Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Can you hear that music in the background? Let me turn it up a little bit. Hmm. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_01Been listening to this for a real long time. That's not music by Jeff Foote, who makes all the music for this podcast. I wish it were. Rather, it's hold music with a tech company I've been waiting to talk to about a broken Ethernet switch all day. It's been a long wait. And finally, I just got to a point where, like, well, you know, I got to record the podcast for the day. I got to hang out with you. And time's running out. But I also don't want to lose my place online. So I guess we're just going to have to sit here and let that go in the background. Let me turn it down a little bit. I don't want you to have to listen to it as clearly as I'm hearing it. So if they pick up, I'm just going to have to go. Yeah, I just, I have to jump on. I've invested too much. I think I've been pretty cool about it, but I can't miss my opportunity. Why, you might ask? Oh, yeah. Because my internet's been obliterated for days here at my house. And it's pretty awesome, actually, how all of that happened. We were doing a 4th of July party. What is that now? Four or five days ago? Everybody was out on the deck. It's a beautiful night, but also a big storm is coming down the canyon. And you can kind of hear it in the distance. You can start to see a little bit of lightning. It's pretty fun. You know, what do you do on the 4th of July? You look at the sky for the light show. So this one was just from nature and it was great. We're all out there and we're doing the thing where you see the lightning and then you 1 1000, 2, 1,000, 3, 1,000. And you estimate how far away the lightning strike was based on how long it takes for the thunder to get to you. We're all having a great time. I mean, it seems like the lightning's a long ways away until it wasn't. All of a sudden, boom! Lightning just directly over the top of all of us. And there's this huge explosion. I mean, just a rip of thunder. Everybody yells and screams and plates are flying, and then like a cartoon. Everybody tried to wedge through the door to get off the deck and back into my house at once. Then I got my hands in the small at the back of two of my buddies who were, I was the last one in. So I'm pushing them, like, go, go, go, there's lightning. I'm gonna die. And they're like, we have babies in front of us. We're gonna trample the babies. I'm like, trample them just a tiny bit, like the kind where it doesn't hurt them that much because I'm gonna get murdered by lightning. In the end, we all got inside. Everybody was fine. It was a pretty good laugh because of how much reaction there was to this. And also, we could see where the lightning hit. It hit the tree between my place and my neighbor's property. Hang on, is this him?
SPEAKER_02Your call will be answered. Please have your money.
SPEAKER_01They turned off the music. I thought it was I thought it was me. I got excited. Okay. Uh my bad. Ignore that. The lightning had hit this huge tree between me and my neighbor's property, and it just blasted a whole bunch of leaves off of there. And you could kind of feel it in the air, you know, if you've ever been real close to lightning, you know what I'm talking about. This was the first or second closest lightning strike I've ever felt in my life. And my neighbor called immediately and was like, My electronics are all going crazy. I think it nuked my electrical system, and I think they're still having problems with it over there. And so I was like, Oh, I better go check. And everything fortunately checked out fine on the electrical side, but I noticed my internet was shanked. And so I was tried a couple of troubleshooting things and nothing worked. I'm like, oh, we're having a party, I'll figure that out later. Well, here I am, four days later, five days later. It's still not fixed. It looks like all my electronics were okay in terms of being surge protected, but the internet line maybe got sizzled a little bit, and that cooked my Wi-Fi router, my Ethernet switch, and my modem. So I'm trying to just, you know, pull on this thread with customer support and try to figure out what's broken and what it's going to take. I don't know if you know this about me, but I make things on the internet for a living, and it's really hard when you don't have uh the internet. So I very quickly burned through my wireless hotspot on my phone. It took me like three and a half hours to publish a silly little short yesterday. And so as you see, I can't hang up on this support call. It's just gonna have to linger there in the background while we talk. Why am I telling you all of this? One, because I think it's a really interesting story. There was a lightning explosion and it wrecked things. That's cool. Two, because patience! Because we're on the fruit of the spirit that is patience right now. And I'm not sure that I am properly demonstrating patience, but believe me, as I've been trying to sort all this out for the last however many days, it has occurred to me what passage in the Bible we are looking at, and in particular, what fruit of the spirit, what word in the Bible we are fixating on right now. And I think it's helped. You know, I don't want to be a total hypocrite, like nothing more than like a three out of 10 level hypocrite. So you know I'm trying to be real cool about it. I think we've made good headway. I've made some friends over there in the customer support world, and uh, you know, maybe we're just one phone call being answered away from having everything straightened out. Yesterday, we talked about how the fruit of the spirit is stuff that flows out of the character of God. There are certain attributes of God that are transmissible, where God's like, this is who I am and this is what I'm into. These are my values. And now, as my children who bear the mark of me, who are clothed in the royal robes of my kingdom, you know, you're under the sigil of my household, you're under my banner, you're going to exemplify these things as well. It's kind of what the fruit of the spirit is. These are trademarks, hallmarks, calling cards of the God who is behind them. That's pretty cool that he would put his mark on us in that way. But also there's stuff from God that isn't transmittable because if it got transmitted, then I guess we would be God. So God does give us the gifts of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control, but he doesn't impart to us all knowledge, all power, the ability to transcend distance and be everywhere at once. There are religions that teach that. The Bible does not teach that. In fact, the Bible pretty explicitly teaches the opposite. God's ways are higher, he is different from us. But the fact that that some of these attributes are transferable is just amazing. So yesterday we talked about patience as an attribute of God. And today, while we wait on hold together, I want to look at some stuff about different aspects of patience that manifest as fruit in the life of the Christian. And they're not just all the same. You think patience, oh, like not getting mad about stuff and being able to bear with something for a little while. But really, if you think about it, patience has a few different flavors of it. One type of patience that we see talked about in the Bible, that we see modeled and people we admire, is patience with God. It's just simply understanding that stuff I was saying a minute ago about how God's ways are higher than our ways, and understanding that we don't get to dictate terms to God. Psalm 37.7, this kind of a famous one. Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him. Don't fret when men succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes. Okay. Well, that that makes sense. That part of getting this right is saying I trust in the character of God. And that means that even though I would like history to unfold differently, more quickly, even sometimes, I'm not in charge of that. And so patience is kind of an aspect of trust. Oh, wait, are they here? Hello?
SPEAKER_02Your call will be answered by Andrew. Please have your model number ready. Matthew, be patient.
SPEAKER_01Be patient. You're literally talking to people about patience from the Bible, live, in real time, right now. Don't make an idiot of yourself. Am I trying to do a fruit of the spirit by the power of the flesh right now? I don't know. It's confusing. Maybe. 2 Peter 3 9.
SPEAKER_03If you would have our ages and calling you back later, please press two.
SPEAKER_01No, I'm staying on the line. I'm pressing one.
SPEAKER_02Your call will be answered by the next episode.
SPEAKER_01Okay, we're hanging in. We're still rolling. 2 Peter 3 9. But don't forget this one thing, dear friends. With the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. But the Lord is not slow in keeping his promises, as some understand slowness. He's patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. What an interesting insight from somebody who knew Jesus real well and real personally, that being Peter. What an insight from somebody who was loudly and brashly on the wrong side of the patience with God equation. Remember, right after Peter correctly confessed Christ in Matthew 16, Jesus was like, Yep, and I'm gonna die. And Peter was like, No, I'll stop it. And Jesus was like, Don't do that. Get away from me, Satan. And Peter was like, okay, um, I'm just gonna wait till my moment. And then when the moment came, he took out a sword and started chopping it. People Peter has been way hi.
SPEAKER_03Thank you for calling people.
SPEAKER_01Hey, I have to go, I'll get you back.
SPEAKER_03Can you have your appreciation back?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you bet. It's Matt Whitman. I am calling from the US. Ten minutes later. Okay, I've got an exciting update. They can't help me at that number. Uh, we looked up the version, the model number, and they're like, oh, that one particular model number, we have to relay you to this other hotline, and they can only help you at this other time. So you'll need to call them. And wait times are higher than usual right now. So we're very sorry about that. So, hey, more lessons in patience. This is great. What I was saying is that this passage in 2 Peter 3 was particularly poignant for Christians who didn't really have a sense of the timeline yet. They didn't know how to understand exactly what time frame Jesus was talking about, all of this, when Jesus explained how history would unfold at the end of the book of Matthew that Peter was there for. It wasn't totally clear. I mean, there wasn't a number, there wasn't a date that he gave. You kind of come away with the impression, might be quick, might be a while. So live like it could be right now, any moment, but also pace yourself like it could be a long time. Why is it a long time? Well, Peter says right here in 2 Peter 3 that we need to be patient because he's doing what he's doing to bring history to its fullness, to bring people to repentance. And that timing belongs to God, not to us. That's a very difficult concept. I like to be in charge of my life and of timing, but patience in this regard isn't just a fruit of the spirit that is about trust. It's a fruit of the spirit that is about assent. I intellectually assent to the idea that I do not have my finger on the pulse of all the considerations that need to occur to manage the unfolding of everything that needs to happen in history and in the hearts of every single person. And God does. So I have to defer a little bit on this one. Romans 8 25 deals with the same concept of patience with God. And I'm going to need patience from you because I can tell right now by the time we're going to have to do another day on patience. Here we go. For in this hope we are saved, but hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we don't yet have, we wait for it patiently. Same idea. Sure, Jesus come quickly. We're all rooting for it. But also at the same time, I think that's going to be a pretty crazy day and a pretty intimidating thing based on how the Old Testament and the New Testament describes it. And even with just a couple of minutes of thinking about it, it's pretty easy to figure out why God wouldn't tell everybody what the timeline's going to be. That would mess with stuff. Instead, I'd reference you back again to Matthew 24 and Matthew 25, where Jesus talks about this stuff with the disciples. And more than focusing on timelines, Jesus focuses with them on readiness, on a right posture, given the reality of who God is and the reality of what God is doing to redeem. Hey, this should be your right orientation toward your lifetimes and the unfolding of history and God's work in all of it. And Peter, clearly, as we just looked at, took from those teachings of Jesus in Matthew 24 and 25. He took from it this sense of I trust God. I trust him to keep his promises. Might seem slow from a human perspective, but no, he's on it. The field is tended, and I will be patient with God and I will trust God. Nice job, Peter. That guy learned a lot along the way, didn't he? Hey, here's the point. As we discussed yesterday, patience is an attribute of God. It's one of the attributes of God that is most evident just from looking at nature and reason. Look around. Do we still exist? Do you see that there are difficult things in the world? Okay, what's going on here? We were made. Why isn't whatever made us fixing it right now, judging it, solving it? Well, I don't think it's carelessness. I think there's a larger plan. And that larger plan includes patience. Because of that, we don't just imitate the patience of God, but we're patient with God. And this is a fruit of the spirit. There's a few more categories of patience and how that manifests in the life of a Christian that we're going to talk about next time around. And hopefully by that time, I will be a citizen of the internet once again. Good luck, me. Thanks for your patience with the hold music. And thanks for your patience with me having to take a call in the middle of our conversation. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.