Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And sometimes for my YouTube channel, I do these road trips where I'll go and film videos at a bunch of churches at once. I like to go to churches that aren't like mine from traditions and theological backgrounds that are different from mine. And I like to get tours of the churches and film it and talk with the people who run the churches and see if we can understand each other better as to how we landed in different places on some of this stuff, as to how our traditions landed in different places on some of this stuff. And it's really fun. They usually work very well. There have been a few where I honestly, like I'll just tell you what I think. There have been a few churches I've gone to that are so far afield from anything that is recognizable as historic Christianity that I struggle with how to frame it up and share it with you. That happened on one road trip I was on. I got all my stuff, I got my little car, I'm driving all over the country, making these videos, and I had two bad misses. I think maybe right in a row. It's been a while. I was very discouraged. I called my dad, who I call about such things, and I said, Dad, who I call about such things, I'm very discouraged. These were bad. Can you help me think of a way to frame them? And he listened and he was like, No, I can't. You might not want to publish those. And who knows what the fate of those will be. Maybe someday I will, maybe I won't. That's not the point. The point is, the next day I stopped at another town and it was amazing. It redeemed the whole trip. The guy was incredible at this church. He pastored me while I was there. It was very formative. It was a huge step. You, if you like this podcast, you benefited from that visit that day. And I called my dad after I told him, you know, hey, this redeemed everything. This is a great stop. And somewhere in the conversation, we very humbly likened that to some of the experiences we read about in Paul's missionary journeys in the New Testament. Now there's no comparison because Paul is Paul, and I'm some guy in his shed, and that is quite different. But come on, we all know what it's like to put together an itinerary or a road trip or heck, even a vacation, and to feel like some of these stops aren't really working, and we need to just pivot or punt and go to something else that might work. So we go back and we look at Paul's missionary journeys as we try to answer the question of whether or not the book of Galatians worked. And what we see here is a pretty high hit rate in the early going. Paul makes his way to Cyprus on that first missionary journey, and things go pretty well on the island. Maybe really, really well. God sort of shows up miraculously and defeats some rivals between Cyprus and then southern modern-day Turkey, Asia Minor, in the region of Lycia and Pamphylia, also right by Phrygia. And it looks like it maybe goes so well that Paul even takes on like the household name of somebody who was a convert in the early going. That's great. Then he goes up to the towns we've been looking at in southern Galatia, Iconium, Derby, Lystra, and Pisidian Antioch. And it seems like it kind of doesn't go great because Paul gets hit with rocks a lot, but also it kind of seems like some stuff works. I mean, it goes well enough that Paul comes back and reports, it worked, Church of Antioch, who sent me on this big road trip and boat trip, it worked. People signed up. So then we turn the page to Acts 16, and we're like, all right, well, what was the hit rate on the second missionary journey? As I'm just looking at a map of it here in front of me, this went pretty well again. Got sent from Antioch, and then right after that, Paul went back to the churches where they hit him with rocks that we're talking about, the Galatian churches. He went to at least Iconium and Derby and Lystra. Yeah, and he would have gone through Pissidia and Antioch. Surely he went to all of them right here. And we, as we talked about the other day, it says in Acts 16, 5, so the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers. Well, it sounds like it's working great. Sounds like this whole road trip, this whole second missionary journey is going to be super. But then the very next paragraph, we see that, nah, this trip might be a little bit more like that filming trip for me, where some of it was a hit and some of it wasn't. But it says Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia. That is so difficult because these borders kept on moving, and there were colloquial names for what is Phrygia and what is Galatia. I don't know exactly where he was for sure, Derby Leistraikonium, that area. And then probably what he did here is that he traveled up through what would be like West Central modern day Turkey, right on the borders, some of the most remote part of a Roman province that was called Asia. Now, when you and I think of Asia, we think of China or India or Mongolia or something like that. But Asia in Roman times was a province that is basically Western Turkey, kind of on the Aegean Sea within spitting distance of mainland Greece. So Paul went through there, but it kind of sounds like it didn't work well, and the Holy Spirit gets the blame slash credit for that. Let me read this to you. Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. It kind of reminds me of Matthew chapter four, when Jesus is led out into the desert to be tempted. It seems like that would be a really undesirable thing. But do you remember who led him there? It says Matthew 4 1. Then Jesus was led by the Spirit, capital S, the Holy Spirit, into the desert to be tempted by the devil. Thanks a lot, Holy Spirit. I don't even know how to craft that joke because of the Trinity. Like I don't I don't know what their conversation sounded like. That just bombed. I think I just I think I just committed a Trinitarian heresy and it wasn't even funny. Come on, Whitman. It's just not worth it. You gotta calculate this stuff better. Come on, man. Get it together. Finish the episode. You gotta regroup, bro. Okay, I I I'm back. I had to mute it for just a second there. I just uh something came up. Okay, I'm back. So the Holy Spirit is responsible for things not working on the next leg of Paul's second missionary journey here in Acts chapter 16. And I gotta admit, that makes me think about my little trips. Well, I'm not Paul. I didn't have any visions that really sent me out on these trips miraculously or whatever. But I was trying real hard to do things that I think Paul would probably like. I wonder if there's a spiritual element to that. I don't know what to do with those things. I don't know what to do with them at all. But if God is sovereign over anything, like if we go a little less mystical here and we'll go a little more philosophical. If God is sovereign over everything, then God is sovereign over me having a couple of really bad stops on a trip where I'm trying to do redemptive things, and then something working. I don't know why things work sometimes, and others they don't. If God's sovereign over everything, uh I guess he knows what he's doing. So it says, when they came to the border of Misia or Mycia, M Y-S-I-A, uh people say it different, they tried to enter Bithnia. I usually do hear that Bithnia. Uh this is a province that's all the way up north on the Black Sea, where uh Istanbul, Constantinople, Byzantium is. So we're like we're way north here as Paul makes his way through Asia and Misia, and he's like, I'm gonna go into Bithynia, but then it doesn't work. But the spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. Oh, that's really interesting too, because before they were kept from preaching the word in the province of Asia by the Holy Spirit, but now it says the spirit of Jesus. That is not a very common word throughout the New Testament or common phrase, and it's interesting. We could deep dive that another time. So they passed by Mesia and went down to Troaz. Now, Troaz, that's old school Troy, like Trojan War. I know a lot of people are reading the Odyssey these days. Troy, that was a big deal town back in the day. Also, it's a town that is intimately and forever linked in the minds of everyone with the idea of infiltration, getting into enemy territory undetected in kind of a sneaky way, and then scoring a huge victory. Well, Troaz, in this case, is the launching point for really the consequential main body of Paul's second missionary journey. So during the night, that Paul had a vision, this is in Troaz, or basically ancient Troy, where the Trojan horse thing famously is recorded as having happened. During the night, Paul had a vision, they're in Troy, of a man of Macedonia. Now that's where Alexander the Great is from. Not kind of where Alexander the Great is from, that is where he's from. Alexander the Great's dad was a guy named Philip, and Philippi is named for Alexander the Great's dad. It's right on the frontier of Macedonia, right between Macedonia and kind of mainland Greece. So he has his vision, Paul has his vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, come over to Macedonia and help us. After Paul had seen the vision, we whoa, we more on that in a minute. After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. Okay, this is just a fun moment because clearly this is where Luke got picked up on the journey. Luke and Paul, maybe they knew each other before, maybe they didn't, but they connected in Troaz. So after this crappy part of the road trip where nothing really works, and Paul has to reroute and probably take more time on the road than he wanted to, he ends up in Troas, and now the story flips, just like it did for me, because there's this huge win. You pick up Luke. Luke, who would write Luke and Acts? One of the most important Christians ever, the most prolific New Testament author, even more than Paul. Luke wrote the most words, contributed the most words to the New Testament. And now you got this superpowered guy jumping in. So you had a job opening and you picked up Timothy, but now you're like, we just got to make a new opening for this guy. He's so talented. And so now you have Luke along for the ride as well. And from there, they sail across a little island and they end up in Philippi. So the trip is getting back on track. Basically, the second missionary journey seems to work like this. The first third of the trip was rad. Pick up Timothy, and the churches were strengthened in faith and grew daily in numbers because Paul had come by and God was working there. That's what we talked about in the last episode that we did. But now, phase two of this second missionary journey is super disappointing. It doesn't work, but it's like God wanted it not to work. I don't know why. It's interesting to theorize about why God would make things not work, especially when you have the best of intentions. But there are a lot of you listening to this right now who have tried to do meaningful kingdom things and it didn't work. And then you're left kind of scratching your head, going, Why wouldn't God make that work? You'd think you'd want to. Well, hey, friend, we're in good company. It happened to Paul and Timothy. They were pretty good at Christianity. So Asia didn't work out. That was a bad part of the road trip, but they end up in Troas. Now the rest of the trip is pretty much supercharged. What happens in Philippi and Berea, then down into Athens and Corinth. I mean, the the message goes to Athens here in just a minute. Corinth, he makes his way back to Ephesus here. That stop in Ephesus is probably what caused the Church of Colossae to be founded. Here's why this pertains to our thing about Galatians. Everything that we know about that middle part of the trip that is the only time Paul is anywhere near North Galatia, I just read you. Is there anything in that stuff that makes it sound like Paul got churches established, preached a bunch, and everything worked? Because I don't detect a single word that gives that impression. That passage to me tells a story of a discouraged Paul, and then finally in Troy, in Troas, he gets both Luke and a vision, which provide clarity for what he's going to do next and where all of this stuff is going. Therefore, I think we've got clue number four here as to whether or not Galatians worked. The only time Paul was in the place where some people think maybe the northern Galatian churches might have theoretically been founded by Paul, the Bible tells us the only time he was there, it didn't go well and kind of nothing happened to the point where he would say that he was prevented from even preaching there. But everything we're hearing about the Southern Galatian churches is just great. So I'm further convinced Paul wasn't writing to northern Galatian churches. And if he was, he never went back. We never hear of them again in the Bible, and we hear basically nothing about Christianity in that region for centuries outside of the Bible. So this passage further convinces me that Paul was writing to these Southern Galatian churches and that they did receive the message of Galatians at least pretty well. We've all been on business trips, vacations, whatever, where a few of the stops went great, a few of the stops didn't go so well, and then some other stuff went great. It looks like that's what happened with Paul's journey here. And just the way that breaks down seems to support an effective letter of Galatians that was pretty well received, that went to the southern Galatian churches that preceded Paul's second missionary journey. The letter went ahead of him to Derby, Lystra, Iconium, and Poseidon, Antioch, and made a difference, and the churches were strengthened. All right, there we go. Four clues that hint that Galatians was at least initially well received and effective, but we got to go a little further down this road yet. More clues from the book of Acts as to the fate of the recipients of the letter of Galatians next time around. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We'll speak to you soon soon.