20 questions with Pastor Mike. I am Mike Winger and this is my cat, Moxie, who sometimes joins us live. That's actually her. Oops, I kicked her camera.

Scared her. Anyway, I'm here to answer your guys questions, not about cats, sadly, but about something even better, actually. That's the bad news. The good news is it's about

Jesus, Christianity, the Bible, the Christian faith, apologetics, like defending the truth of the Christian faith,

basically whatever you have on deck. I'm going to talk to you about and I'm going to start with the first question, which when I find my button, my big red button.

Question number one is from Robert T who asks about the wives of the apostles and you might be surprised to know we do have a bit of information about them in the

in the Bible. So Robert T says, where Christ disciples married, did they have families? I believe there's a reference to Peter's in law,

but I find it to be an interesting question. What would it be like for them? How would that fit with what the Lord tells us about the role of a

husband and father? The love for God trumps all so did that override their responsibilities as a husband slash father. So I take this question to have like sort of two sides to it. One side is, you know, the facts about their wives, where they married and what was going on with them back then.

And then the second side is, hey, um, sometimes people feel a tension between their responsibilities to their family and the responsibilities to the kingdom of God.

And they have even been those who've done missionary work where they've abandoned family in order to do missions or say a pastor who spends so much time doing things for his local church, that he's not there for his own family. And then there can be like a conflict between those. So we'll talk about that too.

First, the apostles were they, in fact, married. And the answer is going to be a resounding yes, in spite of what some people will say. Let me walk you through a few places in scripture. You already mentioned Peter's mother in law, but let's just look real quick at that. This is in Luke chapter four verse 38, as you guys are loading in the other questions. I'll take 20 of them today.

And it says, um, this is early in Jesus' ministry. And he is there at Peter's house, who he shares with his brother Andrew, and the mother in law seems to live there as well. And he arose and left the synagogue and entered Simon's house. Now Simon's mother in law was ill with a high fever, and they appealed to him on her behalf. And he stood over her and rebuked the fever and it left her. And immediately she rose and began to serve them.

This is recorded a few times in the Gospels, and it's real consistent. It's Peter's mother in law, which means that Peter was married. He had a wife, right. And some would suggest that his wife was dead or died sometime after this or something like that. I think we have an argument against that in scripture.

But let me just give you guys a little bit of a clue as to how their culture so different than ours. And our culture right now, this is weird in human history, what's happening right now.

People stay single for really long periods of time, not because they have a mission their life is on, where like they're single to say, serve Jesus or single to be a missionary, single for some function, they're just single because it's just, we're delaying adulthood and marriage as part of that delay.

So that I'm not saying like if you get married at a later age, this something's wrong with you, I'm not suggesting that I got married at the age of 30. So I'm not saying something's wrong with you. What I am saying is that we can use our lens to look at ancient culture and in their culture. No, that's not happening. Like everybody's getting married. It was considered like a Jewish obligation to get married and to have children. This was like normal in their culture. Everybody does it. You get married. You have lots of kids. This is what you're supposed to do. It was part of the command to be fruitful and multiply or at least.

That was their understanding of the command and the apostles reflect this attitude in Matthew 19 when they're talking with Jesus about marriage, they sarcastically bring up singleness as if it's like an option nobody would pick.

And Jesus is like, actually, it's a real option. You can do that. But that was counterculture. They were going to get married. Then we have more specific info in 1 Corinthians 9.5.

And this is where Paul, this is like real detail, right? He lays out the idea that all of the apostles were married, all of them. So this is in 1 Corinthians 9.5.

He's kind of building a case for though he has rights as an apostle, he lays them down to serve others. But he doesn't want that to make people think he has no rights.

So that's the short version. But in 1 Corinthians 9.5, he says, do we not have the right to take along a believing wife as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and seaface or KFS or Peter? He's talking about Peter.

This, some say that this phrase believing wife is really a sister partner in ministry. And so that like, like as if Peter is going around and the other apostles are going around with somebody who is just a woman who is a ministry partner, but they're not actually married.

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