When did you last pick up your Bible?
I don’t know if you have purple passages you
go back to again and again. Mine are very often to be found in the New
Testament within the letters of St Paul.
To encourage us to pick up our Bibles more, I
thought I’d invite you to look with me this summer at the letters of St Paul
and what he teaches there about man, God, the Church and the future.
Here goes then, we start a four part series that’ll
run on until the end of next month as we have to work round all age Sundays.
What does Paul have to say about human
nature? About the good and bad in us? About how we get our nature into its
right mind?
One of the great advantages in reading Paul
is there’s enough of him – 13 letters – to make his character evident. Because
his style is partly autobiographical we know more about him than we know about
Our Lord. We see his humanity full
square!
Take this week’s passage from the start of
Galatians. Look at all that emotion: I am
astonished…there are some who want to pervert the gospel…let (them) be accursed.
All pretty engaging stuff! Paul’s upset and rushes to the point in anguish and
anger. He’s heard how Asian churches he’s planted in Galatia, modern day
Turkey, are losing the plot with Jewish Christians forcing non-Jewish converts
to be circumcised, a development that’s totally against the good news of a love
that embraces without condition.
We’ll be reading more of Galatians week by
week this month but first a little background on Paul.
He was born in what is now south central
Turkey, a Roman citizen of Tarsus and a devout Jew (Acts 22:3). His double
names, Paul, a Roman name and Saul, his Jewish name, express this dual
allegiance. Paul’s date of birth is around ten years later than that of Jesus
Christ.
Besides his letters we get a really good
picture of his life in the Acts of the Apostles where we learn he was a zealous
student of the great rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). Zeal was Paul all over, as a
member of the Jewish Pharisee party when he persecuted Christians, and then,
after seeing a vision of Jesus on the Damascus road, changed zeal in his new
passion to share Jesus.
Paul’s Christian mission began around 40AD
when after his conversion and 3 years preaching he gets driven out of Damascus.
Off he goes to Jerusalem to meet St Peter, then home to Tarsus, from there to
Antioch in north Syria and then with St Barnabas he embarks on the first of
three missionary journeys that take the good news of Jesus to Asia minor,
Macedonia, Greece, Crete and Italy.
The Roman Empire’s his mission field and
there’s no doubt God’s choice of a communicator like Paul of Roman citizenship
was second to sending his Son to earth in strategic importance to get news of Jesus
taken from Jerusalem to the ends of the world.
The 13 New Testament letters we’re thinking
about over the next four weeks were written to a number of Christian
communities about their joys, needs and concerns. They became part of the canon
of holy scripture by the end of the second century. As such they are privileged
writings the Holy Spirit opens up to people in every age.
My purpose this month and next is to give you
a taster of them with the hope you might pick up your Bible and read them
yourself.
They run as follows: After Matthew, Mark,
Luke, John and Acts we’ve got Paul’s letter to Rome, his greatest work on God.
Then we have the first and second letters to Corinth where Paul founded a
church situated on the very bridge between Asia and Europe. The next four I
remember using the vowel alphabet – a, e, i, o – Galatians, Ephesians,
Philippians, Colossians. These are short and sweet compared to
Romans and Corinthians, but Galatians is probably least sweet of them as we’ve
already heard.
Two letters to Thessalonica in Greece follow,
then two to Paul’s assistant Timothy, one to his assistant Titus and then a
very short one to someone called Philemon about a runaway slave. The letter to
the Hebrews was once thought to be from Paul but that is now disputed.
Thirteen letters then, and four subjects over
four sermons: Paul on man, on God, on the Church and on the future.
In five minutes what does Paul have to say
about human nature?
St. Paul strongly affirms in 1 Timothy 4:4
belief that everything created by God is
good. At the same time, he insists elsewhere there’s a power of
disobedience at work that makes for talk of creation as being fallen
away from goodness. This disobedience is there in the devil, a fallen spirit,
and in us as fallen human beings. In spite of the fact that all things created
by God are good, the devil has temporarily become ‘god of this
age’. Evil exists, at least temporarily, as a parasite inside what God created
originally good. In his autobiographical details Paul speaks of the war between
God’s dominion and the dominion of evil as a conflict that’s there in his own
heart as in Romans 7:19-20: For I do not
do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do
what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within
me. He goes on to ponder who’ll
rescue him from this wretched condition and announces it is Jesus who has
rescued, is rescuing and will finally rescue him as a believer.
Paul’s view of humanity is a ‘yes, but’ view
– yes we’re made good but left to
ourselves we’re without hope for no way can we save ourselves from the sin that’s
within us. We need a Saviour and there’s no doubt Paul’s discovery of Jesus as
the Saviour colours his whole view of human nature.
There’s humility in Paul, humble awareness
that for God to touch his life in any way at all is an exceptional miracle. I received mercy he writes in 1 Timothy
1:16 so that in me, as the foremost Jesus
Christ might display the utmost patience. He saw himself as the least of
Christians because he’d been a leading persecutor of Christians. By the grace of God I am what I am he
wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:10.
For Paul and for us our humanity is flawed.
We have God’s likeness, God is within us - yet so is sin. The wonder of
Christianity is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ accepting us as we are and
making us more fully what we should be. All
of us, he writes to Corinth seeing
the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from one degree
of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2
Corinthians 3:19) It’s a matter of where we’re looking. Inasmuch as our gaze is
fixed on Jesus we’re being transformed into right minded humanity. When our
gaze slips, so do our thoughts, words and deeds.
You need more than five minutes to get into
Paul’s wisdom on humanity but times up – though I would encourage you to put in
extra time at home when you hopefully pick up your bible and let Paul himself speak
to you.
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