Our Faith is Universal and Inclusive.

When you are challenged by the idea that your faith is not complete, or that there is a need of something more to believe in, or a new experience to have or a new requirement to complete, then you are tempted to believe that you are not Christian enough compared with the people that are questioning your faith.
 
That was the big problem for the church of Galatia, the Galatians were questioned and criticized in a way that they started to believe that it was real that they were not fully saved, and they started to believe that they needed something else to be really Christians.
 
But not only that, they started to rebuild the invisible barriers that the Roman State religion or the Jewish tradition built to separate the good from the bad, the believer from the non-believer, the Jew from the gentile, the good citizen from the bad citizen.
 
You see the two problems that Paul had to address in this letter. On one side, the wrong theological interpretation that the Galatians were not complete and that they needed to add something to be fully saved. And, on the other hand, the heresy that proclaimed that people had to be always separated and divided like the holy versus the unholy. Paul addressed the problem with a very strong statement:
in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.
 
The Christian faith is not an ethnic faith, it is a universal faith says Paul, then nobody needs to be Jew first to become a Christian, you can be a Christian independently of your previous religious or ethnic background. 
 
Secondly, to be children of God was not determined by the social status in the Roman society, where Romans considered that they were better than other people. Romans divided the world between the civilized Roman society and the Barbarians. Paul declares that that division is not real, that anybody can be a child of God thanks to the faith in Jesus Christ.
 
In his letter Paul emphasizes that our faith creates a community that is both diverse and unified. Gentiles who accept Christ are God´s children. As God´s children, Gentiles have full participation in the blessings of the covenant community. 

According to Galatians 3, 28, faith in Christ compels us to dismantle the social barriers that prevent us from truly being sisters and brothers in Christ because There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. You can see the big contrast in what Paul was saying and what the word of his time was offering. Paul was confronting a world and a system that emphasized differences to justify oppression and dominance of one group over the other. Paul responds to that culture saying that differences are not to justify dominance but to prove that faith in Jesus makes us one body and that faith reunites people that are different and so  we treat them all as children of God.
 
For the Roman and Jewish, the cultural differences were the perfect argument to justify segregation and oppression, for Paul that was the opposite. Differences among people were a blessing that proved that in Christ those differences don’t matter anymore, because instead of oppression, our differences should create celebration and happiness, because we can learn that God is bigger than our differences and that in Christ we can be one beyond all our human, social, cultural, political or ethnic differences.
 
For example, unfortunately many times today, differences of opinion or points of view are immediately used to create polarizations or divisions. That is wrong according to Paul. Paul taught that our differences should be used to move us to dialogue and exchange of experiences recognizing that we are in this journey together as one body. 
 
To highlight differences as something negative and use them to divide churches, nations, families, friendships, couples is to go back to what Paul was trying to eradicate. We need to move forward and talk about our differences as he did in the letter to the Galatians, recognizing that our differences are a blessing and not a curse and that in Christ they are not a reason to divide but to unite. I think this is the great contribution that the message of the letter to the Galatians has for our time.
 
First, it is a reminder that we are complete in Christ Jesus, that we don’t lack anything for our salvation, our salvation is complete, and we should celebrate this fullness in Christ as a great gift from God to the world. We are saved in Christ we don’t need to seek for or add anything else, we have fullness in Christ.
 
Secondly, Christ faith promotes unity and communion. Christ calls us to remember that in him: 28There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Thanks, God, for that!
 
And finally, remember that difference is not bad, difference is good because we can understand more of the amazing love of God when we see that different people gather around the same table and eat the same bread and drink from the same cup as one body and one family.