I once met a Christian who told me that Jesus Christ was the center of their lives. They said they knew this because they kept catching a brief glimpse of him in the middle of their road of life as they ran from the ditch on one side of the road into the ditch on the other. Well, this story kind of characterizes what we're going to find today in the book of Galatians. From what we're able to discern from the Apostle Paul's letter to the churches in Galatia, the church was experiencing divisions in what appears to be three groups. One, a group that supported Paul and his teachings. Two, a group that questioned Paul's authority and believed Paul's teaching was too liberal and inadequate. Though they were Gentiles who lived in what today we would call central Turkey and who had been pagans, they had come to believe that they needed to be circumcised, obey Torah, and keep the law of Moses to truly be God's people and to be saved. And group three, a group that believed.
What Paul taught about grace and freedom from the law, caused them to reason that they could maintain their pagan cultural ways and basically, behave any way they wanted to behave because everything was all right. We need to carefully pay attention to what Paul said and what his teaching was. So, with that little bit of background, let's go to Galatians chapter 5:1,13-25
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