Hey, my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And I have got a handful of friends who are fantastic at being loving to other people. They're Christians, they exude, they exhibit this life by the Spirit stuff that we've been looking at in Galatians. They exhibit the fruits of the Spirit. They do so in a way that is not performative. In other words, they're not trying to get it out there so people see how good they are. They just do it. And I'm not going to tell you who they are because I don't want to be weird for them or for you. But I look up to these people, some older than me, some younger than me, because even though I know it's not natural, because the Bible teaches that the the the things that they're getting right that are of God are from the Spirit. It's not from the flesh. That's a contrast that Paul uses. It's the language that Paul uses in the book we're working on right now, the book of Galatians. And if you sat any of these people down and were like, How do you do that good stuff? How do you exhibit the fruit of the spirit? It'd be like I it's entirely God. If anything that resembles the values of God or the kingdom comes out of my life, that's from God. And anything that's stupid or destructive, that's from me. That's flesh. Dang. Okay. Well, I mean, like I said, these are people I admire and look up to. One thing they all have in common is they do the stuff they do, especially the stuff where they love other people and serve other people and even love their enemies, like we were reading in the book of Matthew that Jesus was saying yesterday. They love other people in a way where it isn't broadcast. They're not looking for credit. They do loving, caring, compassionate things to show the grace of God, to show kindness to even their enemies in a way that they deliberately will not get credit for. It's very compelling to me. And I'm I'm having to be vague here because I don't want them to feel weird. And I don't want you to feel weird about them. So I'm having to choose my examples and my words really carefully. All of this is just to say I've seen this stuff up close and personal. I see people who live out this life by the Spirit and who love other people in ways that are deeply countercultural. Now you remember, you know, right now we're looking at uh we already looked at the stuff that Paul said about love, kind of got a feel for that. Now we're looking at what the different gospel authors record Jesus having said about love. Yesterday we looked at Mark 12 and Jesus' great commandment that the most important thing is to love God with all you got and love your neighbor as yourself. Before that, we looked at Matthew 5 and the business that Jesus says there in the Sermon on the Mount about you've heard it say, you love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I tell you, love your enemy. Well, some people will do that in society today. Some people will do grand acts of generosity or generosity of spirit, where they, you know, cross the lines and so forth. But overwhelmingly, you've heard about it, like crossfitting or cloth diapers. You'll know that that's what they do because they tell you, no hard feelings, crossfitters or cloth diapers. I have great respect for what you're doing. But generally speaking, people who do certain things are gonna let you know they do certain things. They will find a way to let you know. And performative good deeds, come on, this is this is one of the great ills of our society right now. If you do something good in the forest and nobody is there to see it, does it make a sound? Heck no, you got to have your social media team broadcast all of that stuff so everybody knows how good and enlightened you are. And increasingly in our age, you don't even need to necessarily do performative good deeds. Just performative right opinions is enough. What, something happened far from me that I don't know about? Great. Uh what is the correct opinion right now? Oh my goodness, that's polling at 7129? I think that then, and I thank it harder than I've ever thought anything before. Here's a video pointing at me in black and white that I made myself that my editors put music behind. It's me really feeling emotion about this news story that I recently became an expert in last week that is pulling very strongly in the direction I just happened to think. Come on, we all see through this crap. It was cute in the early age of social media, but we all know that is fake. Those are performative good deeds done for the approval of people. It's transactional. We know it doesn't work on sophisticated people. It's meant to move the needle with dumb people, and social media promotes dumb things, and there's enough needle to be moved there. Think about who you think of as being truly loving to other people. Like let's say it's a life and death situation, and you absolutely needed someone in your life who you believe really knows what love is, really understands it, and would really come through in a pinch. Are you gonna go to the person who makes social media posts to put in front of everybody to demonstrate that they think all the right things at exactly the right moment, but that they never think those things at the wrong moment? No. You're gonna go to the person who does the loving things they do in their life to anybody who's in need, regardless of whether they agree about everything, regardless of whether they get anything tangible from it, but just because it's an outflow of the reality of the spirit, the reality of God working in their life, you're gonna look to that person who you have seen require or seek no credit, even make efforts to hide what they've done so as not to compromise what they're trying to do or compromise their own motives. You're gonna look for that person in a pinch. If you really need someone you believe is truly loving in a difficult situation, you're not gonna look for the performative thing. Look, I'm not smart enough to draw the line on what is and isn't performative, but it's kind of like what that guy said, I what was it, a Senate hearing or something, or the maybe a justice ruling on something. They were like, uh, they were talking about what's the line between art and porn. And the individual said something to the effect of, I don't know where the exact line is, but I know porn when I see it. Okay, weird way to get there, but I'm going to invoke that right here. I don't know exactly where the line is between performative good deeds, performative love, and real spirit-led truthful love that other people happen to find out about, but I generally know performative when I see it, and I know it when I do it, because I've felt the ick of that on me before. Sometimes you just want the credit, a little more than you wanted to do the actual good thing. I'm not above that. So with that in mind, we've looked at what Matthew records Jesus saying about love. We've looked at what Mark records Jesus saying about love, and the Gospel of Luke, the third gospel of the New Testament, includes articulations of both of those principles from Jesus, but there's a parable here that really robustifies this idea of what love is for the right reasons and what that would look like. And everybody knows the story. It's the parable of the Good Samaritan. I mean, hospitals are named after this story. It's one of the parts of the Bible that transcends culture. People have heard of this, people use this expression, even if they care nothing for the things of Jesus and God and know nothing about the Bible. Many people probably don't even know that phrase even came from the Bible, yet they still use it and they know what it means. Here is something we often forget, though, easily overlooked. The Good Samaritan thing happens in Luke chapter 10. We're gonna look at that in a second, but in Luke chapter 9, Jesus is on his ways, traveling southward, and he goes through a Samaritan area in kind of the middle of what I guess we would call the Holy Land. And the Samaritans, there's a long, ugly history there. These were people who, in the series of conquests hundreds of years before the time of Jesus, kind of intermingled with some of the undesirables in the minds of the Jewish people. And there was a parting of ways, a fracturing here, and this rivalry still exists. They don't agree on where to worship or how worship ought to happen. Theoretically, they're worshiping the same God, but it's I mean, it's a real thing. As the time approached for Jesus to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. That's the pivot point of the book of Luke. Everything after 951 is this bold, confident, difficult, long march toward Jerusalem and toward the cross. So right after the pivot in the book of Luke, verse 52, it says, And he, Jesus, sent messengers on ahead who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him. But the people there did not welcome him because he was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples, James and John, saw this, they asked, Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to destroy them? But Jesus turned and rebuked them, and they went to another village. Man, I like that passage. James and John, they had a bit of a reputation for being a bit youthful and feisty, those attributes and the taming of those attributes over the course of their time with Jesus is a really cool subplot in the Gospels. But that happens right there toward the end of chapter nine, and then we turn the page to chapter ten, and some other stuff happens, and then we get to the parable of the good Samaritan. The Samaritan is the one who comes out of this parable looking good right after the Samaritans just got done rejecting Jesus and offending two members of Jesus' inner circle so badly that they were like called down bolts of lightning and fire from the skies to destroy them. What? What are we doing? And Jesus is like, wait no. It's like Jesus makes a little mental note of how dumb an idea that is, and how contrary to the whole notion of who he is and the the love that he is articulating in the form of the gospel and his own work and what he's on his way to Jerusalem to do. No, no, no, no. And I got to call out fire from heaven. And then just a page later, that much later, the Samaritan is going to be a good guy in the story. And I've taken up all of our time, so I'm going to read you the good Samaritan tomorrow. So just to put a mental pin in it here, we are talking about not just the word love as it appears in Galatians chapter five. Hey, love, that's good. Because if we just say the word and roll on and forget that that word is being offered in the context of Galatians, which clarifies what we mean here by love, in the context of the New Testament, which profoundly clarifies what we mean here by love. If we just imagine that that word is happening in a vacuum in the list of the fruits of the Spirit, we can inflict on that any number of cultural meanings or preferences that we might have for what that word means. But in the context of the Bible, I think it is knowable what that word means. It just takes a little bit of effort. So once again, we are in the part of working through Galatians where we are fixated on the word love because it is such a central principle to understanding everything here and knowing what you and I are going to go do with it. Love is the thing that binds up all of those other beautiful attributes together, according to what Paul wrote in the book of Colossians. It makes everything else that we're going for, everything else the Spirit does in our lives hang together. So to get to the bottom of what love means in the Bible, first we spent a bunch of time with things Paul said about it. Now we're looking at the stuff Jesus said about it through the recording of each of the different gospel authors. And right now we are on Luke, considering how the parable of the Good Samaritan helps clarify exactly what we mean by love when we look at the fruits of the Spirit. Thank you for indulging that little reset so we stay on track. Okay, Good Samaritan tomorrow. Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.