The letter that Paul wrote to the Christians at Galatia
(The book in the Holy Bible called Galatians)
About this letter
Paul wrote this letter about 2,000 years ago, about 20 years after Jesus went back to heaven, and it is now in the Holy Bible.
Paul wrote this letter to the Christians that were living in Galatia country. At that time Galatia was a part of the country that is now called Turkey.
God sent Paul to lots of countries to tell people about Jesus, and one of them was Galatia (see Acts 16:6). A lot of the Galatia people believed in Jesus and became Christians. Most of those new Christians were not Jews. (You see, Jesus belonged to the Jewish nation, so he was a Jew, and so were Peter, and Paul, and a lot of the other Christians at that time.)
After Paul left Galatia, some Jewish people went there and told the new Christians, “You can’t be a friend of God unless you become like us Jews. You men have to let somebody do a young man operation on you, and you all have to follow the Jewish law.”
The new Christians listened to those Jews and started to go wrong. Paul heard about it and it upset him, so he wrote this letter to get them to go the right way.
This letter has some very important messages for us today. It shows us that we need to trust Jesus and let the Holy Spirit control us, and not listen to anyone that says we have to go a different way.
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1 I am Paul, and this letter is from me. I’m sending this letter to you Christians in the churches in Galatia country.
I am Jesus’s special worker, but it wasn’t a man that gave me the power to be Jesus’s special worker. It wasn’t any mob of people. It was Jesus Christ, and God our father. They sent me out to tell everybody about Jesus. You see, God is really powerful. People killed Jesus, but God made him alive again.
2 Your Christian friends that are with me here, they all say hello to you.
3 I’m asking God our father, and Jesus Christ our leader, to be good to you, and to make you feel happy and quiet inside yourselves. 4 You know, we all did bad things, but Jesus took the payback for all of us. He died instead of us, so now he can save us from this bad world that we live in. That is what God, our father, wanted him to do. 5 So everyone has to say that God is very good and very great. We have to keep on saying it all the time, for ever. Yes, that’s right.
Don’t listen to the wrong story
6-7 But now listen, you mob. You are giving me a big shock. A little while ago I told you the true story about God, but now you are already listening to other people, and they are turning you away from God. You are forgetting the good news we told you, and now you are listening to a different story that other people are telling you. They say it is good news, but it is not. We told you the proper good news about Jesus Christ. He loves you, and he is very good to you, and God used him to bring you into his family. But that other mob are trying to change this story into another story, and they call it good news. But really, there is only one good news story. They are just messing you up. 8 Listen, don’t let anybody teach you a different story that is not the proper good news that we taught you. I pray that God will punish anyone that teaches a different message, no matter who it is, even if it is us, or an angel messenger from the sky. 9 I will say it again. If anyone teaches a story that is different from the story that we told you, the story that you believed, I want God to properly punish that person.
10 I’m not trying to make people happy with me, I’m trying to make God happy with me. I work for Jesus Christ now, so it doesn’t matter to me if some people aren’t happy when I talk straight like this.
Paul’s message came from Jesus Christ, not from people
11-12 You see, my Christian friends, I want you to understand this. Jesus Christ himself told me that good news. No man or woman made up that message. It came from Jesus himself, and after Jesus told me that message, I told it to you.
13 It was like this. You have heard what I was like before. At that time, I didn’t believe in Jesus. I was a Jew, and I believed everything that the Jews believe. And you know about the things that I did at that time. I made a lot of trouble for the Christian people. I tried hard to stop them from following Jesus.*
14 You see, our Jewish grand-fathers told us the way we Jewish people had to live, and I tried hard to live that way. I was becoming a better Jew than most of my mates, the other Jews that were the same age as me.* 15 But God was good to me, and he picked me to be his worker even before I was born. 16 God wanted me to go and tell the message about Jesus to the people that are not Jews. So he showed Jesus to me, and he told me all about him. Then I believed in Jesus. God told me that message, so I didn’t ask anybody else about it.* 17 I didn’t go to Jerusalem to talk to the men that were Jesus’s special workers before I was. Instead of that, I went straight away to the country called Arabia. Then later I went back to the city called Damascus.
18 Then, 3 years later, I went south to Jerusalem to meet Peter. I stayed there with him for only 15 days.* 19 I didn’t see any of Jesus Christ’s other special workers, except James, the brother of Jesus. 20 What I’m writing to you now is true. And God knows that it is true.
21 Later I went north to the countries called Syria and Cilicia. 22 But back in Judea country the Christians there didn’t know me. 23 They only heard people say, “The man that tried to stop us believing in Jesus Christ, the man that gave us bad trouble and hurt us, that man has changed, and now he is telling everyone to believe in Jesus Christ.” 24 Those Christians heard that I changed, and they were happy, and they thanked God and said that he is really great.
* 1:13 Acts 8:3; 22:4-5; 26:9-11 * 1:14 Acts 22:3 * 1:16 Acts 9:3-6; 22:6-10; 26:13-18 * 1:18 Acts 9:26-30