Hello everyone, as Clarielle said, I’m the new pastor at Saint-Christol-les-alès for the next few years. We’ll have the opportunity to meet over the coming weeks and months. I’m very happy to be here with you this morning and for the years to come, and to discover with you where God is calling us together as the Church of Saint-Christol-les-Alès. To begin the year with you, I wanted us to reflect on the Gospel and the particularity of the Gospel. Our society constantly reminds us that Christianity is a religion like any other, that it’s of no great importance. Karl Marx, for example, said that “religion is the opium of the people”, that it is man who creates religion, not religion that transforms man, and that the natural tendency of human beings is to create a religion in their own image. In this way, our society believes that Christianity is a reflection of nice people, not the other way around. Our society has such a hard time understanding the power of the Gospel message to transform us. Hearing all this makes it all the more fundamental that we root ourselves deeply in the message of the Bible. So this morning, I invite you to read with me what the apostle Paul thought about the Gospel he was proclaiming. We’ll be doing a series of sermons on the epistle to the Galatians. Let’s read Galatians 1:1-12:

Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christand God the Father, who raised him from the dead— ² and all the brothers and sisters^[a] with me, To the churches in Galatia: ³ Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,⁴ who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age,according to the will of our God and Father, ⁵ to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

⁶ I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— ⁷ which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. ⁸ But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! ⁹ As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse! ¹⁰ Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ. ¹¹ I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. ¹² I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

1. What the world says about the Gospel

It’s been said before, but our society sees Christianity as just another religion. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a non-Christian say to you: we all climb the same hill by different paths, but we all have the same destination. Or sometimes we hear about the blind man’s elephant, where each blind man touches a part of the elephant and all the blind men actually describe what they perceive, but they all have a reduced vision of what the elephant really is. In the same way, we’re sometimes told that all religions hold part of the truth about how to get to God, but that they have to be put together for them to be truly true. In fact, when our society does this, it removes the exclusivity of Christianity and Christianity becomes just another message. And honestly, how many times have we experienced this in our lives, times when we’ve lost sight of the breadth of the Bible’s message, its grandeur and profound power.

A few years ago, I had a brand-new computer that worked like a charm, but as time went by, it started to get pretty slow until it became a real pain to work with. So early last year, I bought a new computer and was shocked at how quickly it turned on, or how well it worked.

And it’s the same in our Christian life. Sometimes we get so used to thinking that the message of the Bible is like any other, that it has no power in its own right, that we forget just how much it can change our lives. Sometimes we also forget the power of prayer and the Bible, because we’ve been told so much in our society that religion is simply a psychological support for the weak.

2. Don’t turn away from the Gospel (because it comes from God)

But when you look at Paul’s letter to the Galatians: that’s not what he’s saying! In fact, Paul’s reaction in this letter can sometimes seem a little excessive, so emotionally charged is it. Why is Paul so harsh as to curse anyone who turns the Church away from the Bible? Why doesn’t anyone, even an angel, have the right to turn God’s people away from the Bible and the Gospel? Precisely because the good news, the Gospel, is not like any other religion. And Paul goes very far: the Greek word “anathema” has a very strong meaning. It can be translated as “cursed”, but the word anathema refers to the total destruction of an object or person that threatens the stability of God’s people. This destruction was done to protect God’s people. There are plenty of stories in the Old Testament, in particular, where we find this idea. The destruction of idols or the shunning, sometimes even the killing, of certain people. When we understand the real meaning of the word “anathema”, we see how intransigent Paul is about anything that would distract us from the message of the Bible. In this day and age, many people are shocked by this chapter of the Bible. What may help us to understand Paul’s reaction a little is that, in fact, we’re often very tolerant when we think something isn’t that serious or important. Where we become really intransigent/intolerant is when we see the true importance of something.

We can tolerate, for example, someone who doesn’t like the same type of food as us, because it doesn’t have many consequences, but we have to be intransigent about someone who wants to kill another person.

Here Paul is uncompromising, because to turn away from the message he has given is to turn away from God himself, and therefore from salvation. C. S. Lewis had this to say: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it can’t be is of average importance”. It’s interesting because it calls us to look at things as God sees them and to be uncompromising for the good things and tolerant for the good things. When we start to see things as God sees them, we’ll stop being intransigent about always being right about the right way to go to this or that place, or how to put things away in the house, etc., and we’ll be able to make a point of helping others move forward with God. And that’s where it gets exciting: it should always be a loving, compassionate intransigence, ready to give ourselves for others. Paul goes so far as to wish anathema on himself if he lies.

3. Christ gave Himself for our sins in order to rescue us from the present evil century.

But then… what is this all-important, life-changing message that absolutely must not be distorted? This message is what we call the Gospel or the Good News, and it’s summed up in verse 4: Jesus Christ “gave himself for our sins, so that we might be snatched from this evil age, according to the will of our God and Father”. We’ll see in the next few sermons that there are many different ways of distorting this message, but the heart of Paul’s message, of the Bible and of Christianity, is that Jesus Christ died to free us from the slavery of sin and evil, and that he rose from the dead to enable us to live a new life. The heart of this message is that we deserve hell for all the evil we’ve done, but that God is a good God who freely forgives us all who accept this forgiveness. It’s a fundamentally different message from all other religions, because in all other religions it’s up to man to ascend to God, to do enough to be accepted by him, whereas here it’s God himself who descends to us in the person of Jesus Christ to deliver us from evil and to save us. Do you understand how different this message is, how right it is that Paul should have taken offence at his message being perverted and hijacked? It’s such a powerful message that Paul was ready to die for it, and that so many Christians, even today, are ready to suffer and die to live out the full implications of this message. It’s the message of the Bible that is so powerful that it can transform the most hardened murderers into people full of love.

We can think of the apostle Paul, who was someone who sought at all costs to kill Christians, and who became one of the leading missionaries of the first-century Church. We can also think of John Newton, who was a slave trader who converted and became a great campaigner against the slave trade, and lots of other people!

When we distort the message of the Bible, we lose all that power and it turns them away from God himself, which is why Paul is so frustrated with the Galatians. On the other hand, accepting this message brings us back to God and enables us, like Paul, to say: “To God be the glory for ever and ever! Amen” (v. 4). When we understand the greatness of our faults, God’s forgiveness and his love for us, it brings us closer to him and leads us to worship the living God. In fact, what Paul is saying in these few verses is that when we’re in trouble in our Christian life, all we need is to remember the Gospel and live it deeply.