You can find the text either in your order of worship. We'll be looking at Galatians chapter 1, verses 11 through 24. But actually, to begin with, this morning, I'm going to read you from Acts chapter 26. And it's Paul's account of his own conversion to, before King Agrippa. And I'm going to sort of pick and choose some spots because it'll fit into the Galatians. So I say, do you hear the word of God starting at verse 5? Paul says, they have known for a long time if they are willing to testify. That according to the strictest party of our religion, I have lived as a Pharisee down the verse 9. I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things in opposing the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And I did so in Jerusalem. I not only locked up many of the saints in prison after receiving authority from the chief priests, but when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. And I punished them often as in all the synagogues and tried to make them blasphemy and enraging fury against them. I persecuted them even to foreign cities. And this connection I journeyed to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests. At midday, okay, and I saw on the way a light from heaven brighter than the sun that shone around me and those who journeyed with me. And when they've fallen on the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads. And I said, who are you, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus from your persecuting. But rise and stand upon your feet for I've appeared to you for this purpose. To appoint you as a servant and witness to the things in which you have seen me in me, and those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles to whom I am sending you, to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me. Let us pray. Father, I pray this morning that as we look at Paul's autobiography, as we look at his defense of his own gospel, that that same gospel would become utterly clear to us. And becoming utterly clear, we would embrace it whether we have never embraced Jesus or whether we think we have been doing so our whole life. I pray that you would open the eyes of the blind and the ears of death. I pray that you would be in my head and in my thinking, in my heart and in my understanding and in my mouth and in my speaking. Christ, name, we pray these things, amen, amen. Well, if you've just, if this is your first Sunday here, we're about, this is the third sermon in, I think, to the book of Galatians. And thus far, we've sort of been looking at some intro stuff. You remember the book of Galatians was written by the Apostle Paul and it was written to people who were Pharisees or there were becoming Pharisees. Remember, he says of the Galatians they were deserting the gospel. Now, what's a Pharisee? If you remember, I've told you that the nice thing about being a Pharisee is that there are a million different ways to illustrate it, it's almost everywhere you look. But the bottom line is a Pharisee is someone who believes that they will receive acceptance and pleasure from God through something other than Jesus alone. In other words, Jesus plus anything equals nothing. That's the whole point of Paul's letter. If you try and add something to the gospel, you lose Paul is going to say. So a Pharisee is constantly struggling with doing good things, almost always good things in order to gain the approval of God or the approval of men, right? And you know of your Pharisee, if you're more concerned about the rules than you are about the gospel, you're more concerned about your Pharisee, if you're more concerned about the rules than you are concerned about people. You're a Pharisee, by the way, if you dislike Pharisees, right? That's my struggle. The first Sunday, I started preaching someone walked out and they said, he said, I don't know what I feel about going to a church where the pastor hates me. He got it. So did I. When I was in seminary, I had a professor named Roger Nicole. He was in his 80s then struggled with narcolepsy, which made class interesting. He did a great print. She's from France. He had a great French accent. And one time I was complaining about Pharisees, something I forget what the complaint was, but I do remember him looking over and says, my brother, you have just out fellacy, Ziffelacy. And I remember what I was complaining about, but I'd never forgot that. That Paul's writing this letter, basically there are two parties in Galatia that are causing a problem. They're one, the Judaizers, if you will. And the Judaizers are the ones who are coming in, probably from Jerusalem, and telling the Galatians, you know, you need to add something to the gospel. I know Paul said, trust Jesus and trust in Jesus is good, but really what you need to do is trust Jesus and you need to become circumcised. So they were sort of watering down the gospel, if you will, by adding to it. The Galatians on the other hand, were simply deserting the gospel by embracing it. And so that's the struggle. So Paul enters into this discussion with the Galatians. And the first thing he said last week is, what, I'm astonished at you. And by him saying, telling the Galatians he was astonished, it's that sort of parental feeling when you tell your child not to touch the stove and they touch the stove and they burn themselves and you don't know whether to be angry or compassionate. That's what Paul's feeling when he says, I'm astonished that you were so quickly leaving the gospel. And yet, he says, there is only one gospel. That's it, one, uno, it, I'm. And anyone who preaches a gospel, anything other than what I have preached to you, he says to them, let him be a curse. If an angel does it or another preacher, or even if I come to you and say something different, then what you've heard, let him be a curse. In other words, you are bound for hell. If you preach anything or believe anything other than what I have delivered to you. That's pretty clear, is it not? And some people struggle with that. And they say, how can he say there's only one gospel? Doesn't everything sort of lead to the same place? It really doesn't. At the end of the day, no matter who you are, you believe that there's only one gospel. No matter what you believe, you really believe that as well. The Leslie Newvagan was a missionary in India for about 50 years, I believe. And after 50 years, he came back from Mission Field and started writing. And one of the most famous objections to the gospel that he often got was that it was too exclusive. And people would use the illustration of the three blind men meeting an elephant. Have you heard that one? Right, three blind men come and they approach an elephant and their task is to touch the elephant and to tell the world what an elephant is like. And so the first guy goes up and he grabs the tail and he said, oh, elephants are weak and measly. I mean, they're thin and a little tough to the fur. I mean, they must be cute, but really, that's all they are. The next thing is no one elephant, they're just solid as a rock, you know, he put his hand on the midsection. And he said, they're just adamant that you can't get around them, they're so big. And the third guy grabs the trunk and he said, well, elephants are weak and mushy. And the person would say, see, they all had part of the truth, but they were all touching the same elephant. The problem with that Newvagan would respond to them and I tell you, it's the only way that you can tell, you can say that all of these men only had part of the truth is if you were somehow able to be behind them and see the whole truth yourself. In other words, by saying that no one has the whole truth, no one has the one gospel, you have just articulated the one gospel. It's not the right one, but it is a statement that is just as exclusive as Paul saying there's only one gospel. Now the question is, how can he say that? You know, where does he get off saying something like, I have the one gospel and nothing else, no one else does. Well, that's what we're gonna look at today. Paul tells us why he thinks he has the only true gospel and then he's going to give us three arguments to sort of back up his claim. So he starts with a surprising claim and what's Paul's surprising claim is to why he has the one true gospel. Let me read it to you, it's the verses 11 and 12. Paul says, for I would have you know brothers that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel. For I did not receive it from any man nor was I taught it but I received it through revelation of Jesus Christ. So why is Paul's gospel in his opinion, the one gospel, the only true gospel, it's because he didn't receive it from man to begin with. In other words, someone else didn't tell me the gospel, Paul is saying, and I didn't receive it from tradition, I received it directly from God by revelation of Jesus Christ. If it's the one true gospel because God himself gave it to me and the person and the work of his son, Jesus. Remember the road to Damascus? That's why I opened with reading that. But Paul also wants to make it clear that this gospel did come from God. And so now the rest of the argument he makes is how we know that it came from God on one hand, on the other hand, how it could not have come from man. In other words, how he couldn't have learned it from some other person or how he didn't go to Jerusalem and they taught him and then he came back because one of the claims apparently that people made against Paul is that, you know, he went to Jerusalem and he learned the gospel from Peter and James and John and those guys. And then when he went out and started preaching, Paul started deviating from what Jerusalem taught. And Paul's gonna show us this morning, there's no way I could deviate from what Jerusalem taught because I didn't get what I got from Jerusalem. I got it directly from the source. I got it from Jesus himself. And so Paul's gonna give three arguments for his gospel and the first argument is gonna be, we'll look at three. I mean, the first is an argument from his past and the second argument is an argument from what happened when Jesus appeared to him and the third argument is what happened after his conversion. So let's look at Paul's past. In verse 13, Paul says, for you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the Church of God violently and tried to destroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers. So first off, he says, for you know of my former life in Judaism, they know of it either because of one, or another reason that either Paul told them when he came through there and preached as part of just his story. Here's who I was and here's now who I am or his detractors were saying it about him. Do you know how bad Paul is? So you're telling me, Paul says you don't have to be circumcised and you look at what he did. Paul was so zealous for the law, he tried to kill Christians and you're telling me, Paul doesn't think you ought to be circumcised. You don't think the law is important? Paul says I was so zealous that I tried to, I've not only persecuted the Church savagely, but I tried to destroy it. I read it to you in the book of Acts, Paul says when Christians were brought before the Council and there had to be a vote as to whether to kill them, I voted to kill them. I tried to destroy the Church. He says I was the head of my class if you will at Tarsus High School, right? The THS Pharisees, he says I was the valedictorian there. So zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers. Now here's what you need to get. What is it that made Paul odious and evil and bad? Was it his adultery? Was it his thievery? It was his goodness. It was Paul's zeal for the law. It was his zeal for good things that actually made him ultimately turn out bad. And it always is that way. Almost all badness if you look throughout history is rooted in goodness and when I say goodness, I mean self-righteousness. When you look at the Nazis, why did the Nazis in Hitler kill six million Jews? Was it simply because they thought Jews were bad? No, it's because they thought they were superior. Superiority always leads itself to zeal and it always leads itself to harm, which just as a side note, the same thing happens today. In other words, I've been a minister for about 15 years now. And in 15 years, I have never seen a church divided or split because of unrighteousness. I'm sure it's happened. I personally have just never seen it. I've never seen some lascivious behavior result in a church splitting and dividing. On the other hand, I have seen more churches than I can count on both of my hands and my feet that have been split divided, crushed, ruined, and destroyed by well-intentioned yet self-righteous Christians. Self-righteousness always leads to a negative place. It never leads something good and people are well-intentioned. Do you think Paul was ill-intentioned? Every time Paul casts his vote to kill a Christian, every time he drugs someone to prison, he probably pat himself on the back and he and the boys went out and with their arms around each other and said, we another one down, God must love us. And yet in retrospect, we realized that all of these things that he thought were good and all these things that he were doing to destroy the church were actually bad. In fact, they were evil. Now, why does Paul give that as the first argument for why his gospel had to come from God? And I think the answer is just this. Someone like that doesn't change very easily. I mean, if it was about arguing with the gospel to Paul, how could you do it? Paul knew the Bible, he's at the top of his class, he knew the Bible better than anyone else. He was obviously a good rhetorician, he was good at argumentation. You ever try to have an argument with someone who knows the Bible pretty well and they're also good at arguing? Ask my wife, it's pretty hard. It really is. So whether the Paul didn't know the Bible, it wasn't that he didn't know all of the traditions of the fathers. The point is that God, in spite of Paul's goodness, in spite of his self-righteousness, in spite of his zeal for the wrong thing, God changed him. People like that don't change on their own. And guess what, people like you and me, we don't change on our own either. If you're here today, if you're a Christian at least, the reason you're here is because God changed you, not because someone persuaded you. And that's where Paul goes next. Do you notice in the text the word but is used? So in verse 14, he says, I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age, my own people, so extremely jealous of it was I for the traditions of my fathers. And then in verse 15, that great word but, second argument, the argument from grace, he says, but when he who set me apart before I was born and who called me by his grace was pleased to reveal his son to me in order that I may preach him to the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone. Remember whenever you see the word but you replete, you just delete whatever came before that. And so Paul says, I was zealous, I was a persecutor of the church, I was bad but, but when God who set me apart from birth, the first thing you should notice here is when, as soon as you switch from verses 13 and 14 to 15 and 16, there's a pronoun change. Then when Paul's talking about his life before knowing Jesus, everything is I, I persecuted the church, I was zealous, I was advancing, I was this, I was that. And as soon as he's converted after the butt, all you hear is he, he changed me, he set me apart, he revealed his son to me, he, he, that is God. One of the ways you know you are starting to understand the gospel is when you begin to use the word eyeless and start to use the word he, more, because you realize that you bring very little to the table. And that's the first thing Paul says is he, who set me apart from birth. You think God had a plan for Paul's life? That strike you as odd. Some people are uncomfortable with that. And yet Paul wasn't. Paul said the reason I'm here is because God set me apart from birth. You hear me say it every single Sunday, God always initiates with sinners. And when I say that, I don't mean just in the order of worship. I mean, if your eyes are open to see the gospel, it is because God set you apart before you were born. And what does he set you apart for? Same thing he set Paul apart for. He said, and he called me according to his grace. What is grace? Grace is unmerited favor. In other words, why did God call Paul? No good reason, at least no good reason in Paul. There was nothing in Paul that would merit God calling him. God called him by his grace. And it's interesting to me because the call to worship this morning was Psalm 23. And that's just out of the lecture area. That's what is on the calendar for this time of year. In the last line of the Psalm 23 says, and goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. A really more accurate translation of that would be something like goodness and mercy will stalk me all the days of my life. Or goodness and mercy will hunt me down all the days of my life. And that's a good thing. Most of us avoid goodness and mercy. We desperately say we want it and we avoid it. And the good news of the gospel is that at least Psalm 23 says, you don't have to worry about it because if God wants to show you goodness and mercy, he will stalk you until he finds you. It will hunt you down. And Paul, when he says I'm called according to grace, it just struck me as ironic that now the hunter has become the hunted. The one who used to hunt down Christians and persecute them is now the hunted. And the thing that hunts him down is goodness and mercy and grace. And what did he call him for? It says that he called me by his grace and he was pleased to reveal his Sunday in order that I may preach him among the Gentiles. So when God reveals his grace, what is the agent of God's grace? The agent of God's grace is Jesus. The reason that God can show unmerited favor toward someone like Paul and to someone like me is because Jesus, the son, has earned all the merit for us. That Paul realized that Jesus, when Jesus went to the cross, Jesus bore the weight of the law. Jesus bore the weight of the wrath of God and it was revealed that in Jesus everything was taken care of. Paul knew the Bible and he thought it was all up to him. But as soon as he saw Jesus and realized that Jesus had died for his sins and risen for his justification, it all clicked and he realized that in him is where I find grace. And then the most interesting thing to me is that the next part, as he says, and called me to preach to the Gentiles. Now, when you really start to think about that and you start to think about the whole book of Acts, it is completely and utterly backwards from what you and I would think. Here's Paul, who is the top of his class as far as Judaism, Pharisees, knew the Bible better than anyone else. He could argue the Bible better than anyone else. And who are you going to send if you're sitting around, if you're having a sort of session meeting, it's okay, we need to send someone to the Jews and someone to the Gentiles. Paul, you're pretty refined. You know the Bible, you could argue the Jews into a corner and you'd kill them. So who are we going to send you? Gentiles. Peter, you're a little bit rough. Speak out of turn sometimes. You're not the most sophisticated. You're not the most savvy person in the world. Where are we going to send you? You're going to go to the Jews. Is that enough backwards? Worldly wisdom would say send the Hebrew of Hebrews to the Hebrews in order that he could argue and you send the guy who cusses like a sailor, or people who cuss like sailors. And yet in the Providence of God, he says, Paul, you, the one who has mastered Judaism, you go to the Gentiles and Peter, you the one who has mastered cussing, I guess, go to the Jews. Remember, first Corinthians says, the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of man. That if Gentiles are converted through the ministry of Paul, or if Jews are converted through the ministry of Peter, what do we know among other things is that God must have been the one, the operator there and not Paul and not Peter. That God is the one who does all the work. So Paul says, I used to be this and now I'm not, that's one of the arguments. God called me by his grace, that's another argument. And then the last argument is just a practical argument. Paul gives an alibi, if you will, or he gives three different alibis as to why he couldn't have received his gospel from anyone but God. Let me read the verses 17 and 18. Verse 17, he says, no, did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia and turned again to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Seifas and remained with him 15 days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother. What I'm writing to you before God, I do not lie. Then I went south into the region, then I went into the regions of Syria and Selissia. And I put this on a map, Brian, if you can pull that up. I think we have a bulb missing, that's so it needs to be dimmer. But so Brian, if you hit the button, you get Jerusalem. If you're Jewish, Jerusalem is the center of the universe, right? Whenever you go to Jerusalem, you always go up to Jerusalem, no matter where you're going. If you're headed coming from north-south, east to west, it's always up to Jerusalem. And so Paul is persecuting people and so Brian, if you hit it again, he's going to Damascus and right in the vicinity of Damascus, that's where you read the story and Acts. Paul is knocked off his horse, he is converted. And what did he do immediately after he's converted? He does not, he says, go back to Jerusalem, to figure out what he needs to know. Brian, he hit the next, instead he goes to Arabia. And the reason I put Arabia, he could have gone anywhere. He could have gone two blocks away from Damascus or he could have gone 200 miles away from Damascus. But Paul's point is he basically went in the opposite direction of Jerusalem. And Brian hit it again, how long was he there? He went for three years. Now it's interesting, a lot of people speculate, what did he do when he went to Arabia? Did he preach the gospel? Did he just go there for solitude? And I read something interesting actually yesterday where I think it was John Stott speculated that Paul went to the wilderness for three years to make up for the three years that he didn't get with Jesus and the original disciples. In other words, Jesus spent three years with the original 12 and now Paul is spending three years with Jesus all to himself. So either way, whatever he did there, we're not sure, but he was there for three years and so he couldn't have gotten the gospel there. And then Brian, if you can hit it again, at that point, he goes to Jerusalem. And he meets Peter and James and how long is he there, one more hit? He's there for about two weeks. And the language there, he says, I went to visit them. It means something like visit, at least if you're in the, if you're Southern, right? If you're Southern, you go to visit people. And really, that's you just go to sort of chew the fat and to get to know them better. It doesn't mean I'm going, when you say in the South at least, I'm going to visit, you know, someone, that doesn't mean I'm going to receive instruction at the feet of them. It means we're going to chew the fat. And so he says, I went to Jerusalem for two weeks, chew the fat with Peter. And during that time, we assume they talked, they compared notes and we know from other parts of the Bible that Paul's, they agreed. Paul, what you're preaching is in fact the truth. So but in two weeks, they couldn't have taught him everything he knew is Paul's point. So after two weeks with Peter, what does he do? Brian, boom, he goes to the Celicia in Syria and Galatia is right above Celicia, by the way. And how long is he there? One more button. He's there for 14 years. So at least by the time of this Friday, probably more time. Paul's saying, I went in 17 years since the time I became a Christian, I've only been to Jerusalem one time and I was there for two weeks. And I talked to Peter and James. That's it. I didn't get all this stuff from them. I got it from Jesus directly. You can turn that off. So what's his point? What then? Notice the last part. He says in verses 22 and he says, and I was still unknown in person to the churches of Judea, that are in Christ. And they only were hearing it said, he used to persecute us is now preaching the faith. He once tried to destroy. And they glorified God because of me. In other words, he's saying when he's traveling to Syria and Celicia and these out, out of lying regions, he said, I couldn't have gotten the gospel from them either. Because they didn't even know me in person. They didn't know me by faith. In other words, I didn't sit down with someone else and they didn't teach me the gospel either. In fact, exactly contrary to that happened. They heard about me. They heard about the one who used to persecute the church is now preaching. And what do they do? They go, I don't believe that. I don't buy that. Jesus can't change anybody. He can't change me. But he can't change something like Paul's too bad. They didn't say that. They said they heard of me and they heard by me and they glorified God because of me. Now notice it says that it's interesting here. It says they didn't glorify God because of the gospel. Paul says they glorified God because of me. What do you mean by that? I think as I read that, the first thing that came to mind was the experience I had. I don't know, it was probably seven or eight years ago now in Colorado. My best friend Paul Warner and I were at a baseball game. Actually, we were a general assembly. And Paul's one of these kind of guys who wants to see every baseball park in the country before he dies. And I'm sort of like, yeah, I go the safe way a couple times a year, I'm good. And so we were at general assembly and he says, hey, let's go catch a baseball game at the Rocky Stadium. And I said, great, I said, maybe we're there. We can see my friend Danny. And he said, Danny, who? I said, Danny, the chef. He said, they have a Dante, the chef at the stadium. I said, Danny, Dante, whatever. I mean, yeah, he and I played baseball from time I was in third grade. And he's like, you know, Danny, the chef. I was like, why would I say it otherwise? He's like, I don't believe you. I'm like, okay, fine. So we went to the game. And we went down and I said, where, and now if I'm going to meet a baseball player, where would I go and shout him out? Paul's like, well, right down by the first baseline where the kids are trying to get autographs. So we went down to the first baseline. And as we did, people were running out. Players were running out sort of one by one. And apparently they started, a lot of them can't sign autographs because they have contracts for this kind of thing and what have you. So as players are streaming out, the kids are yelling for them. And finally, Dante the chef comes running out and his back is turned to the crowd. And everyone's going, Dante, Dante, Dante. And I thought, well, work when I was a kid. I went, Danny. And as soon as I yelled, Danny, he stopped dead in his tracks at about first base. And he turned around and said, stop me. And he came running back to the first baseline. And he stood there and he started signing baseballs. And he's talking, has your mom doing? I haven't seen your mom for 10 years. Has your sister Katie, how's Amy doing? Oh, you know, what are you doing now? We talk, we talk for a 10 minute. And you know, coach said, yeah, I got to get out there. So he goes running out there. And that was an interesting part of the story. Besides, Paul was more quiet than I'd ever seen him. Was after the fact, after all this was over, a man and his son came up and the guy was literally teary-eyed. And he said, I just want to thank you. I said, thank me for what? And he said, my son has been collecting player autographs. And he's had every player autograph for two years. And he's never been able to get the shits. And today he got the shits. And they glorify God because of me. That's what Paul's getting at here, by the way. It's not that I did anything other than connect them with the only person who could help them. That's it. They didn't even know my name, that father and son. They probably don't even care what they care about is they got what they needed, what they got, what could help them. And that's exactly why people glorify God because of Paul. It's not because of who Paul was. It was because of who Paul could connect them to. I connected them to Jesus. I connected them to the one who could help them. And because of that, they glorify God because of me. And that should tell you that on one hand, we have great, we should have great humility. It really is all about God. On the other hand, we do have great responsibility. Who says that about us? They glorify God because of me. Think about that. Let's pray. Father, I just prayed this morning that you would make us a place that is growing in our faith, growing in our knowledge of the gospel, but also that we would glorify God. And people would glorify God because of us, not because of what we do, but because of who we were able to connect them with. Jesus' name would pray these things. Amen. Amen.