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On Sunday, Pastor Russell Johnson opened the Galatians series with Steve Harvey at the 2015 Miss Universe pageant, crowning the wrong contestant and then coming back on stage to correct it. Galatians opens awkwardly too. Paul gets two words in and interrupts himself to defend his apostleship, which Pastor Russell compared to hearing one half of a telephone conversation: you only insist your calling is not from men if someone has said it was. Judaizers had been whispering that Paul never walked with Jesus and had watered the message down for Gentiles. Pastor Russell walked the map of the first missionary journey, where Paul was run out of Pisidian Antioch and Iconium and stoned and left for dead at Lystra, then got up and walked back into the city. He leads with the resurrection and barely mentions it again, because it is the foundation of the house: unseen, and everything stands on it. In Galatians 1:3-5 the order never changes. Grace is the cause and peace is the effect, and peace that comes from performance is not peace. Jesus gave Himself for our sins to rescue us from this present evil age, a word that echoes the Exodus.

Look up Galatians 1:11-12, Acts 9:1-6, Philippians 3:4-9, and Colossians 2:13-14. Galatians states the claim, that Paul did not receive the gospel from any man but through a revelation of Jesus Christ; Acts shows the moment it happened on the Damascus road; Philippians shows what it cost him, a long record of law-keeping he counted as loss for the sake of knowing Christ; and Colossians shows why he could, because the certificate of debt against us was nailed to the cross with nothing left on it to pay. How do these passages together shape the way you understand a gospel that came to Paul rather than from him, and what would it look like this week to tell one person how it came to you?
For everything happening at Faith Bible Church, including the Galatians series and Understand: Discipleship launching this week in Lif