Freedom!

(Sermon given 7/12/2026 at Huntley Community Covenant Church)

Okay, so, at the beginning of the week I had almost no idea what I was going to talk about today, but then the internet came along and made the topic of today’s sermon abundantly obvious.

I came across this ad on social media where these fine folks were trying to sell a book that answered all your questions about the Bible. In it, a nice-looking, neatly-groomed Christian man was explaining how he and his wife were at a dinner party and an atheist tried to make his wife look stupid by asking her whether she ate shellfish or wore mixed fabrics and, because she did, he accused her of being like most Christians and just cherry-picking the parts of the Bible she believed in and followed while ignoring the parts she didn’t like.

Mr. Well-Groomed stepped in and rescued his wife by telling the atheist that he was conflating the Mosaic purity laws in Leviticus with the New Covenant, and Paul argues in Galatians that those Old Testament laws do not apply to gentiles. Mr. Well-Groomed then tells the atheist that he should know what he’s talking about before trying to make others look stupid.

So, Mr. Well-Groomed Christian actually wins an argument with an atheist and is a big hero with his wife! 

And of course, you too can be this smart and cool – all you have to do is buy their $39.99 Bible study book.

The deal is, the answer that put that bad old atheist in his place wasn’t actually the best answer.

The best answer, the answer that is so clearly much better than the one Mr. Well-Groomed used is only two words: Acts 15.

What really got me about this ad was there were over 300 comments in the comment section, many of which quoted Scripture, but absolutely none of them mentioned Acts 15. 

Now, if you ever made comments on Facebook, I need to give you a bit of advice about that and this comes directly from my friend, Pastor Kenny Ortiz, who is a missionary and a theologian and a Bible professor and much smarter than me, especially when it comes to stuff like this:

“Never post online that which, if said in person, would get you punched in the nose.”

You know that whole, “they will know you by your love” thing that Jesus said? That goes double for social media. Please, please, brothers and sisters, try not to come off as the north end of a southbound horse when you are online. There is way more than enough of that going on already. Thank you.

So, before we go on, let me back up to what the atheist was talking about: Leviticus does, indeed, contain pages and pages of rules God gave the Israelites to set them apart as His Chosen People from other nations, to bless them, and to protect them. There are 613 of them and they do include not eating shellfish (Leviticus 11:9-12) and not wearing clothing made of two kinds of material. (Leviticus 19:19) There’s also a one in Exodus 23:19 which forbids boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk, which is why to this day, you cannot walk into a McDonald’s in Jerusalem and order a cheeseburger. (I am NOT making this up.) 

As you can imagine, all these rules and regulations that the Jews had lived by for thousands of years were very difficult for gentiles to live by when thousands of them came to believe in Jesus Christ. But the one law in all the laws of Moses that caused the most problems was the one about circumcision. 

Let us go to Acts 15, verses 1-29:

"While Paul and Barnabas were at Antioch of Syria, some men from Judea arrived and began to teach the believers: “Unless you are circumcised as required by the law of Moses, you cannot be saved.” Paul and Barnabas disagreed with them, arguing vehemently. Finally, the church decided to send Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem, accompanied by some local believers, to talk to the apostles and elders about this question. The church sent the delegates to Jerusalem, and they stopped along the way in Phoenicia and Samaria to visit the believers. They told them—much to everyone’s joy—that the Gentiles, too, were being converted.

When they arrived in Jerusalem, Barnabas and Paul were welcomed by the whole church, including the apostles and elders. They reported everything God had done through them. 5But then some of the believers who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees stood up and insisted, “The Gentile converts must be circumcised and required to follow the law of Moses.”

So the apostles and elders met together to resolve this issue. At the meeting, after a long discussion, Peter stood and addressed them as follows: “Brothers, you all know that God chose me from among you some time ago to preach to the Gentiles so that they could hear the Good News and believe. God knows people’s hearts, and he confirmed that he accepts Gentiles by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, for he cleansed their hearts through faith. So why are you now challenging God by burdening the Gentile believers with a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors were able to bear? We believe that we are all saved the same way, by the undeserved grace of the Lord Jesus.”

Everyone listened quietly as Barnabas and Paul told about the miraculous signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles.

When they had finished, James stood and said, “Brothers, listen to me. Peter has told you about the time God first visited the Gentiles to take from them a people for himself. And this conversion of Gentiles is exactly what the prophets predicted. As it is written:

‘Afterward I will return

and restore the fallen house of David.

I will rebuild its ruins

and restore it,

so that the rest of humanity might seek the LORD,

including the Gentiles—

all those I have called to be mine.

The LORD has spoken—

he who made these things known so long ago.’”

“And so my judgment is that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead, we should write and tell them to abstain from eating food offered to idols, from sexual immorality, from eating the meat of strangled animals, and from consuming blood.

And that is exactly what they did. The letter read as follows in verses 23b-29:

“This letter is from the apostles and elders, your brothers in Jerusalem. It is written to the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia. Greetings!

“We understand that some men from here have troubled you and upset you with their teaching, but we did not send them! So we decided, having come to complete agreement, to send you official representatives, along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are sending Judas and Silas to confirm what we have decided concerning your question.

“For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay no greater burden on you than these few requirements: You must abstain from eating food offered to idols, from consuming blood or the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality. If you do this, you will do well. Farewell.”

Done. End of story. 

And with that, all of the requirements of the Mosaic Law no longer applied to gentiles like you and me.

Boom! 

You are now free to eat all the cheeseburgers and fried clams you want.

Now, if you wanted to follow all those 613 laws and rules, you would first have to convert to Judaism. Then, if you wanted to be saved, you would want to accept Jesus as your Messiah and Savior, the Perfect Sacrifice who took away all your sins forever AND who kept all 613 of those laws perfectly, thus wiping out the need for sacrificing goats and lambs and doves as required by the laws of Moses, while simultaneously fulfilling every prophecy about Him, thus perfectly fulfilling every single jot and tittle of the law!

Yes, we gentiles do observe and follow the Ten Commandments and we even make our kids memorize them, so what’s up with that?

They’re good rules! 

A lot of those 613 rules were really good rules! Not eating pork was a great idea because that’s how you don’t get a disease called trichinosis. Once we figured out how to cook pork, the disease wasn’t so much a problem. (Which is why my mom and grandma cooked the pork chops till they bounced.) Then we figured out if you don’t feed the pigs household garbage, they don’t get trichinosis and so now it’s not a big deal.

But we still don’t eat vultures and badgers and bats and other stuff like that, because it’s just a good idea not to… and ewww! 

And having no other gods, not worshipping idols, not taking the LORD’s name in vain, honoring the Sabbath day, honoring your father and mother, not murdering people, not committing adultery (that one was was in the letter the apostles sent out), not stealing, not bearing false witness, and not coveting are really, really good ideas. They are great rules. That’s why we post them in courthouses and churches and schools and stuff.

So, there is a ditch on both sides of the “saved by grace through faith” road.

And that, my friends, is what Paul is addressing in Galatians.

The Galatians were fierce celtic warriors from the area in and around Switzerland who settled in what is now Turkey and were absorbed into the Roman empire about 25 BC. Paul showed up around 47 or 48 AD and told them about Jesus. He wrote to them shortly after the Jerusalem Council that is described in Acts 15. He did so because… well, here's Galatians 1:6-7:

“I am shocked that you are turning away so soon from God, who called you to himself through the loving mercy of Christ. You are following a different way that pretends to be the Good News but is not the Good News at all. You are being fooled by those who deliberately twist the truth concerning Christ.”

Paul then goes on to tell how he was called to preach to the Gentiles with the blessing and encouragement of Peter and all the other apostles, but there were some false teachers who wanted to “take away the freedom we have in Christ Jesus. They wanted to enslave us and force us to follow their Jewish regulations.” (Galatians 2:4b NLT) 

Paul says that when he was at Antioch, Peter used to eat with the Gentiles, but when James and some of his friends showed up, he stopped doing so. Paul called him out on it and “opposed him to his face” accusing Peter of trying to make the Gentiles follow Jewish traditions. He said to Peter, (Verses 15-21.)

“You and I are Jews by birth, not ‘sinners’ like the Gentiles. Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law. And we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made right with God because of our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law.” 

He even goes on to say that if you try to rebuild the old system of trying to be right with God by following the law, you are a sinner.  He says in verse 21:

“I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die.”

Then, Chapter 3 opens with this:

Oh, foolish Galatians! Who has cast an evil spell on you? For the meaning of Jesus Christ’s death was made as clear to you as if you had seen a picture of his death on the cross. Let me ask you this one question: Did you receive the Holy Spirit by obeying the law of Moses? Of course not! You received the Spirit because you believed the message you heard about Christ. How foolish can you be? After starting your new lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort? (Verses 1-3, also NLT)

This is why I am so opposed to reading Scripture in monotone. I mean, I know the intent of doing so is that you don’t add meaning that is not there, but if you read THOSE verses in monotone, you are subtracting meaning that was obviously intended when it was written. I can literally see veins standing out on Paul’s neck and head, pounding his fists and stomping his feet. This man is truly, genuinely very, very upset.

Paul was very clear here.

Our salvation is by grace, through faith made possible by the Holy Spirit. We have been set free from a series of laws we could never keep!

HALLELUJAH!

Paul then goes on for two more chapters clearly and carefully detailing why we are no longer tied to the slavery of the law and, at the end of Chapter 5, draws us an incredibly specific picture of the difference of living by the law of the flesh versus living by the Spirit.

When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God. (Verses 19-21)

In contrast:

But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things! (Verses 22-23.)

And there you have it. We have been blessed with this incredible freedom in Christ solely because of His love, mercy, and grace poured out for us on the cross and proven by the empty tomb – not because we abstain from eating shellfish or by sacrificing goats and lambs. We are adopted into the family of God as His dearly-loved children with a guarantee of eternal life sealed and assured to us by His own Holy Spirit living in us. 

HALLELUJAH AGAIN!

And, come to think of it, spending $39.99 on a Bible study book advertised on Facebook so I can “win” arguments, put atheists in their place, and be a some kind of theological hero in front of my loved ones seems like more of a personal ego thing than sharing Jesus and His amazing love so that others, even mean ol’ atheists at dinner parties, can come to know Him and also live in this amazing, glorious, wonderful freedom with Him forever!