Talking About the Gospel - Galatians 1 - 2:10

What is the gospel that is referred to in the Bible? It is the Good News of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and about how He will return to earth to claim his own. The gospel is the GOOD NEWS that Christ loved you so much that he died to save you. The GOOD NEWS is that if you will only believe that Christ died for you—confess your sin—and call on His name to save and keep you—then you are a child of God. Are you able to express in your own words and verify according to the Bible exactly how any person can be sure that he/she is going to heaven when they die? The next thirteen lessons in this series will be based on the wirings of Paul and James. No other writer of New Testament Scripture emphasized the importance of grace and faith in the plan of salvation any more than Paul. Paul said that it is by grace, through faith that we are saved and NOT OF WORKS lest we would have something to boast about.
Peter comes back with the statement that FAITH WITHOUT WORKS is dead faith and will produce nothing. These lessons will place faith and works side by side and compare their functions in the life of a Christian. There will be six lessons by Paul and seven by Peter, and when the argument is settled you will be able to see that there is absolutely no conflict between the writings of these two men.
Christ was crucified in about AD. 33. The apostles began to travel and preach the gospel throughout the land. At first there were only the twelve apostles and a few close followers that had been with them in the Upper Room when the Holly Spirit arrived—and the gospel they knew was in their memories from the sermons that Christ had preached over a three year period in his personal ministry. There seems to be no exact time recorded when certain apostles started writing the word of God in book form. We know that most of scripture [possibly all except John} had been completed by AD 68. We also know that the apostles started preaching immediately after the ascension. Therefore we can draw the conclusion that they started writing their sermons based on what Christ had taught them in person. Maybe later on they would draw from their personal notes the truths that made up the gospels.
In Paul’s day the arguments, conflicts, and religious differences were basically between law and grace and between the Christian and the Jew. It is really difficult to understand how so many different teachings have arisen in the past two thousand years. Religion has become like a Sunday meal at a huge cafeteria, the selections are endless and each selection may seem fairly appealing. So what will you choose? Now add to the problem of choice the fact that many will argue that their choice is the only true choice and all others are wrong. Complicate it more by the fact that many today believe that there are many ways to heaven and that it doesn’t matter which route you take. Many Christians are not immune to this high degree of uncertainty. Some still think that we must earn our way to heaven.
Let us TALK ABOUT THE GOSPEL. First, do you believe that the GOOD NEWS is simply the story about how Christ died on the cross to save people from sin? In fact we might even just say the GOOD NEWS is simply CHRIST.
Are you clear about the truth of the gospel as presented in the New Testament? Can you use quotations from the Bible to explain exactly how people enter heaven? This letter written by Paul to the Galatians provides a vivid presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and clearly answers the question of how a person gets into heaven. You can read what he says and gain a clear understanding of what the true gospel really is.
The first Christian teachers had no written manual to guide them. Paul could not leave a written Bible with the people at Galatia and other churches, so it was so easy for a leadership problem to arise. Differences of opinions arose, and misinterpretations became many. False teachers had a hay-day and no one had the Bible to prove them wrong.
One of the most important of the false teachings that threatened the early church concerned the nature of the gospel itself. What did a person have to do to be saved? Paul argued that salvation was by grace through faith alone. False teachers claimed the obedience to at least some of the Law of Moses was necessary. The biggest argument was probably over circumcision. Paul had a second battle to fight at this time for the Jews were arguing that he was not one of the disciples as defined in the scripture. His rebuttal came in the argument that God called him individually in his dramatic encounter on the road to Damascus
Paul had been to Galatia and preached the gospel of salvation by faith in Christ. After his departure it was not long until there were the false teachers that were preaching other ways to be saved. In the sixth verse Paul lets them know that he is unhappy with them in that they so quickly turned from the truth to false doctoring. We must continue to be ware of those that say that we must do more than have simple faith in Christ to be saved.
Paul said that he was astonished that so many were so quickly turning from his teaching of salvation by grace through faith to “a different gospel.” Then he said that this was really no gospel at all. My brother, the Bible says that if you are not saved by grace through faith…then you are depending on a different gospel which is no gospel at all. I contend that the Bible teaches that the name of your church or denomination has nothing to do with your salvation. In fact, you have no salvation unless you received it from God, by his free and unmerited grace—through your faith…simply believing in Him—and there was absolutely no kind of works involved. God does not accept any man made religion as a substitute for Jesus Christ. There is just the one way—Jesus Christ see John 14:6. If you doubt Paul…Can you deny Christ when he says the same thing? There is simply no other way to heaven except through Christ.
Each individual was borne in sin; at birth we are sinners, lost and condemned. The sin has already been committed at birth. It was committed in the Garden of Eden and there is only one solution for the problem. A price has to be paid. You can not pay the price even for yourself and especially not for some other one. God sent his son Jesus Christ to this world for the special purpose of giving his life on the cross to pay our sin debt. He did it freely. It was pure grace…we did not deserve it. Then he told us that if we would confess our sin and our need for him to forgive us; that he would forgive us of all our transgressions and make us as clean as wool.
Oh, how I wish there was more time for us to dwell on this the most important one subject in the Bible.
You can say that I am very, very, extremely… narrow minded, and that is fine with me—but there is ONLY ONE WAY TO HEAVEN! And that is by God’s GRACE, and through our faith in Jesus Christ as our savior. You must feel the need and call on the name of the Lord in order to be saved. The thief on the cross barely had time to do just this much and Christ assured him that he was ready to die. I hope and pray that we will all have more time to praise him for what he has already done in our lives.
MAY GOD GET THE GLORY:
My wife, Juanita came home Friday, May 22, and is steadily improving. She is able to be up and around the house. I have to watch to keep her from doing too much. Praise Him. And thank you.