The sermon text is Galatians 1, 11 to 24. For I would have you no brethren that the gospel was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man nor was I taught, but I received it through the revelation of Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my former man of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the church of God beyond measure and try to destroy. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries, among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions. But when God who has set me apart, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace was pleased to reveal his son in me so that I might preach him among Gentiles. I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood. Nor I go to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away to Arabia and returned once more to Damascus. And three years later, I went to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days. But I did not see any of the apostles except James, the Lord's brother. Now, in what I am writing to you, I assure you before God that I am not lying. Then I went into the regions of Syria and Selisia, and I was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea, which were in Christ. But only they kept herring, he who once persecuted us is now preaching to faith, which he once tried to destroy. And they were glorifying God because of me. The grass with us and the flow of fades, please pray with me, Father in heaven, make glad now that souls of your servants for to you, O Lord, we lift up our souls. We've just heard it read, Father, and yet it's so basic and so profound that we forget it every single day. And it is that the gospel is not according to man, and so we should be more surprised by it than we are. We confess that we are not shocked as we ought to be, that things are more right side up than they ought to be for us in our lives. They should be more upside down and inside out from the world's perspective because the gospel, which came through the revelation of Jesus Christ is not according to man. And so, Father, would you send your spirit now to help me to be faithful to this word and help us as a people to swim more deeply in the truth that that precious gospel, which is your very power for salvation to everyone who believes, is a shocking message that we should expect to uproot our rootedness and to unsettle our settledness. And would you do that gracious work this morning for us, for our desire, our desire as your people, is to know you and to know your son more fully. And we plead that same desire on behalf of our non-Christian friends who are here. And they don't have name tags that say, from a non-Christian, so we don't know who they are, but Father, you know the hearts of everyone in this room who survey them perfectly. And we plead with you on their behalf that they would come through the same transformation of grace that we've just read, Saul of Tarsis was brought through by the power of Jesus Christ. We pray in Jesus name, amen. There is so much phoniness in our relationships with each other. We learn this like a life skill from our earliest days. We get embedded in our hearts and in our minds and our understanding of our self from our earliest encounters with things like comparison with siblings and peers and grades. And we even, this is how it gets so weird, we even reward people for this as they develop this skill farther on. Our thought, especially in our culture, that strength is what counts, that success is what really matters. And we define it very selectively. Just go to a borders or to a Barnes and Noble or get your trusty copy of the New York Times book review out and look at the best seller list and just look at the kinds of books that our culture eats up, that tend to sell well. And they all emphasize, so many of them emphasize, the same thing, that putting the best foot forward, savoring success, these, the literature of our culture reflects what we worship. And we worship success. You know when the Israelites, after 40 years in the wilderness, came into Palestine, do you know why they got so quickly entangled with the gods of the Canaanites? Do you know why? Because they've been 40 years in the wilderness, they were a shepherd, nomadic people, and now all of a sudden God has brought them into a land and he said, now the way you're going to feed yourself is you're going to have to be farmers. And they looked around and they said, we were going to have a farm with Canaanites do and they're successful. And so what we need to do is we need to learn how they're successful. So does bail get rain for the crops so we can eat? He does. So we'll worship bail. Do the asherum, do those help us get crops? Yes, they do. So we'll worship them. Friends, we're no different. We're peering over into the unbelieving world and we're saying, man, that looks good. I want success, so I want to be successful like you, therefore I'm going to buy the books you buy and I'm going to read them. And we're going to, we're going to start measuring success in the currency and in the categories that the world uses because that's what really turns our cranks. Now this preoccupation with success and strength is, it's an idolatry. And the really sad thing is, is that it's not a private matter. It's not something that you can kind of harbor in your heart and have it not affect other people, friends. It distorts and twists every relationship we have with each other. Because what we learn from very early on is that if I acknowledge weakness or failing, you're going to be uncomfortable. And I won't get promoted. And I'm going to have to very diligently and selectively edit everything I tell you about how I'm doing and what I'm like so that my status of success, however it's defined, will be preserved. Right? A truth we feel so often about weakness, threatens our success. And so what ends up happening is that from my own shame, and I'll just speak for myself, for my own shame, and my desire to promote in you as high an image of me as I can achieve, I dishonestly withhold truth from them about how I'm really doing or who I really am. And I always will tend to emphasize my successes and deemphasize my failings and the things I don't know. So the net effect of that is that I offer you a relationship with nothing more than an elaborate two-dimensional cardboard cutout of who my Francis is. I'm just like so often in my dealings with people. I'm just like one of those SIM characters on those computer games. I don't play computer games, but know the same thing, a bunch of fake people. Now, here's the problem. It's when that stuff affects relationships and church. And that pattern, that idolatry of success that leads us to be dishonest about who we really are, we don't, you know, there isn't a filter at the door when you come this building. And so we carry that garbage in here. And what ends up happening is that in so many ways, relationships in the church end up being SIM relationships because we don't really share with each other openly and freely. And quite frankly, there are times we don't want, I don't want you to share with me, sinfully, right? The vocabulary of success change a little bit and go through some shifts when we come inside the church, but the game is still the same at its core and that preoccupation and preoccupation with projecting success and strength, that remains unchanged. So we end up with this SIM church, the church of people who are struggling but who are hiding behind a Thomas Concade like facade. Now you may find that attractive, Thomas Concade. I may find that attractive, I don't, okay, I don't like his paintings, but whether you find that attractive or not, that is not where you live. That is not where you actually live. And neither is it where I live. And so we have to realize, you know, hello, that is not where any of the non-Christians who we say we want to serve and attract, whether it's here or it's in Bangladesh, it's not where they live either. So non-Christian friends who are here, I'm pretty confident having once been a non-Christian as an adult. That if you come in here and you get to know us and you learn from us, that it's unsafe to admit failure or weakness or that there's no permission here to do that or that so-called Christian maturity entails the increasingly deceptive projection of strength and the image that you've got it under control and that you have all the answers, I know what you're going to do as a non-Christian. You're going to get out of here. You're going to leave because you're going to know first that that's not where you are. I know you're going to know that. But more importantly, you're going to know that that's not where we are despite the way we act. We should be the ones who beat you to the punch telling us that we're hypocrites. We should be the first to admit it, but so often we're not. When Marie and I, we lived in Seattle for nine years. We're both born and raised in California and it's on the same coast, but it's very different because there's this thing in the sky in California called the sun and there's this thing in the sky in Seattle and it's called gray rain and that was jumping across a huge cultural golf. Now what's so odd to Marie and me because that's where we lived, all our lives, we lived in California. What's so odd is we got up to Seattle and we were talking to these people and we were kind of mowing and groaning about the weather because I'm, yeah, I'm biased, it's awful, it's just awful. Okay, I move on. But we would talk to people in Seattle residents, long-term people in Seattle and they would say, where's fine here? Talking about the weather's fine, it's raining 28 consecutive days in March. That is not fine. What's the matter with you? How can you explain to me why the buses have life preservers under the seats? I mean, those are ridiculous. But here's the thing, people would keep saying the weather's fine, the weather's fine, the weather's fine. So you're around that environment enough and you begin to say, well, I guess it only rained an inch and a half today, that's not bad. But what Maria and me able to look in at that and say truly that the weather's bad is that we had lived outside of that environment. Now we forget that sometimes in the church because we've been here so long, we forget what it is like to not believe. Do you remember what that was like to not believe? Do you remember what it was like to be haunted by the guilt of your sin? Do you remember what it was like when it rained all the time? Friends, we've got to remember that to pretend like it's not raining in here just because we're in the church, maybe it's just drizzling and maybe it's okay for us to pretend that we're better off than we actually are, that's not okay. Now that is exactly the opposite of what the church of Jesus Christ is intended to be by its king, okay? Jesus, the goodness here is that Jesus doesn't want the church to be that way, that's not his design for his church, and let me bring it around to the passage in Galatians. The reason I can say that very confidently that that's not what Jesus wants to produce in his people is from this passage. The church that he is building, the digits of hell, will not be able to withstand is a church full of seafaces, full of Peters and full of Paul's, failures and betrayers, those who haven't succeeded when the stakes were their highest. That's the constitution of the church of Jesus Christ. So what are we doing pretending like that's not true about us? Now our passage this morning gives us an account of Paul's whereabouts, the reason I wanted to do this this week and said last week is I wanted to say the big picture of Paul's whereabouts in his movements after his conversion and Luke gave that to us in last week's passage this week, Paul in Galatians 1, he kind of slows it down in some ways and tells us a little bit more information in some ways and what I want to zero in on this amazing verse 18. After three years later I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Seifas and I stayed with him 15 days. That is an incredible intersection of lives. Paul in the same house with Seifas with Peter for 15 days. Why would Jesus Christ put those two men together? I think we can learn a lot about what we're supposed to be, who we're supposed to be as a church from looking at the wisdom of Jesus and taking these two men who were leaders and putting them together. So remarkable and fruitful 15 days I think for us. So first just think about how unlikely that combination of men is. And there are some major differences that separate these guys, right? I mean they both come from Jewish backgrounds, but that's about it, there are a lot of reasons these guys should not have been able to stay together under one roof for 15 days. Educationally, Peter was an entrepreneur, he was part of a family business, he was a smart guy but he didn't have an education they could hold a candle to what the Apostle Paul had. Paul had degrees, Peter had the school of hard knocks. Family wise, right? You can imagine Peter as somebody who very close to his brothers, very close to his siblings, very close to his father, tight knit family in the family business. So we don't hear anything, do we? We don't know anything about his family except he had a sister in Jerusalem at some point. How about politically, very different, Paul was a Roman citizen, Peter wasn't, geographically Peter was a native of Palestine and Paul was from what we would think of today as Southeast Turkey. And vocationally, Peter was, he was a fisherman, well Saul, he didn't, Paul, he was more like a rabbi, very different guys. That's their backgrounds, how did their relationship to the church, very different again and so there's this odd, what is Jesus doing here and bringing them together? Relationship to the church, Peter is the forefront, I mean he is the rock, right? He is the leader of the church in Jerusalem and Paul, he's public enemy number one. So very strange intersection of lives, there's on paper, there's no reason that these guys should be together except for two massive similarities that they share. Me number one, each had nigh Jesus Christ and failed. That's a big, big similarity, isn't it? Peter's threefold denial of the Lord at the moment of his greatest need. His was the denial of a traitor, one who had once been close but who had let go of his Lord under pressure. That Paul, well his was the denial and opposition of an enemy, he had betrayed and denied Jesus Christ in that way. Now I spent some time thinking about what the conversation across the table must have been like or really what it wasn't like. These two guys in the same room, I'll tell you what wasn't happening across that table, they weren't pushing their chest out at each other because each knew the truth about the other, can't have that, can't pretend success when the record of failure is so public and so obvious, very, very, very full of grace, no room for phonies under that roof. What's the second thing that brought them together? Second similarity that they shared, well, Jesus Christ had personally restored each to full fellowship with himself. Peter just think about the end of John's Gospel, the threefold again do you love me, do you love me, do you love me? And then Paul's own understanding that he had been so restored by Jesus himself, right, that he'd been shown grace to be a witness in an example to others. You see, there were far bigger things that united them than that separated them. What united them, what united them was the open acknowledgement of their failings and their complete dependence, therefore, upon Jesus Christ as the one who restored them. See, because they had failed so badly, the fact that Jesus Christ had now picked them up and made them his leaders made his grace that much greater and undisplayed. Now friends, I think that is exactly a picture of what relationships in the church are supposed to be like. The same two things are true of every single person in this room. There isn't a single person here who can say, I did great for Jesus Christ. Give me a break, come on. You're not what you're supposed to be, remember John Newton. Nobody can put your chest out in the church of Jesus Christ. Nobody does that, because nobody who knows the truth about themselves or about him would be able to do that. And everybody who is a Christian has been restored, not by the dent of their hard labor, not by their wisdom, not by their efforts, not by their service, not by their commitments to spend the rest of their lives devoted to Jesus Christ, but by his grace, so that he empties your hands completely. And if you know him, you know him on his terms, which means he's made the complete provision for it, and you're left empty handed only to receive what he alone can provide. That was Peter and Paul, and Jesus' design to make the leaders in his church, those kind of men, tells you a lot, tells me a lot about what Jesus likes, what he doesn't like, and what he wants for his church to be like, right? That's the foundation of the church, the apostles and the apostles are people who are weak. So our family may be an inside job like Peter's, or maybe a forceful rejection like Paul's, but when we're honest about it, none of us can pretend that better off than we really are. So what do you do? How do you apply this? Well, I think the first thing that this text summons us to do is to repent, to repent. And I'm not talking about repenting over the dishonesty and a phoniness and the deception that we kind of traffic in with each other in relationships. I'm talking about going deeper than that. I'm talking about repenting down to the roots of what makes that kind of phoniness seem like a good idea to us. What makes us look at it as a shield and a bulwark and a protection, that if I deceive you and with whole information from you about how I'm really doing or who I really am, then I'll be safe because I've got to protect something. That's the thing that you need to repent of, is that deep rooted insecurity that gives rise to the deception, and why should you repent of that, my friends? Because if you're a Christian, the one who knows you the best, God, who knows all the truth about you, has looked at every part of who you are in full view of all the true information of everything that was actually the case, and he said, I'm sending my son to live and die in your place. So best gift came to those about whom the worst things were true. If I think that I have anything that I have to protect myself from from you by disclosing the truth about me, then I have completely missed the great work of Jesus Christ who's come in full view of everything that I have given his life for me on the cross. Why in the world would your opinion of me weigh more heavily upon my life and influencing my behavior than his? You see, that makes Jesus real small and people real big. And it's not supposed to be that way in the church. It's supposed to be the opposite. In terms of defining my identity and freeing me up to love people and to just be honest with you, that I really stink at a lot of stuff, and it's okay because God likes me. I'm a son. I'm not supposed to be perfect. And if I tell you that I am or I convey the impression that I am, what I do is I undercut the gospel that's saved me and the gospel I proclaim to you. So you need to repent when Jesus took my shame on the cross. I mean, one of the things that's going on the cross is that he was openly shamed, stripped naked, bore the curse of sin, he bore on the cross all of the shame that we are supposed to have because of our sin in the presence of God. Do you remember what made Adam hide in the garden and Eve hide with the fig leaf? Why were they hiding because they were ashamed of their own sin? My friends, when we are dishonest with each other about who we are and how we're doing, what we're doing is we're playing out that same shame theme. But we've missed the greater significance which is that all of the reason for that shame has been dealt with definitively on the cross so that if I stand before God unashamed, that I can stand before you unashamed. Now, that ought to free me up to be a bold confessor with you and with the relationships I have. It ought to free you up, it ought to change relationships. So you start with repentance and then you remember who you are and who others are, right? We've each betrayed Jesus, we've each been personally restored by Him. It have to boast to follow Paul's example. I mean, let me ask you a question if you're in a life group or in a men's discipleship group. Are you following what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1130? If I have to boast, I will boast of what pertains to my weakness. Now how upside down is that compared to the message of our culture? Where our culture came to boast in your weakness, what would our culture tell you to do? Conceal your weakness, boast in your strength. The gospel is not according to man, right? It's not according to man. The physics of our culture do not work with the gospel. Jesus said, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs as the kingdom of heaven. The culture says, the poor in spirit, you're going to get nothing. It's the strong in spirit who get everything. And Jesus says, that's wrong. So who are you going to believe? If I trust him and I believe that the truth about me has been totally understood by God and that he has welcomed me because of Christ's work into his family, then why do I ever feel the need to spray myself with spiritual perfume so I smell better for you? I don't need to. You know what God says? I'm an aroma of Christ to God. I don't need perfume with you, and you don't need it with me. Friday night, we got a call, we were going out to dinner, and we'd call from our gay neighbors, and they invited us over for wine and cheese, and so Maria and I went over there, and the kids came over and watched a DVD there, and we sat with them out on the porch and talked with them. And first, the way these conversations always work is they start out in politics because they still can't believe that every Christian doesn't worship Fox News. And I don't. And neither should you still can't believe that there are evangelical Christians who think that, because in Polish, frequently makes mistakes, and he does. And so that gives us an open door with them because they don't understand us. And so we were talking to them, and the discussion will always go from politics to the issue of gay marriage, and then one of them said, well, if I came to your church, could I be a member? And I said not, not as you are now, because the call to discipleship is so demanding that no relationship can matter more than your relationship to Jesus Christ. But you would be so welcome long before you ever got to that point. And one of the neighbors said to me, she said, you know, she had lived in the heterosexual world until she was 33, and she took up a gay lifestyle when she was 33. She's been married. And she said, you know, I found, when I moved into the homosexual community, I found an acceptance, and a love, and a fellowship, and a humility, and an acknowledgement of weakness in that community that I had never found anywhere else. And I wanted to weep because I thought, and I said to her, I said, I said, that's exactly what the church is supposed to be. Now, friends, that doesn't mean, by the way, that we say, you can be as your, and you know me well enough to know, that's not what I told her. But friends, there is a lesson in that vision of community for us, that it should be inconceivable that a homosexual person or somebody living in a homosexual lifestyle could find a better community than the church. That should be inconceivable. It should be inconceivable that the church, not the place where the people are the most humble, where they are the most honest about their weaknesses, where they are the most will to admit. You know, I don't have all the answers. Is that not what we should be? Is that not what the gospel should free us up to be? At the same time that we are lionhearted for truth, aren't we to be the people who say the truth about me is that Jesus, I heard Jesus summon the weak and the weary, I can't, because I'm not strong. And so how seriously do you want to be his people? Do you want to be that kind of people? I think that by his grace we could become that kind of people, and if we become that kind of people, do you know who this room is going to be filled with? Exactly the same people who follow Jesus around. The tax gatherers, the centers, and the prostitutes. So the church, I come back to my metatheme in the book of Acts. The church is Jesus' evangelistic method. It's who the body of Christ is in its relationships with each other and with him that ultimately draws unbelievers into the kingdom. We are his tool. It is utterly necessary to the accomplishment of his mission because when Jesus says that he wants his people to go to the end of the earth, he is not interested. I am quite confident in sending a bunch of deceptive self-righteous people who pretend like they have it all together to bring that virus into every corner of the earth. He wants broken people who go forward. He wants humble people who say, I don't know. He wants people who are willing to trust his promises of restoration so deeply that they're freed up to love and be weak without any fear of consequences. That's what his gospel has meant to do for us. If it's meant to do that before God in our relationship with God, then how much more is that meant to change the way we relate to each other? And friends, I think it's a growing edge for us. I think it's a growing edge. I think we're doing so much better than we were, but friends, we got to go deeper. How often in your life groups, do you talk or in any setting in the church, how often do you stress questions like, what was your biggest failure in 2005? Do you ever wonder about that? Do you ever share that with each other? Do you even talk about it with your wife or your husband? What's your chief idol? What do you worship? Where do you go to find life besides Jesus Christ? Where do you go? Do you ever talk about that in your life groups? What kinds of things do you tend to get anxious about? Where are you definitely afraid of right now? What do you tend to get angry about? Now, if you have two hours, I can tell you. Friends, part of what growing strong in the faith means is living out gospel liberty in the relationships within the church. Now, you want our church to be an integral part of God's determination to reach the thousands of new people who will be moving into the neighborhoods around our church in the coming months and years. I want it to be a church that lost people are drawn to and where Christ will set them free. I know you do. Do you want to be a church in which our covenant children are made wise at an early age to salvation and spared the wreckage of distorted relationships? I know you do. Then it's non-negotiable. It's non-negotiable for us to resolve together as a body to put aside phoniness and the idolatry of success in our relationships with one another in the body of Christ. The builder of our church didn't call to himself healthy and happy people who had it all together. And I thank God he did not. And so should you. And if we thank him for that, then let us change the way we relate to each other in Christ. So that he gets credit for freeing us from those fears. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, even now, I just think of how short we fall, short eye fall, from this kind of transparency. And so I look again to your work on the cross where you told the truth about me and all your people and you did so exhaustively. And when you were raised from the dead and seated at the father's right hand, you continued to tell the truth about who we are now in you. And so made that vision of what you have accomplished, what you've finished, and what you are yet doing right now in behalf of your bride, made that radically change our relationship. So we as a church become a tool, lethal against unbelief, and all the thoughts that raise themself up against your reign in the world. We pray in your name, amen.