Galatians 1:10 “For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.” (ESV)
Have you ever felt like you weren’t good enough? Not good enough for the job, not good enough for the relationship, not good enough for God? I have. And I would guess you have too, because it is one of the most common wounds a human heart carries.
Here’s what’s strange about that feeling, though, when you hold it up next to the gospel. If “not good enough” is the problem, then “be good enough” should be the fix. Try harder. Do more. Sin less. Show up better. And that logic feels so reasonable that entire churches have built themselves around it. Which is exactly the mess Paul is charging into in the book of Galatians.
Paul wrote this letter to get the churches of Galatia back on track. He didn’t open the way he usually did, with warmth and thanksgiving. He opened astonished. “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel” (Galatians 1:6). These were churches he had planted himself, and in a short amount of time they had already drifted from grace toward something that looked like faith but wasn’t.
Here’s what had happened. Some teachers had come in after Paul and told the Galatian believers that faith in Jesus was a good start, but not quite enough. To really belong, they said, you needed circumcision too. You needed to keep the law of Moses. In other words, Jesus plus your own effort. Grace plus works. And Paul does not treat that as a small footnote to fix later. He calls it a different gospel, which he then clarifies is really no gospel at all (Galatians 1:7). Not a lesser version of the truth. Not truth-adjacent. A completely different message wearing the same words.
I want you to see why that distortion is so dangerous, because it is not just an ancient argument about circumcision. It is the same lie dressed differently for every generation, including ours. “We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16). If you could be made right with God by being good enough, Christ died for nothing. Read that again. If earning it were possible, the cross would have been unnecessary. So when we tell ourselves we’re not worthy because of what we’ve done, or that we need to clean ourselves up before we’re fit for grace, we are, without meaning to, arguing with the very same twisted gospel Paul was astonished by. We are trying to add our own effort to a gift that was only ever going to be a gift. And by definition, anything you can earn was never grace to begin with.
That’s what makes not good enough such a strange thing to feel, once you see it clearly. It agrees with the false gospel Paul rebukes and disagrees with the true one. And it’s exactly backward. You were never going to be good enough. That was never the plan. The plan was a Savior who was good enough in your place.
So how had a whole group of churches lost sight of that? I think it happens the same way it happens to us. Not with a dramatic announcement, but with a slow drift. A little more focus on the rules and a little less on the relationship. A little more measuring ourselves and each other, and a little less resting in what Christ already finished. Paul saw it happening in real time in Galatia, and he loved these people too much to stay quiet about it.
The rest of the letter is Paul’s answer to that drift, and it moves in a shape worth knowing before we dig into it piece by piece. First, he defends where his message came from, straight from Christ, not from man, so the Galatians would trust the source (chapters 1 and 2). Then he makes his case for faith over law, using Abraham himself as the proof, since Abraham was counted righteous by faith long before the law ever existed (chapters 3 and 4). Then he turns to freedom, real freedom in Christ, and warns against turning that freedom into another kind of slavery, whether to the law or to the flesh (chapter 5, and yes, this is where the fruit of the Spirit lives). And he closes the letter practically, teaching the church how to gently restore each other and bear one another’s burdens (chapter 6).
Grace, twisted into law. Faith, defended with truth. Freedom, protected from both legalism and license. And a community, taught how to carry each other well. That is Galatians in miniature, and it has just as much to say to us today as it did to a handful of churches in the first century.
I don’t want to rush through all of that in one post and lose the richness sitting inside each piece. So this is the beginning of a series here on the blog. In the weeks ahead, we are going to walk through Galatians verse by verse, and dig into what each one means for us, right now, in the actual lives we’re living. We’ll start next time with the verse that opened this post, 1:10, and that question underneath everything. Whose approval are you actually living for?
If that sounds good to you, friend, make sure you’re following along so you don’t miss a single post in the series. I would love to walk through this letter with you.
