All right. This is going to seem like an odd question, but let me throw it out there anyway.

Is being married a skill?

Let me phrase it differently.

Can you be good at being married or is married just a state of being?

I think you can be good at it, right?

Well, I don't know.

What do you make of it? You've seen a lot of people in your lives who are married and you've seen people where you would look at their marriage and just say, a lot of good comes out of that. Seems like that's going great. That is a beautiful institution. That's a beautiful thing. Those two have built together through the ups and downs, whatever. Surely there are people in your lives who you would picture, maybe you're thinking of your own marriage right now. Awesome. I don't think that's vain. Picture your own marriage if that's the way you think of it. Awesome. But surely, you can envision a marriage you've seen up close and personal where you're like, dang, that's really good. Maybe you would even use the phrase, they are good at being married or they're good at

being married to each other. Probably also, then I know this is a sore spot for some of you because I know

that some of you are going through difficult things in your marriage right now. I know that some of you

aren't married to a person you used to be married to anymore. Last thing I ever want to do with these conversations

we have is rub salt in any wound or picket a scab that's kind of starting to heal over. That's not the

point. I mean, it's tragic, but I mean, it happens, right? Look, sometimes big, gigantic,

calamitous things happen and a marriage falls apart. You see that. Usually you can

kind of point to that and be like, well, that seems to be kind of what happened. But sometimes you

look at a marriage that isn't working or didn't work. And deep down, your honest evaluation would be

it just doesn't seem like they were good at being married to each other. Like the marriage, and this is

where you're going to see the connection to

what we're talking about in Galatians, the marriage did not bear the fruit of love. Marriage is an

interesting thing, right? Because it is both a state of being. You either are married or are not married.

There aren't really other options. It's very binary in that regard. But it's also something that you do. You live in that state. You walk in that state. Okay, clearly, I'm drawing this analogy to try to make sense of what Paul is saying in the book of Galatians about something that is both a state of being and kind of something that you do or that you are as well,

that is being a Christian and then living the life of a Christian that is walking in the

spirit. So here's a passage we've been working on right here at the very end of the book of

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