Galatians Series and Our 25th Anniversary

I am preaching three messages from the book of Galatians over the next few weeks as our church approaches and celebrates our 25th anniversary on May 23, Pentecost Sunday.
When you spend time listening or reading Galatians it is easy to believe that it’s message is more important than any other portion of Holy Scripture. I encourage you to read through it. If you like, you can also listen to someone else read it. I have given you a link below to my favorite reader, Max McLean, reading Galatians from the KJV. Listen to the entire book, 123 verses, in less than twenty minutes!

For thirty years or so, between his conversion on the road to Damascus and imprisonment in Rome, the Apostle Paul traveled through the Roman Empire and started churches in the provinces of Galatia, Asia, Macedonia, and Achia. In the course of his missionary journeys described in the book of Acts (13-14; 16:23-20:38; 18:23-20:38), he wrote letters to help in the supervision of the churches, and Galatians is one of those. Maybe he knew some of these readers very well and that explains why more than any other letter from him, Galatians is imprinted with the marks of his personality as well as the fullness of his passionate belief in the message he proclaimed. He is greatly disappointed and distressed that the gospel he proclaimed has been compromised by “another gospel”. He appeals to his own experience of coming to faith in Jesus and moving from death to life in Christ and allows no possibility for any other way of acceptance with God except by faith in Him alone. A comment from Geoff Ziegler’s study of the book captures the concern: “Any addition to Jesus as the basis for our standing before God is ultimately a deadly subtraction; to say we need more than Jesus to be justified before God is to lose everything.” Paul’s authority as an Apostle as well as his own experience are mounted in this letter to win back his friends to the message he proclaimed.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>