I’ll never forget the day I was going to move away to Durham for seminary.  It’s hard to believe that’s been over 18 years now.  In some ways, it feels like just yesterday.  It was a sunny August day and, believe it or not, it wasn’t oppressively hot, I remember that.  Natalie and I had only been married a couple of months, barely enough time to get all my stuff unpacked in her new townhome.  And I had everything arranged.  I knew what time I was picking up the rental van, knew what time my friends were arriving at my house to help me move.  Heck, I had even planned where my volunteer moving crew was going to eat after we’d finished.  It was a perfect plan.  Oh, if it had only went the way that it was planned.  The first major hiccup occurred when I arrived to pick up the rental van.  When I got there, I was surprised not to see ANY rental vans on the property.  This after I had called the day before to make check that everything was in place.   Well, it turns out that there was a SNAFU there.  They’d rented the van (and all their other ones as well) and, at present, they had NO INVENTORY OF VANS for me to take.  It was a major blow and I felt my brilliant plans collapsing.  Thankfully, there was a van-rental competitor down the road.   And even though it was getting towards the end of the month when their inventory is tight, they had the right sized truck.  My friends only had to wait at my house about an hour while I got the new van and made my way back over to my home.  Little did I know that was only the beginning of our misfortune.  Thankfully, we got the job done but with traffic, a rainstorm and a parking brake mishap it sure wasn’t pretty and it absolutely did not go according to my brilliant plan.

It was the poet Robert Burns who once penned the line, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”  Wasn’t he onto something universal there?  No matter how well we draw things up on the proverbial board, something always seems to come along and complicate or waylay our plans.

I had an experience of that just last week.  As you know, I’ve been away on study leave for the last two weeks.  My plan was to take a class through the Dallas Theological Seminary online on Galatians.  Registered for the class, got the course materials and was looking forward to it starting the first Monday on my break.  But on the Friday before, I got an email telling me that the seminary was updating their network and that online classes would be OFFLINE for the very week I had planned to take the course.  I adapted but it just goes to show the truth of Robert Burns poetry – the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Even though he wouldn’t have had access to the specific words, I’m sure the Apostle Paul would’ve thought something similar when it came to the churches he had planted in Galatia.  Now since we’ll be talking about this letter quite a bit, it’s important you know where we’re talking about as if you look on your present day maps, you won’t find Galatia anywhere.  The churches that Paul writes to in Galatians in in a region of modern-day Turkey.  Just in case you were wondering, Turkey is about 600 miles from Jerusalem.  No matter what you think about Paul, it is clearly amazing how far his travels for Christ took him.

These churches Paul is writing to?  It’s important that.  We remember that it was he who planted them.  Which means that prior to his arrival, the people had never heard about Jesus Christ or, if they had, only in a vague and misunderstood way.  Paul brought them the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.  I can only imagine the amount of hard work church planting takes.  I mean, it’s hard now but it would’ve been exponentially so back then.  You really only had your voice and the vague hope that people would listen.  Thanks be to God for the Holy Spirit that they did.  I can only imagine the long hours Paul would’ve spent getting to know people.  The effort it took to explain Jesus’ resurrection and what it meant would’ve been tiring too, no doubt.  Then, to top it all off, you’ve got to make a living, right?  We know that Paul, for example, was a tent-maker.  That means that on top of his evangelizing work, he had a real job to boot.  Planting those churches in Galatia would’ve been an amazing amount of work but that’s exactly what Paul was called to.  So, Paul takes the time and energy to get these new Christian communities going but then he is called to go plant other churches.  He leaves behind what I’m sure he planned them to be thriving bastions of the Christian Gospel.