Sunday Service: The gospel and the law (Galatians 3:1-25)

Tomorrow we'll have our morning service to worship God together and to proclaim His Word in Budrio.

 

 

 

 

 

We are glad for the Lord's provision of the meeting room at the social center Magnolia, a well known cultural meeting point right at the centre of Budrio.

Every Sunday in July and August, we'll interact with the Good Book Company book Galatians: Gospel Matters, by Tim Keller.

Tomorrow we'll engage with The gospel and the law (Galatians 3:1-25).

Which gospel are you relying on?
In Galatia in AD 50, the church faced a choice between two “gospels” - two ways of living, of thinking, of viewing how to be right with God. On the one side were the teachers who told these young Christians that
their performance mattered. Of course they needed to trust Christ and his death; and then, if they wanted truly to be acceptable to God, they needed to get circumcised and get on with keeping God’s laws. Their efforts were what counted. On the other side was Paul, the church-planting missionary who had founded the Galatian church a few years before. He said they were “foolish” and “bewitched” (3:1). He claimed the gospel they were turning to was actually “no gospel at all” (1:7). And he told them that the only performance that mattered was Christ’s: his life, death, and resurrection. Faith in him, Paul argued, was all that anyone needed to be truly acceptable to God. Their efforts counted for nothing - and relying on them would bring them under God’s “curse” (3:10). Which “gospel” they followed mattered. The choice between the gospel of Christ-alone and the false gospel of Christ-plus is still one which Christians face today. Christ-plus may not look the same in our cultures as it did in Galatia. But it’s still an attractive message, a flattering view, and a subtle reversal of the true gospel… and so it’s still deadly. As Paul wrote to the Galatian church, he knew that to lose your grip on the true gospel is to desert and lose Christ himself, and to lose the salvation and blessing and freedom he gives. The gospel matters. Paul knew that everything was at stake. It still is. In these seven meetings on the book of Galatians, Paul will present us with a gospel that is wonderful, liberating, and true. He’ll show us that our problems in the Christian life come when we lose or forget or fail to live by this gospel. And he will ask us repeatedly: which gospel are you relying on?