1:5
If we want to bring glory to God then we need to believe in Christ, and we need to trust in Him alone. God has presented Christ as the only way to Him, so to seek to approach God by any other means is to insult God. When we trust in Christ God’s name is truly glorified.
1:6
We do not appreciate the tone of this letter. It was common in letters of the day to express appreciation of the people and maybe offer up a prayer for them. Indeed, this is the pattern in Paul’s other letters. This was true even in the letters to the Corinthians, where almost everything that could be wrong was wrong. Here there is no commendation at all, but Paul dives right into addressing the issue. This shows how serious a matter he considered it to be. We are called to “live in the grace of Christ”. Sometimes, perhaps even frequently, Galatians is viewed as talking about how we are saved, and saying that we are saved by faith not by works. Of course, we are saved by faith not by works, but the letter is more about how we are to live. The Galatians had already made a “profession of faith”, as Paul will state later, they had made a good start. It wasn’t about “how to be saved” in the initial salvation sense. Rather it is about how to be saved in the ongoing how to live sense. They were “turning to a different gospel”. And it is so easy for us to do the same. We realise there is some area in our life where we need to improve (or even get started!), and we will seek to bring this change about by works. One common area where we do this is evangelism. Most of the church in the West is pretty hopeless at this, so if we try to change things we do so by a combination of making people feel guilty about not doing enough evangelism, and by giving people “training” or techniques. And this does not work, If it did work the west would have been won long ago!
No comments:
Post a Comment