Everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible Hour podcast bonus episode. Every now and then we do these, we haven't done it in a really long time. Sometimes I got stuff on my mind that is a little bit extra that doesn't make sense to put into a normal episode or whatnot. And we're in the middle of tracking down this whole Peter and Paul thing and how it all worked out. And that's not what this bonus episode is going to be about at all. It's going to be about something totally different. I got two things that I want to accomplish here. And to accomplish both of them, I have invited my close personal lifelong friend, Jeffrey Foote, to join us. Hello, Jeffrey. Hello, Matthew. So we got two things we need to talk about. One is where we're at with the Galatians season, because you and I haven't talked about it much. Right. I kind of want to hear your thoughts. And two is you just put out a new album and we need to tell people about the new album and probably play some of the new album because you make all the music for the podcast, which is basically why people are here to see the in which way you're gonna mess with me with dumb musical outros that are usually hurtful. Well, I do my best. No, and you do very, very well, very well, very efficiently, I might add. You do not take your time, you don't mess around. Twenty minutes after you get the file, there's um some ridiculous thing that you've put together, and you've been on a roll lately. Uh okay. What's the like the last three? What have we done here? We had a mashup not too long ago that was an outro. What was the mashup for?
SPEAKER_01Um Oh, you had said the middle school cafeteria jukebox always played the same two songs. Doctor Feel Good and Pump Up the Jam, Technotronic and Motley Crue. Yeah. And I just thought I wonder if they would go together. And they don't. They really don't, but I tried. No, they didn't at all.
SPEAKER_00But I I laughed super hard. You did something else that was offensively horrible recently, but in exactly the right way. What was that? Drawn a blank now.
SPEAKER_01Offensively horrible. I'm gonna have to look that up. Oh no. I mean maybe it wasn't that bad. You did the you could go with this or you could go with that, but only one of them is the actual gospel.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, that wasn't offensively horrible. That was really good. No, okay, that one was that one was fantastic. I guess maybe it's all been good. Hang on, there's one more. Clownhammer. Oh, that's right. You did the clown hammer song. That one really did stick with me. I still haven't shaken that. It's still in my head. Well, the point is, thanks, buddy. You do a great job, and I like the way that sometimes you make fun of me a little bit with the music, and if people don't get what each and every little reference or homage is that you're throwing on the end of things there from time to time, that's alright. Podcast still works, but if somebody happens to get it, I think it betterifies it a lot. So I am grateful. Thanks, dude.
SPEAKER_01I've learned, you know, when we were doing these in Matthew, my outros that were mashups or homages, they just went too long. I'm learning how to do it quicker and get to the punchline a little faster. And so long.
SPEAKER_00Which one went too long?
SPEAKER_01Give me a specific because I can't think of anything you did wrong. I did the entire MacGyver theme.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it was great. I think it's the whole reason that 800 episode run was a success. I think you take that out, nobody listens to a single word of it. The MacGyver thing is what made it, it's what people talk about. All right. I don't know what you're going on about, man. No, as soon as I hand you the edit, you have the conch. You can do whatever you need to do. And I, for one, I'm here for it. It's a good time. For those of you who don't know, Jeff edits the podcast. The it's a daily podcast, so we gotta do it every day. So I record something, usually in real time. Sometimes I work ahead a little bit if I know I've got some travel or something. And then Jeff just ultra famously takes out all the stupid stuff and the boring stuff and makes it tighter and more respectful of y'all's time, and then he puts music on it to make it more fun as well. And you do a great job, dude, and I'm very, very thankful.
SPEAKER_01I think the terribly offensive one that came to mind just now is the piano recital episode. You were talking about your daughter, who started out doing When the Saints Come Marching In as a beginner and now is doing Claire Delune.
SPEAKER_00Oh my goodness. Yeah, no, that wasn't it made me tear up, you jerk animal. Like, what are you doing? Yeah, that I got my wife real good too. She was real misty-eyed over that one. So thanks a lot.
SPEAKER_01I want to say I how much I appreciate you giving me an audience or an opportunity to play Peter Gabriel music or Claire Deloon and like have an outlet to do that. Because it's one thing to say, boy, I wish someday I could cover Peter Gabriel, and then you actually say clown hammer. Like that's an honor for me.
SPEAKER_00I finally get to do it. Well, first of all, thank you for doing it, and I guess you're welcome also. It just it's symbiotic, it works really well because why would you ever do that? There's just no reason to fiddle around with great and memorable pieces of music that we've appreciated from years past. And we can say we would do it, but we never would if there wasn't a reason, if there wasn't somebody who we thought might get a kick out of it. So the fact that people seem to get a kick out of it is the excuse.
SPEAKER_01It's not just fun to do as a musician, it's funny to do as a punchline. I mean, how can you beat that? That's just an awesome way to spend an evening.
SPEAKER_00So And it's fun to do as a hook. I bet there are people sitting there in the conversation right now who could think of three or four different things that you've done musically, little homages or riffs goofing around at the end, that are meant to really double down on the hook of that episode. Admittedly, the hook that I come up with, I mean, it's every day. This is happening in real time. Sometimes it's going to be better than others, but the hooks aren't always going to be perfect, but I'm always trying to come up with something that it is is memorable, that makes sense, that is relatable, so that whatever passage we're talking about on a given day, we have a thing that we can go back to and be like, oh yeah, that's right. That was the point. That's what we're looking at, that's what we're working on here. Because it's really easy with any podcast, but I think with Bible stuff and things like that, to get into the zone and get the glaze over feeling. And he just forget what you're doing, but you don't really want to go back and rewind it and remember it all. And David Letterman used to do this thing where he would have a running joke. This is very impactful for me. I watched it as a kid, I saw what he was doing. He would come out, he'd do his opening monologue where he takes his pointer finger and hooks it inside his collar and makes his jokes or whatever. And he's watching the audience for feedback to figure out what they're laughing at and what really connected. He makes a mental note of that, and if the show ever starts to go off the rails, because that guy from the Beethoven movies is there, and he or Madonna, and they're smarting off at him, or whatever, he will go back to that running joke to reorient the audience and have him be like, Oh, yeah, that's right, that's what we're doing here. We're having a laugh about this thing. That was funny. Right. And he kind of goes back to the last thing that made sense to sort of reset it and keep the thing moving forward. And I just thought that was genius as a kid watching him do it. And so all of those silly little hooks that we build in here and stories and stuff like that, it's really just meant to be an orientation point. So that do we remember what we're doing and maybe it makes a stick a little bit better. And then I bet there are a bunch of people listening right now who are thinking to themselves, yeah, and your dumb song, Jeff, that you did at the end, doubled down on the sticking. And now, whenever I hear this song, I think of that thing from the Book of Esther, or whenever I hear Maneater, I think of the banquet of Astyages in Arpegas. Hopefully, not that one. I'm really sorry I brought that back up for everybody. But there is that one.
SPEAKER_01I'm not sorry at all. I think that's exactly what that episode needed. So, what you're saying is I'm I'm your Paul Schaefer.
SPEAKER_00You're good enough to be Paul Schaefer. I'm not good enough to be Letterman, but yes, let's go with that. I like that a lot. That works very well. And thank you for doing it. Okay, uh, Galatians. Yes, sir. How are we doing, man? Is this sounding right to you? Because you went to seminary, the same seminary I went to. You got all the credentials and everything. Uh, you got a big church that you handle like a small church, normal human guy. You've been around this for a long time. You do it very, very well. I'm very high on how you come at Bible and church and theology and all of this stuff. So your opinion matters, and you can tell me, and whatever you say right now, we're gonna keep it in the edit, even if your feedback is Matt, you are screwing it up on this point or that point. But so far, does this sound like what you make of Galatians, or are there things you see a little different?
SPEAKER_01I think the amount of time you put into Acts is really helpful because I think the issue in the first century church was this merging of Jewishness and not Jewishness. That is the issue. It shows up in almost every letter in the New Testament. How Jewish do these non-Jews need to be to be a part of the thing? And if you don't have that historical theological orientation, a lot of these passages could be taken out of context to mean a lot of things, but historically that is the question. And for Paul to be spending an entire book like Galatians saying, This is the answer. The answer is none. You do not need to be any Jewish for this to be salvation for you. He couldn't be stronger about it. It's the theme a lot in the book of Romans as well. It certainly is the controversy in Acts. So everything you're sharing, when I get it, I'm like, yeah, yep, yep, this is center cut fast lane New Testament is this issue. The way he says it in Galatians, right? If if anybody teaches you a gospel that it's Jesus plus anything, let him be cursed. You know, let him go to hell, even if it's an angel.
SPEAKER_00Man, that poses such an interesting challenge though, because the New Testament anticipates a really long run. It's very aware that this is gonna last, this is gonna go way out to the fringes of humanity, this is gonna last for generations. You can see that it's gonna go from a mustard seed to this big giant tree. It's all there from the gospels to the end, this anticipation of a very big event that takes a while to unfold and then and that won't be fully unfolded until the end and culmination of all of theology and all of history as described in Revelation. So it's this huge thing where the vast majority of the timeline, when it's all said and done someday, the vast majority of the timeline that is the age of the church, like Jesus' public ministry until the end of all things and the completion of history, the vast majority of that timeline is not going to be struggling with the issues that were front and center during the writing of the New Testament. The whole how Jewish do you have to be controversy maybe it sort of comes up, maybe it's taken on some new forms in our times, but it is not a hot button issue. It is not what everybody is thinking about in an overt way, but in a subtle way, it's a huge issue because you got people even today, very popular people who kind of do what I do for a living, out there saying, you know, we need to unhitch ourselves from the old testament. It's not so good. Right. People talking about the Old Testament being very problematic and finding the God of the Old Testament to be, you know, unlikable or seeming to play by different rules, but the God of the New Testament, Jesus, He's likable and good, or we like the Holy Spirit. I mean, that's an ancient heresy. That that's not Christianity. So maybe there's some manifestation of that now in in some of those debates or those circles, but for the most part, the whole how Jewish do you have to be and how circumcised do you have to be in order to be a Christian, it feels like a very, very old debate.
SPEAKER_01A couple things have came to mind when you're saying that, but first let me address the Old Testament versus New Testament issue. I love how you presented Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther as everything is going the right way to prove once and for all humans can solve this. And then of course we find out they can't. The point of the Old Testament being we need help. But the story of Jesus didn't just start in Bethlehem. In fact, here at our place for Christmas this year, we're doing Advent through Genesis.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01How does the Christmas story actually start in the first book of the Bible? There's definitely a con continuity and a Jewishness to the origins of God's plan. He did that on purpose. But the controversy, and I do think it is still happening now, it's not just Jews versus non-Jews the way it was first century, but it certainly is tribe versus tribe or nationalism versus a different perspective. And one of the things you see in Ephesians and Colossians and Romans is Paul talks about the mystery has been revealed. In the fullness of time, the mystery has now been shown. And the mystery he says over and over again is that this is for all the nations, not just for Israel. That's the mystery. That through what Jesus did, he demolished the dividing wall between cultures, between languages, between races. And we as a human race really can't do that on our own. These dividing walls we keep rebuilding. The emphasis in that first century teaching, and obviously in the New Testament, of saying no, there is no longer division between people groups because of what Jesus did if you are a follower of Jesus. So stop rebuilding that. I think that has been an ongoing thing throughout all of human history, and proving again and again that government can't do that, even well-meaning people can't do that, affinity groups can't do that, sports can't do that, whatever it is that is the the go-to this will unify us. It it won't. The mystery is that only Jesus can do that. And again, in Galatians, anybody who's trying to say, like Peter, there's still favoritism to this one people group is going against what Paul says the mystery that has been revealed now shows us. And I think that temptation or that tendency in humans is still here for sure. I mean, I know it's in my heart from time to time of inward focus for our church versus outward focus to bless the city we live in. And how do we approach that? And I think uh this take in Galatians on what the gospel is is always needed as a reminder.
SPEAKER_00So there's a couple of levels there. I mean, rivalries still exist between people groups all the time. Like people from in our part of the country, people from states further west always punch down on states one state east. So from Colorado, like you would never make fun of Missouri. Who cares, right? Who do you make fun of if you're from Colorado?
SPEAKER_01Nebraska.
SPEAKER_00Correct. And who does Nebraska make fun of?
SPEAKER_01Can they make fun of anybody? Do they have high ground? Stop now.
SPEAKER_00Stop it. That's the good life. Good people there. I can't have none of this. I'm doing my best, Nebraska. No, they punch down on Iowa. They make fun of Iowa. The idiots out walking around. That's a Nebraska joke about Iowa. And what's the famous Colorado joke about Nebraska? Why do they have an N on their helmets? You know it. That's great. Yeah, knowledge. Yeah, it stands for knowledge. All the knowledge that they teach there at the Nebraska University. Yeah. It's all cheap and it's all dumb. And it's I I hope that most of those rivalries are good fun. But the point is, people will invent reasons to be in fights with each other and tribe up and be different. It gives you a sense of identity and meaning and all of that stuff. Whatever. But the New Testament division, it's a little bit different because it has the theology element to it as well. By which I would say the Jewish people had this sense that they had this exclusive claim to the redemptive work of God, even though clearly the Old Testament teaches it was always going to be for everybody. Right. And then it starts going out to Gentiles, and some people are like, hmm, I'm cautiously really excited about this. And some Jews were like, I'm cautiously not excited about this at all. This strikes at the heart of our identity. That's different than a rivalry between France and Germany. That's different than a rivalry between two opposing football clubs or soccer clubs or whatever, because the there is a theological element, and it actually comes into play in terms of sorting out the whole Bible and how the whole thing works. And so if I'm hearing you're right, you're saying that both of those things are spoken to in the New Testament. Any human division is overcomable with the work of God, the gospel, all of that stuff. Yeah. But also particularly at first had to kind of overcome this one specific division, and that's why we get Galatians and things like that.
SPEAKER_01And I think historically, there is the human tendency to continually make things us versus them. As well as the human tendency to say, I need to bring something to the table. And I think that's the other half of my answer to your earlier question is this is still totally applicable because we don't receive free gifts well. We want to say, We brought something to the table. We met God halfway. We cleaned ourselves up. We did the thing, we're in the club. And Galatians pretty much lays it out that no, it doesn't work like that. It never worked like that. Circumcision, which I know you're gonna get to, didn't work like that. That wasn't the point of it. The idea of we still have to do something, mixing in with the faith alone through Christ alone, by grace alone. You and I grew up in kind of the legalistic eighties in churches. We were trained how to behave yourself to make yourself a good little boy Christian. Yeah. It's insidious sometimes, or it's it's so subtle you don't even notice that you are adding something. It's Jesus plus something. And that's why Galatians is always worth going back to to say, Oh, where am I losing track? And I'm trying to get back to work, so I'm trying to get back to human effort. I I need to be done with that.
SPEAKER_00And that's why I love the book. And I I'm kind of ashamed to admit this, but really until this run through it and this is probably my fifth really intentional run through Galatians in my lifetime, until this run through it, I don't think I've really been able to lean into the issues as they pertained to the people back then. Because I was so saturated in that we say it's Jesus plus nothing, but it's really Jesus plus these four or five behaviors and these three or four prohibitions kind of thing. And my parents didn't give me that. I don't even know where I got that growing up. It was just out there. It was assumed there was a a film over the top of Christianity, a filter that honestly really messed with me. And I that's why I was a not Christian or whatever you call me for a period of time after growing up and getting into early adulthood, that was really difficult. I haven't done all the things well enough, and I know I haven't done all the things well enough. And even though we say Jesus and grace plus nothing, that wasn't how it felt. Right. And that took some time to unpack that and work it back through. And this faith 2.0 that that I'm very committed to, that I think is a gift from God in my life now, like that it's kind of a response. It it took a rebuild from what I was raised around because that mixed message was very, very confusing to me. And when I'd never done anything wrong, it was pretty easy because you know it was the wonder kid and pastors kid. I know what's naughty and nice, and just don't do the naughty things. But then you say some stupid stuff, you live a long enough to figure out that was dumb. I can't believe I said that or did that. Yeah, you start to have some history behind you, you start to see the fallout from some of your decisions that maybe you thought were good at the time, and you start to realize I am not good enough. I thought, you know, yeah, yeah, it's about Jesus wink wank and all of that, but really look at me, I'm very, very good. And then when that illusion went away, that was a time bomb that was waiting to go off, and it went off in my life. And so Galatians became a very cherished book for me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Trying to figure that out, trying to figure out what to do with this one foot in option A, one foot in option B kind of approach that I had accidentally bumbled into as a kid and as a young man. I mean. Maybe it would have been better in some ways if I'd just been bad. Right. I don't know that I actually mean that, but maybe I do. I I don't know. It was very difficult and it was very hard to sort through. And so I fell in love with Galatians as something to help me sort that out. And I really read it through the lenses of me and now. And I think it's totally valid for that. But it's not until this trip through with you and me and everybody else who's here that I think just because of the nature of how we come at it, that it was like, oh dang, we really have to talk about the Old Testament and Acts and all of the Jewish stuff in here. And it really is that first and me second, if I'm being fair to the text.
SPEAKER_01I think it's important for people to know that certainly you, and I they don't know my story, but I would echo exactly what you just said. Like we're not coming at this because we've solved Galatians. We're coming at this because we've lived what Galatians is teaching against.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yes. And Jeff, and I didn't just live it, I helped build it. Oh yeah, me too. I have been on the side of the Judaizers. I've been one of the people who caused the problems.
SPEAKER_01We're both overachievers. We're both driven people. And so when I was a kid, also a pastor's kid, if there was a prize to be won, I was gonna win it. And if that prize came because I memorized more verses than the next guy, I was gonna do that.
SPEAKER_00Me too. There's so much Bible I still know off the top of my head that I got and learned for all the wrong reasons. Like impress a girl or defeat my enemies. Absolutely. Learning all these verses about the grace of Christ because I'm going to crush my rivals and hear the lamentations of their women when they realize I learned more Bible than them and got the most camp Bible Jesus bucks.
SPEAKER_01I had a nervous breakdown as an adult because of good little boy syndrome. When we were in college, I would tell myself, this is actually a phrase I used to motivate myself to get up early to go lift weights and to study my Bible. I said, I'm going to be a Navy SEAL for Jesus. How does it feel to hear yourself repeat that now? Oh I mean, I'm grateful for what I eventually picked up during that time, but man, what a unsustainable model. It's like the parable of the prodigal son, right? You end up being the older brother. Like I don't mind that other people are getting forgiven for doing what they did as naughty boys, but I'm the good little boy. So where's mine? I think that's baked into my heart in a way that I need Galatians over and over again. That's the beauty of it. I think if anybody carries around that weight of good little boy or good little girl syndrome in the name of Jesus, it's like uh he really wants you to let that go.
SPEAKER_00Man, like I'm listening to you talk though, and I could totally see how somebody would take that and be like, okay, so then we should do more bad things. Because as long as you have the grace of Jesus, you can just do bad things. Is there a part of the Bible you can think of that would speak to that, that would help correct against that impulse that we might be picking up from Galatians?
SPEAKER_01Because I memorized it for a contest, I'm sure, at some point. But no, this is exactly the question in Romans when Paul says exactly that. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more, and then he anticipates the next question. Well, should we go on sinning so that grace will increase? And he says, Yeah, no chance. Stop it. May it never be.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And if while we seek to be justified in Christ, it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners, does that mean Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not. If I rebuild what I destroy to prove that I'm a lawbreaker. Yeah. So y it's just right there. It's sitting right like the exact next logical question that somebody who's gone through this, like you or I would ask, is sitting right there in the text. Paul is exactly with us anticipating the next thing we're gonna wonder. Because I don't think that the the solution to the stuff that I got wrong as a kid and that really lit the fuse on the time bomb of my kid faith. I don't think the solution to that is be worse. Or like I just need to indulge and do bad things sometimes just to keep myself from liking myself too much or for doing this for all the wrong reasons. I don't think that's the antithesis. I think it's just kind of a heart uh heart. Well, it is kind of a heart thing. It's a cart before the horse thing. And so at the end of Galatians, again, like the the book just covers everything we're talking about. But at the end of Galatians, famously you get the fruit of the spirit stuff. And what is it? It's fruit. I I guess you cultivate it a little bit, but I don't know if it's an orange tree, it makes oranges, it's what it does. And if it's a gentleness and self-control tree, it produces gentleness and self-control. It just kind of can't help it. It just does it. And so the analogy of fruit, I think even in choosing that analogy, Paul is answering the question you and I have about like why do the right thing at all, in that you can't help it. In life by the spirit, it's gonna happen. You will want that, and it's gonna happen. And that's totally different than I deserve life by the spirit because I put my finger to the wind and figured out what goes over well in church or this religious setting or this Christian school, and then I did those things satisfactorily, and my peers voted me best Christian. It's very, very different.
SPEAKER_01And I think you're hitting on the answer that you're gonna get to by the end of this season. That the solution to works-based moralism is not sin. The solution to works-based moralism is life in the spirit. And that human tendency to say, No, I'm gonna fix this by doing better or by something I'm gonna change about my behavior will fix this. And over and over, especially in Paul's letters, he just goes back and says, Stop doing it by the flesh, stop doing it by human effort. It's the spirit is the answer. Life in the spirit, the fruit of the spirit, the surrender to the spirit, put set your mind on things of the spirit.
SPEAKER_00And well, one of the fruits is the thing that lets you do that. The last one is self-control. Sure. And that's a little circular. We're gonna have to get to that when we get to the end here. I've to me that is one of the hard questions. It's a little bit circular. You have life by the spirit, and you want to get things right because you're grateful to God and you want to honor God and you want to be a part, you want to have the values of the kingdom, be a kingdom citizen, live out the beatitudes. I am crucified with Christ, I no longer live. I want to do that because I just want to. But I also want to do these other things that are destructive sometimes and that are contrary to the stuff of God. Sometimes I want to do things that are about me and making me look cool or getting what I want or feeling good. What am I gonna need to change that? I'm gonna need self-control. Well, how do I get self-control? Well, it's a fruit of the spirit. Well, how do I get that fruit? I probably need some self-control to get it. I mean, you can see how somebody would read this and feel like, well, it's kind of circular. Yeah. I mean, at some point I have to pick something, right?
SPEAKER_01This was my breakthrough when I started realizing how much in the Bible is teaching live in the spirit, trust the spirit, keep in step with the spirit. That the idea that he will produce the control. What I need to do is learn how to live in him, which is not a matter of moralism. It's a matter of conversation, it's a matter of trust, surrender, uh, all sorts of words for it. But nobody taught me that when we were growing up. They just taught me how to behave. And it's taken me a long time, and I'm not I certainly haven't mastered it, but I like Paul says, I'm chasing after that goal because that's when it gets produced as fruit, as opposed to getting produced by the fruit of human effort, which only leads to the list he says before the fruit of the spirit.
SPEAKER_00Okay, but Jeffrey, and we and we need to talk about your album because it's good, and I want people to know about it, because I think the people who are in the room right now are some of the people in the world who would be most interested to listen to what you do and uh and we're getting there. It's great. Thank you for indulging me on all of this. I know I'm hogging our time here talking about Bible stuff, but don't you want to teach kids naughty and nice? I mean, train up a child in the way they should go. When they're old, they're not gonna turn from it. I mean, that's good parenting, that's raising your kids the right way. But how do you keep that in a Christian household from having the effect that it had on us? And again, I would not put that on my parents. I think my parents got this right. I don't know where I picked up my weirdnesses, but I don't think it was from them. I think they threaded this needle really well. But you're supposed to teach kids right and wrong. You're supposed to teach them don't do that. So yeah, how do you thread that needle? What are you supposed to do?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think it's a the difference between teaching obedience because obedience is good, and uh curing a soul. We've never had to teach our kids how to lie, steal, fight, argue. We've had to teach them how not to do those things. So that is the parent's responsibility, right? To sow the seeds of good choices and protect them from the consequences of bad choices. But obedience to proper behavior doesn't actually fix the human heart. The core of it, if that becomes the message of how somebody is saved or transformed, that was never the plan. And my parents were the same. My parents were awesome. They taught me grace, they taught me forgiveness. I think I just picked it up from the subculture we grew up in.
SPEAKER_00There was something off about that, wasn't there? I'm not imagining this. There was there were good intentions, clearly, but there was something off about the Christian scene, the Christian marketplace. I'm not trying to wad the whole thing up and throw it away. I don't want anybody to feel terrible. But you sensed that, right? There was something weird about this that even as a kid, it just felt off. The media, the little cartoons they would show us, and the the pop songs, the Christian pop songs that you know, now it's kind of tongue-in-cheek and funny to remember those, but it all created this environment back then that just felt off. I don't know how else to put it. I I don't think I'm alone in that. I bet there are other people listening to this who are like, yes, something fell off and it was hard for me too, and adult faith was hard too. I it's a two-part question. One, did you feel that? And two, can you put your finger on what it was if you did?
SPEAKER_01I think it was, and I'm gonna bring this full circle, I think it was the temptation that Paul's talking about in Galatians that was in that culture. That the world is being the world, and we need to make sure that our children grow up not being like the world, and so we need to move these fences in, and we need to add rules. And again, it wasn't from our parents, but it was certainly part of the culture. You know, if you listen to that band, you're a naughty boy, or whatever it was.
SPEAKER_00By that band, you mean every single one that you cover or make homages to on this podcast? And a lot more, yeah. Good.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I know the ones you mean. But there was this I don't know, it this idea of you'd be disappointing Jesus if you acted that way. Like that was where I put my finger on it. Like, is that how this works? I think it just came through a subtle legalism of performative Christianity that makes you better than those outside of the church. And again, yeah, it hit me and probably you in the way it did because winning and being approved and affirmed by winning drives us, and it drove me then, and I had to come through that the hard way as well. I didn't walk away the way you did, but I certainly had to reset everything.
SPEAKER_00I have likened it to untangling a bunch of Christmas tree lights that weren't properly put away the year before. That is how the faith thing has felt to me between build one and build two. You plug them in, it's a big, giant, ugly clump, you plug them in, the lights still light up, but it works or whatever. But just the way Christmas tree lights are, when they get tangled, it is really hard to get them straightened all the way back out without wrecking them and to have them do what they're actually supposed to do. They're not supposed to be unwieldy asymmetrical light clumps that just light up. That's a bare minimum expectation. They're supposed to adorn things. They're supposed to bring a sense of beauty and clarity, and uh to do that they have to have their full functionality, and yet it's very, very difficult to untangle tangled Christmas tree lights. Right. And I feel like that's a lot of what I had to do coming out of all of this was clear off my mental workbench, the workbench of my soul, and take my big mess of clumped up Christmas tree lights that worked, but not properly, and painstakingly try to unweave it all and take it all back apart and spread the thing out so that maybe someday I could hope to have it do what it is supposed to do. And in the end, Galatians has just been a super pivotal book for me and all of that. And the first two chapters look, there is no getting around it. They are a little bit of a grind. The tone is shocking, but I mean I just because the way the thing reads, it seems like you are the recipient, it feels like you're the one getting yelled at. Right. It doesn't feel like that in Esther when Xerxes is raging about something. It doesn't feel like that in Nehemiah when he's yelling at the people he's not gonna come down the wall to entertain. It doesn't r feel like that in Ezra when Ezra's making big sweeping speeches, but in Galatians, there's a lot of me, you language, and it's shocking if you haven't been there in a while to open the thing up and just feel like I am being berated here. This is very, very aggressive, and the Bible has been really nice in the parts we've looked at. I mean, except for the genocide and stuff that was barely averted in Esther. Okay, well, it hasn't been totally nice, but it's more like story-like, you know, it feels like you're taking the whole thing in from a distance, and then we jump from you know, as a group from Nehemiah to Galatians, and dang, that is a tone change in a hurry. And then he goes right past the tone into this thing where there's all this assumed knowledge, like you were there when this happened, and I opposed Peter to his face. It was difficult in this format to kind of pump the brakes and be like, okay, what is he talking about? Who is he talking to? How much of this am I as a modern reader supposed to take to heart right here? Like, is this part where he's chastising people for rejecting the true gospel? Is he chastising me? Did I reject the true gospel? Does everybody who's a reader of this have like automatically rejected it? Like, wait a minute. Right. And so there's some kind of untangling that has to be done here in the first two chapters to just be like, whoa, what is he talking about? Who is he talking to? What happened before to get us here? Right now, as I mentioned earlier, we're kind of pausing a little bit to be like, what happened after? Because I kind of want to wrap up the loose ends of the Peter and Paul dynamic from Galatians 2 to the rest of their lives. And then it ends with this really profound theology stuff culminating in 220 that everybody knows. I've been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. And I think that little part at the end of chapter two is where the book really starts to pivot from dang, we got to do some hard setup work here to okay, wow, this is really starting to come into focus from chapter three forward, and I kind of understand where I fit in the conversation more. I think we're getting into that part. Is I mean, is that fair read?
SPEAKER_01When I read Galatians or when I read it at the right time in my life, it was the kick in the butt I needed. Because I realized, man, behavioral Christianity is like crack to me. Like I have such a tendency to chase after it. Have you done a lot of crack? Or are you just guessing? I'm a good little boy, so no.
SPEAKER_00I just checking.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, the temptation to fall back into that. And so when I read Galatians, I don't mind that it's about me. And I don't mind that tone because it's like, yeah, I have let myself add to the gospel. I have let this give me a false sense of security or a false sense of righteousness, if you want to call it that. And that's why Galatians 2.20 is probably my favorite verse in the whole Bible. What do you do with it? How do you read it? It's a way to re-surrender and say, it's the life of Christ in me that makes anything happen. Because I died with him. So the life I now live, I live by faith in the one who loved me, and gave himself for me. It's no longer I who live, but he lives in me, and that's the Holy Spirit, right? So again, it's the reorienting where the power comes from, and it is not my behavior.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's kind of the pivot verse, the pivot point toward that life by the spirit concept we were talking about earlier.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I know I'm culpable. I I can't blame this on a youth pastor. I mean, I can say maybe that's where I got some of this, but no, that false gospel is something that attracts me like crazy. And so I need verses like Galatians 2.20 to say, stop it.
SPEAKER_00I think you just own that more than I ever have. I have owned that before, but maybe not quite that vigorously. Yeah, I think I tend to use the language of this happened to me 80% of the time and 20% of the time use the language of I helped build a thing that wasn't right and wasn't sustainable, and I inflicted it on others. Yeah, it's just helpful for me to hear you say that. Again, I try to think of who the villain is in my early faith story. Like, who's the person who grabbed me by the ear and was like, you need to believe in the salvation uh version one is Jesus plus a bunch of stuff, and here's the stuff. I don't know who that person is. They don't have a face. I don't know where I got it. So if I don't know where I got it, and there's nobody to point a finger at, yeah, I guess you're right. I guess I have more ownership of this. And maybe Galatians is better read for someone like me, the first two chapters of Galatians, that is, is kind of a useful rebuke and deserved rebuke for me, as opposed to something that maybe in the past I've been more likely to read as, ah, I'm a victim here of people doing Christianity poorly and teaching me poorly. And this is kind of cathartic for me to listen to Paul call them out. Yeah, I appreciate what you're saying. That kind of reorients me a little bit on this. I think we could do this for a lot longer, but everybody's been really patient. I know that why they're actually here is because they want to hear about your album. So thank you everyone for enduring, Jeff and I gaming all of this out. We haven't had that conversation off, Mike, so it's kind of nice to just unwrap that package all together. There we have a lot of people. The album's called Simple. Why'd you call it that?
SPEAKER_01Well, it started with the Nehemiah song that we did earlier this summer. We're coming to the end of Nehemiah, and you said, Hey, we should release the intro music as a full song. And I'm like, I don't have a full song, I just have the intro music. And I'm like, I bet you do. Yeah. And so that idea of the simple life of Nehemiah came out, and that kind of threaded the needle for all these other musical ideas I had about how we overcomplicate what should be a beautiful and simple truth life existence. I remember when I was a teenager, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago with a friend of mine, and they had that Mondrian painting, the guy who did all of the little rectangles and colored squares with the intersectional black lines on a white canvas, and I kind of made the simple album cover as an homage to that. But I remember looking at that for the first time and saying, What everybody says when they see that the first time, well, I could do that. And I'll never forget my buddy said, Yeah, but could you have thought of doing that? And I just realized, man, that's my whole life. If I could just think of doing it simpler, if I could just focus on the important stuff, everything comes into focus a lot better. So I want to kind of communicate that with the songs and using art as kind of the central metaphor to tell that story.
SPEAKER_00It comes through. It's smart, and I appreciate that your album about simplicity is very, very sophisticated. But it doesn't wear the sophistication on its sleeve. I mean you it it sounds like the art of someone who got to value. Simplicity through very complicated means very circuitous and very busy and complex path that has a very busy and complex story behind it. But the output speaker itself, I mean it's the album is great and I resonate with it a lot, and I've been hitting it on repeat of late. I was listening to it today again. And I really like what you ended up doing with the Nehemiah song as well. I didn't know that I would end up resonating with that Nehemiah song and that it would become the anthem for the rest of the year. It wasn't my anthem while I was doing Nehemiah. It became the anthem of our time in Galatians, not because of anything having to do with Galatians, but because of stuff going on in my own life. I'm in a season where I have got heavy, heavy things that I have got to get done. There is a finish line, and I have to fight to get to the finish line. I have a little bit of help, but a lot of it I just have to do myself right now. And it's it is a very difficult season in my life. I have not talked about the details of that with much of any specificity into a microphone, but it's been challenging, and I've got a lot of those challenges still ahead. What I believe is on the other side of this fight that I'm in, not with anybody. This is man versus nature that I'm doing right now. But what I think is on the other end of this fight, and what I want is not the next big grand fight. I think there is a beautiful season of simplicity on the other side. And that's the tone of what you did with the Nehemiah song, the idea that we're building this wall in fifty some days, we're cutting through red tape, we're doing all of this stuff that we have to do. And what's on the other end? What do I want? It's not to be the king of this thing or to live like this forever. And there's something beautiful and simple on the other side of this very complex, very difficult thing. So I've really resonated with that. I've really you have ministered to my soul with that bit of art. Well, thank you.
SPEAKER_01That the whole album is pretty autobiographical in terms of what we've been talking about this whole time. So, like, the opening song is an instrumental that I wrote picturing the women walking to the tomb on Easter Sunday morning. And then the the first song with lyrics is I was trying to imagine what Peter would have been feeling on Pentecost with the tomb being empty and the Holy Spirit has come. Like nothing's gonna stop you. You don't need to be afraid of anything. And then the last song on the album is essentially the return of Jesus and the parable of the virgins with the lamps. And so everything between those two is basically how I overcomplicate my life and need to go back to redemption and simplicity again and again, and including something like Galatians to get me back to what really matters and what's actually quite simple.
SPEAKER_00And a listener can go and wring every drop of that meaning that you just said out of it, or just listen to it because it sounds cool. Yeah, just sing the words, get them in your head. Maybe someday they'll mean a lot more to you, but maybe that's not the mood that you're in right now for deep probing, reflecting on the grand scheme of your life. Maybe you just want something that sounds rad. It does that. I mean musically it's really fun. And I like the way the style of your writing on the the composition side this time around is very reflective of the theme.
SPEAKER_01And if at the end of the day it's just twelve songs, that's fine too.
SPEAKER_00It's more than twelve songs. I mean, it is literally twelve songs, but I mean it's more than that in terms of weight, but you know, that's what happens with art. You make it, you put it out there, and then it will be what it will be to the people who receive it. Art has two parties, uh maker and the one who receives it. And that's kind of fun. It plays real well on either level.
SPEAKER_01I'm just super grateful for your vouch, and really for anyone who would ever take a minute to listen to anything I do musically, that's what artists would want. That other people would notice it or enjoy it or hate it, something. I appreciate anybody who takes the time to click on any of those songs and give it on the spin.
SPEAKER_00What if you take this and edit it up and stitch it all together? And just throw some music in wherever. If it makes sense to throw a sample in somewhere back earlier in the mix, you know, do that, or give us a few samples of what the album is about here at the end. But before we do that, if people want to hear it, what do they do?
SPEAKER_01It's available on all the digital platforms Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, etc. Look for Rooktown. The album is simple, and if you want a physical CD, go to Rooktown.net.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and this is where I'm gonna take the vouch just to the next level. Hey, I would be so grateful if you would consider just straight up buying the physical media. I know Jeff gets absolutely nothing from all of those digital platforms. I mean, it's pennies, it's nothing. If you want to support him and encourage him in what he's doing, go buy the actual physical copy. It's a way to support him. It's also a way to feel like you kinda have a stake in meaningful art that somebody you at least sort of know has made the effort to make. So Jeff won't go so hard to the hole on that because he's modest, but I will go hard to the hole for you, Jeff. It's really good to support Jeff if you're able to do so by getting an actual physical copy, please.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's very cool of you, Matt. Also, if you just want the digital download but want to throw in a few bucks, uh a good place to do that would be the bandcamp. So rooktown.bandcamp.com will allow you to send some money as well as just get the digital download for yourself.
SPEAKER_00This is fun, dude. Good conversation. Thanks for I mean, this is deeply honest and useful and contributed a lot to what we're doing with the whole Galatians thing. It's kinda fun to unpack it this way. Thank you for also for sharing your music with us and talking about the album and what you were thinking there, and thank you in advance for sharing a couple cuts with us. Appreciate you, dude.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you too. This partnership is golden for me. So whatever we do tomorrow is gonna be awesome, I hope. And I just love that we've been able to do what, fifteen hundred episodes together by now.
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, it's getting crazy. That's pretty awesome, man. Thank you.
SPEAKER_03So we got to begin. Till he put his two cents in. Now that's the time to pay the big stop. He put it on the line. He let his skin get thin. But she knew he wouldn't mind. So she put her two cents in. Now there's a price to pay. About words that slice like knives. And they rediscover grace. Cause who wants a toothprice? Oh, it's a price to pay. Oh, we could make a stop. Just a little bit of credits.