The Taste of Blessing: Until Christ Is Formed In You

 June 8 2025

Galatians 4:8-20

         As a church we follow a different calendar which covers roughly the whole arc of God’s salvation. Last week was the last week of Eastertide, the forty day period when Luke records that the risen Christ taught his followers about the kingdom of God. The end of Eastertide is marked by the ascension of Christ. Now, I find it interesting that we, as evangelical Christians do not see Christ’s ascension as a holy day as the Amish and Mennonite communities do. This is one of those traditions that often catch tourists off guard, and if they went to Amish country on May 29^th, they would have gotten a surprise when everything was closed. Yet, at least these communities are reminded yearly that Jesus Christ has ascended to the right hand of the Father. We need to know the importance of this day because Jesus told his disciples that he was being carried into heaven in order to send the promise of the Father upon us, to clothe us with power from on high as recorded in the twenty-fourth chapter of Luke.

         Today, is the day when we celebrate that the promise of the Father was indeed sent to us, when at last the followers of Christ were clothed with power from on high. This day is called Pentecost, because this outpouring from heaven happened as the people of Israel were celebrating this festival. The name, “Pentecost”, refers to the festival happening fifty days after the celebration of Passover, “pente” meaning fifty in the Greek.This festival marked the beginning of the harvest of the wheat crop when the faithful would come to Jerusalem with the first fruits of their harvest to offer them to God as the Law required them to do. So it should come as no surprise that God would choose just such a day to send the Holy Spirit so that the first fruits of his kingdom might be brought before him. Many times Pentecost is referred to as the birthday of the church. So our church calendar is marked by two birthdays, one, the birth of Jesus, and the second is the birth of his bride, the church.

         Now when we hear that phrase, “the birth of the church”, just what does this mean? There seems to be just as much mystery in who the Holy Spirit is as there is in understanding who we are, the church that has come forth because the promise of the Father has been given to us, the power from on high is now clothing all of us. In our day, the church is what happens every Sunday when people get up and go to a building and sit often in the most uncomfortable seating, to sing songs and listen to a half-hour lecture about Jesus which makes the listeners so hungry that they rush from the service to be the first in line for lunch. I hope, by now, that most people realize that the church is not about the building which we often call a church. No, the church is not a steeple, the church is a people, for I am the church and you are the church, all who follow Jesus all around the world, we are the church together. Yet, is it just enough for us to be people who sit in a certain building for an hour in order for us to be the church. I mean, if you sit in a garage does this make you a car? No, there must be more to being the church than singing all the right songs, saying all the right things, listening for as long as possible and going home. As it turns out there is something more that is expected of us who say that we follow Jesus. At least this is what should be obvious to us when Paul tells his church, in todays scripture, that he is in anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in them. Can you hear the importance of Christ being somehow born in us? If such an experience was so important to Paul, then I believe it has to be this important to us as well. We  might even want to go so far to say that the church is not born until Christ is born in us.

         As Paul is writing this letter to the churches in the region of Galatia, he makes this idea of Christ being in us a steady drumbeat all the way through. He begins in the first chapter by telling us, in the sixteenth verse, that God has called Paul by his grace and it pleased God to reveal his Son in Paul. Then in the twentieth verse of the second chapter we hear this oft quoted scripture, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the Son of God , who loved me and gave himself for me.” As we read this we can sense that Paul is testifying to a deeper experience of knowing Christ, one which he desires all who follow Jesus to know for themselves.

         Now when we get to the third chapter we find that Paul introduces the patriarch of the Jewish faith, Abraham because he was the one who was first declared righteous by God because of the faith he had placed in God.Yet, Paul speaks about Abraham not just for his faith but also for being the one through whom the blessings of God would go out into the nations. This message is one Paul could say was God preaching his good news right from the very beginning. Paul explains, here in the middle of the third chapter of Galatians, that we all used to live under the curse of the law but,”…Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us by dying upon a cross so that the blessing of Abraham might come to all the world, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” So what the Father has promised to us is the Spirit, the one through whom all of the blessings might go out to all the world. Here we need to pause just to figure out just what is this blessing that God desire to give to everyone? One of the best definitions of being blessed is found in the sixth chapter of the book of Hebrews, where we are told that to be blessed is to finally know what God is up to, it is to taste the heavenly gift, being able to share life with the Holy Spirit; it is to taste the goodness of the word of God and to taste the powers of the age to come. The writer is obviously taking off where the thirty-fourth Psalm left off because in the eighth verse, we read, “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the one who takes refuge in him!…those who seek the Lord lack no good thing”. Blessed means that the goodness of God is not just some biblical definition but rather the goodness of God is a wonder for us to taste and experience for ourselves.

         It is just this experience that Paul is afraid that this church at Galatia is in danger of losing out on. We hear his anguish in our scripture for today where Paul tells them that now that they have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how could they turn back to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world all to end up becoming a slave to such things. Paul wonders, what happened to the blessing that this church had received? Perhaps this blessing seemed too good to be true, but for whatever reason, this church had become convinced by some spiritual con artists that keeping the law was still necessary for those who found faith in Jesus Christ. Paul, right at the beginning of this letter, tells this church that what they have come to place their faith in was some other gospel, some other means of salvation not based on the promise God had made to Abraham. Now, this idea that there might be some other gospel that people would be attracted to should grab our attention because such goofy gospels still exist. People run after the good news that says that following Jesus will make you rich but the true gospel says that we have received a blessing in order to bless others, not ourselves. Or some believe that the good news is that if we follow Jesus then God will make us a great nation but the good news that speaks of blessing others says that these blessings will go out to every family on earth no matter what nation they live in; this is the true good news of Jesus Christ. The mark of these false gospels is that they always create division. At the churches in Galatia, their false gospel caused separation between those who thought salvation is by following the rules and those following the ways of blessing. The reason why people become susceptible to false gospels is that they have stopped short in receiving all of the fullness of blessing that the Holy Spirit desired for them. You see, the depth of the blessing of God is when the Spirit brings the life of Christ to be lived within the life of one who has found faith in Christ alone. When one allows the Spirit to lead them, this is when they will be led to discover and know God through the experiences they have with God, tasting and finding that God is indeed good.

         So again, on this the birthday of the church, it must be said that the church is not born until Christ is born in us, the church. The reason we must insist that this is true is that as Paul points out to the churches in Galatia, if Christ has not been formed in us, those who are the church, then the church is susceptible to chase after other gospels. And here is the bottom line: The church without the one, true gospel ceases to be the church, it’s as simple as that. The church that is born at Pentecost is in danger of dying unless it insists that Christ be born in those who are the church. This is the truth that the Spirit reveals to us because the Holy Spirit did not just move there on Pentecost setting the church in motion but the Spirit from that moment on was always leading every generation through the wilderness of this life in preparation of the life to come. Perhaps when Paul spoke of the Spirit’s leading he thought of the image found in the sixty-third chapter of Isaiah, where the prophet remembers how in the days of Moses, God put his Holy Spirit in the midst of of his people. Isaiah writes, “Like livestock that go down in the valley, the Spirit of the Lord gave them rest. So, you, O God, led your people, to make for yourself a glorious name.” The implication here, is that the glory of God is tied to his ability to lead his people to a place of rest, a place where they would at last cease to always be striving in unbelief and at last abide in confidence that comes from knowing the goodness of God.  

         So, yes the church is born when the promised Spirit is given to us when Christ has ascended to his throne. The Spirit descends to us so that through his leading, the authority and dominion of Christ evident in the heavens above might at last be seen in us here on earth. This is why Paul insists that Christ must not just be claimed to be alive by us but instead, Christ has to be alive in us for this is the very promise of the Father. How can we not allow Christ to be Lord over us as he lives in us when we remember the wonder of his love for us, his giving to us his very life as an act of the greatest love of all. 

         Those who are the church would most likely believe in all Paul is saying but what is difficult for most people is, just how do we become those who can join Paul in testifying that we have been crucified with Christ, that it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me? The answer, strangely enough is found in this beautiful expression of Paul who speaks of the fruit of the Spirit. You see, people love this image of fruit, spiritual fruit, virtues that are in some way the result of the work of the Holy Spirit. What people don’t love though, is figuring out how this fruit connects with this issue Paul is dealing with in this letter. It is easy, and very tempting to cut this section out of this letter so that we no longer see that here is the answer Paul is giving to them in order that Christ might be formed in them. I believe that this fruit of the Spirit is the experience of tasting and seeing that the Lord is good in a multiple of ways. As the Spirit begins to lead us we will discover all of these different attributes which make up the complex flavor of the goodness of God. The journey, of course begins with love, because love is this, that God first loved us. It makes sense that our first experience will be that we know God as not just the one who loves us but rather we are to know God as being love in all of its fullness. 

         The Holy Spirit, then, leads us through the wilderness of this life and along the way, we are led to different experiences where we are blessed by God. Through that blessing of God we not only know God but we know God as being for us love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This last experience, often called self-control, is the part of this fruit which proves that this work of the Spirit is indeed tied to all the rest of what Paul is writing about in this letter. When self-control is ripped from the context of this letter, it can be defined many different ways but when this word is taken down to the original Greek, what we discover is that it means the dominion in us. This word that means, “dominion”, is found at the end of the word, “democracy”. This part, “cracy”, means dominion, so that democracy is dominion, or government, by the people. So to have dominion within us surely must be understood that the one who has been given all dominion, this one called Christ, is found to be in us. It is this last experience found by following the Spirit through the wilderness of this world, this is the experience that Paul insists that this church desperately is in need of, to have the dominion of Christ found to be alive in them. Without this experience of being governed by the inner work of Christ in us we are at risk of being governed by every whim and every other gospel that people insist that we obey. We will be, as Paul told the church at Ephesus in the fourth chapter, “…children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.” As Paul insists, we must be willing to grow up and allow Christ to be the dominion within us.

         As intimidating as this sounds, the good news is that Christ knows our frame, being one of us. So, when we go to his one true gospel, we discover that his core teachings deal with blessing, as they should do. The very first core teaching of Jesus from which everything else flows out of, begins, “Blessed are…” In the fifth chapter of Matthew we find this teaching of Jesus which begins, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God.” This is where the leading of the Holy Spirit begins, with us spiritually poor and God with all the riches of his kingdom. What is our experience when the God who holds all the cards comes to us and offers us the entirety of his kingdom even though he is aware that there is absolutely nothing we can do to be worthy of such an offer? What we should come away with is that this God who has found us is a God who profoundly loves us. This is what we are going to look at next week in this series of messages on the fruit of the Spirit, called “The Taste of Blessing”. Each subsequent blessing will have a different experience as we find listed in Paul’s description of the fruit of the Spirit. This is the way that the church is born of the Spirit, following his lead until Christ is born in us because we know without a doubt that the church is not born until Christ is born in us. Amen!