Galatians 3:23-4:7
June 20, 2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
When seminarians visit our church and learned about how we receive new members, they have remarked to me on how difficult it is to join FCBC. We expect candidates to attend classes, they are interviewed by the Deacons, we expect total immersion and before we extend to them the right hand of Christian fellowship, they share a 3-minute testimony in front of you. It seems like we make it difficult for people to join our church.
It may seem that way but it is in fact relatively easy for a person to stroll into our church and after fulfilling these minimum requirements, we put them on the church roll. It may first appear difficult, but some have said that it’s not hard at all to join a church.
But if you look more carefully, one of the most difficult things in the world is to join a church. We have seen people show up and declare their intention to affiliate with our congregation. They go through the process. We baptize them, have a reception with a cake and pose for pictures. Everyone smiles and seems pleased to have them in the church.
But then weeks later, one of the new members has not really become a member at all. No group was found to adopt her. She made no real friends, despite repeated attempts. A few months later, someone asks, “Whatever happened to that nice woman who joined the church in April?”
Getting your name on the membership list is easy. But belonging to the church is something else. Some people have said, “They do fine coming in the front door, but in a few months, they quietly exit the back door.” They joined, but they never belonged.
Maybe nobody ever joins a church. Perhaps the only way to get into a church, to belong to a church is to be adopted.
Paul and the Galatians
In our text in Galatians this morning, we find ourselves in the middle of a conversation that Paul was having with the Galatians. Evidently some missionaries were preaching a message that was contrary to Paul’s. They were saying that Gentile men had to be circumcised and Gentile men and women had to obey the Torah as a requirement before becoming a Christian. Paul got angry with the Galatians for their lack of understanding of how people join the church.
Paul told them that the law did have its place at one time according to verse 3:24, but now that the disciplinarian is not the law anymore but rather that Christ has come, we don’t need the law any longer. “But now that faith (in Christ) has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian.”
There’s an interesting example to highlight here. The Greek word for disciplinarian is pai-da-go-gas. It refers to a specific kind of slave in a household, one charged with looking after a male child. This slave protected the boy from harm and made sure that he behaved properly, even punishing him if necessary to be sure he was raised correctly. But the role of this slave was temporary, and once the boy reached maturity, the slave was no longer needed.
The point that Paul was making is that now that Christ had come, the law wasn’t needed anymore. To keep the law now that Christ had come would be like hiring a baby-sitter for a grown man—the disciplinarian’s job was over.
The law simply was no longer relevant to the situation. It is now faith that makes us children of God, not whether we had the proper training, the proper religion, or that we dotted the right I s and crossed the right T s. Simply following the proper rules at the proper times, which often is what the law had become, was not the way to God.
Under the Law
As human beings, we find it very difficult to accept this truth that now in Christ; we are no longer subject to the law. The law is our human effort to get into God’s good graces, to get right with God, to belong in God’s family. How on earth could sinners like us expect to do that?
When we decide we or others must do certain things to be a good Christian—read certain amount of Scripture each day, pray a certain length of time, attend church every single week, or any spiritual discipline—then we run the danger of becoming captives of laws and rituals. While we certainly will grow if we read Scripture, pray daily, and attend church regularly, it has to be a discipline and not one more thing to check off on our “to do” list. These things are only empty rituals and not a way to connect with Christ.
The one time that I was really bad—the time I told you that I played hooky from Chinese school and my father found out from one of his friends, he disciplined me by taking one of his Chinese leather slippers and gave me a spanking. He was basically trying to tell me that under the law, you can’t devoid yourself from me. You are not just “Donald Ng” but you are the “Son of Joseph Ng.” For me to be a member of the Ng family, I need to comply with the rules of the family.
In our human families, the law of being good children still applies. But sometimes, we try to use our human laws to get into God’s good graces, to get right with God. But we can’t do with God what we do in our human families.
No Longer Jew or Greek
Before faith came, we were all imprisoned and guarded under the law…but now that faith has come…in Jesus Christ you are all children of God through faith.
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring; heirs according to the promise (Gal. 3:23-29).
The Galatian church was full of Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. To the Jews, Paul was telling them that their old life was “imprisoned and guarded under the law.” They had the law, with its list of requirements and demands. That was the way they related to God, through the law. “But now that faith has come,” the Jews like Paul have discovered that they are in a very different relationship with God. No longer are they subject to the judgment and discipline of the law. They are “children of God” through faith. Those who once obeyed as if they were hired hands, servants, are now children of God.
What’s more surprising is that Paul says that Gentile Christians are now Abraham’s offspring.” Abraham was the father of the Jewish people, the head of the household of the whole family of Israel. Through faith in Christ, even outsiders, these Gentiles have become children of God, members of the family, inheritors of all that God has so graciously promised Israel. They have been adopted into the family.
Paul does not say that these distinctions no longer exist. Of course, even after Christ, there are men and there are women. What he says is that these distinctions as a means of distinguishing ourselves, as the primary mode of saying who we are and what we’re worth, that these distinctions no longer matter in the way they did. The main distinction we have now that faith in Christ has come is that we are all adopted. By an amazing act of God’s grace, we—Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, male and female—have been brought into one family.
Up for Adoption
You can’t work hard enough to become someone’s child. Imagine someone showing up on your front door saying, “I’ve observed your family at work and play and think that you are a nice group of people. I want to know what I need to do to work hard enough to get into your family.” You can’t do that.
When it comes to the family of God, the only way to join is by being adopted. The only way to be beloved children in the family of God is through the adoptive expansive love of God in Christ.
When visitors come to our church, one of the strengths that they observed is our love for one another and how willing we are to share that love them. The source of this love that we have is the oneness that we have in Christ. Surely, we can learn as human beings to be more caring or listen more attentively or be more compassionate. But at the foundation of our great love for one another is based on the reality of what happened to us in Christ. We have been adopted and therefore we are able and committed to welcome and adopt others into the church.
Faith is not some new program for making ourselves right with God. Rather, faith is the recognition that, in Christ, we have been made “heirs” of the “promises of God.” We didn’t do anything to deserve this special status we have as heirs of God’s promises. Out of God’s love, God adopted us to be his beloved children.
It’s like baptism. Paul in Galatians 3:27, says that we all have been “baptized in Christ.” You can’t baptize yourself. Even if you are baptized as a grown up rather than as a young junior high kid, you can’t baptize yourself. It is something done to you and for you rather than something done by you.
I’ve been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I was brought into the church as a baby in the arms of Joseph and Lee Ng. Yet, if you just joined this church and became a Christian last Sunday, I have nothing over you. Both of us are adopted. Neither of us have any claim, on our own, through our natural endowments or whether I was born in Boston and you were born in San Francisco or whether I went to seminary and you went to dental school.
We are all adopted. We belong, not on the basis of who we think we are or what we have done, but on the basis of God’s embrace and love for us. As Jesus said to his disciples on one occasion, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”
When parents adopt a child, we nurture that child from the very beginning that he is a very special person because in some families, children are just born into a family, but in this family, you are special because we chose you to be a member of our family. You are adopted.
Since today is Father’s Day, I would like all the fathers in this congregation to not take for granted that your children are just there. Don’t take them for granted. Instead, consider how you might say to them, “I want you to be in this family. I choose to adopt you as my own.” Just as we can feel God’s love when he adopted us as his children and heir to God’s promise, imagine how your children might feel when you let them know that they are special too.
That’s what happened on that Friday afternoon on top of Calvary. We who were nobodies became somebodies. We were adopted. Jesus stretched out his arms and embraced us, all of us. I’m special only for that reason. I was adopted, made part of the family. And you are special too. For that very reason, I treat you as special as well. You have been adopted. None of us has any special distinction, when it comes to God or to one another, other than that we’ve been adopted.
But there are still people who are “up for adoption.” They are the ones who come through the front doors of the church and quietly exit through the back door.
We have some people who are unhappy and impossible to live. Maybe they are in our congregation. It’s not that they are difficult people, but rather they are just homesick. That person has no where to live, has been cast out of some comfortable place and now longs for home. They are “up for adoption” and what we need to do is to say to them,
“God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to
redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as
children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son in our
hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a child and if
a child then also an heir, through God.” (Gal. 4:4-7)
Welcome home all of you who are adopted sons and daughters, heirs to God’s promise!
Let us pray.
Dear God, our Father, teach us that a person is justified not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. Help us to accept your love and grace as adopted sons and daughters in your family and heirs to your promise. And we pray that we may learn how to welcome and adopt others who have not found a home to belong so that this church community might be that for them. Assure us once again that we are one in Christ, one family created in love, re-created by grace. Amen.