Hey, my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and we are working on the book of Galatians. We're in chapter three. We've been chipping away at it a little bit each day. And in this part of the book, Paul brings up a guy from the distant past, Abraham. I was saying yesterday that when Paul was bringing up Abraham, that was as far back in time

as us bringing up Paul right now would be to us as we're having this conversation.

This is the distant past.

This was a guy with a huge reputation at this point.

And Paul is using him.

He's bringing up his name in a conversation about how it is that one achieves right standing, good standing before God. Now, there were people who had gone and talked to the recipients of this letter, the Galatian Church. There were people who had gone and said, the way you get right standing with God is do stuff, lots of stuff.

You impress God.

You obey every single little detail of the Old Testament law.

And then you even go beyond that.

And you obey even made up bonus rules that we just thought of that'll keep you from ever getting too close to the actual rules and breaking those.

And if you do all these

things and you're perfectly good and you get it right, then God will be impressed and you'll have

right standing before God. But yesterday, we went and looked at Matthew 19, where Jesus went and had

a conversation with the rich young ruler. Jesus made really clear that goodness isn't really something you can do that only God is really good,

but this can all be confusing, right? Because we use the word good differently than it's being

used here in the Bible. When you and I say somebody's a good guy, oh, she's a great lady. When we say

that, we're grading on a curve compared to other people.

And we're being generous and gracious because we know they have flaws we see. And we also know that the hypothetical people in question that we're talking about here have flaws that we don't see because we know ourselves.

And we know that we have very visible flaws. we also have subtle flaws, but we hope people

give us the benefit of the doubt and see that the balance of what we do and what we think is

good, even if it's not perfect. But then good here in the Bible seems to be describing something

very different. I mean, we're talking about like God's level of

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