Galatians 1:15-16 (NIV84) When God … was pleased to reveal his Son so that I might preach

Oh how mysterious, marvelous, merciful, manifest, and majestic is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  If we were going to create a religious, it would have been altogether different that the Gospel of Jesus.  Look at all of the man made religous.  They are either weird, lenient, or legalistic.  But the gospel of Jesus is rigid, as is all truth, and yet it is free.  If you can understand it, then you don’t understand it.  So many theologians want to make the gospel cut and dry, but then it loses its marvelous nature.  Two of the great mysteries of the gospel are seemingly contradictory.  They Bible declares that God has known and called his own since before time began.  God has predestined his people to be formed in the image of Christ.  And yet we cannot get around the needed faith action of mankind individually called to respond to the wooing of God and say “yes Lord, I believe, I receive.” Jesus died for all mankind, and yet this is not experienced unless it is received. The gospel is a mystery.  So, Paul is preaching to the Church in Galatia who is being assaulted by some who would take the gospel of Jesus and pervert it into something that man made up.  This non-gospel they were preaching was not good news, it was full of legalism.

So here in Galatians 1:12 he says the gospel I preached is not something man made up” v13 says I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ

Wherever the gospel is preached faithfully, the revelation that comes is from Jesus Christ himself

v15 but when God, who set me apart from birth, and called me by his grace, was pleased

eudokeo = well pleased, consented, enjoy

Every time I preach, I do my best to be faithful to preach what God would have me, but I cannot move their soul.  I cannot change their heart.  So, I preach faithfully and I pray that God move on a heart, woo them, and they combine it with faith.  It is not only that he decides to do it, but he knows the right time, the right place.  But not only is it the time he is pleased with, but also it pleases him, it makes him smile.  So Paul says when God smiled and revealed himself, v16 to reveal his son in me, so that I might preach him …

Paul understood that he was part of something bigger, something outside of himself.  God revealed Christ TO him … SO THAT He could reveal Christ IN him.

Oh folks listen, we are here SO THAT Christ IN us may be revealed THROUGH us to a world in need.  In every circumstance, in the simplest things … SO THAT

Planning an event, wiping a nose, sharing your faith SO THAT

Listening to a child quote a verse, struggling with an unruly 3rd grader, SO THAT

Extra work, patient with personalities, balancing an account, SO THAT

Misunderstood, smiling through it all, SO THAT

This was the life of the apostles, insulted, and persecuted, lied about, but still rejoicing, SO THAT

That was Paul, in prison, hungry, thirsty, shipwrecked, SO THAT

The martyrs of history, burned at the stake, drowned, in prison, boiled alive in oil, killed by villagers, rejected by governments, SO THAT

That was Jesus, despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, familiar with our sufferings, not esteemed, taking our infirmities, carrying our sorrows, smitten and afflicted, pierced, crushed, punished, SO THAT

So That we might be forgiven, at peace, righteous, pure, holy, blameless, without spot or wrinkle

Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest) of these verses says “If Jesus is to regenerate me, what is he up against?  I have a heredity I had no say in; I am NOT holy nor likely to be; and if all Jesus Christ can do is tell me I must be holy, his teaching plants despair.  But if Jesus is a regenerator, one who can put into me his own heredity of holiness, then I begin to see what he is driving at when he says that I have to be holy”

He puts it IN Me

Again Chambers says “The moral transaction on my part is agreement with God’s verdict on sin in the cross of Jesus Christ”

Oh The Mystery and Majesty of the Gospel