Galatians 3:2-5
2 I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? 3 Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? 4 Have you suffered so much for nothing–if it really was for nothing? 5 Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?

Here we see the apostle Paul being pretty forceful–but it’s for a very good reason! After witnessing to the Galatian church, Paul continued his missionary journey, only to come back a little while later and find that the Galatians had started believing in a different gospel…one which said that the new Christians had to be circumcised and follow all the Jewish holiness laws in the Old Testament in order to be saved.

Paul was understandably confused and a little frustrated by this. This “different” gospel, preached by some Jews who had pretended to be converted long enough to infiltrate the fledgling church, was threatening to tear apart the Christian movement before it even had its wings. If the Galatians quit believing that faith in Christ was enough to be saved, then they had lost the core of what made Christianity different from Judaism in the first place–the identity of Jesus as Son of God and Savior, Who died to pay for sins and rose again.

Thus, Paul asks the above series of pointed questions: was their faith rooted in the old Law, as the Jews believed, or in the new knowledge of Christ as Savior? Did they really believe, after learning the sheer magnitude of what Jesus did for them, that they could attain salvation all on their own just by “acting good enough?” Was God among them because they were “being good” by human standards, or because they professed faith in His Son?

Paul works hard in his letter to the Galatians to correct the slumping gospel, and this helps the early church rally and gain its feet again. But these days, the modern church is just as susceptible to false gospels (I like to call them “Christian-esque” beliefs), which confuse believers and nonbelievers alike. How often have you heard people talk about their good deeds as if the deeds alone will win brownie points with God? Or how often have you heard that God is for one political party and against the other? These and many other false gospels only distract from the real message. To proclaim the message of Christ, we must first be sure we know what that message IS!