Um if you've been around the Bible for a while, you've been around people talking about the Bible for a while, you've seen this phenomenon where sometimes people, maybe with the best of intentions, I don't know, but sometimes it seems like people will pit one part of the Bible, one part of the New Testament, against another part of the New Testament. I've heard a lot of people over the course of my life pit Paul against Jesus and make an argument that goes something like this. Well, uh, there's a thing in culture that you don't like, and you're citing verses that Paul wrote, but I don't see Jesus talking about this thing. And if I don't hear from Jesus, then I'm not sure I'm gonna go with you on that, because maybe Paul, you know, implicitly what they're saying is maybe Paul was getting this wrong, and maybe Paul isn't on the same side as Jesus here. Okay, I get the argument. The Bible really gets into our business, everybody's grappling with it. To me, the problem with this, and maybe I've done this at some point, I hope not. I'm not trying to do this, but the the problem with this is that it assumes that the Bible isn't a unified document. It assumes that parts are not from God and other parts are from God. Or some parts are more from God and other parts are less from God. Historically, the church Christians have said it's all from God. Scripture affirms each other. So, you know, it's yeah, it's a little problematic. It's you know you're kind of cutting off the branch on which you sit, I think, a little bit, if as a Christian you make such arguments. Well, there's always been debates about what is loving to your neighbor and what is not, what is loving to another person and what is not, what is a proper expression of love and what is not. Here's one that always makes everybody mad when I talk about it on the podcast. And I'm going to shoot this right down the middle so you can't even tell what my opinion might have been on this. But there are some people who said that it is fundamentally unloving not to follow the instructions that were handed down for how to mitigate the spread of COVID when we were early on in that. There were other people who said, no, those strategies are wrong, therefore it would be fundamentally unloving to do those mitigation approaches. Well, that's a pretty big disagreement about what actually is and is not loving. And of course, that was a pretty tough one to sort through with just Bible verses alone, because the fundamentals of how that disease actually works would really affect how you would apply scripture to it. So I bring that example up to demonstrate and just try to be charitable here and say, look, some of the argumentation about how love ought to be and what exactly it means, and what does Galatians 5 mean when it says love is one of the fruits of the Spirit, some of that debate might be off-putting to you or me, but it's coming from a place of fairness, even if you don't see the world exactly the same way as your conversation partner, it's coming from a place of genuine wrestling. Some other times, yeah, maybe it is a little bit disingenuous, and such argumentation pits different parts of the Bible against each other. We want to try to avoid that with a concept as important as love. And maybe you figured this out about me, but because we have all the time in the world with these seasons, and because we can just linger on one word as I guess as much as we want until you get bored and you all leave, we have the ability to do something that maybe you can't do on Sunday morning, or you can't do if you have a podcast where you just have one day to work on it and you really got on get on to the next thing. You know, ultimately, hey, it's the internet, it's a podcast. We can just look at a large volume of things in the Bible that clarify and speak to something we want clarity on. What is love as God defines it? And then, hey, God bless you, my friend. Go and do with that what you need. So we're in the midst of just taking a broad look at what the New Testament says about love and who says it. And are all the messengers, all the human authors of the New Testament, are they all saying the same thing? Well, yesterday we looked at more stuff from Paul. In particular, 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter, the one that probably comes to mind for everybody when they think about love. And that was awesome yesterday. What a great passage 1 Corinthians 13 is, especially in light of what we're working on, because it's just like you double-clicked on the word love in the fruits of the spirit. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control against such things. There is no law. That's Galatians 5.22, that's where we're at. And 1 Corinthians 13 is just this wonderful expansion, a list within a list to help us get a great sense of what the Bible means when it says love. Well, there's a bunch of other stuff here that Paul does, and we're not going to look at all of it, we're going to look at some of it. Let's look at another letter we've checked in on quite a bit, that being Romans. And we're going to do Romans 5 5. And hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us. So Paul thinks love has that long list of rich, very nuanced attributes that we looked at yesterday in 1 Corinthians 13. Also, he thinks that the love we have on our lives is something that's given to us by the Holy Spirit. It's poured out by God, by the Holy Spirit. It's a gift of God. And in this very same passage, words like rejoicing and hope and the glory of God and rejoicing in suffering and suffering that produces perseverance. Perseverance produces character and character hope and hope doesn't disappoint us. Why? Well, again, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. All of these ideas are held together by love throughout the Bible. We get such a rich, full picture of what this is. Let's jump over to more stuff from Paul. Go eat popcorn, Galatians, versions, Philippians, Colossians 314. And uh wouldn't you know it? This one spans a page. Here we go. I'm gonna back it up a little bit. Let's do three twelve. Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you, and over all these virtues, put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. That's powerful for the project we're working on here. What is love according to the Bible? I mean, so far we've only looked at the writings of Paul in the Bible on that. We'll get to more later. But what is love according to the New Testament? Well, it's something that binds together all of those other beautiful things on that virtue list. Yeah, God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved. So love bookends this list. Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive us the Lord forgave you. I mean, it's easy to just let these Bible words roll over us. And maybe the way I'm reading it isn't doing you a service, because I am kind of just lilting through it and letting these lists of virtues roll freely in a cadence. But man, pause and think about all that stuff. That's what you want, right? That's what you want from your husband or your wife. That's what you want from your kids who you care about. That's what you want to give to your kids. That's what you want from your parents, right? That's what you want from your best friend. That's what you want from your serious boyfriend, your serious girlfriend. You don't have one of those yet. That's what you hope is in your life at some point. That's what you want from your community, from your team, from your classmates, from the people you spend the most time with socially. You want compassion, kindness, humility. This is what you want from the people you hang out with on the internet, even. You want gentleness and patience. You want people who bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. You basically want the opposite of religious and political discourse on the internet, where the lowest brows and the lowest hanging fruit just gin up clicks by doing the opposite of everything on this list all the time. Go look at the thumbnails in your feed on YouTube. Do they exhibit these things? No, they exhibit the opposite of these things, because that gets clicks. But this is what we actually want. And what binds it up all together, I mean, isn't that just a wonderful turn of a phrase, by the way? And overall, these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. You imagine like a disparate collection of scrolls all being brought together and bound together into one corpus, or you imagine uh a bunch of things that you can't, they're all good, but it's just too much. Your hands are full. You can't hold it all at once. You're fumbling all of these things, these precious things you want to keep. But along comes love, which is this cord that you wrap around all of them and lets you hold all of these things that would otherwise slip through your fingers, slip through your arms. You also have that phrase bind up. You think of that as you're almost being like a nurse. Somebody cares about somebody else binding up the wounds. You hear the word bind even in scripture. Sometimes that's how you read it, and maybe that's what it means here. Maybe I'm just reading into the imagery, but that is a beautiful passage from Paul describing not just what love is, but what love does and what love does to the other beautiful attributes that we want in our lives and that we cherish and that we admire when we see it in others, and that we regret when we do the opposite, or we don't give away those beautiful things that we want for ourselves. Like I said last time, love is like gold, it's bigger than normal, natural things. It feels like it's from another world, another cosmos, like it was delivered here, like it's a space metal, a gift from something bigger than us, and all of those beautiful things on that list in Colossians 13 are bound together by it, flow out of it, are expressions of it. Love is just one word. The Bible makes no sense without it, and the Bible makes all the sense in the world with it. Why would anybody do all of the stuff that's happening in here? Why would anybody do a redemptive plan at their own expense that involves going to the cross, bearing the collective guilt of all of humanity? Why would you do that? Contractually, there's nothing that could balance that out. There's no deal or bargain that could be struck that would make such behavior on the part of God work. How do you explain his behavior? Well, he explains it love. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever would believe in him would not perish but have eternal life. It's John 3.16. You know that one. There's so much more love stuff from Paul in the New Testament, First Thessalonians opens with beautiful stuff about love. I'm just flipping through seeing what I find. Ephesians, wow, Ephesians at the front end, Ephesians at the back end has beautiful love stuff. Philippians 2 has stuff about love and the example of love and humility from Christ. And uh it wraps up with an exhortation to have peace and to treat people. I mean, I can do this all day. All the Paul stuff keeps coming back to contrasting loving and unloving, but we're gonna move on to other New Testament authors tomorrow as we continue to just use sheer volume to help each of us better nuance and understand what is meant by this one all-important word and concept at the front end of the fruits of the spirit list, that being love. We got more to come. Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.