Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I would like to tell you a tale about a football team that I do not root for and that is not my football team, but of all the football teams that exist that I do not root for, this is the one about which I happen to know the most. This is the tale of the Nebraska Cornhuskers from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Here's what happened. For those of you who don't know anything about American football, or even more so, American college football. It's okay, this is going to make sense. Nebraska is a state right in the middle of the United States. It's an awesome state. Without them, everyone would starve because all they do is work and have integrity and make things that everybody else can eat and take for granted. So they're super. The slogan there is it's the good life. And they have a point, even though Nebraska is not where I call home. I get why people like it. Well, since they have no pro team, they are very in love with their college football team, which, for crying out loud, is called the Corn Huskers. It's indicative of who they are and what they're about and what they believe. The football team represents their values. And it also, for the longest time, represented winning. All they did was win. And they drove everybody else crazy because they were so good under the tenure of this legendary head coach named Tom Osborne, who went on to be like a congressman in the U.S. Congress, like very successful. This guy just won and won and won and won and won. And everybody rooted for all the other teams was so happy when he finally retired and got replaced by his successor, whose name was Frank Solich. Now, Frank Solich was pretty good at football. Hang on a second. I'm pulling up Frank Solich right now because I'm going to tell you something about him. Frank, oh my goodness, Frank Solich is already 80 years old. Time, where have you gone? Frank Solich, during his time at Nebraska, put together a record of 58 and 19. If you don't know much about football, let me just tell you, that is very, very good. And they went to bowl games, which means you had a really good season. I think every year he was there, six years. But let me tell you, as a friend of people who like the Nebraska Corn Huskers, everybody hated this era. They were all mad. It wasn't enough winning. Everybody during this time was picturing the ideal, which is win literally every single game with honor and integrity. Mostly there's a couple things. But every for the most part, with honor and integrity. And so these Nebraska fans from 1998 to 2003, while Frank Solich was in charge, they couldn't enjoy it. And it was both funny, funny at first, but then it became sad to watch because I have so many friends who like this team. And I was like, you guys are you're actually pretty awesome, and your coach is doing a pretty good job. Pretty much every other team would love to be you, but you're used to perfection, and so you can't appreciate this. And then eventually they fired him, and they haven't been good, like really good, ever since. Why am I telling you about a football team that I don't root for? Well, because there's a likewise here. Likewise, sometimes it is possible for us as humans to get a little hung up on the absolute ideal, so much that we can hang our heads and be very discouraged when things are really pretty good, if not perfectly ideal. This is the emotion or the conflict or the tension or the situation that I feel like is in play as we come out of the fruit of the spirit passage in Galatians chapter five. It's this incredible list of ideals, of beautiful stuff, characteristics of God that God imparts to Christians who are living life by the Spirit. I mean, listen to this list: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It's fantastic. But you get to the end of that list, and on the one hand, you're going, that is beautiful. That's what everybody wants. That's how we want the world to be. That's how Christianity ought to look. That's how Christians ought to act. That's how I ought to be. But then on the other hand, we're like, yeah, but I don't always do that stuff. I'm not always those things. And Christians are mean to each other sometimes. And we do fight about stuff a fair amount as well. And the 2000-year history of the church is not perfect. Sometimes we really get after each other. And so there's kind of this emotional dilemma that I think the attentive reader who's a little bit aware of the history of Christianity and maybe a little bit aware of the state of their own soul, their own impulses. There's this emotional dilemma that I think it's real easy to feel at the end of the fruit of the spirit passage. And that dilemma is just that's beautiful. But also, why isn't it better? Why isn't it exactly like this beautiful thing that's being described here? I think it becomes very tempting when you start to feel that emotion. And indeed, I think it's been very fashionable in Christian circles when talking about hard-hitting important Christian issues for the last several decades to bemoan and bemoan and bemoan. Everything's bad. Christianity is bad. Christians are bad. I'm bad. We should have more guilt. We should straighten out all the Christians who are bad. I should feel bad more often. And there is this weird mopiness, this malaise that sometimes can follow around Christians or churches or Christian traditions, and all the time. I said sometimes, and I mean sometimes, that when you really step back and think about it, is like the exact opposite of the fruit of the spirit in terms of a vibe, in terms of a feel. And so I think Christians, myself even, we don't appreciate how much better it is than it could be. Look, here's the reality of what the Bible teaches the flesh is still on us. We have it, we're made of it. The flesh is touched by sin. Creation is touched by sin. Remember, we called the thing that happened back in the garden the fall. So that it was bad. And the whole plot of the Bible is God unfalling the fall. It's Him redeeming this messy thing that went way wrong and has huge consequences that have just, in a hereditary sense, just been passed down all the way through all of life. We see it all the time. Death, pain, suffering, suffering in childbirth, all the things that we feel in life that are just baked into the nature of being made of flesh, that all is a result of the fall. But the good news is God is fixing it. And Jesus is the centerpiece of the fixing it. And then after Jesus did what he was here to do and ascended to the right hand of the Father, he gave us the spirit, which is part of fixing it. So it's not like stuff's just fallen off a cliff and everything's going to get eternally worse. God is in the process of redeeming this thing. There is someone very competent at the helm. I don't mean to liken all-knowing, almighty God to former Nebraska Cornhuskers head coach at Frank Solich. That's maybe where the analogy breaks down a little bit. But the point is, I think it's okay to look at the church, to look at our own heart, to look at our own impulses and be like, man, there is still a lot of this that is touched by the flesh. The perfectly natural, not good or bad, that is morally neutral impulses of the flesh, some of the more corrupted impulses of the flesh. I mean, there's still stuff that needs to be redeemed here. We're still in that phase of the grand redemptive story. But I think it's really easy to look at those things and fixate on them inappropriately, like to such a degree that you miss the amazing thing that is happening. And here's the amazing thing that is happening. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control happen in your life if you're a Christian. They wouldn't happen at all if we weren't, if there was no God, if he wasn't redeeming, if there was no spirit, we wouldn't have the capacity for these things at all to even recognize that we wish that we had them in greater measure. No, something awesome is happening here. We are in the middle of a big redemptive story, but even the Bible says that the big redemptive story is going to take a minute to unfold, that there will be destructive things that happen outside the church and inside the church. And we're not supposed to panic because Jesus called that shot. I mean, why does Matthew 18 exist? Matthew 18, you'll recall, is the fourth of the five big speeches around which the book of Matthew is structured. And in Matthew 18, Jesus basically covers, like, hey, here's what you do when stuff goes wrong in church, which means that he anticipated that sometimes flesh stuff would happen in church and things would go wrong in church. So he knew it was coming. He didn't ever say, like, I'll go to the cross, I'll send the spirit, and then all of that will just vanish. So there's an ideal in front of us. There is a uh, you know, the fancy word is sanctification, but there is a sanctifying or holyizing process that the spirit is doing in the life of the Christian. And there's a preserving work that God is doing and that God is doing through his church as well in the whole corrupt fleshly world. And so look, I get it. I think it's a completely right and biblical and reasonable and common sense response to look at our own lives, state of the world, even the state of church, church hurt, church history, and be like, man, that isn't quite the ideal. There's some there's speed bumps there, there's some worse than speed bumps there, there's some really ugly stuff there that hurts. I I was hoping for undefeated. But I think it's also totally right and biblical and common sense to look at all of those things, including the state of our own soul and the impulses of our heart, and be like, wow. God be praised for holding me back from those darker impulses. God be praised for putting into the life of Christians, even flawed Christians, the capacity to love love and joy and peace and patience, and know what kindness looks like, and know what goodness is, and catch a glimpse, a whiff of the example of those attributes of God to be able to duplicate those by the power of the spirit to some degree in our lives and in our institutions, and when we go out into the larger world and do stuff. Here's the point on the back end of the whole fruit of the spirit thing. Maybe emotionally, you don't feel the same thing I do as we've wrapped this up here in the last day or so. But if you do feel the thing I do, which is a temptation to hang your head about, ah man, this is such a beautiful list, but we don't meet up to the ideal. Well, I would say lean into that a little bit probably is the thing we're supposed to do. Like I think we're supposed to grieve the things that don't meet up to God's standards. But also, I think if you're a Christian, you're supposed to come away from this passage and be like, God be praised that by the power of the Spirit, these things happen, these preserving, redeeming attributes of God happen in a fallen world, happen in a flawed institution, like your church, and happen in a flawed individual like me. That's exciting. That's God using things that are damaged and broken by the fall as part of his redemptive plan. That's him letting us and the things that we've helped build participate in the biggest, most important, grandest story ever. Nothing personal, Nebraska fans. I think you should have been happier during the Frank Solich era. He did a pretty good job. You were just so spoiled by being awesome. God bless Nebraska. God bless everybody. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.