I don't know how much we've talked about this before, but I love baseball. I played forever as a kid and all the way into adulthood. It is my favorite game, and I love all the strategy and little nuance that goes into it. And there was one time that I was learning about a certain defensive situation as a kid in what we call little league, little league baseball. And the coaches were trying to explain the thing as we were sitting there. They laid out a situation in which a runner got stuck in no man's land between two bases. And they were trying to explain what you do as defenders to try to trap the runner and keep them from making it successfully to either of those two bases. The situation is called a rundown. They laid it out, none of us got it. And we looked at them and we were like, that's overwhelming. I don't know that we can ever actually do that. There are so many implications. Who stands where? What do we do? And the coaches, there were four of them at this time, were like, just watch. And they went out between second and third base, and they had one of us kids go out and be the base runner that got stuck and stranded in between. And then they proceeded to weave this elaborate, beautiful braid, so to speak, as one would catch the ball and run at the runner and throw it over the runner's head to somebody else, and then they would turn around and run the runner back the other way. And they just kept falling in line behind the other. So there were always two people surrounding the runner. And they just kept doing it until the distance between the runner and the defenders tightened down and tightened down and tightened down, and there was nowhere for him to go. And then we were like, oh, well, that's what you do. Okay, well, I was kind of wringing my hands about this and wrestling with what it was going to look like. But now that I see you do it, I can picture that. So we've been talking about evangelism in Matthew chapter four. And yep, it's weird because we live in a time where people don't really want you knocking on their door, which is probably a good thing. People don't really want you invading their space with messages that they didn't ask for by ticking the it's okay to advertise to me box on the app or by playing a stupid freemium game that requires you to watch ads to get more crystals or purple diamonds or whatever you have to get to win the dumb game. Unless we invite the advertising into our space, we really don't like to be advertised to. And we also live in a postmodern age where, you know, we like to imagine that there might be multiple versions of truth. Now, I think in the olden days, we probably overreacted on this. And we were like, no, there's one story, one narrative, one version of truth. And even within the boundaries of Christianity, I mean, come on, I think there's a little bit of wiggle room here for people to see things a bit differently. And so postmodernism, where we live now, is kind of a reaction against that. And we're like, there are multiple versions of truth, maybe as many versions as there are people. So it's kind of an affront to go to somebody else and be like, hey, I'm giving you something that you need to do or think about, which implicitly intones that you are wrong or incomplete without having thought about this thing. So maybe we're in a situation after a few days of talking about evangelism and what it means for Simon and Andrew to be told that they're going to be fissures of men, effectively taking the message of Jesus out. We're kind of wringing our hands about that and we're worried about it. But then Jesus, in the very next chapter, just does what my coaches did and goes out and simplifies it by showing exactly what it looks like. So Jesus calls his disciples and then he goes out in verse 20. My goodness, that's small print. Where are we at here? Uh verse 23, and it says, Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them. Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and the region across the Jordan followed him. Lot to break down here, but for today, all we're looking at is what Jesus does to answer the obvious pregnant question coming out of the last passage. Well, fishers of men, that's a really cool phrase. I could see how that would make a nice bumper sticker. But what do I actually do? Oh, well, you travel around, so you go outside your own boundaries to talk to other people. You, okay, uh, taught in their synagogue, so he was clear on theology, on who God is. And so he goes to people and talks to them about these things. He communicates the good news of the kingdom. Ah, so Jesus is crystal clear on what the message actually is. There's a kingdom gospel with a king and kingdom values, and that, first and foremost, is what people need to understand. That will have an individual manifestation, but the invitation is to something much bigger than just individual transformation. It's to being a part of this kingdom and the king and following the king who's at the head of it, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. Okay, that one gets a little bit tricky because it would seem that most people don't really have a knack for healing diseases and sickness. But what Jesus is modeling here is the gospel in a miraculous manifestation that I think isn't entirely unique to him biblically, but is mostly unique to him. We don't see a lot of this stuff happening day in and day out. And I know there are a lot of you who will say, Yeah, we do, we see the miraculous all the time. To which I would say, eh, we live in the age of cell phones. If people were having arms grow back and they were coming back from the dead left and right, like a lot of people claim, that would be all over the internet and everyone on earth would be a Christian. It does not seem that this is happening at the rate that some people claim, but I believe fully that it was happening at the rate that it is claimed here, which I know for a lot of you is like, ah, sometimes I respect you, and then you say stuff like that, and like how you just lost all your skeptic cred. How can you believe that? Well, we'll talk about why I believe the miraculous stuff in the Bible happens some other time. For now, thank you for continuing to humor me and be nice to me. So, what we see are elements of theology, elements of clarity as to what the big picture invitation is, and then just stuff that points to the miraculous reality of God, which Jesus could wield. And even if you and I can't, we could still point to that as well. And so could Peter, Andrew, James, and John. Well, the result is exactly what you'd expect. People hear about that and they want to know what the deal is, and they want to test it. So they bring people to Jesus and he heals them. Again, here we're talking about literal healing. We're talking about a little something different, I think, for most Christians throughout history. And then large crowds come from all over the place. We're going to break down the geography questions and how the original audience would have received that here in just a little bit. If I am these four disciples, I am absolutely enthralled, enchanted, and intrigued by Jesus. I am excited to follow him and see where this thing goes. But the fact that the calling included some stuff that I'm supposed to do is baffling. It's overwhelming to me. And if I'm in the original audience and I'm tracking with all of this up through Matthew chapter four, I'm like, whoa, he takes all the boxes, everything that the Old Testament lobs forward. Jesus is the completion to all of these arcs, all of these narrative arcs that are left hanging out there. Jesus could solve all of this. There could be hope. There could be this dawning of a new light. This could be the beginning of the kingdom that was promised to David that would last forever. I want to be on board with this thing. But my guess is people weren't thinking, what role do I play? What responsibility do I have in this? They were thinking, how do I be a recipient of this passively and have God do things at me? Now, maybe people were picturing ritualistic stuff. That was a very popular element in the religion of the day. Some of that makes sense biblically, some of that was cultural evolution over time. But the idea of an outward-impulsed evangelistic expression of this kingdom and that what it is to be a citizen of the kingdom is to live the kingdom values and represent the king as an ambassador, a son, a daughter, an heir out to people you might not like very much. That had to have been mind-blowing. We are so used to the idea of Christianity and the outward impulse that I keep describing that we fail, I think, to appreciate how shocking this would have been when people heard it for the first time. And so, for the purpose of the narrative, as we're starting to come up on Jesus' first of five great big speeches that build the skeleton for the book of Matthew, we have at least a little more sense of what Jesus is going to do at this phase in his ministry, and a little more sense of, if not right now, eventually, what his followers might be expected to do as well. That is fascinating, and it's going to serve as a helpful cipher as we get into some very complex teaching coming up. I got a little bit more that I want to break down on this particular passage, and we will get to that later on. Hey, once again, I'm doing kind of a buddy sponsorship with my friend Shane Heilman this week. I know and hang out with this guy. I love him and his family. His kids are friends with my kids and everything. And I love his brain and what he does musically. I love the way he talks about the Bible. I love processing stuff with him. And if I were good at music, what he's doing is what I would want to be able to do. I really hope you'll check it out. Again, the stuff I'm trying to put in front of you here are things that complement what we do well, not things that are just completely different and out of the blue. So I really do hope you'll go and check out his Psalms project. It's on Spotify. It's linked below. It's wonderful. All right. I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. We are moving ahead into the last few questions before we get into the enormous implications of the Sermon on the Mount and Matthew chapter 5. We'll catch you soon.