Hello, I'm Michael Barber, and this is my dear friend, Jim Prothrow, and we're both professors here at the Augustine Institute Graduate School.

Today we begin a new series on the Letter of Paul to the Galatians.

This is a really important letter of Paul.

Why would you say this is such an important letter for St. Paul?

Oh, it's important in a lot of different ways, I think.

One of the ways for us as readers, I think, is it shows us how Paul responds to a crisis.

And we'll see that there's a big crisis going on with the people in Galatia.

And the way in which he responds to try to teach them out of their error, not just so that they believe the

right thing, but also, especially in chapters 5 and 6, so that they act and live in the truth,

or living, walking in the truth of the gospel, as he calls it, so that their entire lives,

instead of going off after this falsehood that they've been deceived by,

that their entire lives are walking in line with the truth of the gospel and its power through the Holy Spirit to transform us and make us like Jesus.

And so what we're going to see throughout this epistle is Paul proclaiming that he has been deputized by the Lord, he has been commissioned

by the Lord to preach the truth of the good news of Jesus Christ. And this is apparent in the very

first verses of the letter. So I always like to tell students in my courses on Paul that you often will be able

to recognize what ideas are going to be central to a letter of Paul by the first few verses,

say the first 10 verses or so. And that's definitely true, I think, of this epistle, right?

So you see that right at the beginning. You see some really important themes in the first couple of verses.

So why don't we just jump right in?

I want to encourage you to join us.

We're using the English Standard Version Catholic Edition here.

And you've got your Bible, open up.

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