Galatians 1:11-24

Pastor Jamey Bryant opened with the stress test videos that filled his feed after he bought a new phone. A grown man takes a knife to it, drops it on concrete, hits it with a hammer, holds it underwater. Every one of those videos ends the same way, because the point is to keep going until you find the failure point. Teachers in Galatia were telling the churches that Paul was selling a knockoff gospel, so Pastor Jamey ran Paul's own life through three tests. The counterfeit test: Paul says in Galatians 1:11-12 that nobody taught him the gospel, it came by revelation, and he swears to it before God. The impact test: Paul was the worst case anyone could design, breathing threats and murder, and he swung the hammer at the church with everything he had. The gospel hit back and changed his life. The field test: the believers in Judea who had never seen Paul and surely hoped they never would kept hearing that their persecutor was preaching the faith, and they were glorifying God. They recognized it as the real thing, which means the men adding to the gospel in Galatia were the knockoff.

Look up Isaiah 49:1-6, Acts 13:46-49, Acts 26:16-18, and 1 Timothy 1:15-16. Isaiah describes a Servant called from the womb to be a light to the nations; Paul quoted that very verse in Pisidian Antioch, right there in Galatia, when he turned to the Gentiles; in Acts 26 he tells a king that Jesus appointed him to open blind eyes and turn people from darkness to light; and in 1 Timothy he says God made him, the foremost sinner, the example case, so nobody coming after him could think themselves past mercy.

How do these passages together shape the way you understand being sent somewhere with something, and what would it look like this week to write down the three parts of your story that Pastor Jamey described?