Freedom in Relationships

John Abruzzo is alive today for one reason and one reason only: because his friends carried him literally. John was working at 8:45 a.m. in his office on the 69th floor of the World Trade Center South Tower on September 11th, 2001. That's when the first hijacked plane hit the North Tower. Immediately, his office went into confusion and panic, and people began running toward the exits, realizing that some sort of unimaginable catastrophe was about to happen.

Everybody ran for the exit, that is, except for John Abruzzo, because John has been a quadriplegic since he was paralyzed in a diving accident when he was 17 years old. The elevators no longer worked, and so John's motorized wheelchair was not going to get him to safety. He sat there in his chair thinking, "Well, this is it. I can't get down 69 flights of steps in my wheelchair. This is all she wrote." As they ran for the exit, one group of eight people in his office stopped and looked back at John and realized his situation.

Seven men and one woman realized that the choice they had in front of them was either saving their own lives, probably for sure if they left immediately, or trying to save John's life at great risk to their own lives. They stopped and looked at each other and knew they had to go back to John. They went to John, who is 6'4" and weighs 250 pounds, and they decided, "Well, what are we going to do?" One of them went searching for an evacuation sled, and they found one. They strapped John to it. Now, the sled itself weighs 150 pounds, so these eight people carried a 400-pound weight. If it was evenly distributed, that's 50 pounds a person, and they started going down the 69 flights of steps.

After just a few minutes, the whole building shuttered; that's when the second plane hit the tower that they were in. After an hour, they were on the 20th floor, and that's when the North Tower next to them collapsed. All of the power in their building went out, and so now they were in pitch darkness going down the final 20 floors, bearing this weight and getting more and more tired. Meanwhile, hundreds, probably thousands, of people streamed past them, not one offering to help, incidentally.

By the time they got down to the lobby, there was nobody left running down the stairs. They were probably the last people to leave the building safely. The lobby just looked like a war zone; there was overturned furniture, and it was filled with thick, acrid smoke. As they trudged with John in tow out the front doors, a firefighter was surprised to see them still coming out of the building, and he yelled at them, "Run for your lives!" With a last ounce of strength, they picked up the sled and sprinted as fast as they could with John about two and a half blocks down the street to a church where a lot of people found safety. Ten minutes at the most after they left the building, the entire South Tower collapsed.

John Abruzzo is alive today because his friends carried him. I read an interview with John this week, and he says looking back on it, he has no words to express the debt that he owes to his friends. He said, "We all had our lives to lose. What they did, I don't know. Do you just say thank you after something like that? I literally don't think there are words to express what I owe to them."

That true story is a great example of our main verse in the text of the Bible we're going to look at today. It's from Galatians 6:2. I'm going to put it on the screen, and I want you to read this out loud with me. Let me hear you read this together. Here we go: "Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." Let's talk about what that means. Grab your message notes that look like this. "Free" is what we've been calling our series in the book of Galatians.

Just to review, if you're just joining us in this series, in chapter 5, Paul has been telling the Galatians over and over again that the Christian faith is not about legalism. It's not about some dry system of rules. Instead, this is what it's all about. He says, "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free, but do not indulge, do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

What Paul is trying to do is to get the Galatians to move from asking the question, "What does law require?" That is the question that people caught in a legalistic system of religion think is the main question that you should always ask about your religion: "What does law require?" What's actually kind of in the rule book? I hear this a lot of times as a pastor when people come up to me and say, "Pastor, I want to ask you a question. If I did this with that, would I be sinning? Or if I did this with this, would this technically be a sin? Is this a sin? Would God look down and think this was a sin?" What they're saying is, "I really want to sin, but I think I found a loophole." You know, "Can I do this thing?" That's legalistic thinking, right? What does the law require? I want to do what the law technically says, but I don't really want to do anything else. I want to try to have as much fun as I can and look for loopholes to get around the commandments that are in the Bible.

That's what you get to when your religion is based on a legalistic mindset, what we've been calling in this series the temple model mindset. That's the question you're always going to end up thinking is the crucial question in your faith: "What does law require?" In Jesus' day, in the first century, this was the main question that the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the temple lawyers were always asking. What Paul is saying is you have to move beyond that to asking this question: "What does love require?" What does love require? That's what it's all about.

Because when you think about it, there are a lot fewer loopholes in this question. Because then you're not asking the question, "Well, could I technically steal? Could I lie? Could I indulge myself this way?" No, because if you steal, you are hurting somebody, and that's not loving. If you lie, you're hurting somebody, and that's not loving. The reason you shouldn't commit adultery is not just because it's one of the commandments, but because you're breaking somebody's heart, and that's not loving. There are no loopholes in love.

Now, I know at first to some of you, you're going, "Wait a minute. If I move from what does law require to what does love require, this all kinds sounds very kind of 1967 summer of love kind of weirdness." You know, sort of, "I'm just tripping out on love all the time, man." Well, frankly, like Santa Cruz is every day of the week. The rest of the nation left that behind in '67, but we're still right there, right? But actually, if you look at the history of the early Christian Church, they caught what I think might have been the original vision of kind of the summer of love much better than the hippies and the Haight-Ashbury did back in 1967.

In fact, look at Acts 2. It describes the Christians, right? It says, "From time to time, they sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people." You know, I look at that, and I think, who would not want to be a part of that for one thing? And secondly, it can happen again. Do you believe that? That can happen again, and it can happen right here. And when it does happen, look at what happens: they enjoyed the favor of all the people. Because people, even people who don't believe what we believe, even people who think that maybe they're kind of weirdos over there going to church and talking about a risen Savior, they look at a body, a community doing this, and they think, "But boy, those people love." They not only love each other; they love the whole community.

This was the reputation of the church in the first century. And you know what? I'll be honest with you. We've been talking about the world's biggest garage sale. This verse was the original inspiration five years ago for that whole thing that we call the world's biggest garage sale. My wife and I and a couple of friends of ours were looking at this verse, and we thought to ourselves, "It says from time to time they sold possessions and they gave whatever came in to the poor. We can do that. That sounds like a garage sale to us. Let's just do that." It started small, and it's just gotten so big.

I don't know if you caught what Val said: a hundred percent of the proceeds go to Second Harvest because they're so efficient at feeding the poor. We use Second Harvest food here through our own people's pantry ministries. But last year, $50,000 was raised through Second Harvest through the world's biggest garage sale. That's in quarters, you know? It's amazing. But why do we do this? Because there's not a command; the law doesn't require this. There's no commandment that says, "Thou shalt sell some of your possessions from time to time and give your money to the poor." You could keep all the Ten Commandments and never do that. But love requires that you do that. When you see people who are needy and you love them with the love of Jesus Christ, you go, "I want to do that," because you start feeling the love of God for them.

So Paul's been talking to the Galatians, saying, "You know, this is the direction that you want to move as Christians. Instead of being focused just on legalism, I want you to focus on love." In this part of Galatians, he really starts getting very practical about what it looks like to live a grace-focused, kind of love-focused faith. Specifically, the first kind of application he makes is grace can give you freedom in your relationships. Relationships are so important to God. God is all about relationships. The Bible says that God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that he can have a relationship with you and me. I mean, he paid for that by dying on the cross for you. That's a huge, huge price to pay just for a relationship.

And God is love. We sang earlier, "Our God is three in one." Why do Christians talk about the Trinity? Because it means that before there were even any created beings, God, as the Trinity, was existing in a love relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God has been loving, loving as a Trinity. He exists for relationship; he exists in relationship. The Bible says that God is love. In fact, the only thing in the whole creation that God looked at and said, "This is not so good," was when man was alone. So God created relationships to bless us.

The problem is that selfishness and sin entered the world and fractured what God wanted to be a good thing. Today, relationships can be very draining. In fact, relationships can be dry. In fact, relationships can even kill you. They can rob your joy. So God wants you to rediscover what he originally intended for relationships. In this passage, the Apostle Paul shows what the trouble is at the root of so many relationship problems. There are three things I want to look at here: what's the problem with our relationships today, what's the solution, and what does this look like in real daily life?

Especially on this first point on the first page, I'm very indebted to a great book called "Galatians for You" by Timothy Keller, where he talks about this and includes the chart that I have there at the bottom of this first page. So first, what is the problem? What's the problem with our relationships? Well, I think the key is in this verse, Galatians 5:26, and let's read this together. I'm going to put it on screen for you. Here we go: "Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other." There is so much in this verse, but let's just focus on three words. The reason really for why all relationships fall apart is the word that's translated here, "conceited." Now, this is one of those Greek words that is really hard to find an English language equivalent for.

If you go back to the old English translations, like the old King James Version, it translates this as "vain glory." That's actually a really good word, "vain glory." It translates the meaning of this really well, but today that doesn't get any traction, right? It doesn't get anywhere with people. "Vain glory"? What does that mean? So let's explore this. The Greek word used here is the word "kenoo doxa." "Kenoo" means empty, and "doxa" means glory, like in the word doxology. This word literally means "empty of glory." A glory vacuum deep inside of us, we have a problem. The problem is this: we feel empty of glory because, in and of ourselves, we are empty of glory. Deep inside of ourselves, we know that we don't matter.

See, the word "glory" in the Bible basically means weight. If something has weight, it has matter, right? It weighs something; it has mass. So when we say, "Ah, that doesn't matter," we are literally saying something is no weight; it's featherweight. It has no glory; that doesn't matter. This is the problem that's in all of us: we're empty of glory. We feel like we don't matter; we don't count; we have no weight; we have no glory. I know it seems like the opposite of what it's translated as "conceited" in English, but what it means in the original language is "empty of glory." When you feel you are empty of glory, that your life is weightless, that it has no mass, that it doesn't matter, what happens is you desperately want to find a way to prove you matter, that you are somebody.

Now, let me read you a quote to illustrate this. But before I tell you who I'm quoting, I want to qualify this because this person's public persona carries some baggage, and I'm kind of worried that when you hear this quote, some people are going to go, "Oh, René's putting that person down, and I like that person. How can he put that person down?" Or you're going to go, "Oh yeah, she is weird. René's using her as an example of a wicked woman because she is." But actually, one of the reasons that I want to read this quote is that this woman is really in touch with the condition of the human soul, including hers. She is not weird; she is normal according to Scripture. Her name is Madonna, and in Vogue magazine, she said this in an interview: "I have an iron will, and here's why I'm struggling with fear. Now listen to this: I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being, and then I get to another stage and I think I'm mediocre and uninteresting. Then I find a way to get myself out of that again and again and again. My drive in life is from the horrible fear of being mediocre. That's what's always pushing me, pushing me, because even though I've become somebody, I still have to prove to myself that I'm somebody. My struggle has never ended, and I don't think it ever will."

Now, maybe you see there's a really messed-up person. That's not what the Bible says. It says that there's a really average person. In fact, that is every person deep down. What humans really fear is to be found worthless, meaningless, weightless. This word means deep insecurity leading to a need to prove my worth to myself and others. We are desperately trying to feel worthy, and what happens is we sort of see others as ahead of us or below us, and that leads to these next couple of words. The word "provoking" basically means to look down on. The word literally means to call out or challenge somebody, like, "You, yeah, you! How dare you talk to me that way? How dare you? I'm better than you! Don't you know that?" You know, that kind of provoking, kind of poking somebody in the chest to prove your superiority. That's what this word means; it's the posture of the superior mindset, looking down on others.

While "envying" is the opposite of that. Envying is looking down on people. It's not looking down on people that you feel superior to; it's looking up to people that you feel inferior to and going, "Why can't I have what they have? Why can't I have their talents? Why can't I have their looks?" That's the posture of the inferior mindset, looking up at others. Basically, those are two halves of the same coin: feeling inferior, feeling superior. It is very difficult not to fall into one of these in every relationship. Hey, true confession time: I'm a pastor, okay? News to you, right? But so I visit churches. I love to go and visit churches, right? And when I visit churches and listen to sermons, I am so surprised at how, without even trying, quickly one of two thoughts in my human nature will pop into my head: "I could do better than this. You call this a sermon?" If my wife is sitting next to me, I'm like writing down, "Here's where he's wrong." You know, or, "I could never preach like that. I may as well quit. I'm going to quit, honey. Seriously, I'm going to quit my job." Driving home, I'm like, "I can't. I could never be as good as that person I just heard at the Mount Hermon conference. I'm going to become an ice cream scooper at Marianne's because I'm worthless as a pastor." So what happens is you're swinging on this trapeze all the time: "I'm better than you; I stink compared to them." Right?

Now, most of us are a mixture of the two, but we tend toward either provoking or envying other people as an outworking of our own struggles with weightlessness or vain glory. So what are you? What do you tend toward? Look at the chart there at the bottom of your notes. Maybe you tend toward provoking; there on the left, that's where you have a superiority mindset. You tend to blow up right in confrontations. Like, somebody cuts you off in the car, and you roll down the window. "Hey!" You know, like the women's conference speaker said yesterday. Somebody cut her off, and she literally found herself just the other day doing this. "I got my eyes on you," she said. She goes, "I don't know why I did this, but I took a picture of the back of the car and posted it on Facebook: this person cut me off." You know, that's a superiority mindset; that's provoking. Or I pick arguments, right? Actually, or I tend to judge harshly, or I attack when criticized, or I say things like, "I'd never be that stupid." Right?

Or on the right-hand side, you tend to have an inferiority mindset. That's what you tend to clam up. You tend to avoid confrontation because you think this person could run rings around me with their verbal skill, so I'm not even going to get into that argument. I'm intimidated around certain people. I get discouraged; I get defensive. I think, "I could never be that awesome." Right? Listen, all of us struggle with some sense of this, and it messes up our relationships. So what's the solution to this?

On page two, in the previous verse, verse 25, Paul says, "Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit." We talked about this at length last week. Keeping in step with the Spirit means step by step, day by day, I'm living in the awareness of God's grace. I remind myself I'm saved by God's grace, not by my own efforts. I'm beloved by God; I'm covered by the blood of Christ. I am precious in his sight. Jesus died and was buried and was raised alive for me. What happens is when daily I find my glory in God's value of me and not in comparison to others or in the opinions of others, then I will finally be free to truly love others. Does that make sense?

When finally I find my glory in God's value of me and not in comparison to others or in the opinions of others, then I am free to truly love other people. See, if I'm still under that legalistic, law-oriented temple model of religion, it makes that situation we described on page one even worse because I either get superior, proud, provoking if I feel like I'm winning the game. If I feel like I'm keeping the rules better than anybody else, I get overly confident, and I get judgmental on other people. Or if I feel like I'm losing because I'm not keeping the rules right, I put myself down, and I feel like slime. I feel inferior; I feel envious. Legalism just makes all of that even worse. Grace humbles me because I realize, "Hey, I'm just a sinner saved by God's grace." Grace emboldens me because the most important eyes in the universe are looking at me with love and are empowering me with God's strength.

Only the gospel of grace can make you bold without pride and humble without self-despair. Only grace. The way this works out practically in relationships is if I find myself being really defensive around somebody, I think, "Well, wait a minute. What that person thinks of me is not the most important thing. That person's approval actually doesn't matter. God's approval matters, and that is a settled issue not based on my performance. It's settled unconditionally simply because I've received his offer of grace." My identity at my core is as a child of the King. Abba is my Father; he loves me. That's what matters, so I don't have to get defensive around this person.

Or if I find myself looking down on somebody with superiority, I think, "Whoa, whoa, whoa! There I am just as much of a sinner, just as undeserving of grace as they are." My primary message to this person is good news, not judgment: the good news of God's grace to them, just as I've been graced. Now, point three: what does this look like in real life? Well, there are a lot of things, but Paul gives two quick application series. First of all, restore the fallen; don't kick somebody when they're down. Restore the fallen. He says, "Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in his sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently." The word "restore" in this verse, in the Greek, was used for setting a broken bone and for mending a fishing net.

How many people here have ever had a broken bone? Can I see a show of hands? How many of you have had a broken one? Wow, seriously, this is like an accident-prone crowd. Let me see that hand again. Show it. How many of you had more than one broken bone? More than one? Really? How many of you more than two? No, we can keep going, but we should have a prize for like the most, you know, five or more. No, if you've ever had a broken bone, all of you raised your hands; you know how painful that can be, right? And you know, listen, how a doctor sets that bone can make your pain much worse even as he tries to help you heal. That's why it says, "Restore gently." When a friend is down, when a friend is hurt by sin, you don't announce it to the world. You know, "Look at this idiot!" You don't dropkick them; you don't try to ruin their reputation. You do what you can to help them.

But Paul says we should be careful in helping, or we might fall into the same trap as our friend. "But watch yourselves, or you may also be tempted." How many times have you read around here in the news of people who have been drowning off the coast, and then somebody jumps in to rescue them and is not a skilled lifeguard, and they drown? Right? You got to be very, very careful. Now, before I move on, I just want to note Paul does not specify the sins involved here, and he does not go legalistically into some precise pattern that we are to follow. That's another thing I talked about: you know, what does the law require? Another question I get a lot as a pastor is, "How long do I have to be gentle with somebody before I can just kick them?" You know, "Can it be like six months of restoration before I just sock them in the face?" You know, technically, how long? Paul doesn't go into that detail. This verse is about an overall willingness to get involved and promote restoration. The precise details, the time involved, are going to vary from case to case, from person to person. Don't get all legalistic about this. Just as no one medicine cures all diseases, there's no magic formula that works in every case to bring somebody back. He just says, "Be compassionate and be careful."

The second example he gives is this: help the hurting. Help the hurting. The verse we started with: "Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." The word used for burden here refers to an overwhelming load weighing you down as you stagger along the highway of life. Now, that might be all kinds of things in different people: sickness, personal loss, financial difficulties, broken dreams, a broken marriage, family problems, career setbacks, the death of a loved one, feelings of depression. I think it's significant that Paul does not focus on what the burden is because that doesn't matter. What matters is when you see your brother or sister staggering under a burden, unable to get out of their situation by themselves, you do what John Abruzzo's friends did: you stop, and you look back, and you realize this person is going nowhere without help, and you go back and you help.

Now, there are more needs around you than you can deal with. That's why we're in a body, in a community called a church, and that's why together, as a big church, we share the load of the people who are down. That's why, as a church, we have things like the Stephen ministry to help carry the burdens of those who are down. But it's important to do it. I want to show you an interesting clip that illustrates this. This story was on ABC News last fall. Watch this. There's a story getting plenty of attention online right now, and it really comes down to one picture: a high school cross-country meet. There's the picture: a girl from one team carrying a girl from a different team to the finish line. Melanie Bailey stopped and helped out this young lady, Danielle New, after Danielle had injured her knee. Looks pretty painful. They finished the race in Minnesota together, nearly 10 minutes behind the winner. But man, the sportsmanship conduct like that, we congratulate both of them.

Wait a minute now. Wait, wait, wait. So the young lady could have— I mean, what? She could compete? Where she did she have a chance to win the race? And she stopped and picked her up and put her on her back? On top of that, not just picked her up, right? Like literally put her on her back and finished the race? Well, she's a better woman than I am! Thank you, Ron Burgundy! Right? I mean, insert your comment about the intelligence of anchor people here. But anyway, she's a better woman than I am too because, listen, if you think the goal of life is to win the race, to finish first, you're right. He's exactly right. Stopping and helping people is going to interfere with your achievements. It's going to get in the way of the daily to-do list. Absolutely it will. But if you think the goal of life as a Christian, that part of the profile of what it means to win as a Christian is to stop and help those who fall by the wayside, then you're going to carry another's burdens because that's one of the reasons why you are in the race. Paul says, "By doing so, you fulfill the law of Christ."

Now, I have a question for you: why in the world would somebody not want to do this? Well, Paul talks about this. Man, he's so good in the next two verses. He says, "If anybody thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. Each should test his own actions, and then he can take pride in himself without comparing himself to somebody else." It's so easy to look down your nose and say, "Oh, they deserve it. She's so weak. Guess they just couldn't handle the pressure. You know what? I saw this coming. I saw it coming. Maybe they're going to listen to me next time. But right now, I don't want to get involved. I'm just glad it's them and not me. I would never do something like that." When people are under a burden, we are so quick to condemn, to look away, to pass by on the other side. But in these verses, Paul puts his finger right on the problem, and this is the bottom line: the biggest problem in relationships is personal pride.

If you think you are something special, you will find it's so easy to condemn people. But if I understand grace, without it, I'm nothing; with it, I have everything. I am going to be more forgiving and less insecure. Right? More forgiving because I know I am nothing apart from the grace of God, and less insecure because I know in God's grace I'm completely forgiven and free. So I don't have to prove my superiority to anybody else, and I don't have to feel inferior to anybody else because God and I are good by his grace. This makes a difference in every relationship.

I'm going to close not with a story this morning but with a song. Our worship pastor, Trent Smith, actually wrote the song about the kind of advice that Jesus would give to you and to me if he were here today. He would say, "You know what? If you want grace to infuse every relationship, here's how to start." I'm going to have Trent come back and sing this song, and let's just prepare our hearts to hear it in a word of prayer. Would you bow your heads with me? Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your grace. Help all of my relationships to reflect your grace. I don't have to feel superior; I don't have to feel inferior. Help us to solve all of that, all of the issues of our pride, of our vain glory, by just soaking in your grace. And God, especially right now, if there's somebody here who is hearing all the same, and it sounds really good to me, I thought Christianity was about asking the question, "What does the law require?" But if it's about asking, "What does love require?" as modeled for me and as I am powered by the risen Jesus, well then, I'm in. You may want to just pray this prayer right now: "Lord, help me receive your grace. God, I am opening myself up to you. I'm surrendering my will, my pride, to you right now, God, because you forgave me and saved me by your grace and your grace alone. Help me reflect that throughout my entire life, starting with my closest relationships." In Jesus' name, amen.

Dear sons and daughters of the Father, once thieves and vagabonds wandering far away, I have redeemed you. My wounds have healed you. Hold fast, unite as past hope will bring the day. Fathers and mothers cling to each other; give love and give enough as I have given you. Spend time together and listen better, 'cause when pride is cast aside, hope will see you through. Sisters and brothers, love one another; make grace your resting place. As you walk alone, share wine and laughter. Oh, tears may return one day, but hope will lead you home. You, my precious children, free and forgiven, we know that here below the waiting seems so long, but your names are near; you are never forgotten. And when I return again, hope will be a song.