Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour podcast. And do you remember the old take luck joke? I don't remember whose it is. Some comedian years ago, I remember him talking about fumbling the goodbye on a phone call or something and getting nervous and combining take care and good luck and saying, take luck. I don't know. I thought it was funny. Am I horrible at explaining other people's jokes or what? It seems like we've done that a lot lately. Still, the joke was funny because it's incredibly relatable to me. You string together this whole great conversation. And then right at the end, there's the conversational turd. I did that to a buddy the other day. We were talking. I genuinely needed help with something. And I called him up and it's like, help me walk through this difficult question. I have this hard talk I have to give here in a couple of days. And so I called my buddy and I was like, You're good at this stuff. Help me think it through. And he really did. He took a bunch of time. We made a lot of progress on it. At the end, I said, thank you for letting me borrow a book. And what I meant to say was sort of like, you're a gentleman and a scholar. But what I accidentally did is I referenced the Ben Franklin effect, which is a trick that he and I have talked about a lot to sort of curry favor with someone who's an enemy who doesn't like you. Like you ask him for a small favor, like, let me borrow a book. And I said goodbye. And then I'm sitting there going, I'm an idiot. I fumbled the outro. All I had to do was be like, dude, thank you. That was very helpful. And instead, I tried to say something clever. Again, that is a me problem. I know it. And I completely rewrote in his mind everything about the exercise we just did together. So I immediately texted him back. I am dumb. This is what I meant to say. This is what I said. And to my buddy's credit for honesty, he was like, Yeah, I kind of wondered about that. Thank you for sending this text. Okay, the point is every single one of us have had something go really, really well. And then we just fumble the goodbye, we fumble the thank you, we fumble the outro, and then we sit around, we kick ourselves for that forever. And so we know the importance. You know the importance of landing the plane, of sticking the landing, of getting it right right there at the end. But I think most of us who've read the Bible a little bit, especially the letter parts of the Bible and the New Testament, we would admit that once we kind of get into the landing pattern, the final approach of each of these letters, we sort of go maybe a little bit on autopilot. Hey, that wasn't a mixed metaphor. Those two things work together. We go a little bit on autopilot. We're like, okay, yeah, it's a grace and peace to you, blah, blah, blah. Uh God, you sure. Okay, great. Uh, moving on. Next book. But the ending's important. We know how important the ending is. Well, today in Galatians, we get to see how Paul does at sticking the landing. How is the ending going to go? Are you ready for it? We're about to have finished reading every word of the book of Galatians. Here it is. We're going to pick it up from where Paul takes the pen and just read this whole final stretch. See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand. Those who want to make a good impression outwardly are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ. Not even those who are circumcised obey the law, yet they want you to be circumcised that they may boast about your flesh. May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything. What counts is a new creation. Peace and mercy to all who follow this rule, even to the Israel of God. Finally, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen. Okay, before we even break down these couple of closing sentences, I can tell you already, he did a much better job than I did in concluding my conversation with my buddy the other day. But what is he actually saying here? If you think about that whole block of those last seven verses, like we've talked about the last couple days, it again very neatly mirrors the pacing, the structure of the entire letter. It's a microcosm of the whole letter. But also, did you catch right there? And I kind of cheated by giving you a little bit more of the tone with my voice, but did you catch how it matches the tone of the whole letter? I mean, you remember this. How many times do we talk about it? The first part of the letter is very scolding toward party one in the room. That is the Christians of Galatia who shouldn't have fallen for this. Then Paul seems to shift his shoulders and body language toward the whole room, including you people over there who caused these problems. And at points in the middle of the book of Galatians, it's almost like Paul is looking right at the problem causers, the agitators, even though theoretically this letter is entirely directed at the Christians of the churches of Galatia. Paul is in varying degrees more conscious of the outsiders and the agitators from time to time. But Paul seems to really finish his communication that is sort of side-eyeing the agitators when he says, as for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves in Galatians 5.12. Then remember, we talked about how Paul's body language now shifts, full shoulders, full eye contact, leaning in for the rest of the book of Galatians from 5.13 forward. You, my brothers, were called to be free, but don't use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature. And for the final chapter and a half, Paul seems to be really talking to them. Deep eye contact. And it's tender and it's pastoral and it's shepherding and it's big brothery in not like the George Orwell way, but in like the good big brother who cares for the little brother kind of way. And the the outro here, when Paul takes a pen and writes with his own hand, it follows the exact same pattern. Scold the outsiders and bad guys with sort of the shoulders pointed toward them, but then change the tone and point the shoulders toward the people who might actually listen to this and receive it and land that plane well. Guys, why are we worried about boasting about anything? This whole thing is about pride. This whole fight, you guys devouring each other, it's about pride. These people showing up and getting you to turn on each other and believe stupid stuff. That's about pride too. That's not our thing. We walk by the spirit. We have nothing to boast about anything we've done. If we're gonna boast about anything, we should boast about what someone else has done. Jesus. That's it. Also, guys, this whole controversy is stupid. Circumcision, not circumcision, whatever. It doesn't, it's not, it's not the key thing here. It isn't the point. It's not that circumcision is inherently bad. It's the believing that circumcision somehow makes you more a son, a daughter, an heir, an agent of the king. That's bad. That doesn't work. That doesn't earn you right standing with God. Such thinking pushes us away from God, it puffs us up with pride, and it causes us to imagine that we earned this when we didn't earn this. A lot of paraphrasing going on, but I don't think I'm out of line here. So he takes that tone. And then finally, he says, peace and mercy to all who follow this rule, even to the Israel of God. This is a conciliatory remark, and it's a pretty safe one. He's saying, look, if you believe what the Old Testament teaches, if you believe the example of Abraham, if you believe what Jesus taught, if you believe what his church and his disciples are repeating, that God is the hero of the story, that God is the one who gives life, that God is the one who earned this, that Christ is the one who did this work on the cross and in the resurrection, cool. Well then peace and mercy. You might have your little cultural preferences or whatever, but if you believe this, wherever you're from, inside the Old Testament ethnic family, outside of that, and a part of the new family of faith, either way, peace and mercy to everybody who follows this rule. This is the big unifying truth that makes us one. And further, what's my authority on this? You know, Paul lands the plane by highlighting once again my authority to claim this, my resume is right here on my back. I'll pull this off my shoulder. You can see what's been done to me. Some of you guys remember doing this to me yourselves with your own hands and rocks you picked up. But most of all, here's the final line. And Paul has earned this line with the damage to his body he just pointed out, with what he's done in this letter, with what he's done with his life, and further, he's earned this by the merits of Christ and not by his own merits. He says, The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen. That is not a throwaway line. What is this grace and peace that he keeps talking about? Where is it found? It's found in the true Christ. It's found in the true gospel. This peace that passes understanding, this grace, this mercy, this unity that he's talking about, it can only exist because of what Christ has earned and what he has done. If you get it, this is a grace you get to abide in. This is a peace that you get to abide in, a peace that goes all the way down to the level of the spirit that is real and not contrived or forced. Also, he calls them brothers here. Who is my mother, my sisters, my brother? Who's the person who is actually a part of this thing? Yeah, it's who does the will of my father. It's it's those who are in this true, real family of faith. Given what we've read in Galatians, that Paul has said overtly, given the implications of the theology that Paul has worked through here, given the teachings and life and death and resurrection of the Jesus that Paul keeps pointing to here, this final greeting, this final blessing is a blessing to anybody, far and wide. People Paul probably really resonates with personally, get the same jokes and they're coming from the same culture, people totally foreign to Paul, probably even people pretty irritating to Paul on an interpersonal level, people of higher status than Paul, lower status than Paul, people who Paul can't even understand because they speak some weird foreign fringe language that Paul didn't know. He was a pretty well-educated man, but he didn't know them all. Anybody who is in Christ by the work of Christ, peace and grace to you, you're in this family of faith, and you are there as an equal at the table, given this privileged, unearned position by Christ, by the work of Christ. This is such a different way of thinking about the world. This is such a different way of thinking about an institution. And even this blessing at the end, it's not a throwaway. This is Paul absolutely sticking the landing. This blessing only works because of everything that we've seen throughout the book of Galatians. And I would argue, I don't think this is a stretch, that this blessing applies to you and me if we are in Christ. There's a really good chance that as you listen to this, there's a bunch of stuff that you read between the lines, and you're like, I think he thinks that. Or I think he was intoning that. And I disagree with it strongly. Come on, we've hung out for so long. Surely I'm irritating you at times. I don't want to. I'm not trying to pick a fight with anybody. I really like to be liked. But also, I think stuff, you think stuff, we might not think the exact same stuff six months from now. I don't know. I got years of a snapshot of different things that I've thought in different places that I've been that I've put out on the internet in front of you here. I guess I have to own all of that. I feel pretty good about most of it. But still, surely we've been crossways with each other at some point. But right here is a framework for why we're still in it together. Right here is a framework for something that is more sticky, more gluey, more meaningful than how the world system thinks about relationships. We're both beggars invited to this table. That's the biggest thing we have in common. Grace of Christ on you, the grace of Christ on me, grace of Christ on all of the Christians who came before us and maybe didn't think all the right things or lived at a time where they did things that maybe now we wouldn't like so much. Trust me, people in the future are going to look at our time and be like, how could you people have done that? Like every era has stupid stuff that we like to imagine we wouldn't have gone along with if we were there, but we probably would have. The point is that everybody needs Jesus. Grace and peace to everybody. We're not at the table because we perfectly navigated our moment on the stage of history. We have a seat at the table because of the unbelievable grace and patience and forgiveness and long view perspective and love and redemptive impulse of God made manifest through Christ. Anything that cheapens that or makes us imagine that we're there for any reason other than the work of God, that's the bad stuff. It's the fake stuff. Anything that points us back to understanding that true reality of who we are in Christ, well, that's very unifying. And that pulls us together, and it also gives us hope in this life and for the next. We're not done. More Galatians next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.