You're listening to the 10-minute Bible member podcast. It's Fest Hun Free Daily Deep Night Bible. And right now we're talking about Galatians.
SPEAKER_00So all of this stuff that we do with the Bible, working through this, I mean there's a lot of narratives and stories and things like that. There's interesting characters. It's colorful. I think the Bible is very funny. I think it's very dramatic. I think that it's very timeless. I think it transcends culture and language. So I just think it's so, so, so much fun to do what we do together. I also happen to think that the God who made everything, whose name is I am, the encompassment of all existence. I think the God is behind it, and that makes it even more compelling to me because it isn't just a bunch of interesting stories cobbled together. It is a cohesive story that spans out and spreads out and makes sense of all of it. It makes sense of human existence and history and politics and human behavior and failure and art and beautiful things. This story at the centerpiece of thought makes the rest of the things we encounter in life make sense. If you haven't figured it out, I'm really, really, really high on the Bible for a ton of reasons. And as you read along, Old Testament and New Testament, you figure out, oh, this isn't like other stories. I'm in this story. I am both an observer but also a participant. And the things that are happening here have direct bearing on me, not just because of how this book and the stories accounted for therein shaped the world in which I live, but the God who is in this thing is building out this redemptive plan. And this redemptive plan includes me. And yet, when I was a kid, being around this so much, there were probably moments where I was really compelled by the stuff about forgiveness and salvation and the hope of God and all of that. But I think growing up, I was kind of entitled. I was a pastor's kid, so I felt like I kind of know all of that. So much of what you get in the language in the Bible about how this applies to you comes with the word forgiveness in it. Like there's forgiveness of sins, specifically what we were looking at the last couple days in Acts chapter 13, the message of Paul to the Jews in the synagogue in Poseidon Antioch and to the Gentiles who were there listening in, Paul said, Therefore, my brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him, everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses. Well, I listened to that as a kid, and the relevance of it didn't fully strike me. And I think the reason that that didn't hit as hard as it should have hit for me is because I didn't think I needed to be forgiven for anything. I really hadn't meaningfully screwed anything up yet. And anything that I did get wrong could just be chalked up to being a precocious kid who gets into things and is a little bit rascally. And so I just don't think that hit the way it was supposed to hit. I'm not sure that internalized as hard as it was supposed to internalize. And when I went a and read a passage like this when I was a kid, I don't know what I thought was going on or why that message would be the thing that would spark this massive response from people or would cause so many people to want to follow Jesus and receive that forgiveness. Because frankly, I probably found mistake making to be a bit unrelatable. Then life happened. Oh, do I find mistake making to be relatable now? Isn't it incredible? How when you look back over the course of your life, you got a whole bunch of things that really have gone very, very right. But the handful of things that make you cringe, that make you wince that you did or you thought or you said that you just didn't understand maybe the implications of at the time. Now you look back on it and you're like, ah, ayi aye, that is just an albatross that I get to carry with me. That is a shame that I do not get to wash away. That is a stain that is on the fabric of my life. I hate that I can't separate myself from it. There's no amount of words that I could go and say and be like, here's what I was thinking. This is like I can't talk my way out of it. It's just there. That stuff lingers like when we cook oily food, and then a few hours later I go to that little place in the turnaround stairwell where the stairs pivot going down to the basement where all of the oily food smells just live for some reason. It's like, oh dang, it's still right there. I just have this part of my soul where all the things that I've got wrong want to linger and mingle together to create this composite, gross, indiscernible smell of the ick of the things that I regret. Well, when you get to the point in life where you've had any feelings of regret or any feelings of sorrow over stuff that you've got wrong, or sadness over people that you've hurt, or confusion over how things you tried to get right and really thought you were getting right didn't produce the good results you hoped they would in other people's lives. When those things start to stick to you a little bit, and then you come back to a passage like this stuff in Acts 13, and you hear Paul saying this simple thing about forgiveness in Jesus, it hits a little different. There's an amazing historical phenomenon that's accounted for. A whole bunch of people signed up to follow Jesus and they weren't just Jews. The Jesus thing defies simple sociological explanations so much as to smack of the supernatural, and it just makes you wonder what God said. I I think it was this, dude. This is what caused people to think, okay, if that's real and it were applied to my life, and I walk down to that little place where my stairs have a landing and bend back on themselves, where all of the stinky, oily smells from all the things that we cook mingle together and wreak and don't go away for hours or even days. I think that area would be fresh. I think a breeze of cleansing forgiveness could go through there, and all of that could actually go away. And I believe it because it sounds like Jesus has the supernatural authority to actually forgive. But I think it felt to people like there was actual potency to the forgiveness that Paul was describing in Acts 13 when he said, Therefore, my brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him, everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses. There is something about forgiveness that everybody wants, but we're also suspicious of the promise of forgiveness, of being separated from our worst days and our worst failures. And that is, we have to believe that whoever is offering it has the ability for it to count. It's gotta be real, or deep down we know we still have that oily smell in the metaphorical stairway of our soul. So, one, the tender-hearted promise of forgiveness is compelling. Two, the character and the story of the one who is offering the forgiveness is compelling. My stupid party fouls and mean things that I said, and that time I was real gossipy and all angry and hurt about stuff and acted like a jerk behind the scenes. I bet that could be forgiven. So there's that, but then there's also the story and the character of Jesus that makes this forgiveness seem compelling. Would his forgiveness count? Well, I don't know. I mean, he's powerful beyond death. He came back to life. He's the smartest, most competent person ever. He makes more sense than anybody ever. He lived the best life of anybody ever. He said himself that the authority to forgive has been given to him. He forgave other people, and it seemed to count. Like if anybody has the power to say that forgiveness is an actual thing, I think it's Jesus. And then you add to that all of the stuff about the sacrificial system from the Old Testament and blood being shed for sin, but those sacrifices, you know, there were imperfect sacrifices, and then along comes Jesus, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. I mean, that's how he was first verbally, publicly identified by John the Baptist, his forerunner. And people got that rolling around in their head, and it's like, I don't think this is just some weird upstart who is running his mouth about something he knows is going to play real well with everybody. There is something different about Jesus. He didn't teach like the religious teachers of the law who were popular of that day. He taught with actual authority, and that got everybody's attention after his first speech. I mean, that's what it says right at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. People could see it from the very beginning. So I think you add all of that stuff up and the promise of forgiveness, which everybody yearns for. Come on, you want to get to the heart of people, you want to get to the thing that makes us all the same. It is that we have regret. It is that we have not done the things that we wish we had done, or we did things that we thought made sense, and then later we realized it doesn't. We all know what it feels like to have our actions, our words, our ideas hurt people both that we don't like and people we love. To have our own actions hurt us, to have our own actions just make things worse. And we all have the capacity to think about how much that damaging stuff can overshadow all of the things that have gone right. Brokenness and failure and regret is a very human thing, and we all have it in common, regardless of how loudly we yell about which preferred political thing, regardless of how we style ourselves in the internet or in front of other people. We all know what it is to hurt over stuff we got wrong and can't fix. Lots of people have talked a good game about forgiveness, and that's very nice. I mean, they've identified the problem, they've identified the human need, that's great, but then along comes Jesus and everything lines up. He could actually deliver on that. He could deliver on it in a way that the Old Testament law of Moses could not. And when I was a kid looking at the Bible, maybe that stuff didn't hit quite as hard because I hadn't screwed anything up yet. But now as I go through this and read it, I see why those simple couple of turns of phrases that we get from Paul here in Acts 13, 38, and 39 spoken at the synagogue in Poseidon Antioch, I totally see why that hit. It still hits for me. And we're going to see a whole lot of people respond to that throughout the rest of the book of Acts. And frankly, I've seen a whole lot of people respond to that and have their lives changed about it in my time on the stage of history as well. I think I want one more day on this multi-day arc talking about what the words were that made this historical phenomenon of people responding to Jesus happen here in the middle of the book of Acts. I got a couple more things that I want to look at. So we'll pick that up tomorrow. Let's be real with each other here. This is a weird podcast. It's a very different tone from day to day. I understand that you get where I'm at at a given day, you get whatever a given passage kind of does to me. And my heart is so, so soft when it comes to the idea of forgiveness and what that means for me and what it looks like to give it away to other people. And this one gets squarely through the armor. We'll talk about it a little bit more tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again, sir.