This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast question. How many of you can reel off the fruits of the spirit in order right off the top of your head? Right now, rock and fire, let it rip. Maybe you remember them from Bible camp or memory verses that you did, maybe Sunday school, maybe your super tender-hearted, Bible-loving grandma or grandpa who always took you to church and was like, you're this is gonna matter someday. Let's learn this stuff and remember it. Maybe they give you little Bible books or something. Or maybe you know the song. I'm acting like I know the song, or like there is a the song for the fruit of the spirit. I don't know a song. There's gotta be a song, right? This is the most obvious thing in the Bible to make a song about. I mean, for crying out loud, it's less obvious than the Romans 16-19 song. How did Romans 16 19 get a song? Romans, how does it go? Romans 16, 19 says, Be excellent in what is good, be innocent of evil. And I think you just say that again. There's more to Romans 16, 19 than that. No, Matt, you're getting distracted. The point is there's gotta be a song for the fruit of the spirit thing. And I bet a lot of you, when I asked you the question, do you know what the fruit of the spirit are from Galatians 5, 22 and forward? You started singing a song in your head. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, and patience, kindness, goodness. I don't that did not rhyme. That had no melody. I hope someone's done better at some point. Please send me a message and sing me the song if you're aware of one. Here's how the verse actually goes, whether you remembered it or not. This is it. Ready? 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. So I know for some of you, you're like, no, that's the first time I've ever heard that verse in my entire life. This is all brand new to me. Don't feel weird. It's awesome. I'm glad you're here. You didn't need to know this coming in. We're covering it now. So, hey, there it is. This is one of the all-time beloved verses or passages, rather, in the whole Bible. But for those of you who have read it a lot, or maybe you know the song that I don't know, it has a lilt to it, doesn't it? There's just a rhythm that you get into. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I think I had somebody tell me once that there's a certain poetry to this particular list that maybe was a result of Paul. I don't think of Paul, the author of Galatians, as being super poetic, I guess, but I do think of him as quoting from poems. I mean, he was knowledgeable about music and rhythm and rhyme and stuff. Philippians 2 has that famous passage about Jesus that is probably an ancient Christian hymn or something, that also has a beautiful rhythm that you get into, who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking on the very nature of his servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Even translated over to the English from the original Greek, you can still hear the rhythm of that one. And that's part of my love about this fruit of the Spirit passage as well, is that there's a there's a cadence to it that makes it stick. It's a really sticky passage. And I think that's great because it's a really important passage and a beautiful passage that we get to spend the next few days talking about. And frankly, I love the fact that the previous list, the sin list, the acts of the flesh, the acts of the sinful nature, is an absolute mess in terms of cadence. It's all over the place. It's dissident, it clashes. You don't get into rhythm with it and be like, and the acts of the sinful nature are obvious. Sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy drunkenness and orgies. That did not work. I hope that does not stick in your head. The point I was trying to make is that it's a very clunky list that rhythmically doesn't work. And obviously I didn't have enough syllables left for the orgies part at the end. I'm doing my best here. We don't do two takes on music things. You just get what you get. The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I have had it pointed out to me that even if Paul wasn't doing this in the first place, because you'd have to go and think through, you know, what would be all the Greek words and syllable counts for that, that the way it works in English, it's building, it's crescendoing. You're going from monosyllabic to longer monosyllabic to bisyllabic, dual syllabic, two syllable words, and then on up to a compound word, self-control or hyphenated word. So they just get bigger and longer and the rhythm works beautifully. And I think that's great. I think that is a gift from God. Something about the way the Bible works that it gives you the impression that this is meant to stick with you. Why is this list such a big deal? Okay. Reason number one, let's just go with immediate context. It's a big deal because it's a drink of cool water in the desert of a pretty aggressive letter that is, for as many times as I've read it, I just don't think I internalized how harsh and how tough this letter is to work through until I tried to do it in front of a whole bunch of people all at once. It's tough. This letter has challenged me. It's been difficult. It's challenged me spiritually. It's challenged me intellectually, it's challenged me in trying to put myself in the shoes of the original audience in a part of the world we don't know quite as much about as we do some of the parts of the world that other parts of the New Testament are directed at. It's been tough. But also the letter's very understandable. And the part, you know, once you get to understand it, it's a difficult letter because of what it says. And because so much of what it says, I mean, if I'm to be completely honest, feels like sort of a direct critique of me right now or me at other points in my life. So, you know, hey, here we are. We've put on a brave face and we have soldiered through Galatians together. We've made it fun, I'd like to think. We just went through a brutal stretch, looking at all the sin lists of the Bible and the acts of the sinful nature, the acts of the flesh from that previous passage I just sang to you in what might be the most enchanting song ever composed by humankind. And it stings. It's a tough list. Something on that list is gonna hit you. Something on that list is gonna hit a little too close to home. It's gonna remind you of something you wish it didn't remind you of. Yeah, me too. We're in that boat together. But here we hit that cool drink of water in the desert. Finally, we get some clarity of what that life by the spirit looks like. Okay, great. There's the hallmarks of what's screwed up. What are the hallmarks of what's beautiful? Walk me through that in a way that I can remember. Well, here it finally is. And when you hear the list, I don't know about you, but when I picture people who exhibit every single thing on this list, most of them are older. Most of them are people I met when they are older. Most of them are people who I imagine did not always exhibit that list entirely. Yeah, maybe they did. Some people are just freaks. I mean, they they just got some kind of crazy, amazing inherent gift toward love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It just happened. But I'd like to imagine that most of the people I've met who exhibit this, it happened over time. It was a work of God in their lives. And there is, you know, for me, gentleness is the one that stands out. Everybody I know who I would say, oh, yeah, wow, they're that, they're that, they're that, yeah, all of that fruit is there. They're also not haughty about it. It's not a big deal. Like they're not advertising it. And that's where the gentleness comes in. There's an ease, uh being at peace in one's own skinness to the people I've seen who exhibit all of this stuff. It's very admirable. It's very inviting. You look at that and you go, I don't know that I could ever be that. I don't know how one necessarily attains that. It's hard to see what the straight road is to really living all of these things out and having all of this fruit be on display. But man, when you see it, it is compelling. And I bet you're picturing someone right now in your life who has lived these things out. And more than even having to do so intentionally, this is another reason why I think this is a beautiful passage and I love it, is that it doesn't say, but the commands of the spirit are, or but the spirit commands us, no matter how hard it is, to find strategies and accountability to muster the capacity to at least fake, but hopefully actually mean love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I mean, self-control is on the list. But the word is fruit. What a weird image. And notice before it didn't say the fruit of the sinful nature or the fruit of the flesh is obvious. Those are acts indicating that's crap you do. Indicating maybe to some degree uh that isn't necessarily you. That isn't the final defining aspect, the final word on your identity, on who you are. The stuff that Jeff was talking about yesterday when I called him for a minute. But there's a huge contrast here between the two lists, and that the one is saying the acts is an outgrowth of thing. I mean, it kind of reads like fruit contextually. I guess you could kind of lump the two together. But the word is the word, the acts of the sinful nature versus the fruit of the spirit. Why does fruit work? At least to the untrained eye, it just kind of happens, right? And that's another reason I love this passage. And that's another reason that I'm glad that this list is sticky. The previous list, despite how catchy that song I just wrote was, tends to not be as sticky. It's because fruit is just an outgrowth of a thing. You don't really have to coach up a healthy apple tree to apple. They're gonna happen. If the thing is an apple tree genetically, and you know, that apples should happen. That's a clear indication that it is what it is, and in some way uh it's healthy. Well, but that's kind of the deal here. This really isn't, it can't be construed what we're gonna be looking at here, the fruit of the spirit. It can't be construed as a New Testament Ten Commandments. Well, it's like the Ten Commandments. You got love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Well, that's that's nine, but if you split out self and control, it's like ten. It's the numerology, it's like the ten commandments. It's look what we did there. Let's find a way to shoehorn all ten of those into matching with the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament. And then Galatians, it's like it's like it's fulfilling the Old Testament law by giving us a new Ten Commandments. It just isn't. This is a different thing. These aren't a list of commandments. This is stuff that just sort of happens. These are indicators, these are outgrowths, these are things to look at and give God thanks for that this is happening. This is what happens when the spirit is indwelling somebody and they're a new creation, and the old is gone and the new is come. Now, look, it is not hard to read through the rest of the New Testament and be like, oh, well, clearly, though, you can be a Christian and still do stupid crap. Yep. Uh no, there's a lot of stuff in here that indicates that. Peter was pretty definitely a Christian when he did not demonstrate the fruits of the Spirit three or four chapters earlier here, when he was being a turd at dinner in Antioch, and Paul had to straighten him out. But I think Peter was probably definitely a Christian at that point, right? So, okay, there's no mystery here as to the reality that sometimes this fruit might not pop as much as others in the life of a Christian. Sometimes Christians might do stupid stuff, but this is the stuff that gives you a little glimpse into the supernatural. When you see this in a person, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, when you see that, it's from God. It's a kind of a miracle. I mean, you're you're seeing a much more transcendent, much more meaningful, miraculous work of God to take something that was dead and dry bones, that being someone who's a slave to sin and death and dead under the law, and brought him back to life, and not just like a zombie back to life, but like thriving back to life with beautiful attributes. So there's a ton of reasons that I adore this passage. And one of the reasons is not because I do all this and am all this all the time, but rather because it's a beautiful list of beautiful things that I want to see in others, that I want to see in myself, and that I know I struggle to muster all the time. But this is fruit, meaning that someone much more powerful than me, something much bigger than me, is at work and powerfully nurturing and bringing out this beautiful stuff, this transcendent stuff. So we had a lot to talk about here, and it's gonna be fun. And I look forward to finding out what the song is about the fruit of the spirit, because I probably should have known that before now. All right, that's plenty. Uh Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.