In v19 Paul says: 'through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God'. Dying to the law doesn't mean that he can live a life of sin. It means that he can live to God. And how is living to God defined? By God's law!So what does it mean to die to the law?

As Paul writes his letter to the Galatians, arguing for salvation by faith and not by works, he knows that his opponents are going to object. And one particular objection they'll raise is this: 'If you tell people that they don't have to keep the law to earn salvation then they'll just live whatever way they like'. And so he

In v16, Paul makes three different statements about justification. Firstly, there's a general statement. We know that a person - any person - is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. But then he makes it personal. ‘So we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ

By his actions, Peter is forcing the Gentiles to live like Jews. That is, if sincere Gentile Christians see what Peter is doing, they'll think that to be a proper Christian they can't eat pork, they need to be circumcised and so on. It's sending out the message that in order to be acceptable to God, you must believe in

In these verses we have a conflict that we don't expect. We find two leading Apostles, Peter and Paul, disagree with each other! Now there have always been people in churches who don't like public debate - who would say, why do we have to have these disputes out in the open? Surely it looks bad to have Christians publicly

Verse 10 nearly seems like a throwaway verse. We could pass over it, almost without noticing. The only instruction that the Apostles in Jerusalem give Paul and Barnabas is that they remember the poor. This, says Paul, is the very thing he was eager to do. Most likely, this is talking about the Jewish converts in Judea who were suffering

Here in verse 3 we get one of our biggest clues so far about the false teaching that's rocking the Galatian churches. Paul says here that Titus wasn't circumcised. Circumcision was standard Jewish religious practice. In fact, it was something that God had commanded Abraham and his descendants to do. It was a sign of God's covenant with them. For

Paul has made the claim that he received the gospel message he was teaching directly from Jesus Christ. But he had nothing to fear from other people examining his claim. Because he knew that since it really was a message from God, others would recognise it as that. And so in v1, fourteen years after his conversion, Paul goes up

Jesus' plan and power are shown clearly in the conversion of the Apostle Paul. But what was the ultimate purpose in all this? And what is the final thread of evidence that Paul's gospel isn't man-made?We're shown the answer by the Christians in the churches of Judea. They'd never met Paul. All they heard about him was that he was

The greatest evidence that Paul can point to against claims that his gospel is from man is the change in his own life. Verse 13 can't have been an easy verse for Paul to write. 'I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it'. ‘Violently’ is literally 'beyond measure'. Now, writing as a Christian, did the pleas