Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I have an announcement, and it's relevant to your life, and it's important, and I want to tell you about it. Ready? Okay, the announcement is that the next book that we are going to do for season seven of this podcast is well, no, I'm not gonna tell you just yet. Let me tell you what I'm thinking first, then I'll tell you the name of the book. I miss Jesus. It's not like we don't hang out or anything. You know, I go to church, I'm a Christian and everything. But Matthew was magical for me because every single day, including weekends, above and beyond my normal time, thinking about the Bible, reading Bible stuff, history stuff, I was working on Matthew all the time. And I felt like I got into this rhythm with Jesus where I heard, you know, you're just hearing what he says so much all the time that eventually it's like, oh, I I kind of I kind of feel like I know what he's gonna do in this situation. I kind of feel like I understand what's going on between the lines of that quick terse little thing that he said right there. I kind of think I can tell how he's responding in this situation. And I think I can tell maybe a little bit how all of that applies to me and what I do and where I fit into this whole thing. It was great. I love the whole Bible. It's awesome. I had the time of my life working on the Persian era of the Old Testament with Esther and Nehemiah, but also we kind of sneaked in a season on Ezra in there. Going through every book of the Bible was amazing for me. The book I just published. Well, it's only available for pre-sale now, but it'll be out really soon. The Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible. The idea for that book came out of season two of this podcast. I loved doing everything that we've done. Galatians and Philemon kicked me in the teeth. They were both so much harder. Well, Philemon's not done, but they've both been so much harder than I figured they were gonna be. I used to think I had Galatians absolutely on lockdown, and then we got into some of that hard stuff, and now all of a sudden I have to explain something to other people instead of just to myself. That was hard. That was a very humbling season for me. And Philemon has been challenging in a different way. No, I've loved every season that we've done, but I miss Jesus' books, and I think we have done enough other Bible stuff that I feel very comfortable saying that we have earned our way back to a gospel, and so that is what is up next. John is going to be the next book on this podcast. Will it take 800 episodes and three years like Matthew did? I don't know. Will we maybe do half of it and then go and do a quick short book somewhere else as like a little sub-season? I don't know. I'm not gonna paint myself into a corner on any of this. What I know is that this podcast seems to be at its best when it is following what I am curious about and what is happening. This sounds so sappy. Please just hear what I mean and not how this sounds. When I am following where my heart is at in terms of my actual faith, I want to study this stuff very clinically. I want to think about it objectively. I want to speak about it very practically, like normal people. And when normal people break down ideas, they have fun and they laugh about things. And I like that we get to do that. I also appreciate how patient you are with me when we need to flesh out ideas I don't agree with, and we need to talk about what other people see in the text that maybe isn't how I would read it, but other people who are smarter than me who see things in different ways, and from time to time, we have to acknowledge that. And I so appreciate that you are up for that. Sometimes the curiosity takes us toward really important foundational history stuff outside the Bible, and that stuff just takes a minute. It doesn't even seem like you're patient with that, it just seems like you like that and you are down for it. So I don't know why it always sounds like I'm apologizing for it. I need to stop doing that. Clearly, if you're here, you're game for this approach. Thank you. That means a lot to me. But I keep just looking over the fence over there at Mark and Luke and John. Like, man, I could really go for some conversations with my friends about that stuff. And maybe you've noticed me cheating us over there a lot. Like, I found an excuse for us to go look at something in Matthew. We're gonna go look at it right now. It's gonna take a whole day. I just like Jesus. I think he's real, I think he's actually God in the flesh. And I think that the Gospels are four of the most amazing works in the history of humankind, and they're the bright red, glowing hot spot of my interest right now in the New Testament. So we're going back over to John. And what I know about that season is this. Whereas with Philemon, which we're not done with yet, but we are really close, whereas with Philemon, I thought, man, let's do this weird. There's like 15 things I got to cover with Philemon. Let's make the actual book of Philemon happen last, the verse-by-verse treatment, and let's go grab all the things that are gonna make us really qualified to get it when we pick it up and read it. Nobody knows how to tackle Philemon. I've gone and looked at other people and their approach. Nobody knows. Everybody is guessing how you're supposed to read this book or teach this book, because it really is, for all the reasons we've discussed, a very important oddity in the New Testament, but structurally an oddity nonetheless. That's a great deal of the charm, that's a great deal of the opportunity of the book. Not so with John. John is the kind of book where you start the first day by reading the first verse of John and then just go. So this is probably what's going to happen. Obviously, we're gonna have a lot of extra biblical history stuff in this season coming up, and we're gonna have a lot of jump all over the Bible theology stuff. It connects with the Bible very differently than Matthew. Matthew and John are very different animals, and the tendrils that reach back and forward out of those books into the rest of the Bible, they go and poke all kinds of different places. So John is gonna be a great excuse to explore tons of stuff that we haven't really visited much before. But uh, Matt, just finished the thought. The point is, Philemon had a whole bunch of things on the front end. John is gonna have nothing on the front end. I think it might be kind of fun if the first words of the season on the book of John were just John 1-1. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness hasn't understood it. I think that's how we're gonna open the season, and I think we're just gonna tear right into it. And then as the rabbit trails emerge and as the history stuff that we need to tap back into emerges, we'll go and get that in the moment. So, what that means is the investment that we put in in Philemon is about to pay off double time because all of that history stuff, maybe other than like the you know, seven flags over colosse business, but all of even that is going to be useful. But all the big picture stuff about the intertestamental things and the old testament stuff and the rise of Rome and the Maccabean kingdom and the different factions at the time of Jesus, all of that is going to give us a robust foundation for tearing into John from uh you know, hopefully a pretty historically informed position. Now I know that maybe there are a few of you who are like, ah man, another gospel? I mean, we just did one like four or five years ago. I mean, that maybe we could do a couple other books first. Yeah, you're right. That's a completely fair point. Maybe we could, but I don't wanna. I wanna go do John. I want to go figure out what the deal is with those seven I am statements, where Jesus seems to be saying pretty directly, I'm God. I want to go and look at all of those different signs that are recorded in John that all seem to have meanings beyond just what the miracle was, but they all seem to say something or represent something about the nature of God from the Old Testament that is paying off there. I want to piggyback on all the stuff that we've thought about in terms of Greek thought and Greek culture and even the kind of Greek thought that existed in Asia Minor, where Colossae is. I want to go and look at the way John incorporates these foundational Greek philosophical ideas, ideas that affect you, even if you don't know the language of it or you've never consciously thought about it. I want to go and look at how John takes those ideas and weaves them into his narrative of the life and teachings and death and resurrection of Jesus. Further, I want to put the feelers out from the beginning for what John is going for with the book and how good a job he does with it. Because at the end of John, he tells us why he wrote the thing. He says, like there was a lot more that Jesus did, but what I wrote down, I wrote down so that you would have enough that you might believe. And by believing, you would have life in his name. A little bit of a paraphrase there, but that's the gist. So we're gonna know going in exactly why John wrote the book. We're gonna have our antenna out for that. We're gonna know going in the historical context in great detail because of work we just did here on Philemon, work that's gonna do double duty for two books at least. And we're still gonna have Matthew in our hip pocket and stuff we've done in the Old Testament in our hip pocket, which is gonna make us all the more equipped to see those patterns and the stuff that John is connecting from back there to his gospel, his account of Jesus. So John is where we're going next. I got a pretty good sense on the front end of how we're gonna tackle it. Philemon has been a blast. I'm looking forward to rounding that out here in the next little bit, but John is an easier invite than Philemon. So if you get a wild hair for something that is stable and predictable, but also just weird enough to keep your attention, and you might want to invite somebody else to be a part, I would say, what are we at here? I bet we're a week and a half from getting started on John. Anything can happen, but I would guess that we're about there, and I'll try to keep you posted. One other thing, as is always the case, I've got stickers for everybody who supports this podcast. And I know we just did a whole round of stickers, the Galatian stickers. For those of you who are new, let me just explain how this works. We do achievement stickers for each book of the Bible when we finish a season on that book. If you want, anybody can just go buy it. And my wife and my kids ship that out. They do their best. Sometimes it takes a minute. Sorry, everybody for whom it took a minute. Sometimes we're right on top of it, sometimes a couple of weeks, and we just, I don't know, things happen. Life, it's just a family operation. But we have a white outline version of the sticker that anybody can just go and buy, and you can grab those off the website or whatever. Then we have a gold outline version of that commemorative, great job. This was a season in your life, level up celebratory, achievement unlocked, Philemon sticker that we're gonna send out. And that gold one is limited edition. It is only for people who are supporting the podcast in any way to any degree on any platform. If you're supporting the thing and you have an up-to-date address, we are going to send you one of those special gold outline ones. But then there's also a third version, and I think these are rad. These are the super special, limited edition, super secret hologram versions. And there are a few of you who have gone way above and beyond in terms of support, and you know who you are. We send you that as a very modest way to try to express how thankful we are for that. The program exists because some of you support it, and this is a little thing that we can do to make that happen. So if you want in on that, again, any platform, any level, whoever is supporting the program at the time we send out the stickers here in I don't know, whatever it is, the week, week and a half, as we're rolling over into John. If you're supporting the program, we're gonna send you one of those. We always get a bunch back, expired addresses, things like that. If it doesn't go through, shoot us an email. That's not weird. We always have to resend a bunch of them. It just mail loses it or you moved or whatever. It's no big deal. Also, I think we're just gonna send them in envelopes again this time. That's a lot more expensive for us. We tried these postcard versions last time around, and the people who sold them to us were like, yeah, these postcard stickers, they're the wave of the future. They're gonna be great. And we were like, Do they get ruined in the mail? And they were like, no, never, except always. So we heard back from a lot of you who were like, my sticker is mangled. Thank you for making Bible podcast. I like you. My sticker's mangled. Can we try again? Sorry about that. They told us it would work, it didn't work as well as we had hoped it would work. We'll go back to the older way of doing it and get you stickers. Oh, also, the sticker for Philemon is going to perfectly match the art for Philemon in the Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible. So if you wanted to, you could start using that as a sticker book and you could put your Philemon sticker right there in this book, and it'd be like, there, that's an achievement in my achievement sticker book collection book. I don't know, maybe I'm pushing it now. At any rate, one, John is the next book that we're going to do here. Two, that's gonna get started in about probably a week and a half. We'll see. Three, thank you so much to everybody who supports this program in any way on any platform. Please make sure your addresses are up to date. If you want to get the sticker, you can sign up to support at any level. Whatever makes sense to you is cool. And four, whoever is supporting at the time we send out the stickers, like if you're on the list and we have your address, we're gonna send you one of those special edition stickers as a way to commemorate this chapter in our lives that was dominated by our time in the Book of Philemon and stuff surrounding the Book of Philemon. All right, that's good for now. Not a lot of Philemon. There'll be more Philemon tomorrow. All right, I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.