Interpreters have long debated where Hermas learned and what he meant by the phrase "live to God." Virtually every time the phrase appears in the Mandates section, it is linked either implicitly or explicitly to fulfilling a particular commandment. Against scholars such as Dibelius and Barberet, who suggested that in using the phrase Hermas was primarily influenced by the LXX, especially Ezekiel, I demonstrate that Hermas mirrors the distinctive Pauline usage of the phrase, employing it in a manner strikingly similar to the apostle (esp. Galatians and Romans) and to later Pauline sources (e.g., Luke-Acts, Acts of Paul, and Tatian). From Paul, Hermas learned both to speak of believers’ “living to God” as beginning in baptism and to imagine their ongoing experience of that life as somehow contingent upon fidelity to particular modes of ethical behavior. In particular, the Mandates reflect, first, a collapse and, second, an expansion of the logic of Paul’s argument in Gal 2:19. For Hermas, the full Pauline “through the Law I died to the Law, so that I might live to God” becomes simply “through the Law… I might live to God.” The expansion that follows lies in the Shepherd’s commandments being additions to, perhaps even replacements of, the Law given by God to the people of Israel. At the very least, they constitute a Law like the “law of Christ,” which Paul exhorted the Galatians to fulfill and of which their bearing one another’s burdens was one element (6:2). Understood in this manner, Hermas’s use of the phrase "live unto God" in his Mandates thus fall squarely within that river of Pauline tradition emerging from the headwaters of the apostle’s authentic letters, which construes proper ethical activity as “living to God.”