Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Do you remember a while back when Jeff Foote, my buddy who does the editing and the music on this podcast, jumped in and we did a special bonus episode on a Saturday where he and I sat and processed out Galatians and the two big theological arcs of the book of Galatians. The front end is how is someone made right with God? Well, the agitators went into Galatia and they said people are made right with God by doing flesh stuff. In particular, this this one flesh thing that involves chopping on flesh. That's how you get right standing with God. Paul counters that by saying, no, you go from being a slave to a son, a daughter, an heir, an agent of the king by faith in Christ, the work of Christ. That's it. The first half of Galatians deals with a whole lot of that. There's some overlap throughout. And then the second half, the last third, I guess, deals with the question of what happens after you sign up, after, after you become a Christian. What does that look like? Well, life by the spirit. That's what it looks like. And the agitators were coming along and being like, well, you do that by the flesh. You do flesh things to defeat the curse of the flesh. Way harder. It just occurred to me that some of you were here for the first time ever. That's got to feel pretty weird. I mean, there's not a lot of context for that. You're like, oh, it's Bible. I like the Bible. My friend at work said this is a nice podcast with a nice man. And he probably doesn't talk about circumcision all the time or use weird variations of the word flesh a whole bunch in ways that make me feel uncomfortable because it's a Bible podcast. This is going to be super. Hey, to all of you who are new, welcome. We're in the middle of a book that just has a lot to do with the flesh. I don't know. It'll all come into focus. I promise it's all very Bible-y. At any rate, a while back, my buddy Jeff Foote came on the program. We had a weird episode where we got super real and pulled back the veil, and we both compared notes on what it looked like being brought up in the era in which we were brought up in church as pastors, kids around the Bible all the time, and how guilt and being this mommy's special good boy and wanting to obey God and genuinely believing this stuff and all of this internal turmoil, how all of that came into play and how important the book of Galatians was to both of us. If you didn't catch that episode, because it was a bonus episode and you're like, it was long, I'm not going to listen to the bonus episode, you might want to go back and check it. I'll have Jeff throw that in the show notes. But in the process of talking about that, one of the big questions that we both had to wrestle through with this whole our journey of faith and with the book of Galatians is the question of okay, well, if there is such a thing as life by the Spirit, if the Holy Spirit, literally God the Spirit, indwells, that's a fancy Bible Christian word, indwells Christians when they become Christians and gives them the capacity to obey God and glorify God and do good and imitate God and exude the virtues of God and the attributes of God that are transferable. If that actually happens, then how could anybody who's actually a Christian ever still do anything bad? And does the Bible actually teach that Christians still do things that are bad and destructive? What is the balance there? How does that all work? And we grappled with that a bit. And then I think we got distracted and we talked about other stuff. Maybe I'll have Jeff back on and we can grapple with that some more. But with or without Jeff, we're grappling today because as we enter the final chapter of the book of Galatians, not metaphorically, literally, we're in Galatians chapter six. It's the last one. As we get into this, Paul turned his attention away from the difficult people that he's been talking to in the room. And now he's pretty much entirely focused on the people who've been thrown into confusion, his dear children, who he wants to help get this thing straightened out. And so he's giving them a bunch of practical stuff, but there's also really deep water theology mingled in here, including theology about what goes on with a Christian who is a Christian and is indwelt by the Holy Spirit. But also, like pretty much if you've ever lived at all on earth or you are Christian or have ever known one, it turns out that Christians still do stupid crap and sometimes really more than stupid crap, destructive crap. Well, are they still Christians after that? How much stupid crap are we talking here? Like, if you're like 93% Christian but 7% stupid crap, are you good? Is it when you get into like A minus B plus territory that it starts to be like, oh, maybe not a Christian? Or should it be totally gone? And if it's not totally gone, then you're in big trouble. I mean, those are really logical questions that after the dust settles from what Galatians was actually about, I mean, the big drama and the turmoil and everything that we've talked so much about, when the dust settles after that, these guys are still gonna have that letter sitting there, right? Just in the corner of the room, kind of talking to them like Green Goblin's mask over there. Just like read the letter again. Read it again. This is a really important letter. I know it doesn't necessarily make you feel good, but there's a lot going on in that letter. You better read me again. Read me. And they're gonna get the letter back out, and it's gonna be like a year after they got it. And the hurt feelings are gonna start to subside about all the mean stuff that happened with the people that came up from Jerusalem and brought along a bunch of clinky, sharp, shiny tools and got them out. And we're always like lurking around whenever the dudes were sitting there not paying attention. They're like sneaking up on them with them, like, hey, hey, okay, are you are you trying to circumcise me again? Dude, you have to stop. All the emotions of that era, they've thinned out, they've passed. It's a year later. Now the Galatians are gonna get this letter back out, and they're not gonna be so overwhelmed with that set of questions. I mean, it's a pretty pressing question, like should I get adult circumcised or not? Should my dad get adult circumcised or not? Like it's not just the dudes. Everybody's gonna be wondering about that, right? Now, these people, these agitators, they're gone. They're no longer skulking about. Emotions have subsided, and now some of the less immediately obvious theological questions are gonna surface. And among them is the one that I just keep setting up here and that Jeff and I talked about, which is the question of what goes on in the life of the Christian. If you have God in your life, how can sin ever still occur? Should we expect the Christians will ever do dumb stuff or make mistakes? And the answer is yes. The Bible at every turn, the New Testament at every turn anticipates that Christians will still do stupid stuff, even stuff that you could call sin. Jesus anticipates it in Matthew chapter 18, the fourth of the five great speeches around which the book of Matthew is structured. Jesus gives a bunch of instructions, as we discussed the other day, as to what to do when you get into a fight with specifically your brother. That's language Jesus uses for people who are living in the same spiritual household here. You probably know this passage. It's very useful, very applicable. If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens, you've won your brother over. But if he won't listen, take one or two others along so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector. The point is that even in the little bit of time that Jesus spent talking about the institution that would flow out of his life and death and resurrection, even in that tiny little bit of time, a great big chunk of it was spent anticipating the reality that you're going to get crossways with other Christians, that you're going to get crossways with people at church, that you're going to do bad things. Specifically, let's not sugarcoat it, sin if your brother sins against you. So there's really not much more to unpack here in terms of the question: can Christians sin according to the Bible? Well, according to Jesus, the guy for whom the religion is named, yes, Christians can sin, and from time to time that's going to happen. And here's what you can do to work that stuff out. Okay, but what are the mechanics of that? How does that still happen? Well, Galatians gets us into that a little bit as well. Right after the fruit of the spirit stuff at the end of Galatians 5 says, you know, the fruit of the spirit is all this awesome stuff. Against such things, there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. And you're like, oh, oh, that makes it sound like you would never sin again. But remember, sinful nature is a tricky translation, as we've established in many of our conversations. Flesh is maybe the tidier translation. And by flesh, we don't just mean naughty impulses. We mean everything good, bad, morally neutral, that is just born out of the fact that we are very temporal beings that live in a physical world, subject to the forces of that world. Our bodies do things that are weird involuntarily. You remember puberty? Our bodies do things that are weird involuntarily. Also, our minds do things that are weird involuntarily. We think of things that maybe sometimes we would rather not have thought of. Also, sometimes we wish we could think of things that we just can't remember. Forgetfulness is such an under-discussed, underappreciated aspect of the frailty of the human condition and of why we need the grace of Christ. I mean, if you strip away everything else about who people are and you just look at your experience with being a person and your experience with the people you know, forgetfulness alone is a big enough crisis, is a big enough human problem, causes enough problems that we would need the cross and we would need Jesus, even if just for all of the destructive stuff that is born out of, I meant to remember, but I forgot. So all of this stuff ranging from involuntary loss of bladder control to the monthly cycle of a woman to hunger, to need, to lust, to an idea that you cooked up in your brain that is really dark and selfish and awful and exploitative, and then you actually acted on it all the way to forgetfulness. All of this is the flesh, according to the text. And our impulses towards sin and giving ourselves over to that is just one part of it. So those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. It's a more robust idea than just sinful nature. Although sinful nature kind of covers it too, it just needs a little bit of discussing, which we have done. So since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Oh, well, okay. There you go. So you know what happens when the flesh is crucified? How does that work? I mean, well, then who am I after that? I mean, kind of all I know is my flesh. I've never experienced the world from anything other than my flesh and my five senses. Oh, well, I have life by the spirit and I live by the spirit. But also the indication here is that there's an exhortation from Paul to Christians, from the Bible, to Christians, to you and me, to keep in step with the Spirit. What a fascinating concept. It's proactive, it's positive. Like there's some sort of capacity being described here for a Christian to somehow have some sort of sense of what God wants, what the Holy Spirit wants. How do you do that? I don't know. It's a longer conversation. We'll get to it. But this is kind of teasing the idea that God gives Christians the capacity somehow to know the Holy Spirit and have a pretty clear sense of what the Holy Spirit is doing or would want. And for that to be clear enough that Paul could expect Christians to have that be the orienting force of their lives. Obviously, we've got a lot more to unpack here. We're out of time. I didn't even get to anything from Galatians 6. We'll obviously we'll do it tomorrow and just keep chipping away at this idea. But I think we made some progress here. Okay, so what is the relationship between the Christian and sin? Is the big question here that's lingering at the end of Galatians chapter 5 that maybe the Galatians didn't think about when they first got the letter and everything was hot and passionate, and there were people at scissors and stuff, but now a year maybe has passed and they're remembering that letter's there and they get it back out to read it. And hey, there's all these hidden wisdom in there now that passions have cooled about the life of the Christian, life with the spirit, what it looks like. And no doubt this is addressing some of the same questions you and I have. Question number one: can Christians still sin? Well, Jesus answered that before Galatians ever happened. Yep, they can. Here's some stuff to do with that. Well, question number two how does that happen? What do we do about that? I I don't, I don't want to dishonor the head of the household and the king who has adopted me and given me life from death. I I want to I want to be in step with God. Okay, well, then we have this concept of living in step with the spirit. We used to live in step with the flesh, but apparently the flesh, that all-encompassing thing, apparently that got crucified with Christ. Which means that at this point in our conversation, as I go to hit pause here, we're in limbo a little bit because the flesh is crucified with Christ. We have this life by the spirit. We're still working on exactly what that means, and we'll just keep working on it tomorrow. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Thanks for being here. Let's do this again soon.