Intense and eager and determined as he was, he was also tender and loving. This letter is all full of passages in which you can almost feel this great man’s heart throb. “You are,” he tells them, “just like my own children. I came to you when you were living in sin and ignorance and, like a father full of love, I helped you into a new life. I brought you to Christ and I showed you how to get free from your old bondage and how to rise into a life of joy and power. I cannot bear to see you drop back into bondage again. If you believe what these visitors have told you, you will never be free again, you will have to carry burdens all your days.” “When I came first among you,” he wrote, “you were full of joy. You loved me and believed me, as though I had been an angel or a god come to visit you. You would have plucked out your eyes and given them to me, if you could have done it. I want now to be your friend and I want you to believe that what I tell you is the truth.” Then he showed them how foolish was the story which the Jews from Jerusalem had told them. They had said that only those who were “sons of Abraham” could share in the promises of Christ. “Sons of Abraham,” Paul cried out to them, “who are the real sons of Abraham!” “Not those who become Jews and keep the law but those who are full of faith, who trust Christ and live by His power. The most wonderful thing about Abraham was his _faith_. He believed God. He trusted God. He walked with God. He did not keep the law, because the law was not given until many centuries after Abraham had died. If you want to be ‘a son of Abraham’ you must live by faith. You must trust God and take Christ for your leader, your helper, your inward strength.” He drew, in his letter, a wonderful picture of the true way to live. He gave his friends an account of his own life and told them they could also have what had come to him. “Why,” he said, “God has revealed His Son in my soul. I used to do wrong and go wrong. I could not keep myself. I tried to live by the law but it would not work. Now I live by faith—faith in Christ, and the life I now live is really the life He lives in me. I do not care any more for the things people do to make themselves good. I feel Christ coming into me and giving me strength and power, just as the sun comes into the tree and builds its life from within. You can all have that power formed in you. You can all feel the life of Christ sweep into your lives and that will make you free. And you will cry ‘Abba, Father,’ for you will find the life and spirit of God in your own hearts. When that happens you will not think much about those things which these Jews from Jerusalem have been telling you you must do to be saved!