Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we are working on love. We are in the love part of the Bible. And we're doing all of this because of one word, really, in Galatians chapter 5. We're toward the end of this book, toward the end of this season that we're working on. And we get this list of unfortunate things, the acts of the flesh, stuff that is a manifestation, an outgrowth of the physical, the body, the sinful nature, all the different elements of humanity in our fallen state, apart from the redemption of God. And then you flip that around and you get the contrast. The first word in the next list, the contrasting list is but. But, contrastingly, the fruit, the outgrowth, the evidence of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We're all going to have that memorized by the time this is done. Every now and then, like, hey, this is a part that if you're new to the Bible or you haven't memorized a lot of Bible before. Maybe just jam this one into your brain. Maybe just recite it to yourself. Set like some kind of little reminder, tie a piece of string around a finger, wear an extra piece of jewelry you don't usually wear. And every time you see it, be like, oh yeah, I was going to reel that off to myself because this is really, really, really hyper important. And then you just do that until you have it. I don't know, whatever your trick is. This one is worth internalizing. We're going to spend the most time in this list on the first word, love. And we last time around, we went and looked at a bunch of stuff where Paul, in his letters, talks about love, a theology of love, a clarifying, more elaborate, in detail definition of love over in 1 Corinthians 13. But as I said the other day, we are in the process of doing one of many techniques that we try to use here for getting a sense of what the Bible really says about something. If you're not sure on something, look at the sheer volume of material about it. And it's like, I don't know, statisticians tell me. I'm not one of those, but statisticians tell me that sometimes you get a whole giant data set and you don't even necessarily know what you're looking for, but you look at the giant data set and patterns, points of emphasis, repetitive things will emerge. So sometimes when you study the Bible, just volume. Look at a bunch of stuff. So we've looked at some things that Paul says. Well, let's consider some other biblical authors and what they do with the love thing. So we're going to go with the gospels next. And in this case, the main character of the gospels, well, the main character of the whole Bible is Jesus. Jesus is the centerpiece of the redemptive plan that the whole Bible is about. There's a whole lot of words and teachings from Jesus, public teachings, teachings to his disciples. And what do you know? The love thing comes up quite a bit in all of the Gospels, maybe most famously in the first of the four Gospels, the four accounts that describe the life and teachings and death and resurrection of Jesus. And the first of those, which is Matthew, which we've spent a lot of time on on this podcast. Your brain probably goes to the Sermon on the Mount, the first big speech, the first of five speeches around which the book of Matthew is structured. And in the Sermon on the Mount, we get a few teachings of Jesus recorded by Matthew that have to do with love. And they're very clarifying in terms of what love is and how counterintuitive love is to the way culture thinks about it, to the way it looks on the internet. Check this out, Matthew 543. This is Jesus talking, Matthew recording it. You have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his son to rise on the evil and the good, and descends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect. Now I feel like there's a bunch of language in there that I would like to hear unpacked further. Well, might I recommend the aforementioned eight hundred episode season on Matthew. All of the verses, by the way, are in the description. So the very first line of the description of every episode in the history of this podcast says what passage we looked at that day. The titles, you know, they're a little goofier, a little quirkier. I mean, don't get me wrong. What do we uh how many episodes do we have? 800 on Matthew. Come on, help me out. What did we do? Then through the Bible, that was 66 books plus a little bit of bonus material. Call that 70. So that's 870. What'd we end up with? About a buck 75 on Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther each. So, well, Ezra kind of combined with both. So that's like 350. That's 1,200. We're at about 215 here. So we're coming up on probably 1,500 episodes of this podcast. It's a lot to sort through. I gotta just make stuff up for titles to keep it interesting and make them not all sound the same. I think I've accidentally probably titled a few episodes the same thing anyway. So the way to get around that and help it to be searchable on the internet and help you to go back and find things that we've already talked about is we put the passage right at the beginning of the description. So if you're scrolling through episodes trying to find a particular thing and you look at the title, they'll also almost always be in another font, maybe not bold, a little bit smaller. They'll just be the beginning of the description, which has, you know, credit to Jeff, who does the music and editing here, has a few details about how to get in touch. It has details about how to support the program if you want to. Always no hard feelings if you don't. Thanks to everybody who does. In those show notes, you'll get links sometimes to interesting things that we talked about that you might want to see with your own eyes. But the biggest thing is the passage is always right there. So you can go back and find where we talked about Matthew 5 and this particular passage and questions that Jesus' language there might raise. Look at how much that notion of love contrasts with human nature. You give me things, I give you things back. You be forgiving to me, maybe I'll remember that and be forgiving to you later. It's all very transactional. This doesn't make sense. This idea of don't just love your neighbor, don't just love people who can help you, but love your enemy, love people who can't give you anything. Well, what is that? That's an entirely different set of values than the values that all of humanity has reasoned to, with very few exceptions ever, that would say, you know, you don't live for very long, you're trying to gather resources, maybe pass them along to some kids, build something for yourself. Love is something that is, yeah, I mean, okay, it's it's real and it's true, but there's a very transactional element if you really dig down to the heart of it, in what most people mean, most cultures mean when they say love, to encounter somebody in the wild who is just truly self-sacrificially loving, even to their enemies, not people who annoy them, but to use the language of Jesus here, their enemies? To find somebody like that, that's very weird. So, what are we talking about when we talk about love in Galatians 5? When Paul says the but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and all that stuff. Well, apparently we're talking about something that isn't just reserved for people who can give you something or love you back. I mean, that alone, before we get into anything more, completely makes the I mean it challenges every notion of love that you hear in society in the often dumpster fire style conversation that we have on the internet. So the love thing it comes up in Matthew. Do we have time for another one? Let's do one more. Um, well, the next one up is Mark. Which one do I want to do for Mark? Let's use Mark for maybe one of the most famous statements on love that Jesus ever makes, and that is in Mark 12. I've read this one a whole bunch. Uh, one of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating, and noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, Of all the commandments, which one's the most important? And this is Mark 12, 28. And Jesus' answer is in verse 29. Well, the most important one he answered is this Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. And the second is this love your neighbor as yourself. There's no commandment greater than these. So Mark, who was a student with Peter, has a little bit of overlap with some of the early missionary work and the book of Acts. He's recording Jesus. And in fairness, this appears in other gospels as well, but he's recording Jesus as saying, the big deal is love God with every element of your being, all you got, and love your neighbor is yourself. We've heard it so many times, and maybe that sounds simple or easy, but this is a profound teaching, especially when coupled with Jesus talking about loving your enemies, and especially when coupled with Paul's detailed description in 1 Corinthians 13, that cross-stitch passage of what love actually looks like and all the things it isn't and all the things that is, we're getting a clearer sense of what all of this means and how all of this fits together. And tomorrow we are gonna spend more time on some of the highlights of what Jesus said about love. And that seems like a great place to leave off. And can't we all agree that this love material here, the last week or so, maybe with the exception of the snow babies thing, but come on, I don't want to do a whole episode ranting about snow babies, but you all don't have to keep sending me snow babies. Is that really loving? That aside, hasn't the last week or so just been delightful talking about all of this? Sometimes you earn the awesome stuff when you go straight through the Bible by grinding through the challenging, super difficult stuff. And don't get me wrong, I mean, the love stuff is challenging too, because even the beautiful description of all that it is, on the one hand, I hear that and I'm like, ah, that's great. I love it. Just to imagine that that concept even exists in the universe, let alone is exudes from God and maybe could never be pulled off by people by their own effort, but God is giving people the ability to do this. I mean, that's just amazing. Also, it's very challenging because I am not always demonstrative of love as I'm seeing it described here throughout the New Testament. So I'm not saying this is necessarily easy, but it's just fun to look at the this gift from God, this attribute that God invented and God owns, and that God is and that God models. And I'm okay with being challenged by it. Well, more on this tomorrow. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon. Jeffrey, that is Things Jesus says about love.