A little while back, I was traveling outside of the country. I was in a hotel lobby eating their breakfast that they provide there. There was on the screen their version of ESPN, whatever that was called. You can tell by the branding and everything. Oh, this is sports talk. I'm watching it. I think I'm doing pretty well with the language. I felt like I was understanding what was being said perfectly fine. But what I realized is that I was not doing well with all of these details they kept referencing in rapid fire as they were debating this very important issue. Oh, so-and-so did this, and then they said that. And because of the incident last year, as everyone knows, it's like this. I'm thinking to myself, well, not as everyone knows. I don't know anything about what you're talking about. But as it went on, and all the panelists felt very impassioned about this issue, I was able to figure out, okay, I might not know exactly who did what and all the ins and outs of this, but I get it. That guy used to be on that team, now he's on this other team, and there are hard feelings. And that was enough context for me to get the flow of the conversation and play along. Likewise, we've got a thing here that's foreign to us in Galatians chapter 4. Paul is in the middle of this very emotional passage where he's stepping aside from pleading with the Galatians to come back to the gospel using logic and argumentation. Now he's doing more of a personal plea here in Galatians 4, 12 through 20. He's referencing in the midst of this some sort of ailment or affliction that he had. We don't know what that was. I've got a couple theories. We're going to talk about theories in a little bit. I've got a couple theories, but we don't know exactly what that was. So it might be tempting to check out a little bit and say, well, since we don't get to know this, we can't really understand what's being said here, and it's going to feel rather random to us. But I think we might be able to cobble together what was going on here, and even if we can't get to the bottom of exactly the details of what this affliction or ailment was all about, in the same way that I still understand what it's like for a guy to be on one team and then go to a rival team, and now everybody's mad about it, so I can understand what it's like to be traveling and have a medical crisis and remember that people responded hospitably when you were in your hour of need when that all went down. So, with that in mind, here we go. Galatians 4, 12, and I'll read until it makes sense to stop reading. I plead with you, brothers, become like me, for I became like you. You've done me no wrong. As you know, it was because of an illness that I first preached the gospel to you. Even though my illness was a trial to you, you didn't treat me with contempt or scorn. Instead, you welcomed me as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Christ Jesus Himself. What's happened to all of your joy? I can testify that if you could have done so, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me. Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth? Yesterday we workshopped that tricky turn of a phrase, I plead with you brothers, become like me, for I became like you. We got as far as we were going to get on that for now. There's one more tricky phrase here. You have done me no wrong. Yesterday I hinted that I think what's going on there is that Paul is contrasting himself to these agitators who've come in from out of town and are trying to get the Galatians to go away from trusting in Christ by faith to trusting effectively in themselves and their ability to uphold every tiny detail of the law. I believe that Paul is asserting throughout the book of Galatians that these agitators are emotionally needy and manipulative, and that somehow their sense of self and right religion can't work unless they go around and get everybody to sign up for their weird, sad little version of things. I suspect that Paul is intoning here that he's heard that these agitators are like, if you guys don't go along with us, you're wronging us. And that's really hurtful after all we've done and all we traveled and we did you it would be you're hurting us by not I mean Paul is trying to differentiate himself from them here. And he's being like, you haven't wronged me. I'm not playing that card. On the contrary, you guys have been great to me. Remember when I showed up there and I was sick and miserable? Y'all were awesome to me in that time. You loved me. You cared about me when I needed that. And listen to what he says. As you know, it was because of an illness that I first preached the gospel to you. Okay, let's try to piece the timeline together here to see if we can understand this a little bit better. You remember the whole d Galatia thing that we talked about, whatever, a hundred or so episodes ago, where you've got this Roman province in the middle of modern-day Turkey. Back then they called it Asia Minor, Anatolia. And this hourglass-shaped Roman province is called Galatia, but historically, only the northern half of that hourglass is where the actual Galatians ethnically lived. They were Celtic Gauls who transplanted 300 years earlier from northern France, what we would now call that, to northern Turkey, and they had their own language and culture and all of that stuff. But eventually Rome came along and divided up everything they conquered into provinces, and they made this weird hourglass-shaped province. They gave the whole province, spanning almost all the way from the Black Sea, almost all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, north to south. They named the whole province after the northern ethnic region, but most of the population was in the southern half of the province, filled with people who were not ethnically Gauls, per se. So you'll recall there are some people who think the Book of Galatians is written to Christians in that ethnic region of Galatia, and that means that Paul went through there sometime that isn't recorded in the Book of Acts and planted that church. There's no record of him being up there in the Book of Acts that records all or most of his travels. That isn't to say it couldn't be the case. Acts doesn't make any effort to tell you every single detail. Paul clearly made travels that aren't recorded there, so you know, who knows. Other people think that the book of Galatians is written to southern Galatia, the Roman province of Galatia, in which case Acts does give us a whole bunch of details about what went down there, and that would be in Acts thirteen and fourteen. So we got all right, why don't you just hang on a second? All right, events in Galatian cities. That's how my subheading works, starting in Acts 13, 13. So Paul is just getting started on his missionary journeys. He's at the very beginning of his very first one. So he's a rookie, he's new at this. His first part of the trip took him through Cyprus, which is a pretty big island that sits there in sort of the armpit, the northwest corner of the Mediterranean Sea, a little north of Jerusalem, west of Damascus, if you can kind of picture that in your brain, just south of Turkey. So he goes there and he has great success. Cool things happen, and important people convert while he is on the island of Cyprus. It's possible, I suppose, that Cyprus is a pretty culturally, ethnically, uh cuisinerally, I don't know what that adjective is, different place. The food is maybe different there from anywhere that Paul had ever been. Maybe it was foreign enough that his stomach didn't respond very well to what happened in Cyprus. I'm just spitballing here. And so then right after he left Cyprus, he went up into Galatia, and maybe he had trouble shaking, whatever that stomach thing was that maybe came with him out of Cyprus. That's one theory. The other theory would be that Paul had some chronic illness that bothered him maybe his entire life, or maybe starting on his first missionary journey and then never went away all the way until the end. I've heard people theorize that maybe the issue was some sort of epilepsy. I don't know, I don't see that in the text, but I'm sure they have their reasons for thinking it. I've heard other people suggest that he simply had a chronically weak stomach, and that's why he was so sensitive when he was writing to Timothy and encouraging Timothy to teach, you know, not drunkenness on the part of Christians, but then Paul, real quick, is like, but you know, take a little wine for your stomach. That's an interesting hint. Could be that. The more common theory that I've heard is that Paul had some sort of eye issue, macular degeneration. What do they call it? What's the thing that you get marijuana for? Back in the day, everybody would say that they had it so they could get prescribed medical marijuana before it was legalized. Come on, Matt, what is in it? Glaucoma. Maybe it was glaucoma, uh, detached retina. I don't know. I don't have any of these things. I don't really know how they work. But I think the having problems with his eyes theory is a good one, but maybe somehow that was tied to him having fits of dizziness, vertigo, uh, upset stomach kind of stuff. I don't know. It seems like the guy had some sort of chronic thing that he really wanted to go away so that he could be more effective, but he couldn't make it go away. I've kind of wondered when we were gonna get all the way into this business about Paul's ailment and what that was. I thought maybe we'd do it at the end of Galatians. I'll get to that in a minute as to why I was thinking maybe when we got to Galatians 6.11 we would do it. But we're just, I mean, we're tackling it right now. So I'm gonna pause right here, and then we'll just pick up with more about what the backstory is here between Paul and the Galatians and Paul's ailment or affliction or whatever it is next time around. Also, I heard from a handful of you about maybe helping me out with editing over on the YouTube channel and some of the videos where I go and visit churches. Thank you. I will get back to you very soon. I'm kind of organizing all of that back up and preparing something for you to maybe take a quick run at. If anybody else is interested, I would love to hear from you. Uh, thanks everybody who shot me an email already. That was just warm and kind and cool of you. Okay, we'll be done there. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.