A Drastic Change Of Heart

18Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him fifteen days. 19I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother. 20I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie. 21Later I went to Syria and Cilicia. 22I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. 23They only heard the report: "The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy." 24And they praised God because of me. NIV

Paul morphed from being the Christian faith’s worst persecutor to being its greatest defender. Paul writes to the Galatians who lived in what is now Turkey. (My brother’s widow, Karen, as it happens, is working on an archeological dig in Turkey as we speak...in the same region of the Galatian church!).

Paul writes because the church he had planted years earlier is being threatened. It is being threatened by those for whom the simplicity of the gospel was a stumbling block, to those for whom the grace of God, seen in the free gift of salvation, was an impediment, in their minds, to really following God.

Let’s look at today’s passage more closely:

11I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. 12I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. 13For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it.

Paul is responding to things that he had got wind of since planting the church in Galatia. The church had been built on the rock of the gospel of God’s grace in Jesus Christ…that Jesus had lived and died to reconcile the world to God, that salvation was an act of God’s grace, that by faith and faith alone one had access to this grace.

But since Paul had left to plant churches elsewhere, some had come into the Galatian church and were preaching that the gospel Paul preached was too simple. They said that in order to truly be saved one had to follow the law of Moses, including circumcision.

In other words, some were teaching that in order to access the grace of God and to be saved, it was necessary to engage in other works…to do things to qualify oneself to be saved.

We just watched how it was that Paul, then Saul, while on the way to even further persecuting the church, was met by Jesus on the road to Damascus. Paul had not been among the original disciples.

During the time of Jesus’ public ministry, in fact, Paul had been in training and, as he says in 1:14, he “was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers”.

So, Paul had not heard Jesus’ teaching directly, had not seen His miracles, had not had any previous encounter with Jesus during Jesus’ public ministry.

All that he knew of Jesus came from direct revelation. And what he learned from Jesus was the precise opposite of all that he had previously believed and lived by.