If you would, take a Bible please as we return this morning to our exposition of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Turn there with me. Galatians chapter 1; page 972 in the church Bibles.
Paul, you will remember, is writing in some distress – reports having reached him that his children in the faith, the believers in the churches of Galatia, were being led astray by false teachers who were distorting Paul’s gospel in a legalistic direction. And now, after having come out of his corner swinging as it were, in verses 1 through 10, as we turn to the remainder of chapter 1, we see Paul beginning to develop his fully orbed response to the Galatian false teachers. You may remember the Judaizers, the legalists in Galatia, were suggesting that Paul wasn’t much of an apostle at all. His message, they said, was derivative – sourced in the teaching of others. “He is a cut-rate, B-list, wannabe apostle and we really ought not to listen to him.” Sometimes we refuse to listen to the truth of God because we don’t like the message, but there are other times when, no matter the message, we refuse to listen to the truth of God because we don’t like the messenger. The false teachers understand if they are going to be effective in winning the Galatians over to their cause, they need to deploy both tactics. They must counter Paul’s message and they must discredit Paul, the messenger.
And so before he can move on in the letter to expound his theology, he begins with autobiography. He wants to set the record straight concerning his apostleship and the authority of the Gospel he proclaims. As he does it, I want to highlight three things together. First of all, verses 11 and 12, where we’ll see the origin of the Gospel. The origin of the Gospel – where it comes from. Then 13 through 16, the work of the Gospel – what it will do in your heart when it grips your life. Where it comes from. How it works. And then thirdly, 16 through 24, the effects of the Gospel – what difference it makes. Okay, so the origin, the work, and the effects of the Gospel. Where it comes from, how it works, and what difference it makes.
Before we look at all of that, let’s pause and pray and then we’ll read the passage together. Let us pray.
O Lord our God, we pray now for ears to hear what Your Spirit is saying to the church. Indeed, our cry is, “Speak, Lord, for Your servants are listening,” in Jesus’ name, amen.
Galatians chapter 1 at the eleventh verse. This is the Word of God:
“For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers. But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone; nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus.
Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother. (In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!) Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. And I was still unknown in person to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only were hearing it said, ‘He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.’ And they glorified God because of me.”
Amen, and we praise God that He has spoken in His holy, inerrant Word.
The Origin of the Gospel
Well I’m sure you know of the shepherd boy who cried, “Wolf!” Thinking it funny to deceive the villagers again and again, he’d come running to warn of a fictional wolf about to attack the flock and fooled the town into coming out to defend their livestock. But when the wolf really did attack the flock and he came running, they all refused to believe him, so often had they been deceived by him. And so the sheep all get eaten by the wolf and in at least some versions of the story, so does the boy. The point of course is that the credibility of the message rests on the reliability of its source. The credibility of the message rests on the reliability of the source.
And that’s why Paul starts the body of his letter autobiographically and why he starts the autobiographical section of his letter with a straightforward assertion about the origin of the Gospel. And so that’s the first thing I want to see with you here – the origin of Paul’s gospel, where is comes from. Look at verses 11 and 12 with me please. Paul says, “I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” Paul’s gospel is not to be placed on a par with a host of other philosophies and ideologies and worldviews. We can’t spread a smorgasbord of world religions, Paul’s gospel somewhere among them, and then, you know, pick and choose a little of this and a little of that as seems best to us since, after all, they’re all merely competing versions of the same human instinct to make sense of the world. No, Paul denies that possibility categorically here. His gospel, he says, isn’t like any other. It is not man’s gospel. He did not receive it from any man, neither was he taught it. That is to say, he didn’t pick it up along the way on one of his travels. He didn’t figure it out for himself by deduction or calculation. If these had been the origin of Paul’s message, well then, the false teachers in Galatia may have had a legitimate case against him. But actually, he says, his gospel came “through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”
Sometimes I run across people who will say something like, “Jesus, I like. The Sermon on the Mount is lovely. I just can’t stand the apostle Paul.” And so they adopt a sort of pick-and-choose approach to the Bible. And their standard, of course, in deciding what to believe and what to reject is entirely subjective. And let’s leave aside the very high likelihood that such people haven’t paid sufficient attention to the words and works of Jesus they profess so much to enjoy and love or else they would have found a great deal in His often very sobering message that they did not like either. Let’s leave that aside for a moment and recognize that beneath this entire point of view lies a fundamental rejection of the divine inspiration of holy Scripture. If God is not the final author of this book, well then why not pick and choose which parts to believe and which to deny? But then I might also add, if God is not the author of this book, why believe any of it at all? If the Bible is not trustworthy and true, there is no Christianity and you may as well stop playing at religion right now. But once we admit that God speaks here and that as 2 Timothy 3:16 reminds us, “All Scripture is breathed out by God,” once we admit that, then we no longer have the option available to us of picking and choosing.
And that is precisely the claim made by the apostle Paul in our text, isn’t it? The gospel he preaches comes from a revelation of Jesus Christ. Paul isn’t crying, “Wolf!” you see. He’s not telling tall tales. He is, rather, the herald of the risen Christ charged to proclaim His Word to the world. And as such, what Paul says, Jesus says. Paul is the preacher of the revelation of Jesus Christ. You can’t take Jesus and leave Paul. Paul is the mouthpiece and the spokesman of the Word of Christ. The origin of the Gospel. Do you see it? Its authority rests on its source – not man, not even Paul, but Jesus Christ Himself.
The Work of the Gospel
Then secondly, let’s look at verses 13 through 16 and notice the work of the Gospel. How does this divinely revealed message work? If it is sourced in the exalted Christ, surely it comes with life transforming power. And that is precisely what Paul teaches us by describing what it did in his own life and experience. First of all, you’ll notice he tells us how he used to live before he was converted. “For you have heard of my former life in Judaism,” he says, “how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it.” Paul actually uses a word in the original – the Greek word, “huperbole.” We get our English word, “hyperbole,” from it. We mean by that some form of speech that is an exaggeration. That’s a hyperbole. But in the original, it means “any act or behavior that is extreme, something off the charts, something over the top.” Paul isn’t just a violent prosecutor of the church of God. He is excessive in his rage against the cause of Jesus Christ. He is an extremist of the highest order.
And he does all of that, he is caught up in all of that, he tells us, in service to his religious convictions. Verse 14, “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers.” Now there’s probably a polemical edge to that last statement about “the traditions of his fathers.” The Judaizers at Galatia were urging that in order to follow Jesus correctly, if you wanted to really be a Christian, you first of all had, to all intents and purposes, to convert to rabbinic Judaism. That is, they were saying you had to be circumcised. You had to submit to the Law of Moses. You had to embrace and bow before all the traditions of the rabbis. But here, Paul is telling us how, though he couldn’t see it at the time, zeal for the traditions of the fathers – the very thing the false teachers were advocating – zeal for the traditions of the fathers consumed him but had devastating results. The tense of the verb, “I was advancing,” means that at the time he was converted, he showed absolutely no signs of slowing down in his pursuit of pharisaical perfection. It’s not that Paul was having second thoughts about his Judaism when he became a Christian or that he was drifting somehow, slacking away from his previous commitments to the traditions of his fathers. On the contrary, he says, he was growing even more deeply invested in them. He was all in. And yet all it did for him, he says, was lead to violence against the church of God.
This is a picture of a deeply religious and yet deeply misguided man, isn’t it? Consumed with hatred and bitterness but calling it righteousness. I imagine as the apostle Paul is writing these words, I imagine the waves of shame rolling over him as he remembers this time in his life – how much damage he sought to do to the church of God and the cause of Jesus Christ. “How blind I was! How full of rage! How utterly lost!” That was Paul. But listen, if that was Paul, the mighty apostle and spokesman for the Lord Jesus Christ, if that was Paul’s condition when he was converted, you see what that means? That means that no one, no one is so far gone in their rebellion and sin, no one is so lost in unbelief and ignorance, no one so ensnared by a lifetime of wicked habits or enslaving passions – there is no one beyond the reach of the saving mercy of God, is there? Paul’s backstory proves beyond all objection that you are not a hopeless case. You are not too bad or too broken for Jesus. If God can break in and save a Paul, He can break in and save you too. There are no hopeless cases.
Which, by the way, also means for us if we are already Christians, since no one is beyond the reach of grace and since there are no hopeless cases, we should never give up on that unbelieving friend or neighbor or family member or loved one for whom you have been praying so very long. No one is beyond the reach of grace, no one. No one. God did it with Paul and He can and will do it again.
And now look at how Paul describes the great turning point in his life when it came. In verses 15 and 16, three clipped phrases summarizes the Gospel pattern in Paul’s presentation in its proper theological order and sequence, although of course we need to remember the last thing he mentions was actually the first thing he experienced when he became a Christian. What was the first thing he experienced? Look at the last part, first part rather, of verse 16 – “God was pleased to reveal His Son to me,” he says. You remember how that happened, don’t you? Acts chapter 9, while he was on the road to Damascus, on the way to arrest Christians, the risen Christ suddenly appeared to him and brought him overwhelmingly to saving faith in Himself. Now if you have an English Standard Version or you’re using one of our pew Bibles, which is an ESV, there is a footnote you may have noticed there at verse 16. It tells you that the word “to” – “God was pleased to reveal His Son to me” – actually translates a little Greek preposition that means “in,” so that the phrase literally is, “God was pleased to reveal His Son in me.” And that’s important because when Paul was converted, it wasn’t just that his mind embraced a new set of convictions that he never understood before. Much more than that was taking place. God revealed His Son not just to Paul, but in Paul.
That’s what happens, you know, when a person becomes a Christian. Jesus ceases to be distant from us, separated from us. “We must understand,” wrote John Calvin, “that as long as Christ remains outside of us and we are separated from Him, all that He has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.” But when we become Christians, when you trust in Christ, God reveals His Son not just to you, but in you. You are united to Him by faith. It is intensely, intimately, gloriously personal. He comes, as Paul puts it elsewhere, “to dwell in our hearts by faith.”
And then, notice the mechanism by which all of that took place in Paul’s life. Paul says, “God called me by His grace.” You see that expression at the end of verse 15? Of course Paul doesn’t mean there that God had sent him in the mail, you know, an RSVP that Paul could take or leave at his discretion depending upon his mood. No, rather Paul is talking here about what the Westminster Confession of Faith calls “the effectual call of God.” It is that call that accomplishes in us what it requires from us. It’s that call that says into the darkness, “Let there be light,” that causes light to shine into our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus who speaks and says to the storm, “Peace, be still,” and it becomes as smooth and calm as a mirror, who says to the lame, “Be healed,” and they get up and take up their bed and walk, and calls Lazarus in his tomb, dead for three days already, “Come forth,” and Lazarus lives, it’s that voice that calls us in the Gospel in the power of omnipotent grace and by the work of the Holy Spirit in our heart. And when that call comes to us, everything changes. We become new creatures. “Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature’s night. Thine eye diffused a quickening ray. I woke, the dungeon flamed with light. My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.” That is what Paul says happened to me. “I was effectually called, and in that moment, my heart was changed, I was set free from bondage to sin, and Christ was revealed in me. He came to dwell within.”
And back of all of that, back behind the call of grace, back behind the revelation of Jesus Christ in us, Paul says, stands the eternal, electing purposes of our sovereign God. Look at the start of verse 15. This all happened, he says, because God had “set me apart before I was born.” But just think about that. All the while he had been breathing out murderous threats against the church, traveling around to take Christians prisoner, all this time, God had had His hand on his life. It really is one of the great joys, you know, of becoming a Christian. As you look back over all those years of ignorance and idolatry and unbelief, you discover that through it all, despite your rebellion against Him, God had fixed His love upon you to make you His child in His good time. He loved you and chose you from before the foundation of the world. And then, by sovereign grace, called you and united you to Christ and made you a new creature. So the keynote that sounds in this whole description, I hope you can see, is the freedom and the power of sovereign grace. Paul’s Christianity, actually Paul’s apostleship as well, because it’s clear from the text that Paul’s call to faith in Christ was coterminous with his call to serve Christ as an apostle, but all of it was God’s doing, not the product of human persuasion. God makes Christians. That’s the big idea, surely. God makes Christians.
And that should do at least two things in our hearts if we are believers. First of all, it should make us deeply grateful, deeply grateful. God saved us, having set us apart from our mother’s womb, called us by His grace and revealed Christ His Son in us. We were blind and lost and dead in our trespasses and sins, “but God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even while we were dead, made us alive together with Christ.” You know I often wonder where I’d be, who I’d be, what a mess I’d be in if I had never come to know the Lord Jesus. Do you ever wonder that? Do you ever look back and wonder, “Where would I be now? What devastation would there be in my life had He not had mercy upon me and made me His, had He never intervened?” What amazing grace we have received. I hope it generates praise in your heart.
The second thing it ought to do is renew our commitment to prayer, surely. If God alone saves sinners, and we think about the countless numbers of the lost all around us in our great city, we must remember there is no preaching, there is no witnessing, there is no evangelism, there is no persuasion, there is no pleading that will make the slightest difference to a single one of them apart from the power of God. That’s not a disincentive to pray and witness and evangelize and serve. It is, rather, an incentive while you pray and witness and evangelize and serve to give yourself to prayer, to plead with God, to follow the outward, general call of His Word with the power of His Spirit that that general call might become an irresistible and effectual call. So pray, “O God, yes, give me words to say and the opportunity to say them with that unbelieving spouse or child or neighbor or friend or colleague. But more than that, O God, save them! Bring them from death to life! Don’t just give me evangelistic opportunity, give me evangelistic success. Do more than fill my mouth with Your words. Fill their heart with Your Spirit.” Because salvation belongs to the Lord.
The Effects of the Gospel
The origin of the Gospel. The work of the Gospel. And then finally – the effects of the Gospel. Look at verses 16 through 24. Verse 16 makes it clear, doesn’t it, that Paul’s conversion to Christ was also his call to apostleship. God set him apart and called him and revealed Christ in him, he says, “in order that I might preach Him among the Gentiles.” Now remember the accusation. The accusation is that Paul got his apostleship from men. It’s a second class apostleship, a derivative apostleship, not a real apostleship. But not only is Paul making it clear that he has been called directly to his apostleship by the risen Christ Himself, he is also showing us after having been called he did not then immediately seek the approval or endorsement of the other apostles in Jerusalem. Do you see that in the passage? “I did not immediately consult with anyone; nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus.” He spent the first three years of his Christian life preaching the Gospel in relative obscurity in Arabia and Damascus. Verses 18 and 19 tell us that he visited Cephas, that is, the apostle Peter, and he met James, the Lord’s brother, in Jerusalem where he stayed for fifteen days. Then in verse 21, he covers the next fourteen years of his life. He spends those years partly in Syria, in his hometown of Tarsus, where the Jerusalem leaders send him in Acts 9:30. And then he moves on to Cilicia where Barnabas, remember, brings him that he might become a part of the church in Antioch in Acts chapter 11. And throughout all of this time, the Christians in Judea knew virtually nothing of the apostle Paul. They knew him mainly by reputation alone. Verse 23, “They only were hearing it said, ‘He who used to persecute us is now peaching the faith he once tried to destroy.’”
Now just think about that pattern for a moment. We’ve seen several very high profile evangelical ministries implode in recent years in North America, haven’t we? When you examine the backstory of those prominent leaders, you discover that very often they have been elevated to positions of authority and responsibility and sometimes even catapulted into celebrity far too early. But Paul spent the first thirty-four years after his conversion faithfully serving in the local church, sharing the Gospel wherever he could, and serving beside other leaders as God in His providence opened the door for him. And that is a model of wisdom in the service of Jesus Christ that I dare say we need to recover. Not self-promotion, not premature advancement by other people, but a proven track record of steady faithfulness over the long haul.
Which means, of course, that the thing everyone saw in Paul was the evidence of a changed life. They said, verse 23, “‘He who persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy,’ and they glorified God because of me.” His reputation for faithfulness in ministry spread far and wide so that even the church in Judea knew all about it. It wasn’t mere celebrity. He wasn’t known as a social media influencer. It was a transformed character and faithful ministry that people were remarking upon. The evidence of a changed life. He was a persecutor, now he is a preacher – what a great reversal God has wrought in this man’s life! And you know, that, in the end, is the real mark and evidence of true conversion, isn’t it? Not the ability to talk a good game or to put on a show. A changed life.
So listen, if you have recently become a Christian, please don’t think that we are looking for you to know all the right words or for you suddenly to throw yourself into leadership of some kind. On the contrary, we’re not looking for superficial, surface changes. What we want for you is modest, steady, faithful progress in godliness. It’s not about show; it’s about growing in holiness. That’s where your own assurance of salvation will come from – the evidence of the work of grace in your life. And that’s the basis of any future usefulness amongst others will be found. None of that lies in how impressed people are with you. Rather, it is the evidence of a changed life. That’s what matters most. You are no longer who you once were, by the grace of God and the power of the Gospel.
Well Paul is defending his apostleship, isn’t he, and along the way he has shown us what a glorious Gospel we really have. Its origins lie in the revelation of Jesus Christ alone. Its work in our hearts is by free, sovereign grace alone. And its effects are lives changed forever to the glory and praise of God alone. What a Gospel we have! May the Lord help us to love it and rest in it and live by its enabling power and proclaim it boldly to everyone who will listen, all our days. Let’s pray together.
Our Father, we bless You for the good news that is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe. Help us to look nowhere else but to the grace of God in the Gospel of Jesus Christ for our joy and our hope and our peace and for motive power that leads to new obedience. Give us grace to live transformed lives to display the evidence of Your mighty resurrection life flooding into the dark death of our old selves and making us new. For we ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.