Real quick, before we get started with the actual Bible stuff and some ridiculous analogy that's

totally going to pay off later, I promise.

I want to offer a thank you that might seem like a weird thank you at first, but if you

think about it with me, I think it makes sense.

I want to say thank you to everybody who used to support this podcast but doesn't anymore.

Of course, there's no expectation that when you sign up

to kick in on something like this is just free for a little while, that now you have some sort

of blood oath covenant to do it until the end of time. That isn't how things work. Yeah, I was just

thinking this morning, hey, there's a bunch of people who did this for a while. It was a gigantic

help when you did. And now you're on to

do another stuff or support and other things or whatever. Awesome. I'm just enormously grateful to you. And we are here because at one point or another, you did kick in. Thank you. It really means a lot. Okay. Now let's go do that stuff that I said we were going to do. Hey, everybody. It's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and I think today we're going to round out this side quest, this mini-quest that we've been on

to try to understand the concept of the authority of the apostles in the New Testament. Paul alludes to

that in Philemon verses 8 and 9 when he says, therefore, although in Christ, I, Paul, could be bold

and order you to do what you ought to do, yet I appeal to you on the basis of love.

Paul is setting aside some kind of authority here that Phileiman assumed he had, and that

clearly Paul assumed he had, and he's foregoing that in the interest of whatever happens here,

happening on a voluntary basis.

That's what we've been working on for the last few days.

That's what we're going to land the plane on

right after Jeff plays some music to get us into it.

Finally been... to it. I remember when I watched Master and Commander with Russell Crow. There's a scene where a dude, we talked about this

a while back, didn't we? Oh, well, I'm telling you again, there's a scene where a weak officer

...