Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And we are going to do a Bible exercise to start where I ask you a question about something we've been talking about for a very long time. And then you think thoughts to yourself or scream them out loud if you want to. You determine whether that makes sense socially given your context. And then we're going to talk about it. Okay. Ready. Fruit of the Spirit. What are they? Do you remember them? Have you memorized them yet? Because I've said them one trillion times at this point. You probably got them. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Here's the Bible exercise, a little mental exercise I want you to do. If you could add one more thing to that list, then you're like, dude, obviously this other thing is also a fruit of the spirit. Paul just did this list because he's talking to these people with these proclivities and problems. This letter was written on an occasion. But if you step back and you were like, the universal list of the fruit of the spirit for all audiences for all time. And I let you add one more to it. What would it be? I'm giving you time to think. I'm stalling right now. I'm mumbling so that you can think. Because it's a really hard question I asked you, and you were probably just working out or working in your yard or shopping or taking your kids to school or something. You were just doing stuff and you didn't know you were going to get asked this question. So I've now stalled for as long as I am prepared to stall. Here is my answer. I would go humility. I think humility is the one that if you just if you had to add one to this, the rest of the Bible supports my thesis on this, right? It's this right orientation, this right posture. Do you remember when we did the whole 800 episodes on Matthew? Maybe a lot of you weren't there for that. I know a lot of you weren't there for that. But for those of you who were, what's one of the big motifs? I mean, it's that right posture before the king. Throughout the whole Bible, Old Testament and New, you can kind of tell the good guys from the bad guys, the people who get it from the people who don't get it, because they assume a right posture before the king. They understand who's in front of them, and it's like their body language and their verbal orientation. I said that stupidly, but you know what I mean. Like, like just how they're talking, how they're coming off, the good guys, the people who are primed to get it, they assume a right posture before the king. Off the top of my head, Nehemiah had a right posture before a literal king, right? I couldn't possibly dare to bother you with my things. And Arta Xerxes is like, no, bro, what's up? What's going on? What's with the thing? I mean, Nehemiah was a dude who assumed a right posture before an earthly king, but then he also assumed a right posture before the king king, God himself. At every turn, he demonstrates humility. How about all the people? Remember how the phrase all the time comes up in the Gospels and in Matthew about then these people came up and they fell at the feet of Jesus. Remember the Cyrophoenician woman when Jesus went on the road trip up north out of his home stomping grounds before he resolutely turned his face toward Jerusalem. Remember that lady? And it seems like Jesus was kind of being mean to her, but when you really look at the language, you see what he's doing there. I mean, what does she do? She's throwing herself at his feet. She recognized, she doesn't know everything theologically about who he is, but she orients herself properly. Like, you are authority. How about the uh the centurion coming down off the Sermon on the Mount, right? And Matthew, what would that be? Eight. You know, Jesus is coming down the mountain, he's got this big following and everything, and everybody's all happy because the Sermon on the Mount went really well. And they're on their way to Capernaum. And who shows up? It's a Roman outsider, an occupier. This guy's a jerk, right? But what does he say? He's like, Yeah, I got this problem back in town. You heal the you know, this person back in town. And Jesus is like, Yeah, okay, yeah, I will. And the guy's like, Well, you don't even have to come. They just say the word and it'll work. I know authority when I see it. Even that is assuming a right posture before the king. It's everywhere. Old Testament, New Testament. One of the big takeaways from the Bible is hey, if you want to be a Christian and follow God and be a citizen of the kingdom of God, you understand you're dealing with a king here and assume the right posture before the king, given his tremendous authority and power and command over your own fate and your own life. It only makes sense that you would embrace. Here we are, back to my bonus fruit of the spirit, humility. Is this sense of self? I mean, Paul talks about humility a lot. It's it's not thinking more highly of yourself than you ought to. It's having a right understanding of your status and your position. Think about instructions in the New Testament, like, hey, if you go to a dinner, like take the crappy seat, because then you might get moved up and honored. But if you take the fancy seat, you might get kicked to the back and humiliated. The first will be last, the last will be first. I mean, it's just everywhere, right? This idea of treating others as better and more prestigious than yourself. It's kind of the beggars can't be choosers principle, in a way, too. I was destined for eternal separation from God by merit of me being a part of a fallen, sinful human condition, and then God, the king, intervened, and I didn't really do anything to get that. I was just kind of a dead skeleton in a valley of dry bones, and then God gave me life. That was really nice of him. I suppose I should be grateful since I was dead before, and now I'm alive. So the humility thing is just the right response to literally the entire story of the Bible and the whole deal here. Being forgiving is humility. I got forgiven for so much. I mean, I gotta give away the forgiveness to other people, right? So we get to the end of Galatians chapter five, and Paul has pivoted. He's no longer kind of side-eyeing the agitators who came up from Jerusalem and caused all the problems that are the occasion of this letter. He's now squared up his shoulders. I mean, it's a letter, but metaphorically, he's squared up his shoulders to the people he actually knows, to the people he calls brothers. He's using that term again. Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, but you brothers, I mean, it's all over the end of Galatians here. So we know he's getting personal. Paul does that in his other letters as well, when he's really trying to dial it in with the people he knows. And what really is he exhorting them to here in the home stretch of Galatians? It's humility. It's think of other people as being valuable. It's think of your brothers and sisters in church as being. I mean, I'm kind of inserting some larger biblical theology here when I say this, but as being image bearers, as being other people who were forgiven for the same kind of stuff that you were forgiven for. In other words, like how you got here should change the equation. The way we do things in the flesh, relationship-wise, it really doesn't make sense here because how we got here precludes nasty, gossipy, taken angles, undercutting other people's friendships and relational clout to try to climb some social ladder in this kind of environment. It's just the most tacky, awful thing ever. I should know I've done it, and I know how it feels to have done it, especially in like a church setting or a youth group setting as a kid. Ick, I mean, pride cometh before the fall. Pride is the opposite of walking by the spirit. So, to be clear, and this is very important because I don't want you to think that I just got some weird bee in my bonnet, and now I just criticize the Bible. Be like, the Bible left off some stuff that the Bible should have said. That's not where I'm at. I think the Bible is very, very good. I'm very impressed with it. I like it a lot. I'm pro-Bible, I think it's excellent. What I am saying is that if there were one big grand list that we made that was a distillation of all the stuff in the Bible that is presented as being a byproduct, an unavoidable outgrowth of walking by the Spirit, not just the list we get here that I think is abbreviated, I think humility would be right on that list because it is such a natural outgrowth of that right posture before the king and of just the very humbling reality of being, you know, indwelt by the God of all creation, because that is what is happening when someone's a Christian and they are indwelt by the Spirit. I mean, it's it's kind of a big deal to be in such proximity to such tremendous power and authority. So we get into Galatians 6, and Paul gives us uh a section here in the first five verses. It can feel on your first pass through Galatians or your fifth or eighth or twelfth pass, like we get this super tight argumentation through the first five chapters, and then we hit Galatians 6, 1, and Paul reels off like just all this stuff you should do. Like, uh, here's how to restore people when they sin. Uh, also, here's another thing I just thought of uh carry each other's burdens, because that's fulfilling the law of Christ. Um I don't know, you should um you should be humble and not imagine that you're something when you're actually nothing. Let me see what else I can come up with here, guys. I kind of got to fill a little more space at the end of the letter. Uh I don't know, take responsibility for your own actions, I guess, and uh quit comparing yourself to other people. And uh, what do we have? Time for one more? Uh everybody should carry their own load. Well, if you think about Galatians 6, 1 through 5, divorced from the rest of the passage, it can feel like this is just a scattershot list of nice things that you ought to do. But when you think about it in the context of the whole letter and humility being the opposite of the prideful, nasty, mean-spirited jockeying for positionedness that the Galatians had clearly been engaged with, then you see how all of these things fit together. Brothers, if someone's caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. Okay, that drips with humility. Do you catch it? People are gonna do dumb stuff. Why should you restore him gently? Because the point isn't to get your pound of flesh. The point is, I mean, it says restore. The point is to get him back on track. Why should you do it gently? But because you want it to work and also because someday you're gonna do stupid crap. You can probably wish that people would restore you gently and they're more likely to do it if you were cool when they did stupid crap. But watch yourself, or you may also be tempted. Okay, well, it's real easy to get high and mighty when you're in the seat of judgment and you're the helpy helperton. So I think there again, that drips with humility. Carry each other's burdens. Well, that's humility. Your problems are my problems. We're this new family of faith. Remember how the language of a page earlier about how we went from being slaves to sons and daughters and heirs and children, and they were a part of this household. We have agency and like this ownership of this beautiful thing that we should be outsiders to by all rights. But now here we are, from beggars and slaves to children dressed in the royal robes of Christ and his righteousness. Well, of course we should carry each other's burdens. This isn't some kind of humility we should have to muster. It's just situational awareness of what we were and where we are now and what other people were and where they are now. Of course we should do this. It drips with humility, but it's obvious humility. If anyone thinks he's something when he's nothing, he deceives himself. That's verse 3 of Galatians 6. I mean, it is there any more obvious central statement to the whole passage? And that that line is right in the middle of this passage or this paragraph. If you think you're big and important and you're not, you deceive yourself. I mean, you're not self-aware, and honestly, you're you're probably embarrassing yourself. I'm reading between the lines a lot there, but from my own experience, uh, that's the most humiliating stuff I've ever done in my life, is when I think I'm real fancy and important, and everybody else knows I'm not, but I'm acting like I'm a big deal. Each one should test his own actions. That is a humble exercise in and of itself, because it starts with the assumption that I could be wrong, another thing that I've empirically proven to myself again and again over the course of my life. Then he can take pride in himself without comparing himself to somebody else. Well, there the word pride pops up, but what kind of pride are we talking about here? Well, without doing the whole literary linguistic analysis here on the word pride, pretty simply, it talks about a right attitude, a right understanding of your position and where you fit. And how do we find that? Well, by our orientation to Christ, which is earned by the work of Christ, and not by comparing ourselves to other people and their adherence to the law or their knowing how to do the religious gestures or whatever else is creating this ridiculous pecking order that the Galatians were operating under. For each one should carry his own load. The bottom line is this humility is so obviously a fruit of the spirit, even if it isn't explicitly in this particular fruit list in the Bible. Humility is the binding thing. You can have this, and this will work when you walk by the spirit. This is what you need to look like, not biting and devouring each other, not failing to serve one another, not abusing the freedom that you have in Christ. So, yes, this is very practical instruction. No, it is not the blunderbuss shot of here's some stuff I thought about, and I just wanted to say it at you. There's a really cohesive flow of thought that we're getting from Paul here. So I'm wrapping it up there. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.