We have so much to cover today. So, so much. I mean, I just I gotta like five things. I'm holding up five fingers on my right hand. This is gonna be a busy one. So let's get started. Number one, congratulations? Is that what you say? I don't know how you wish Catholic Christians goodwill for them having a new Pope, but hey, congrats. It's gotta be it's gotta be weird to not have a Pope for a while, these in-between times. If you're a Catholic Christian, and so I got the sense from a lot of my Catholic friends that you know, there's sort of some anticipation and eagerness, maybe even a little bit of anxiety in that in-between time, wondering what things are gonna look like next, where's the church headed next? So that stuff got settled this week as I'm recording it. There's a new Pope, and so uh I again I don't know if you say like what the universal greeting of new popeness is, but whatever it is, I sincerely offer it. I think you know it's gotta be a really exciting time for Catholic Christians to have a decision like that that's so impactful made. And I thought it was really interesting that the guy's an American. I mean I apparently that's never happened before. And so I learned a little bit more about him. And he was in Chicago when I was in Chicago. I don't know if he went to school there. I don't remember where he went to school, but I mean, you know, rooting for the same teams. They got footage of the Pope at a White Sox playoff game from several years back. That's just, I mean, that's crazy. And I don't know if you know this about American taxes, but you have to pay them. And even if you leave, unless you renounce your citizenship, your taxes follow you. Not all countries work that way, but we're gonna get them taxes. So you can't just not pay them if you become Pope. I think you still have to pay them, which means for the first time ever, the Pope salary is in part getting paid to the United States government. It's just huh. It's just interesting. Never thought about that before. But the white smoke comes out, it's a whole thing, you know, in in the spirit of picking, which has occurred this week. I have also made a pick. And it is not a pick that was arrived at with nearly as much fanfare because it's not nearly as important, but I've picked what book of the Bible we're gonna do next. Season six of this podcast, the next season, the one that's coming up, is it's Philemon. We're gonna do Philemon. You probably saw that coming. Philemon is a teeny tiny little book of the New Testament. I should have looked this up before we did this to see how many actual verses it is. It's like twenty five or something. Tidas and Philemon. I gotta think about it because you gotta look it up. So I got all my tricks for figuring out where books of the Bible are, right? And so if you remember the Bible song that Tidas and Philemon, then it's easy to remember if you combine that with my other trick, which is that all the T books in the Bible, that is books that legit properly start with the letter T, they're all next to each other, and they're all in alphabetical order. First and second Thessalonians, T H, first and second, Timothy, T I, and then Titus, T-I-T-U-S. So then they're in alphabetical order. Look at this. So Titus and then Philemon's right after that. I mean, blink, and you'll miss it. This is a tiny little book. How many verses? Oh my goodness. I look so smart right now. There are 25 verses in Philemon. Jeff, don't you dare edit that out. This is my one chance to have people think I'm competent. I said 25 verses. It's not like 25 verses, homies. It's 25 verses. Spike that football. So we're doing Philemon, and uh there's a few reasons that we want to go this direction next. And if you're like, hey, I don't want a housekeeping day, I want a Bible day like every day. Don't worry, we're getting we're like, we got Bible stuff today, too. That's part of it. Philemon is going to be awesome because we're gonna get the benefit of piggybacking on top of Paul stuff and Acts stuff that we've been doing in this season. It's also awesome because it takes us into a really interesting story that is between the lines of the Bible and the history of the early church. Stuff about uh Philemon and uh the other important character in the book, Onesimus, and the church in Colossae, you have to triangulate to get to all of it. And you can triangulate pretty well, you can figure out how this story works and where it fits in the timeline, but there's an opportunity to learn about how the New Testament narrative is built with the book of Philemon, because we only really get one or two threads after the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15, and then it starts to blur with, I guess, what we would call the end of the Bible and the beginning of post-Bible church history. And so it's going to take us to some really interesting places in terms of just how do we know stuff about what happened in the foundational generations of Christianity, the faith that's been handed down to us. Also, it deals with a topic you and I have touched on a lot, that being slavery and the different types of severity levels of slavery throughout the centuries. And so we're gonna be able to dive deeper into all of that, compare and contrast with what that's looked like in other parts of the world. And on top of that, it also is a book that really challenges a lot of the critiques of the Bible. That means I think the, well, this is pretty mean of me, but I'm just gonna say it. I think the lazy, uninformed internet age take on the Bible, sort of your fashionable 2013, 2014 Dawkins at his height, new atheism era. I mean, look, there are people who very sincerely have struggled with their faith during that time, but let's not joke around. It's also been internet fashionable to not believe in God. And it was especially internet fashionable there for seven or eight years in the 20 teens, less so now. But one of the big critiques that is still with us from that age is that the Bible is very backwards, and the Bible has backwards values compared to our very recent and very enlightened values that we've come up with here in the last few years and are now absolutely immutable. People say things like that, the Bible's mean to women, the Bible promotes slavery and all of these other bad things. Well, does it actually? I mean, you push somebody on that, and you go, well, okay, just walk me through your complex, robust biblical interpretation and your understanding of scripture and history and how it all works, and tell me what the Bible actually thinks about slavery. And if you push on that, you usually discover that there's not a lot of meat behind it. I mean, people who don't like God don't tend to study the Bible real hard, and that makes perfect sense. As a result, some of these critiques just linger out there and they're never really thought about. Well, my argument would be that Philemon demonstrates probably the first anti-slavery sentiment in any meaningful way that got any meaningful traction in the history of ever. There's some light pushback that we'll explore from a few philosophers whose influence didn't go much beyond their own bubble in Greece and in the early Roman age. But what Paul is doing in Philemon, his view of the value of a human and uh how a Christian social order, a society in general, ought to look, this is so weird and so different. And if he'd come out and used language like we use now, you know, like the kind of language that got used in the wake of George Floyd situation or the riots in LA when I was a little kid or anything like that, it just would it wouldn't have made any sense to anybody. So of course it doesn't sound like how we talk about social issues today because it's at an entirely different time and the language was totally different. But a close look at Philemon takes us to some really interesting places and takes us to some really interesting things in terms of the gospel and how all of that works. That was quite the long sales pitch. I really hope that you will hang around with me and do the Philemon thing. It obviously, you know, it's 25 verses. I mean, so how many episodes can that possibly be? Like not very many, probably like 200, 400. I don't know, it can't be heavy. Okay, probably not that much. So Philemon is coming up. That book is going to be fantastic. We're going to get more payoff from Paul, and we're also going to see how Paul's thinking, how his ministry, how his work is developing, and how it's paying off, because Philemon happens closer to the end of his life. Galatians is representative of his early work. And somewhere in between there, we get the letter to the Romans, which we're going to be poking around at today and tomorrow again, which I think demonstrates uh refining of Paul's thought. Not that Galatians was sloppy and bad, it's that the circumstances that Paul is writing to with the Roman church, they're different. I mean, they're just different. So he maybe doesn't have the same urgent burst into the room, stop that ceremony right there, kind of pressure going on in his communication with the Romans that he does to the Galatians. So it gives him the chance to flesh out, no pun intended, some of the very important underlying concepts that he's dealing with in Galatians. So in particular, tomorrow, we're going to be looking at the second half of Romans 7 and into the beginning of Romans 8. And we're going to be thinking about how neatly that dovetails with what we've got going on in Galatians as we are rounding the corner from the strongly corrective part of this letter into the constructive proposal part of the letter of Galatians. And what is the constructive proposal? Well, it's life by the Spirit, Galatians 5, 16. So, there's one of those hint words. It's like, hey, in conclusion, in light of everything I just said, uh, ranging from Abraham to Hagar and Sarai to don't get circumcised, to the stuff about the law being a tutor and a teacher, and slavery and freedom, and in light of my meeting with Peter and everything, in light of everything. So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. That's your practical, constructive proposal for how to move forward. That's what we're getting into next. And I'm gonna let Paul do a little bit of the heavy lift on setting this up further with what he has to say to the church in Rome next time around. So, in summary, congratulations to Catholic Christians for picking a pope. That's awesome. Don't know quite how to do that. I don't know if there's like a greeting card or like a salute that I do, but whatever it is, I mean that. Goodwill to you. And obviously, I am rooting for the gospel and kingdom success of your church and your new leader. And I hope it goes awesome. Thing number two. Oh, I forgot. Dang it, I forgot thing number. Thing number two is gonna be hey, my wife's a great mom, and my mom's a great mom, and I'm recording this on Mother's Day, and not in any shallow, flaky, sentimental way, but in just a real, real way. I am so grateful for the moms in my life. It's so much more than the little acts of service, that's so much of it, but the intentionality, the steadiness, the thoughtfulness, the formation, the investment, I'm just incredibly grateful. And even though whoever you might be, I mean, you're not my mom, but I'm grateful to you as well for the momming that you're doing. And um, even if your kids don't know how to articulate it yet because they're little, they're grateful too. So, okay, one, we got the Pope thing, two, we got the moms, that's awesome. Three, we got Philemon. Philemon is up next, which of course means that everybody who's a patron is about to get a mailing here in uh a couple weeks or whatever, where you get the Galatians achievement unlocked sticker. More on that later. And I think we're gonna do another book, even for Philemon. We mail out a little book in between seasons so you can jot down notes and things like that. So we got Philemon coming up. And uh then we're gonna go support Paul's constructive proposal that is the thought that dominates the end of the book of Galatians with a bit of time in Romans Magnana. Look at this. I said we had a lot to do. We did a lot. We're out of here in a reasonable amount of time, and I wish you a magnificent Monday if you're listening to this in real time. If you're not listening to this in real time and it's not a Monday as we're talking, I don't even know what to say to you. I because I don't know what day it is, so I don't know what to I I'm just at a loss. I hope all of you are doing wonderfully. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again, sir.