Remember, Christ died for your sins so that a holy God who cannot abide sin can come down to you

and in all grace and love give you enablement to liberate you from thinking and feeling

and acting the way this age thinks and feels and acts.

How many times have you been frustrated with how the world is shaping your thinking,

how you understand life and the way things work in this world?

I'm Dan Kroover.

In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper opens Galatians 1 to show us how Christ didn't just die to forgive us. He died to free us from the

grip of this present age with all of its futile ways of thinking. This message was originally

delivered at Bethlehem Baptist Church on January 23, 1983.

Paul calls himself an apostle, and many of you know that apostle simply means one who is sent by somebody else as a representative.

That can be seen most easily in John 13, 16, where Jesus said,

truly, I say to you, a slave is not greater than his master, neither is an apostle greater than the one who sent him.

So an apostle is a sent one.

But in the New Testament, you have a general usage of this word apostle and a particular

usage that has a more precise meaning.

Let me spell each of those out and see what the context indicates this one to be here

in verse one.

In the general sense, an apostle is a person who could be sent out by a church.

For example, in Philippians 225, Paul calls Epaphroditus,

who brought from the Philippian church to him money.

He said, he is your apostle to my need. Or in 2 Corinthians 823, when the churches of

Macedonia choose representatives to go with Paul to take the money to Jerusalem, as their

...