I know I keep bringing this up as we're talking about the fruit of the spirit, and I said I wasn't going to go over each one individually, and now of course I am going over each one individually because that's just what happened. But I'm really enjoying it. It's been worthwhile. We've been working on faithfulness. And as I've been going through each of these fruit of the spirit, these attributes of God that are transferable from God, that go from the character of God to the Christian, that are only by the power of the Spirit, not by the power of the flesh or our own effort. As we've been working through this list in Galatians 5, I've noticed that on each one of these, it's really easy for me to say, picture the coolest people in your lives. Picture the people you would go to if you were in a nightmare scenario and you needed that one individual who you know is gonna deliver. They're gonna think about it the right way, they're gonna help, they're gonna be kind and compassionate, they're gonna have their heads screwed on straight, they've got the character to handle it. Picture a great mentor, picture somebody you trust, whatever. They're all fruit of the spirit people. They all exhibit these things. And the one we're talking about right now, faithfulness, my goodness. Faithfulness is kind of the one that binds them all up together from the perspective of that thought exercise. And the people in your life who you really trust, the go-to people who've made that huge impression on you, the kind of people who you aspire to emulate and to be. Boy, they got this one on lockdown, don't they? They're not all of those cool things from a distance, if they're the individual you're picturing when I take you through this thought exercise. They're they're in a pinch. They're doing this in close proximity to you and they're steady in all of that. And so Yeah. Faithfulness, a very admirable quality. When I think about my favorite characters from fiction, at least two of them are named Sam. And I think it's related. I'm thinking of Sam Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings, and then I'm thinking of Sam Tarley from the Game of Thrones Song of Ice and Fire book series and TV show I don't recommend to anyone. I watched it to find out if it was as bad as people had said, so I could warn other good people. And along the way, I just happened to really like this character, Samuel Tarley. What was the deal with Sam Gamgee? What was the deal with Samuel Tarley? Why do we love these guys, even though they were a little bit pudgy, not the most athletic, not the best warriors, maybe not the brightest and the most everything. Well, it's just because they were faithful. It's because they showed up and they understood friendship and loyalty, and they were present and they were steadily who they were throughout the whole thing, at least in terms of good characteristics. So, faithfulness, phido, we like this one. We looked at some Bible verses dealing with this one yesterday, and I got another one here that I held off on because it was kind of a big one to bite off because there's a lot attached to it. And this is Lamentations 3. This is kind of a moment for me and you. Have we ever been to Lamentations before? I sort of don't think we have. I should have done a thing where I marked each episode along the way to celebrate the first time we ever went to a given book of the Bible together. It'd be fun. It could be like color-coded, there'd be like a little star on each episode as we unwrapped a given book for the first time together. Well, maybe this one deserves it, because I think this might be our first time in Lamentations. Lamentations three. Just a little bit of context, because I know it's probably been a while since most of us have read this. Lamentations is it's five poems, and the poems are all different grief poems coming from a little different angle in response to the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. Lamentations is by Jeremiah. Thematically, it's very similar to the book of Jeremiah. And right in the middle, in the central poem of the book, even if you didn't read the rest of it, golly, this is like the central peak of the whole book of Lamentations, like the central thought is this verse that I'm about to read you. In other words, like half of the book of Lamentations comes right before this verse, and then this verse or this double verse is the central theme of the book of Lamentations. And then the second half of the volume of all of Lamentations happens on the other side of this verse. So it's like the middle thought, it's meant to be there. This is important, and well, you'll see why. Ready? Because of the Lord's great love, we're not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They're new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. And again, think about what this book is about. This is a book written in sackcloth and ash. Maybe five percent of you listening, three percent of you listening, one percent of you listening, have gone through a true calamity. And by calamity, I mean bigger than tragic personal loss or the deeply painful things that we go through in life. I'm not minimizing that stuff. You know, my origin story starts with a p hugely impactful personal loss that changed everything about my family in just an instant. So I get that. But what I'm talking about here with Lamentations is not personal loss, which we will all inevitably go through, tragedy, which we will all inevitably go through. We're talking about something truly exceptional here. Calamity, like at scale, like the end of a way of life, the end basically, or so it looked in the moment, of a people group, the destruction of a building where there was empirical evidence to say God lived in there. We had God living right there, the poet is thinking, as he points over to a heap of rubble where the temple once stood. Like right there, 200 yards from me, God lived with us. We were his people, he was our God. He gave us this land. There's this whole story, this whole background. He said prophet after prophet, he was so patient with us, he tried to get us back on track and we just would not listen. And now, this is what we're left with: a pile of rubble and flame and burn and pain, and everything is gone. Everything is ruined. Now, this is calamity poetry here, and yet the central thought of the whole thing is because of the Lord's great love, we're not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They're new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. Then it occurs to me, just as I flip back and forth here, I've always said that was the middle verse of Lamentations. Is it? I that's more math than I'm willing to do here. I may have told you something that's only part true or maybe just entirely not true. Well, let me just reframe it. It's right in the middle of Lamentations, basically, and it could be that those are the middle verses. I'll let someone else math that one out. But my point stands. What incredible perspective from the suffering prophet from Jeremiah to say, Great is your faithfulness, right in the middle of this. But was he wrong? Why would he say that? Is he just being a bro? Is like just that's what you're supposed to say at church when bad things happen, and when bad things happen, you have a chance to have everybody be like, oh, he is so nice. He is so Christian. That was so good. This must be such a hard time. And he said very Christian things. I I get it. Do you want to be steadfast and everything? We're we're doing our best in the face of grief. Is this performative on the part of Jeremiah? I'm not suggesting, by the way, that's always performative when people say spiritual things in the face of suffering. But with this was it here? No, because this isn't all that Jeremiah knows about the situation. Jeremiah has this, like I mentioned a second ago, this gigantic book of prophecy that is this many pages right before. Listen. Is the point. It's like several quarters thick in my Bible. A lot of pages. What happened over there? Well, God made it very clear that Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon was inevitable. This is going to happen. God will judge the nations. God's going to judge his own people. God made a deal. He said, I'm going to be your God. You're going to be my people. Everybody's going to know it one way or the other. If you obey me, everybody will know because I'll bless you. If you disobey me, everybody's going to know because I'll punish you. God did exactly what he said he was going to do, and Jeremiah had a front row seat to all of it. But God also told Jeremiah that, hey, it's going to be 70 years, and I'm going to start putting things back together. I'm going to start rebuilding my people. And there's this whole idea that there's still a hope and there's still a future despite this terrible calamity that Jeremiah had to sit through. And indeed, well, what Jeremiah prophesied from God turned out to be true because like 70 years later, almost on the dime, the new temple is dedicated in the book of Ezra under the leadership of a direct descendant of King David, the guy who would be on the throne, Zerubbabel. So, I mean, that was pretty rad. So why is Jeremiah able to say, Great is your faithfulness? Because Jeremiah has been given from God a bigger perspective, like we were talking about yesterday, of God's timeline, of God's huge redemptive arcs that he functions in and that he thinks in. And so he's able to say this. There's obviously a super famous hymn for those of you who've been around churches that sing hymns and whatnot. It was written in 1923. That surprised me. I thought the one that you already know what I'm referencing here was probably a little older than that, but 1923, Thomas Obadiah Chisholm is the name of the hymn writer, and he spells Obadiah, O-B-E-D-I-A-H. There's got to be some kind of backstory there. I wonder what that is. I mean, that's not how they spell it in the Bible. At any rate, the song is Great is Thy Faithfulness, and it's a beautiful song. It's based on this passage in Lamentations, and it's one of the reasons that I really like singing old songs and hymns, and I don't like singing new songs. Yes, I have some complaints with how songs get written now. Call me old, don't care, really like Great Is Thy Faithfulness, and really like it in the context of the passage from which it was lifted, from which it was inspired, because it's a passage that kind of wraps up the whole idea that we're talking about with this fruit of the spirit right there in one. God is faithful. Even when things look untended, he's sovereign over everything. He said he would redeem, he's gonna redeem. He said there's gonna be a Messiah, there's gonna be a Messiah. He said there'd be forgiveness of sins in this eternal kingdom, there's gonna be forgiveness of sins and this eternal kingdom. Jesus said he's gonna send the spirit, the spirit's gonna show up, the spirit showed up. He said there would be life by the spirit, there is life by the spirit. Even in the face of all of the ugliness of humanity, even the ugliness of the people who are theoretically followers of God, God has been faithful. What does that do in us? Well, it brings us back to another fruit of the spirit. It brings us back to that place of peace, peace with God. We have peace with God because of the faithfulness of God, because of the work of God, because of his commitment to be faithful and to redeem. And that peace with God, that right standing before God that pretty much all of Galatians is talking about is also a peace with existence, a peace that passes understanding that can only exist in the context of the faithfulness of God because greatest is faithfulness. That was fun. We did Lamentations, but there will be no sticker. We haven't earned it. And we just we don't just do stickers around here. They're a big deal. Speaking of which, I'm doing something new for the stickers. Don't worry, they're still gonna match the old theme for the books of the Bible stickers that we've done in the past when we finish up a season. But I'm doing something new. There's gonna be a little bonus stickerage to go along with the sticker. Like you're gonna like it. I'm gonna tell you more about it later. But we've been doing this for a while. I gotta shut it down. Uh Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.