Have you ever heard of the durian fruit? It’s a large, spiky fruit from Southeast Asia with a smell so foul it’s been banned from hotels and public transportation. People describe the odor as garbage, sewage, and rotting flesh all at once. The outside looks exotic, but the inside is straight up nasty. Galatians 5…

We read in the book of Galatians a glorious truth for all Christians: you have been set free! That’s great news. But here’s a question every single one of us must consider: for what purpose was I set free? Apostle Paul gives us the answer in chapter 5: serve one another in love. The same…

Down South, when you meet somebody new, there’s one question that comes after they find out your name: “Who’s your mama? Who’s your daddy?” Bloodline matters. Heritage matters. Everybody wants to know where you come from before they decide what to make of you. Well, Apostle Paul asks the same question in Galatians 4, but…

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in 1838 and never looked back. He could have. The North was cold, unfamiliar, dangerous. But Douglass understood something deeply: a man who has tasted freedom cannot untaste it. Going back was unthinkable. It’s this truism that caused Apostle Paul to be so bewildered by the Galatians in Galatians 4. Before…

We live in an age of labels. Political. Racial. Sexual. Generational. Economic. Every day, someone is sorting us into categories. And we’re often sorting ourselves. The divisions feel permanent, like walls with no doors. But in Galatians 3, Apostle Paul had a word for first-century people who were doing the same thing. Before Christ came,…

Have you thought about the role CT scans, MRI’s, and PET scans play in the life of a person with cancer? When a person has one of those procedures, the result might be that they have cancer. But it’s important to note that those procedures don’t cause cancer. They reveal cancer. The disease was already…

So many childhood stories follow the same plot: someone is under a curse, and the whole story is about breaking out from under it. Sleeping Beauty. Beauty and the Beast. Rumpelstiltskin. We grew up rooting for the cursed one to finally go free. Nobody wants to be under a curse, but in Galatians 3, Apostle…

Imagine filling up your car with gas, hitting the road, then pulling into a truck stop, and thinking, “You know what, I think I’ll switch to diesel from here and fill ‘er up.” Bad idea. Catastrophic, actually. You don’t put diesel in your gas-burner. You don’t change fuel mid-journey. Yet, spiritually, that’s what the Galatians…

There’s a version of you that died on the cross. But we keep bringing him back to life. Apostle Paul says it plainly in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ.” Not wounded. Not reformed. Crucified. The self that demanded its own way, that clawed to get ahead, that kept a record of wrongs…

What if silence is the cruelest thing you could offer someone? In Galatians 2, when Apostle Peter came to Antioch in the days of the early church, he ate freely with Gentile believers. That is, until the staunch Jewish crowd showed up. Then he pulled back and separated himself from the Gentiles, pretending the old…