Galatians 6

Today’s Passage: Galatians 6

Here is where the fire comes to rest. For five chapters Paul has been defending one thing with everything in him, that a person is put right with God by faith in Jesus Christ and by nothing laid alongside Him, and he has defended it hot, with a curse on any other gospel, with the memory of Peter’s face across a table in Antioch, with Abraham and Sinai and Hagar and Sarah, with freedom and the fruit of the Spirit. Now he turns and shows you what that gospel actually grows in a congregation. It grows people who go and pick up the brother who has fallen, and pick him up gently, watching themselves as they do it. It grows people who take the crushing weight off one another’s backs and still shoulder their own ordinary pack without whining. It grows people who quit measuring themselves against the man in the next chair. It grows people who feed the ones who teach them, who do not grow weary in well-doing, who do good to everyone and especially to the household of faith. And then, near the end, Paul takes the pen out of his secretary’s hand and writes the last paragraph himself in big, blunt letters, and everything the letter has fought about comes down to a single sentence about what a man will boast in. They wanted something in the flesh to point at. Paul points at an execution. Read this chapter slowly. It is the whole letter, put into a life.

As you read, hold this: A gospel that adds nothing to the cross produces a people who restore the fallen gently, carry the weights that would crush a brother, sow to the Spirit without giving up, and boast in nothing on earth except the cross that made them a new creation.

Galatians 6:1–5 (BSB)

¹ Brothers, if someone is caught in a trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him with a spirit of gentleness. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. ² Carry one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. ³ If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. ⁴ Each one should test his own work. Then he will have reason to boast in himself alone, and not in someone else. ⁵ For each one should carry his own load.

Notice how the sentence begins. Not if someone commits a trespass, but if someone is caught in one, which carries the picture of a person overtaken, surprised, tangled up in a thing before he quite knew what was happening. That is honest about how sin usually works among believers. And notice who is sent. “You who are spiritual” does not mean an elite tier of Christians standing above the rest; the whole previous chapter has just defined a spiritual person as one who walks by the Spirit, whose life the Spirit is growing love and joy and peace and gentleness in, and Paul is simply saying that the person in whom the Spirit is doing that work is the person fit for this errand. Then comes the verb, and it is a beautiful one. He does not say expose him, or discipline him, or discuss him. He says restore (καταρτίζω) katartizō, pronounced kat-ar-TID-zoh. Strong's G2675, to mend, to set a bone, to restore to working order. The verb is katartizō, and its ordinary uses are wonderfully physical. It is the word for what fishermen were doing to their nets when Jesus called James and John, sitting in the boat working the torn mesh back together so it could hold fish again. In the medical writers of the ancient world it is the word for setting a broken bone, taking a limb that has snapped and putting the ends back where they belong so the body can knit. It means to mend, to put back into working order, to make fit for use again. Sit with those two pictures, because they tell you the entire aim of this errand. You do not go to a fallen believer to remove him from the net; you go to weave him back into it. You do not go to a broken bone to lecture it about breaking. You set it, and you set it as gently as you possibly can, because you know what it is to be handled roughly. There is another thing worth noticing. Setting a bone takes patience, skill, and touch. Anyone can point at a break. Very few will kneel down and take the weight of the limb in their hands. The church of Jesus Christ is meant to be full of people who know how. him, and he says to do it with a spirit of gentleness, which is not a soft word for indifference but the very fruit the Spirit had just been named as growing. And then, before anyone can straighten his collar and set off on this holy errand feeling tall, the apostle turns and puts a hand on his chest: but watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. Watch yourself. The man walking over to help the fallen one is in danger, and the danger is not chiefly the sin he is walking toward but the pride he may be carrying in his pocket. Whole churches have been ruined by people who were right about someone else’s failure and rotten in the way they handled it. A gospel of pure grace can produce nothing but a community that restores. If God received you without a single qualification of your own, you have no standing anywhere to crush a brother who has fallen, and every reason on earth to go and lift him.

Then Paul says something that sounds like a contradiction, and it is not. In verse 2 he says carry one another’s burdens (βάρος) baros, pronounced BAH-ross. Strong's G922, weight, heaviness, a load. The word in verse 2 is baros, and it means weight, a heavy thing, a load that presses down. It is used for the burden and heat of a whole day’s labor, and for what is crushing rather than merely inconvenient. The word in verse 5 is a different one altogether, phortion, the diminutive of a ship’s cargo, and it was the ordinary term for a man’s own pack, the kit a soldier carried on the march, the bundle a traveler shouldered for himself. Once you hear the two words the apparent contradiction disappears and a whole pastoral wisdom opens up. There are weights in this life that will break a person’s back if he is left alone under them, grief, illness, a failure that has flattened him, a fear he cannot say out loud, and about those Paul says get under it with him, and calls doing so nothing less than fulfilling the law of Christ, which is the command to love. And there is the ordinary pack every one of us is responsible for, our own obedience, our own work, our own accounting before God, and nobody else can shoulder that for us and we insult them by asking. The mature believer knows the difference. He runs to help with the crushing thing and he never uses the fellowship of the church as an excuse to set down his own bag in the road. , and three lines later in verse 5 he says each one should carry his own load. Both are true, and they are not even in tension once you see that he has used two different words for two different things. In between them he sets the reason we so often fail at both: the man who thinks he is something when he is nothing, deceiving himself. That is the whole trouble in one line. A man who needs to be something cannot carry anyone, because he has no strength left over from holding up the image of himself, and he cannot carry his own load either, because he is too busy comparing his pack to yours. So Paul gives the cure, and it is a strange one. Test your own work. Not measure it against your neighbor’s, which is the whole business of the flesh and the reason the Galatian churches were being pulled apart by men who wanted something in somebody else’s body to point at. Just your own, honestly, before God, and let that be the end of it. A believer who has genuinely stopped comparing himself to the person beside him has been set free from an exhausting occupation and now has both hands available for something better. Paul says elsewhere, plainly, what those free hands are for.

"We who are strong ought to bear with the shortcomings of the weak and not to please ourselves." Romans 15:1 (BSB)

Galatians 6:6–10 (BSB)

⁶ Nevertheless, the one who receives instruction in the word must share in all good things with his instructor. ⁷ Do not be deceived: God is not to be mocked. Whatever a man sows, he will reap in return. ⁸ The one who sows to please his flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; but the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. ⁹ Let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. ¹⁰ Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to the family of faith.

Verse 6 looks at first like a small housekeeping note dropped into a great argument, and it is more than that. In a movement where false teachers had come in from outside, the churches needed to be able to keep their own faithful teachers fed, and Paul says the one who receives the word must share all good things with the one who brings it. The word for share is the word for fellowship. This is not a fee paid for a service rendered; it is a partnership, the taught and the teacher holding one purse and one table. And it is placed here on purpose, because a congregation’s giving is one of the truest signs of what it actually values. Then, immediately, the great warning. Do not be deceived. That verb is where the deception theme of this chapter comes to a head: the man in verse 3 deceives himself about his own size, and here Paul says do not let anyone deceive you about the field. God is not to be mocked, and the Greek picture behind that phrase is of turning up the nose at someone, sneering, treating a person as though His word were a joke that cost nothing. Nobody outwits a harvest. Whatever a man sows, that is what comes up.

Hear this rightly, because it is misused in two opposite directions. It is not a transaction, as though God kept a ledger and paid out returns to those who deposited enough religion; the whole letter you are holding was written to burn that idea to the ground. And it is not a promise that faithfulness will be repaid in comfort or money or an easy life, which is a lie told loudly in our day and never once by Paul, who was stoned and beaten and shipwrecked for his sowing. What Paul is describing is direction. Two fields lie open to every person, and a life is walked into one of them a handful at a time. Sow to the flesh, spend yourself on what is passing, feed the appetites of a nature that is already dying, and you will reap out of that field exactly what grows there, which is corruption; nothing sown into a rotting thing has ever come up alive. Sow to the Spirit, live where the Spirit is at work, and out of that field comes life that does not end. Notice that Paul does not say the Spirit’s field pays a wage. He says what the Spirit grows is eternal life, and eternal life is the gift of God in Christ Jesus, not a crop we cause. Nor is this a threat held over a believer’s head to make him fear being dropped. Christ does not lose the ones He bought. It is a plain word about the direction of a life, and it is meant to make you look down and see what is in your hand.

Then the tenderest line in the chapter: let us not grow weary in well-doing. He knows. Doing good is slow, unrewarded work, and the field looks empty for months at a time. The person who restores a fallen brother gently is often misunderstood for it. The person who carries another’s crushing weight is often never thanked. The person who does good to everyone gets tired, and tiredness is where most quiet Christians actually live. So Paul does not shame the weary. He gives them a season and a promise: in due time, at the proper hour, which is God’s hour and not ours, there will be a harvest, if we do not give up. And then he throws the circle as wide as it goes. Do good to everyone, all of them, the neighbor and the stranger and the man who is hostile to your faith, and especially to the family of faith, because charity that skips over the household of God has misunderstood what a household is. Another apostle points the weary to the only place where strength for this is found.

"Consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart." Hebrews 12:3 (BSB)

Galatians 6:11–14 (BSB)

¹¹ See what large letters I am using to write to you with my own hand! ¹² Those who want to make a good impression outwardly are trying to compel you to be circumcised. They only do this to avoid persecution for the cross of Christ. ¹³ For the circumcised do not even keep the law themselves, yet they want you to be circumcised that they may boast in your flesh. ¹⁴ But as for me, 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.

He takes the pen. Picture it: the secretary’s neat lines stop, and the apostle’s own big characters march across the last of the papyrus, and every person in that room, watching over a reader’s shoulder, knows that what follows is the thing he came to say. And what he says is a diagnosis of motive, delivered without cruelty and without flinching. These men wanted to make a good impression outwardly, which is to say they wanted a religion that could be seen and counted and photographed, and they wanted it because the alternative was to be shamed. Preach a crucified Messiah with no covenant markings, no protective legal cover, no respectable ancestry, and the empire has no category for you and the synagogue has no patience for you and you will suffer for it. Add circumcision, and the pressure eases. Paul says it plainly: they only do this to avoid persecution for the cross of Christ. Then he notes the inconsistency that gives the whole thing away. The ones pressing the law on Gentiles do not even keep it themselves. They are not driven by a passion for holiness; they want to boast in your flesh (καυχάομαι) kauchaomai, pronounced kow-KHAH-oh-my. Strong's G2744, to boast, to glory in. The verb is kauchaomai, and it runs through Paul’s letters like a nerve. It means to boast, to glory, to exult in something, and it is not automatically a sin. It is simply the act of resting your weight on a thing and then telling the world about it, of saying this is what I am, this is what makes me somebody, look here. Every human being does it. The Galatian agitators did it with a count of circumcised Gentiles. The ancient world did it with birth, city, wealth, philosophy, and the honors carved on a family tomb. We do it with work, children, health, opinions, the record of our own decency. Paul knew the pull of it better than most, because he had once had the finest list of credentials in his generation, and he had it memorized, and he called all of it loss for the sake of knowing Christ. So when he uses this word about himself here, he is not renouncing joy or confidence. He is naming where a rescued man puts his weight. There is only one thing left in the universe he will stand on and speak of, and it is not anything he did, gave, achieved, or suffered. Watch what a person boasts in and you will know what they think saves them. , to hold up a tally of converts marked in their bodies as proof of their own standing. Six chapters of this letter have been about men looking for something to point at.

And then verse 14, and the letter arrives. But as for me, may I never boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Feel what an outrageous sentence that is. A cross was not a symbol in the first century; it was a Roman gallows, a public torture stake set beside a road to make an example of a man and to leave every passerby too frightened to imitate him. Rome reserved it for slaves and rebels. Decent people did not say the word in polite company. Nothing in the ancient world was less boastable, and Paul says it is the only thing he has left to boast in. Set that beside the men he has just described, who wanted a mark in somebody’s body they could hold up. Paul holds up an execution. All the way through this letter, men have been hunting for something to add: a sign, a calendar, a table rule, a pedigree, an achievement, anything at all that could be laid next to Christ so that a person might contribute a little to his own acceptance. And Paul’s answer, in his own big handwriting, is that the Son of God was nailed to a stake for him, and that this is finished, and that a man who understands it will never again go looking for a supplement.

Then he says what that cross did, and he says it twice over. Through it the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Two deaths, and the second is as important as the first. The world here means the whole system of judging and being judged, the scoreboard of status and approval and belonging that the flesh cannot live without, and Paul says that when he looked at the cross the scoreboard died. It has nothing left to offer him and nothing left to threaten him with. But he does not stop there. He says he also died to it, that he himself hangs dead as far as the world’s opinion is concerned, which means he is no longer available to be flattered by it or frightened by it, and that is exactly why he can afford to preach a message that gets a man beaten. A person crucified to the world is the freest person alive. He cannot be bought, because he has nothing to gain, and he cannot be intimidated, because he has already died. This is what the men avoiding persecution had never understood. They were trying to survive a world that had already been put to death. And this is the summit of the whole letter, standing right where Paul’s own hand is on the page: not a better religion, not an improved law, not faith with a little something added, but a crucified Christ and a man who has nothing else to say for himself. The message looks like nothing to the people it is spoken to, and Paul knew that too.

"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." 1 Corinthians 1:18 (BSB)

Galatians 6:15–18 (BSB)

¹⁵ For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything. What counts is a new creation. ¹⁶ Peace and mercy to all who walk by this rule, even 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. Amen.

Here is the sentence the argument has been building toward from the first page. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything. Notice that he cuts both ways, and this needs saying, because a person can make a badge out of not having the mark just as easily as out of having it. Paul is not swapping one party for another. He is announcing that the whole category has been retired, and that what counts now is a new creation. That is a phrase to stop on. The word is the one used of God’s own work in the beginning, when there was nothing and He spoke and there was something. Paul does not say that what counts is a reformed person, an improved person, a person who has turned over a new leaf and is trying harder in a better direction. He says creation, which is a thing only God does and which no one has ever contributed to. It is why circumcision cannot possibly matter here: you cannot cut a man into being made new any more than you could have helped on the first morning of the world. Everything this letter has fought for rests on that. If God must create, then no one can add, and the only posture left to us is the open hand of faith and the astonishment of praise. He puts the same glory into a single line elsewhere.

"Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!" 2 Corinthians 5:17 (BSB)

Then the blessing, and one phrase in it that faithful readers have never fully agreed on: peace and mercy to all who walk by this rule, even to the Israel of God. Some read it as a single group, so that “the Israel of God” is the church itself, Jew and Gentile together in Christ, called Israel because they are the true children of Abraham by faith, which is exactly what Paul has argued in chapter 3. Others read the phrase as marking out believing Jews within that church, a particular word of peace to those who had the most to lose socially by walking this way and who are Israel indeed, the faithful remnant within the nation. Others still hear a distinct blessing pronounced over ethnic Israel, Paul’s own kinsmen, for whom his heart ached. The Greek word standing between the two clauses can be read as and or as even, and the sentence turns on it. All three readings have been held by people who love this letter and submit to it, and this day is not the place to settle what the sentence itself leaves open. What is not in doubt is the rule they are to walk by, and it is the rule of verses 14 and 15: no boast but the cross, no confidence in the flesh, nothing that counts except what God creates new. Peace and mercy to everyone who walks that way.

And then the last two lines, and they are as personal as anything Paul ever wrote. From now on let no one cause me trouble, he says, and it is not petulance; it is a weary man laying down a burden he has carried through six chapters of argument. Then he gives his credential, and it is the opposite of the one the agitators wanted. They wanted marks cut into other people’s bodies to boast about. Paul says: I bear on my body the marks (στίγμα) stigma, pronounced STIG-mah. Strong's G4742, a brand or mark of ownership burned into the skin. The word is stigma, and it is a hard, deliberate word. In the ancient world a stigma was a brand or tattoo burned or cut into the skin, and it was not decoration. Runaway slaves were marked so they could be identified and returned. Captured soldiers were marked. Devotees of certain gods carried the mark of the deity they belonged to, and a temple slave’s brand meant that his body was not his own to dispose of. Paul takes that ugly word, the word for the mark of ownership on someone else’s property, and claims it for himself with something like pride. The scars on him were not evidence of failure or of God’s disfavor; they were the brand of his Master, put there by men who hated the message he carried, and he wears them as a slave wears his owner’s name. Set that beside what the false teachers were after and the contrast is total. They wanted a mark that spared them suffering and won them standing. Paul carries a mark that cost him blood and won him nothing but the right to belong to Christ. He is not calling every believer to be beaten. He is telling us where the proof of a true servant is found: not in what the world admires, but in what it has cost to follow a crucified Lord, and in the willingness to be marked as His. of Jesus. He had been stoned at Lystra and left for dead, beaten with rods, given the thirty-nine lashes five times over, and the scars were on him as he wrote. That is my proof of ownership, he says, and there is nothing else to discuss. And then, having thundered for a whole letter, the last word out of him is grace, the word he has defended with everything he had, and the last thing he calls them is brothers, which is what he called them in the first line of this chapter when he sent them to go and restore a fallen one gently. He never stopped counting them family, not for a single sentence of the rebuke.