It is a letter from the Apostle Paul to some of the first churches he set up, following his Damascus road conversion.  He would normally set up a church with the local believers and then leave them in the hands of a pastor and then move on to the next town to start the process again.

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He had heard through other travelling Apostles that false teachers were tearing down everything that he had taught them while he was ministering to them.  Throughout the book of Acts there is mentioned many times how some Jews were insistent that Paul’s teaching was in error and that everyone needed to follow the Law of Moses for salvation both from the guilt and penalty of sin.  Paul, however, taught that “through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved” (Acts 15:11).

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Now Paul is right to the point when he calls out the false teachers for distorting the message of faith and grace.  You do not have to add anything to the message of grace; no other laws or good works or anything else that the 630 Mosaic laws call for will help their cause.  Faith and Grace Stand on their own, it is a gift from God. 

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He uses his own life as an example, a living proof that living by the law was ineffective.  Paul who was Saul before his Damascus conversion, lived each day for the purpose to persecute Christians.  He kept the Jewish laws zealously, a true Pharisee through and through.  He does state in verse 13 that his life in Judaism caused him to intensely persecute the church of God and he tried to destroy it. 

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After his Damascus conversion though, when God called him by Grace, he responded by faith.  Only God can change a heart that dramatically, changing a persecutor into a preacher.  And we can all be thankful for this because God gave him the task of preaching to the Gentiles, us.

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So Paul is sort of stern with them stating the he is astonished that they so quickly have deserted what Paul had taught them.  His message was straight from God on the Damascus road, no one else, straight from God, so why were they so eager to fall away from the message of grace and listen to those false preachers who were preaching Mosaic Law?  We are justified before God by faith in Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, not by becoming slaves to religious ceremonies and traditions.

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Paul goes on to say that if anyone, even an Angel from Heaven, should preach a different Gospel than the Gospel of Jesus Christ, what Paul had preached to them, they should be eternally condemned.  Paul did not go to Jerusalem immediately after his conversion; he did not go to get approval or knowledge from the other Apostles, he stayed in the Damascus area for three years and preached the Gospel to the Gentiles, filled with complete knowledge, directly from God, not man. 

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You can be quite a witness when you have a Damascus road experience, it would be memorable.  But I think that everyone can look back on the time when they know that their life was changed because of Jesus.  If we can’t say we know of the time or place that we became a child of God, there is still time if we are still on this side of the dirt.  We should do it today; Tomorrow is only a date on the fool’s calendar.

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