Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And when I parent, a lot of the times, you know, I sit the kids down and something didn't go right, or we're thinking about what we're gonna do. We always work on why. I always work on the principles behind it. I like to hear them articulate. Why don't we do that thing? All right, guys, why don't we talk to people that way? Why do we always do the following things? And it's just, you know, it's an opportunity to kind of reinforce the values and all of that stuff and have them kind of internalize it and not just think that it's arbitrary. But also, I want them to be grounded in the story deeply and to know that what we believe and what we value as a family and what we're going for, ideally, we won't always get it right, but what we're going for flows out of something much bigger. It's not arbitrary. We didn't just make up a set of values from nowhere. We didn't just go out and see whatever values were popular right now and then think that. No, I mean, I mean, we could be wrong and we make mistakes as a family, but ideally, if we think it, we're trying to think it because of the values of the kingdom, the values of God, what we see in the Bible, and how we're connected to the story of the Bible. Again, I keep saying it. This is an ideal. We're not always gonna nail that, but that is the ideal to which we aspire. We're a part of a story, the values all flow out of something bigger. Likewise, in the book of Galatians, Paul is fixing to lecture his spiritual children. He is getting ready to tell them some things are gonna be hard for them to hear. Maybe some people are gonna hear this letter in love, the whole thing. They're gonna be like, I knew it. I thought that seemed like what Paul and all the Christians and God would think about our situations. Others are gonna be a little uncomfortable, some are gonna be the complete losers in this whole exchange. They're gonna come off looking terrible. And we get this little blip in here before we get into the actual meat of the letter, where Paul has come out, and you've kind of heard him hinting that the letter of Galatians, it's gonna have some punch to it. There's authority behind it, whatever you're gonna read next, this is gonna be from a higher authority than just Paul's opinions, real quick off the hip while he was busy doing other things. He just dictated this text real fast into the phone, and it's not really thought through. No, no, no. It's Paul, an apostle, sent not from men nor by men, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead and all the brothers with me. Okay, so we know right off the bat this is very authoritative. Who's he writing to? Multiple churches. So this thing is gonna get read aloud and discussed multiple times. It also tells us that the exact same problem was happening in more than one congregation, which means this wasn't a situation where the wheels might come off of a church. That would be really bad, I guess. But a whole region of Christianity, and this is the region probably from the Prove It Trip. So if the Prove It Tri region can't solve this problem and it falls off a cliff, there is a big issue here. So Paul is taking this seriously. He has thought through what he's doing, he's made his little greeting, all the things Mrs. Springer taught me to do with the letter. But now, in this next couple, what how many we let me see a second? This verse three, verse four, these next two, no, and verse five, these next three verses of the letter, this is a part of the letter structure that Mrs. Springer didn't tell me about. This is the how what I'm about to say in this letter flows out of the larger story and values that we all have agreed to and that we all embrace and theoretically are trying to live by so that we're all operating from the same starting point as the rest of the body of the letter begins portion. She did not cover that in fourth grade letter class. This is all new to me, but listen to what he's doing. You're smart, you're gonna get it right here. Okay, so we're writing all the churches in Galatia, and then he says, verse three, Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Okay, well, that actually happens in a lot of these letters. In fact, he says pretty much that exact same phrase. Let me see, I'm gonna turn my hair up. Colossians, that's another one of the letters I've told you before, but I remember these four letters that are written to churches as go eat a popcorn. Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians. And then Colossians he says in verse two grace and peace to you from God our Father. And there's just a period after that. So that's it. Let's see what happens in Philippians. That's right back here. Verse 2, chapter 1 of Philippians. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Period. Okay. Pretty straightforward. Flip back over here to Ephesians Ephesians. Come on, Whitman, you're embarrassing yourself. Here we go. Ephesians 1, verse 2. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Period. There's a reason that these four letters, the go eat popcorn letters, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, are lumped together. It's because they're very similar in style and tone. I mean, some of them are a little grouchier than others, but they're all about the same length. They're all addressing a specific need in the church. They're all written to people who Paul knows, and all four of them have basically the phrase, Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. But Galatians is the only one of those that has a comma after the name Christ. Oh, what's that about? Oh, he's gonna go on. Okay, okay. Grace and peace to you. This is Galatians one, three again. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, comma, verse four, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. Look, I already tipped my hand. I think I know exactly what he's doing here. I mean from the very beginning, he's been going with authority, citing things bigger than himself, like his own apostolic call, specifically from God, like the consensus of all of the brothers, all the Christians where he's at, like God and Jesus, and even that authority is further undergirded and evidenced by the fact that God raised Jesus from the dead. So there's a lot of authority behind this letter, and now there's even more authority, even behind the niceties of grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. In case you guys forgot, this is the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age. You guys remember that one? Like not some other version of Jesus, like a cartoon caricature of Jesus. This is the one who laid down his life and went to the cross. Remember that? And all of this is according to the will of our God and Father. So the God, when the actual one, the God of Abraham, I am Yahweh, the God of the whole Old Testament, that God, the one God, he wanted Jesus to do that, that is, to give himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age. If you haven't been around Christianity much, then it's like, ooh, that's all very titillating. There's so much there to dig into. This is all new and fresh, and we will dig into it. If you've been around Christianity a lot, it's disappointing, it's hard to admit, and it's a bummer and everything, but that might just fly by. You might be like, okay, yeah, this is like the prayer at the beginning of an event where we're all on the same page and we're all Christian, and it's just a banquet for like a Christian school women's cross-country event at the end of the year. It's like, all right, uh coach here, everybody gather around. Let's uh have the gentlemen remove their hats. We're gonna, we're just gonna start tonight. We're just gonna start tonight in just prayer, just in this place, just together, to just pray and just to ask just the Lord's just blessing over just this place, together, here in this place tonight, just this evening. So we're just gonna pray. Let's just pray at this time. Let's just bow our heads together and just pray in this time, in this place, just now. Let's pray. And then the prayer, you know what? I'm glad there's a prayer that happens next. But let's be honest, it doesn't have the most teeth to it. I thanks that we had a good time and bless our time together. May it be honoring to your name. I mean it's all nice. It's a nice prayer, you know what I mean? And sometimes, well, I'm glad those nice prayers that are a little bit placeholder-y and very rarely scripted or thought through or prepared in advance. It's just sort of a Taco Bell menu prayer. You got like 15 items of Taco Bell, and you just throw them in different tortillas and different ways and put a different name on it. You just you got like 10 things you can do in those kind of prayers that you can latch on to. And they're all Christian and nobody can argue with any of them, and they're fine. And what I really love about them is it's just an attempt on the front end of things to be like, hey, this is all happening in the context of God. And if my prayer is a little bit, you know, simplistic and a little bit cliche, you know, there are worse things. We're just trying to acknowledge God on the front end. Good enough. But if you have been around Christianity for a long time, it can be easy to come upon a phrase like this and go, oh yeah, okay, uh, God, let's just skim here. The Father and Jesus is in there. That's good. He's uh awesome. I love that guy. And then uh died on the cross. Obviously, we know that happened. Uh, he's rescuing us, I'm for that, and all of this is what God wanted to him be glory. Uh, there's an amen in there. Great. Yep. All of that. Okay, let's get to what the actual meeting's about now. But this kind of is already the actual meeting. It's weird there's a comma after Christ. Paul never does that in this style of letter, but here he's doing it to remind us who we're talking about. This is a Christ who gave himself up. Why? Because there was something we need to be rescued from. And this is also a situation where God, the God that everybody agrees is God. The Jews think this is God, the Jewish Christian converts think this is God, the Gentiles think this is God, this is Yahweh, I am, the God of Abraham, the God of all creation, the maker and sustainer of all things, the capital G God. Well Paul is just pointing out here and reminding them that they all agree on is he signed off on having Jesus do this. He signed off, this was his plan, to have Jesus fulfill the law and pay the penalty for sin. That was God's idea. Okay? Everybody remember that, just so we're clear? And of course, to God, you know, be glory and glory forever. Amen. Now the next line in this letter is where Mrs. Springer would say the body of the letter starts. And it comes in hot. It's very spicy. I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Whoa, okay, we're gonna unpack that in future conversations. So we are about to get down to very overt, kicked in the front door, Kool-Aid man style, just explode in and start saying things, kind of business in the body of this letter. But he's not wasting time with his Jesus-y stuff here. This isn't a perfunctory prayer, this isn't something performative. He is reminding everybody, hey, these are central tenets of what we believe. And if you believe this, then you believe that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament law, and that this is not some kind of departure from what God the Father wanted. This was in fact the opposite of some kind of departure. This is perfectly in keeping with the plan of God, and everything that you're about to hear in this rebuke that is six chapters long is in keeping with these central assumptions of our faith. And so, kind of implicitly, Paul's like, if you disagree with what I'm about to say, you're disagreeing with the plan of God that we all signed off on and the God who we all bend the knee to and trust. So, on the one hand, we get a little extra bonus part of a letter that I don't know the name for that simply says nice things about Jesus and God on the front end that theoretically everybody who's read the Bible is a Christian, or everybody who's receiving this letter totally already knows is true. We're just kind of putting that out there and just like, hey, there's our there's our big idea, okay? We all agree on this. But then on the other hand, there's also a secondary layer to all of this. Is Paul kind of in advance being like, if you agree with that statement and you just accepted my grace and peace to you wish, but you don't agree with what the rest of this letter says, consider carefully where you stand. Because if you're in opposition to the content of this letter, you're in opposition to the thing you just said amen to about who Jesus is, what he did, and that it was God's plan all along, and that he saw it through and sustained this himself. I so much appreciate all of you. Thanks for listening to my thing. More on this tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hours podcast. Who's the answer?