You're listening to the 10-minute Bible number podcast. It's best on the free daily deep minute Bible. And right now we're talking about Galatians.
SPEAKER_00My kids are not fighting at all. They just won't do it. And I think you're supposed to fight with your siblings like a lot because maybe it teaches you life lessons or something. I don't know this for sure. I've watched a lot of sitcoms and family movies, and in it all the kids seem to fight a lot, and somehow in the end, maybe it was good for them. Is it weird? Maybe I should pit them against each other with a bunch of contrived situations to get them to bicker more, move them toward pitched physical combat, you know, like to develop character or something. But I just can't get them to do it. They like each other a lot and they like hanging out and they're always nice to each other and helping each other. It's not like it was with me and my siblings at all. We fought all the time, you know, put hair on my chest. It was good for me. And then it toughened us all up a whole bunch. Or at least that's what I tell myself. Deep down, I guess I probably actually have regrets about fighting with my siblings and arguing with them a lot. It did turn out great. We all loved each other a bunch. My brother passed away. That didn't have anything to do with us fighting. It was a car accident. I think it was an I wasn't there. It wasn't any, like we're all very sad. We miss him a lot. He was awesome. But when we were all together and kidhood was all done, there were a lot of high fives all around. I think we all felt like that was a pretty good thing. But it was hard-earned. Mom and dad had to work with us a lot, and they had different principles that they would give each of us to help us not be so mean to each other and cut each other a little slack, give each other some grace, be a little bit forgiving. But we had, you know, we had pretty serious rivalries. I rivalry with my sister sometimes. I remember my dad when he would sit me down. I would always try to be very clever and weasley, and I'd have all these clever phrases and I'd spin up these narratives that I mean technically were generally true. I don't I don't think I lied or anything. But the narratives were very framed, you know, like the way a catcher frames a pitch to make it look like a strike, even though it was kind of on the edge. I was pretty good at that as a kid. And dad got sick of it, and he would cut through that by saying, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, I don't care about how your whole story works. I don't care about your characters and your narrative, and she said this and you did this. I want to talk about what you did. Simple question, son. Was that loving toward your sister? Well, but she hung up the phone, and I was talking with my friend because she wanted to be on the phone, and you'd already told her that Matthew was what you did, loving to your sister. I need a yes or a no. No. No, Dad, it was not loving to my sister. Okay, that's what I care about. You gotta get that right. You gotta get that straightened out. You're not being loving to your sister, and you think that your narratives and your stories and all of these elaborate frictions that you feel, and somebody did this and somebody did that. You think that somehow it trumps you simply doing the simple thing that you know is right, which is love your sister, and you didn't do that again, and I need you to do it. And dad eventually got through to me, and I love my sister very much. I think she's just absolutely the best. I think so highly of her. But I was selfish as a kid at times, and I needed my dad to pound that idea into my head. Forget your stupid narratives. What is the actual point here? Love my sister. Likewise, Paul's doing the same thing with the Galatians here in Galatians chapter five. There's been a lot of narratives spun up, a lot of so-and-so said this. Well, these guys from Jerusalem said that. Well, there was another traveling apostle who came through, and his opinion was kind of this. And we got a letter from somebody else that said that. And a couple of the elders here at one of these churches in one of these Galatian cities said this, but these other people said that, but they thought they actually said this, and then they got into a big fight, and then one of their wives got mad at one of the other wives, and some of their kids got angry about it, and then they wouldn't even go to the shop that the other people owned anymore. And we had to have somebody stop with your stupid drama story for two seconds, I sense that Paul is saying. Are you being loving to your brothers and sisters? Yeah, but they you should they said, but the thing that happened, okay, you didn't, but they called on Tuesday, but they said they called on Monday, but it was actually Tuesday, so they couldn't. Guys, are you being loving to your brothers and sisters in Christ? Yes or no? No. Okay. Above all else, I'm gonna need you to love one another deeply. You have to imitate Christ's love for the church, and you have to give that away to each other. Or to put it more precisely, 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. The entire law is summed up in a single command, love your neighbor as yourself. Do you hear what Paul's saying there in that phrase? The entire law is summed up in a single command, love your neighbor as yourself. That's Galatians 5, what are we on, 14 at this point? I mean, you can just hear him being like, oh my goodness. There's all these debates about the law and the rules and the interpretation and how it ought to be and how much circumcising we need to do. And you're forgetting the most fundamental thing. Paul's like, I'm writing this to a letter in Corinth. I'm dealing with the Corinthians on this as well. Love. That's the greatest of these things. That's the big thing, that's the trademark of the Christian love. And you're not doing it. So all of your talk about the law and all of the agitators' talk about all of the finer points and details of this and their charts and facts and figures that they've all accumulated and assembled to present to you, to wow you with their superior knowledge, is any of this producing love? The Apostle John would go on to write a book basically exactly this theme: First John. So much of 1 John is a test for orthodoxy and getting it right in the church is do you love other Christians? Is it loving? I mean, Paul says that if I can speak in mystical languages like the tongues that the apostles spoke with on the day of Pentecost, if I can predict the future and prophesy things, and if I'm the smartest of all and I know all of the mysterious ideas and the super secret conspiracies and nobody else knows, and I have all of the great faith and I can do miraculous things better than anybody else, but I don't have love, even if I'm deeply performatively self-sacrificial for religious looking things, but I don't have love. I'm a resounding gong or a clanging symbol. I'm chaos, I'm a farce, I'm a parody of what the whole enterprise of being a Christian is actually supposed to be. There's a ton of paraphrasing going on there, but that is pretty solidly the gist of the first part of 1 Corinthians 13. Paul is always bringing people back. The other apostles are always bringing people back to this idea. Jesus was always bringing people back to this idea. The foundational virtue of the kingdom is love. Why did God go and forgive people? Well, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son. God is love. God loved people so much that he sent his son to seek and save the lost and to give his life as a ransom for many. This is the foundational concept. If you've received the love of God and you're not giving that away to other people, especially your brothers and sisters in church, it doesn't matter how you got there. It doesn't matter who said the thing or did the thing or it you're wrong. You got it wrong. Matthew, it doesn't matter how you got to the place that you treated your sister that way. She may have been a jerk. It may have been very complex and very unfortunate. But were you loving to your sister? No, I was not. Okay, well then you were wrong. Because at its foundation, Matthew, we love each other in this family. And you weren't loving to your sister. Love your sister. Okay. Paul is saying, it doesn't matter how you got to this insane place with all of this arguing. We've kind of covered it, we've tried to sort it through. But all of that aside, at the most basic level, has this produced love in the church? Do you love your neighbor as yourself? No? Okay, well, you're supposed to do that because the whole law is summed up in this single command. Where did he get that kind of stuff? Well, I mean, Jesus, you remember Jesus from the Bible? The religion is named after him. Mark 12 and Matthew 20, call it 22. Yes, I'm flipping right now and buying time. It is 22. They both tell roughly the same story that you've heard before. I mean, we covered it in the Matthew series, but uh let's just read it. Matthew 22, 34. This is right in the middle of the rapid-fire peppering of questions that Jesus was getting after he came into Jerusalem and they're hitting him with the pay taxes to Caesar stuff. This is where the marriage after the resurrection stuff happens in Luke, and he gets hit with this one. Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. Now they're going to send in their heavy hitter to mess with Jesus. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law? Jesus replied, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. That's a prayer called the Shema from the book of Deuteronomy. Like that is rich, thick, creamy, center cut Judaism right there. Center cut Christianity for that matter. So he says that and then he goes on. He says, This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. I guess we don't get the follow-up in Matthew 22, but I'm pretty sure in Mark twelve, the guy's like, uh yeah, that's a really good answer. And he was impressed with Jesus. And I'm flipping pages again. The greatest commandment. This is starting in verse twenty eight. Well said, teacher, the man replied. You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself, is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. When Jesus saw that he'd answered wisely, he said to him, You're not far from the kingdom of God. And from then on no one dared to ask him any more questions. What a pleasant little moment before this thing goes to a midnight arrest, a kangaroo court, and an execution on the cross. There's this one little moment of agreement right here between the crowd that would produce the circumcision party and Jesus himself, where they're like, Yeah, well, we can agree on this. Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. There's no greater commandment than these. All the law hangs on this. They have agreement on that. Okay, we'll now go back over to Galatians. Who's Paul talking to here? Two parties, right? One are confused but legitimate followers of Christ. They're Christians. The others, yeah, kind of hard to say. They might be faking it. Maybe some of the agitators are actually Christians who are just in error at the time. Maybe others are false infiltrators. We can't really tell for sure. But even if they are false Jewish infiltrators that come from the same tradition and school of thought as the Pharisees, what Paul just did was brilliant. He appealed to both parties. Remember, Jesus and the Pharisees agreed on this. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. There you go. That's it. So when Paul appeals to that and he says, Hey guys, are you loving each other? Because that's the greatest commandment. It's it's summed up in that. He's citing Jesus, but he's also citing the religious leaders. In other words, he's kind of sat down the entire room, put his hands on their shoulders and looked them in the eye, like Dad would do with me, and corrected them. Hey, all things aside, are you being loving? No. Okay, well then something's wrong here and something needs to change because the entire law is summed up in a single command. Love your neighbor as yourself. This is not just an abstraction from the distant past that we're dipping back into and looking at. This echoes through the ages. You're supposed to hear this and you're supposed to do it and be compelled by it to. I am supposed to as well. It's hard. Some neighbors are very lovable, some neighbors are very not lovable. Sometimes I suppose I'm probably the not lovable neighbor, but the whole thing works because of the enormous gap between Jesus and his perfection and holiness and humanity and our not perfection and not holiness. So when Jesus, of all people, who loved us, despite the enormous gap between us and him, when he says that this is a big deal, love your neighbor as yourself, man, that carries tremendous weight. It does echo through the ages. It is not something to be left back here on these pages. That is for you and for me. And we very rarely do the thing on this podcast where I'm like, hey, my friends, we should probably think about this one. But I'm gonna do the thing today where I say, hey, my friends, we should probably think about this one. That's good for now. I'm Matt, this is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.
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