Hey, my friends.

Hey, my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. If you didn't listen to the last couple episodes in like the last five or six, you might want to. It'll make more sense. We're looking at Galatian 610, which says, therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, obviously, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. Oh, well, maybe that's a little more startling. We've been working that through. And we've been working this concept through with the help of a guy named Rodney Stark, who is a scholar who wrote The Rise of Christianity. He wrote it about 30 years ago. It's an amazing book that I highly recommend. And he has this chapter, chapter four,

which is about the Christian response to epidemics in the first few hundred years after Paul

wrote Galatians, after Paul wrote the words that I just read to you about Christians should do

good to people outside the church and especially do good to their brothers

and sisters. Well, there's no qualifier here that comes next in Galatians where it's like,

unless obviously it's really bad or very scary or unless there's risk, then, I mean, good heavens,

I don't want anybody to get hurt. We need to be safe. Then obviously don't do good to anybody. Safety is the most important thing. Nope, it ain't there.

The qualifier of safety, dang, that kind of HR, insurance, don't get sued value. It really doesn't appear a lot in the New Testament.

This is, the New Testament is a pretty

assertive. This is going to be crazy. The seed falls to the ground and die. I'm crucified with

Christ. This might hurt a little bit, but it's totally worth it. Bring it on. That's more the

tone and the values of the New Testament, not sort of HR safety culture.

So there is no qualifier that comes next where Paul is like, unless things are bad, if

things get bad, then don't worry about doing good to all people and don't worry about doing

good to the family of faith.

The idea is, you do this stuff when it's hard.

You think about what happens at the end of Matthew in that kind of terrifying passage

from Jesus when he's going through stuff and he's talking about who he knew and who he didn't

know.

And he's like, you know, whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.

And there's going to be all these false people

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