Let’s look at verse 14 again.
“But may it never be that I would boast, that I would glory. May it never be that I would glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world.”
What I want to do today, I will mention the resurrection at the beginning and maybe a little at the end, but I want us to look back to the cross of Jesus Christ this morning. The resurrection demonstrates that what happened at the cross in those dark hours is true. What happened actually happened. It is real, and we know it is real because he lives, as we were singing. I almost did not want to preach after we sang those hymns. It was time to go home, it felt like to me. The whole thing, the message is accomplished. What a glorious thing to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the hope we have in him, and the love that he has shown us on the cross and his resurrected life which we have received.
Understanding God’s Glory
I think it is important for us to think about this, think about the cross in a different way. We glory in the cross of Christ because through it we find forgiveness of sins, and that is wonderful. Usually, when I come to the cross and I am thinking about it, I am thinking about myself, and that is not a bad thing in this sense. It is not bad. But there is more here. There is more here for us.
I want us to think about the cross, those dark hours when Jesus hung on the cross. I want us to think about what we learn about God through that. Because the cross of Jesus Christ in that incredible darkness, that most dark time on earth, is also one of the most glorious times on earth. This whole thing is filled with lots of conundrums that are like that. Lots of things that seem to conflict, but they are not. No conflict there. Both are true.
It is helping us to understand what we learn about God that I want to do today, because if we learn more about him, I think we can appreciate him all the more.
“May it never be that I would glory, except in the cross of Jesus Christ. May it never be. God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
I was thinking about this today, and I was thinking about that word glory. Glory. We use it a lot in our Christian circles. We use a lot of words. We talk about words like grace, we talk about faith, we talk about glory. Often, very often, we do not have a very clear understanding of what those words really are. We have a vague understanding. We know what it means, but we do not really know exactly what it means. Sometimes thinking about those words a little harder helps us. I remember when I was probably 18 or 19, struggling with what grace meant. I remember I knew a lot of things about it. I knew those sayings like “God’s riches at Christ’s expense” and all sorts of things. I knew generally about it. I did not understand what grace was, not really. I had experienced it, and yet I had not exactly fathomed it. I still have not fathomed it. But it was a vague idea.
Faith is like that for a lot of people. They think they have faith. They think they know what faith is. But for many people, they really do not know what it means, what faith really means, what it means to have faith in Jesus Christ. They do not know that. They do not understand what the word faith means.
That is true for this word glory. I think it is true for glory. The best way for me to describe glory gets me into trouble as well, because I think if you are thinking about the glory of God, we are going to glorify God, that means that we are responding to his glory.
I think of the glory of God as beauty. I think it is perfectly legitimate to do that because I have noticed in the Old Testament words that are used that mean beauty are often interchanged with the words that mean glory. They are very closely related. The problem with saying that it is beauty, the glory of God is beauty, is that we do not really understand what beauty is either. We have our own ideas about what it means. That gets us into a kind of trouble if you think that I determine. It is up to me. People think that what is beautiful is up to them. They decide what beauty is. You cannot do that with God’s glory, can you?
So God is glorious. He has great beauty. The glory of God is when he acts in history in some way so that we learn something true about him. When something that is absolutely true of God is revealed in something that he does, it is a glory. It is part of the glory of God. In our heart, we should respond to that. We should respond to it. Humans, God created mankind in his own image so that we would be able to enjoy him, so that we would understand him and enjoy him.
Any expression of God’s glory should resonate in our hearts so that we understand him better, so that we know him better. I know this seems, I am hoping this does not seem abstract to you. It is not abstract. This is part of reality, and it is relational. I pray that by the power of God’s Holy Spirit that he makes this relational to us.
Let me just do this. The question is, do you know God? Do you know him? The question is not, do you know that God exists, because everybody knows that God exists in this world. They may repress that and push it down, but nature teaches that, Romans 1 says.
Do you know him? Do you know God? That is an important thing to really know him. If you think about that in terms of a relationship, what does that mean? If you are in a relationship with someone, do you not need to know something about them? You certainly do. We have a relationship with God. We think we have a relationship with God. We have a relationship with God. Is that relationship about him? Does it center on him or does it center on us? What is the nature of our relationship with him?
It is pretty important. Just before Jesus went to the cross and went to that dark hour, he prayed to the Father, and part of his prayer is,
“This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
Do you want to know what eternal life is? It is knowing God. Eternal life is coming to truly know God.
Paul says, “That is the most important thing. The most important thing for me is that I am not going to boast. I cannot come before God as I did once before in my life and boast of all the achievements that I had made.” Saul, the Pharisee, Saul, the son of Benjamin, Saul, the man who was on his way to such excellence in Pharisaism, took great glory in all of his accomplishments. He says in the book of Philippians that it is just like, it is just like trash. It is the stuff that I throw away now. It is worthless. It is pointless. The only thing that is worth glorying in, taking pride in, taking before God is what took place by Christ himself on the cross. It is what Jesus did for us.
Why should that be? He says, “I am only going to boast in the cross, and that is it.” Why should the cross be our only boast? I said before, the very darkest moment in history is also the brightest, because it reveals God’s glory like nothing else does. In those moments from 12:00 on Friday to 3:00 when he says, “It is finished,” in that blackness which fell on the earth, when you could see nothing, God was revealing himself to mankind in a way that he had never, never before. Never before, and never again probably. It is the greatest moment in the history of mankind, what took place in those dark hours. We know that it is all real because Jesus rose from the dead.
The Cross: God’s Justice and Mercy Revealed
What did he accomplish? First of all, God proved and demonstrated on the cross that he is a just God, that he is perfectly righteous. He demonstrated his righteousness on the cross. You remember when God created Adam and Eve, and he told them, “In the day that you eat of the tree of life, you will surely die.” They ate of the tree, and they were separated from him with a spiritual death, but they did not die physically, did they? Not immediately. They eventually died.
Then a couple chapters later, you have Cain and Abel, and Cain murders his brother Abel. He murders him, and God confronts Cain, and Cain continues to live. When I was reading that when I was a kid, I read that story, and I thought, “Why did he get away with this?” That is really what I thought. “Why did he get away with it? Why is it that he, God did not just put him to death right there? He killed, he murdered his brother.”
Then you have all the people in the Old Testament sinning in various ways. Those who trusted God put their trust in him by doing what he said, by bringing sacrifices before him. God did not judge them for their sin. They were not judged for their sins.
It tells us, in the book of Hebrews, it tells us in chapter 10 that it is not possible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin. That passage goes on to say, Jesus says, and it quotes from the Old Testament, but it puts the words in Jesus’ lips. It is what Jesus is saying as he comes into the world. He says, “Sacrifices and offering you would not.” Falling back to King James again. “You would not, but a body you have prepared for me.” Prepared a body for Jesus so that he could do the will of God. That is what the passage came to say. So that he could carry out God’s will perfectly.
What is ugliness? If beauty is the revelation of God and his will, what is something that is ugly? Ugliness is when God’s will is violated, when we do something that messes it up, that twists it in some way. Proverbs says, “Like a jewel in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman who lacks discretion.” Does that mean that she is not beautiful, and that God, God created beautiful people, and it is a glorious and good thing. That beauty fades. We are not to trust it because we live in this sin-cursed world. It fades away. There is nothing wrong with the beauty there. It is that that beauty is not complete. No, not by a long ways, because the lack of discretion twists that and makes it something that is really rather ugly and terrible.
A beautiful thing that is twisted becomes something that is terribly ugly. The precious gospel of Jesus Christ, which came to the Galatians, is picked up, and that same gospel is twisted and turned into something destructive and ugly. That is what ugliness is. It is sin. It is sinful thinking, and it is all the things that sin leads to. It is terribly ugly.
God passes over sins for thousands of years. Thousands of years he passes over the sins of mankind, accepting these offerings, even though it does not satisfy. Why? Because he holds back that judgment for thousands of years, and then pours it all out on Jesus Christ in that dark moments, the dark moments of the cross. Jesus Christ came there submissive to the will of the Father, being completely obedient. That is part of the beauty of the cross, because he is submissive and he is obedient to the Father through this. He willingly entered this world for that purpose. So he endures that.
It tells us, I had planned on reading a portion of Romans, but in Romans 3 it says, “For the demonstration,” why was Christ, why was he hung on a cross? Why did God so publicly display him in such humiliation? “For the demonstration,” Paul says, “of his righteousness at the present time, so that he would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in him.” That is what this passage is saying. He passed over the sins of people for generations, for years and years, but he is satisfied with the wrath that is poured out on Jesus Christ. Jesus took it. He took all the sin for all those centuries and all those years and all those to come. It was placed on him, and he paid that debt, and God’s justice is satisfied.
Paul goes on to say, “Where is the boasting? What can we boast of? If we are saved purely by this work of Jesus Christ, what can we claim?” “It is excluded,” he says. “By what kind of law? Of works? Can we boast in what we have done?” “No, but only through our faith, only through trusting what Christ has done.”
When you look at the cross and you look at what took place, it is a horribly ugly event. It is hard to comprehend it. Just our side of it. What was visible to people? Jesus, after he had been beaten, and all of the humiliation that he experienced, and the scourging, and the crown of thorns, and being nailed to a cross, he was marred unbelievably. It was horrible. It was a horrible scene. If you look at Renaissance paintings, the Italian Renaissance paintings, Jesus, it is a beautiful picture of Jesus on the cross. He is floating there with a halo over his head. It was not like that. It was horrific. His body was marred more than any man, it says in Isaiah. The idea, the abuse was so horrible, no one wanted to look at him. His appearance was marred more than any. “Like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised, and we did not esteem him.” It was ugly. It was horribly ugly.
The Greatest Love and Hatred
Yet it was in that moment that it is the most beautiful moment in history. It is the most beautiful moment in history because grace and mercy is poured out, revealed. The grace, something that is true of God. God is gracious, and he is merciful, and he pours out his mercy on us by taking that debt himself that we owe. That is just pure mercy. That is unbelievable.
It is beautiful. Ugly though it is, it becomes incredibly beautiful. You know why? It is the opposite of what we talked about before. We are looking at redemption. We are looking at God coming down and taking the thing that is the most ugly, the most ugly thing that has ever happened, taking the ugly and changing it into something beautiful. That is what takes place on the cross. That ugly moment when Jesus takes all the sin and all the ugliness of the world, and he transforms it into something beautiful. It changes us. We are changed through what he has done for us on the cross.
Paul writes, “Through the cross I have been crucified to the world.” He says earlier in Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, who gave himself for me.” God changes us through the redemption that he gives us. What he accomplished on the cross is an outpouring of his grace that gives us life, that changes us. We are transformed. We are changed from being an ugly people, made to a beautiful people before God. That is why this work is beautiful. It is beautiful because he is taking, it is a miraculous work of God to make the ugly beautiful.
The church becomes the bride of Christ, and it is beautiful, reflecting Christ’s beauty. The work of sanctification, the working of the Spirit of God in us, based on the cross and what Christ has accomplished, works in us so that we are able to reflect the beauty of Christ. “So that he might present himself, the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless.”
The cross separates us because of our identification with it from the sinfulness of this world. It changes the way we think. It helps us to understand, know what we were created for.
The cross of Jesus Christ, those dark hours, is an example of the greatest hatred that has ever expressed, but it is also the greatest example of love ever shown. The many verses, Peter’s preaching, told how Jesus, the Jews put Jesus to death with wicked hands, had wicked hands putting him to death. It was pure hatred. You cannot imagine the hatred people have before God until you look at the cross. You cannot imagine the depth of sin and the sinfulness of sin until you look at the cross.
It was at the cross that the great love of God was shown to us. He did not withhold his son. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. He did not withhold his only son. “For this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and he sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
God is incredibly beautiful, and he is glorious. Jesus Christ is glorious. I skipped over a lot of verses, but one of them that I should have read is in John 12, when Jesus explains that he is going to the cross because of the glory that is set before him. God is going to glorify him. “My hour has come,” he says, “to be glorified.” He goes to the cross for his glorification. All that follows it is glory. Glory.
Our Response to God’s Glory
That is something to boast about. That is something to take joy in when you understand it. Jesus Christ accomplished it. He did this most amazing thing, beyond anything that we can comprehend.
The reason that if it does not resonate in our heart, it is because we do not get it. If this does not stir our heart to joy and love for him, it is because we treat it as nothing. We are probably still thinking, “What is in this for me? What is it about this that I need to get? How do I benefit from this?” Do you know what the benefit is, the ultimate benefit? It is God. God is the treasure. God is the treasure.
The most glorious thing is that we were created to glorify God, and we have lost the ability to, but Jesus restores that ability by taking the debt that we owe and gives us new life to restore us so that we can take joy in God, so that we can love him. Do we love him? When we see these outpourings of God’s glory, of his nature, the fact that he is, he loves us with a mighty love. The fact that he is not just a God of justice, but he is a God of justice, which is wonderful. But he is more than a God of justice. He is a God of mercy and love.
When we really get it, in Revelation chapter 5, it pictures a future. It looks into heaven, and you hear all the hosts of heaven, the angels, the living creatures, the elders, and then myriads and myriads and thousands of thousands of redeemed. What are they doing? They are saying with a loud voice, they are singing, they are saying with a loud voice, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.” They are giving glory to Christ for what he has done. They are giving glory to Christ for what he has done. They are rejoicing in Christ. We are made to do that. We are made to take joy in God. Do we take joy in God? It is essence. It is the very essence of our salvation.
“Far be it from me to boast, except in the cross of Jesus Christ.” Jeremiah chapter 9, God says, “Let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me.”
The cross of Jesus Christ, he redeemed us. He saved us, and we have life today. If you have life, you have life because of what Jesus accomplished on the cross. You share in his resurrected life. Do you rejoice in him? Do you take joy in him? Do you celebrate God?
Isaac Watts, “When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.” That is where we need to close. That is what we need to stop with.
There is nothing that we, we come to God with empty hands. We trust him for his work. We receive it with joy, and we come to know him in an eternal relationship where from now on, we learn more about him, and the more we learn, the more our heart grows in joy and love for him. It is an eternal relationship.
That is the message of the cross. The greatest, the brightest moment in the history of mankind was in those dark hours. More is revealed about God to us in those three dark hours than any other thing that takes place in the Bible, in biblical history. It is a glorious moment. When you think about the cross, think about him. Think about the glory and who he is. Think about what is revealed to us and praise him and take joy in him. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank you for this truth from your word. We pray, Father, that by your merciful grace to us, your spirit would take some of this and teach us with it. May we learn to love you more. Father, if this merely exposes to me in my heart how little I love you, would you make that a conviction so that I repent of it and think about you, spend my time praising you, learning to love you, to get to know you? Father, as I reflect on the cross of Christ and the incredible agony that Jesus suffered under your wrath, what a light thing all of my suffering is. What he endured for us, what an expression of love, laying down his life. No man can give a more precious gift or a better expression of love than what Christ has done. Thank you, Father, for all that you have done for us in revealing yourself to us through the cross. Help us, Lord, to celebrate you today. I pray that Jesus Christ would be glorified throughout this day, and Father, throughout our lives as we live them to bring glory to you. Help us to do that. May we glory in your name, praise you, and give you glory. We ask this in the name of our Savior, Lord Jesus. Amen.