Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And a while back, I got to coach my son's little league team a bit here and there. He didn't play baseball these last couple of years. We're doing a lot of tennis as a family these days, which is just love. And he's creeping up on me, which is wild. I thumped him pretty good for a long time. I, you know, I play tennis, I like tennis. I'm trying to get better at it. And I lose a lot, but you know, I can handle my kid. And every time we go out, he's getting a little closer and a little closer. And I think one day, and I'm not going to give it to him, and you know, he's going to one day soon he's going to beat me or take a few games off me. And it's going to be a rite of passage moment. I'm pretty excited about it. But baseball was great too. We did several seasons together. And one season, when I was in the dugout coaching, things got a little riled up. I was out base coaching, and so the kids were in the dugout, you know, a little bit unsupervised. That's just how baseball works. And a couple of kids got into it a little bit. One of them popped the other one in the nose. It wasn't terrible. It's not like he broke his nose or something. Sometimes boys hit each other, and a lot of times really good things come out of it right after that. So I'm not going to freak out or anything, but you know, you got to speak to it for the cohesion of the team and the growth of the boys. And so after the game, we broke down how the game went and everything. I was like, hey, and also we got to speak to a thing that happened. You know, somebody got punched and somebody did the punching. And here's why we don't want to do that. Here's how we need to think of each other and treat each other. This is what it is to be a teammate, to be a good teammate. But if stuff starts to get out of hand or it does get out of hand, here's how we come back from that as young men. These are skills you're going to need later. I mean, you can imagine the whole speech, right? And I gave them this sort of generic, not pointing the finger at anybody talking to, about these are the steps. This is what you need to do to clear it up and get things right in the locker room or in the dugout again after something goes wrong and tempers flare a little bit. But even as I'm saying all of this stuff, right? I mean, these are general principles of life. These are general truths of being a teammate. I mean, in any environment as a person. But everybody there is like, yeah, but it was that kid, right? Like we're talking about uh that kid right there. And until that gets dealt with, things I guess are going to be weird. Well, yeah, because of course they knew, because the kids are smart and they saw who punched who, and they can see the body language of the puncher. And you know, he's pretty sheepish, he doesn't feel great about it. But the cohesion of the team, I mean, clearly the pathway forward to make it better, is to go from these general principles of what we do when something went wrong, and to talk about why it went wrong. But what we need to do now is we practically speaking, we need to put the team back together. We need to make amends. So a few people are going to need to say a few things to each other, and then we just need to get on with it. Likewise, in Galatians 5 and 6, we are at this pivot point that we've been discussing a lot, where Paul goes from calling out the theological mess and the messmakers who came up from Jerusalem to turning his shoulders and looking exclusively and right at the Christians who got sideways with each other. Metaphorically, you know, somebody punched somebody in the nose in the dugout. They're not getting along right. The cohesion is broken. The fabric of the team has been damaged. And Paul is going to speak to that in theological terms, in practical terms, in ethical terms. And so all of this life by the spirit talk and the fruit of the spirit and how we treat each other and warnings against biting and devouring each other and all of this stuff, it's all theological, but it's also all very practical. And it's kind of a pep talk for the team after somebody popped somebody metaphorically in the dugout to say, hey, we got to put it back together. Now, for the last few days, we've been talking about basically a bonus fruit of the spirit that is humility and what it looks like to demonstrate humility between Christians in the church and on the metaphorical baseball team and the metaphorical dugout. And so we've been looking at this passage, and I've decided that I'm going to read this passage to you now. Galatians 6, 1. Brothers, Paul always says that in all of his letters when he's tenderly speaking to and coaching up Christians from churches he's a part of. Brothers! If someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, you also may be tempted. Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you'll fulfill the law of Christ. If anyone thinks he's something when he's nothing, he deceives himself. Each one should test his own actions, then he can take pride in himself without comparing himself to somebody else. For each one should carry his own load. Now think about that passage like that post-game baseball talk after there was a dust up between teammates and the dugout. Picture it. Everybody knows who Paul is talking about. They're probably standing over there looking a little sheepish. They got a little stupid. They got too hyper. They got too worked up and they did dumb stuff they shouldn't have done. People were hurt. Pride was involved. It was sinful. Paul is calling it sins. He's kind of settling the matter. Just think of the passage as we break it down one more time here. In light of Paul actually giving practical advice to say, hey, you know, this isn't just a grand letter that future generations will read and they'll make sense of it. And I'm not even really talking to you guys. No. First and foremost, Paul is talking to the Galatian Christians and he's trying to solve a problem. And one of the problems he needs to solve, and I think he's solving it rather quickly in this little passage, is what do we do with the nose puncher? If we have to move forward as a team, how do we do it without causing more problems? I think practically speaking, that's what this is about. And I think everybody knows who the nose puncher is. So just imagine that. Keep that in the back of your head as we break it down a little bit. Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, okay, first of all, a whole bunch of people are going to be like, hey, we were really hurt by this and it violated the commands of Jesus and all the stuff we agreed to be. But you know, some people are trying to spin it as a personality dispute or everybody was a little bit wrong here. Paul puts that to rest immediately. Now it was sin. Like what happened with the nose puncher, metaphorically, it was a sin there. I said it right at the front end. If somebody's caught in a sin, see, I told you, I told you, oh, settle down, settle down, settle down, paraphrase is mine. You who are spiritual should restore him gently. So, on the one hand, Paul comes right out in this very practical passage speaking about the nose puncher. He's like, hey, yeah, it was a sin. But immediately on the other end, he's like, and we're going to deal with it gently, and you should deal with it gently. It's far better to get the nose puncher back on the team and back in the fold than it is to see, you know, how big a pound of flesh we can extract from the nose puncher. But watch yourself, or you may also be tempted. We've talked about this several times over the last few days. I think in light of what this passage is about, the best way to understand what the temptation would be would be to get, you know, you're gonna be tempted to get hoity-toity and imagine that you're special and that you've never screwed anything up. So be gentle to the nose puncher because someday you might be the nose puncher. So see, maybe you can kind of sense Paul doing the two hands out Chris Pratt, Velociraptor, calm down gesture here. He is defusing things, he is not amplifying things. He probably did all of his amplifying back here, like got all that out of his system with the whole emasculation passage. Now we're calming things down. Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you'll fulfill the law of Christ. Whoa. Okay, help the nose puncher. Nose puncher. Help the guy with the nose that you punched. We're not punching each other. We're trying to win ball games here. And we do that as a team, and we do that by in this case, quite literally, walking in step with the spirit. If anyone thinks he's something when he's not, he deceives himself. Okay, well, Paul needed to speak to that because again, some people got uppity and prideful. And now Paul is saying, yeah, there was pride in this situation. And yeah, some of you did get too big for your britches. Maybe that's why the nose punching happened. But stop with the pride. I know these outsiders, they came and modeled that, and it was stupid and it looked dumb, and it looks terrible on you guys. Get that off. It's gross, it's not a good look for you. We do humility with each other. This is how we treat each other. Paul goes on. Continue, please, to imagine this as a post-game talk after there was a nose punching, and we're trying to put everything back together. Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself without comparing himself to somebody else. He's giving them a pathway forward. Here's a way you can think about yourself. Here's a way you can think about other people. Here's a way you can think about people who irritate you, whose noses you might want to occasionally punch. Here's a narrative that is sustainable and will work for continuing to exist in Christian community here, even though you're not always going to be crazy about everything everybody does all the time. Hey, it's like, you know, he's kind of hearkening back to Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount here in Matthew 7. Like, take stock of the log in your own eye, and then you know, you can worry about the speck in other people's eyes. Seems like Paul is always having to push back on people clamoring to be the first. I want to be the first, when Jesus is saying the first will be last. So Paul is reorienting them here to a right posture before the king, to walking by the spirit, to a right attitude toward even our enemies or the people we get crossways with or have dust-ups with. And then it looks like maybe one other problem was that part of what went wrong here is that some people were, I don't know, somehow they were skating by. You know, a little breeze from the outside was all it took to get everybody all mad at each other in Galatia and to have that escalate to a metaphorical nose punch. Paul is trying to put that back together and paint a picture of how we move forward. Everybody knows who we're talking about when this letter was originally read. And I think it's pretty stunning for how hot Paul came in in Galatians and some of the stuff he said to the agitators. I think it's pretty stunning how careful and gentle he is being with people who were Christians, but they got some stuff wrong. Well, he's not hand-waving it, it has to be resolved before they can move forward as a team. There's some good instruction, go and do the right thing, and let's get it back on track and let's keep going. And I think there's a beautiful template here for what to do when we run into these kind of interpersonal crises or stupid stuff at church, even to this day. I mean, there's an opportunity to acknowledge that got weird, it got crossways. That's gonna happen when you hang out with a group of people in a very close setting where you're very vulnerable with each other, where you share resources together for a very long, even multi-generational period of time as families, you're gonna have fights. It's just a byproduct of that level of proximity and trust with each other. And the Bible is never surprised by that. In fact, it gives very succinct, very clear instructions for what you do after a metaphorical nose punch and how you move forward. And I think this little passage in Galatians is beautiful. We'll be moving on to the next little passage in Galatians. Next time around, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.