Hey, my friends.

Hey, my friends, it's Matt.

This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast.

And if you want to know what somebody means by a word that could mean a lot of things,

I suppose one way to figure that out is to just go and listen to a lot of stuff they said.

And if they talk about that one key word or concept a lot, you just compare it all. You gather all of that and you hold it

in your brain at once and then eventually you go, huh, I think I know what you meant by that.

That is exactly what you and I have been doing for the last several days when it comes to the word

love, the concept of love, and the New Testament. That's a word that I suppose people can use in

kind of slippery ways with the best of intention, too. It's just, I don't know, it's language. Sometimes

language can morph or evolve or drift. And all of a sudden, do you think it means one thing,

but somebody means something totally different. So we're using

one of many techniques that one might use to clarify what's meant by a certain idea in a certain

context. And this time around, we're using the volume method. We're just doing this by sheer force.

We're looking at a gigantic amount of stuff from across the spectrum of the

New Testament that talks about love in the hopes that we see the patterns emerge and that

you and I, though we may never even meet in person, can get a clear Bible-informed sense of

what exactly Paul is picturing as he is inspired by the Holy Spirit to write Galatians

522 where it says, but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,

goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We've been fixated on love.

There are worse things to fixate on. Here's what we've done so far. We've looked at

what Paul says about it. We've got a sense of that from across his letters. He's one of the

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