Jesus The North Star

Every day we make decisions that will affect our future. As you make decisions, do you make them through the lens of Christ? Bill will speak this Sabbath as we continue our series in the book of Galatians and the importance of recognizing Jesus as our North Star.  

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How many of you have heard of the North Star? Anybody? Okay, what's the North Star?
It's a star in the north, right?

Have you seen these long pictures? They do long exposures at night, and you can see
the stars tracking through the sky, and they leave tracks. Well, if you did
that all night long, you would get a picture that looks kind of like that. And
right there in the middle, which is pretty hard to see, but right there in the
middle, there's a dot. That's the North Star. It's Polaris. It's the North
Star. It points to geometric north or true north, as opposed to magnetic north.

And remember, the Earth doesn't sit straight in space, right? We're tilted. Anybody
remember how much? 23 and a half degrees, right? So we're at 23 and a half
degrees, give or take, because it wobbles. Okay, 23 and a half degrees. So if
you think about that in space, the North Star is not right above us. It's off
to the side a little bit. Okay?

And for hundreds, thousands of years, we've used the North Star to navigate at
night. Sailors used it. People on land use it. That's how you know where you're
going. Unless you're in the Southern Hemisphere. If you're in the Southern
Hemisphere, you can't see the North Star. It's on the other side of the planet.
So they use other stars. There's no South Star, but they use other stars. So, but
for us in the Northern Hemisphere, we use the North Star.

Now, not only does the Earth sit at an angle, and not only does it wobble a little
bit, but it's on about a 26,000 year big wobble. Okay, so that 26,000 years, we
think we haven't been around long enough to measure, to make sure, but it looks
like it's about 26,000 years. And that means in the past, Polaris wasn't always
the North Star because it pointed somewhere else. And in the future, Polaris
will not be the North Star. If time goes on long enough, something else will
be, most likely Vega. But for our lifetimes and probably our grandchildren's
and our grandchildren's lifetimes, it'll be Polaris, the North Star.

Now, how do you find the North Star other than to stand there all night and wait to
see the circle and see where it is? Well, if you can find the Big Dipper and
you follow the handle and then you see the two that make the first part of the
cup and then the two stars that make the outside of the cup. You draw a line
through those, it points right to the handle of the Little Dipper and Polaris.

The North Star is the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper. Pretty easy to
find. Most of us can find the Big Dipper. It's even bright enough to see in the
city most of the time. And then you can find the North Star, and it turns out
to be super easy to find and super useful to use.

Now, we're in week two of our series on Standing on Grace, and we're talking about
Jesus, the North Star. Now, the Bible never refers to Jesus as the North Star,
at least not that I know of. I haven't found it, but a lot of other Christian
writers have done this, and we know Jesus is our example, right? We follow
Jesus. You've been around church, you've heard this. Jesus is our example. We
follow Jesus. We look to Jesus. Even the Bible is our example. It gives us
direction. It's our North Star. The star that leads the wise men to the Christ
child is another example. Okay, so we have this example of looking to an
example, right? Proverbs 3: 5-6. Encourages us to trust in God, right?

Just trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. You
know the rest. In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will what? He
will make your path straight.

It won't make your paths easy. Doesn't say that. That's what I wish it said. But
it says, I'll make it known. You will know where to go.

Okay. All right, so we're in the second week. We're in Galatians 2. Everybody open
your Bible to Galatians 2. And we're going to be looking at some verses here. And
I encourage you to read the whole chapter during the week at least once, maybe
twice. Three times. Paul has a way of writing where you need to kind of look
forward and look back and consider what's in the front and what's behind. And
so reading through it a couple times during the week will be beneficial. At
least it is for me. And I assume if it is for me, it is for you, too. But,
because we're not going through the whole thing in detail in the small groups,
but it's good to read the whole thing.

So at the top of Galatians 2, about the first ten verses, Paul is describing how
he gets accepted by the disciples. Remember, Paul's not one of the 12, right?
He's not one of the disciples, but he had an encounter with Jesus. Pastor
talked about it last week. And he's been out preaching. But he wants to meet
with the disciples and, and have them say, yes, what you're teaching is good,
it's valid. It's. You're one of the gang.

Okay? It's good. And sometimes when I read these chapters, I think this stuff happens
in close one right after the other because it's chapter one does this, chapter
two does this. It must have been like, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
But there's often big time breaks in here. And if you look, I think it's verse
one that says, then after how many years? 14 years, the disciples have been
preaching. Paul's been preaching for 14 years. You'd think that somebody would
have said, you're good in 14 years. Right?

Now, remember, it was a lot different then, right. We didn't get immediate feedback
from across Asia. Right. It took a while for the news to get back. By the time
the news got back, Paul, you know, Paul's in Galatia. By the time the news got
back to the disciples, Paul was in Galatia. He wasn't in Galatia anymore.
Right? And so everything's running on this big  time delay for word and news to travel. But he
has a meeting with the disciples and they all kind of agree. Yeah, what you're
teaching is valid. It's true. It's right. And Paul's kind of given the marching
orders, if you will, to go reach the Gentiles. That's what you're doing, Paul. Keep
doing that. Glory hallelujah. It's working. Okay. And so he goes off and
continues to do that.

Now, verse 11, if you have little headers in your Bible, what does it say right
there? Paul opposes Cephas. Who's Cephas? Peter? Cephas, as you probably
remember, is an Aramaic word. It means rock. It's what Jesus gives the name to
Peter. So here's a Hebrew person with an Aramaic name given to him by Jesus. I
was looking up the proper way to say this, and I think I counted 12 people that
claimed the proper way to say it. And we're all a little bit different. But I
noticed one thing. It's really different in Hebrew than it is in Aramaic. In
Hebrew, you would say Cephas. It's got a short C. And that S is kind of an S Z
sound. See-fasz . Okay?

If you said it in Aramaic, the C has a hard sound. It's a K. And the as makes an
as sound that we would normally have. It's Kay-fas. So you might hear people
say See-fasz. You might hear people say Kay-fass. That's the same word. Just
one's kind of how they say it in Hebrew and one's how they say it in Aramaic.
I'm going to use the term Peter because I know how to say that one, okay?

So, Paul calls out Peter here, and he has this beef with Peter. And the beef is,
hey, when you're with the Gentiles, you act like a Gentile. And when you're
with that really ultra conservative sect of Jews, and these Jews have been
saying for a while, hey, we know how to be Jews. We know how to follow God.
We've been doing it for thousands of years. You gotta keep all those festival
days and all those Sabbaths and you gotta get circumcised. There's 6,000 rules
for keeping the Sabbath. We know how to do it. And if you don't do it this way,
you're doing it wrong. And so when Peter is with the Gentiles, he doesn't do
those things. But when he's with this group of Jews, he does do these things.
And Paul calls him out on it.

And at first it seems like kind of bold of Paul, right? I mean, you're not one of
the 12. What are you doing? I mean, Jesus told Peter he's the rock, right?  You had a pretty impressive calling from the
Lord.

And there's a way of reading Paul's writing sometimes where you can take it like
he's a little bit proud of himself, a little bit full of himself. He's a little
bit, hey, look at me. See what I have. See what I'm doing? Look up to verse
six.

That's up above. He says, as for those who were held in high esteem, whatever they
were, makes no difference to me. God doesn't show favoritism. They added
nothing to my message. There's a way of reading that of like, well, who
does Paul think he is, right? The people of esteem can't add anything to his
message. He's got it all right. He's perfect. There's a way of reading that. I
don't think that's how Paul means it, okay? I don't think that's what he means,
right, not what he's trying to do.

Look
at verse 14. This is where he kind of calls him out. He says, when I saw they
were not acting in line with the truth of the Gospel, I said to Cephas in front
of them, you are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not a Jew. How Is it
then that you force the Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? He's not trying to
dominate Peter. He's not trying to make Peter look bad. He's not trying to make
himself look better than Peter. Okay, We'll get more on that here in a minute.
We'll get more on that in a minute.

All right, then we come to verses 15 to 18. Now, verses 15 to 18, in my opinion,
this is me speaking, are amongst the most important verses in the Bible. I
don't think they're THE most important, but they're in that top group.

If you're going to make a top 10 list, these better be in it. Okay? And I think a
lot of Christians get this wrong. We struggle with this because it's hard.

We're not going to spend a lot of time talking about it today.

That's for the small groups to discuss. So I hope you're all in a small group because
I think that's where we're going to discuss this a lot. But there's a lot of
things going on here. So let's look at verses 15 to 18. If you really
understand this. Well, I think you're doing better than many Christians.

Verse 15 says, we who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles know that a person
is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we
too have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in
Christ and not by works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will
be justified.

But if in seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews find ourselves also among the
sinners, doesn't that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not. If I
rebuild what I destroyed, then I really would be a lawbreaker.

There's some stuff we need to dive into there. And like I said, we're just going to
skim the top and kind of leave that to the small groups. But real quick, what
justifies us in verse 16? Faith. I skipped this one. Sorry. If you're
following on your notes, Paul's big on authenticity and authority, right?
Paul's big on authenticity and authority.

But verse 16 says a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by
faith in Jesus Christ. I mean, that's what the Bible says, plain and
simple. Now, we get that and we say that and we compare it back, but we often
have problems with it. Right. And I've used this example before.

You
use it when we're looking at some big topic or something. Some of us head way
over to the extreme on this side, and some of us head way over to the extreme
on this side. And generally those are bad places to be. Somewhere here in the
middle is a better view of it. Okay? And in this case, when we're talking about
how we're justified by grace or by the law, right? We go over here, we start
abusing the grace. I have God's grace. I can do anything I want. You know, if I
cheat on my wife, oh, well, I got grace maybe from God, probably not from your
wife. Right. If I do these things, I don't like that part of the law. So I'm
not going to keep that. That part's too hard. And God gives me grace. Not a
good place to be.

The other place is over here where I've got to somehow show that I'm worth it and I
can earn it. And I try to do more and more and more and more. And that's what
was happening with these particular Jewish group. We've got to keep those
festival days and those Sabbaths, and we got all those rules about the Sabbath
to keep. We've got all this stuff we've got to do.  Not a good place to be either. We actually
have a song about this, Right. Remember the song Holy Water that we sing? I
don't want to abuse your grace, God, I need it every day. It's the only thing
that ever really makes me want to change. We should have sang that song today.
Thought of it too late. All right, so we don't want to be way over there. We
don't want to be way over here. We want to be somewhere in the middle.

Thelast thing I want to say about this real quick is there's. There's room in themiddle for some variation. Some of us may lean a little this way, some of usmay lean a little that way. That's okay. We don't all have to be in lockstep.Okay. That's okay. That's one of the things I love about the Adventist Church.We have fundamental beliefs, not dogma. And those fundamental beliefs give us alittle room for some variation. Some of us may be a little more this, a littlemore that. It's okay. So have some grace for the person sitting at the end ofthe pew that's doing it different than you. Quit elbowing your spouse.I saw that.

Okay, let's look at verses 19 to 21. It says, for through the law I died to the
law so that I might live for God. What for through the law. I died to the law
so that I might live for God. I don't even know what that means. I have
been crucified with Christ and I no longer live.

But Christ lives in me the life that I now live in the body. I live in faith in the
Son of God who loved me and who gave himself for me. I do not set aside the
grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died
for nothing.

What right. It's like a tongue twister. And some of this points back to 15 to 18,
but I kind of want to focus on verse 20. I have been crucified with Christ
and I no longer live. But Christ lives in me. The life that I live in the body,
I live by faith in the Son of God who. Who loved me and gave Himself for me.

Now, what does it mean when Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ because he
was not physically crucified with Christ? Right. So it's a metaphor for
something. The question is what?

Anybody here looking at the King James version? Anybody got King James open? What's
King James say there instead of I have been crucified, what's it say? New King
James doesn't have it. It's got to be the old King James. Verse 20 in King
James, I am crucified.

So that's present tense. I am crucified. NIV, and every other version. I looked
through all 4857 versions. That's a real number. No, it's not. But I looked at
a lot of versions. They all are past tense. And I looked it up and in the
original language, it's past tense.

It's actually past perfect tense for all you. I don't want English teachers getupset at me. I do remember, right? Past tense is ‘I ate’. That's past tense.‘I ate pizza’ is past perfect tense because it tells you what you ate. So I wascrucified with Christ is past perfect tense. Yes, English teachers, I waspaying attention, okay? But King James is the only version that has that inpresent tense.

And I tried to figure out why. And I've come to the conclusion that we don't know
why, because there's a lot of opinions out there. The kind of majority kind of
says, though, that they're trying to impress upon the reader that you have to
make this decision every day to follow Jesus, to be a part of it. It's not
something that you do once in the past, it's something you do every day.

And I agree and disagree. Okay.

How many of you here are baptized? Let me see your hands. Who's baptized?

Good number of us. Some of you I know are baptized because I was at your baptism.
Didn't raise your hands. So when you were baptized, probably before you were
baptized, you made a decision to repent, turn away from a certain way of life
to go a different way. You repented and you were baptized. Now, every day, do
you repent and turn away from your sinful life?

Kinda. But not really. Because if you did that, you'd stay in the same place every
day. Every day would be, I repent and I start over. I repent and I start over,
and I repent and I And you never grow. Really, what you do is you reaffirm the
decision every day, right? So I repented, and every day I say, lord, I'm still
good on that, right? It's like you don't get married to your spouse every day,
but every day you should tell them, I reaffirm my love for you. I still love
you. Right? Because you're growing. You're growing. You're moving on.

Okay, so maybe we're splitting hairs a little bit, but even the new King James
switched back to past tense. Past perfect tense. All right, so we've been
talking about King James. Let's see how the King James reads. See if that helps
us any.

Starting again with verse 19. It says, for through the law I am dead to the law that
I might live unto God. I still don't know what that means.I am crucified with
Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life
which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved
me, and gave himself for me. That's one sentence. That one sentence has a
colon, multiple commas, a semicolon, and another colon and a period. That may
be the most complicated sentence I've ever read my whole life, and I don't know
what it means, Right? It's tough. Verse 21, I do not frustrate the grace of
God. I kind of like that. For if righteousness comes by the law, then Christ
died in vain.

Now, that's pretty close to what the NIV says. Not all that different. Just the
present tense versus the past tense. And I read a bunch of other versions, and
they didn't help a whole lot either. So I switched over to The Message.

Now, The Message is a paraphrase. It's one guy's idea of what he thinks they're
trying to say here. But we're a little bit stuck, or at least I was a little
bit stuck. And so I wanted some another opinion. So we go to the Message to get
this guy's opinion.

Listen to what he said. He says actually what took place was this. I tried keeping
the rules and working my head off to please God and it didn't work. So I quit
being a lawman so that I could be God's man. Christ's life showed me how and
enabled me to do it.

I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with
Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear
righteous before you or have your good opinion. And I am no longer driven to
impress God.

God lives in me. The life you see living is not mine, but was lived by faith in the
son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. And I'm not going to go back
on that. Is it not clear to you that to go back on that old rule keeping peer
pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free? In
my relationship with God, I refuse to do that to repudiate God's grace.

Repudiate means to reject, to turn away from. If a living relationship with God could
come by rule keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.

All right, I feel like we're making some progress. I was, but I'm starting
beginning to understand this. Well, he used a lot more words so that helped
some.

Okay, but what do we see here? See what Paul's saying is that there's a penalty for
not keeping the law. Perfectly right. That penalty is death. We know that the
wages of sin is death. And there's no amount of keeping the law that gets you
into heaven. The law cannot justify you. The only thing the law can do is show
you where you've messed up. That's all it does, right?

I read a story about a young man who made a mistake, committed a crime and he did it. He
robbed a convenience store. And over the years as his case went through court,
he kind of had a change of heart and tried to make up for it. He was a good
citizen and he was behaving well. About ready to switch mics here. He
was behaving well and trying to help the community and he donated to charities
and he did all these things to try and prove that he was a good citizen.

Eventually he gets to court and the judge declared him guilty even though he had been such
a good person all the years. Because why? He did the crime. He held up the
store.

See you can't earn goodness. You can't. It's unobtainium. You can't do it. And what
Paul is saying here is that the penalty for not keeping the law perfectly is
death. And Paul as a Pharisee knew that he hadn't kept the law perfectly.

And he knew what was coming to him, what was owed. If you want to be in God's
presence, you have to be perfect or you can't withstand God's presence. And all
the law does is show you you messed up and you can't go.

Well, that seems kind of hopeless, doesn't it? That's it, I'm done. So that seems
kind of hopeless.

And so we can't be justified and please God. And so Paul says, I died to that, See,
because when you're dead, you're dead to everything, including the law,
right? When somebody dies, they don't just partially die, you die, right? And
so when you die, you die to everything, including the law. And Paul says, I
died with Christ. I died to the law through the law. I died to the law. The law
says the wages of sin are death. So I died, right? And Paul's not going to
nullify. He's not going to ignore or make worthless God's grace, okay? He was
condemned by the law.

If you could be made righteous by the law, why did Jesus have to die? Jesus
doesn't have to die if I could be made righteous by the law. So Jesus comes to
die because you can't get righteousness that way. The law cannot save us. So we
die to the law and we put all our faith in Christ's righteousness and his death
on the cross, right?

So how many of you play the piano or guitar? Let me see your hands. I'm not
recruiting for the band. It's okay. Nobody, couple, couple out there. Play a
little bit, okay?

I, you know, I hacked around on the guitar a little bit. I can't do anything on
the piano, right? It's. Oh look, pretty white and black keys. I wonder what
they do, right? I can make noise, but I can't make music. But what if I had a
world class musician there with me and he told me exactly where to put my
fingers. Could I make music then? Probably not, right? I could make some nice
sounding chords. Oh, that sounded nice. Well, now move all your fingers this
way. Well, that sounded nice, but there was five minutes between the last sound
and this sound. So we're not getting a lot of music, right? What if that world
class piano pianist could be inside me and could just Control my fingers, then
I'd have some chance of making some music, right?

See, and Jesus is our North Star. And when he's our North Star, there's always
something between us. There's always a distance between. Always looking for
that example. And there's goodness in that. But if the North Star is inside us,
I've removed one level of indirection and now it's just coming out. I don't
have to look to somebody else, say, what should I do? Okay, go do this. It's
inside of me. And see, when I can let Christ in, I can do these things. It's so
much better that way. Christ does the work for us. We don't do it. It's not
forced.

I don't have to get up every morning and say, lord, help me remember not to kill
anybody today. Help me remember not to cheat on my wife. Help me remember not
to lie. Help me remember not to cuss. Help me remember to keep the Sabbath. I
don't have to do that because when Christ is inside, that happens
automatically. I keep the law, not because it earns me something, but because
there's no other way to behave. There's no other way to behave. There's no
other way to do it.

The law condemns me and I couldn't be good enough under the law. But when Christ
lives in me, I don't have to worry about that. See, the law is there for our
benefit. It helps us be a better person. I'm a better person when I don't
murder people. I'm a better person when I don't cheat on my wife. I'm a better
person when I keep the Sabbath. You can go through the whole thing. It makes us
better. It's not there to constrain us. It's there to help us be better. And
when Christ is inside me, that happens automatically. That grace,

A reflection. Have you died to the law and yourself like Paul did, and invited Christ to live
in you?

Now, some of you may be here for the first time today, like, no, I haven't done that
yet. Okay, no worries. Some of you may have been here 10,000 times and said, I
haven't done that yet. Yet. I'm starting to get a little worried. Some of you
maybe have done that, but kind of wandered away and maybe you need to come
back. Some of us maybe are good. It's okay. We should reaffirm that decision.

I'm going to pray here just for a second and give. I'm not going to ask you to
stand up or come down or anything. It's not between you and me. It's between
you and God. Pray for just a second.

Heavenly Father, help us to die to ourselves. Help us to die for all the things that we
think we have to do to be good enough. Help us to die to all the things that
just seem to get in the way. And help us to keep our eye on the North Star so
much that eventually that North Star is inside of us. And there's almost no
other way to behave. Yeah, we'll still make mistakes, we still mess up. But
Lord, we're grateful for your grace and we don't want to abuse it, But we're so
thankful for it. Help us to accept that and then let it drive everything else
out. Everything. We're not going to hold on to anything. My ego doesn't matter
anymore. All that matters is what you have planned for us and what you want for
us. Be with us now. In Jesus name. Amen.

The challenge this week. So I want you to write down three to five of
your goals, dreams, desires, whatever you call it. Put a check next to those
things if they keep you pointed to the North Star. Put an X next to those
things if it doesn't, or it has the potential to impede you from following the
North Star. All right. That's a tough one. I did it. I didn't like the
results. It's a tough one.

All right, thank you.