Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And I've been doing tennis lessons this summer with a guy who just went into the South Dakota Tennis Hall of Fame. And some of you who are from MSA, you're like, ha ha, that is dumb and small. But it's a really big honor. It's a really cool thing. And this guy got there the right way. It's made a lifetime out of propping other people up and helping them get good at the sport and appreciate the beauty of it and play it the right way. So I have two friends, two really good friends who've both taught me tennis, who are both in the South Dakota Tennis Hall of Fame, and they're humble about it and they're great. And when they teach me tennis, I give them money for it. Then the reason I do that is because they know stuff that I don't know and they have experience I don't have. And I want them to take that and I want the them to just download it, to dump that into me so that I can get better. But I pay them. Why do I pay them? Well, you're going, because it's common sense. They're coaching you, and these people have lives and things to do, and their knowledge is worth money. So obviously, you give them things. It's just a basic law of the marketplace. Well, in Galatians 6 6, Paul feels like apparently he needs to remind the Galatians of that obvious thing that you all just shrugged at and were like, that's obvious. Because they weren't doing it with the good instructors who had been teaching them true and good things in their midst. And instead, apparently they had chased after the interlopers, the agitators who had showed up. Then you kind of get the impression from the verse I'm going to read next that now all of a sudden the people who were getting it right and were teaching them like they're starving, and the people who got it wrong, they've been feasting for a while. Maybe I'm overly reading into it. Here it is. Galatians 6, 6. Anyone who receives instruction in the word must share all good things with his instructor. So simple, so black and white, not a complicated verse, but in the larger context of Galatians, you can kind of read between the lines and imagine why Paul felt like he needed to say it. Now, this is common on the heels of the fruit of the spirit passage. Obviously, it's very easy, as we have done, to pinch zoom way, way in on the fruit of the spirit passage and focus on all of that stuff in a very universal sense. I think it's a perfectly fair way to read it. I mean, I hope it is. We've spent like what 40 episodes on that, maybe more. I don't know, I haven't counted it yet. But also, it is happening in the middle of the book of Galatians. It is part of the flow of logic and argumentation. It's part of the gentle, corrective, constructive proposal part of the book, where Paul is trying to very practically help get these people back on track. Somebody got metaphorically punched in the nose, they're trying to get that back on track. There was a theological catastrophe, they're trying to get that back on track. And apparently something happened to just the structure that made this whole thing go in the first place, where people were teaching them and they could do that for a living. And now that seems to be disrupted. And so, Paul, in basically one sentence, I mean, yeah, it kind of flows into the next batch of thought as well that we'll look at tomorrow. But in basically one sentence, Paul's like, hey, pay the guy, like the people who are taking care of you, take care of them so that they can keep doing this. That's interesting to me because it's pretty easy to just sort of cruise by that and be like, okay, yeah, obviously, you know, give your tennis coach money because it's your tennis coach and you're paying him for his time or whatever. But this to me has some parallels to the last book of the Bible that you and I looked at, which is back in Nehemiah. Remember all of the stuff where you were tempted to get bored toward the end of Nehemiah? And I was too, and I had to be like, we're not gonna get bored, we're gonna actually look at all of this. Remember how right at the end, Nehemiah has made it his quest. I mean, really, Ezra and Nehemiah, their quest is to rebuild the temple. That gets done mostly in Ezra, it's pretty much taken care of. But then quest number two is rebuild the people. Now the walls are part of rebuilding the people because they're vulnerable. So Nehemiah comes along and he rebuilds the walls. For those of you who don't remember, all of this is happening 500-ish years before the events of Galatians in ancient Persia, under the rule of the great Achaemenid kings of Persia, including Darius Xerxes, and Nehemiah happens under the reign of Artaxerxes. Well, do you remember at the end of Nehemiah, there's all this stuff where Nehemiah is like, all right, we're rebuilding the people, we're gonna put everything back in order. And he goes through and he lines it all up so that all of the temple stuff will be paid for. There'll be provisions for it. Here's who's gonna kick in, here's how you're gonna kick in, here's who's gonna run this part and that part and that part. And we get these lists in both Ezra and Nehemiah of all these different people, the servants of the temple and the Levites and the priests and all these people who play all of these different roles. Nehemiah was coaching them up and putting them in position, and he was building this whole protocol, this whole setup, this whole institution where it would theoretically become self-replicating. And this could just go on and on and on into history. And in a lot of ways, Nehemiah pulled it off because for 500 years, from I mean, from the time of the book of Nehemiah, all the way up to I mean, three decades, four decades after the time of Galatians, that totally works. The temple functions, Nehemiah's reforms mostly hold, but a big part of the reforms is hey, we have to have a built-in system here where there are provisions for the items that we need for the temples, the sacrifices, and we've got to have the animals and the wood and all of these things. And we also have to maintain this new temple that God basically gifted us through the generosity that he put on the heart of the Persians, and from the huge labor and the difficult stories and travails and ordeals of our ancestors, we inherited this beautiful thing, and we have to maintain the thing that was handed down from the past. A huge theme of Ezra and Nehemiah is this stuff will die. It is foolish to imagine that this will last from generation to generation to generation without caretakers whose job it is to make sure it gets passed down. Really, a lot of times what we see in the Bible is it doesn't even last for a few years within the same group of people. I mean, that's what we're seeing in Galatians. It's not a generational break that's happening here. They were forgetting the plot like just a couple years after they learned the plot in the first place. So there's kind of echoes here in Galatians of what we got back in Nehemiah of this theme of, yeah, it's fun to have these lofty ideas about how it'll all just kind of magically work. And by God's miraculous power, miraculously people will believe and miraculously know stuff. But there's also the principle in scripture that, you know, how are they gonna believe if they don't hear? There's a high value on teaching and meditating on the word and the people who are caretakers of the word and the people who administrate the church and all of this stuff throughout the whole Old Testament and New Testament. And so this little nod here at the end of Galatians in Galatians 6, 6, is very simple. Anyone who receives instruction in the word must share all good things with the instructor. It seems obvious to you and me, as obvious as Matt, you should pay your tennis coach when he coaches you. But apparently it had become unobvious to the Galatians, and they needed to be reminded of this ancient truth. If you want this thing to take root, if you want it to last, then you need to take care of the people who do it. This episode of the 10-minute Bimal Hour Podcast is brought to you by Patreon.com, who reminds you to support and see. There's the elephant in the room right there. The obviously, this whole thing that we're doing right now, this is very meta, is funded by you. We don't do ads. We've done a few, but pretty much none. I say no to almost all of those that come in, and a lot of people do ask, but we don't do ads on the podcast because almost everything that people propose that I would then try to sell to you will not make your life better. And if this podcast ever doesn't make your life better, you won't want to listen to it anymore. And then I won't get to do it anymore. And I want to keep doing it, and I want to do this with you, so I have to make choices with this that are about you and things that will make your life better. So I don't run a lot of ads because the ads, I mean, they just generally have sounded dumb to me and not like something you would enjoy, which means this podcast is funded by a whole bunch of you who are like, I am going to give that man $20 a month, and I'm it's just something I'm gonna do. I'm not even a 501c3, you don't even get like a tax break for it or anything. I just I pay taxes on whatever you give me, and then that's that. And that's like this primarily this is the how I feed my family and pay my bills. I do a couple other things on the internet, but this is kind of my thing. So we have this weird conundrum. Am I talking about this first to see if I can trick more of you into signing up for Patreon? Well, look, I love that some of you support the thing on Patreon, or you know, many of you support it on Planning Center as well. Some of you just weirdly and randomly are like, you know what? I want to make sure your thing keeps going, so I'm going to send you a check for some money. That is rad. There's one of you just like every month for a long time. You didn't tell me who you were, you wouldn't give me a return address, but you just sent me a silver coin. That was awesome. Those were worth like 20 bucks a piece when you started sending them to me. Now they're worth like 40 bucks a piece. That's crazy. I still have all of them, by the way. Thank you, whoever you are. That was weird and cool. So look, I yeah, I get it. I said this phrase earlier. I'll say it again, elephant in the room. It feels like this passage is the kind of thing that I could be like, this applies to me. But here's why I think maybe in some ways it kind of doesn't, and why this passage should not make you feel like you should change something or go out of your way to support this podcast. I think first and foremost, you need to take care of the people who are actually in your life and who are making the local institution that is the church go. And this is one of those places in the Bible where, you know, you can debate the principle of the tithe, like give 10% all you want, but this is just smoking gun. Like if you think this stuff is true and real, or even if you just only think it's good and helpful to society, even if that's the only place you are, like kicking in to the people who make the local community of faith happen is a really good idea. And the teaching's clear. Like if this is true and this is real, you probably ought to do that. Uh, does that apply to podcasts? I don't, I don't know. I don't think that's probably in view here. Um, whatever the case. Hey, for those of you who above and beyond anything else that you do make this podcast go by supporting it, I noticed that. Thank you a lot. I think about that when I design cute little stickers to send you, like the ones that I just made up. I think about you a lot, and I'm really grateful for it. Also, um, this episode is not sponsored by this verse. And while I am really, really grateful for your help and support, first and foremost, I think a passage like this is saying, hey, the people in your lives who are investing in you share all good things with those instructors. So I actually think that was fairly unawkward. I feel pretty good about where we're at. Some of these themes are going to come up in the next few verses, like I mentioned earlier, but we'll jump on to Galatians 6, 7, and forward next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.