WHAT IT TAKES TO BELONG
As a young person, I struggled with feeling like I belonged in Christian groups. I felt like I stood apart from the other youth in my youth group because I was too committed. But I really felt awkward among my fellow counselors at Red Rock Bible Camp. I just didn’t feel like I belonged among them. They were tanned. They wore name-brand summer clothes. They were confident in themselves. They played volleyball like it was a religion and heaven help you if you screwed up. Do you know where these young men and women were from? (Rosenort).
What did it take to belong? What did I need to do? Exchange my long pants for shorts? Practice more volleyball drills? Would this kid from Winnipeg fit in then?
What does it take to belong to the people of God? What did you need to do to belong in the fellowship of believers?
Lyle Schaller writes that every congregation can be described in terms of two concentric circles. The outer circle is the membership circle. Everyone who signs our covenant, let’s say, is in that circle. But the smaller inner circle includes those who feel a sense of belonging into the fellowship of this called-out community. Most of our workers come from the inner circle. Terminology will distinguish those who feel like they belong and those that don’t: The former use terms like we, us, and ours when referring to the congregation, while the latter tend to use, they, them, and theirs.
Schaller suggests that at least one-third, or as much as half, of all protestant church members do not feel a sense of belonging to their congregations. They may be members on paper, but they don’t feel accepted in the fellowship circle.
Do you feel like you belong here at RFC? What do you need to do to belong to God’s people? If Paul were speaking to us as he did to the Galatians, he would say only one thing is required: Believe! Are you on the outside looking in? I want to assure you that by your faith in Jesus Christ, you belong here!
Through Believing You Belong to God’s People (3:1-5)
As JB Philips puts it in his translation, verse 1 says, “O you dear idiots of Galatia…surely you can’t be so idiotic?” Nice, eh? Paul can’t afford to be nice while the people are turning away from the gospel. They are abandoning God by submitting to this “Jesus-plus” gospel.
Let me remind you of their error. The Galatians were falling for the teaching that you begin the Christian life by faith, and then you grow in the Christian life by works. Jesus dying on the cross was a good start, but if you are going to follow a Jewish carpenter nailed to a cross, you must add the Jewish Law to complete your faith and thus belong to the people of God. A modern form of this heresy is “God helps those who help themselves…”
Faith is the only response to Jesus that is needed. Believing in Jesus Christ – that’s it! Paul said, “It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified,” (1b). When Paul preached Jesus, it was as if he put Jesus crucified on a billboard so that they could clearly see how God saved them. That’s the message. But they turned to works of the law as if it could ever produce the life-changing salvation that faith in Christ does.
Paul then uses their own experience to prove his point in four rhetorical questions. He asks:
“Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?” (2b). They know the answer. Did they do anything? No! They weren’t saved by anything they did, but by what they heard. The message of Christ crucified changed their hearts. “Doing” doesn’t save; “Believing” does.
“…why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort?” (3b NLT). Their mistake, and I believe ours as well, is that they believed “Christ died for my sins, but I still have to fix myself.” The unchurched have believed the fallacy that we have taught them: You must be perfect to belong. So, we resurrected the law, the rules that improve us.
“Did you suffer so many things in vain?” (4a). Paul was talking about how when they believed in Jesus, other people abused them for their new faith. As much as we detest suffering and pain, Paul’s understanding of Christ is that to follow him is to suffer for him. Was this a waste? Did they suffer for an incomplete gospel? No, the suffering itself was a validation of the sincerity of their faith.
“…does God give you the Holy Spirit and work miracles among you because you obey the law? (5 NLT). This one got me. What do I have to do to get God to heal someone? See the flaw? I fall for this quite a bit. If God doesn’t heal, it’s because I didn’t pray hard enough, fast long enough, or give a big cheque to a charity. Because if I did, then God would surely do what I ask. Does God give the Holy Spirit to work in you and do miracles among us because of what we do?
These rhetorical questions drive home the point. What do you need to do to belong to the people of God? Nothing! Except believe in the crucified Lord Jesus Christ.
Do you belong in this fellowship of believers we call RFC? Yes. Do you feel like you belong? Maybe not. But you do not need to have a Germanic name, or come from a certain family, or be of a certain skin color, or have a lot of money, or fit a mould of behavior that is uniquely Rosenort, to belong here. What Jesus asks is that you believe in him!
Through Believing You are a Child of Abraham (3:6-9)
The Judaizers were teaching that a person who wants to belong to the people of God must follow the law of Moses. So, Paul does one better. You want to appeal to Scripture? Fine! Let’s go back to Abraham.
Paul quotes from Genesis 15:6 but let me set the stage. The LORD brings Abraham out from his tent to see if he can number the stars. The LORD then says, “So shall your offspring be,” (Gen. 15:5). Abraham is an old man (90) and beyond childbearing years. Sarah is about 80. Abraham considered this and then the promise of God. And he said, “Ok!” That’s faith. Faith is seeing beyond the outward circumstances and believing that God can do what he says he will do. That’s how we’re saved.
The official record says, “(he) believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness,” (6). The word “counted” or “reckoned” means that Abraham didn’t do anything to earn perfection, but God declared that he was perfect, simply because he believed.
That’s how we’re saved. We can’t erase the sins of our past by therapy or good works. Only Christ can deal with our sins and wipe them out by his blood. We can’t reconcile ourselves to God. We must believe that God has reconciled us to himself in Christ. We can’t change our hearts. We must believe that the Holy Spirit is transforming us from one degree of glory to another. Abraham believed it.
I like the next verse. “And the Scripture foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all nations be blessed,’” (8). See that? The Scripture “preached the gospel” to Abraham telling him that he would be the first in a family line built on faith. In a sense, Abraham believed the gospel, that faith in Jesus would make him the father of many people.
You are a son of Abraham if you believe in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins. You are a daughter of Abraham through your faith. Abraham was considered the father of the Jewish faith, and the false teachers were saying that you had to obey Moses and get circumcised. But if Abraham is the template, then faith is all that is required to belong to God’s people. You belong to God’s people!
Through Believing You Receive the Holy Spirit (3:10-14)
The reality is that we can’t help thinking that we must do something to belong to God’s people. If we live by that principle however, we will fail. Works will not get us any closer to God and they will not make us feel more “Christian” or help us to belong.
Paul contrasts the two ways of getting God’s approval. In verses 10-14, we see these two ways explained. In the ESV it reads like this: “The righteous will live by faith” (11b; Hab. 2:4) and “The one who does them shall live by them,”(12; Lev. 18:5). The phrase that stands out is “live by.” One lives by faith; the other lives by keeping the law (slide of 10-14 in NLT).
If you are going to live by rules, you had better be prepared to keep them all. Otherwise, as Paul quotes the OT, there is a curse on those who fail at just one point to keep the law. The logic of Paul’s argument can be explained like this:
Those who don’t do everything required by the law are cursed (10b).
No one does everything required by the law.
(Implied Proposition)
Therefore, those who live by the works of the law are cursed (10b).
Living a legalistic lifestyle is shallow because it is attempted by people who cannot keep God’s commands, and yet somehow still think they can put God in their debt. What the Judaizers were trying to do in making non-Jews follow the law was bringing a curse down on them instead.
God knew that humans could never keep the law. We were cursed if we tried and cursed if we didn’t. We were under a curse because of sin. The only way for that curse to be removed is through the cross of Jesus Christ. He became the curse so that we could receive the blessing of Abraham.
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us – for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’ – so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Holy Spirit through faith,” (13-14).
This is an ancient saying. Hanging on a tree was not a method of execution, but something that was done after the death of a criminal on the same day the man died. He would be hanged on a tree or a wooden post so that the gruesome sight would serve as a warning to the people that breaking the law was death and humiliation. Jesus was crucified on a tree, so both were applicable. He took that on for us so that we could receive the blessing of the Holy Spirit.
By believing you receive the Spirit. It is not a two-stage process. If you believe in Jesus, he gives you the Holy Spirit right then and there in that moment of initial faith. Paul explained to the Ephesians, “The Spirit is God’s guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people…” (Eph. 1:14 NLT). He is the seal placed on you showing that you belong to God.
What does it take to belong to the community of God’s people? Just one thing: Faith!
You belong here.
I know the feeling of not belonging. Maybe you feel like you don’t belong at RFC. If we have not welcomed you or included you, we need to do better. Maybe that feeling is a faulty narrative. You are telling yourself you don’t belong. Change the narrative: You belong here because of Jesus. He took the curse of rejection away from you and made you his own.
Author Keith Miller tells of an outgoing 40-year-old woman who was part of a sharing group he led. She said:
"When I was a tiny little girl, my parents died, and I was put in an orphanage. I was not pretty at all, and no one seemed to want me. But I longed to be adopted and loved by a family as far back as I can remember. I thought about it day and night, but everything I did seemed to go wrong. I must have tried too hard to please the people who came to look me over, and what I did was to drive them away. But then one day, the head of the orphanage told me that a family was coming to take me home with them.
I was so excited that I jumped up and down and cried like a little baby. The matron reminded me that I was on trial, and this might not be a permanent arrangement, but I just knew that somehow it would work out. So, I went with this family and started to school. I was the happiest little girl you can imagine, and life began to open up for me just a little. But then one day a few months later, I skipped home from school and ran into the front door of the big old house we lived in. No one was at home, but in the middle of the front hall was my battered suitcase with my little coat thrown across it. As I stood there it suddenly dawned on me what it meant--I didn’t belong there anymore."
Miller reports that when the woman stopped speaking, there was hardly a dry eye in the group. But then she cleared her throat and said almost matter-of-factly, "This happened to me seven times before I was 13 years old. But wait, don’t feel too badly. It was experiences like these that ultimately brought me to God--and there I found what I had always longed for--a place, a sense of belonging, a forever family."
When you feel like you don’t belong, remember that you do. There is nothing you must do to belong in the company of believers except believe.
AMEN
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