Paul’s strong admonition in Galatians 1 helped spur Luther and other Reformers to recover the true gospel in the Reformation. The same gospel must be asserted and reasserted in every generation. Peter sought to stir up our minds by way of reminder because we are a forgetful people (2 Pet. 1:13). And the first thing to go, usually, is the gospel. But the gospel we reassert must be the gospel of God’s grace in Christ. As Paul points out in Galatians 1, all other so-called “gospels” are the broad road that leads to destruction (Gal. 1:6–9).

I’ve found that many Christians, post-conversion, tend toward legalism or antinomianism in their pursuit of sanctification.
I’ve seen this trend both in churches I’ve pastored and in Christian friends. One woman grew up in a strict Reformed Baptist home. She always tended toward legalism and fought it biblically for years. Another friend was converted in his mid-thirties after spending many years searching for joy in bars and honky-tonks. He has battled an antinomian impulse for many years. Others pendulum-swung after conversion: from legalism to license, or vice versa.
Not all Christians struggle deeply in one of these areas, but the tendency is widespread. That’s why we so desperately need Galatians.
Give My Life Back to Jesus?
My discovery of the spiritual riches in Galatians came at the end of a long road. For more than a decade, I tried to follow Jesus by “rededicating” my life to him over and over and over again, maybe two hundred times. I was converted at age 10 and was fortunate to grow up in church. That church preached the gospel pretty well. My sin. His grace. Repentance. Faith. Forgiveness. Reconciliation. God’s anger at sin and sinners was always present.
But discipleship and sanctification? Not so much.
Although my childhood church helped me understand how to become a Christian, it took me a lot longer to learn about the pilgrimage that follows salvation — the need for daily repentance and killing sin, praying for the fruit of the Spirit, and other crucial elements of sanctification. I lived as if justification came by grace through faith but sanctification came by law.
My life was a frustrating merry-go-round of sin — rededication, law-keeping in my own strength, sin, rededication, law-keeping — you get the picture. I had to keep proving to God that I was serious about him. Practically, it was a strange brew of Baptist nominalism and Roman Catholic formalism.
Sanctified by Grace
Then, at a national conference for Christian men in 1995, I heard a plainly worded sermon on Galatians 2:20:
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Through the preaching of that passage, God worked in my heart. The gates of paradise swung open (to use a phrase from Luther), and I walked through. At age 28, I understood (perhaps for the first time) that both justification and sanctification are by grace — I was saved by grace and am now being sanctified by grace. Though I hadn’t yet begun to study the Reformation in any depth, I comprehended more clearly two vital solas: sola fide and sola gratia.
I understood how they applied to my daily walk with Jesus: I was saved (justified) by grace through faith alone, and I am being saved (sanctified) by grace through faith — the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God. For all the effort involved in the Christian life, we grow, at bottom, by faith in Jesus Christ, as we rest on the grace he gives us. The cycle of rededication, sin, and rededication stopped; my growth in the Lord accelerated, and I eventually entered the ministry with a heart to help others.
And I fell in love with Galatians. Nearly 25 years later, I have preached or taught through Galatians five times and have read meditatively through it dozens of times.
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Some common ways God reveals himself in a dynamic way are through prayer and Scripture reading, but there’s also a connection between our ethical actions (doing justice, for example) and our knowledge of God. We gain an even better understanding of God as we participate with him in his mission, a part of which is justice. We go from knowing about God to knowing God. From static to dynamic. 

A few years back, my church went through A.W. Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy. That book, perhaps more than any other, taught me about who God is—his attributes and desires, his likes and dislikes, his view of his creation, including man.
That book had such a profound effect on me, I read it once a year. As good a book as it is, though, Tozer would never think his book is a substitute for living a life in relationship with God.
Here’s what I mean by that: Knowing about someone is not the same as knowing that person. We would never claim to know Abraham Lincoln after reading a few biographies about him. In the same way, we shouldn’t equate knowing God with simply gaining knowledge about him from books, church, or Bible studies.
To know someone, we must spend time with that person and participate in life with him. It’s often easy to mistake knowledge about God for knowing God. Why do I bring this up? Because the idea of knowing God has been a missing component in our discussion about doing justice.
Justice flows from the very character of God. In fact, Dietrich Bonhoeffer—one of the German Christians who resisted Hitler—pointed out that there’s a connection between justice and our ability to know God. When we participate with God in seeking justice for the vulnerable, seeking their good, and living out biblical justice in all areas of our lives, we are, at the same time, participating with God and building our relationship with him.
In his book Pursuing Justice, Ken Wytsma uses static and dynamic art as a way to describe the difference between knowing about God and the knowledge that comes from being in a relationship with God.
A painting is static. It doesn’t move. You can learn a lot about the painter by looking at it, but you never know the painter in a personal way simply by looking at his art.
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Let’s not just tell people we love them; let’s show people we love them by how we treat them. That’s the character of love. It’s active. It shows itself in behavior. It meets needs. It is selfless, looking out for the other. It is not jealous; it is not angry; it is not rude; it does not keep an account of wrongs; it believes and hopes all things. John’s test is to examine ourselves by this standard and ask ourselves, “If I look at the character of love, is it obvious I am a child of God?” 

The distinguishing mark of a follower of Jesus Christ is love for one another. Love for the people of God is essential for disciples because we cannot be disciples of Jesus Christ without genuine, Christ-like, Spirit-wrought love for His people.
It comes as no surprise that the Apostle John, who recorded the Upper Room Discourse in John 14-16, asserts that one test of true salvation is our love for one another in 1 John 3. John argues that the true children of God are characterized by love for one another, and so this forms the basis for a powerful test of salvation. If we do not love other believers as John describes in this passage, then we very well may be self-deceived about our spiritual condition. But if we see this love, that Christ has commanded, active in our lives, then there is great evidence that we have been born again and have eternal life.
This test concerning love comes right on the heels of John talking about the return of Christ and its impact in our lives. The return of Christ should move us to holiness, obedience, purity, and righteousness. Then John pivots from obedience to love without any warning because he wants us to see that there is an inseparable connection between righteousness and love. Obedience in our lives manifests itself in our relationships with others and characterizes those relationships with love.
We might all testify that the reality of our holiness, the depth of our obedience, is often best viewed as we relate to others in the body of Christ. It is often easy to act in a way that seems holy when we are alone. When our preferences are not challenged, when our desires are not at odds with the desires of others, when our opinions reign supreme, when the only person we discuss what to do with is ourselves – it is much easier to appear holy than when we collide with other people and their preferences, their desires, their opinions, and their decisions. Our sanctification is put to the test in relationship with other Christians. These are the fires that test the mettle of our holiness. And this is why John joins doing what is right with loving the brothers and sisters in Christ.
We need to see what kind of love John has in mind so that we ensure that we are truly loving one another as God commands and as His children will do by the Spirit’s power. To this end, John gives us two examples of love to test ourselves by: one negative and one positive, so that we might know if we are living one another as God commands. The first example is the negative example of Cain. Cain was jealous of Abel, and he was convicted of his own sin. John makes the point that Cain didn’t merely kill his brother, but he murdered a true worshipper of God in a violent rage.
Here are two brothers, and they should love one another – just like those of us in the body are brothers and sisters in Christ, and we should love one another.
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