The gospel of grace, and the freedom it brings — choose any three
Reading different theological perspectives. Historical readings express their authors' perspectives, including Arminian and Reformed or Calvinist traditions. Inclusion does not make an author's position settled CTS doctrine. Read with Scripture and the assigned material. A supported answer from another evangelical perspective should be assessed on its reasoning, not penalized simply for differing from the author. If an automated score rejects such an answer, ask CTS for review.
Master’s Assigned Readings (all five)
M.Div. and Th.M. students read all five assigned selections and take their separate exam after activation. The test page states the current rule; valid earlier completions remain valid.
Optional Honors (choose three)
Honors is optional on every track. Certificate and Associate students may read three honors selections without a required-reading exam. Honors does not replace either master’s exam.
The Master's textbook test: read Galatians — Findlay (assigned chapters), then take its test: twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once. Correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. It is separate from the reading test on the five digests below: passing one does not pass the other. On the M.Div. and Th.M. tracks both tests are being introduced; each test's page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take them, and a pass is kept in your record.
Full-length textbook
Read The Expositor’s Bible: The Epistle to the Galatians by George G. Findlay. The complete English text opens here on the seminary website. The five CTS readings below remain available. The chapters assigned for the Master’s textbook exam are also translated into Spanish and French.
How to read this shelf
This intensive walks through Galatians — Paul’s short, fiery letter, written to guard the one true gospel of grace against those who would add human works to the finished work of Christ. These five readings are Chapala Theological Seminary digests, moving in turn through the movements of the letter — no other gospel, justified by faith and not law, sons and heirs, freedom and the Spirit, and glorying only in the cross — and drawing on its classic public-domain expositors, from Luther and Lightfoot to Bunyan, Booth, Wesley, and Machen. The gospel of grace here is common ground to the whole believing church, Arminian and Reformed alike. Each is written to be read on its own, in English, Spanish or French. Choose any three, read them in full, and record your reading below.
Galatians was written to guard the gospel against “another gospel, which is not another” — the very concern of the course’s closing units. A reader who knows the true gospel deeply is the one best able to recognize a false one, wherever it appears. These five digests carry you through the letter’s argument for grace, drawing on Luther’s great commentary, Lightfoot’s scholarship, and the classics of free grace. Read each with an open Bible; the gospel of grace here is common ground to the whole believing church, Arminian and Reformed alike.
The Master's reading test: separate from the honors invitation below. Honors asks you to read any three of these digests; the Master's test covers all five. It has twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, four from each reading, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once; correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. You may try again after a short wait. The test is being introduced: its page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take it, and a pass is kept in your record.
With Honors — an invitation, not a requirement
The honors reading attestation is optional for every degree. Certificate and Associate students complete the course through its units. On M.Div. and Th.M., the assigned textbook and required-reading tests also count after activation; valid earlier master’s completions remain valid. Reading three digests for honors does not replace either test.
These supplemental readings are the path to one added distinction — your degree awarded with honors. Each class whose reading you complete counts toward it: twelve classes for the Certificate, fifteen for the Th.M., twenty-five for the Associate, and thirty for the M.Div. Choose any three of the readings below, read them in full, and record your reading on your honor — then track your progress on the Honors page.
No constant internet required — see below
Reading the digests
Every one of these five readings is a Chapala Theological Seminary digest, written by CTS and available here on the site — all of them open directly from this page, in English, Spanish or French, with nothing to download. Each digest walks through a portion of Galatians and rests on the classic public-domain expositions, but the digests themselves are CTS-authored teaching, not reproductions, and those classic works are freely available online for any who wish to read them in full.
Reading in another language
Most of these works are in English. If you would rather read in Spanish, French or another language, the Chrome browser can translate a whole page for you. On a computer, right-click anywhere on the opened reading and choose “Translate to…”. On an Android phone or tablet, tap the three-dot menu and choose “Translate”. On an iPhone or iPad, tap the translate icon in the address bar — or open the page in the Chrome app if you don't see it. Machine translation is not perfect, but it is enough to follow the argument.
The Five Readings
Chosen: 0 of 3
Galatians 1–2 · a CTS digest, ~2,000 words per language
1.No Other Gospel
A CTS digest
The letter written in alarm (no thanksgiving, straight to rebuke); “a different gospel, which is not another” and Paul’s solemn “let him be accursed”; the gospel received by revelation, not from men (his own conversion as proof of grace); the gospel confirmed by the apostles, and Peter withstood to his face when he acted against it; and the thesis — “a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ,” for otherwise “Christ died in vain.”
CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here
The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.
No Other Gospel
A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Galatians 1–2: the one true gospel of grace, and justification by faith
A CTS-authored survey, anchored in the classic public-domain expositions of Galatians (Luther, Lightfoot, Machen, and others), and in Scripture.
Book Study: Galatians
One Gospel
Justified by Faith
Anchored in classics
A word before you read. Galatians is unlike Paul's other letters — no warm thanksgiving at the start, but urgent alarm. His churches were being told that faith in Christ was not enough. This first reading walks through Galatians 1–2: Paul's defense of the one true gospel of grace, and its ringing thesis — that we are justified by faith, and not by the works of the law.
1.A Letter Written in Alarm
Galatians does not read like Paul's other letters. He usually opens with warm words of thanks for his readers; here he is so alarmed that he skips the thanksgiving altogether and plunges straight into rebuke. The churches of Galatia, which he himself had founded, were being unsettled by teachers who insisted that simple faith in Christ was not enough — that to be truly right with God, Gentile believers must also be circumcised and take up the keeping of the law of Moses. To Paul, this was no minor adjustment or harmless addition. It was a betrayal of the gospel itself, and he writes with holy urgency to drag them back from the brink and set them once more on grace. Little wonder that this short, fiery letter has been called the "Magna Carta of Christian liberty," and that it became one of the great sparks of the Reformation. Martin Luther loved it above almost any other book, and said he had, as it were, betrothed himself to it.
2.“A Different Gospel — Which Is Not Another”
Paul's opening words are a cry of astonishment: "I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel, which is not another." There is, he insists, only one true gospel; and any so-called "gospel" that adds to it — that makes our standing with God rest even partly on our own performance alongside Christ — is no gospel at all, but a corruption of it. And Paul is so deadly serious about this that he pronounces one of the most solemn warnings in all his letters: even if he himself, or an angel straight from heaven, should come preaching any other gospel than the one they had received, "let him be accursed." The gospel is not his to change, nor ours; it is God's, and it must be guarded. Centuries later, J. Gresham Machen would argue this very thing in his own day, in Christianity and Liberalism — that a message which denies the true gospel is not a milder form of Christianity, but a different religion altogether.
3.The Gospel Is from God, Not Man
Because his opponents were undermining his authority, Paul pauses to defend where his gospel had come from. He had not received it, he says, from any man, nor been taught it by human beings, but had received it directly "through the revelation of Jesus Christ." And to prove it, he tells his own story. He reminds them of the man he had once been: a fierce persecutor of the church of God, who tried to destroy it, a Jew more zealous for the traditions of the law than any of his peers. And then, unbidden and undeserved, God "was pleased to reveal His Son" in him, and called him by sheer grace to preach that Son among the Gentiles. His gospel, in other words, was no clever human invention; it was God's own truth, handed to him by the risen Christ Himself. And his very conversion — the persecutor turned preacher — was itself a living proof of the grace he now proclaimed: God had saved His own enemy.
4.One Gospel, Confirmed — and Peter Withstood
Paul then recounts how, years later, he laid the gospel he preached before the leading apostles in Jerusalem — and they added nothing whatever to it. Instead they recognized the grace that had been given him, and gave him and Barnabas "the right hand of fellowship." The gospel Paul preached to the Gentiles — grace through faith, apart from the works of the law — was confirmed by the pillars of the church as the one true gospel; the Gentiles were not to be loaded down with the law. But Paul also tells of a sharp and painful moment. At Antioch, even the apostle Peter, under pressure from certain visitors, drew back and stopped eating with the Gentile believers, behaving as though the old dividing wall of the law still stood between them. Paul would not let it pass. "I withstood him to his face," he writes, "because he was to be blamed" — for Peter's conduct was "not straightforward about the truth of the gospel." The point was simply too important to overlook: the gospel of grace makes Jew and Gentile one in Christ, and to act as if it did not was to deny it. When the gospel itself is at stake, even an apostle must be corrected.
5.The Heart of the Matter: Justified by Faith, Not Law
And now Paul lays down the thesis of the whole letter, in words that would one day shake the world awake: "knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ... for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified." To be justified — declared righteous and accepted before God — comes not by keeping a set of rules, however earnestly, but by trusting in Christ. And Paul makes it intensely personal, in one of the most beloved verses he ever wrote: "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." Then he drives the argument to its sharpest edge: if right standing with God could be gained through law-keeping, "then Christ died in vain." The cross would be a pointless tragedy if we could have saved ourselves by our own obedience. But we cannot — not one of us — and therefore the gospel is grace, from its first word to its last.
6.Hold Fast to Grace
Galatians 1 and 2 set squarely before us the one great question of the whole letter, and of the whole Christian life: is the gospel grace alone, received by faith — or must we somehow add our own works to it to be accepted by God? Paul answers with every ounce of his strength: there is only one gospel, and it is grace. We are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, and not by the works of the law — for if we could have saved ourselves, then Christ died for nothing. This is a truth worth contending for, as Paul contended for it, even to the point of correcting an apostle to his face. So hold fast to the pure gospel of grace, and do not let it be muddied. Your acceptance with God rests wholly on Christ crucified for you, received by simple faith — and on nothing whatever that you add to Him. Rest your full weight there; and refuse, gently but firmly, every "gospel" that would quietly shift the burden back onto you.
7.Taking It to Heart
For reflection. Is there some "different gospel" at work in your own heart — a quiet sense that God accepts you because of your performance, and not simply because of Christ? Can you say Galatians 2:20 as your own: that you live by faith in the Son of God, "who loved me and gave Himself for me"? And do you hold the pure gospel of grace precious enough to guard it?
Galatians 3 · a CTS digest, ~2,000 words per language
2.Justified by Faith, Not Law
A CTS digest
“O foolish Galatians!”; the argument from their own experience (they received the Spirit by faith, not works); Abraham justified by faith as father of all who believe; the law’s curse borne by Christ, who “became a curse for us” (Anselm on why); the promise not annulled by a later law, and the law as a tutor driving us to Christ; and all made one — sons of God and heirs — by faith in Him.
CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here
The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.
Justified by Faith, Not Law
A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Galatians 3: how a sinner is made right with God, argued from every side
A CTS-authored survey, anchored in the classic public-domain expositions of Galatians (Luther, Booth, the Marrow, and others), and in Scripture.
Book Study: Galatians
Faith, Not Works
Christ Bore the Curse
Anchored in classics
A word before you read. Having laid down his thesis — justified by faith, not law — Paul now argues it with all his might. This reading walks through Galatians 3, one of the great chapters of the New Testament on how a sinner is made right with God: by faith, and never by the works of the law, because Christ Himself bore the law's curse to bring us the blessing.
1.“O Foolish Galatians!”
With his thesis stated, Paul now sets out to prove it, and chapter 3 is his sustained argument — one of the most important passages in the whole New Testament on the question of how a sinner comes to be right with God. He opens not gently but with a cry of dismay: "O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you...?" They had begun their Christian life so well, resting wholly on the grace of Christ; how could they now be slipping backward, trying to secure by law-keeping what they had first received by faith? Something, Paul says, has all but put them under a spell. And so, one after another, he brings forward a whole series of arguments, each driving home the same truth from a different direction: righteousness before God comes by faith, and not by the works of the law.
2.The Argument from Their Own Experience
His first argument is disarmingly simple: it is their own experience. "This only I want to learn from you," he says: "Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?" They knew the answer perfectly well. When they had first believed the gospel, they had received the Holy Spirit — not as a wage earned by keeping the law, which they had never done, but as a gift received by simply believing the message. So Paul presses the obvious question: "Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?" It makes no sense at all to begin the Christian life by grace and then imagine you must complete it by your own works. What began by faith goes on by faith and ends by faith; grace is not merely the doorway but the whole road.
3.The Argument from Abraham
Next Paul turns, as he also does in Romans, to the towering figure of Abraham, the father of the faithful. What does Scripture actually say of him? "Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness" — and this, note well, was long before the law of Moses was ever given. Abraham was justified by faith, plain and simple. It follows, then, that those who are "of faith" are the true children of Abraham, whatever their nationality. Indeed, Paul says, the gospel itself was preached to Abraham ahead of time, in God's promise that "in you all the nations shall be blessed" — a promise that God would one day justify the Gentiles, too, by faith. And so all who believe are blessed together with believing Abraham. It is faith, not law-keeping, that makes a person a child of Abraham and an heir of the ancient promise.
4.The Law's Curse — but Christ Redeemed Us
Now Paul shows why the law could never justify anyone in the first place. "As many as are of the works of the law are under the curse," he writes; for the law itself pronounces a curse on everyone who does not continue in all that is written in it — and no human being has ever kept it perfectly. The law, approached as a way of salvation, can therefore do only one thing: condemn the person who breaks it. But here, against that dark background, the gospel blazes out in one of the most precious sentences in all of Scripture: "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us." On the cross, Christ took upon Himself the very curse that our lawbreaking deserved, dying in our place — so that the blessing promised to Abraham might flow out to us, and we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. Christ bore the curse; we receive the blessing. This is the very heart of the atonement, and it was to explain why such a thing was necessary that Anselm, long ago, wrote his great work Cur Deus Homo — "Why God Became Man."
5.The Promise Stands, and Why the Law Was Given
Paul anticipates an objection: did not the law, given four hundred and thirty years after Abraham, change the terms of God's promise, or add law-keeping as a new condition? Not at all, he answers. A covenant, once it has been ratified, cannot afterward be annulled or amended. The promise was given to Abraham freely, by grace; the law, arriving centuries later, has no power to cancel it or to turn the inheritance into something earned. "If the inheritance is of the law, it is no longer of promise; but God gave it to Abraham by promise." Salvation was always, from the very beginning, by grace and promise, never by law. But then what was the law for? Paul answers plainly: it was added "because of transgressions" — to expose our sin, to make us feel the weight of our need. It was never able to give life or to make anyone righteous. Rather, Scripture "has confined all under sin," shutting us all up together as prisoners, so that the promise might be given, through faith in Christ, to those who believe. The law, Paul says, was our "tutor" — a strict guardian or schoolmaster — whose task was to lead us, like a child taken firmly by the hand, to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. And now that faith has come, we are no longer under that guardian. The law had a real and holy work: to drive us to Christ. But once it has brought us to Him, its guardianship is done.
6.All One in Christ, by Faith
And Paul ends the chapter on a soaring, joyful note. "You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus." All who have been baptized into Christ have "put on Christ," clothed in Him as in a garment. And within that new family, the old dividing walls simply fall down: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Whatever once separated people — race, rank, and the rest — none of it determines one's standing before God; faith in Christ makes every believer equally a child of God and an equal heir of the promise made to Abraham. The gospel of grace joins together the very people the world holds apart: all one, all sons and daughters, all heirs, by faith alone. And here, then, is the great encouragement of this chapter. From every possible angle Paul has shown the one same truth: we are justified by faith, and not by the works of the law. We received the Spirit by faith; Abraham was justified by faith; the law could only curse us, but Christ bore that curse to win us the blessing; the promise came by grace and not by law; the whole purpose of the law was to drive us to Christ; and in Christ, by faith, we are every one of us sons of God and heirs. So do not slip back, as the Galatians were doing, into trying to earn what God gives away for nothing. Christ has borne your curse and clothed you in His blessing; you are a child of God and an heir of the promise, by faith in Him. Now live as the free child of grace you truly are.
7.Taking It to Heart
For reflection. Having begun the Christian life by faith, are you tempted to think you must now keep it going by your own performance? Does it move you that Christ became a curse in your place, so that the blessing might come to you? And do you truly rest in being a full son or daughter of God and an heir — by faith, and not by anything you have earned?
Galatians 4 · a CTS digest, ~2,000 words per language
3.Sons and Heirs, Not Slaves
A CTS digest
The fullness of time — God sending His Son to redeem and adopt us; the Spirit of His Son crying “Abba, Father” (the heart of assurance); Paul’s alarm at their drift back toward bondage and his aching, motherly plea (“until Christ is formed in you”); and the two covenants — Hagar and Sarah, bondage and freedom — closing with who we are: children of promise and of the free.
CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here
The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.
Sons and Heirs, Not Slaves
A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Galatians 4: adopted into God's family, and the freedom that is ours in Christ
A CTS-authored survey, anchored in the classic public-domain expositions of Galatians (Luther, the Marrow, Booth, and others), and in Scripture.
Book Study: Galatians
Adoption and Sonship
“Abba, Father”
Anchored in classics
A word before you read. In chapter 3 Paul showed that we are all sons of God in Christ, by faith. Now he unfolds the sheer wonder of that sonship — and pleads with the Galatians not to slip back into slavery. This reading walks through Galatians 4: our adoption into God's family, the Spirit crying "Abba, Father," and our standing as children of promise and freedom.
1.From Slaves to Sons
In the previous chapter Paul proved that we are justified by faith, and that all who believe are sons of God in Christ. Now, in chapter 4, he opens up the wonder of that sonship, and then turns it into an urgent, deeply personal plea: do not, having been made sons, go back to being slaves. The whole chapter turns on that one great contrast — the vast difference between living as a slave under the law and living as a free son under grace. Paul longs for the Galatians, and for us, to grasp fully what we now are in Christ: not slaves at all, but sons, and heirs.
2.The Fullness of Time
Paul explains it with a picture from family life. In the days before Christ, God's people were rather like a young heir who is still a small child: he may be the legal owner of the whole estate, yet while he is a minor he lives under guardians and stewards, and is in daily practice hardly different from a slave. That was the condition of the world under the law. But then came the great turning point of all history: "when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons." The eternal Son of God entered our world as a real human being, born under the very law we had broken, in order to buy us out of our slavery and bring us into God's own family as His adopted children. And God gives us the sure inward proof that we truly are His: "God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, 'Abba, Father!'" And so, Paul concludes, "you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ." From slaves to sons and heirs — that is what the gospel has made us.
3.“Abba, Father”
It is worth pausing over that cry. The Spirit whom God places within His children moves them to call out to Him, "Abba, Father" — and "Abba" is the intimate, tender word that a small child uses for a dearly loved father, close to our "papa" or "dear father." This tells us something breathtaking about the gospel. It does not merely cancel our debt and leave us at arm's length; it brings us right inside God's family and puts God's own Spirit within us, so that we may come to the almighty Maker of heaven and earth not as trembling slaves creeping before a master, but as beloved children running to a Father. Here is the very heart of Christian assurance and Christian joy: we belong to God, and we belong to Him as His own dear children.
4.Do Not Turn Back to Bondage
All of which makes what the Galatians were doing so bewildering and so grievous to Paul. Having been set gloriously free, they seemed strangely eager to walk back into slavery. Once, in their pagan days, they had been enslaved to things that were no gods at all; but now that they had come to know the true God — or rather, Paul corrects himself, now that they were known by God — how could they possibly turn back "again to the weak and beggarly elements, to which you desire again to be in bondage"? By taking up the law's special days and months and seasons as a means of securing God's favor, they were trading away the glad freedom of sons for the heavy chains of slaves. Paul is so troubled that he says he is afraid he may have labored over them in vain. To exchange sonship for slavery is a tragedy indeed.
5.Paul's Personal Appeal
Here Paul's voice softens, and he pleads with them as a father with beloved but wayward children. He recalls the warmth of their first love for him: when he had first come to them preaching the gospel in bodily weakness and sickness, they had not despised him but had welcomed him "as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus," and would gladly, he says, have torn out their own eyes and given them to him. "What then was the blessing you enjoyed?" he asks — where has all that joy gone? He warns them plainly that the false teachers who are courting them so eagerly are not doing so out of love, but to win the Galatians over to themselves for their own ends. And then he opens his very heart to them: "My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you." Like a mother enduring the pains of childbirth, Paul is in anguish over them — and what he aches for is not merely that they hold right opinions, but that Christ Himself would be fully formed within them. That is the true heart of a faithful pastor: a longing, whatever the cost, to see Christ formed in his people.
6.The Two Covenants, and Who We Are
Paul closes the chapter with an illustration drawn from Abraham's own household. Abraham had two sons: Ishmael, born of the slave woman Hagar in the ordinary way, "according to the flesh," and Isaac, born of the free woman Sarah as the child of God's promise. Paul takes these two as a living picture of two covenants, two ways of relating to God. The one, like Hagar the slave, can only give birth to slavery — this is the covenant of the law, which puts people in bondage. The other, like Sarah the free woman, is the covenant of promise and of grace, and it gives birth to free children. And believers, Paul says, are "children of promise" like Isaac — born not of the flesh and the law, but of the Spirit and the promise of God. Just as, long ago, Ishmael mocked and troubled little Isaac, so those who trust in law-keeping have always troubled those who rest in grace; but the word of Scripture stands: the son of the slave will not share the inheritance with the son of the free. "So then, brethren," Paul concludes, "we are not children of the bondwoman but of the free." We belong to grace, to promise, and to freedom — and not to law and bondage. And there is the great encouragement of this whole chapter. See what the gospel has made you: not a slave, but a son or daughter of God. In the fullness of time God sent His own Son to redeem you and to adopt you; He has placed the Spirit of His Son within your heart, so that you may cry "Abba, Father"; you are an heir of God; you are a child of promise and of freedom, like Isaac. Why on earth, then, would you ever go back to the weary slavery of trying to earn what God has already given you for free? So know who you are — a dearly loved child of God, an heir, a child of the free. Come to your Father with all the confidence of a son; never trade that freedom for the chains of the law; and let Christ be fully formed in you.
7.Taking It to Heart
For reflection. Do you come to God as a trembling slave, trying to earn His acceptance — or as a beloved child, crying "Abba, Father"? Are there "weak and beggarly" things you keep slipping back into, as if your standing with God depended on them? And is your deepest desire for those you love the same as Paul's — that Christ would be formed in them?
Galatians 5 · a CTS digest, ~2,000 words per language
4.Stand Fast in Freedom, Walk in the Spirit
A CTS digest
Standing firm in the liberty Christ won (“faith working through love”); freedom that is not license but love that serves; the secret of victory — walking in the Spirit rather than willpower under law, amid the real war of flesh against Spirit; the sobering works of the flesh; and the fruit the Spirit grows in those who walk with Him.
CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here
The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.
Stand Fast in Freedom, Walk in the Spirit
A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Galatians 5: the freedom Christ won, and the Spirit-led life of love
A CTS-authored survey, anchored in the classic public-domain expositions of Galatians (Luther, Gordon, and others), and in Scripture.
Book Study: Galatians
Christian Freedom
Fruit of the Spirit
Anchored in classics
A word before you read. Having shown that we are free sons, not slaves, Paul now urges us to live in that freedom — and carefully clarifies what Christian freedom really is. This reading walks through Galatians 5: standing fast in liberty, freedom that is not license but love, and walking in the Spirit against the flesh.
1.Called to Freedom
Paul has proved that we are free sons of God, and not slaves. Now he turns from that great truth to its practical outworking, and chapter 5 is the hinge of the whole letter, where doctrine becomes life. Having settled that we are saved entirely by grace, Paul now shows how the free child of grace is actually to live. Two great concerns run side by side through the chapter. The first is: hold on to your freedom — do not, whatever you do, slip back under the yoke of the law. The second is: use your freedom rightly — not as an excuse for sin, but as an open door for love, lived out by the power of the Spirit. Christian liberty, Paul will show, is not the freedom to do as we please; it is the freedom, at last, to love.
2.Stand Fast in Liberty
The chapter opens like a trumpet blast: "Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage." Christ has paid dearly to set us free; we must plant our feet and refuse to let anyone load the law's heavy yoke back onto our shoulders. And Paul warns very sharply where the alternative leads. If the Galatians go the way of the false teachers and seek to be justified by keeping the law, then, he says, they cut themselves off from Christ; they "have fallen from grace." He does not mean that a true child of God is cast out of the family, but something just as serious: to seek acceptance by law is to abandon grace as the very ground you stand on, and to try instead to stand on your own law-keeping — which cannot bear the weight. For those who rest in Christ, Paul says, the outward badge of circumcision counts for nothing either way; what actually matters is "faith working through love." The gospel is faith — and true faith is never idle, but shows itself in love.
3.Freedom Is Not License
But Paul knows that the moment you preach freedom from the law, someone will twist it into a license to sin, and he guards against that misunderstanding at once. Christian freedom is not the freedom to do wrong; it is freedom from the slavery of sin and the condemnation of the law, and it is given to us for a purpose — that we may love. "You, brethren, have been called to liberty," he writes; "only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another." Indeed, he says, the whole law is actually fulfilled in a single command: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." So the free child of grace does not treat his freedom as permission for selfishness; he pours it out in the humble service of others. Grace, rightly understood, never leads to lawlessness. It leads to love.
4.Walk in the Spirit
How, then, are we to live this life of love, and actually get the upper hand over the sin that still clings to us? Not, Paul insists, by crawling back under the law and gritting our teeth, but by the Holy Spirit. "Walk in the Spirit," he says, "and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh." He is honest that there is a real war going on inside every believer: "the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh," so that the old sinful nature and the new life of the Spirit are locked in genuine conflict, and we do not always do the good we want. But the way of victory is not the law: "if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law." The secret of the Christian life turns out to be, not law-keeping powered by our own willpower, but a daily walking in step with the Spirit of God — who alone supplies the power to overcome the flesh and to love.
5.The Works of the Flesh
Paul is entirely realistic about what the flesh produces when it is left to itself. He sets down a plain and ugly list of "the works of the flesh" — the natural fruit of the sinful nature: sexual immorality and impurity, idolatry, hatred and strife, jealousy and outbursts of wrath, selfish ambition, envy, drunkenness, and things like these. These are not the marks of the children of God, and Paul gives a solemn warning that those who make a settled practice of such things, as their chosen way of life, "will not inherit the kingdom of God." It is a sobering word, and meant to be. But it is not given to drive the struggling believer to despair; it is given to show, by contrast, how utterly different the Spirit-led life looks — and to send us, not to self-hatred, but straight back to the Spirit for the power to walk another way.
6.The Fruit of the Spirit
For over against that dark catalogue Paul now sets one of the loveliest lists in all of Scripture: the "fruit of the Spirit." "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." Notice his word carefully: he does not call these the works of the Spirit, but the fruit — for they are not things we manufacture by our own strenuous effort, but things the Spirit quietly grows within us as we walk with Him, as naturally and inevitably as a healthy tree bears its fruit in season. "Against such there is no law," Paul adds — no rule was ever needed to hold back love, or joy, or peace. Those who belong to Christ, he says, "have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires"; and so his closing appeal is simple: "If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit." Since it is the Spirit who gave us life to begin with, let us keep in step with Him now, and let Him direct every stride. This, then, is the true character of the free child of grace — not a record of rules kept, but the fruit the Spirit grows, which is nothing less than the likeness of Christ Himself taking shape in us. And here is the great encouragement of the chapter. We are called to stand fast in the freedom Christ won for us, and never to go back to the yoke of the law. Yet that freedom is not license to sin; it is freedom to love — "through love serve one another." And we live this whole life not by our own willpower under law, but by walking in the Spirit, who wages war against our flesh and grows His own beautiful fruit in its place. So stand firm in grace; refuse both slavery to the law and slavery to sin; and walk, day by ordinary day, in the Spirit — and He will form the very character of Christ within you.
7.Taking It to Heart
For reflection. Do you fight sin mainly by gritting your teeth under rules, or by walking in step with the Spirit? Have you ever quietly turned your freedom in Christ into an excuse for the flesh, rather than an occasion to serve in love? And when you long to change, do you look to your own willpower — or to the Spirit, who grows His fruit in those who walk with Him?
Galatians 6 · a CTS digest, ~2,000 words per language
5.Glorying Only in the Cross
A CTS digest
The capstone: bearing one another’s burdens and fulfilling the law of Christ; sowing and reaping, and not growing weary in doing good (the harvest is sure); the great climax — “God forbid that I should glory except in the cross,” where nothing counts but a new creation; the marks of Jesus, and a blessing of grace at the last. It gathers up the whole letter on the note of grace and the cross.
CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here
The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.
Glorying Only in the Cross
A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Galatians 6: the gospel of grace lived out, and the one thing worth boasting in
A CTS-authored survey, anchored in the classic public-domain expositions of Galatians (Luther, Bunyan, Anselm, and others), and in Scripture.
Book Study: Galatians
The Cross Alone
A New Creation
Capstone
A word before you read. Having taught justification by faith and the Spirit-led life of freedom, Paul closes the letter with practical counsel that flows out of grace — and then brings the whole letter to rest on one triumphant note: the cross of Christ alone. This closing reading walks through Galatians 6, and gathers up the message of the entire letter.
1.The Gospel of Grace, Lived Out
Paul has laid the great doctrine before the Galatians — justification by faith and not by works — and then shown them the Spirit-led life of freedom and love that flows from it. Now, in this last chapter, he adds some final, down-to-earth exhortations that grow straight out of the gospel of grace; and then, at the very end, he lifts the whole letter up and lets it come to rest on a single, blazing note: the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, and nothing else. This closing chapter shows us, in plain and practical terms, what the gospel of grace actually looks like when it is lived: gentle care for one another, patient well-doing, and a heart that boasts in the cross alone.
2.Bear One Another's Burdens
The free, Spirit-led life, Paul shows, is not lived alone; it is lived together, in tender care for one another. When a fellow believer is caught out in some sin, those who are spiritual are to "restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness" — and Paul adds a needed word of humility: each of us watching ourselves, lest we too be tempted. The mark of the Spirit is restoration, not condemnation; a gentle lifting up, not a harsh casting down. "Bear one another's burdens," he writes, "and so fulfill the law of Christ." The "law of Christ" is simply the law of love: we are to get underneath each other's heavy, crushing loads and help carry them. (When Paul says a little later that "each one shall bear his own load," there is no contradiction: he means that each of us must carry our own personal responsibility before God, and answer for our own life. We help one another with the burdens too heavy to bear alone, and yet each still stands before God on his own account.) The community of grace is a community of humble, gentle burden-bearers.
3.Do Not Grow Weary — Sowing and Reaping
Then Paul gives a principle that is at once solemn and full of hope: "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap." The one who sows to please his own flesh will, from the flesh, reap only corruption; but the one who sows to please the Spirit will, from the Spirit, reap everlasting life. Our choices and habits are like seeds dropped into the ground — they do not vanish, but grow up into a harvest, whether bitter or sweet. And so Paul turns this into a great encouragement for tired and discouraged believers: "Let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart." The harvest may seem long in coming; the good we do may appear, for now, to bear no fruit at all. But it will come. So we are to keep on doing good to everyone, and especially to our brothers and sisters in "the household of faith." Do not give up; do not stop sowing to the Spirit. In God's own good time, the harvest is certain.
4.The One Thing to Glory In — the Cross
Now Paul takes the pen from his secretary into his own hand, and writes the closing lines himself, in large letters — and here he comes to the very heart of everything he has been fighting for. He sets the false teachers, who wanted to boast in the Galatians' circumcision, in all their outward religion and human achievement, over against his own single boast. And it rises up as the great climax of the whole letter: "But God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world." Paul will boast in nothing whatever — not in his impeccable Jewish pedigree, not in his labors, not in his religion — in nothing but the cross, where Christ was crucified for him. That cross has broken the grip of the world upon him, and his upon it. And then he gathers the entire message of Galatians into one sentence: "For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creation." In the end, what counts before God is not the law, nor any outward religious badge, but the new creation that God Himself works within us through the cross of His Son. And upon all who walk by this rule — the rule of grace and of the cross — Paul pronounces peace and mercy.
5.The Marks of Jesus, and Grace at the Last
Paul ends with a word both weary and triumphant: "From now on let no one trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." The false teachers made their boast in one mark cut into the flesh, the mark of circumcision; but Paul carries marks of a wholly different kind — the scars left on his body by beatings and stonings and hardships endured for Christ, the very brand of a man who belongs, body and soul, to his Master. And then, as is only fitting for the letter that has contended so fiercely and so gladly for grace, he closes with grace itself: "Brethren, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen." The letter that fought for grace from its first line signs off with a benediction of grace.
6.The Message of Galatians, Gathered Up
And so our walk through Galatians comes to its close. Paul wrote this letter in holy alarm, to rescue his beloved churches from a counterfeit gospel that would quietly add human works to the finished work of Christ — and from its first word to its last, his message is one unbroken song of grace. There is no other gospel, and no one may alter it. We are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, and not by the works of the law. Christ bore the law's curse in our place, to bring us its blessing. We are no longer slaves but adopted sons and daughters and heirs, who cry "Abba, Father." We are to stand fast in the freedom Christ won for us, using it not as license for the flesh but as an occasion for love, and walking day by day in the Spirit, who grows His own fruit within us. And all of it — every argument, every appeal — comes to rest at last right here, at the foot of the cross. That is the one thing in all the world worth glorying in: the place where Christ died for us, and made us a new creation. This is the gospel that Paul would let no one steal from his people, and would let no one add so much as a single work to. So make this gospel your very own. Glory in nothing but the cross of Christ. Rest the whole weight of your standing with God on His finished work, and never on your own. Live as a free, Spirit-led child of grace. And let the new creation that God has begun in you grow up, day by day, to His glory. Grace to you — and, as Paul himself would have it, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.
7.Taking It to Heart
For reflection. When you are tempted to boast — in your background, your work, your religion — can you say with Paul that you will glory in nothing but the cross of Christ? Are you sowing, day by day, to the Spirit or to the flesh — and will you keep doing good even when the harvest seems long delayed? And do you truly rest your whole acceptance with God on Christ's finished work, and on the new creation He is forming in you?
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Further Study: Ten Public-Domain Works
These ten works are for further study, for the student who wants to go on reading. They are not part of the honors reading above: that stays as it is — the five CTS digests, any three read in full and recorded on your honor. All ten are in the public domain; each link opens the work online, and most can also be found in the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg. Most are in English: the Chrome browser can translate a page (right-click, “Translate to…”; on a phone, the browser menu).
The Whole Epistle · The Reformation Commentary
1.Commentary on Galatians
Martin Luther · 1535
Luther's lectures on Galatians are the book that lit the Reformation's understanding of the gospel — that a sinner is justified before God by faith in Christ alone, apart from the works of the law. Fierce, joyful, and endlessly quotable, it is the great companion to our whole course; Luther called Galatians his own epistle, to which he said he was betrothed. Read it for its blazing clarity on grace, weighing its sharper edges as you would any single teacher.
Lightfoot gives Galatians the care of a first-rate scholar — the history behind the letter, the meaning of Paul's words, and the great questions of the early church — in a commentary still valued a century and a half later. Where Luther brings fire, Lightfoot brings light: read together, they let you feel the gospel's power and understand the text with precision, unit by unit through our course.
In this short, radiant treatise Luther states the paradox at the heart of Galatians: the Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none, and yet a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to everyone — free from the law as a way of earning, freed for love as the fruit of faith. It is the finest brief statement of the liberty our sixth unit reaches, and among the most influential few pages ever written on the gospel.
Bunyan tells the story of his own soul — years bound under the terror of the law and his own sin, until grace broke in and set him free in Christ. It is Galatians lived out in one man's life: the passage from slavery to sonship our fifth unit describes, told with such honesty that generations have found their own struggle in it. No book shows more movingly what it is to stop striving to be accepted, and simply to be accepted in the Beloved.
Booth traces the reign of God's grace from first to last — in the calling, the pardon, the justifying, and the final glory of undeserving sinners — showing that salvation is grace from beginning to end and never a wage for works. It gathers into one view the “whole of grace” our eighth unit sets out, written with warmth and order; read it for its exaltation of grace, letting Scripture, and not any single system, settle the finer points.
Machen argues, with unusual force and clarity, that the liberal Christianity of his day was not a variety of the faith at all but a different religion wearing Christian words — the very issue Galatians raises with “another gospel, which is not another.” It is the ideal companion to our closing units: a model of how to tell the true gospel from a counterfeit, and why the difference is not a quarrel over trifles but a matter of salvation itself. A reader armed with this book can recognize a false gospel in whatever new dress it appears.
Wesley sets out plainly what it means to be justified — pardoned and accepted by God — and how it comes to us: by faith, received as a gift, not earned by anything we do. It is the same gospel Galatians defends, preached here in the clear voice of Wesley’s Arminian tradition, and a reminder that justification by faith is not the property of one party but the shared treasure of the whole believing church. This identifies Wesley’s tradition, not a settled CTS position on disputed doctrines. Set it beside the Reformed voices on this shelf and compare their reasoning from Scripture.
Freedom and the Fruit of the Spirit · Walking in the Spirit
8.The Ministry of the Holy Spirit
A. J. Gordon · 1894
Gordon unfolds the Spirit's work in the believer — regenerating, indwelling, sanctifying, and bearing fruit — the very life Galatians calls us to when it bids us walk in the Spirit and bear His fruit rather than the works of the flesh. Warm and practical, it matches our sixth unit's turn from bondage to the freedom of a Spirit-led life, and shows that Christian liberty is not licence but the Spirit's fruit growing freely.
Anselm asks why God became man, and answers that only one who was both God and man could pay the debt of human sin — the deep reason the cross stands at the center, in which Galatians will glory and in nothing else. It is the classic medieval statement of why the cross was necessary, written long before the Reformation and shared across the traditions; a fitting companion to our seventh unit, that we might glory in the cross with understanding.
Fisher sets law and gospel side by side in a lively dialogue, guarding the reader from two opposite errors — the legalism that turns the law into a way of salvation, and the licence that casts off the law altogether — the exact double danger Galatians confronts. Long loved in Scotland and beyond, it is a wise guide to the very distinction our course turns on: not law against grace, but each in its rightful place under Christ.
Chapala Theological Seminary · Seminario Teológico de Chapala · free self-study in English, Spanish and French
Chapala Theological Seminary · Further Study
Further Study — Online
Optional resources for students with internet access — Galatians
ONLINE
Requires an internet connection. These resources are hosted on the web and do not open offline. They supplement the course; they do not replace its units or exams.
Free animated Bible videos
BibleProject — Proyecto Biblia
Video EnglishEspañol
Short, well-crafted animated videos that walk through the whole of Scripture. In the video library, open the overview of Galatians to see its structure and message. Non-partisan and freely available.
A place for a specific video the instructor has watched and approved for this course.
These optional supplements link to third-party websites that Chapala Theological Seminary does not control; weigh their content against Scripture and this course.