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Nobleton Community Church
29084 Sentinel Street PO Box 224
Nobleton, Florida 34661
Rev. Paul V. Lehmann, Pastor
813-389-8683
Nobletoncommunitychurch.org
info@nobletoncommunitychurch.org
OUR VISION IS:
To experience SPIRIT-FILLED WORSHIP AND PRAYER
To be involved in EVANGELISM, DISCIPLINING AND TRAINING PEOPLE
To use our SPIRITUAL GIFTS
To SERVE AND REACH PEOPLE FOR CHRIST, BOTH
“ACROSS THE STREET AND ACROSS THE WORLD”
Nobleton Community Church
Date May 17, 2026
Text Galatians 1:1-12
Pastor Paul Lehmann
(Everywhere we look these days, someone is either discovering or coming up with another version of the gospel.)
Text: SCRIPTURE READING: Galatians 1:1-12
This leads us to consider many of the so-called “gospels” floating around these days, and to ask why the apostle Paul would point a finger at a “wrong gospel” in his letter to the Galatian church.
Seems like it’s becoming a regular occurrence in the information age — someone is always discovering a new “gospel” that purports to shed some new light on Jesus that the church has either ignored or suppressed for two millennia. Most recently, a fragment (and we do mean fragment — it has four words) from a fourth-century Coptic Codex was found in Egypt. Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King says it may (read: “possible-but-I’m-not-going-to-stake-my-reputation-on-it”) reveal that Jesus actually did have a wife, à la the claims of The Da Vinci Code. The revelation of this “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” as it has become known, was exposed as a fraud in 2012, and it follows in the footsteps of a host of other Gnostic “gospels” that have been unearthed in recent years, like the gospels of Judas, Thomas, and Mary Magdalene, just to name a few. Historians and archaeologists don’t have a corner on the new gospel market, however. Just do a search of “The gospel according to …” on Google and you’ll come up with a host of other takes on the Christian gospel — Besides;
The Gospel of Jesus’ wife (Mary Magdalene) we also have,
The gospel according to the Simpsons, Dr. Seuss, Coco Chanel, Elvis and even Lamb. The gospel according to Biff. , Jesus; Childhood Pal,
Granted, some of these are merely trying to find themes of the Christian gospel within popular TV shows and characters, but others, at least:
Some are certainly trying to craft a gospel that fits their own conceptions of God.
Churches, of course, aren’t immune to this gospel-izing. There are plenty of gospels out there that more reflect the culture than they reflect anything having to do with Jesus. Think about some of them:
The Gospel of Sacrament Keeping and Priestly Confessions.
The Gospel of Hate spewed by “Christians” from the Westboro Baptist Church, in Topeka, Kansas, who picket soldiers’ funerals, the LGBTQ, and believe that people who don’t follow their agenda deserve whatever tragedy befalls them. So much for grace.
The Gospel of Prosperity is touted by famous TV preachers who tell their people that God wants them to be rich, and that all they need to do is “name and claim” what they want and God will give it to them (if they will only believe and send a check to their ministry). So much for “Blessed are the poor” (Luke 6:20), and “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24).
The Gospel of “Grace” is preached by the pastor of the largest church in America, and there are some other TV pastors who also emphasize God’s Grace and Love, but leave off repentance and the necessity to live our lives as committed followers of Jesus and obey Him. Another name for this is:
“The Gospel of Sin Management”— a phrase coined by Dallas Willard to describe a gospel that “produces vampire Christians who want Jesus for his blood and little else.” As I have said before, “A fire escape from Hell.: This gospel is only concerned about getting people into heaven and reduces salvation to a spiritual exchange divorced from life in this world. It makes salvation and God irrelevant to daily life.”
The Social Gospel, which grew out of the Enlightenment idea of progress and reason, believes that humanity can rid itself of social evils and that human progress will continue to make things better and better. In this gospel, Jesus provides a good example of how to make the world a better place, and his death and resurrection are mere metaphors for living sacrificially —more good advice than good news.
The Apocalyptic Gospel is all about the End Times: watching the sky for Christ’s return and waiting for the Rapture that will suck all the right-believing Christians into the great beyond like some kind of Heavenly Hoover vacuum cleaner, leaving the rest of humanity behind to stew in hell.
You can probably think of other “gospels” that get preached all the time.
Of course, there may be elements of truth in some of these “gospels.” God does hate sin, but continues to love sinners. God does want us to be prosperous, but in the richness of his grace, not necessarily the wealth of our bank accounts. Jesus’ blood does save us, but it doesn’t just save us from something; it saves us for the work of God’s kingdom. Yes, God desires our participation in making the world look more like what we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer (“on earth as it is in heaven”), but we can’t make that a reality without Christ’s redemptive death for the world and his resurrection promise of the ultimate defeat of death. We do, indeed, await Christ’s return, but he’s not coming to take us away — he is coming to take over!
What’s interesting about these wrong gospels, however, is that they tend to reflect or represent the people who promote them rather than reflect or represent the good news of Jesus Christ and his kingdom. People tend to understand the gospel through the lens of their own times. That can often lead to incomplete or distorted versions of the message, and:
The church in every age has had to recalibrate its understanding of the gospel.
Martin Luther, Jonathon Edwards, John Wesley, D.L. Moody, Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, Franklyn Graham, Reinhard Bonnke, or Louis Pilau are just a few of those throughout history who called people back to the full and powerful gospel of Christ.
Paul had to do the same thing as early as Christianity’s second decade. Paul gets fired up at the Galatians because they have bought into the wrong gospel — a gospel that reflects “the present evil age” (1:4).
The “different gospel” that the Galatians had bought into was one preached to them by some Jewish Christian missionaries who required Gentiles to be circumcised as Jews before they could become Christians (v. 6). Paul regarded this message as a non-gospel because it reflected the status quo of the age before the coming of Christ —
An age governed by the law of Moses. Paul believed that Jesus’ death and resurrection had transformed the status quo, and that faith leading to a spiritual circumcision of the heart was the mark of a true Christian (Romans 2:29; Colossians 2:11). The requirement for physical circumcision was thus abolished because God had reconciled Jews and Gentiles through the grace of Jesus Christ — a theme that runs through most of his letters.
A close look at this passage, then, reveals:
The gospel that Paul preached, and the one that the Galatians (and we) should be centering our faith around:
- The gospel is not a human construction, subject to alteration by every human generation. The gospel comes from God, who has taken the initiative to rescue us from sin and death through his grace (1:1, 3-4, 6).
- The grace of God is embodied and enacted in Jesus’ death. Jesus’ death liberates us from sin and the power of the present age. We cannot defeat sin and evil and change the world on our own. We need a Savior who defeats sin and its ultimate power, death. Jesus does this through the cross and his resurrection (1:3-4)
- The grace of God enacted through the Lord Jesus enables us to become children of God, bringing people from different backgrounds, cultures and customs together into a new community not marked by ethnicity and circumcision, but by faith and baptism (1:3).
- As God’s children, we participate with God in his mission of transforming the world into God’s new creation. As Paul puts it, “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!” (6:15). The goal of the gospel is not the mere transformation of our spirits or our bank accounts, nor is it merely about making the world a little better. The good news is that God’s kingdom is near and that will be the means of changing the world, not taking us away from it. As Revelation puts it, God isn’t about to destroy the world and make all new things; instead, God comes to redeem the world and “make all things new” (Revelation 21:5). If a gospel only benefits the individual, you can bet it’s the wrong gospel. A false gospel always seeks human approval and mostly benefits the human who preaches or believes it. Paul reminds the Galatians that the real gospel — the gospel of what God has done and is doing through Christ — does indeed benefit us by saving us from sin and death, but it doesn’t stop there. The real gospel is the good news that God is transforming us so that we can be part of God’s transformation of the whole cosmos. To put it another way, the gospel isn’t about our leaving, but about God’s coming! We have been saved by faith, but for God’s purpose. The gospel isn’t about pleasing others or even ourselves; it’s all about pleasing God and, like Paul, becoming Christ’s servants (1:10).
Maybe we keep coming up with new gospels because:
The Gospel, The Good News that Jesus gave us actually requires something of us. We serve Christ and we serve others, which is more important than any physical mark or promise of individualistic eternal bliss.
It starts with our faith, our believing in Jesus, receiving Him into our lives, but the surrender and commitment to Him means that we serve Him and obey Him.
Paul will go on to talk about the fruit of the Spirit as being the mark of those who belong to Christ and have crucified their old selfish and sinful natures (5:22-24). Endless debates about eschatology, soteriology, and any other ology can keep us from responding to the heart of the good news not only with our faith, but with our faithfulness to the gospel’s call to be and work for God’s new creation.
What will you do with the good news?