Galatians 6.11-18: The Iceberg of Us
This sermon was preached on April 28th, 2024.
If you ever see a picture of an iceberg—a veritable mountain rising above the ocean—that 90% of the mass of that iceberg is actually under water. You can’t see it.
We can be like icebergs—our actions and what everyone sees the 10%, but the 90% under the water level are the motivations and desires, which can often go misunderstood or missed all together. It’s what Paul is talking about here at the end of Galatians, tying his letter together by going back to the heart of the matter.
Our passage today is Paul’s sign-off of Galatians, his PS on the back of the letter he has written to these people he dearly loves and is concerned about. In these last few verses, he takes up the pen himself. The rest of the letter had been dictated to someone else to write, like a secretary. We don’t know who, but this was a common practice for Paul. It seems like he may have had ongoing eye problems that made it difficult for him to write (large letters in his own hand)
These verses are almost a summary of the whole letter. His final words are meant to tie it all together and re-emphasize the main points.
11 See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!
12 Those who want to impress people by means of the flesh are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ. 13 Not even those who are circumcised keep the law, yet they want you to be circumcised that they may boast about your circumcision in the flesh. 14 May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 15 Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation. 16 Peace and mercy to all who follow this rule—to the Israel of God.
17 From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.
18 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. Amen.
1. The Base of the Iceberg
As we’ve talked about over the past few months, there were people who had infiltrated the Galatian churches that were trying to make the new Christians in these churches do a bunch of actions to prove that God should love them. Their faith in Jesus is not enough—there’s some hoops they need to jump through. But Paul points out that the issue isn’t first and foremost the action of circumcision or uncircumcision. That the why matters. The motivations.
He points it out here—the people trying to compel them to be circumcised and following this path are not doing it for the people's good. No, they're actually being motivated by two things:
To avoid persecution. Things difficult for Jewish Christians, and part of the motivation of the people going to the church’s Paul started is to try and make Christians look more Jewish, to alleviate some of the accusations against them. They were essentially cowering in the face of a nationalism that had weaponized religion for political purposes.
So that they may boast about getting these new Christians to perform. Not only did they want to alleviate their own troubles. They were hoping to win converts to themselves, in a sense, and boast about it after the fact. In other words, they are not after true transformation. They're after performance. They’re not about the heart. Just the outside.
In v15 Paul makes it clear though: the performance of a religious ritual is not the point. It's never been the point. The thing that sets Christianity apart in our world of religions is that it isn't just about doing a set of rituals, going through some motions to keep a God off of your back. No, our faith is about a God who seeks out his people, who gives not just blessings of stuff, but gives us himself. And we are brought into relationship with Him to find him as our source of life. Him as our nourishment and strength.
To put it a different way, God is not looking for a bunch of robots to do a bunch of stuff—if he wanted that, he could have created us that way. He’s also not looking for a bunch of servants that he’ll beat into submission, who do things to keep him off their backs. That’s what religion can look like—a merely outward thing we do to keep God happy. Like how we pay our electric bill so the lights don’t get shut off.
The rituals of what we do aren’t us paying dues, or magic rituals we do. It’s easy to treat faith that way. To treat the Bible like it's a magic book. To treat prayers like they're magic spells. But what makes the good news so good is that it is about a Father who is bringing his lost children home.
And so motivations matter. It's the decider that the Christians in Galatia shouldn’t submit to circumcision—because it's not being motivated from a place of worthiness in the gospel. It's not rooted in who God has shown himself to be in Jesus Christ.
See what I mean? What mattered was the motivation. For us, there are all kinds of things that can be good things, but many times getting to the heart of the matter means looking at the 90% under the water level. Quiet times. Bible reading plans. Memorization of Scripture. Those can absolutely be wonderful things. But what’s going on underneath them? Are we doing them because we are actually trying to impress someone or feel more secure in ourselves or, really, trying to prove to God that we deserve his love?
Good Boasting
So we’ve seen the bad boasting of the false teachers here—an attempt to treat the Christians like they are things or numbers, and get them to perform. But there is a good boasting, and it's what Paul talks about in verse 14: boasting in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Notice he doesn't just say “boasting in Jesus.” He could have said that. But he says “boasting in the cross” of Jesus. Paul is drawing attention to the depth to which God had to go to find and free us in this world. The cross of Jesus was the NO to the ways of our world. Think about it—God himself took on human flesh in Jesus, becoming one of us. And what did humanity do when the light of the world shined into this darkness? It killed him.
But the place of this rejection became God's place of judgment against the false power of this world. It was where the political and religious power of this world was exposed and shown to be empty. Where the way our world works—giving people value and worth by their ethnicity or their heritage or their status or whatever—where the way our world works was turned on its head.
To boast in the cross of Jesus is to realize that those other usual places of our boasting have lost their power. To boast in the cross is to refuse to boast in those things, refuse to let those things hold our hearts bound. That's what Paul means when he says that in the cross of Jesus he was “crucified" to the world and the world to him. That for Paul to come to faith in Jesus was for Paul to give all of that up. For him to be entirely remade and reoriented to what truly matters. So that now he can know that boasting is ridiculous unless it is boasting in how God had to break into our world to give us his grace.
And what really counts? The new creation. Not performance. Not the things we tend to use to judge value and worth. What really counts is what God is doing—bringing life into our world of death. The new creation—God’s work! God’s work of renewal. Peace and mercy to us because of him.
This doesn’t mean that we don't matter. It’s why Paul can hope that no one will cause him trouble. He isn't a glutton for punishment. God’s glory doesn’t mean our bad. We aren't pawns on a chessboard or canon fodder in the kingdom battle. The new creation is God bringing us life, awakening us to ourselves.
And when boasting in the cross of Jesus, we can now own the skills and talents that God has given to us because we aren’t trying to build our identities on those. We can boast in the cross of Jesus and then revel in our gifts because we know they are all grace to us. So we can work and take satisfaction in that work knowing that our work has nothing to do with whether or not we are loved and welcomed, but they have everything to do with living lives that spring from that love and welcome.
Last Things Last
Paul began his letter with these words: “Grace and peace to you.” It wasn't just a friendly greeting. He was saying a profound thing. That in Jesus grace and peace have come to us. And they’ve come to us because Jesus has rescued us from the “present evil age”—a time that is defined by anything other than grace and peace.
Yet grace and peace belong to us in Jesus. Grace and peace. It’s like the left foot-right foot of walking as followers of Jesus in this world. Grace and peace. Grace and peace.
As we grow as a church, and as we grow as individuals, there will be scores of temptations to let those two steps be many other things. But the road under our feet that we walk on is grace and peace. The fuel in our engine carrying us down the road is grace and peace. The food for our souls that nourishes us is grace and peace. And what we have, in turn, to offer to others is grace and peace.
To bring it back to the beginning, to the iceberg. What God is growing us in (and this is the only true spiritual growth for us) is for the 90% of us that’s under the waterline be God’s grace and peace to us in Christ.
Usually when we’re talking religion in southern church culture, we don’t really care what the 90% is if the 10% looks good. We can dress up that 10% and make it look really nice, really clean. No struggles. No issues. But when we do that, the 10% takes up 100% of our time, and our Christianity has become cosplaying. Not the vital, authentic way of life that God has for us.
The true spiritual growth and the abundant life that God is leading you into, however, is to stop wasting time on dressing up the 10% in front of others, and to let the 10% be defined and shaped by the 90. Or to leave that metaphor behind: it’s to go beyond the surface level of appearances and dive all the way in on God’s new creation and our part in it.
Grace and peace. Grace and peace.
That’s why the benediction I use every week, which was give by God to the Israelite priests 3,500 years ago, is structured the way it is. When I lift my hands I pronounce it, it isn’t just me trying to inspire you as you leave. It is, as God says, him putting his name on us.
“The Lord bless you and keep you
The Lord make his face to shine on you and be gracious to you
The Lord lift up his face toward you and give you peace.”
Grace and peace. Day in and day out. Be carried along by it. And let’s go further up and further in on this grace and peace together.