When we look back over this difficult letter, we need to be clear what is really important in it for the Christian faith today. We can identify the following important points.

(i) The whole letter raises the key question, 'What makes a person a Christian?' The question is asked today and will continue to be asked in every generation of Christians. The answers which the letter provides are still valid. A person is a Christian because of faith in the saving power of Jesus Christ. The situation in which the modern Christian lives is obviously different from that in which the Galatian Christians lived, but the need to be rescued from the power of sin, to find the will of God for our times and to be reconciled with God, is just the same.

If, however, you asked some of the members of our modern churches or other people who are not church members at all, by what criteria they decided whether someone was a Christian, you might be given some strange answers. Might they not say that so-and-so is a Christian because he does not drink or because he has only one wife? Or that someone else is a Christian because she sends her children to Sunday school or church classes (she does not go to church herself), or because she does not plait her hair or wear necklaces? Might we also not find that in some churches there is teaching that a Christian is someone who has the gift of speaking in tongues, or who uses a rosary when praying, or who wears white robes for worship? There is at least one African church in which circumcision is considered necessary for Christians.

Against such varied and confused answers, the need for Paul's teaching on what makes a person a Christian, is very clear. Paul still speaks to our modern times.

(ii) Paul's understanding that the Jewish Law had to be left behind as the Church spread away from its Jewish origins, provides important guidance for the young churches of the parts of the world where Christianity is still a new thing. We think particularly of the many areas of Africa where the Christian faith came for the first time in this twentieth century. Obviously, there is a universal core of tradition and teaching about Jesus Christ and his Church which has to be handed on by the older churches to the younger ones but the question arises as to how much else has to be handed on, in the way of church architecture, fittings and furniture, dress and vestments, forms of music, and so on, which may seem 'foreign' to the younger churches. The universality of the Christian faith has to be 'clothed' in forms which are meaningful to different peoples and acceptable in different places. Paul understood this when he saw how strange the practices of Judaism would have been to those who were not Jews. The Jewish Law had a specific purpose, for the Jews, but that purpose did not extend to the Gentiles.

(iii) Paul's teaching about how the life of a Christian should be lived, under the control of the Holy Spirit, applies to the modern Christian just as much as it applied to the Galatians. The Christian community should be recognizable by the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self-control which is in it and goes out from it, to others. How many of our modern churches are like this? How many modern Christians are like this individually? We can think of some, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who really are like that, but there are others who claim to be Christians but whose lives unfortunately reflect some of what Paul describes in Galatians 5: 19-21. Christian living in our modern world should express itself in acts done in direct personal responsibility to God, yet which also express solidarity with the whole Christian Church in the world.