All right. This is going to seem like an odd question, but let me throw it out there anyway. Is being married a skill? Let me phrase it differently. Can you be good at being married? Or is marriage just a state of being? I think you can be good at it, right? Well, I don't know. What do you make of it? You've seen a lot of people in your lives who are married, and you've seen people where you would look at their marriage and just say, a lot of good comes out of that. Seems like that's going great. That is a beautiful institution. That's a beautiful thing. Those two have built together through the ups and downs, whatever. Surely there are people in your lives who you would picture. Maybe you're thinking of your own marriage right now. Awesome. I don't think that's vain. Picture your own marriage if that's the way you think of it. Awesome. But surely you can envision a marriage you have seen up close and personal where you're like, dang, that's really good. Maybe you would even use the phrase, they are good at being married, or they're good at being married to each other. Probably also, then I know this is a sore spot for some of you, because I know I know that some of you are going through difficult things in your marriage right now. I know that some of you aren't married to a person you used to be married to anymore. Last thing I ever want to do with these conversations we have is rub salt in any wound or pick at a scab that's kind of starting to heal over. That's not the point. I mean, it it's tragic, but I mean it happens, right? Look, sometimes big, gigantic, calamitous things happen and a marriage falls apart. You see that. Usually you can kind of point to that and be like, well, that seems to be kind of what happened. But sometimes you look at a marriage that isn't working or didn't work, and deep down your honest evaluation would be it just didn't seem like they were good at being married to each other. Like the marriage, and this is where you're going to see the connection to what we're talking about in Galatians, the the marriage did not bear the fruit of love. Marriage is an interesting thing, right? Because it is both a state of being. You either are married or are not married. There aren't really other options. It's it's very binary in that regard. But it's also something that you do, you live in that state, you walk in that state. Okay, clearly, I'm drawing this analogy to try to make sense of what Paul is saying in the book of Galatians about something that is both a state of being and kind of something that you do or that you are as well, that is being a Christian, and then living the life of a Christian, that is, walking in the spirit. So here's a passage we've been working on right here at the very end of the book of Galatians. It says, Do not be deceived, God cannot be mocked, a man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature from that nature will reap destruction, the one who sows to please the spirit from the spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. Tell me if I'm taking crazy pills here, but throughout the book of Galatians, it seems like we're seeing a lot of bee language and a lot of do language. The bee language is in Christ. Hey, it's my lovely wife Camilla. Speaking of somebody who's really good at being married, there she is. She's wonderful. Hi, Camilla. Everybody from the internet said hi. Hi, everybody. They don't know they said hi yet, but they did. Here's what I'm driving at. The stuff in Galatians, we get two types of language. We get the the be language and we get the do language. And they're both very present. You just can't pretend they're both not there. So clearly, that's intentional. Christians believe this is all inspired by God. So, I mean, it's from God. He's communicating be language and do language. The be language is you used to be slaves and outsiders, but then by the work of Christ and through faith in Christ, which is the gift of God, you became insiders. It's not like you went from being enemies of the king to just being like pardoned and now the king doesn't care about you. You went from being enemies and outsiders to being heirs, sons, daughters, agents, heirs of the kingdom who are helping to build this thing and are vested in this thing. That is a state of being that doesn't change. My kids are my kids full stop. We, Camilla and I are married, but there's doing stuff. And anytime that it's time for me to show care or support or listen to or just do tasks and be useful or hang out or just whatever, like normal married stuff. If every time it's time to do that, I'm like, oh no, I just am married to you. So that's kind of where I draw the line, you know? That's not gonna go great because there's a state of being, but that state of being produces a state of doing. We see that relationship that can be confusing at first glance, but makes a lot of sense when you think about it for a minute. We see that relationship between be and do throughout the entire Bible. If you are in Christ, if you are walking by the Spirit, there will be things that indicate that. When we look through the New Testament at all of the different accounts of God adding up uh the sum of your life and what you've done, all of the judgments of God around the New Testament, all of them, at least on some level, have to do with visible things. There's always some element of yes, okay. Well, what did you what did you do? What did your life produce? What did your espoused beliefs, your claimed belief in God, what did that produce? And every time the master looks at what it produced and determines that it produced nothing, the master is very unhappy. And ultimately the judgment that then comes down is I never knew you. Like you were never a son, a daughter, an agent, an heir of the master. You said you were, I guess, from the outside, but I never knew you because you in no way, nothing about what you've done indicates that you know anything about my household or a part of my household in any way. There's also language like, say, Matthew chapter 16, where there's some inquiry, like, well, okay, what are the indicators of that? You say you're a tennis player, do you I've never seen you play tennis. For the Son of Man is going to come in his father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. Okay, it's a very simple little passing line here at the end of Matthew 16. It comes right on the back end of Peter's confession of Christ. So there's some pretty serious theology happening here, and they're all like, okay, well, so Jesus, you're gonna die and go away. What happens next? And it's in that context, you know, Jesus is confessed by Peter as the Christ. Then he says, I'm gonna be betrayed and killed and raised to life on the third day. And now they're all, no doubt, wondering, well, how do things shake out? Where do we fit into that? And here Jesus is reassuring them, even though it's a scary passage, saying, Yeah, I'm gonna come back and there's gonna be a blessing bestowed on, I mean, paraphrases mine here, but people from the family of faith, sons, daughters, agents, heirs of the kingdom who have done things in keeping with that. The state of being changes first, they become sons, daughters, heirs, agents, but then that cannot help but produce stuff that looks like that. Now, again, the same Jesus, just this many pages further on. Ready? That was one. I don't know if you could hear it. That same Jesus, just a page later, says, if your brother sins against you, okay, so he acknowledges that not everything we do is going to be in keeping with the interests of the new household of faith that we're a part of. But there's a protocol, there's forgiveness, there's a there's a way to put it back together when stuff gets a little bit sideways or even a lot sideways, but still the language of the judgment of Jesus here has to do with the things that are indicators of the reality of who you are in that identity. Then we jump over into the letters of Paul and we see the same kind of thing. Second Corinthians 5, 10. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ that each one may receive what is due to him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. Now, ultimately, Paul clearly teaches that it is the forgiveness of Christ that supersedes everything. That's why we have right standing before God, it's how the forgiveness of sins are possible, it's why the cross had to happen, that is in view. But throughout the New Testament, this being and doing thing in that exact order are in view. Well, if that's causing you to be like, well, I how do I pull that off? How do I metaphorically be good at being married? How do I metaphorically, you know, and not metaphorically, how do I literally live out this new reality of who I am, this new state of being? Well, then we come right back to Galatians. And that's kind of what the last third of Galatians is about. Walk by the spirit. You're not on your own with this. The whole idea is that God knows and anticipates that that's a that's the obvious question. That's the big hard thing that is still to be worked through. So, what does he do? Well, God the Spirit indwells Christians and makes it possible to walk by the Spirit and makes it possible by the power of God for people who were dead in their sins, who were slaves, to suddenly act as free people using their freedom in the service of the greatest, truest, realist thing ever. Maybe I'm making this too complicated and worrying about it too much, but I think for me at least, this is a really important question. And very easily misreading this can cause one with you know a few really good sounding verses to veer off into weird, controlling, culty, uh merit-based, I have to impress God kind of guilt religion. But also, if you look at just a couple of verses and ignore all the rest of it, it could be really easy to veer off into complete cruise control. Yeah, I did something Christian once, and um, nothing about my life looks like it in any way, but I said, like I said, a thing once. And so I think, you know, I think we're good here. I think I'm in the family of faith. Well, the Bible teaches something more robust, and we cover whatever the Bible puts in front of us, and this is what it is putting in front of us right now. So we're gonna bounce around, look at a few more passages on this before we move on, manana. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Camilla says goodbye as well. Let's do this again soon.