First Week of "Paul's Letters" Recap
This past Tuesday we started the “90 Day Chronological Journey through Paul’s Letters” Bible reading plan. This will be a nice follow up to the sermon series I’m finishing on Sunday in the Thessalonian letters. Paul’s letters are full of rich wisdom and theology.
This week in Galatians has been a great reading time for me. I’ve enjoyed going through it and looking at what Paul was teaching to the church in Galatia. Here’s what really struck me:
Paul begins Galatians with an understanding of who he was in Christ. He says “an apostle- not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead…“ Paul understood who he was in Christ. Too often we can claim success or sufficiency in ourselves and act in fleshly ways. But to be an effective minister for Christ, we must know where life comes from and not try to operate from our own power.
Right after this, Paul showed that he understood the importance of expressing what Christ had done. Verses 3-5 show Paul taking a few seconds to write out what Jesus did– “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.” Expressing who Jesus is should come out of understanding who we are. When we realize that we are nothing without Christ, the passion of sharing His story increases.
So I was reminded of who I am in Christ and that I must make Him known. What about you? What did God show you this week? Leave comments to help us all read, learn, and live scripture together.
I love Galatians. For a while my email signature was taken from Galatians 1:10 – “For if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.” Boy is that hard to live when I want people to like me!
I had a lot of fun exploring the idea of “fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4) in light of God’s purposes from Genesis to Revelation. While Galatians is talking about that moment in history when God brought His promised Savior into the world, a lot of the references seem to point to days when sin reaches a point of “fullness” that brings on God’s judgment. I remember talking to a young man from Korea who wanted to know why Jesus still had not come back after 2,000 years. He thought that was such a long time ago that the Bible couldn’t possibly be true. We took some time to read 2 Peter 3 together. He might have turned just a bit green when he realized that he was one of the people Peter was talking about 2,000 years ago.
While reading chapter 3, I was reminded of how easy it would be to forget that this life in Christ is not about trying harder to keep rules that I could never keep before but rather that it’s about faith – believing God like Abraham did.