Approval
Galatians 1:6–10 (NIV)
6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel —
7 which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.
8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse!
9 As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!
10 Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.
He Skips The Thank You
Paul opens almost every letter the same way. He greets the church, then he thanks God for them. Corinth was a mess and he still thanked God for them. Not here.
Here he goes straight from the greeting to this:
“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you.”
Many scholars think Galatians is the earliest letter we still have from him. You can feel why. There is no warm-up. Paul planted these churches himself, walked out, and word has come back that teachers arrived after him telling the Gentile believers they were not really in yet. Believe in Jesus, yes, but also take on the law. Then you will belong properly.
Notice what Paul says they are deserting. Not a doctrine. Not a rulebook. “The one who called you.” He treats it as a person walking away from a person.
A Gospel That Is No Gospel
Then he says something strange in verse 7. They are turning to a different gospel, “which is really no gospel at all.”
He corrects himself mid-sentence. He calls it a different gospel, then immediately takes the word back. It does not qualify.
This is worth sitting with, because the teachers in Galatia were not telling people to stop believing in Jesus. They were saying believe in Jesus and then add this. It sounded like more. More seriousness, more obedience, more commitment.
But grace does not work like that. If you add a requirement to a gift, you have not improved the gift. You have cancelled it. A gift with conditions attached is a transaction, and a transaction is a different thing entirely. That is why Paul will not call it a lesser gospel or an incomplete one. There is no such category.
Even If We
Verses 8 and 9 are the part people remember, and they are harsh. Anyone preaching another gospel is under God’s curse. He says it once, then says it again.
But look at who he puts in the firing line first.
“But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you.”
We. Paul includes himself before anyone else. If I come back tomorrow and tell you something different, he says, do not follow me either.
That one word does a lot of work. Paul is not defending his territory here. He is telling them the message does not belong to the messenger. He cannot revise it, and neither can an angel, because neither of them made it. If Paul himself is not above it, then no visiting teacher with a better argument is either.
The Question He Asks Himself
Then verse 10, and the whole chapter turns.
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“Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God?”
Paul is answering a charge. Somebody has been saying he softened the message to make it easy, that he dropped the law so the Gentiles would like him better and his churches would grow.
So he asks it out loud. And then he gives the test.
“If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.”
Not could not. Would not. He is saying the two cannot both be steering. You can want people’s approval, or you can be a servant, but the moment one of them is in charge the other has stopped being in charge. There is no arrangement where both sit in the seat.
What makes this honest rather than preachy is that word “still.” Paul is not speaking as a man who never wanted approval. He is speaking as a man who once had it and found out what it was worth.
He Had The Approval Already
That is where the rest of the chapter goes. Paul tells them his history, and he does not tell it as a sad story.
He was advancing in Judaism beyond many of his peers, he says, extremely zealous for the traditions of his fathers. He was not a failure looking for a second chance. He was winning. He had the credentials, the reputation, the clear conscience of a man doing what everybody around him agreed was right.
He was also, by his own account, persecuting the church and trying to destroy it.
So when Paul asks whether he is chasing human approval, he is asking it as someone who already had it, at the very moment he was most wrong. He knows exactly how safe a crowd’s agreement can feel while you are standing in the wrong place. That is why he will not go back for it.
And then the turn:
“But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me.”
Set apart before he had done anything. Called by grace, not by merit. It was pure gift for Paul too, which is precisely why he cannot let anyone sell it back to the Galatians for a price.
They Praised God Because Of Me
The chapter ends somewhere quiet, and it is easy to read past.
Paul says he did not rush to Jerusalem to get the other apostles to sign off on him. He went to Arabia. Three years later he went up and stayed fifteen days with Peter. The churches of Judea, he says, never even met him. They only heard a report going around:
“The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.”
Then verse 24. “And they praised God because of me.”
Because of him, but not about him. They had no relationship with Paul, no reason to be impressed by him. They heard what had happened to a man they had feared, and it sent them straight past him to God.
That is what approval from God looks like when it lands. Paul spends a whole chapter refusing to work for human approval, and the chapter closes with people he had never met glorifying God over his life. He was not chasing it. It arrived while he was facing the other way.
Walk On
Most of us are not being asked to add circumcision to the gospel. But we are very good at adding quieter things. I will be properly accepted once I have sorted this habit out. Once I serve more. Once I stop being the person who keeps needing grace for the same thing.
It sounds like humility. Paul would call it a different gospel, which is no gospel at all.
The test in verse 10 is a plain one, and it works on an ordinary week. When you chose what to say at work, at church, in that conversation you kept rehearsing, what were you actually protecting? The truth, or how you would come across?
And the harder question underneath it. If everyone whose good opinion you are currently managing simply stopped watching, what would change about how you live this week?
All glory to God — forever and ever. Amen. 🤍
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