Well, hello. It's me, Matt Whitman from the Internet from the podcast you're listening to now, the Ten Minute Bible Hour podcast. We're working on the list here. That's uh Fruit of the Spirit. It's in Galatians. It's a very nice list. We've been talking a lot about love, which is the first of the Fruit of the Spirit. Then we spent, how long was it? You probably know. Like two weeks, more than two weeks on just love. We could have kept going. That was pretty fun. But there's more fruit of the spirit. So we got to keep working ahead. But before we do, today, we have a pretty special segment. I'm excited here. I've been waiting to open this up. I got a little mystery package in the mail. And I'm hoping it's something good. I've been pretty pumped. And I just thought we would do this live together. It'd be cool. So looks like this is from Libby. Libby, thanks in advance. Wow, it's got a little bit of girth to it. Feels like maybe I'm about to get something special here. Let me just pop that open. All right. It looks like it's a box. Pulling that. It's a snow baby. It's a it's another snow baby. Huh. This one's called puppy parcels. Unpresent pour la chiat. I don't speak French. It makes it sound pretentious. Unpresent poor lay chiot. This is a figurine. It's a box. The box here, it's about four inches by six inches, but I mean you can tell what it is from the cover. Snow baby. I never should have told you about the snow babies. It just keeps getting worse. I'm opening it. I'm destroying an ink pen to get through the tape. Maybe that it's not. Maybe it's now it's a snow. Oh my goodness. It's the biggest snow baby I've got yet. For those of you who are here for the first time, some of the people who listen to this program along with you are trying to make my joy complete by giving me these quaint knickknacks. Oh, I was gonna say from the early 2000s. They're still making them. This one's dated to 2024. This is original in box. It's like the old painting. You know, the one where like the baby's at the beach and the puppy grabs the little baby diapers and yanks on the diaper, and it's like, ah ha ha ha ha ha, you can see the baby's butt. Because that that mutt was yanking on the diapers. That's what this is. It's a little Christmas snow baby and a Christmas snow baby onesie. And there's an old dog back there, and the dog's tugging on one of the gifts, but the trousers, the trousers are still on. It's a Christmas onesie. You can't, even if you're a dog, you can't just pull those. Like it doesn't work that way. So I kind of imagined that segment going a little different. I'm not gonna lie. But um, you know, I made a moral commitment, a covenant with myself and with you that no matter what was in that package, I was just gonna be in the episode. So now you know it was a snow baby. Thank you, Libby. I like my snow baby. Thank you very much that was very nice of you. Thank you. Also, I think you know what you're doing. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things, there is no law. This is a really important list that is coming at the end of a really important but very complex, counterintuitive idea that is at the heart of the Christian life that the Apostle Paul is trying to spell out here in Galatians. I feel really bad, by the way, as a side note, for the people back then in Galatia who got this letter. They didn't have the whole Bible yet. They didn't have all of these Christians who came before them, they could stand on the shoulders of to have worked this stuff through. This is a challenging set of concepts that Paul is spelling out here and articulating. But I think, I think the heart of it goes like this. Most things we do and get in life, most things we achieve, naughty stuff, even a lot of good stuff, is born out of the flesh. That being all the things that come part and parcel with us being human beings, with all of our flaws and weird stuff, and our grumpy days, and our little dust-ups, and our noble stuff, and our self-sacrifice and our yearnings for pleasure and not pain, and the fact that we're gonna die someday, and our frailty and our forgetfulness and our impulse toward dark things and even evil at times, all of that, some of it's moral or immoral, a lot of it's just what we are, all of that generally that's the realm that we live in when we do things. Along come some religious people to the church in Galatia, and they're like, hey, here is what it looks like to, without, I mean, they didn't mean to say this, they weren't trying to, but they did. Here's what it looks like to do religion by your effort, by the flesh, to use Paul's word. And ironically, of all things, the way to do religion by the flesh is by cutting off some of your flesh. It's weird, but it's a whole circumcision thing from the Old Testament. So Paul tackles that first, this idea of earning the favor of God, earning right standing with God, doing Christianity with God, and then he gets to his constructive proposal part way through the book, which is life by the Spirit. The Spirit is contrary to the flesh. The Spirit is something that is the gift of God. It's life to dead, dry bones. It doesn't make any sense. It's counterintuitive to pretty much every deal we've ever made, every transaction we've ever had in our entire lives. And it's this one thing that we need the very, very most, which is God's presence in our lives, God's grace, God's forgiveness, God imparting to us his righteousness and the title of son or daughter of the king. We need it, but we can't do it. It's very strange. It's understandable that the Galatians had a tough time wrapping their brains around this. It's understandable that you and I have had a tough time wrapping our brains around this, and helped drive home the point here in the last two pages. I got one remaining double page spread here in the book of Galatians on page 1808 and 1809. And these final remarks, one of the things that Paul does to help us get this very important idea is he says, there is stuff that comes out of the flesh. It's a list of acts, things you do. Now, the acts that he lists are pretty dark reflections, some of the ugliest stuff that is born out of the flesh. But then he contrasts that with beautiful stuff that comes part and parcel with the spirit that is with when God is present in your life, this stuff is the gift of God in your life. And indeed, him leading with love, as we've looked at for the last two weeks. Well, that's squares. That's all over the Bible. It would make sense that if God is love, that the fruit of the spirit of God, first and foremost, first thing on the list, you would think it would be love. And it is. So that checks out. The second one is joy. So I sat down right here with that snow baby package that I unwittingly opened before all of you. And I thought, all right, rapid fire off the top of the head. What are the joy verses you memorized at Bible Camp that never went away? By the way, I'm so grateful to Bible Camp for making me do that. I just wanted girls to like me. I just was hoping that the food would be something edible and not like egg salad or casserole or something. Fingers crossed, I'm just trying to get through camp, right? But along the way, they made us memorize all kinds of Bible verses. Like, yeah, it's fine. It's camp's fun or whatever. And it was easy because my brain was just putty back then. I could put anything in there and stay forever. I still have all these Bible verses because people just made me memorize them when I was a kid. And I was like, whatever. And now I'm so grateful to all of those old, unstylish, out-of-touch people who I imagined I was probably gonna be better than, who turned out they were way better than me and they knew what they were doing all along. Thank you, people whose names I don't remember, who made me memorize Bible verses. I'm grateful for it. Because today I was like, joy, joy, joy. Oh, I got three of these right off the top of my head. Romans 15, 13. That's another one of those that has a rhythm to it. There's a song about this one. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. When I memorize that verse, yeah, I was trying to impress Amber. Did it work? No, not at all. But the cool thing is jokes on me, because in the end, this verse trying to impress Amber when I was 14 years old is what connected the ideas of hope and joy in my brain forever when it comes to the Bible. These things go together. Why do Christians have joy? Come on. The Christians that we see in the Bible, I mean, they're taking a whipping, right? I mean, they're literally taking a whipping. It's not great for them all the time, but they count it a joy to suffer as they walk out of getting whipped at the beginning of the book of Acts. Yes, we're suffering. We get to imitate Jesus in this way. Well, that's not your attitude if you live life in the flesh. If you live life in the flesh, you don't like whips to touch your flesh. I mean, hopefully nobody likes getting whipped at all anyway. But the disciples were so full of the spirit. That's where their mindset was. Their eyes were on eternal things. Their lives were already forfeit. That's where their heads were at. And for all but one, that's exactly how it turned out. Only John lived out his days. They were so in that mindset of life by the spirit that they're like, okie dokie. Well, what can you really do to me other than kill the body? And what happens if you do that? I mean, they were dialed on this thing, and so they had joy in suffering. Why? Because they had hope. Again, thank you, Bible Camp. Thank you, Amber, for linking these two ideas in my brain forever. John 15, 11 is another one of those that I'm I'm not kidding. I think I learned these all at Bible Camp and they're still in there. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. And this is simply Jesus talking. He's talking about the love of God and the love between him. Why don't I just read it to you? Why do I do these things where I summarize the Bible? You know who says it better than me? It's the Bible, it turns out, because it's by God. All right, uh, this is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed the Father's commands and remain in his love. And here's the one I just read you. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. My command is this love each other as I have loved you. And then I read you this one the other day. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. So there you go. Love and joy. They're joined at the hip by Jesus himself. And then this last verse is not from Bible Camp. This is from last season. That's how I remember this one. That's why it came to mind. It's kind of fun. So we're doing Slum Dog Millionaire here, where I tell you how I remembered each of these things because there's a little story to go along with each, and that makes it fun. I remember this one from last season. Nehemiah 8. The wall has been built. Everybody was trying to kill Nehemiah all the time and ruin the wall. Things were very stressful for him. But dude was good at handling stress. I mean, he literally drank potentially poisoned beverages all day, every day for a living. So I guess he was the right guy for this job and to overcome all of these pressures. He does that. You'll recall that the quests of Ezra and Nehemiah were rebuild the temple and then rebuild the people, which kind of includes rebuilding the wall to protect the temple. So in Ezra, we accomplish quest number one. The temple is rebuilt, dedicated. But in Nehemiah, the people, the book of Nehemiah opens with the report that the people are all they're still messed up. They're in turmoil. Jerusalem's in danger. The people are not rebuilt yet. They don't understand the law. They're not using the temple right yet. And they might get picked off by their enemies. So Nehemiah takes up the quest and he goes to Jerusalem. Of course, he gets the wall rebuilt and everything like we were talking about. And then finally, they put the law back in front of everybody on this who's sitting inside this freshly rebuilt wall. And they're like, listen to the law. And everybody starts crying because they're going, oh, dang, we're not doing that. We're not even close to that. But then Nehemiah and Ezra, they hear all the weeping and they're like, Yeah, let's not do that just yet. Nehemiah said, Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve. Nehemiah 8 10. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. And then you know, later on they grieve more and stuff. But in this moment, Nehemiah's point is, hey, we have hope in this stuff that God has done. And yeah, the law is, I mean, to use Paul's language, it's a heavy tutor, it's a heavy weight. Who can bear it? But it's supposed to produce joy. Being with God, being in the presence of God is supposed to produce joy. And dang it, even if you guys don't feel like it, we're going to do joy right now. So there you have it. Joy is a fruit of the spirit. Obviously, there's a lot more verses and a lot more things that we could go and look at, but for the sake of pace, we're not going to go through every one of these fruit of the spirit the same way we did with love. But I think joy is tied closely to the idea of hope. Joy flows out of the love of God. And joy is kind of weird and counterintuitive. If you're just playing the convert food to poop and go-to-work game for your entire life, then eventually I think you're probably going to contend with quite a bit of despair. Sometimes you hurt when you're a Christian too, but big picture, the idea is that the end game of all of this, the reality of God and the knowledge that there is something bigger than this moment and the ups and downs of it. What comes with that is a steadiness, an abiding, healthy, low engine hum of joy that's just beneath the surface of all the comings and goings of life. And this is another one of those byproducts of life by the spirit, fruit of the spirit. All right, that's plenty for now. Thanks again for the snow, baby Libby. I'm at the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's keep this again soon.