Galatians 1

_1-2I, Paul, and all the believers here with me, are writing this letter to those of you who are from the congregations in Galatia. I am an apostle, but I was not chosen by a person or by people. Jesus Christ and God the Father chose me. This is the God who made Jesus live again after He had died. ₃I pray that God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ will be gracious to you and that He will give you peace. ₄Christ did what God our Father wanted. He died to take away our sins. This is how He has saved us from this sinful world that we live in. ₅That is why we praise God forever and ever. Amen.

₆I am surprised that you in Galatia have forgotten the grace of God so quickly. God was very good to you. He chose you to belong to Him and He gave his grace to you when He sent Christ to save you. But now you have started to believe something different, not the Good_News that we have preached to you. ₇You must know that there is no other Good_News message. The people who are telling you different stories are confusing you and they change the Good_News of Christ and make it false. ₈We told you the true Good_News message and no person may preach anything else to you. He may preach only the Good_News that I have preached to you. Not even an angel from heaven may preach another message. If someone does, then God will punish him. ₉I will say it again: I have told you the right message and God will punish anyone who preaches a different message.

₁₀Do you think that I am saying these things so that people and God will like me? No. Some people will say that I use clever words to please people and that I am trying to say things that people like. That is not_true. If I do that, then I am not a servant of Christ.

₁₁Friends, it is very important to me that you must know this. The Good_News message that I preach does not come from people. ₁₂I did not get this message from other people and I did not learn about it from someone else. Jesus Christ Himself gave it to me when He appeared to me.

₁₃You know what my life was like before, when I knew only the Jewish religion. I did very, very bad things to the congregation of God. I tried to destroy the church. ₁₄I was a more successful Jew than all the other Jews of my age. I was more obedient to the things that our forefathers said and taught us. ₁₅But God chose me before I was born. He was very good to me and He made me an apostle. He decided ₁₆to show me his Son so that I can go to the Gentiles and tell them about the Son of God. After I had seen Him, I did not ask other people what they knew about Him. ₁₇I also did not go to Jerusalem to the people who had become apostles before me. No, I went to the land of Arabia and then later on I went back to the city of Damascus.

₁₈After 3 years I went to Jerusalem to meet Cephas and I stayed with him for 2 weeks. ₁₉I did not see any of the other apostles. I saw only James, the brother of the Lord. ₂₀What I am writing to you is the truth. God is my Witness.

₂₁Later on I went to the provinces of Syria and Cilicia. ₂₂The Christian congregations in the province of Judea did not know me. ₂₃They only heard people say: ‘Paul has changed. He persecuted us before and tried to break our faith, but now he tells everyone that they must believe in Christ.’ ₂₄And they praised God because I had changed.