You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized

into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abrahams seed, and heirs according to the promise. Galatians 3:26-29 C. John Miller writes in Outgrowing the Ingrown Church about the crucial place that the heart of the Gospel has in the life and the work of the Christian Church and in the lives of individual believers. The important point is that the Spirit of grace wants to bring people to Christ, release them from their fears, and fill them with His missionary presence. As preachers we must cooperate with this purpose as we prepare and preach the text, confident that Christ will give us His specific application for the particular message, and that the message will transform lives. To put it another way, we must be willing to make fools of ourselves to see this expectation fulfilled. Matthew Arnold went to hear Spurgeon preach, and then concluded that Spurgeon with his dramatic preaching was something of a fool. But Spurgeon was simply surrendering all his powers to preach the foolishness of the Cross with a confident spirit. Spurgeon was not attempting to preach artistically chiselled messages, but to preach the excellence of Christ, and to do it with all his powers of mind, heart, and body and to do it by faith. Preaching for Spurgeon was merely aiming the gospel at peoples hearts and minds and expecting it to bring them to a knowledge of the forgiveness of sins and the power of a new life. People believed because Spurgeon believed. (Miller, C. John, Outgrowing the Ingrown Church, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1999, p. 128) I believe that something of Spurgeons approach can be seen in the Apostle Pauls writing of the letter to the Galatians. Paul is here dealing with Christians who are facing a crisis of faith. They have encountered false teaching, and are as a result in danger of drifting away from the truth as it is found in Christ. Given the situation that they are facing Paul writes them this wonderful gospel letter. He has one main point that he is seeking to impress upon the minds and hearts of the Galatians. This is that they need to be restored in their communion with the LORD Jesus Christ. In everything that Paul writes here he is pointing them back to Christ. That is the one essential point that they need to be clear upon. Everything else depends upon that issue being straightened out. The Christian faith is all about Christ. He and He alone, is the fulfillment of all that the Scriptures promise to us. When we go astray, what we need is to find our way back into fellowship with Him. Every part of this letter calls us to this. This is the heart of the reformation message to us. The reformers were calling the Church back to Christ, just as the Apostle Paul was doing to the Galatians. In this time in which we find ourselves struggling with many questions regarding the relevance of the gospel message for our society the one thing that Paul calls us to must become central to us once again. Once again we must seek and live out the reality of faith in Christ. When we rebuild communion with Christ then we will discover that every part of our life and work will begin to display the living reality that can only be the fruit of faith.