Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour, and we just gotta get down to business here. I keep thinking of more things that I want to talk about about love, and I don't want to make us grumpy because we talk about love too much. That would be disappointing and kind of self-defeating. But at the same time, can you blame me, right? It's a good topic. This is fun. I mean, for crying out loud, we took all that time going through all the sin lists of the Bible. I think it's cool that we've taken easily double that amount of time talking about love stuff all over the Bible. I'm having a blast, and I've got more. We've surveyed the stuff that Paul says about love. We've surveyed the stuff that Luke records Jesus saying about love in the Gospel of Luke. And then yesterday we recorded what Luke says about how Christians in the early church obeyed Jesus' command to love one another and how that did exactly what Jesus prayed that it would do and said that it would do. It just solidifies and undergirds the whole message of Jesus and the gospel and everything in the minds of outsiders as they see that love playing out among Christians. We've talked about how Matthew and Mark recorded Jesus talking about love in kind of practical definitional ways, but also in going way beyond the expectations that anybody would have in terms of how self-sacrificial love is. And then we looked at John and the Gospel of John talking about kind of three different levels or focuses on what love is. You know, first, if you want to know what love is, the best example is God. Look at what he does. Take your cues from him. Further, love is commanded. You gotta do it. Jesus commands this. It's not like this is something we hope for or aspire to. Do it. Meaning, implying very heavily, that this fruit, language Jesus uses, is something Christians have the capacity to do by the grace of God. In other words, even when we don't feel like loving, we have the capacity to imitate Christ and be loving and demonstrate the love of Christ because of the powerful work of the Spirit in our lives. God gives us that. And then finally, in John, you know, John is making the point that strategically love is the thing that makes all of this work. It's what makes it make sense. So we've covered a lot of Bible. We've got a much better sense of what the Bible means when it says love in the fruits of the spirit list in Galatians 5 that we're theoretically still lingering on and paused on. And we got a few more outliers here that I want to go and look at. How about Peter? What does Peter say about love? If Peter is the guy who is the source and informant on the Gospel of Mark, and Peter's got these letters towards the end of the New Testament, then he's one of the really big contributors to the Bible. And on top of that, Peter's just one of the biggest names in the history of Christianity ever. What does he have to say about that? Well, first Peter 4.8 has him talking about this same topic in a letter that he wrote. It goes like this. Uh let's start in verse 7. The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear-minded and self-controlled so that you can pray. Hey, self-control, that's one of the fruits of the Spirit. Sweet. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gift he's received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength that God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen. Okay, first of all. Peter is a really easy guy to criticize because he does a bunch of stupid stuff in the Bible. In the Gospel of Matthew, we don't even get resolution for Peter. He just runs off in the night. We don't know how things are going to work out for him. And now here's Peter saying stuff like that. Great. Clearly, this is a dude who's lived a lot, who's endured a lot, who's screwed up a lot, who's been corrected a lot, but also a dude who has been impacted by the love of God, impacted by the presence of the Spirit in his life, and he's now one who's articulating and exhorting the next generation of Christians to this love. And not just the general notion of love, but he's being very specific, including one topic that we haven't talked about much, that is a clear New Testament theme of what it looks like to be loving, and that is to be hospitable. It's something that, you know, in our culture you used to stay at other people's houses when you would travel. Now in the 15 years or so before this has kind of fallen out of fashion. But even that idea of just opening your home, or in the New Testament, opening your home and specifically opening it to people who are traveling and doing the work of the kingdom in one way or another. So he highlights that in his little list of clarifications about what love looks like. Let's do another one. We don't know for sure who wrote Hebrews. Maybe you have a strong opinion about that. Maybe you've put more thought and effort into that than I have. That's not me being fake humble. I believe there are many of you who probably have, and probably have better reasons for who you think wrote it than whatever my opinions are. Somebody wrote it. Somebody, some people think it's Paul, some people have other theories. Whatever. Somebody wrote it. It's cherished book of scripture, has been from the beginning. And much like 1 Corinthians 13 is a love chapter, Hebrews 13, the final chapter of the book, opens talking about love. And it kind of feels like this this chapter is sort of winding down, landing the plane, getting into the final things that the author of Hebrews wants his audience to keep with them in a practical sense. But this is what we get Hebrews 13, 1. Keep on loving each other as brothers. So even right there, we're getting a sense of what we actually mean by love here, or one of the things that we mean, clearly love, also deals with family relationships, fathers, sons, daughters, husbands and wives. I mean, we've got the business at the end of Ephesians, Ephesians 5, that talks about family relationships, where you got both the husband and the wife submitting to each other. Wives submit to your husband as to Christ, and husband be like Christ to her, like laying down your own life, maximum submission. This is this beautiful image within marriage of what love is. But here, um, in the first verse at least, we're talking about this as like this new family of faith idea that that love includes the idea that you are family eternally with people you don't share blood with. Keep on loving each other as brothers. Don't forget to entertain strangers. Hey, there we go. There's that hospitality principle again. For by doing so, some people have entertained angels without knowing it. I maybe that's a reference to the Old Testament. Maybe that's a reference to things that were still going on. I don't know. Fascinating. Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering. Clearly, here we're talking about persecution in the original context, but also we're talking about out of sight, out of mind. And here's a biblical exhortation toward love being not just toward those who are right in front of you, but also love being a Christian principle that requires a thoughtfulness and an effort to be like, well, of course I'm not seeing my brothers who are in prison or suffering far away where things are much harder. But there's a call to intentionality here to let that command of Christ we looked at in the Gospel of John extend out beyond your own natural intuitive social borders. What does it look like to love somebody who's in prison who you've never met? I don't know. Uh maybe that's a conscious state of being. Maybe it's doing something. I mean, the Bible certainly celebrates the idea of going and showing care to people who were in prison, people who were sick. Maybe some people are just practically too physically far away to do that. Okay, well, remember seems to be something you can do then. Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering. And then it goes on from there to talk about marital purity, which kind of harkens back to some of the stuff I was talking about in Ephesians 5 and God's view of marriage. And there you go. We're getting the same stuff out of Hebrews. And then because I really do think today needs to be the last day on our big love overview of everything, I want to come back to something that I reference a lot. The book of the New Testament that might be easy to overlook, but that I think is kind of a cipher for so much of the rest of the New Testament and a boiling down a distillation for you and me as we get to the end of the New Testament. We might feel overwhelmed. It's so much stuff to sort through. How do I know up from down and what's right and what's wrong? Well, first John is a letter written by John to Christians who, you know, were in danger of becoming a wash as weird ideas were infiltrating the church and as all sorts of pressures were affecting them. And so a very grandfatherly John repeats a couple times over these tests of orthodoxy, of right faith, these tests to make sure that you're in Christ and you're pulling in the right direction. One is this test of being loving to your brother. How can somebody say they love God who they haven't seen if they can't even love their brother who they have seen? So John, who recorded Jesus' command to love that John heard as a young man, here as an old man is still remembering that, and he's passing it along to the next generation, or maybe the one after that, depending on how old he was when he wrote this. And he's saying, You gotta love your brother. It's the same thing Jesus was saying back in the day. This is core, this is central to the whole thing. So test number one of right faith of Christian Orthodoxy is you gotta be loving to your brother. This should produce love. It is also loving and right to repeat things about God that are what God said about God. Orthodoxy. Say the stuff that is the faith handed down to you. Say the stuff that is from Christ. You know, people who are making up new things about Jesus or trying to mush Jesus into other social or philosophical patterns, they're wrong. That isn't loving. They're changing the thing. You can't change the thing. Jesus revealed himself to be exactly who he is. We can't mess with it. So first John is teaching the idea that a true test of faith is if somebody loves their brother, sister, that a true test of faith is someone lovingly hold to the truth of who Christ is, and that a third test of faith is simple obedience. Do you obey the stuff that God commands, that Jesus commands? Do you try to honor God with your life and and do what he said to do? And John says, if you look at those three things, you can get a pretty good sense of who is a true teacher and who is a false teacher. If you look at what a teaching produces, if it produces the fruit that is those three things, well that would be that'd be a good indicator that maybe you're onto something with that teaching. If it doesn't produce those things, you got a problem here. And what do you know? Just like all of this stuff, love, very specifically defined, is very central to the whole thing. So there you have it. We heard it. That's not everything that the New Testament has to say about love, but it's a ton, and it is more than enough to solidly triangulate what we're talking about here, what love looks like manifest in different situations under different pressures, what Jesus means when he talks about love, what example Jesus points to when he talks about love, practically what love looks like in the context of the church or a relationship. Paul gets deep into that in 1 Corinthians 13. We get a sense of the role that love plays strategically in the big mission of the church and of Christ, as Jesus commands his disciples to love one another by this. Will all men know that you are my disciples? And then we get to see how that plays out as the disciples, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, manifest the fruits of the Spirit as they navigate an incredibly tricky time in the history of the world, articulating Jesus to people of all different tongues and tribes and languages all around the ancient world. And what do you know? What's the thing that keeps coming up? The power of God and love between Christians, the love of God manifest. So makes a ton of sense to me that we would get to this list of what is the fruit of the Spirit? What is the stuff that is the outgrowth of not the flesh but the work of God and the life of the believer, and love would go right square at the top of the list. Perfect sense. We're not going to do this with all the other ones on the list, but we'll start looking at those tomorrow and we'll see how far we get. Time well spent. Thank you for talking about love with me. Thank you for indulging a very long love rabbit trail. I hope it was as fruitful for you as it was for me. All right, good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.