Book of Common Prayer

1 ^1-5 I, Paul, who am appointed and commissioned a messenger not by man but by Jesus Christ and God the Father (who raised him from the dead), I and all the brothers with me send the churches in Galatia greeting. Grace and peace to you from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to the Father’s plan gave himself for our sins and thereby rescued us from the present evil world-order. To him be glory for ever and ever!

The gospel is God’s truth: men must not dare to pervert it

^6-7 I am amazed that you have so quickly transferred your allegiance from him who called you in the grace of Christ to another “Gospel”! Not, of course, that it is or ever could be another Gospel, but there are obviously men who are upsetting your faith with a travesty of the Gospel of Christ.

^8-10 Yet I say that if I, or an angel from Heaven, were to preach to you any other Gospel than the one you have heard, may he be damned! You have heard me say it before and now I put it down in black and white—may anybody who preaches any other Gospel than the one you have already heard be a damned soul! (Does that make you think now that I am serving man’s interests or God’s? If I were trying to win human approval I should never be Christ’s servant.)

The gospel was given to me by Christ himself, and not by any human agency, as my story will show

^11-12 The Gospel I preach to you is no human invention. No man gave it to me, no man taught it to me; it came to me as a direct revelation from Jesus Christ.

^13-19 For you have heard of my past career in the Jewish religion, how I persecuted the Church of God with fanatical zeal and, in fact, did my best to destroy it. I was ahead of most of my contemporaries in the Jewish religion, and had a greater enthusiasm for the old traditions. But when the time came for God (who had chosen me from the moment of my birth, and then called me by his grace) to reveal his Son within me so that I might proclaim him to the non-Jewish world, I did not, as might have been expected, talk over the matter with any human being. I did not even go to Jerusalem to meet those who were God’s messengers before me—no, I went away to Arabia and later came back to Damascus. It was not until three years later that I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and I only stayed with him just over a fortnight. I did not meet any of the other messengers, except James, the Lord’s brother.

More pictures of the kingdom of Heaven

⁴⁴ “Again, the kingdom of Heaven is like some treasure which has been buried in a field. A man finds it and buries it again, and goes off overjoyed to sell all his possessions to buy himself that field.

^45-46 “Or again, the kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he has found a single pearl of great value, he goes and sells all his possessions and buys it.

^47-50 “Or the kingdom of Heaven is like a big net thrown into the sea collecting all kinds of fish. When it is full, the fishermen haul it ashore and sit down and pick out the good ones for the barrels, but they throw away the bad. That is how it will be at the end of this world. The angels will go out and pick out the wicked from among the good and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be tears and bitter regret.

⁵¹ “Have you grasped all this?” “Yes,” they replied.

⁵² “You can see, then,” returned Jesus, “how every one who knows the Law and becomes a disciple of the kingdom of Heaven is like a householder who can produce from his store both the new and the old.”