The Transforming Power of the Gospel, Galatians 1:11-24

I've been thinking about some of the friends I had in elementary school. The first one that comes to mind is Rudy. He and I were friends for awhile, but two memories stand out when I think of him. One day, when he and I were sitting together, a teacher asked him a lot of questions because he had so many bruises and scrapes. She was clearly concerned that he was being abused (though I didn’t realize that at the time). Rudy said he got the bruises from wrestling with his brothers, but I‘ve often wondered, since then, whether that was true. The other memory I have of Rudy is that he and I were sitting together at lunch when the principle came in and announced that president Kennedy had been assassinated.

I don’t remember much about him after that. His family moved out of the area shortly afterward and I didn’t see him again until high school. He appeared at our school in my junior or senior year, and everyone was afraid of him. He didn’t seem to care about anything; we got the impression that he would, without hesitation, kill anyone who got in his way. He got expelled from school within less than a week, so I didn’t see much of him. Shortly after this, he left town. After I got out of high school, I heard that he was in prison.

About 15 or 20 years ago, another friend, Marc, called me. Marc and I had grown up together but hadn’t been in contact since high school. We had been best friends for a long time, but his home situation was really unstable, and after high school he had left the area and was wandering around the west coast doing drugs. Anyway, he had contacted my mom, who gave him my phone number, and was calling to tell me what had happened with his life. When he left Sonoma, his whole life was wrapped up in drugs, but after awhile he had come to the end of himself and had gone to Teen Challenge looking for help. And through that ministry he had become a Christian.

He told me about another friend of ours. Dwayne had been a good friend all through elementary school and into high school, but he became disillusioned with life after his parents’ divorce and during high school had immersed himself in the drug culture. While we were still in school, he had dropped out and left home. But Dwayne had also come into contact with Teen Challenge and had committed his life to Jesus Christ. He had then received a high school diploma, gone to Bible College, and is now a pastor.

But Marc also had news about Rudy. Marc and Dwayne were messed up and confused, but Rudy was a hardened criminal. Marc told me that Rudy had become a Christian while he was in prison and is now a prison chaplain. God has completely turned his life around. All four of us, Marc, Dwayne, Rudy and me, were friends in elementary school. None of us had any involvement in church as kids. All of us were headed in one direction, then God intervened and turned us around, all independently of each other.

How do you explain these kinds of changes? These stories could be multiplied millions of times, because the gospel is, as Paul says in Romans 1, “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.” The gospel is a message that has power to transform our lives. In this passage in Galatians 1, Paul points to the complete change of direction in his own life, but he’s not just telling the story. He’s saying that this change needs to be explained, that it didn’t just happen in the natural course of events. He’s saying that this change is evidence of the divine origin of the gospel. The gospel that he preached, and that the Galatians believed, is not of human origin. It’s not something he came up with in his studies. It’s something he received from God. It’s a message from God that has the power to transform, because it is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.”

Notice, first of all, how Paul describes what has happened in his life. He doesn’t say: “I came to the end of my rope, so I sat down and weighed my options and decided the best course of action was to become a Christian.” He hasn’t embarked on a program of self-improvement in an effort to get his life on track. It’s not, primarily, that Paul has made a decision. It’s that God has intervened in Paul’s life: “But when God, who had set me apart before I was born....” Before it ever entered Paul’s mind that he might be fighting on the wrong side, God was there. God had set him apart from before his birth. God had an interest in Paul’s life, even though Paul was bent on destroying God’s people.

Paul wasn’t at the end of himself. God calls us all in different ways and at different points in our lives. People like Marc, Dwayne, and Rudy came to the end of themselves, and then they were willing to listen attentively to the message of the gospel. But it doesn’t always happen like that. Paul was doing well, humanly speaking. He says “I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.” Among his peers, Paul was someone to be reckoned with. His life was on track. But then something unexpected happened. This God, who had set him apart from before his birth, called him: “But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.” Jesus met him on the road to Damascus, when he was on his way to arrest and kill more Christians. Paul was rushing headlong in one direction, and Jesus stopped him in mid course and turned him around. But the explanation for that change of direction is God. It’s not that Paul did something to get himself on track. It’s that God stopped him and called him to turn around.

The second thing is that Paul was not completely passive in this process. I’ve noticed a contrast in the way people look at their spiritual lives. They make a lot of the fact that following Christ is their decision. The primary way they describe their conversion is in these terms: they heard an invitation and made a decision to follow Jesus. But after that initial decision, they wait for God to do something extraordinary to make them grow. They go forward in revival meetings, and they spend year after year praying and waiting for God to do something, to make them more spiritually engaged, to cause them to begin following more diligently. They were very active at the beginning: they took charge and received the gift that was being offered; but now they’re passive, just waiting for God to do something apart from any effort on their part.

Paul is just the opposite. God took hold of him in the beginning and did something that was no part of his intention. And then he responded by actively following. The first thing he did, according to this passage in Galatians, is go away into Arabia. He says that he didn’t consult with other people. Paul had no one to turn to at this point, so he went away into Arabia, to give himself time to assimilate and adjust to the things he’d just learned.

Eugene Peterson has a good description of what Paul was doing: “Paul was in no hurry to get back to work. He didn’t have to be in a hurry for he knew that God was at work. God didn’t need him; he needed God. Arabia was his place and time for the leisurely, contemplative training in which he got used to this new way of life in which God was at the center, in which he himself was accepted, and in which he could travel light” (Traveling Light, p. 52).

I’m convinced that the reason many people don’t grow in their Christian lives is that they don’t give themselves time to assimilate the message. They make a “decision for Christ,” then they rush back into their frenzied lives and the Word never sinks in. If we want to grow as Christians, we need to be ruthless in this area. We need to give ourselves time in God’s presence, in prayer and in His Word and in corporate worship. And anything that keeps us from doing these things is harming us, whether it’s excessive work to maintain our lifestyle or excessive time in recreational activities. If we don’t give ourselves time to cultivate this new way of life with God at the center, we’ll spend our lives floundering.

Thomas Merton says our modern, fast-paced life dehumanizes us: “The world of men has forgotten the joys of silence, the peace of solitude which is necessary, to some extent, for the fulness of human living.... If man is constantly exiled from his own home, locked out of his own spiritual solitude, he ceases to be a true person. He no longer lives as a man. He is not even a healthy animal. He becomes a kind of automaton, living without joy because he has lost all spontaneity. He is no longer moved from within, but only from outside himself. He no longer makes decisions for himself, he lets them be made for him. He no longer acts upon the outside world, but lets it act upon him. He is propelled through life by a series of collisions with outside forces. His is no longer the life of a human being, but the existence of a sentient billiard ball, a being without purpose and without any deeply valid response to reality” (quoted by Peterson, in Traveling Light, p. 52). What he is saying is really not much different than what Jesus said in the Parable of the Sower: “As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing” (Matthew 13:22). Jesus is describing people who are so wrapped up in the things of this world that they don’t have time to cultivate this new way of life with God at the center. So the Word ends up being choked, and their spiritual life dwindles into nothing. The condition Merton is describing has the same effect.

The third thing to notice is that Paul’s conversion was part of a larger work of God. Jesus confronted him individually, and he went into a time of solitude to give himself time to assimilate the change that had taken place. But when he responded to the message, Paul found that he was part of a larger body. Paul is emphasizing, in this passage, that he didn’t learn the gospel from one of the other apostles. It’s important for him to do this, because the Galatians were questioning the legitimacy of his claim to be an apostle. Paul shows that he is truly an apostle, that he has received the message directly from Jesus Christ. But then, having received the message, he doesn’t remain in isolation. We see him, in these verses and into the next chapter, recognizing that he is part of the Church.

He tells us that he eventually went to Jerusalem and spent 10 days with Peter: not enough time to have been discipled by him, but enough time to establish a friendship, enough time to recognize their common bond in Christ. The churches in Judea didn’t know him, but they were hearing reports about his ministry and they glorified God because of him (v. 24). And Paul was called to use his gifts in the church, proclaiming Jesus among the Gentiles (v. 16). It’s not just Jesus and Paul. Jesus calls Paul to be part of the Church. God is building His Church, and He’s called Paul to be part of it.

St. Cyprian, writing in the early 200's, said that “Without the church as mother one cannot have God as father” (Roger Olson, The Story of Christian Theology, p. 114). That sounds strange to us as American Evangelicals in the early 21st century, because we’re so used to thinking of salvation in individualistic terms. But the truth is that God does not deal with us individualistically. He graciously calls in the context of our daily lives, and then as we turn to Him we find that we are part of His Church, the bride He’s preparing for His Son. I said earlier that many people don’t grow spiritually because they don’t give themselves time to assimilate the message. Many others don’t grow because they don’t see the importance of the Church. It’s through the ongoing ministry of the Church that we first hear the message, and it’s within the context of the Church that we are nurtured spiritually. When we’re negligent about corporate worship, we’re sabotaging our own spiritual lives. It’s not just us and Jesus. Jesus calls us to grow as part of His Church by entering into corporate worship, receiving the sacraments, hearing the Word preached, and using our gifts to serve one another in His name.

The gospel is the “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith.” But responding to the gospel involves every area of our lives. God graciously calls us to Himself, and then He says to us: “You were bought with a price; your life is no longer your own to do whatever you want.” So, when He calls us to Himself, He’s also calling us to order our lives in ways that enable us to grow. When we, over an extended period of time, allow our spiritual lives to be crowded out by the cares and pleasures of this life, we’re being disobedient. And when God calls us to Himself, He calls us to enter into the life of the Church, to be faithful in worship and to be diligent in exercising our gifts in service to one another. When God calls us to Himself, He lays claim to our lives in every area. It’s as we accept and respond to this claim that we are transformed into His image.