When Sam asked me to choose a week to preach,
I just chose any week that was free.
I didn't realize it was going to be on Hagar and Sarah.
It's a pretty difficult passage.
And I also remembered about three months ago,
at heartbeat, Steve said that we should really dig into the Bible.
And he read through the passage in Hagar and Sarah
and found out something that he never found out before.
So I've got double pressure now.
Hard passage and Steve saying that he understood this clearly.
So I feel a bit intimidated right now.
I think it's more important that it's not just because that is a hard passage
or what Steve has understood, because it's God's Word.
So let us pray to help us understand it and help us to live in light of it.
Let's pray.
Dear God, we thank you for your Word.
Pray that we will submit before your Word.
Pray that you can help me to speak clearly
and be faithful to your Word.
And that we will live in light of what you say
and believe in what it says.
In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen.
Okay.
So one of the great things about telling the Gospel
to people that have never heard the Gospel before
is that they have a very refreshingly different perspective.
So I'll recall a time I was doing student ministry in China.
I've just learned Mandarin for about three months or so.
I was sharing the Gospel with a uni student in China.
And then I read through a Gospel tract with him
and I basically shared with him how you can become a Christian
and probably quoted John 3.16
and told him that if you believe this honestly
and pray it in your heart with me
then you can become a Christian.
He says,
I can't pray this and become a Christian.
I can't believe in Jesus.
I can't pray this.
And I asked him why.
And he said,
because I have a lecture at 3 p.m.
I said,
how does a lecture at 3 p.m.
affect your decision of becoming a Christian?
He says,
doesn't it say in your tract that 3.16, right,
that you have to pray to believe in Jesus at 3.16?
So you can actually see that maybe a few things.
One thing is that I didn't tell the Gospel clearly.
The other thing is that non-Christians
or young Christians are very eager
to pick up anything about the Christian faith.
And we have to be clear in our communication.
Sometimes it is Gospel
and sometimes it's just my bad habits being transferred to him.
So hopefully we need to communicate the Gospel clearly.
But this is some of the pressures that the Galatians are facing.
Remember the Galatians,
they just believed in the Gospel,
but they've been facing pressure
from a group of false teachers
from the Jewish background.
They've been telling these Galatians
that you have to be circumcised
and you have to observe various fluid laws
in order to receive God's promises.
So it's under this background
that Paul is preaching,
writing this message.
And just like a good sermon,
this passage is in three parts.
So I'll just break down each part for us
and walk through it.
So the first part of this passage
is the history of Hagar and Sarah.
We can see that in verses 22 to 23,
where Paul recounts the history of Hagar and Sarah.
And we know that he's recounting history
by the way he introduces these verses.
At the start of verse 22, he says,
it has been written.
So if you know your New Testament well,
this is how Jesus
and other New Testament writers
quote the Old Testament.
So they want us to look at the Bible carefully,
so let's look through Genesis chapter 16
and chapter 21.
Before we read that on the screen,
I'll just tell you a little bit of backstory
of what led up to these passages.
So in Genesis chapter 12,
we recall that God made a promise to Abram
saying that he will bless Abram
and have a great nation through him.
And Abram is challenged by that message
because he doesn't have any kids.
And in chapter 15,
he basically had some doubts
because God reaffirmed the promises to Abraham,
but Abram said,
I only have adopted heir, Eliezer.
So I can't build a nation through that, right?
But God reassured him
and in chapter 15, verse 6,
it's a very famous verse.
Abraham believed in God
and it was credited to him as righteousness.
So let's look at what Abram did
after that chapter.
I'll read the first half of Genesis chapter 16.
I'll start from Genesis chapter 16, verse 1.
Now Sarah, Abram's wife,
had borne him no children,
but she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar.
So she said to Abram,
the Lord has kept me from having children.
Go sleep with my slave.
Perhaps I can build a family through her.
Abram agreed to what Sarah had said.
So after Abram had been living in Canaan for 10 years,
Sarah, his wife,
took the Egyptian slave Hagar
and gave her to her husband to be his wife.
He slept with Hagar and she conceived.
When she knew that she was pregnant,
she began to despise her mistress.
Then Sarah said to Abram,
you are responsible for the wrong I am suffering.
I put my slave in your arms
and now that she knows that she is pregnant,
she despises me.
May the Lord judge between you and me.
Your slave is in your hands,
Abram said.
Do with her whatever you think best.
Then Sarah mistreated Hagar,
so she fled from her.
The angel of the Lord found Hagar
near a spring in the desert
and it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur.
And he said,
Hagar, slave of Sarah,
where have you come from
and where are you going?
I'm running from my mistress, Sarah,
she answered.
Then the angel of the Lord told her,
go back to your mistress and submit to her.
The angel added,
I will increase your descendants so much
that there will be too numerous to count.
And we will stop the reading there.
So one of the things that we should notice there
is that God made a promise to Hagar
that a great nation will be also built through her
because she is the wife of Abram.
So if you look at the history of Ishmael
and you look at Islam in particular,
Ishmael is recognised as the forefather of Mohammed.
And Ishmael is head of several Arabian tribes.
So you can actually see from one act of disobedience,
not only did it cause family's drive
between Sarah and Hagar and Abraham,
it actually had a huge impact for the world,
which we experience right now.
Let's read through Genesis chapter 21.
I'll start from the first one again.
Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah,
as he has said,
and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised.
Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham
in his old age.
And at the very time God has promised him,
Abraham gave the name Isaac to the son Sarah bore him.
When his son Isaac was eight days old,
Abraham circumcised him,
as God commanded him.
Abraham was a hundred years old
when his son Isaac was born to him.
Sarah said,
God has brought me laughter,
and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.
And she added,
Who would have said to Abraham
that Sarah would nurse children,
yet I have born him a son in his old age?
The child grew and was weaned.
And on the day that Isaac weaned,
Abraham held a great feast.
But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian
had born to Abraham was mocking.
And she said to Abraham,
Get rid of the slave woman and her son,
for that woman's son will never share
in the inheritance with my son Isaac.
You can see Hagar and Ishmael is driven away once again.
And just as an aside,
before we go back to Galatians,
we actually want to look at this story as a side note.
We can look at the story of Abraham and Sarah.
The Bible isn't ashamed to hide their flaws.
Abraham is the father of many nations,
is called a man of faith.
But yet in these passages,
we can see that Sarah is the one wearing the pants.
She told Abraham what to do.
She told him to sleep with Hagar
and take her as his wife.
And she drove her away
when things didn't work out.
So if you were to write the Bible
of one of your founding fathers,
if I was to write the account,
I would just write all the stuff,
good stuff about him
and just leave out all the bad stuff
because it's embarrassing.
But that's not what the Bible does.
The Bible isn't ashamed to hide these flaws.
And this is one of the many, many factors
that contribute to the historicity
and the realism of the Bible.
So the Bible is true.
So if you have questions about the Bible,
please talk to me or Sam
and one of the other leaders.
And one of the things that you can talk to,
talk to Ko as well.
Ko loves talking about the historicity of the Bible.
I talked to him a few weeks ago.
He talked to me.
I just sat there and listened for
maybe 10 minutes or so.
And I talked to him just before the service
and listened a bit more again.
So he loves to talk about the Bible.
Please ask him.
And he would love to tell you
why the Bible is true.
And throughout the series,
let's go back to Galatians.
Throughout the series,
we've been talking a lot about the false teachers
and what they have done to the Galatians.
But we have not really explored
their cultural heritage or their motives.
So let's borrow from our vision series
and I'll get the AV team to bring up the iceberg.
The iceberg is,
this is one of the things
that hopefully we'll be exploring
in the vision series.
So one can use an iceberg
to represent what people do.
If you see people's behaviour,
it's like the tip of the iceberg.
It's just a tiny, tiny bit of
what makes them tick.
But beneath that,
there are values and worldviews and beliefs.
And it's those things that drive a person.
So if you look at Genesis
and look at the brief snapshot
of what the false teachers are like,
you can sort of basically tell
what they've been doing.
They've been pressuring the Galatians
to circumcise and observe fruit laws.
But let's explore why they do that.
They would have believed
that they were God's chosen people
because they were descended from Abraham.
They are Jews that are circumcised.
Now they have believed in Jesus.
So in some sense,
you can almost imagine them saying
that we are doubly blessed.
We've got the best of the old
and the best of the new.
We've got both mixed together.
So they believe that they've got
a mix of Judaism and Christianity
that they want to tell other people.
They believe that that is the way
to be blessed.
And they don't want the Galatians
to miss out.
They want them to be circumcised
and observe these laws.
And on the flip side,
they would have thought possibly
that those that didn't undergo circumcision
or observe the fruit laws,
they would have been missing out on things,
missing out on God's promises and blessings.
So it is to this background
that Paul is writing to the Galatians.
And the way that he helps them to understand
is to interpret the historical facts
that we have read in Genesis
as an allegory in verses 24 to 27.
So when I heard the word allegory,
I was a little bit shocked
when I first read it
as a Christian about 20 years ago.
Because I've been taught that
the right way to read the Old Testament
is biblical theology.
You have to read the Bible in context
and you have to read the history
and how it's real and fulfilled through Jesus
and how this is real for us now.
But why is Paul using an allegory?
Is he reading the Bible wrong?
So I guess the answer is,
well, it's probably me, not him.
So let's work out what this means for us.
So let's put this allegory together
and compare Hagar and Sarah side by side.
We have two women, Hagar and Sarah.
Two sons, Ishmael and Isaac.
And this is a story we've just read about
in Genesis 16 and 21.
We also have two covenants,
old and new.
And there are two types of people,
slaves and free.
So Paul, if you look at the book of Galatians,
Paul has already touched on
what the old and new covenants are
in Galatians chapters 2 and 3.
The old covenant is for those
that want to be right before God
by observing the law.
And it says in Galatians chapter 2 verse 10
that clearly no one is justified
from observing the law.
In fact, those that are trying
to establish a relationship with God
through the law
are cursed and are slaves to the law.
The new covenant is through Jesus
and what he has done for you on the cross,
which gives us freedom.
So imagine what the Jewish false teachers
would have heard when they heard this allegory.
They would have agreed with all these points.
Yes, Hagar and Sarah,
the first four points,
Ishmael, Isaac,
slave and free,
old and new.
If we were to say that there were two cities,
what would you have thought
their expected answer would be?
They would have expected Paul to say
and there are also two cities,
one in Arabia and one in Jerusalem.
The ones that are from Hagar,
they're outside of God's promise.
Whereas the ones that are descended from Sarah,
they're the ones that are truly God's people.
But that's not what Paul says in this passage.
The last contrast is that
there's the earthly Jerusalem
and the heavenly Jerusalem.
Those people that were the Jewish false teachers
would have been shocked by this comparison.
Because after all,
if you think about their worldview,
if you look at the iceberg,
they would have believed truly about Judaism.
They believe that they are God's people
and they believe they are the free ones,
they're the blessed ones.
But what is Paul saying?
The ones that are observing these laws
are in fact slaves.
They are not God's people.
So that's exactly opposite
of what they were expecting.
Paul is implying that their belief system
is completely false.
And so if we understood this passage properly,
we can see that Paul didn't interpret the Bible wrongly
or forget his biblical theology.
Rather, he's using concepts
that are close to the hearts of these false teachers
and what is said by them probably,
that he's using these concepts
to communicate to the Galatians
and the false teachers
and to tell them that
what the false teachers have been preaching is wrong.
So this is not bad exegesis.
It's not bad understanding of the Bible.
In fact, it's actually good communication.
Paul is using things that are close
to the Jewish people's hearts
and turning it on them
to make them understand the gospel.
So having a look at what it means
for the meaning of the allegory,
let's have a look at what it means for the Galatians.
Paul returns to plain language
in verses 29 to 31.
He's not using the allegory anymore
and he just tells the Galatians plainly what to do.
Paul tells the Galatians
to get rid of the false teachers
and to get rid of the false teachings
that they have been bringing to the Galatians.
He quotes Genesis chapter 21, verse 10,
in verse 30.
Get rid of the slave woman and her son,
for they will never share in the inheritance
with a free woman's son.
We can see that Paul is very serious here.
He doesn't want the Galatians
to mix Judaism and Christianity together.
He doesn't want them to rely on both the law and Christ.
So having had a look at,
had a really brief snapshot
of having a look at what it means for the Galatians,
let's look at what it means for us.
So the way that we can help us
to understand what something is,
is to look at the flip side
and to understand what it is not.
So this passage,
I think one of the things
that it is not telling us to do
is to get rid of our culture completely.
Paul is not saying that
to become a Christian,
you must stop being Chinese or Australian or etc.
I don't know.
Yeah, I should say etc.
But yeah,
Paul is not saying for us
to abandon our culture.
After all,
Galatians chapter 3,
verse 28,
says that there's neither male or female,
Jews or Greek,
slaves or free.
We are all one in Christ Jesus.
We are not to abandon our culture
when we believe in Jesus,
but we are to be joined together as one body.
And it's also not telling us
to abandon our history.
He's not saying that
the old covenant is bad
because it's just old
and the new covenant is good
because it's new.
If that was true,
I think our last series
is not very useful.
We celebrated history.
We celebrated the history
of the Reformation.
We celebrated the gospel truth
that we've been preserving
for the last 500 years.
What this passage is saying though
is there's one encouragement
and one rebuke.
So the encouragement here is that
just like the Galatians,
we are not Jewish,
I don't think.
We don't have a Jewish background.
So what that means is that
just like the Galatians,
if you believe in the gospel,
you can be just like Sarah's children.
You will belong to the heavenly Jerusalem.
You'll be part of God's people
with his blessing.
And I want to expand this point
a little bit more
by telling you of the stories
that I've encountered
when I've been running through
the Investigating Christianity course,
both once there
and I've been running
another instance on Friday nights.
There have been quite a few ESL students
that have been bringing their kids
to Friday youth
and their parents have been hanging around
and they really want to hear the gospel,
which is really great.
That's why I've been running
the course on Friday nights
in the office.
And both the September course
and that one,
most of the people
are from a Chinese background,
from mainland China,
and they have the same question.
We think,
they phrase a question like this.
We think that
the Christian faith
is a Western religion.
We from China
have no exposure to this.
We come from an atheist background
and we have our Buddhism
and Taoism
and Confucianism.
And I think it's just
you have your Christian faith
for the West
and we have our own faith
in the East.
And it's really hard for us
to believe in the gospel.
The encouragement
from this passage
is that
no matter
what your ethnicity
or your background,
the Christian faith
is for you.
All you have to do
is to believe
in what Jesus has done
for you.
So if you want to know more
about what it means
to believe in Jesus,
please talk to me
or put it on the
communication card.
I would love to talk to you
more about this.
And it is that simple.
No matter what your background is,
you can come to know Christ.
With this news,
there's also,
on the flip side,
there's a reminder
and a rebuke.
So one of the things
that Paul reminds the Galatians
to think about
is to get rid of the slave woman
and to get rid of
the false teachings
and the false teachers.
And one of the things
that we can do is,
if you look at the iceberg,
which has always been there,
is that it's easy for us
to have Christian behaviours.
We'll go to church,
we'll go to Bible study,
and we'll pray
and read the Bible.
But sometimes we have to ask us,
what is the worldview
beneath all these things?
We might even have
some of the values,
like core values
in this church,
they're on the wall,
outside the church.
If you're going to pass away,
you'll hear about the core values.
These are important
to our church
and important to us.
But we have to actually ask us,
right at the bottom,
our worldview.
What is real for us?
Because the great danger
is for us
to mix
our Christian faith
with something
that we believe in.
And I'll actually bring
an illustration from,
I've got one from
the Chinese congregation
I used in the morning.
So,
this is a story
about a pastor,
he's a Canadian Chinese,
and his mum
who is involved
in ancestor worship.
And,
actually this is,
like,
the matter of ancestor worship
and paying respect
to the elders
is not that far
from me.
When I do certain ministry
in China
or when I have to go
to funerals
for non-Christians
in Hong Kong,
we will be pressured
to pay respect
to our ancestors
and to worship
ancestors in the past.
So,
this particular pastor
has a mum
and his mum
has lots of,
like,
Chinese idols
and,
like,
a lot of ancestor
worship places.
I'm not sure
whether you've seen them.
The little red things
with the glowing lights
and you put,
like,
rose pig
and oranges
and other things.
And,
she became a Christian
but she didn't want
to get rid of her,
all her idols
and all these
worship places.
And,
she told her son
this story.
Imagine,
if you've known
your old friend
for a long time
and you've met
a new friend
who is better.
Jesus is this
better friend
and,
it would be really
disloyal of you
just to abandon
all your old friends
just because
you've got a
better friend.
the best way
to do it
is to,
why don't you
just spend time
with your old friends
and spend time
with your new friends
and they'll be
all fine.
And,
that's the way
she thought about
Christianity.
And,
although we won't
laugh at this,
we actually need
to ask ourselves,
is Christ
just a little bit
better
on what you rely on?
Or,
is Christ
at the centre
of your world view?
If Christ
is at the centre,
it will affect
everything else
that you will do.
The values
that we have
outside at the church,
it won't be
just
something you put on,
it's not something
that we are asked
to do,
it will be flowing
out of your heart.
If Christ
is at the centre
of your world view,
what is said
in Galatians chapter 2
will be true.
It is not
I that live
but Christ
that lives in me.
If it is true,
our behaviours
isn't just something
that we do
on Sundays.
We wouldn't just
come to church
and at the first second
we will just
dash out the door.
I remember
there was a
traditional church
I went to
about 20 years ago.
The pastor
is just standing
at the door
greeting people.
He's expecting
people to leave.
People are
wanting to get
out of the church
and spending
time to do
their own things.
But if we are
keen for the gospel,
we would want
to encourage
our brothers and sisters.
We would want
to tell people
within church
that doesn't
know the gospel yet
how they can
encounter Jesus.
So I actually
want to ask us,
is there anything
that you are
placing along
with Christ
right at the
bottom of the
iceberg
that is real
for you?
It's not,
you're just thinking
that Christ
is a little bit
better than
what you have
here.
If there is,
Paul would
probably ask you
to do the same
thing.
Get rid of
these things.
Get rid of
these things
so that you
can hold
on to Christ.
Believe in
Christ,
hold on to
Christ so
that the
things that
we value,
the things
that we
believe,
the things
that we
do is
actually
flowing from
what you
hold dear
in your
heart.
And I hope
that God
can help
us to do
that.