Before we get to today's episode, I want to invite you to Ligonier's 2026 National Conference, happening on April 9th through 11th. Gather with thousands in Orlando, Florida to hear gifted Bible teachers address fundamental questions facing Christians today, questions about God, our identity, and life in an increasingly hostile society. Go to Ligonier.org slash 2026 to register and learn more. When you draw life's last fleeting breath and your eyelids are closed in death, you will not suddenly become unconscious or annihilated or swallowed up in oneness in the ocean. You will awake in the next second and face your maker. And that reality should cause us to stop and think. Are we prepared to meet our maker? If you're not sure, please request RC Sproul's free e-book, What is the Gospel, at renewingyourmind.org slash gospel. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham and welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Today, we're beginning a short sermon series in Galatians chapter 4. I remember hearing these messages preached when Dr. Sproul was my pastor. Well, all of those messages from the entirety of Galatians were brought together to form his commentary on Galatians. And we'll send you a hardcover edition when you give a donation in support of this daily outreach at renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. Well, if you have your Bible, open it to Galatians chapter 4 because here's Dr. Sproul. I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything. But he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way, we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of this world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. What a glorious passage this is, summarizes the very essence of the gospel. And this is not simply the opinion of the apostle Paul in the first century. This is the Word of God. Please receive it as such. I think of the 18th century, the advent of what was called the Alph-Clarone in Germany, the Enlightenment, and it spread to France and the rest of Europe and then crossed the seas to America. But in that so-called discovery of Enlightenment, though it was not a monolithic position held by all the philosophers of that day, the basic point of the Enlightenment was this. Now we know through the advances of science that the idea of God is not a necessary concept in order to explain the origin of the universe or the origin of human life. We know now in our sophisticated scientific understanding in the 18th century that all these things came to pass through spontaneous generation. These were intelligent men, brilliant men, but what they were teaching was nuts, pure nonsense. Rather than an essay of a scholar, a Nobel Prize-winning scholar from the West Coast who said, we can no longer believe scientifically in the concept of spontaneous generation. We have to modify that concept and speak of gradual spontaneous generation. We went from nuts to nuttier, and it's one thing to have spontaneous generation, which the more recent scientists said, you can't have that. Things don't just pop into being out of nothing like a rabbit out of a hat. If you want to have spontaneous generation, you have to have it gradually. You have to be patient. You have to wait for it. Well, if you're going to wait for something to pop into being on its own steam, you're going to wait a long, long time. But in any case, the 18th century Enlightenment had a far greater impact on American culture as we experienced it today than does the results of the impact of the Protestant Reformation. If for no other reason, then what followed in the wake of the Enlightenment was a whole new theology based upon an attempt to make a synthesis between Enlightenment naturalism and Christianity. And that was birth, again in Germany in the 19th century, and we speak of 19th century liberalism. And the basic credo of 19th century liberalism was this, that we have to get rid of all aspects of supernaturalism and historic Christianity. The miracles of Jesus gone. The virgin birth gone. The transfiguration, it's gone. The substitutionary atonement, that's gone. Of course, the resurrection is gone. The ascension is gone. And there's no hope of any return of a dead Jesus who remains a corpse buried somewhere in hidden in Palestine. And so the immediate problem that 19th century liberals has is, well, what do we do with the church? Because the church has been built upon 1900 years of conviction of supernatural events. One pastor and theologian of the days, named was Beerson, said, well, what we need to do is be honest and close the church doors because the church is committed to something that's out of date, antiquated, and no longer tenable. And the other men said, wait, wait, wait a minute. You know, all we're trained to do is be preachers and we've invested billions of dollars in these great edifices that go throughout the land of Europe, the wonderful cathedrals and art and all of that stuff. So we can't get rid of it. We just need to change it. And as they were looking around for ways to change it, one of the most insightful church historians of all time, Adolf von Harnack, wrote a book called The Vazen or the Being or the Essence of Christianity, in which he tried to reduce the bare minimum of Christian religion to its most basic substance, its being and essence. And he said historically that the real essence of Christianity can be summed up in two principles, the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. He said, now we can have a truly humanitarian religion based upon a new gospel, which was called a social gospel that addresses the fundamental needs of humanity. Under that great umbrella of the universal truths of the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man, the problem with that of course is that the Bible doesn't teach the universal fatherhood of God, nor does it teach the universal brotherhood of man. However, I dare to guess that every one of you in this room was raised in a culture that assumed the truth of those two premises, the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of men. When I say the Bible doesn't teach this, there's one remote passage, for example, when Paul's at Mars, and he's debating with the philosophers, the Epicureans, and the Stoics, and he saw an older to an unknown God, and he declared that unknown God to them in power, and he quoted one of the poets. He says, even your poets are saying that we're all God's offspring. Well, in that sense, you can talk about the universal fatherhood of God in the sense that every human being is a result of God's creation. We're all creatures under God, but the idea or the metaphor of fatherhood in the Bible is not something that's universal, but rather is particular. To be a child of God is an exclusive privilege reserved only for those who are believers in Christ. And likewise, the Bible doesn't teach the universal brotherhood of man. It teaches the universal neighborhood of man, where we are to consider everybody around us in the whole world to be our neighbors, not simply if they just live next door, but if they live anywhere in the world, they are our neighbors, and we are to love them as we love ourselves. So the Bible has a lot to say about how we treat our neighbors. But brotherhood? No, the brotherhood is a unique, special relationship reserved for those who are adopted into the family of God. By nature, God has one Son. He's introduced to us on the pages of Scripture as the monogonace, the only begotten Son of the Father. And yet the most wonderful thing that we've heard in this passage today is that this one Son has untold brothers and sisters who are adopted into the Father's family. Let's look at the text. Paul says, I mean, explaining on what was said earlier in chapter 3, Calvin had apoplexy about these chapter divisions here. He said, how in the world could somebody start a new chapter here? When Paul wrote these letters, he didn't write verse 1, chapter 1, verse 2. There weren't any versifications or chapter divisions. These were read as an entire epistle to congregations. But in any case, we read, I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, yet he is the owner of everything. This is an incredible statement. But it's one that's tied so closely to everything Paul's been expanding on with respect to our relationship to the Father as adopted children and the relationship of the law that was given to be a tutor or guardian to the people of God until the covenant of promise was fulfilled in Christ. And he's addressing this to those Galatians who have fallen away from the gospel as we know. But what Paul is explaining here is he said, an heir. Let's speak metaphorically here. As long as an heir is a child, he's no different from a slave. What? The slaves are working in the kitchen. They're working outside on the grounds. They clean the house and they involve in all kinds of labor. It differentiates them from the children of the estate. Paul says, well, there's still children. Well, you were still children. You weren't any different from a slave. How could that be? He says, because you haven't received your inheritance. The big difference between you and a slave is that you were mentioned in your father's will, but the slave isn't. And as long as that will has not been executed, in the meantime, you might as well be a slave. Why? Because you're still under a guardian. You're still under that tutor. He goes on to say, he is under the guardian and managers until there is a terminal point when you graduate from being a slave or a child to the status of being an heir. And when is that day? He's saying here that the day that you become an heir is the day that your father determines. And not one second before, we know the story in the New Testament of the prodigal son. He was impatient. He didn't want to wait until the appointed day when his inheritance would be realized. Rather, he goes to his father and he said, let me have my inheritance now. I don't want to wait till I'm too old to be able to enjoy it. Let me have it now. The father said, okay. And you know the rest of the story. As soon as that son got his hands on the money, he left his father's house, went into a far country where no one knew him, no one could accuse him, and he lived a life of riotous, sensuous behavior. Until he ran out of money, the inheritance was gone, and he started to live with the pigs. Again, you know the story. But it was a story about one who was prodigal, one who squandered an inheritance. I think Paul goes on. In the same way also, we were children. We were slaves or enslaved by the elementary principles of this world, enslaved by the powers of the air, enslaved by our sin, enslaved by all of these things. And yet we speak again of time where the Apostle says, but when the fullness of time had come. And the Greek, he says, when the play Roma took place. I love that word. I've talked about it before. When it talks about the fullness of time, I like to use an illustration of a glass. You get a glass and you put it under the spigot, and you take and fill the glass halfway full. That's not play Roma. And if you fill that glass to the very top where there's not a centella of space left in it, it's still not play Roma. You have to leave that glass under the faucet until the glass cannot contain it, and the water starts flowing over the sides. That's play Roma. That's the fullness of time, the time that is so pregnant, it is so ripe that it will be burst if we wait another second. And what Paul is saying is where the fullness of time came in all of human history, not one second late, not one second early. The fullness of time had come. God sent forth his Son into the world. And we had the wonderful chorus this morning of the musical version of the statement of faith on Christology, which is desperately needed in our time that the church may once again affirm now and forever the person and work of Christ, the one who was truly man and truly God, two natures in one person, the accomplice for us, our salvation. That didn't happen as an accident. It didn't happen as plan B where God looked down at things going progressively worse in the first century and says, ah, maybe it's time for me to do something. I've got an idea. I decide to send my Son into the world to be incarnate and to redeem my people from the curse. No, from all eternity, the date of the birth of Jesus was on the calendar of God. And he came just as Paul warned in Acts 17. We said, the former days of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent. Why? Because the Scripture says because God has appointed a day in which he will judge the world by one who will be the Holy and Righteous Judge who he has vindicated by raising him from the dead. He has appointed a day of judgment and he has appointed the judge. And that day can never be moved back or forward in history. Now, you live in a culture that for the most part does not believe that there ever will be a judgment day. All you have to do to be justified before God in this day and age is to die because we assume that everything gets better. I've almost finished a almost 2,000 page biography of Frank Sinatra, one of the most corrupt men that ever walked the face of the earth. And you get the end of the book, the last chapter. There's a picture of Sinatra's tombstone, Francis Albert Sinatra, and it gives the dates and so on and on top, and it says, the best is yet to come. I almost cried when I saw that. Now, I believe in last minute conversions, it was possible for Sinatra, the best is yet to come, but I wouldn't count on it. But he assumed that there was no real judgment day. We're not really held up accountable. He did it his way and we applaud that. And again, the Scriptures tell us it is appointed once for man to die and then the judgment. When you draw life's last fleeting breath and your eyelids are closed in death, you will not suddenly become unconscious or annihilated or swallowed up in oneness in the ocean. You will awake in the next second and face your maker. There's no one person in a hundred that really believes that today. We do everything in our power to get rid of the idea that we're going to be accountable for how we have lived our lives, what we have done, what we have left undone, that make no mistake about it. God is appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness. But in the fullness of time, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law. That's the critical point, to redeem everyone who was under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons and daughters, children of God. And because your son's God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, in order to be part of the family of God, we have to have the spirit of God changing our hearts until we cry, Abba, Father. We assume that without realizing at all what it means to be able to say that, to be able to get on our knees and say, our Father, Jesus had this debate with the Pharisees, you know, and they didn't believe in Jesus, and Jesus said they needed to be free. And the Pharisee says, what are you talking about free? We're not slaves. We're the children of Abraham. We're the children of God. Oh, Jesus said, you are of your Father, the devil. Everybody in this room by nature is a child of wrath. Do you believe that? Every one of us, when we came into this world, we were born under the wrath of God, under the law of God, until the curse was removed and we were adopted into God's family, the most precious and beautiful event of our life. And so he ends his passage by saying, so, what does it mean? It means you're no longer a slave, but a son, and by extension a daughter. And if sons and daughters then heirs through God. The right response to the gospel proclaimed is for sinners to repent and trust in Christ's finished work on the cross. And the promise is that those who believe will be adopted as sons and daughters of God. We truly have heard great news today on renewing your mind as we begin our time in R.C. Sproul's sermon series in Galatians chapter 4. Studying God's word is vital to our growth as believers. Romans 15 says that whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope. So I encourage you to respond today to request Dr. Sproul's commentary on Galatians so you can spend time slowly working through this important New Testament letter from the apostle Paul. When you give a donation at renewingyourmind.org, we'll send the hardcover volume to you as our way of saying thank you. Every gift, large or small, keeps renewing your mind on the airwaves and on devices around the world. Simply give your gift before midnight tonight at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes. And if you live outside of the U.S. and Canada, the e-book edition is waiting for you so you can take all of this study material with you on the go. Visit renewingyourmind.org-global to request your copy today. Another simple way to show your support is to subscribe to the official Renewing Your Mind YouTube channel. When you subscribe to the channel and like and comment on each day's video, you help push this teaching to more and more people. Plus, you'll get to see behind the scenes with me here in the studio. Thank you for all the ways that you encourage and support renewingyourmind. Next time, R.C. Sproul continues his line-by-line study of Galatians 4 and will learn that returning to the Old Covenant is not the path to salvation. So hope you'll join us for that message next Sunday here on Renewing Your Mind.
