Galatians 4:7
"Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ." We
are sons. One in full heir-ship - an heir of God through Christ. For
this is the revealing of what the Lord's Last Supper means and the
consummation of that meal with His sufferings in the garden on through
to His ascension. Now verse 8.
Galatians 4:8
"Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are not gods."
Now
we've stressed, that there are so many areas in which the Apostle Paul
labored in, and today they're in gross idolatry, the gross mythology,
these are the places where Paul earned his converts, and how the man
must have been constantly subjected to all the immorality of that
ancient world. It's beyond us. And yet he never slowed down or stopped
proclaiming this Gospel of God's Grace and out of that gross immoral
pagan world, he got trophies for God's Grace. To-day vast areas of the
ground which he gained have reverted back to paganism, for even his own
people, yes the Hebrews are in gross darkness and idolatry. Even our own
churches have fallen pray to this gross darkness through the same
deceitfulness of sin. For they all serve the unknown god all the time
things and believing they serve the God of Abraham and Isaac, which they
are not. But rather the god of Jacob who's sons fell from grace while
in Egypt though God reclaimed them but still they resisted His every
effort until Shiloh came. They even rejected or refused the waters of
Shiloah. (Genesis 49:10; Isaiah 8:6)
Isn't it
amazing that these new converts of Paul's Gospel came out of the
immorality of the pagan worship of gods and goddess. They came into a
salvation experience through God's redemption and almost immediately had
to be martyred for their faith. Now think of that. They hadn't been
saturated for 50 years in Christianity like we have been. But even as
new believers just recently saved out of all that old dead background
and they died for their faith. They didn't go back into their paganism
although we think it would have been awfully easy to do. What over came
them and caused them to stand in the face of over whelming honorably
odds? The answer is simple the very Spirit of Christ which most of us
and our religion system does not have or even know of.
You see, if we look at that and then compare that with
Christianity today, how many professing Christians today, even after
having been taught and tutored for 25 - 40 years, if that kind of
persecution came that their life was on the line, how many would stay
with it? You ask yourself, how many? Next Sunday morning when you're
sitting in church and we don't care what church it is, just look out
over that congregation, how many, if all of a sudden a heavy hand of
persecution would fall and we would have to literally give up our life
for our faith; how many of that congregation would go with you? We think
we would be kind of surprised. For most know nothing of suffering for
their faith. In fact just the apposite is true, they've been brain
washed into believing that they deserve more of God's blessing in
greater number because they live in the promised abundance of life. When
in fact they're still deeper in sin than when they professed that they
believed some mans gospel which was in fact another gospel all together.
But
you see this is what Paul is talking about, that all of his converts
not only in Galatia, but also in Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, Athens,
Corinth, Rome and any other place that Paul ministered and had these
converts out of paganism, they immediately came under the pressure of
persecution. We covered that when we were back in the Corinthian
letters. This is the main reason that he didn't really encourage
marriage because it's so much easier to die for your faith if you're
single than if you have a loved one to think of about. We think that was
his only reason for being against marriage. He wasn't but knew the
secret of Adams demise because of woman and the power which they exhort
over men. But here look at it -
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