Photo Cred: (1) | Updated: 4-22-2020

[This was a sermon I gave to the youth group at my local church when serving there as a youth leader. It was about 25 minutes and was focused on helping students study the book of Galatians verse-by-verse.]

Introduction

Now that we’ve finished our mini series on mental health in the Bible, we are going to start a new series going through the book of Galatians. We will be taking apart each verse as best we can and learning how to really study the Bible better. This just means that we are going to critically study and investigate part of this book to see how it applies to us today.

The book of Galatians was written by Paul the Apostle as a letter to the churches in the ancient highlands of Turkey called Galatia. The whole reason he wrote this letter was to defend against this group of people called the Judaizers. Their whole deal was that they claimed that the old laws of Judaism still applied to Christians.

That instead of being free from the law, somehow Christians who were still under the law. It’s wack and Paul spends this whole letter kind of calling them out for it. Think of Galatians as the Twitter rant of the Bible.

Let’s read the first 9 verses of chapter 1 and then break it down from there:

“Paul, an apostle (not sent from men nor through the agency of man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead), and all the brethren who are with me, To the churches of Galatia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins so that He might rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forevermore. Amen. I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel; which is really not another; only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed! As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed!”

Verses 1 -2

First things first, Paul in his opening of the letter was reminding the church who sent him. He wasn’t sent by some group that hired him or by his own will, but rather he was sent by Jesus as an apostle to guide the church with letters like this one. He was writing under the authority of God to the churches of Galatia.

Also, he was with a group of other Christians who were travelling with him preaching the Gospel. He mentions them as another way of showing that he isn’t alone in calling these Judiazers out, but other Christians were in agreement with Paul in correcting their mistake in going back to the law. As Paul later writes in Galatians, “You were running well; who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion did not come from Him who calls you (1).” They were free from trying to earn their way to God, but then they went back to it for no reason.

It’d be like if Martin Luther King Jr. changed his mind about equality for minorities during the Civil Rights Movement. Like what if we went a few years into having equality for all and then out of nowhere Dr. King decides that life was better when everyone was not equal. That’d be dumb, right? That’s kind of the backwards and bizarre thinking that these churches were going through right here. They were living in the past, instead of the future.

Verses 3 – 5

Here in verse 3, Paul is just saying what’s up with a greeting that was common for Christians at the time. After that, he then briefly goes over who Jesus is and what He did for us in verse 4. This is really the start of the letter and Paul is setting up his argument for why these Judaizers are wrong by quickly defining the Gospel. Verse 5 is Paul thanking God for what He did and this verse is finishing the thought in verse 4.

Verses 6 – 9

Now Paul gets to the part of the letter where he hella mad over what’s going on in these churches. He’s honestly shook that these churches that were taught by Paul on what the Gospel is have now left it for something not nearly as good. They’ve traded the truth of God for a lie.

He keeps going in verse seven and Paul points out that what they fell for isn’t even the Gospel, but a twisted perversion of it. That what they left behind was the true Gospel and what they embraced was a sad attempt at humans trying to spice it up. Kinda like when you at the cookout and Karen puts stupid raisins in the potato salad for no reason whatsoever.

No one actually likes your potato salad, Karen. The cookout was fine and good before you butchered it with your HGTV, white suburban trash-salad. Who in the hell puts raisins in potato salad?!

Anyways, you guys get the idea. Paul’s got the same react when he is calling these guys out. Why would you change the Gospel? It was perfectly fine before you showed up and ruined it. The Gospel was super simple until you guys made it all convoluted and complicated. Watch what he does next here in verses 8 through 9.

What does “he is to be accursed” mean? Think of accursed as being damned to Hell or something equivalent. Those people should be avoided and not given a platform where they preach a false Gospel is basically what Paul is saying here.

Next, Paul’s mention of even an angel telling you a different Gospel is in direct conflict with other world religions like Islam where an angel called Jibrīl (Gabriel) visits Mohammed to tell him a different Gospel or when an angel named Moroni visited Joseph Smith to tell him a different Gospel. By this verse alone, neither of those two worldviews can be true because they directly contradict Scripture.

Whether it’s a religion like Islam or a cult like Mormonism, anyone that claims to have a different Gospel is wrong. The same can be said of Jehovah Witnesses where someone made up some horrible way of understanding the Bible while leading a small group at some local church a couple decades ago. Bottom line: there is only one Gospel. But what is the Gospel? Here’s how I would put it and how I share it with people.

God made everything good. We made everything bad. Jesus has made and will make everything better. Now all we have to do is believe in what Jesus did and trust Him in what He is going to do. That’s it. That’s the Gospel. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, and easy to understand. Now let me break down each part of the Gospel real quick before we wrap up tonight.

Conclusion

In the beginning, God made everything good. He made the whole universe and all that is in it. Everything that God created, including us was good.

But then something happened. The first people, Adam and Eve, screwed everything up. They had the option to either love God or not. They could do whatever they wanted in the Garden of Eden, except eat from one tree. Why? Because in order for love to exist there must be the ability to choose. In that moment, they chose disobedience and that brings us to today where we all now have the inclination to disobey God and are no longer as close to God as we were back then.

But God loved us so much that He sent His son Jesus to make things right. Jesus lived a perfect life and died on the cross for our sins, which repaired the broken relationship with God. Jesus has made and will make everything better.

Now all we have to do is believe in what Jesus did and trust Him in what He is going to do. To decide whether or not we believe that Jesus really is God and really did die on the cross to pay the penalty of sin. We all have to decide for ourselves whether or not we want freedom. Let’s pray.

–

I don’t remember exactly when, but it was during this series through Galatians where I struggled a lot trying to translate our church’s sermon series into something for the youth group. In my mind at the time, I saw too much as a speaker that didn’t seam relevant to our ministry. This was because there are more factors to consider than just the message being communicated.

There is the intended audience, the setting where you will preach, the attention span of listeners, knowing what is relevant to said audience with various illustrations, and so on. I just wasn’t a fan of copying and pasting someone else’s sermon and calling it mine. It seemed lazy to me given my background as someone who knew how to prepare sermons.

For the newer leadership, this was very beneficial and they appreciated following the lead of someone more experienced and that being our main teaching pastor. Each method has its drawbacks, but for me I felt that these sermons were subpar because instead of crafting a message, I was just translating a message that someone else crafted. Maybe it’s evident in these sermons through Galatians, but for me I wasn’t very happy with how they turned out.

Regardless, this was an okay message. Not everything clicked and examples fell flat that were not given enough time to be fleshed out into better ideas. At the end of the day, what matters is that the sermon that needed to shared was shared. This was focused on a specific subset of verses and that brief overview was accomplished. With that, Godspeed and Jesus bless.

Footnotes

1. www.pexels.com
2. Galatians 5:7-8