Outline
I. Introduction (1:1-10)
A. Greetings (1:1-5)
- Denunciation (1:6-10)
- The Galatians' Experience of the Gospel (3:1-5)
- The Experience of Abraham (3:6-9)
- The Curse of the Law (3:10-14)
- The Priority of the Promise (3:15-18)
- The Purpose of the Law (3:19-25)
- Sons, Not Slaves (3:26;4:7)
- The Danger of Turning Back (4:8-11)
- Appeal to Embrace the Freedom of God's Children (4:12-20)
- God's Children Are Children of the Free Woman (4:21-31)
Galatians 1 NLT
1 This letter is from Paul, an apostle.
I was not appointed by any group of people or any human authority, but by Jesus
Christ himself and by God the Father, who raised Jesus from the dead.
2 All the brothers and sisters here
join me in sending this letter to the churches of Galatia.
3 May God the Father and our Lord Jesus
Christ give you grace and peace.
4 Jesus gave his life for our sins,
just as God our Father planned, in order to rescue us from this evil world in
which we live.
5 All glory to God forever and ever!
Amen.
6 I am shocked that you are turning
away so soon from God, who called you to himself through the loving mercy of
Christ. You are following a different way that pretends to be the Good
News
7 but is not the Good News at all. You
are being fooled by those who deliberately twist the truth concerning
Christ.
8 Let God’s curse fall on anyone,
including us or even an angel from heaven, who preaches a different kind of
Good News than the one we preached to you.
9 I say again what we have said before:
If anyone preaches any other Good News than the one you welcomed, let that
person be cursed.
10 Obviously, I’m not trying to win the
approval of people, but of God. If pleasing people were my goal, I would not be
Christ’s servant.
11 Dear brothers and sisters, I want you
to understand that the gospel message I preach is not based on mere human
reasoning.
12 I received my message from no human
source, and no one taught me. Instead, I received it by direct revelation from
Jesus Christ.
13 You know what I was like when I
followed the Jewish religion—how I violently persecuted God’s church. I did my
best to destroy it.
14 I was far ahead of my fellow Jews in
my zeal for the traditions of my ancestors.
15 But even before I was born, God chose
me and called me by his marvelous grace. Then it pleased him
16 to reveal his Son to me so that I
would proclaim the Good News about Jesus to the Gentiles. When this happened, I
did not rush out to consult with any human being.
17 Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to
consult with those who were apostles before I was. Instead, I went away into
Arabia, and later I returned to the city of Damascus.
18 Then three years later I went to
Jerusalem to get to know Peter, and I stayed with him for fifteen days.
19 The only other apostle I met at that
time was James, the Lord’s brother.
20 I declare before God that what I am
writing to you is not a lie.
21 After that visit I went north into
the provinces of Syria and Cilicia.
22 And still the churches in Christ that
are in Judea didn’t know me personally.
23 All they knew was that people were
saying, “The one who used to persecute us is now preaching the very faith he
tried to destroy!”
24 And they praised
God because of me.
Galatians 2 NLT
1 Then fourteen years later I went back
to Jerusalem again, this time with Barnabas; and Titus came along, too.
2 I went there because God revealed to
me that I should go. While I was there I met privately with those considered to
be leaders of the church and shared with them the message I had been preaching
to the Gentiles. I wanted to make sure that we were in agreement, for fear that
all my efforts had been wasted and I was running the race for nothing.
3 And they supported me and did not
even demand that my companion Titus be circumcised, though he was a
Gentile.
4 Even that question came up only
because of some so-called believers there—false ones, really —who were secretly
brought in. They sneaked in to spy on us and take away the freedom we have in
Christ Jesus. They wanted to enslave us and force us to follow their Jewish
regulations.
5 But we refused to give in to them for
a single moment. We wanted to preserve the truth of the gospel message for
you.
6 And the leaders of the church had
nothing to add to what I was preaching. (By the way, their reputation as great
leaders made no difference to me, for God has no favorites.)
7 Instead, they saw that God had given
me the responsibility of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, just as he had
given Peter the responsibility of preaching to the Jews.
8 For the same God who worked through
Peter as the apostle to the Jews also worked through me as the apostle to the
Gentiles.
9 In fact, James, Peter, and John, who
were known as pillars of the church, recognized the gift God had given me, and
they accepted Barnabas and me as their co-workers. They encouraged us to keep
preaching to the Gentiles, while they continued their work with the Jews.
10 Their only suggestion was that we
keep on helping the poor, which I have always been eager to do.
11 But when Peter came to Antioch, I had
to oppose him to his face, for what he did was very wrong.
12 When he first arrived, he ate with
the Gentile believers, who were not circumcised. But afterward, when some
friends of James came, Peter wouldn’t eat with the Gentiles anymore. He was
afraid of criticism from these people who insisted on the necessity of
circumcision.
13 As a result, other Jewish believers
followed Peter’s hypocrisy, and even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.
14When I saw that they were not following the
truth of the gospel message, I said to Peter in front of all the others, “Since
you, a Jew by birth, have discarded the Jewish laws and are living like a
Gentile, why are you now trying to make these Gentiles follow the Jewish
traditions?
15 “You and I are Jews by birth, not
‘sinners’ like the Gentiles.
16 Yet we know that a person is made
right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law. And we have
believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made right with God because of
our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever
be made right with God by obeying the law.”
17 But suppose we seek to be made right
with God through faith in Christ and then we are found guilty because we have
abandoned the law. Would that mean Christ has led us into sin? Absolutely
not!
18 Rather, I am a sinner if I rebuild
the old system of law I already tore down.
19 For when I tried to keep the law, it
condemned me. So I died to the law—I stopped trying to meet all its
requirements—so that I might live for God.
20 My old self has been crucified with
Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this
earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for
me.
21 I do not treat the
grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with
God, then there was no need for Christ to die.
