Under Guardianship Until...

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. My name is Austin Ingerman. I am here at Thrive this summer as a worship leading, so you probably saw me earlier in the service leading worship. I'm originally from North Florida. I'm down here. I spent some time in Austin, Texas at a school called Concordia University studying religious education, and I am not Pastor John. I am filling in for him this morning. He is taking a much-needed vacation, and so I'll be preaching for him this morning. And before we get back into Galatians, well, I guess as we get back into Galatians, I want to open with a quick story about a guy from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, named James Kennedy. Has anyone heard of this dude before? I wouldn't be... Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. So some people have, some people haven't. This was back in the 1900s, which was a while ago. In the 1970s and 80s, I was not alive, and so I'm speaking about things much older than myself. But in the 70s and 80s, this guy named James Kennedy from Fort Lauderdale, he's most well-known for developing this... He's an evangelical Christian, developing this program called Evangelism Explosion, and it was very conversational, a lot of discussion. It was all based kind of around these two questions that you would ask someone in order to begin a conversation about faith. And so the first of these two questions was, if you were to die tonight, do you think you would get into heaven? And then the second question was, if you're standing at the gates of heaven and God were to say, why should I let you in, what would you respond to him with? Now I'm not gonna go into whether or not I condone asking random strangers if they think they're going to die in the next 24 hours, but the point being is that a lot of people really use this program and ask a lot of people these questions. And so what do you think... I'm not asking what your answer is, hopefully we're all on the same page, but what do you think some common responses were to people who said, oh yeah, I'm getting into heaven? And then when they were asked, well, why do you think that? What do you think... Just shout out some... I'm a good person. I'm a good person. Absolutely. What else? What do you think? I've done more good than bad. I've done more... Oh yeah, the scale, right? So all the good on this side outweighs the bad, so we're... I go to church every Sunday. Absolutely. That was one of the top ones. I go to church every Sunday. Come on, I'm getting into heaven. I have actually some of the biggest responses on the slide. Oh, there they are. Yeah. I'm a good person. You can go through all of them. I did a lot of good things in my life, right? I helped people. I went to church a lot. And my personal favorite, I'm not as bad as that guy, come on. Or even that guy, he got into heaven? What the heck? I should come on. I'm definitely in, right? So these are all really good examples, well, they're bad examples of why I think we should get into heaven, but they're good examples of this concept of works-based righteousness or works righteousness, right? So the idea that if we work hard enough, if we do enough good things and we follow the rules, then God will love you and God will bless you and God will let you into heaven. This mentality has been around for a very long time. It's not one that started in the 70s and 80s when James Kennedy was doing Evangelism Explosion. It's one that started thousands and thousands of years ago. I mean, this is something that people believed during the lifetime of Christ. This is something people believed before Jesus even. And so today I want to talk about why it's a really dangerous mentality, and particularly in Galatians, why Paul, who's writing this letter to the Galatians, is saying, yeah, that's a really bad mentality. It's very dangerous and it's very contrary to the gospel because people were holding the law, the old commands, as a means of salvation and they had this idea of works-based righteousness, that I'm a good person, that I can do enough good, that I don't break the rules and I go to church every Sunday, therefore, surely God loves me and surely God will bless me and surely I have salvation. And so this morning we're going to be talking about why only is that not true, but how we can kind of think that way without even realizing it sometimes. So I want to begin by reading a passage from Galatians 3, verses, it'll be up here, Galatians 3, verses 15 through 18. The Galatians reading this morning is kind of long and so I've broken it into little chunks, so this is the first one, if you want to put that up there while I, Galatians 3, we'll start with verse 15. Brothers and sisters, let me take an example from everyday life. Just as no one can set aside or add to a human covenant that has been duly established, so it is in this case. The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his...