Well, this is kind of a big deal for me, and it probably shouldn't be, but you know, we talk honestly. We just tell each other how the things are. So here's how the things are. Football season in the United States of America is about to start this week, and I'm very excited about it. I like football. It's fun for a ton of reasons for me. There's all kinds of storylines in football, and I think that's part of what makes it great. I think that's part of the genius of how they've marketed that is the National Football League leans into the personalities and the conflicts and the drama and all of that stuff. Well, last year, and even if you're not into sports or football, this is all going to make sense. There was a big splashy trade or signing of a super famous, all-time great player in American football. His name's Aaron Rodgers. Am I a fan? No, not particularly. He doesn't play for my team, so I don't know, whatever. I'm kind of indifferent to Aaron Rodgers. But for the longest time, he played for the Green Bay Packers. And then he gets signed by the New York Jets. And his first game out, he's going to be the savior of the downtrodden, horrible, awful New York Jets. And he runs out onto the field in front of a national audience, and they're playing America music, and he has an American flag and he's running with it, and he's in his Jets outfit, and it's very exciting, right? Well, then the game starts and he plays like three plays and blows out his Achilles and is out for the entire season. It's the most anticlimatic thing ever. And the whole prospect for the Jets season in one quick instant on national TV went from sky's the limit. We can win the Super Bowl! We're back to complete despair, everything is ruined. Well, Aaron Rodgers is a fast healer. He healed up in the offseason, and now he's back. And just this morning I saw projections for who's going to make the playoffs and how all the teams are going to do. And people are really high on the New York Jets. Well, what changed? It's real simple. Aaron Rodgers. If Aaron Rodgers is there and he's a part of the team, people seem to think they got a fighting chance to be, well, more than just fighting, really, really good, maybe even champs. But if they don't have Aaron Rodgers, yikes. This is not a very special team. It all comes down to whether that one super high-powered player is there. Likewise, the beginning of the book of Acts, Jesus has ascended to the right hand of the Father. He's obviously been the centerpiece of everything about the story so far. And now you just got his disciples, a band of 11 merry misfits. They're not particularly promising looking, but Jesus told them that they were going to have this super important role and do this super important stuff. And he also promised them that another player, I'm stretching the metaphor a bit, but you know, just roll with me here. Another player was going to fill out that last roster spot and that that player was going to make all the difference. Really stretching the metaphor at this point. So the question coming out of Acts chapter one is is that going to come true or not? Will this one player who completely changes the prospects of the outcomes entirely from it's not happening to this is definitely happening. Will that one player show up? And we get the answer in Acts chapter two, and the answer is yes. We get the birthday of the Christian religion for all intents and purposes. The birthday of the Christian church happens in Acts chapter two. The Holy Spirit, who is God, shows up with the disciples, and all of a sudden the disciples are out and about in Jerusalem and they are communicating stuff about Jesus, what they've seen, what they've heard, what they've been witness to, that he defeated death. And the crazy thing is that all of these people from all around the world that has been built on the backs of the Babylonian Empire, then the Persian Empire, and then the Seleucid and Ptolemaic Empire, and then the Roman Empire. It's this massively cosmopolitan thing that is happening in Jerusalem. I mean, it's a crossroads of trade for the whole world. Everybody's there from all the languages and all the different parts of the world, and they all hear the disciples talking in their own languages from the far corners of the earth. Then the message about Jesus, it makes sense to them. And in one moment, boom, a whole bunch of questions are answered. Question number one, is that last roster spot, the key roster spot, gonna be filled with the star who makes this whole thing possible? Well, yes, God showed up, the Holy Spirit showed up. Question number two, is this thing really for people who aren't Jews? Because the whole Bible, up until just very recently here, has been all Jewish stuff. But there's been this undercurrent through the whole Old Testament and everything that said that this was gonna go out to everybody. Is it really gonna go out to everybody? How could you even make it make sense to everybody? The Jewish religion, at this point, it's so hitched to the Hebrew language, even. I mean, there's a Greek version of the scriptures, but this is deeply Hebraic in terms of thought and culture and language, and it's solidly an ethnic religion. It's not easy for an outsider who doesn't have the bloodline to just jump in with the thing. I mean, we saw that where the Old Testament left off with Ezra and Nehemiah. So is this message of Jesus really for everybody? Well, what's the first miracle when the Holy Spirit shows up? It's an answer to that question. Yes, it is for everybody, and I, the Holy Spirit, will supernaturally make it so that everybody can hear it. The first blush, it seems like the kind of miracle where you're like, oh, okay, that's kind of interesting. And it's maybe more fun when you part C's or make the sun or the earth stop for a minute. That stuff seems like more dramatic. But when you really think about this, and really when you think about every miracle in the Bible, there's a theological theme behind it. It's not just God showing off. He's making a point, he's communicating in a grand way, an inarguable way, what his point is. Theoretically, nobody who saw this should have been able to come away from it and be like, oh, no, it's not for everybody. Well, yes, it is. It's an inarguable miracle, and they're not just speaking in multiple languages either. I didn't tell you this, but they got little tongues of fire above their heads as well, as visible confirmation. They're not just making stuff up. I don't know, it sounds weird, but this is what the story holds out, and the results support the spectacular, miraculous claims of the text because thousands of people start converting to following Jesus, someone nobody had heard of just three years earlier. And sticking with the metaphor of fire, it spreads like wildfire through the rest of the book of Acts. Now, initially, it seems to really catch on with Jewish people, which would make sense. They're gonna have, you know, a better starting place for it. They're gonna have a framework. We know from the book of Luke that there were people like Anna and Simeon, they factor briefly in the Christmas story surrounding Jesus, but there were people like them who had been looking for a Messiah just like Jesus for their whole lives. They'd been reading the Old Testament correctly and saw that Jesus was the fulfillment, the completion of all of that stuff. And so there are a ton of Jews who, when Jesus shows up and when the Holy Spirit shows up and the message of Jesus through the disciples goes out after Acts chapter two, they're like, okay, I've seen enough. This is real. I'm putting my faith in Jesus. And I don't think they in any way viewed that as quitting their old religion of Judaism and now jumping in with a new religion. No, I think they understood what Jesus said back in the Sermon on the Mount very early in his public life, that he did not come to abolish all the old stuff, the law and the prophets, but he came to fulfill it. He is the completion of all of that stuff. Tons of Jewish people saw that and became followers of Jesus very early on. It says, now they were staying in Jerusalem, God fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, it was the sound of the Holy Spirit, like a rushing wind and the tongues of fire and all the stuff I was describing. A crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard them speaking in his own language. Utterly amazed, they asked, Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? What they're saying there is like this isn't exactly the smartest part of the country with the reputation for producing a lot of polyglots who just know every foreign tongue. These are the simplest, most salt of the earth people that there are. It just doesn't seem like they could fake this skill set. So they ask her, not all of these men are speaking Galileans. Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and parts of Libya near Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues. And those of you who kind of know me, or those of you who know me well, you know that it's just killing me not to run down the backstory on every single one of those people groups. And it's killing me not to deep dive into the history of all of them and talk about how the message they were hearing was a perfect fit for what each of those people groups had gone through. The pain, the turmoil, the ethnic trauma, the ethnic pride, all the things that they had been through over the course of the centuries before. But I'm not going to do it because it's a very, very, very deep rabbit trail. The point is everybody from everywhere, affected by every empire, worshiping all the other local ethnic fake deities, they all heard it and they're all being moved by it. So for the initial crop of Jewish converts, and there were tons in the very early going here, this is amazing. Jesus is the Messiah. We've been waiting on this forever. God's redemptive plan is at hand. This is incredible. The prophets were all right. I mean, the God of Abraham, he's still around. If you can't tell, I love the story that we are doing the 10,000-foot view here on the book of Acts. And I'm going to try to hit the gas pedal on it so we can get into Galatians relatively quickly. That is the body of Galatians proper. But really, we're in Galatians right now. Galatians is probably the first of the letters of the New Testament. It's probably one of, if not the earliest books of the New Testament. So, really, I say again, we're kind of already into the setting and the moment of Galatians or right there at the doorstep. All right. Quick favor to ask. I know a bunch of you have been listening to this podcast on YouTube. YouTube changed a bunch of things around here a couple of months ago with how they do Google Podcasts and all of that. So in order to keep this podcast on Google Podcasts or whatever they call it now, I had to create a YouTube channel specifically called the 10-minute Bible hour podcast that is nothing but this daily podcast to keep this in the feed of those of you who like to listen that way. I have a favorite ask. If you like it, I would be so grateful if you could just go and click subscribe to that YouTube channel to help keep the YouTube and Google algorithm positive on this podcast so that we can share this thing with more people and include more people. If not, that's totally cool too. If so, I'll put a link down below, but you can just Google the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and hit subscribe on YouTube, and that would be rad. Either way, thanks for being here. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again, sir.