Christ obeyed God our Father and gave himself as a sacrifice for our sins to rescue us from this evil world.

The Only True Message

I am shocked that you have so quickly turned from God, who chose you with his gift of undeserved grace. You have believed another message,

when there is really only one true message. But some people are causing you trouble and want to make you turn away from the good news about Christ.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. I hope God will punish anyone who preaches anything different from what you have already believed.

I am not trying to please people. I want to please God. Do you think I am trying to please people? If I were doing that, I would not be a servant of Christ.

It wasn't given or taught to me by some mere human. My message came directly from Jesus Christ when he appeared to me.

to show me his Son, so I would announce his message to the Gentiles. I didn't talk this over with anyone.

I didn't say a word, not even to the men in Jerusalem who were apostles before I was. Instead, I went at once to Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus.

Three years later I went to visit Peter in Jerusalem and stayed with him for 15 days.

The only other apostle I saw was James, the Lord's brother.

And in the presence of God I swear I am telling the truth.

Later, I went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia.

But no one who belonged to Christ's churches in Judea had ever seen me in person.

But I went there because God had told me to go, and I explained the good news I had been preaching to the Gentiles. Then I met privately with the ones who seemed to be the most important leaders. I wanted to make sure my work in the past and my future work would not be for nothing.

Titus went to Jerusalem with me. He was a Greek, but still he wasn't forced to be circumcised.

We went there because of those who pretended to be followers and had sneaked in among us as spies. They had come to take away the freedom Christ Jesus had given us, and they were trying to make us their slaves.

But we wanted you to have the true message. This is why we didn't give in to them, not even for a second.

Some of them were supposed to be important leaders, but I didn't care who they were. God doesn't have any favorites! None of these so-called special leaders added anything to my message.

They realized God had sent me with the good news for Gentiles, and he had sent Peter with the same message for Jews.

God, who had sent Peter on a mission to the Jews, was now using me to preach to the Gentiles.

James, Peter, and John realized that God had given me the message about his gift of undeserved grace. And these men are supposed to be the backbone of the church. They even gave Barnabas and me a friendly handshake. This was to show that we would work with Gentiles and that they would work with Jews.

They only asked us to remember the poor, and this was something I had always been eager to do.

He used to eat with Gentile followers of the Lord, until James sent some Jewish followers. Peter was afraid of the Jews and soon stopped eating with Gentiles.

He and the others hid their true feelings so well that even Barnabas was fooled.

But when I saw they were not really obeying the truth that is in the good news, I corrected Peter in front of everyone and said: Peter, you are a Jew, but you live like a Gentile. So how can you force Gentiles to live like Jews?