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Okay, it looks like we're ready to go. And there's our kids. Amy, hi. First time I've seen you this morning. Lindsay, hello again. And Austin, you guys all ready today? Yeah, you've been doing schoolwork today, huh? Yeah. A lot more schoolwork this week. They got you working hard. Well, grandpa's gonna be easy on you today. How about that? Yay. Yay. Remember what we talked about last week? Yes. We talked about the book of action. Remember and how everything living spreads and grows, and it was growing, not only wider in the world. We talked about that from some of the map we used the other day of Paul and others who were traveling around the world, at least that part of the world, to share the life of Jesus with folks up here in Turkey, with folks in Greece over here. We've got Thessalonica in Corinth. Here we've got Ephesus and Colossae and some of those. And it got clear over to Rome. So that's the spread of it all. The spread of this gospel is people were learning to share it together. Now we're gonna talk about some of these other books that are part of our library here. We're putting all these under Paul. Paul's the guy we're talking about a lot here. Paul was, I'll tell you a little bit about him in a minute, but he kind of wrote most of these books that we're gonna talk about from here on out. But here's what I want you to understand about these things. When Jesus died on the cross and when he was resurrected again, he brought what did Jesus call it in the gospels? Do you remember? I used a phrase that we talked about, the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. His death and his resurrection brought a new opportunity for us to live in that. And that was all new for us. We'd never lived in it before. You guys remember learning to swim? Any of you? Did you enjoy learning to swim early on? Was it fun or was it kind of scary? Fun or scary? Fun? Okay, I remember for your mom it was a little bit scary. Because learning to walk, learning to live in water is very different than learning to walk on land, right? Is that right? Talk to me. We all grew up on land, like Amy over here with, who's Amy with? Abby and Zoey. Abby and Zoey. Zoey on the left, Abby on the right and going for a walk. And you grew up walking, you grew up talking, and then you learned to swim. Look at Lindsay over here, underwater. Doesn't everything change when you're underwater? Yeah. Yeah, do you think about breathing when you're walking? No, no. You don't, you never think about breathing, right? But if you're in the water, you think about breathing all the time, right? If you're underwater, you can't breathe. So you have to wait till you get up on top of the water to breathe again, right? When you're on land, is it easy to stay on the ground? Why? Gravity, remember gravity, love that gravity. So easy to stay on the ground. In the water, is it easy to walk on the bottom of the pool? Not really. Why is it not easy? Because it's not really gravity in this water. Because you want to float, right? Everything's buoyant. Everything kind of takes you up when you're in the water and everything takes you down when you're on the ground. Is it easy to talk underwater? Yeah. Yeah, it is? Does it easy to understand Austin when he's talking underwater? No, it's not, is it? And bubbles come out and it's kind of a mess. So it's kind of hard to understand each other. So it's very, very different to live underwater as it is to live out on the land where we're used to living all the time, right? But playing in the water is a lot of fun. You guys have a pool? You guys been swimming yet? No, yeah, I haven't been swimming yet. But you will eventually. But isn't swimming a lot of fun? Like if you go to the beach or if you go to Hawaii or Mexico or someplace, don't you like swimming in the water? And it's fun, right? I want to compare that to living in the kingdom of God. Living in the kingdom of God is very different than living in the world. We've lived in the world all your life. You know how to talk, you know how to do your chores or get in trouble. You know how to do lots of things, right? You know how to do school work, even if you don't like to do it. We've learned to live on the land. We've learned to live in the world. And when Jesus offers us the kingdom of God, that's living in a very different space. We think differently, breathe differently, live differently. Because not just living by what's in our head and the way we've always learned to live, but now Jesus wanted his followers to learn to live in him, inside of him. And Paul uses that. Remember Paul's our guy. Paul uses that language instead. He talks about the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven a little bit. And he talks about, as John does, eternal life, a little bit. But he mostly calls this living in Christ. Not outside of Christ, not just in the world, but living in Christ. Because where does Christ live now? Where does Jesus live? This is a test. Where does Jesus live? In heavens, with God. But where else does he live? Inside of us. Inside of us, in our hearts. So when he lives in us and we live in him, Paul talks about learning to live in Christ. So all these books that we put under Paul, now Paul didn't write them all. There's four or five people who wrote books. Paul wrote most of them. That's why I put them all under Paul. Peter, you remember who Peter is? One of Jesus' disciples. He wrote two books. A man named James who was one of the early disciples as well. But he got killed when he was pretty young. He got stoned for being a teacher of the gospel. But James wrote a book and that's called The Book of James. And then John, remember the Gospel of John? Remember that? That same John wrote three different little letters. Now almost all these books in this library, once we get past Jesus, except for Revelation, which we talked about last week, throw letters. Paul wrote a letter, not an email. They didn't have email back then. So he had to write a letter. He wrote a letter to the church at Corinth. He wrote a letter to the church at Ephesus. He wrote one to the church at Rome and many others. And so the first one, when we get to the end of Acts, the first letters we see are all Paul's letters, right? They're all Paul's letters. And the way they're put in our Bible, the way they're put in our little library is Paul's longest letter to his shortest letter. And then we have Hebrews, which is a long letter that many thought Paul might have wrote, but we don't think Paul wrote it now. We're not sure who wrote the book of Hebrews. And then James is a shorter book. So it goes after Hebrews. And then first and second Peter, then first and second, third John. That's our library of letters. We can actually read the letters that Paul, Peter, James, John wrote to other Christians who were learning to live in Christ because everything changed at the cross. So everything was different. Now, how do we learn to listen to God? How do we live by God's priorities? Because living in the world, we mostly, you know, when you're young, you do what you're told. But don't you also have a lot of selfish things you wanna do, things that may not even be the right things to do, things that may hurt your brother or your sister, and you want to do those things, or you wanna complain when mom's trying to give you a chore to do? Isn't that very common? You guys all do that? Grandpa complained sometimes too about stuff he has to do, but no one tells me to do it. I just have to get it done, or something goes wrong here at the house if I don't do it. So we all have things to do, and we all have a way of living in the world that we're all used to. But living in Christ is living by something different. It's learning to live in his love, and it's learning to know him. And the best way to read these letters is not to read them in the order that we find them in the Bible. I find the best way to read them is to read them in the order in which they were written. Look at this bookmark. Your mommy made this bookmark. Lindsay, I've seen you've already colored yours. Let's just focus on this side of it right now, okay? This is the New Testament. We've talked about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That's in the wrong order there. I should be Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. But Mark, oh, no, that's the order. Sorry, Julie, I apologize. Mark is the gospel that was probably written first. So reading that one helps. Matthew next, John next. And then I like reading Luke after John because Luke takes me right into Acts. Remember Luke wrote Luke and Acts? So when you read those, you can read those together. But now let's get to Paul's letters. These are the letters, not just Paul's. James is probably the first letter written. So when you're gonna read some of the letters start with James. Thessalonians are the first one that Paul wrote. And then Galatians. And when you read them in order like this, there's the early letters, then the middle letters, which are down here, and then the later letters, which are here. When you read those letters like that, you get them in a sense of a story. There's a story going on here. These early believers all of a sudden had something brand new brought into their lives and they didn't know what to do with it. But learning to live in it, learning to live the way Jesus wants us to live. And it's like going to the beach and not being able to swim. And you sit there and you know, there's beautiful fish in there and there's lots of fun to play in the waves, but you're afraid of the water because you don't know how to swim. So you may go out and soak up to your toes, but you're not gonna get out there and swim because you're afraid you'll drown, right? So the early church, they learn how to walk with Jesus, how to follow Him. And so we got lots of really wonderful lessons that when we read the letters to these churches, we'll go, oh my gosh, that's true for me too. Now the reason why Paul is such a great one who wrote so many of these letters, Paul didn't walk with Jesus when he was alive on the planet. In fact, Paul would have been with those guys that wanted to kill Jesus. That's where Paul was. And it wasn't until a couple of years after Jesus died and was resurrected and God, the Holy Spirit came into the world. Remember that from last week? Remember that? It wasn't until right after that that Paul who was out killing Christians, he thought Christians were trying to ruin his religion, which was Judaism. He was a good Jew. He lived by the Old Testament which we'll start talking about last week. And he saw these new Christians as teaching something that was false and something that was bad. And so he went and started killing those people. He was killing them. And one day he's on his way to a town called Damascus in Syria. And he's gonna kill more Christians there. And he's on the road going to Damascus and suddenly a bright light shines. He falls onto the ground, he's blinded. And he hears this voice that says, Paul, which Jesus, at the time they called him Saul, his name was Saul. Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And Saul's afraid, he's blind, he's in the dirt. His overwhelming voice is coming out of nowhere. He doesn't know what's going on but he knows he's come to meet the Lord. And he doesn't know who the Lord is. So he says, who are you, Lord? And the voice says, I'm Jesus whom you're persecuting. Now, Paul is out killing Jesus' people. And now Jesus has come, not inside Paul, Jesus has come on the outside, fully aware. I'm right in Paul's face right now. Paul knows it's God. He knows that's the Lord. And what would you be if you knew you'd been killing Jesus' followers and then you met Jesus? How would you feel? A little scared? Yeah. You thinking Jesus would want to whack you? Sure. Yeah, I think that's what Paul thought. Paul thought Jesus wanted to whack him and instead Jesus loved him. Instead he wanted Paul to know his love and that begins a different journey for Paul. So Paul leaves the judistic religion and he becomes a Jesus follower. Now, what I like about that is that Paul, just like you and I, we never got to see Jesus when he was here. We never got to see him in physical form but Paul got to know him after meeting him on the outside, invited him inside. And now Paul goes on a very different walk and when Paul writes so much of our New Testament, he's helping us understand how to live in the life of Jesus, even though we don't know him yet. Even though we can't see him, even though we can't put our hands on him, he becomes real on the inside. And there's things we learn in these epists. I'm gonna give you three of the major lessons that we learn in these letters, but there's many others. There's so many good lessons. I read them all the time just because he gives me insight about how Jesus is making himself known in Wayne. And I want, at grandpa, and I want him to be known in you. So if you read these books, you'll read things. And one thing we learn, because in the Old Testament, which we'll start talking about next week, what they all thought is when things are going good in my life, God loves me. And when things are going bad in my life, God's mad at me. That's how they thought of God. One of the themes that Paul says, in fact, Peter says it too, and so does John, that as long as we're in this world, we're going to know trouble. This world is very broken. We'll talk about why next week. And so there's sickness in the world. There's sin in the world. There's pain in the world. Has anybody ever done something hurtful to you, some of your friends at school? Have they ever gossiped about you or told a rumor or lied to you or did anything that hurt you? Have you ever had that happen? Yeah, that's the world we live in. Bad stuff happens. And if every time bad stuff happens, you think God hates you, that will wear you out. What Paul teaches and what Peter and John and others teach is that in this world, we'll have suffering. But God will come be inside of us and help us walk through it so that the suffering we go through changes us. It makes us better people on the inside. So if you've been betrayed by a friend, maybe you'll not ever want to betray a friend because you know how bad it hurts. If you know what it is to have a need and not be able to meet it, then you're gonna care more about people around you who have needs that they can't meet. And so we wanted us to know just because we're hurting, doesn't mean God doesn't love us, but it does mean that God wants to walk with us and help changes. Another thing that changed was this. In the Old Testament, they thought God dwelt in a building. They called it a temple. And what the New Testament, what Paul's letters teach us is no, we are the temple. Jesus has come to live in you and me. So he doesn't need a building. He lives in us. Right now, a lot of churches are panicking because they call themselves churches and they meet on Sundays. They can't meet right now because of the pandemic. And some of them are very, how can we know God if we can't be in our buildings? And if they read the New Testament, they would know Jesus doesn't dwell in buildings. He dwells in people. His church isn't that building down the street that put the name church on their building. You are the church. Each of you three little guys, you're the church. He lives in you and when we share his life together, that's his people in the world. So God's not in a building. And if you can't go to the building this week and so many can't on Easter and they're kind of panicking about that, you know what? He lives in us. So we don't have to go to the building. He lives, and that's what the New Testament wanted us to know. The church is not a group of people that meet in a building. It's Jesus's family that live in the whole world. And then this is probably the most important one I want to talk to you about today. In the Old Testament, people learn to live by God by following the rules. God gave a bunch of rules and you got to follow those rules. And if you follow the rules, God likes you. And if you don't follow the rules, then God's upset with you and God punishes you. What Jesus came to show us is not that we need to live in the fear of rules and punishment, but that we get to live inside the love of God, that he loves us and wants to be in us. And even when we do things that are hurtful and even when we hurt other people, it doesn't change his love for us. He still loves us and wants to walk with us and share his life with us. Does that make sense? And so instead of living with God by fear, I'm afraid of God, I better do what's right. God's love comes into my life. And as I learned to live in that love, as I learned to be loved by him and to love others around me, everything God wants to do in my life gets sorted out. That's why one of the things that Paul wrote was this, the only thing that counts, not following the rules, not doing everything, the only thing that counts is trusting God faith, expressing itself in love. That's Galatians chapter five. That's what counts. And so instead of being people who live in, remember the old way of walking in the world is like walking on the ground. You know, that's how we all learn, you know, performance and doing what you're supposed to do and whatever. Now we're learning to swim in God's love. The other side of this story, we're learning to live over here where God's love dwells in us. And that, oops, made a mistake there. And that's how the life of God gets to come into our lives and gets to change us. Does that make sense? And so learn to, that's what the whole new testimony is about. How to learn to live loved. How to learn to live in God's love. I wake up every morning knowing I'm loved by God. And if I live in that love, it will change me and it will change the way I treat other people. It will change the way I treat myself. It'll change the way I treat everybody around me. And that's what makes this book, the Bible, remember we talked about it's a treasure map. This is what makes it that treasure map because it leads us into the reality of knowing who he is and that's what changes us. Now I wanna leave you with this as we get ready to be done. This verse from 1st John 4, which is one of my favorites and it describes this whole process of the larger Jesus story that we're gonna talk about next week as we bring in all these other books from the Old Testament that we've been looking at that we haven't been looking at yet but all the other books in the library that we'll see. And that is this, 1st John 4, perfect love casts out fear. Fear has to do with punishment and the one who fears is not made perfect in love. Now it's a great verse for us because so many people are so afraid of God and what God might do to us and we'll see as we read through the Old Testament, there's some language in there that gives some credence to that. But as we come back to understand Jesus died for us and he rose from the dead and now everything has changed. God loves us, he loved us before but we didn't know it. We were afraid of him for reasons we'll talk about next week. But when Jesus came and invites us now inside the Father and his love begins to dwell in us and we learn to live in that love just like you learn to swim. We learn to live by the way God thinks and we love mommy and daddy, we love our brothers and sisters and we don't do it very well all the time, right? Sometimes we do it really well and sometimes we get lost and sometimes it's like you wanna ring your sister's neck instead of love her because it's just, yeah, she can be a pain in the neck. And then that Austin, you know, he can really sometimes be a pain in the neck too, right, Austin? But it's the process of learning to swim or learning to live in his love. That's what he wants us to do. That's what this whole book is about. The whole Jesus library, the whole Jesus story is to teach us that we can live in love and by living in love, we don't have to be afraid anymore. We don't be afraid of anything. We don't be afraid of God. We don't have to be afraid of the pandemic. We don't have to be afraid because even when we go through tough times, Jesus is dwelling in us and he can use those difficult things to help change us, to help us listen better, to help us know him. When we're hurting and grandpa, you've seen grandpa go through some tough times since you've been growing up in our house, right? Grandpa and grandma have been through some tough times. Fortunately, not with each other. We actually like each other, but sometimes people treat you bad in the world or people lie about you or whatever. And in those times we can get angry and we can get bitter because that's the way the world, that's learning to walk in the world. Or we can lean in and say, Jesus, how does your love shape me here? How can I treat people around me differently because I know your love? Does that make sense? So that's the last part of this. That's the last to put Paul back in here next to Jesus. These are the two things we've covered. And over the next little bit, we're gonna talk about Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, the Psalms, or excuse me, Isaiah. I can't read from here. Grandpa can't read this far away. And then the final one is Nehemiah. These are all different people who anchor the story for us. The story that leads up to Jesus. Why we needed Jesus to come and how we can let him live in our hearts. Okay? Any questions from you guys? You understood it all perfectly? So we're all gonna go swim in the love of God, right? We're gonna learn to do that every day. Grandpa's 67, you know what? I'm still learning how to swim in that love. Some days I do it well, some days not so well, but every day I'm learning more. And I appreciate how much Paul's letters, Peter's letters, James, Hebrews, John's helped me do that. Okay, thanks guys. We'll see you next time.