Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And if you want to know what somebody means by a word that could mean a lot of things, I suppose one way to figure that out is to just go and listen to a lot of stuff they said. And if they talk about that one key word or concept a lot, you just compare it all. You gather all of that and you hold it in your brain at once, and then eventually you go, huh, I think I know what you meant by that. That is exactly what you and I have been doing for the last several days when it comes to the word love, the concept of love, and the New Testament. That's a word that I suppose people can use in kind of slippery ways with the best of intention, too. It's just, I don't know, it's language. Sometimes language can morph or evolve or drift, and all of a sudden you think it means one thing, but somebody means something totally different. So we're using one of many techniques that one might use to clarify what's meant by a certain idea in a certain context. And this time around, we're using the volume method. We're just doing this by sheer force. We're looking at a gigantic amount of stuff from across the spectrum of the New Testament that talks about love in the hopes that we see the patterns emerge and that you and I, though we may never even meet in person, can get a clear Bible-informed sense of what exactly Paul is picturing as he is inspired by the Holy Spirit to write Galatians 5.22 where it says, But the fruit of the Spirit is love. Joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We've been fixated on love. There are worse things to fixate on. Here's what we've done so far. We've looked at what Paul says about it. We got a sense of that from across his letters. He's one of the three huge contributors to the New Testament. We've looked at what Jesus said about it as recorded by the gospel authors. We get a sense of a lot of the practicals of that from Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Then we kind of get three levels of this stuff from John, including the idea that if you want to know what love is, look at what God does. He exemplifies that. If you want to know why love is important, well, look what Jesus prays. It's central to the whole Great Commission and modeling Jesus and showing what the kingdom is to everybody else. And further, John highlights the fact repeatedly that Jesus commands love from his followers. Well, the rest of the New Testament takes that command of Jesus to love very seriously, including the stuff that Paul wrote. It's all over the place. But what about some of the parts of the New Testament we haven't looked at yet? The word love, off the top of my head, I am not sure. I'm not sure the exact word appears in Acts. Maybe it does. I could have Googled that stuff before we talked. I don't think of there as being a love passage in the book of Acts, which describes what happened right after Jesus, the story of Paul and all of that. What I do picture in Acts off the top of my head is a bunch of places where Christians internalized the example of love from God, where Christians were responsive to life by the Spirit, as the fruit of the Spirit of love manifest by the power of the Spirit in their lives, and where they did stuff non-performatively because it was loving and it was right. Christians shared stuff in common outside of their own households with other people who were Christians in their community to make sure widows and orphans and people on the fringes could get by. This was weird and countercultural. In doing this, they were effectively adopting each other and declaring to their communities we are a family, even though we're not a family by blood. Okay, well, that flows right out of the teachings of Christ and the four gospels that we looked at over the last few days. The Christians, that is, Gentile Christians in remote parts of the world far away from Jerusalem, they all threw in a whole bunch of money from their meager possessions to support Jewish Christians back in the home country of Jerusalem where it all started. There was a famine in Judea toward the end of Acts, and everybody kicked in. And you got Paul, he's carrying around all this money from these collections, and he knows if he goes back to Jerusalem, there's a decent chance he'll get murdered or arrested or something because they're not happy he's preaching Jesus and he's already in Corinth, which is a double port, which means it's really easy to get out of there and to sail west. And he really wants to go on to Rome right then and on to probably Spain and like the ends of the earth, right? But he's got this money, and it's not just money, it's not just, oh, I don't want to get robbed because I got all this money. He's also thinking in terms of uh this, I mean, this this sack of cash right here from largely Gentile outsider Christians who shouldn't give a rip about Jews in Jerusalem and Judea where they're having this famine. This sack of cash is a metaphor for the love of Christ and the unity of the body. It's gonna help the people in Jerusalem. It's gonna bolster the church, it's gonna scream from the mountaintops that Christ has done a work in his church. I really want to go to Rome. I'm just gonna have to write him a letter for now because I gotta go to Jerusalem. And that's what he does. Okay, well, is the word love in that description? I don't remember exactly, but the act of love certainly is loud and clear. Did it work? There's a great book by the sociologist who I believe is now passed on. His name is Rodney Stark. It's one of my, I mean, he's just written a bunch of stuff. God's Battalions, uh, Jesus, and the early church. Is that the name of the book? I don't know. It's back there on my shelf somewhere. I've read it a few times, and I think it's great, and I highly recommend it. No, it's called The Rise. Here it is. Hang on. I gotta move. I gotta roll-y chair, I gotta roll over here. It's called The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark. He was at Baylor University and I don't know. This says says Baylor. I thought he was at the University of Washington, too. That sounds right. It whatever. It's a great book. It's short, it's written for normal people, even though it's sociologically, methodologically sound. And one of his big arguments for why Christianity worked is simply that when all the other people groups that did not have the Christian value of love commanded by the iconic figure who is at the head of their philosophy or school of thought or social construction or political construction, all these other groups, when plague and famine would hit, they would bail, especially during plague. Like I I mean, I love you, quote unquote, but I'm not gonna stay here and get the plague. Who would do that? Well, I'll tell you who would do that. Christians. They stayed behind and they nursed people in need. And Stark does all this work to be like, all right, well, what were the plagues that hit the Roman Empire during the early days of Christianity? They were this, this, and this. Well, would having someone to try to nurse you back to health with the tools and medical knowledge we had back in the day make a difference? And what percentage of a difference would that make? And Stark determined, yeah, it would make a difference and a large difference. And so Christians survived and thrived even in hardship because of self-sacrificial love, Stark concludes. Dang! That's pretty fascinating stuff to think about. All of that is in the spirit of what we see happening in the book of Acts. All of that stuff that happens after the Bible in the face of plague and famine, it just flows right out of Jesus saying, uh you gotta love each other. This is our calling card, this is what we do. And even outsiders to the faith who study this stuff have to admit, well, there wasn't a Christianity, and then very quickly there was. How did that happen? Okay, well, some people might say, I don't like Stark's book. That cheapens the idea of the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit. But look at what we're looking at in the book of Galatians, with all this flesh and spirit stuff. It's all the work of the Holy Spirit. I mean, if Christians behaved this way, which the Bible says is contrary to the flesh, and they did so en masse, well I don't know. I mean, not every miracle is a parting of the sea. It's a miracle to take dead dry bones, literally or metaphorically, and bring them back to life. And that is what the Bible is saying is happening in the life of the believer, from death to life, from unable to do these beautiful redemptive things to able to, to unable not to sin to able not to sin. Add all of that up and a few gigantic, glaring, overt, giant, miraculous things, like, say, the resurrection, coupled with a whole bunch of micro miracles that maybe you can't tangibly see, that being the regeneration of a dead fleshly heart into something that is now alive in God and living life by the Spirit, you couple those big overt miracles with those little individual, invisible at first miracles, and it all adds up to this thing taken off in a way that nothing else ever has. And uh if you take away the sword, my goodness, nothing has ever even come close without violence or force to running the way Christianity did over the first three, four hundred years that all of this blew up the way it did. I didn't mean to talk about Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity, but dang, it's a good book, and I do highly recommend it. And I think it gives us one more look at the whole love thing and how it plays out in one more part of the New Testament acts, but also, hey, a little bonus for you. Some stuff right after the New Testament. You know how sometimes on this podcast, I'm like, yeah, I think we're gonna get through all of this this time and then we're gonna do this next. I don't even know why I bother to talk about schedules and all this nonsense. We're gonna get to it when we're gonna get to it. I'm trying. I think we're having fun. Galatians is turning out to be a pretty husky season here. Yeah, no complaint on my part. I like this stuff. All right, uh, we'll try to finish up the Bible overview of what do we mean by love next time around. We'll see. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.