Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And today we are going to be talking about the second half of the book of Colossians. And in preparation for this conversation, I thought to myself, self, where did you put those notes on Colossians that you worked on a couple of years ago when you did the season where you went through a book of the Bible every day? Because you had really good stuff on Colossians there. It took a long time to make that. Where'd you put that? And then I thought, wait a minute, I don't have to go dig for those notes because I have something better and conciser and clearer right here. I'm going to show you right now. And should by show you, I mean make sounds with it because I can't show you because it's a podcast. This right here in my left hand is an advanced copy that you can't get yet, but that I can get yet because I wrote it of a book called The Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible. Listen to it. That's what it sounds like when you flip through the pages. This thing has been so much work over the last year, quietly in the background. It has been a cause of stress, mostly in a good way. Not gonna lie, the last couple months have been uh stressful. I've been I've been going through it over here. This home stretch of this book has been pretty taxing and kind of getting it toward the launch part and and all the strategy that goes into that. HarperCollins published the books. It's a great publisher. They have a subsidiary called Zondervin that is the label on the book. And they've just been awesome to work with. I was kind of afraid that when I set out to do this, that they would, I don't know, what's a nice way to put it, just stupidify the sound of it. I was afraid that a publisher would kind of wreck it because I mean, really, this book just is us. This is a distillation of our podcast and the conversations you and I have together. And really, it's a distillation of all the work I've ever done on the Bible over the entire course of my life. And what I did is I just made a chapter for every book of the Bible. And it's not like a paragraph book, it's like heading and then answer. It is meant to be the most ruthlessly tight while still being fun distillation of what each of these books of the Bible is and how they fit together. I wrote it in such a way that it is meant to be a quick reference for people who've been around the Bible for a long time, but also make sense for somebody who is completely brand new to this. So, I mean, it was hard. It was a ton of work, but the people I worked with, I think they were really cool and they did a good job. I also included visuals, all the stickers for every book of the Bible we're ever going to do. They're all in here, not as stickers, but as images. They're all built to be like the right size for you to be able to put a sticker on there. So it's kind of a sticker book as well. I'm really proud of it. It's really cool. And I had a cool moment with it today when I went to get ready to talk with you about this Colossians stuff, and it occurred to me, wait, I have this here, and I can just flip backwards. And it's, you know, it's all laid out real cool. So I as I flip with my finger, my thumb here, I can see all the names of the books so that I can quickly get to what I want. There's all the T books, which means I'm almost there. And Colossians, there it is, and there's some really cool art that we made. Uh, the art for Colossians is Jesus walking through the ruins of Colossae, and there's a Colossus, like a big giant Greek carving looking thing. And it looks all muscular and magnificent, and Jesus looks all little walking by it, like normal human-sized, but the Colossus is all like busted up and shattered and everything. And I made it that way because of the theme we were talking about yesterday, right? Like you got this fusion idea going on in Colossae, where you lump together all these different ideas, all these different gods, every religious conviction from every religious wave that came through with each invader, each flag that flew over Colossae. And so it looks like from reading Colossians and from historical common sense that the problem this church was gonna face is that they liked Jesus, but they viewed him as one of many, but they needed to be challenged to view him as supreme. Well, if you're making art for that, for stickers that I'm gonna send out, if we ever do Colossians, or you know, for art to put in a book like this Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible, how do you do that? How do you capture that, right? So I was pretty happy with how that one came out. This is one of my favorites in the whole book. The great big, busted up, sad looking Greek Colossus idol, and Jesus just passing by and musing at it, like, hmm, that's cute. So, anyways, this seemed like as good a time as any to let you know about the book. I'm gonna put an Amazon affiliate link in the thing down below. I don't know how much that actually does. I don't know what it does, I don't really understand it. I know that TMBH gets some kind of little direct kickback if you use the affiliate link to buy the book. And I think maybe we get some kind of kickback on your whole cart if you're buying stuff and you you start that cart with the affiliate link. I'm uh maybe, like I said, the this isn't exactly my area of expertise. I just like going out to my shed and talking about the Bible with you. So, reason number one that I want to tell you about the book is because it's ours. I straight up talk about you in the acknowledgments, and I straight up thank you for being there and being how you are and being steady over the long haul and the effect that that's had on me. I mean, everybody always says, like, well, this or that wouldn't exist without these. I mean, that stuff gets said in little thank you speeches all the time. I really mean it. This would not exist without you. The fact that you are on the other side of this conversation is why this book happens. So when you get a copy of this, and I hope you will, like, obviously, I'm gonna nag you and badger you about this. I hope you get it. I hope you buy a hundred of them and give them to all your friends. Not because I'll get a lot of money for that. I don't think I probably will, rather, because the book is meant to help people understand the Bible, and that's why we do the podcast, and you're into that. So, yes, I hope you will buy the book. And when you do, I hope it feels different than other books that you have on your shelf that you look at and you're like, well, that's a book that I observed from afar. That process behind that book happened totally separate and distinct from me. But that book right there with the lightning bolt on the cover, that one's mine. I contributed to that. I was a part of that conversation, and I have ownership over this thing. You do. That's why I thanked you in the book. You're awesome. I'm grateful whether you buy the thing or not. So that's the reason number one, I wanted to tell you about that and tell you that I'm grateful to you because it exists because of you. Two, I wanted to tell you this thing has kicked my teeth in and it's been really hard. And writing a book is way harder than I thought it was going to be, and it's been humbling and exhausting. And I don't feel like I've been on my game as much as I have at other points in my life. There's so much mental output that you can have. I graduated a couple kids from high school this year, getting them transitioned to the next stage in life while doing this book thing. Yeah, maybe that wasn't the smartest idea ever. I feel like I'm kind of coming out of that phase now. But this has been a challenging run for me. I hinted at that uh, you know, maybe a few months ago or whatever as well. You know, I said a minute ago that part of the beauty of the whole thing is like we do this every day. So there's a degree of steadfastness to it. Like I do it whether I'm in the mood or not. I do it whether I'm feeling well or not. And you show up whether you're feeling that or not. And it just means the world to me. And again, this book is a product of that steadiness on your part and me trying to match your energy in that regard. The third reason that I wanted to tell you about the book is because it has stuff about Colossians in it that I think are downright useful. Like, for example, this part. It's a section called The Heart of the Letter. It says, just like everything in Philippians flows out of the hymn to Christ, we mentioned yesterday, so everything in Colossians flows out of a grand declaration of Christ's supremacy in chapter one that we read bit by bit last time around. Paul's saying there's no point in keeping any lingering vestiges of pagan gods when Jesus is one, the image of the invisible God, two, the maker of everything, including Aristotle's visible world and Plato's invisible world. Three, the establisher of all governments and authorities, all the flags that have flown over Colossae. Four, whatever number we're on, the one who holds everything together, another nod to Greek philosophical assumptions about the nature of all things. Five, the head of the church, six, the firstborn from the dead, seven, God in the flesh, eight, the solver of the human problem and the vanquisher of death, nine, the purifier of the sinful, and ten, the healer of the relationship between God and human beings. That is some pretty heavyweight, heady, important theological stuff. And if the people in Colossae actually take that to heart, I'm not reading anymore, by the way. This is back to you and me conversation, not you and me through the book conversation. If all of that stuff is true, and if the people who receive the letter of Colossians internalize all of that the way Paul intends them to, that's going to have a ripple effect in life. Think about different moments in your life where you maybe previously held one set of assumptions and then you have an epiphany. Something clicks, something comes into focus. Maybe for a lot of you, it's a near-death experience, like an accident or some jarring moment, maybe it's an intervention when people in your life told you things you didn't want to hear. Who knows? Whatever it is, some new thing comes into focus. And then over the ensuing days, weeks, months, whatever, you kind of have to re-acclimate all the little details about your life to come into reconciliation with this new thing that you understand to be true. If Jesus is the 10 things that I listed there as a distillation from what Paul says in Colossians one, then that's gonna manifest in how your relationships look. It's gonna manifest in how your business looks, it's gonna manifest in what your household looks like. And where are we at time-wise? I'm gonna keep going just a little bit here to get us into Colossians three. So you can feel the pivot right in the middle of Colossians. There's just this perfect hinge right here. And listen to the language. I mean, it's the word since. So he lays out all the Jesus stuff. Jesus is supreme over all of these different little details from Greek culture, Sumerian culture, Persian culture, whatever other Asian fusion cocktail of beliefs that the Colossians had latched on to. And then Paul pivots into this Colossians three: one. Since then you've been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things, for you died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. That's a verse that's worth memorizing. Colossians 3 3, for you died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Well, that is quite the reset. That is quite the grab by the shoulders and shake, grab the ant farm and shake up the pathways so you have to make new ones, grab by the lips and yank kind of moment where if you believe what Paul said right there in that sense passage, you're gonna have to change some stuff. And not because of petty, dumb guilt or silly little rules, like, well, I won a logical argument. So now tisk, tisk, you have to do this or that. Well, no, just to be an internally cohesive human, if you have died and your life is now hidden with Christ, and your timeline is now when Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Well, dang, everything has changed. Everything, including if you're a guy named Philemon, how you handle a situation that would normally be handled a certain way in light of Colossian assumptions which are rooted in Romanism, Persianism, Lydianism, Phrygianism, Alexandrianism, Greekism. All of a sudden, those isms, if you're Philemon, are no longer the defining realities that frame the context for what you ought to do with this conundrum that is knocked on your door, who's holding a letter at arm's length out to you and looking a little bit sheepish. No, something much, much bigger than those ten flags over Colossae Asian fusion assumptions are now informing how you think about this. I have to think that if Philemon's got those words from the first two chapters and change of Colossians ringing in his ears, echoing in his head, if he is entering into the first stages of recalibrating his life to fit these truths, at some point here, he's got to look at Onesimus and not see a problem, but an opportunity at massive recalibration right here in this situation standing in front of him. More on the rest of Colossians next time around. Thanks for hearing me out about the book. That's been a big deal to me. It has been a both a burden and an excitement, and also something that I've been eager to unwrap a little more and share more details about with you. Like I said before, it's gonna keep coming up. It's pretty present on my mind now, and now it's very fair game for me in the process to talk pretty openly about it. I don't want to assume anything, but thanks in advance for considering picking up a copy of this. If you do, I hope that when you put it in your hands, you really do feel a sense of ownership because you really do have ownership over it. All right, that's good for now. I really do appreciate you. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute 510 podcast. Let's do this again soon.