Growing up is a funny business, isn’t it? When we’re young we long to be older (and I guess every one of us can remember that, even if we aren’t currently experiencing it)! And when we get older we wish we were young again. On my 40th birthday somebody gave me one of those birthday cards which had a badge on the front which you’re meant to wear, which said ‘I may be getting older but I refuse to grow up!’ (if you could see how battered it was, you would realise how long ago my 40th birthday was). I guess few of us here in church this morning are completely happy with our age. And I imagine all of us will remember this longing to grow up, to own my first car, have my first job, own my first house, have our first child – whatever it might be.
There was one student who graduated from college, got himself a job, and managed to buy his first flat. Proudly he was showing his parents round it for the very first time, and he noticed that, as they left each of the rooms in turn, his father was switching each of the lights on. “It’s all right Dad,” he said, “you needn’t worry: they all work.” The father said, “Son, I’ve waited 23 years to come to your house and leave every single light on!”
Well, in Galatians 4, Paul is using this universal experience of growing up as an illustration of how human beings relate to God. In these verses he’s talking about the history of the human race, but also about the spiritual experience of the individual. And at the risk of oversimplifying, I’m going to apply these verses primarily to us as individuals. My two points are going to be Slavery, and Sonship or, if there was such a word, I’d use the word, ‘Childship’: because these verses have got nothing at all to do with being a male, and everything to do with being a Christian.
I would be greatly obliged if you would look at these verses with me, so that I can draw our attention to what this letter of Paul’s says, and not simply to what I’m saying about what it says.
1) Slavery (4:1-3)
‘What I am saying is that as long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. He is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father’ (vv. 1, 2). The child has the potential for adulthood, but the restrictions of childhood. Those guardians and trustees, in verse 2, would in the ancient world, in a wealthy household, have been themselves slaves. So the child comes under slaves and is actually pretty much like a slave; which is, according to Paul, a comparable condition to being a non-Christian: ‘So also, when we were children [he means spiritually], we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world’ (v. 3). Now I know this isn’t a flattering comparison. But elsewhere Paul speaks of us as dead when we’re not Christians; and I suppose that being compared to a slave is at least a little better than being compared to being a corpse. But I apologise to you if you do find that offensive.
Usually in our culture it’s the Christian who’s thought to be in bondage. As one student said to another: “Are you a Christian then?” “No,” said the other, “it’s just my hangover that’s making me look so miserable.” But Paul says it is actually the non-Christian who is in bondage, enslaved, to what Paul calls ‘the basic principles of the world’. That is an expression Paul uses several times in his letters, and he means trying to make sense of my life by my own efforts, trying to give my life meaning and purpose, to give myself a raison de être by my own efforts. There is a religious version of this slavery which sees God as some sort of a merchant who sells us a relationship with Himself at the price of us being good and keeping various rules and practices (attending church, getting confirmed, trying to pray) – a slavery to moral rules and religious observances, as we try to get ourselves right with God. There is also a non-religious version (which is probably more prevalent today) whereby I try to make sense of my life by my own determination to pursue ideals that I have created for myself (to be myself, to do it my way). There is a variation of that in the person who says that there is actually no sense to be made of life. And that person, I would suggest, is enslaved by the need to deny that part of the human personality which is always crying out for meaning and purpose, trapped by a self-imposed deafness to the question Why?
Without God, I am trapped by these things; I am enslaved in the drab little dungeon of my own ego, driven on by whatever I perceive to give my life purpose – the quest for success, the attempt to be good, a concern for my children perhaps (if I’m a family person), concern for popularity, a hunt for meaning. And for many, I would suggest, there are certain questions that keep arising in our minds: Why was I born? What is the purpose of my life? Why am I alive on this planet? – which grow increasingly threatening to us because their implications are so awesome, so that we grow increasingly reluctant to face them, as life goes on. And so we tend to make one excuse after another for putting them back in the pending tray, where they lie gathering dust as the years go by. And it gets harder and harder to get them out, blow the dust off and look at them again. There may be some people in church this morning who, even though you listen to me, even though you’ve come to the church service, are not prepared to reconsider these issues seriously, because of what the implications might be. I might have to change my whole life. After 40 years that gets very difficult. After 50 it gets harder still. You know what they say: that after 40 a man’s face is his own fault! It gets harder and harder as life goes on: but there is always still a little voice telling us that we should be better than we are: there is a different way to live from the way we have yet discovered.
One Mum got tired of nagging her teenage son about the state of his room. So she left a note on his pillow one day. The note read: ‘Dear Rob, I hate being in a mess like this all the time. Please tidy me up. Signed, Your Room.’ She found a reply on the pillow next day, ‘Dear Room, I’ve tidied you up. Now please shut up because you’re beginning to sound just like my Mum.’ But mothers of teenagers don’t shut up, nor does that voice inside us, however faint it may become, that speaks to us about God and that tells us that without Him we are like children in infancy and slaves in bondage.
But God Himself has acted.
(2) Sonship (vv. 4, 5)
‘But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.’
(a) Notice God acted out of eternity into history (‘when the time had fully come’) to send His own Son (somebody who was fully divine) who was ‘born of a woman’ (so also fully human, a representative human being), who was ‘born under the law’: He fulfilled all the moral requirements that you and I know we ought to fulfil. He was the perfect human being; as you and I sense so deeply we ought to be if only we could be. He was perfect as no other person has ever been. But He did not just come to show us what we ought to be like. He came, ‘to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.’
The Law demanded that a human being should live up to God’s perfect moral standards. Jesus did that: He lived up to every one of those standards. The Law also demanded that those who failed should come under God’s curse and die cut off from God. And Jesus did that too! He took that curse, that penalty, Himself. He fulfilled the demands of God’s moral Law both for Himself and for us. No other great religious leader of the world makes that offer: ‘to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons’ (v. 5). There is a way out of slavery into sonship, and it is the way that Jesus provides through His death on the cross. You may remember that He died with a cry on his lips (‘a great cry’ some of the gospel accounts call it): “It is finished” is what one of them tells us He said. It is a single word in Greek: and it’s apparently the word they used to receipt an invoice in those days. You pay for something in a shop and they stamp PAID on the slip, don’t they? Or ‘Received with thanks’ or something similar. Well it was the Greek equivalent Jesus used – it is paid, it is finished, it’s dealt with. All those moral demands that you and I know we ought to try and meet in our lives. whether we acknowledge there’s a God or not. We know that there are moral demands on our lives that we don’t manage to meet. All those philosophical demands to authenticate our own existences; which also leave us puzzled and confused: they are all met in Christ.
Maybe somebody here has something very serious and very secret on your conscience, known to no one else. Perhaps you’ve just a thousand petty selfishnesses, like a million other people. Whatever it is, everyone of us can look at Jesus dying there on the cross and can hear His voice saying, “Finished”. It is paid for. It is dealt with. Received with thanks, as it were. It is all done as far as Mark Ashton is concerned. As far as you are concerned. He did it for me, so I can know God as a child.
(b) And notice what else comes with that new status: ‘Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father” ’ (v. 6). I’ve got a couple of sons, and suppose one of them were to come to me and say, “Dad, I know I’ve not been very good recently, but I’m turning over a new leaf today, and I’m going to make myself more your son than I’ve ever been before.” Welcome as those words might well be to me, I would have to say to that son, “Look, you can’t make yourself any more my son than you already are. It is fixed: nothing can ever change the fact that you are my son.”
And our behaviour as Christians (and just for a moment I’m particularly addressing those who are Christians) comes in that same framework. Jesus makes us God’s children by His death for us, and then His Spirit teaches us to live as God’s children. You see, our status does not depend on our behaviour. It is our behaviour that is now beginning to be transformed by our status. There is all the difference in the world between those two things. And it is the beginning of a process that will last beyond this life: ‘So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir’ (v. 7). That word ‘heir’ points us on to heaven. Without God we will spend eternity in hell, separated from God and from everything good, by our own choice and by His justice and holiness. But with God this life cannot contain all He is going to give us – it is an inheritance of goodness, beauty and truth that human experience can never fully grasp. And so it stretches beyond death. One Christian was asked by her employer if she would work on Sunday, and she said, no, she wouldn’t. The employer said he would pay her double time. And the Christian still said, no. So the employer asked her why. The employee said, “It’s because I’m a Christian.” The employer said, “Well, what do you get paid for being a Christian?” She stopped and thought for a moment, and then said,” I’ve got to admit the pay is not that great. But the retirement benefit is out of this world!”
In an age that cannot bear to think seriously about death (if you don’t think that’s true, can I ask you when you last seriously contemplated your own death?), because it has no answer to it, Jesus Christ offers a relationship with God that death only makes better.
Let me just close by asking this: Where are you in all of this? Where do you come in terms of verses 4 and 5? Are you living before or after them? Let’s just look at them again: ‘But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.’ There was a Baptist minister once who went to the house of a poor and elderly lady in order to give her the money to pay for her rent. It had been granted to her from the church’s Poor Relief Fund. He knocked repeatedly at her door but he got no answer, and eventually he had to leave again. He discovered later that she had been in the house all the time. And when she’d heard that knock on the door she had refused to answer because she had been certain it was the rent man coming to demand the rent and who might even evict her from the house.
And when you and I hear, as it were, the knock of God on the door of our hearts, we think He has come to demand a moral payment, to ask how good I’ve been – and there’s a huge moral debt that I know I have to pay. And we feign deafness to that knock: I don’t want to face God, He’ll interfere with my life! He will condemn so much of it. I don’t want anything to do with Him. We pretend therefore that He isn’t there, and that that isn’t a knock. I remember it so vividly from my own life, that sort of a knock at the door of my heart was exactly how I felt when as an undergraduate student I first faced the demands of God on my life. But He does not come to demand a moral payment. He comes not to demand the payment, but to provide the payment: He comes to say, “It is finished. I’ve dealt with Mark Ashton’s sins once and for all. And Mark Ashton can now be a son of God as he was always meant to be.” And that is how He comes to you today. That’s what these seven verses of the New Testament are saying to you and to me at this moment.
I’m going to say no more about them now, but I want to invite you, if it would be appropriate (and I may just be talking to one person here at this moment) when the service ends I’m going to be sitting down over in that bottom left hand corner for a few minutes. And if you would like to come, I would like to try to explain to you how you can respond to God if you sense He’s knocking at the door of your life at the moment, and your instinct is to pretend He’s not there because you think He’s come to make moral demands of you. I want to share with you how very simply you can respond and, as it were, open the door and invite Him in into a real relationship – maybe for the first time in your life. I won’t keep you long, I won’t embarrass you. I’ll give you a little booklet as well that you can go away and read afterwards.