The Foundations of Authentic Christianity

I appreciate Eddie for leading our songs this morning and for everyone being here today and Happy New Year to you. It’s 2025 and here we go, January. I think it’s an exciting time and it is the first Sunday of this new year and as we’ve been doing for several years now, we’re going to have a first Sunday theme and that first Sunday theme is going to be Authentic Christianity This idea, this concept of being authentic, you know, this is a big concept in today’s world, and people want to be authentic. They don’t want to be hypocritical. They don’t want to be cringey, sometimes they say today.

You know, they want to try to be their real selves as people express that thought and as they express this idea of being authentic. But you know, a lot of times when people try to be authentic, the word authentic has within it this idea of some kind of standard.

If you have an author, an author is not the book that you’re looking at, it’s the one who wrote. The book. If you are thinking about some authority, for example, there’s another root of this word, authentic, authority. The authority isn’t what you are doing at that moment. It’s another standard that stands beyond the self.

And when we think about authentic Christianity, it’s not just the self or the individual that decides what is authentic. What is authentic comes from what is real, and what is real comes from God, and God tells us what is real within His Holy Word.

And so, there’s a standard for being authentic. We can’t be authentic people unless there’s a standard to which we hold ourselves to be authentic. And so, in this day and time, in the world we live in, a lot of times, people use this word authentic to just mean, Well, I’m being true to myself. I’m being true to my own feelings. I’m being true to my own desires.

But that’s not really being authentic in the terms of being authentic. That may be being very emotional. It may be being very self-centered to some degree, but it’s not authentic. And what we want to understand this term authentic and what it means and specifically what it means in relationship to Christianity.

And so we’re going to be thinking about authentic Christianity this year on our first Sundays of each month and we want to start with and we’re going to be looking at the book of Galatians as we think about authentic Christianity because that’s really in a lot of ways what the book of Galatians was about.

There were some individuals who were trying to change Christianity into something that Christianity was not, and Paul had to step in and write a letter to the churches of Galatia and make it clear that Christianity, in order for it to be authentic, it’s got to be based in Christ, and Christ is the standard for authentic Christianity.

And so we’re going to be studying through the book of Galatians and just thinking about the things that Paul says in that book about what it means to be an authentic Christian. And so we’re going to start this morning with Galatians 1 and verses 1 through 3. He says, It says, Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead.

And all the brethren who are with me, to the churches of Galatia, grace to you and peace from God the Father and of our Lord Jesus Christ, “…who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of God and our Father, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.”

Now there’s a lot to unpack in these three verses beginning here in Galatians chapter 1. Well, first of all, the premise of the book of Galatians is this. There was a problem in the churches of Galatia. There were some who had come in and had decided that they were going to pervert the gospel. And Paul talks about this a little bit later on in Galatians chapter 1 and verses 8 and following.

But we see in the history of the church who this was in Acts chapter 15, that there were certain men who taught the brethren, unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. And they were also saying that it is necessary to circumcise them and to command them to keep the law of Moses.

And so, in essence, what these teachers were doing were saying, you’ve got to go back to the law of Moses if you want to be saved, and you can’t be a faithful Christian unless you do the things under the law of Moses.

And so this was a change in the teaching of Christianity. It was not the idea of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, but rather returned to the Mosaic law. Well, many Christians in the churches of Galatia were taken with this teaching, and so the Apostle Paul needed to write a letter to make it clear what authentic Christianity was, that it was not the law of Moses. It wasn’t keeping the law of Moses.

You didn’t have to be circumcised to be saved, and many other things he says in the book of Galatians, but the primary issue here that we’re going to get into this morning is this idea of who is the standard. Who is going to be the standard for authentic Christianity? And why do we need to talk about authentic Christianity in that regard?

Well, you know, think about, for example, an old building maybe that’s dilapidated and run down, and you think, well, you know, I need to restore this building. It is in trouble. It’s going to be dissolved, destroyed if I don’t do anything about it. And so, what do you do to restore an old building?

Well, you’ve got to go back to the blueprints, right? You’ve got to go back to the drawing board and find what this building was made for, what its purpose was. You’ve got to go in and get the original materials and bring them back in so that you can reestablish the walls, the flooring, the ceiling, the roof, and all of those things.

To restore means to go back to the original in some way, right? And that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about authentic Christianity, and when we do that, when we go back to the original, sometimes, you know, we’ve got to go back and find the design. We’ve got to find the plans.

We’ve got to know what the architect was trying to accomplish. And when we can do that, then we can restore a building to its authentic self, to its authentic design, to its authentic shape and purpose. And that’s the idea here, that over the years, over the centuries and millennia, Christianity has been tampered with. It’s become dilapidated in a lot of ways in the world.

And what is our task then, as far as the application of Christianity is concerned, to our lives and to our communities? It’s to restore what God originally intended. It’s to return to the purpose, and the purposes that God has for our lives.

Jesus said this in Luke chapter 8 and verse 11, the seed is the Word of God. And what does He mean by that? He means that we’ve got to start with this. We’ve got to start with the Word of God. We’re not going to go anywhere if we don’t begin with what God has revealed in His Holy Scripture.

And that’s the source. That’s the origin. Just like you have a seed, and that seed has all of the information within it that it needs to produce a plant of some sort, whether it be an apple seed to produce an apple tree, or a peach seed to produce a peach tree, or whatever seed might be out there.

It’s going to produce the kind of plant that it’s designed to produce. When that seed, that original seed, is placed in the ground, fertilized, watered, it will make what God intended it to make. And so also with the Word of God, it’s like a seed. When we put this in our lives and in our hearts, it will make what God intends it to make. And that’s authentic Christianity. That’s what we’re talking about this morning, authentic Christianity.

So this morning, I’d like for us to think about the foundations of Christianity and thinking about how today, in the world, there’s a lot of different foundations that men are trying to build on. But to be an authentic Christian, we’ve got to go back to the foundations of authentic Christianity.

And that’s where we start here in Galatians 1, almost at the outset, you know, one of the very first things that Paul says here is, it’s not from men. Look at that again. Paul, an apostle, not from men, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead.

Now, Paul’s talking about his apostleship here, that it was not from men, it’s not through man, it’s from Jesus Christ. But you know, that’s the same perspective that we’ve got to take regarding our Christianity and how we’re going to live our lives. You know, the foundations of authentic Christianity are not from men.

And he even makes that point a little bit further on in the chapter. This is to say that the bottom line is this, that we as human beings are not the solution. Men are always trying to insert their own ideas and their own think-sos in place of God’s. And this happens on multiple levels.

You know, it can be as high up of a level as changing the words of the Bible, as we know some men have done. It can be as low of a level, on a personal level, as saying, well, I don’t think I really need to do this particular thing the Bible tells me to do. Okay? The effect of it is the same. Whether you’re taking the Word of God and changing it and then disseminating that out, or whether you’re just reading the Word of God and saying, well, I know that’s what God’s Word says, but I’m not going to do it.

The effect is the same. You move away from authentic Christianity. You substitute some other standard than God for what is right and wrong. Now, Paul says this in verses 11 and 12. He says, But I make known to you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man, for I neither received it from man nor was I taught it, but it came through the Revelation of Jesus Christ. Not according to man, not from man.

In fact, it seems very clear to me that if man were to invent a gospel, it wouldn’t be the gospel that you read about in the scriptures, you know. There would be all kinds of additional things and new things and different things and things that very well don’t occur in scripture, you know, because that’s how man is. He wants his way.

And so it should be obvious that the gospel is not from man. But what does that mean for us? It means that I’ve got to acknowledge my relationship with the gospel and recognize its authority over my life. Jeremiah 10, verse 23, Jeremiah wrote this. He said, He said, Oh Lord, I know the way of man is not in himself. It is not in man who walks to direct his own steps.

And he had figured that out way back, you know, several hundred years before the gospel came that man does not have the answers. Man does not have the solutions to the greatest of life’s problems. Regardless of what men want to say, they haven’t come up with the answers.

Jesus said this in Matthew 15 and verses 8 and 9. Even when men try to cooperate with God, they go astray because they end up changing what God says for their own inventions. Jesus said, these people draw near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

And in vain they worshiped Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. And that’s the whole problem. That men decide that their own think-sos, their own commandments, their own traditions, their own desires, are a suitable replacement for God. And that’s not the case. It’s never been the case, and it never will be the case.

But then, you know, thinking about this from a high level, but then let’s think about it from a lower level, too, from my own personal perspective. Because really, it’s more personal than just the idea that some other man out there would replace God’s Word with his own thinking or his traditions.

It’s about how I apply the Word of God to my life. I can do the same thing on a personal level. Postmodernism has elevated the desires of self above everything else. And that’s why we hear people talking about being an authentic person today. What they really mean when they use that buzzword is, why? Just take your own self-desires and your own self-attitudes and whatever you feel and shout that out to everyone who’s out there. And so you see, you know, in the news and other places, people out there just screaming their heads off because that’s how they feel and they’re going to express that, you know.

And so many troubles and problems and riots, these all come not from God, but from people’s emotional state of being. Well, the Bible says that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, Jeremiah 17 and verse 9.

And what does that mean? That means that on a personal level, I can’t let my own feelings And my own opinions and my own personal attitudes, those cannot be what make me an authentic person or an authentic Christian. In fact, just the opposite. The Bible is teaching us that those things that come from within us, that those are the things that have pulled us away from God.

They’ve taken us away from being an authentic person and an authentic Christian. In Proverbs 3, verses 5 through 7, we read, “…trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not to your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes. Fear the Lord and depart from evil.”

And that’s the problem right there. We want to be wise in our own eyes. We want to say, I have the answer. I have the solution. I know what’s best for me. No one else can tell me what to do. And that is such a lie. We don’t have the answers. We don’t have the solutions. We actually need someone else to tell us what to do. And that someone else is the Lord.

And so when we talk about authentic Christianity, it doesn’t come from men. Neither I, nor you, nor anyone else can make Christianity authentic. Where does it have to come from? It has to come through Jesus Christ. He’s got to be that pattern or that blueprint that we follow so that we can be authentic, true to who God made us to be.

That’s what real authentism is, you know, being authentic to ourselves. That’s really what that is. And who is this Jesus Christ? First of all, He was raised from the dead. Now this is evidence to us. God is giving us evidence that Jesus Christ is His man. And He’s telling us that because He raised Him from the dead, He wants Him to be the standard for what it means to be an authentic person and an authentic Christian.

In 1 Corinthians 15, 3 through 8, there Paul wrote these words, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. He was buried and that He rose again the third day. And then he tells us who saw Jesus after He was raised from the dead. Peter, and the twelve apostles, and 500 at once, and then James.

And then also he says, I saw Him personally. These are eyewitnesses to Christ’s resurrection and they’re saying that this wasn’t just an imagination of something that happened. It actually happened. It really did occur. Jesus really was raised by God from the dead and He appeared to all these people. That’s God’s putting His stamp of approval.

On Jesus Christ. Paul said in Acts 2 and verse 36, because of that evidence, let all the house of Israel know surely that God made this same Jesus whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ. God is placing His stamp of approval on Jesus. He’s the standard. He’s the one that we need to follow. He’s the one that we must order our lives after.

Acts 17, 30 and 31, same message. Times of ignorance, God overlooked. But now He commands all men everywhere to repent. And what authority is He giving to command them? Think about what He says here at the end of this. He says, Because He has appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead. The resurrection is proof that Jesus is God’s man. Jesus is God’s authority. And He is the one we need to follow.

But you see, Jesus has authority because God raised Him from the dead, but also because of what Jesus did and how He lived His life. He died for our sins, according to the Scriptures. He was raised from the dead, Galatians 1 here says, but then He also gave Himself for us. He gave Himself for us.

Now, we recognize that when someone gives us something or does something special for us, what does that say about them? It says, well, they’re really trying to be a good person. They’re really trying to be authentic. They’re really trying to do what God wants them to do. And we recognize that and we, well, thank you so much for this gift that you’ve given me. Thank you for helping me with whatever it is that I needed help with.

And we overflow with gratitude when someone does something for us. Well, Jesus has done more than anyone else. He gave Himself for our sins. He died for our sins. 1 Corinthians 15 and verse 3 says, 1 Peter 2 and verse 24 says, He says, “…who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness, by whose stripes you were healed.” And when we think about what Jesus did for us, how He gave Himself, that gives Him the authority to be the standard for authentic Christianity.

Isaiah 53, verses 5 and 6 says that He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. We have turned everyone to His own way. And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. We can’t do it. We’re not the standard.

Jesus Christ is the standard. And so, Peter said in Acts 4, 10, 11, “…Let it be known to you all and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by Him this man stands here before you whole, this is the stone which the builders rejected, which has become the chief cornerstone.”

Jesus now stands as the standard. It is through Him that we experience Christianity. It is for this purpose that we might be delivered or rescued from this evil age. And let’s not kid ourselves when we talk about the world and what goes on in the world around us. And even in our own desires, we can be very worldly.

There is nothing out there in this world that is going to benefit us or that is going to be good for us from a spiritual perspective so that we can depend upon it, trust it, and let it be what guides us.

I love that song that Eddie led right before our lesson. You know, all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand. That’s what we’re talking about. Jesus rescues us from that sinking sand. He rescues us from a world that is corrupt and deceiving.

And that wants to take us and our families and our children and just run them through a sieve and turn them into what it is that the world desires of them. And it ends in destruction. It ends in sorrow. It ends in misery, all kinds of problems.

And we’ve got to come out of that and let Jesus be our standard. He delivers us from this present evil age. Now, the truth is, is that there’s evil in each one of us. Just like we read a moment ago in Isaiah 53, verse 6, all we like sheep have gone astray and we have turned everyone to his own way.

Think about 1 John 3 and verse 4. Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness. And sin is lawlessness. In the world that we live in, we need to be saved from this world. That’s what Peter said. Save yourselves from this crooked generation. James wrote, Adulterers and adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to make a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

We cannot be deceived by this thought that the world is going to somehow save us, the government is going to save us, that other people are going to save us. It is not going to work out that way. It never has, and it never will.

Just look at history. Look at what mankind has done in the history of this world, and you will see that will never take place. We’ve got to come out of the world. We’ve got to come out of the deceptions of the world.

We can’t pretend that the world is some good place where we can just kind of get along, go along and get along. We can’t pretend that. It’s not going to bring any good thing to us. That’s what Paul says here, 1 Corinthians 15, 33, Do not be deceived. Evil company corrupts good habits. Think about Titus 2, 11 through 14.

The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness And worldly lusts, we’ve got to deny that. We should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works.

We need to be purified. We need to come out from the world and come in to Christ. In Titus 3, verses 3 through 6, Paul wrote, For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. Now there’s the real description of the world right there. That’s the way the world really behaves. Right there. Don’t look at the facade, don’t look at the veneer and say, oh, that’s the real world. It’s not. Here’s a description of the real world, but when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy, He saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit whom He poured out on us abundantly, Through Jesus Christ, our Savior. It’s always Jesus or the world. They never go together. You can’t have both. We’ve got to make a choice. And if we will trust in Jesus, then He will deliver us from this present evil age.

And so here’s the foundation of authentic Christianity. It’s not man. It’s not you. It’s not me. It’s not this present evil age. It’s just Jesus Christ. And to get back to Jesus Christ, we’ve got to get back to the Word that He left us. Study it, know it, and apply it to our lives.

Now, we’ll have more to say about authentic Christianity as we go forward because Paul has more to say about it in the book of Galatians. And so we’re not going to stop our discussion here, but we will go forward. But let’s just, for this moment, rest on this truth that Jesus Christ is the standard. In order for us to be authentic Christians, we’ve got to go back to it.

Back to Him and to His teaching and to His Word. Maybe this morning you want to do that for your life on a very personal level. Maybe you recognize, yes, as far as the standard goes, Jesus Christ is the standard. But what does that mean for you? What does that mean for me personally?

Well, for me to be an authentic Christian, I’ve got to give my life to Christ. Paul said, I’m crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me. The life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave His life for me. That’s in Galatians 2, 21, the same book that we’ll be studying. To be an authentic Christian, we’ve got We’re not to let Christ lead our life. And that begins by identifying with Him in baptism, putting Him on, Galatians 3, 27, there’s authentic Christianity working, and becoming one with Christ.

Maybe you need to do that this morning through hearing His Word and believing it, repenting of your sins, confessing Him as Lord, and being baptized. We’d be happy to help you to become one with Christ, part of His body, the church, and start practicing authentic Christianity in your life.

If that’s your need this morning, we’ll be happy to help you. While together we stand and while we sing.

End of transcript. Thank you for reading along!