Thank God for Paul!

A few years after I’d become a Christian, I was interviewing a man for the newspaper who was running for office in the House of Representatives.

I always hated interviewing political candidates, because they always seemed to be wearing masks when they’d talk to us.

Anybody can seem nice for an hour. And politicians are extremely skilled at giving vague answers to direct questions, at telling you what they think you want to hear, and at painting themselves in the most flattering light you can imagine.

I hope you’re not surprised to hear any of those things.

Anyway, we got to know one another a bit in the Suffolk News-Herald’s conference room. And one of the things I learned from this candidate was that he’d attended seminary in Petersburg.

We hadn’t talked much about faith by that point, but when he heard that I was a follower of Jesus and “even a Sunday school teacher,” he’d opened up a little about his time in seminary and his own faith.

And in the course of that part of the conversation, I asked him about the Apostle Paul’s command that Christians submit to the authority of their governments.

This was during a period of civil unrest, when the news was full of reports of violent and destructive demonstrations around the nation.

I’d expected this politician would offer some platitude that affirmed Paul’s command, while still excusing the violence and destruction that were taking place all around America.

But I was utterly unprepared for what this seminary graduate had to say.

“I reject Paul’s teachings,” he said.

“I’m sorry. What?” I replied.

“If it were up to me, we’d take all his letters out of the Bible,” he replied.

I was stunned. Take Paul’s letters out of the Bible? That’s at least 25 percent of the New Testament! The Book of Romans. Ephesians. The pastoral letters. GALATIANS!

Some of the early church’s most important writings on Christian doctrine are to be found in those letters. How could anybody who follows Jesus and believes in the authority of Scripture say such a thing?

Even more to the point for someone who at the time was considering going to seminary, how could someone graduate from SEMINARY and believe such things?

This was a pivotal moment for me. It was the moment that I realized there is STILL false teaching within the Church and that some of it comes right out of seminaries like the one this man had attended.

It was at this point that I decided if God made it possible for me to go to seminary that I’d be very careful to find one that believed in the authority of Scripture and that either adding to it or taking away from it constitute grave sins against Jesus and against His Church.

Sadly, my interview subject is not alone in his distaste for the Apostle Paul. Within the theological and scholarly communities, the 20th century was marked by an unrelenting effort to discredit Paul and reject his writings.

It seems we haven’t strayed far from what seems to have been taking place in the churches of Galatia during the first century A.D.

You’ll recall that I’ve said Paul wrote this letter to the believers in churches he’d planted in what’s now southwest Turkey during his first missionary journey.

After he’d left that area, another group of men, the Judaizers, had come behind him, attempting to discredit him and the gospel he preached.

They insisted that the new Gentile believers there had to be circumcised and follow other parts of the Mosaic Law in order to be truly saved. This was in direct opposition to Paul’s message of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Paul’s formula for salvation was grace working through faith, plus nothing. For the Judaizers, the formula was grace plus works.

But they couldn’t discredit Paul’s gospel message without discrediting the apostle who’d brought that message.

So, it appears they “sought to undermine his authority and his message by claiming that he dealt in a secondhand gospel, one originally derived from the apostles at Jerusalem but then changed and compromised by Paul without their knowledge or approval.” [Timothy George, Galatians, vol. 30, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 126.]

Last week, we began our look at the portion of this letter in which Paul defends his calling as an apostle. He was eager not so much to defend himself and rescue his reputation in Galatia, but rather to defend the one true gospel from those who were intent on destroying its message of freedom in Christ.

Ever the logical thinker, Paul seeks to convince the Galatians of the legitimacy of his gospel message by pointing to three events in his life.

These events would confirm the divine revelation by which he’d received the gospel; they confirmed the divinely-revealed gospel he preached was the same as the one the apostles who’d been with Jesus preached; and they demonstrated the uniformity of Paul’s message, regardless of his audience.

In the verses we looked at last week, Paul described his conversion and his reception of the gospel from the resurrected and glorified Jesus Himself.

This was the divine commission. Neither his conversion nor his education in gospel doctrine had come from the apostles, so he couldn’t have compromised their message. He’d received a heavenly message and a heavenly assignment from the King of kings and Lord of lords.

Next, in the passage we’ll look at today, he describes his first visit to Jerusalem after his conversion to show that he wasn’t IN Jerusalem long enough to have been tutored by the apostles there.

He’d only seen Peter and James, the half-brother of Jesus while he was there. He hadn’t spent time in the churches of Judea during that visit, but when the people of those churches heard what he’d been preaching to the Gentiles of Syria and Cilicia, they’d glorified God because of it.

Indeed, as we’ll see next week, when he visited Jerusalem again with Barnabas 14 years after his conversion, he’d met with James and Peter and John, the leaders of the Jerusalem church, and they’d all agreed on a plan for Paul to preach in Gentile regions and James, Peter, and John to preach in Jewish areas.

Then, they shook hands on the plan, which suggests that the other apostles — the men of “high reputation” in the church there — found no problems with Paul’s message.

He’d received a divine commission from Jesus. And he’d had that commission affirmed in his meetings with the leaders of the Jerusalem church. The word on the street in Judea was that Paul’s gospel message was true.

Later, we’ll see Paul describing an event involving Peter in Antioch, where Peter had reverted to the old Jewish ways of avoiding Gentiles.

Paul had chastised Peter for behavior that had its root in the legalism the Judaizers had been teaching in Galatia.

And the fact that there’s no record either here or in Acts that Peter challenged Paul’s rebuke suggests strongly that Paul’s argument for justification by faith alone was accepted by all the apostles and that it represented the true gospel.

What I want you to see as we prepare to look at this passage is that Paul’s not sharing his life story for his own benefit. He’s sharing it to show proof of his divine calling and message.

And, as I learned in that interview with the political candidate, if Paul were alive today, he would likely STILL be defending the one true gospel against those who’d seek to strip it of its power to save.

We’re going to pick up in verse 18 of chapter 1 today and read through the end of the chapter. Let’s read this passage together now.

Galatians 1:18–24 NASB95

18 Then three years later I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas, and stayed with him fifteen days. 19 But I did not see any other of the apostles except James, the Lord’s brother. 20 (Now in what I am writing to you, I assure you before God that I am not lying.) 21 Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. 22 I was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea which were in Christ; 23 but only, they kept hearing, “He who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith which he once tried to destroy.” 24 And they were glorifying God because of me.

So, three years after his conversion experience on the road to Damascus, Paul makes his first post-conversion visit to Jerusalem.

After he’d met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, he’d spent time in Arabia and then Damascus, where he’d preached the gospel and grew the church he’d formerly sought to destroy.

But Paul became aware of the need to ensure that the apostles in Judea recognized and accepted the new Gentile converts he was bringing into the faith.

So, he headed to Jerusalem to get to know Peter and to give Peter a chance to get to know him. This would be incredibly important to the unity of the church.

Only if everyone understood that they were all united under one faith could it truly be said of this body of Christ that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

So, Paul stayed with Cephas — Peter — for 15 days, during which time he also saw James, the half-brother of Jesus. But he saw none of the other apostles during this first visit, which would be strange if he’d been there trying to get his doctrine straight.

And we see how important Paul considers this point to be by the fact that he assures the Galatians of his truthfulness in verse 20.

“The truth of the gospel, as he preached it, was at stake in the truthfulness of what he said, as was the error of what the false teachers were proclaiming.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Ga 1:20.]

At the end of that 15 days, with people seeking to put him to death, Paul was sent away to Tarsus, his hometown, which was in the region of Cilicia, an event you can read more about in Acts, chapter 9.

And his time in Syria and Cilicia — about 14 years — seems to have borne fruit. We know this because when the apostles and other church leaders at the Jerusalem Council in Acts, chapter 15 discussed the matter of circumcision for Gentile believers, the Council decided to send a letter to the churches in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia confirming their freedom from the Law of Moses. Clearly, these were churches planted by Paul.

What’s significant about this is that Paul seems to have wanted to stay in Judea, perhaps to minister to the very families of those he’d persecuted and killed before he’d been saved.

But his time in Syria and Cilicia would prepare him for the trials that lay ahead of him.

As Timothy George puts it: “God sometimes calls his servants to labor in obscure places and under difficult circumstances in order to make them ready for some particular task or assignment unknown to them at the time. It may well be that Paul would not have had the wisdom to write Romans, or the equanimity to deal with the fractious Corinthians, or the courage to withstand the false teachers of Galatia, or the endurance to face arrest in Jerusalem and martyrdom in Rome had it not been for the ten years or so he spent laboring in little-known places with results difficult to quantify.” [Timothy George, Galatians, vol. 30, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 130–131.]

And that may be the biggest takeaway from today’s message. I don’t know what God’s plans are for you, and neither do you.

But what I do know — and what should bring you comfort when you find it hard to quantify the results of your prayers or your preaching or your teaching or anything else you do for the Kingdom of God — What you should remember is that God is using the difficult periods of your life to make you more like Jesus and to make you ready for whatever it is that He has for you next.

Perhaps Paul had this part of his life in mind when he wrote:

Romans 8:28 NASB95

28 And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

God would use even the difficulties Paul faced in his early ministry to make him more like Jesus and to prepare him for the trials he’d face later on.

And so, he preached in Syria and Cilicia. He planted churches there. And the people of the churches of Judea, who’d never met Paul, began to hear the word on the street of what God was doing in those regions through this former persecutor of the Church.

And I love how Paul concludes this passage: “And they were glorifying God because of me.”

“They only knew him by reputation, and they thanked God for what He was doing through him, which was the exact opposite reaction of Paul’s Judaizing critics.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Ga 1:21.]

So, the word on the street seems to have confirmed Paul’s apostolic calling. And as we’ll see next week, the other Apostles affirmed it, too, agreeing that Paul should take his message of salvation by grace, through faith, to the nations, to the Gentiles.

And what I want you to recognize is how Paul must have wondered if he was ever going to be allowed by God to leave his hometown and take the message of the gospel to the farthest parts of the known world.

When would he finally be released to wander through Europe and Asia, telling people about Jesus?

Well, the answer to that question was this: In God’s time.

And that’s a hard thing for us. I imagine it was a hard thing for Paul. Much like many of us, Paul was a man of action. He didn’t want to sit around and wait.

But God had put him in Tarsus for a reason — partly to preach the gospel there, but also to help shape him into a man who’d act like Jesus, even in the midst of persecution and suffering.

We have a tendency to look for whatever the next thing will be. One of the things I learned as a newspaper editor was that even the most conscientious workers often have an eye on the job ads. Lots of people look at every job as just another rung on the ladder of self-advancement.

But what if I told you that you’re where you are — whether it’s your job or your family or even your church — because God put you there and has a plan for you there?

What if I told you that the lousy boss, the unloving wife — even the ugly pastor — have all been sovereignly placed by God in your life to make you more like Jesus? What if I told you that the trials and tribulations in your life are PART of the ministry Jesus called you to?

Look, I’m not saying you should never go after a new job. There are times when it’s absolutely right and proper to do so. Just as there are times when it’s absolutely right and proper to find a new church — as when a church forsakes the gospel, for instance.

What I AM saying is that we should approach such changes prayerfully and cautiously.

We want to change our circumstances. But God works THROUGH our circumstances to make believers into the image of Jesus. And God works THROUGH our circumstances to do Kingdom work through us.

We want to change our circumstances. But God wants us to learn to trust and praise Him in ANY circumstance. And sometimes, the very way we handle those circumstances — the joy we show in the midst of suffering, for example — can be just what unbelievers need to finally see Jesus.

When we look at the post-conversion life of Paul, we’re hard-pressed to see anything but hard times.

But what we DO see throughout that part of his life is a simple determination to be where God wants him and to be doing what God wants him to do — even when he’s being discredited, even when he’s being threatened, even when he’s on his way to his execution.

Wherever you are in your life as a follower of Christ, I want to encourage you today to persevere; to keep on working as unto the Lord; to have joy when nobody would expect to see it; and to find the peace of Jesus Christ in all the places and situations where peace doesn’t seem possible.

These are some of the things we’d miss if we removed Paul’s letters from the Bible. And I thank God for all the scholars and theologians who’ve fought back against the modern attempt to discredit him. And more than that, I thank God for giving us the Apostle AND his letters.