Galatians 2:1-2 - Paul in chapter 1 insists that the Gospel he preaches came not from men but from Jesus, yet here he says that he went to Jerusalem to present his Gospel to the leaders there, "in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain". Even though he was confident in what Jesus had given Him, knowing that Jesus had spoken also to them (and first), he wanted to be sure that they were in agreement.
Galatians 2:4-9 - He who once a zealot for the law, to the point of punishing law breakers with death, now just as zealously defends the Gospel of freedom and refuses to allow those who would claim we must still submit to the law any ground.
Galatians 2:11-14 - The church needs men of boldness like Paul, who for the sake of the purity of the Gospel will stand up, publicly, to leaders whose "conduct [is] not in step with the truth of the gospel". Paul paid a price for his convictions as do those today who dare to call false gospel false. Of course, Paul's standing for the Gospel ultimately cost him his life at the hands of those outside the church, but I imagine that day he ruffled a few feathers among the brothers that day.
Galatians 2:20 - "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." I struggled with this before becoming a Christian and I've since heard others express the same struggle. The commitment to Christ is complete and total surrender. From the outside, it seems as if you will loose your very identity, becoming some religious clone of every other Christian, robotically living the same life as any other disciple. As this verse says, we are no longer ourselves, but Jesus in the flesh. It's scary and it sounds boring.
But while there is truth to those ideas, that I die and succumb to Christ, that does not produce like Jesus like duplicates in the way that a photocopier does. The beauty of God's creation in humanity is that His will and Jesus can be expressed in a huge number of ways. We are still individual expressions of the will of the Father, when we surrender to Him and live out Jesus instead of us, the real us He created is revealed. on two disciples are alike, just like no two sinners are and none of us are a complete expression of who He is. Only when we come together as the church to we begin to fully experience and express Him.
Far from being boring, when we let go and surrender to Jesus, only then we are able to live up to our potential, becoming, finally, all that He created us to be.
