Um I would wager that at some point you've been in the middle of a weird, unhealthy gossip circle where everybody was talking about everybody else and jockeying for positions socially. And maybe you would aren't the one who started it, but you got into it and then you were playing the game, and then at some point it felt icky. Hopefully because you figured out it was icky, but maybe because somebody had to tell you that was a bad feeling. I've been a part of that. I've been a part of environments where stuff goes, I the term that used to get used so often was toxic. Things go toxic. But it happens at church, and that's worse than when it happens on a baseball team or in a circle of friends. I think church is the most disheartening place where you have that gossip feeding frenzy like a bunch of piranhas with meat in the water. When it happens at church, it's just gross, oh, it's disheartening. Sometimes I've nobly been on the outside looking in, but no, I've been swept up in that stuff too. Heck, I've probably stoked it, imagining or you know, crafting for myself in my brain righteous narratives about how I was protecting something good or doing something good. I mean, we always find this sophisticated language to justify when we get caught up in this stuff or when we make this stuff happen. It's gross, it's destructive, and the Bible doesn't like it. Jesus doesn't like it. The Bible's pretty dang overt about how that ain't it. This is not a mark of the values of the kingdom. And yet, the Bible is also delightfully unpollyannish about stuff in terms of what you're gonna get at church and how people are. I think it's my buddy Jeff who's gonna edit this. Jeff has said before that sometimes people say, you know, the church is full of hypocrites. And his answer is yes, and we have room for one more. I mean, he's not being flippant there. It's kind of in keeping with the teaching of the scriptures, with the teaching of Jesus, that yeah, there are these values of the kingdom, and this is what we aspire to. And when you have a transformed life, that's how it should be. And there's a whole lot of that that manifests in Christians, but also the text is upfront about the reality that sometimes there's going to be stuff that goes way wrong for the church from without, and there's gonna be stuff that goes way wrong from the church from within. Now, if you've ever been a part of that, I mean it just feels awful, leaves this weird hollow feeling in your stomach, and you're like, well, is everything fake? I mean, it can really mess with you when you go through something like that, especially because normally you don't realize you're going through it until you're too far into it, and then it's sort of this moment like the end of the usual suspects or whatever, you know, the scales fall from your eyes, then the rooster crows for the third time, and you go, What the heck? I was just a part of a stupid church thing. I can't believe I fell for that. And then it it feels icky, and a lot of times churches will scatter and break up and all of that. But it's really interesting that Jesus himself, he doesn't use the word church very much, but in the book of Matthew, you know, one of the five big speeches around which that book is built is the church discourse in Matthew 18. And a whole lot of that is dedicated to how to put it back together when things go wrong, what to do when somebody sins against you, how to try to manage things so it doesn't spiral into weird gossipy stuff, but what to do if it does. And then just so that none of us would be under the illusion that Christians are just gonna nail everything and there'll be no hypocrisy in church, just so nobody starts to imagine that'll be the case, really early on in the book of Acts. I mean, you have amazing just win after win after win, and then 3,000 people signed up, and then 4,000 people signed up, and then the Holy Spirit did this miracle. And then the Sanhedrin brought in Peter, and they're like, You gotta stop it. And he was like, Should we obey you or obey God? We're gonna obey God, and they're like, We're gonna flog you. And then Peter's like, All right, and then he gets flogged, and he's like, Cool, I got flogged. I mean, it's just amazing. Stuff keeps happening, and the motives are right and spirits are high. And then some people come in and they lie about supporting the church. They act like they're going all in like everybody else and sacrificing everything to be a part of the church, but they didn't at all. They wanted all the benefits, but none of the sincere sacrifice and laying down their rights to serve you know their fellow members of their church, and they die in church. So I mean, the Bible, again, in the Gospels and then again in Acts, is not shy about the fact that things will go wrong in church. And then the letters, my goodness, have you read the New Testament? The epistles, that's a fancy word for the letters of the New Testament. Pretty much all of these are an open book acknowledgement that, like, hey, just we're cool with those of you who aren't Christians reading all of this material. But just so you know, like we're we're just putting it out there, things go wrong sometimes in church, and then we have to reorient ourselves to the truest, realist thing to pull it back together. Sometimes it's pretty clunky. I mean, literally the entire book that we're working on right now, Galatians, is the Bible acknowledging that things can go sideways in church? Well, they can go sideways a lot of different ways. I mean, false teaching, Galatians deals with that. I mean, it comes up in most of the letters of the New Testament, really. Pride comes up a lot. Also, the stuff we've been talking about here, gossip and slander and little factions and all of this. I mean, church, I think, is better than what I've seen in other environments I've been in. But when it goes wrong, it hurts worse than when it goes wrong at work or on the baseball team or at school or in a circle of friends or whatever, because the expectations are higher. You expect there to be some sort of group adherence to the principles and for people not to lose their minds at church. But when they do, uh, you know, yikes is pretty screwed up. In the whole book of Galatians, Paul is unshy about acknowledging that factions have clearly happened here. There is a fight going on, and at times, as I've been talking about it, um certain scenes, I think it's kind of made sense to characterize it to help you visualize it as you know, you got Paul on the one side, and you got the leaders of the Judaizers on the other side, and you got the poor, innocent, naive Galatians who don't know better. And I think to some extent that's true. But also, I mean, Paul's pretty hard on them at times. Like he says, Who has bewitched you? But he is also like, I'm bewildered by you. How could you fall for this stuff? So he's using both kinds of language. People did something to you, but also you guys are a problem. You're not getting things right, you're not following Jesus properly, so much of the book of Galatians, is just Paul breaking down the anatomy of how they're getting it wrong. But when we get to Galatians 5, we discover that part of what Paul is calling out is the malice that is metastasized within the Galatian church itself. It's not, here's Paul's letter on one side, and the religious leaders and pro-circumcision crowd on the other side making their case and the poor, naive, confused, huddled masses of the church, like we just don't know what to do. We're paralyzed, we're frozen. No, the intonation from Paul is you have factions, you have pride, you have ownership of these mistakes. I mean, it's kind of a wild contrast. God has, on the one hand, opened the eyes of the Galatian Christians to see him, to understand the gospel, to become aware of their sin through the power of the Holy Spirit, through the presence of the law, even, God has done that. But then on the other hand, they also clearly still have the capacity to do stuff that is the opposite of God's will, and the opposite of how God wants people to treat each other, and the opposite of stuff that looks like the values of the kingdom and that emulates Christ. So as we've been in Galatians 5 here, understandably, a lot of our conversation's been big picture theological stuff. Some of our conversation has been very practical stuff about like what Paul's trying to say and how he's trying to intervene. But I want to just step back a little bit and look at these three verses we've been lingering on for a bit here and just see them as a critique from Paul. He is saying, you guys are fighting too much, you guys are giving in to gossips and faction and ick, and you might feel like you can do that forever, but you can't. You will destroy each other, you will destroy your church, you will destroy this outpost of the larger Christian community if you keep doing this crap. I maybe I've read all these verses already, I'm just gonna read them again. Uh Galatians 5.13. You, my brothers, were called to be free, but don't use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature. Rather, serve one another in love. Okay, we've interpreted that verse one of the two ways it needs to be interpreted so far, and that is in light of uh you know circumcision and telling the truth to each other theologically and all of that. But there's also pretty clearly a nod here that they haven't been serving one another in love. They've been decidedly unloving toward each other, or he wouldn't be saying this. You guys, I'm not telling you you have all this freedom, so you can be awful to each other. I'm telling you you have all this freedom. Don't indulge it for screwed up stuff. Instead, use the liberty you have in Christ to serve one another proactively and lovingly, the exact opposite of the way you guys have been behaving. Let's keep going, verse 14. The entire law is summed up in a single command: love your neighbor as yourself. So Paul is pulling them back from the brink. Yeah, there's a lot of theology and knowledge to talk about here, and you might imagine that your theological readiness somehow gives you license to be awful to other Christians, but it doesn't, because the biggest, most easy to understand, simplest truth in all of this is the commandment Jesus affirmed as being the greatest one, which is love the Lord your God with all you got, and love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets are summed up in these, verse 15. If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out, or you will be destroyed by each other. That's a powerful line. And there'd be no reason for Paul to say that if the Galatians were the huddled masses confused as their two sets of spiritual parents or bickering. No, Paul views the Galatians as a belligerent in this fight. He views them as having ownership here. Yeah, God opened their eyes to see and to understand as God does for anybody, but also they chose sin. They chose to be unloving to their brothers and sisters. Unloving how? Well, by indulging in falsehood, a false gospel, by being disobedient to the commands of Christ, and by being cruel and mean and gossipy to each other. Just another page over here, and maybe the most famous part of the entire book at the end of chapter five. We're going to get the fruit of the spirit. And if you go and look at that, you'll notice that a whole lot of what Paul says is the fruit of the spirit. It's all fruit that is relational in nature, getting things right with other people, getting things right with other people at church. So Paul apparently he thinks that these Galatians imagine that they can just do this ad infinitum, forever and ever and ever to each other, that they can keep taking chunks out of each other's hide, that they can keep saying horrible things, that they can keep probably I mean, you've been in fights, you've been in gossip fights, right? What happens? Uh you leverage people against other people. You don't give the benefit of the doubt to things other people said and did. You have lengthy conversations where you just, I mean, it feels like a burden, you know, you act like it's a burden, but deep down you just can't wait to catch up on what everybody else has heard. When you get sucked into this vortex of sinful, destructive gossip, that's how it goes. These guys were no doubt engaged in that kind of stuff. And the illusion they're living under is that they can take those kind of bites, those shots at each other infinitely, and the status quo will hold. Paul is saying it won't. There is an end to this. It can be too much, and when it is too much, you'll have nothing left. You'll just wreck this beautiful thing that is supposed to be this outpost, this city on a hill, this light that can't be hidden, you know, out here in the middle of Galatia, and you guys are about to run the whole thing into the ground to your own detriment and to the detriment of others. I can tell right now this conversation that just this passage is taking us in a direction we don't normally go, which is toward the what do we do with this now part? But I mean, look at what the text is saying. This is timeless, this is practical, this is stuff that I think we're supposed to think about, and I'm going to engage with that a little bit tomorrow. So uh we're gonna pick up where we left off tomorrow. We're just gonna round out the thoughts on the passage, and then we're just gonna think about just a little bit, and thank you in advance for indulging me a little bit. What do I do with this? What do you do with this? What do you do with hurt in church? What do you do when something goes wrong? What does forgiveness look like? What does it look like to get it figured out and do it better? Yeah, more on that tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.