In the 80s and the 90s we learned a new word for naughty children. And the word was strong will. We no longer call our children naughty. We call them strong will. Do you remember that strong willed children? Strong willed children. I had a strong willed child. I also had a strong willed dog. Terriers are strong willed dogs. I don't know if you know that. You may be wondering, do I have a strong willed dog? Do I have a strong willed child? I'll give you some symptoms. Strong willed dogs. Strong willed dogs wait for you to turn your back and they climb up on your kitchen table. And they poop to show dominance. I had a strong willed dog. Strong willed dogs though they are very, very house broken. When you are out of the house and they want you to be in the house, they find their way back into your closet and leave you gifts. Strong willed dogs. Strong willed dogs like Gladys. When they see that you are leaving, when you want them to go outside, you go to the door and you open the door. And they get to the doorway, half in, half out and look at you. To say, are you coming? Because I'm not going without you. And they wait until you are out in the cold before they will go out in the cold. Strong willed dogs. When they see that you are leaving, rush to the front door before you can get there and will wrap their legs around your leg because they want to go with you so that you are kind of left doing this. Strong willed dogs. I have a strong willed dog. She lives in Florida now. I gave her away to someone who kept her for three weeks before giving her away. That's what we do with strong willed dogs. We don't get rid of them. We re-home them. And she has been re-homed. I don't have that strong willed children. Strong willed child who take to see Peter Pan and it's time to clap for Tinkerbell and he looks at me and goes, Hey! Strong willed children. Strong willed children want to be in pictures so bad that they jump up and they knock the camera out of your hand when you are not taking a picture of them. Strong willed children. Strong willed teenagers. They refuse to do busy work even though they know their grade depends upon it. They refuse to do it. And so they take classes like AP Physics and make a very, very low F in the class. But then take the AP exam and make a five out of five. So they end up getting college credit for a class they did not get high school credit for. Strong willed children don't like to lose. Strong willed children watch the Super Bowl and watch their favorite team in the Super Bowl go out to a 28 to 3 lead and get excited and then slowly watch that lead get dug into in the second half until the other team comes back and ties them. And they take that iPhone that you bought for them and they slam it! Strong willed children, you text them and you say, hey, why are you not responding to my text and they say because my phone is broken? And you say, okay, let's go get you another one. And they say, I'm just sorry that you have to keep paying for these. And you say, son, everything that I have is yours. I just want you to get some of it while I'm still alive so I can see you enjoy it. You send strong willed dogs to Florida. You give everything you have to strong willed children. Because they're your children. They're your sons. You love them. Everything you have is theirs. You almost like it when they break something so that you can show them how much you love them. Trust me, parents, if your children aren't old enough for that yet, it's coming. And the question for you is, do you think your God's pet or his child? Now the answer is your God's child. That's an objective fact. If you're in Christ, you are a son or daughter of God. That's just an objective fact. But how do you see yourself? Do you see yourself as running thin on his patients? Do you see yourself as being in danger or being sent and re-homed to Florida? Do you understand that all of the obligations of righteousness, all of the laws been fulfilled by Jesus on your behalf? Or do you still think you have to fulfill rules? Keep rules and fulfill laws to get close to Jesus? We're going back into the book of Galatians for this spring, up until Easter, this winter, up until Easter. And I want you to remember, the book of Galatians is not an evangelistic book. It's not written for unbelievers. It's not to tell unbelievers you're not in Christ, but you want to come in to Christ. The book of Galatians is written to a church, a church filled with people who, even though they were in Christ, insisted on seeing themselves as God's pets. Insisted on relating to God through His rules and His laws. And Paul tells them if you're living by the law, you're no better than the unbelievers. If you're living and viewing yourself as a slave, my work is in vain. And I want to really labor this because I know you. And so many of you have this picture in your mind of what you ought to look like. When you ought to get out of bed, how much Bible reading you ought to be doing, how you ought to be relating to your co-workers, how you ought to be relating to your family, how you ought, how you ought. And you feel the constant disappointment of God when you're not what you believe you ought to be. And I want you to know that is the, that's just not true. That is you insisting on seeing yourself as God's pet. And you're His child. He's not put off by your illness. He's not put off by your weakness. It draws Him out. He wants you to enjoy Him. He wants you to enjoy His grace. He wants you to enjoy His love. He wants you to enjoy His mercy. As long as you insist on relating to God through His rulekeeping, through this standard, you never get to enjoy Him as your Father. That's the message of Galatians 3 and 4 that we're going to reach today. Please stand as we see. The choice really is up to you. Will you relate to Lord through faith or through the law? Will you enjoy His Fatherhood or will you be His slave? Here's the word of the Lord. Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then the law was our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. For in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized in the Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heir according to promise. Now I mean that the heir, as long as he's a child, is no different from a slave, though he's the owner of everything. But he's under guardians and managers until the date sent by his father. In the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent his spirit, the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, father. So you're no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son did an heir for a God, formerly when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world? Who slaves you want to be once more? You observe days and months and seasons and years. I'm afraid that I may have labored over you in vain. This Father reading of God's Word, all men are like grass, and all of our glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but not God's Word. God's Word stands forever. You may be seated. Do you see yourself as God's slave or as God's son? Are you God's pet, or are you God's child? It's an experiential level. It is the most important question you can be asked. And the first thing I want you to see is that the law has a purpose. The law is a guardian. And you need to understand the law's purpose, so you don't continue to slave under it. The law has a purpose. What is it? It says it in the text. It imprisoned us. The law imprisoned us. It convicts us. The law tells us what we ought to do. We ought not to do, right? And guess what? You want to do what you ought not to do. From childhood, no one had to teach you to lie. When you were over at your cousin's house and he had toys that you didn't, no one had to teach you to covet. No one had to teach you to sneak that Barbie doll into your pocket. No one had to teach you to do any of those things. You came into the world knowing how to sin and you had to be taught differently. That's what we do with children. We teach them the law because their hearts have not been regenerated again. That's what's going on with your children right now. Right? They are in Sunday school. They are being taught the law. Do this. Don't do that. The law imprisons us under guilt because we do wrong things. The law then shows us the sinfulness of our sin. If you look through the Old Testament, some of you reading through the Old Testament now, you did it chronologically so you were in Job, which is also hard. Boy, the Bible starts up tough. I thought you know it gets better. Hang in there, right? If you read through the Bible as it's written, you'd be like an ovidicus by now going, that's tough too, right? It's all about being dirty. The law imprisons us under guilt. The law imprisons us under dirt, under shame. It makes us to feel the dirtiness of sin, as Paul says in Romans 7, the sinfulness of sin. It makes us feel our need to be cleansed. We can't come to God as we are. We're ostracized. We're thrown out from the temple because of our sin and our filth, our uncleanness. The law points us to, well, it imprisons us, right? It imprisons us under our inability. The law shows us this is what you ought to do. This is who you ought to be. This is who you are. And you say, okay, I will be that person. And you can't. The things you want to do, you don't do. The things you don't want to do, you end up doing. You're imprisoned under this. I find it to be a law that whenever you seek to do good, evil is right there with you because it's in your own heart. The law imprisons us. The law is a guardian that's meant to bring us to Jesus. It's the phrase for guardian. It's not, we don't have really a good word for it. Some of the older, if you have, I know, a King James or even a NIV, it probably has to work tutor. Tutor's not a very good word either because in our, you know, in our world, if you're having trouble with calculus, you go hire a tutor for an hour a week and get her to take your test for you. But in, you know, in that day, basically, parents, wealthy parents, land-owning parents, would hire a slave or not hire a slave. The worst slavery is also problematic because as it was practiced in America, there's nothing to do with how it was practiced in Rome. In America, it was abusive and violent and based on kidnapping. And it's really harmful to, even in any way, a quate, our relationship with God to that. It wasn't like that in Rome where basically everybody who was in debt was a slave was like an indentured servant. And you hire an indentured servant in the way they would, it would work off their debt, you would be to train your child for you. And it was, you were the whole school. You were K through 16. You were everything and you kind of, you would teach the child how to do everything that he needed to know to be an adult in the Roman world and to be a landowner and be a responsible adult and you would bring them back to the parent. As an adult, you're kind of like Merlin does with King Arthur and the ones in future King, if you read that. And that's what the law does. He works on us. He shows us our sin. He shows us how we are to live. And he brings us to Christ. He brings us to Christ and shows us that Christ is the one who has sacrificed for us to pay the guilt for our sin. Christ is the one who has shamed for us so that we can be cleansed from our sin. Christ is the one who presents us to God so that we can go boldly before the throne of grace without shame, without guilt, without fear, so that we can be His children and we can call Him out of the Father without fear and without shame. And I want you to understand that. This is a little bit of a teaching thing but you need to understand the law hasn't been abolished. The law has been fulfilled. All of its purposes were fulfilled in Jesus. And so now we live as adults. We're not children anymore. The air is no different from a slave as long as he's a child. We're not children anymore. Does that mean we don't need the law? Basically. I mean honestly, if you're at CVS this afternoon and you see a younger thinner, more attractive version of your spouse and you are tempted to commit adultery, then it would be wise for you to pull the law out and go, hey, don't do that. If the offering play comes in front of you this morning and you're tempted to take money out of it, yes, you need the law. Don't do that. I don't think that's a temptation for all I love you. You probably by now so got the law into your heart that you don't even think about. It's not even really a temptation to steal or to kill. I hope. But if that's, you know, it's still there, sure. But you're an adult. You're an adult. You're meant to have adult questions with issues with the law. How do adults deal with law? We're trying to find ways to apply it, right? We look at people and we're saying, how do I love this person? What does love look like? That's a good question. That's a question for free people. The law has been fulfilled. We don't deal with God through law anymore. That's not the way we deal with him. We deal with him as father. He's right here with us. That's the purpose of the law. It was fulfilled. But the son who doesn't live as an adult, the son who insists on living and dealing with God as a child, continues to be childish, is no better off. The son is basically a slave. Many of us choose to be slaves. We choose to view ourselves that way. So if you go back to your history, then you know that after the Civil War, all the slaves in the country were emancipated, right? They were not given full and free rights, like white Americans. Every state against the developed these codes, like they were called Jim Crow laws, and they were designed to keep former slaves pushed down and to keep them under rules and to keep them afraid and keep them in place, in particular areas of town, to keep them from being equals, to keep them from being truly free. And a lot of us essentially apply our own Jim Crow laws to ourselves. We still deal with God in a relationship of fear. We still deal with God in this relationship of, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint him. And we're not full, free, joyful adult children of God. Instead we are afraid, scared, exhausted, basically still slaves of God. What do I mean? Well, we live under shame. We still don't really think that we're good enough for it. We still don't really think that he's forgiven us. We live under this labor, under this guilt of not believing that he's forgiven us. We're thinking that even though he has forgiven us, he's still really disappointed with us and he might send us off to Florida at any moment. We labor under this belief that he's just disappointed with us. And I want you to ask, is that you? Do you live in a constant fear of disappointing God, of being a disappointment to him? Do you think that you're some kind of train wreck that has fallen far, far short of what God wants for you? And do you beat yourself up for that? Or think, I mean even, I mean just really practically, like today when you come to church and you're kind of hunkering your shoulders and you're praying with this idea that maybe if I confess my sins hard enough, what would that even mean? If I confess my sins hard enough, then I'll know the joy of the Lord. Well, this is no secret. I turned 50. Thanks a number of years ago. And I went to one of my spiritual mentors and I was really, I'd been preaching that summer through Ecclesiastes. And in Ecclesiastes it says, actually it says this in 1 Kings. It says, in his over age Solomon's heart was turned away from the Lord. And that text really scared me and I carried it with me for a long time and I went to one of my spiritual mentors and he looked at me and he said well what are you afraid of? And I said well maybe I haven't really developed my spirituality enough trying to use all these kind of long words. I don't think I've developed my spiritual character enough and he's like what would that even mean? And I said well I don't really think I've prayed enough and he looked at me and he goes how much would be enough? You really think that God is going to let you fall away because you haven't prayed enough? How does that stand up by just I guess justification by faith? Do you believe it or not? You know are you like me for years and years like until this many years old? Believe that the way I got God to hear my prayers was by feeling bad. You know I got to feel bad enough to get him to come and be nice to me. That's all that's just slavery. And what that does is it sets us up in this relationship with our sin that we're so afraid of sin that we are so afraid of failure that we can't take responsibility for it. We blame it on everybody else. We set our life up so that if everybody would just do what we want them to do then everything would be perfect and I wouldn't fail. And I would meet this image that I have in my mind. And so when my dog or one of my children causes me to sin, it's not my fault, it's my dog's fault. If you were a Spaniard instead of a Terrier everything would be fine. My children were compliant instead of strong willed everything would be fine. I'm unable to take responsibility for my own sin. So I'm unable to enjoy forgiveness for my own sin. And I'm unable to give that forgiveness to each other. That's what it feels like to live as a slave even though you're an heir. But that's not what God's calling us to. He's calling us to live as his children, to live as heirs to glory. Look in verse 4 of chapter 4. He says, When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of the woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because your son's God has sent the spirit of his son into your heart, trying, how about father, you are no longer a slave but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. Now what Paul's doing is really interesting. He's drawing this picture of history that also mirrors the story of our life. So Jesus has come in history to redeem his children and to make them sons of God. So he comes into our life, he domes upon us. And at that point we make this transition from being slaves, from being children to being sons and living his heirs. And the question that this text asks for us, right, we're many, many, many years later, is not as Jesus come yet, obviously he has, but has that domed on you yet. You know what that meant? I'm sorry, that's an old Southern term, it's my mom's term. Has it, has it, have you awoke into that yet? Over Christmas we were talking about music. And Bianca brought the band in excess, an excess as a classic rock band if you're younger than me. And they're a new wave band if you're older than me. And they're just a band if you're my age. And they're a great band if you're my age. And Bianca said that was the first concert I went to see in college. And she said, that's when I realized I didn't have to ask my mom's permission to go to a concert. You know, you had that moment at some point in your life when you realized when you, when it domed on you that you didn't need permission. Remember that? Like whatever that first thing was, has it domed on you that you're an adult heir of God yet? Is that domed on you? That he's happy with you. That he's with you. That he wants to be near you. He wants you to acknowledge his presence that he, this is it, this is a phrasom and to use. Has it domed on you that he's on your side? He is not somebody you have to hide from. He's on your side. He wants to work. Yes, he sees all those flaws that you see. And he knows that you would like to stop hurting people. And he wants you to stop hurting people. And he wants to work with you, but he's on your side. You have the security and confidence to be able to cry out of father to call him your intimate dad to take in that intimate language with him. And note that he will respond. You have the security and the confidence of a child who just walks into the kitchen knowing that you're going to get fed or you still live in fear that you're every, every moment of your life is dependent upon all those pennies that you've been counting. And if you don't have enough pennies, then you're, you're living in fear that you're not going to have enough. Do you live in the confidence that your father is taking care of you? Do you have the confidence when you back out of the driveway and forget to look behind you? Slam into your son's friend's car that was shouldn't have been parked there. Do you immediately get angry? Oh, you get angry, of course. Nobody wants to slam into somebody else's car. But I mean, do you go and just kind of craven fear of, oh, no, or do you acknowledge? Well, that's a, that's a funny thing for God to do with his money. It's not how I would have spent it, but we're going to be okay. Do you believe that God is on your side? Do you believe that he wants you to enjoy your inheritance now? So we can see it. Or are you still afraid he's going to send you off to Florida? Please pray with me. Father, heaven is hard. We've been told our whole lives. We've had this, these kind of Jim Crow laws enforced over us and been told what we ought to be and how we ought to look and how we ought to dress and how we ought to talk and what we ought to eat and what we ought to drink and it's hard for us to enjoy freedom. And it's hard for us to enjoy you. Pray, Father, that you would make us just a little bit closer. Pray for some of us, it would dawn on us today that we are your children. Pray, Father, that when we start to condemn ourselves because of these, these rules that did not come from you and that you never intended for us. When those start to condemn us, Father, I pray that you just set off a little arm in our minds. And remind us that where your children were not your pets, and our pray that you would replace that fear, that disappointment, that fear of disapproval that we live with, I pray that you would replace that with joy and intimacy and fellowship with yourself. For in Jesus' name.