Navigate Podcast
Welcome to Navigate, we are two long term friends doing life and ministry together. I got tired of the same ole answers when I started looking for help when it came to my walk with God. So together we go deeper than most would on topics that most people have heard or were taught but never fully understood. It is our way of simplifying concepts that we may have over complicated throughout our lives. Bringing theology and life experience into each episode. It is our hope and desire to help Navigate your Christian walk with you
Navigate Podcast
The Christian Process: Faith Beyond Comfort
Tjbhpodcast@gmail.com
does real Christian growth look like? Not the Instagram-perfect version, but the messy, challenging reality that shapes authentic faith. In this compelling episode of Navigate, hosts Justin and Tim dig into what they call "the Christian process" – the cycle of growth every believer experiences.
Faith isn't about having all the right answers or maintaining a comfortable spiritual status quo. Instead, it's about taking your armor off to fight battles in ways that feel counterintuitive but ultimately lead to growth. As the hosts powerfully assert, "the opposite of comfort is not discomfort – the opposite of comfort is life." Just as a flatline on a heart monitor indicates death, a Christianity without challenges and growth indicates spiritual stagnation.
The conversation explores how we often approach our faith journey like spectators rather than participants. Many Christians wear the badge and speak the language without doing the difficult work of following Jesus. This approach might work temporarily, but becomes exhausting over time. True faith requires continuous confession, repentance, acknowledgment, obedience, hope, and renewed faith – a cycle that repeats throughout our lives.
Hey guys, welcome to Navigate. Justin. What's up, buddy?
Speaker 2:What is up, my dude?
Speaker 1:Oh, Justin.
Speaker 2:My brother, my shield brother, shield brother. Yeah, you're the man. Oh yeah, you're the man. Thanks, you're the guts of this show, tim.
Speaker 1:I don't think so.
Speaker 2:That rugged, deep voice you have, I don't think I'm you can grab any cynic off the streets and do my job here. Nah, dude, that's true. That goes for both of us.
Speaker 1:I had a listener come up to me actually and she's like so I got a question for you, tim. I'm like what's up? He's like do you know the answers to the questions you ask? You're like usually, why do you ask? Yeah, I Really, but not always. But it just made me laugh.
Speaker 2:Tim's goal is to ask questions that other people would ask not because he doesn't know oftentimes, but because he wants you to know and he, unlike myself, is in touch with you, dear listener, and I am not.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering where you're going with that.
Speaker 2:I'll just float away.
Speaker 1:I'm much more grounded. That's true. Thank God you're here, Tim.
Speaker 2:I would be in the sky.
Speaker 1:I'd have to carry around a 50-pound bag of dog food, just so I didn't float off. I'm sorry, that's an inside joke.
Speaker 2:It is. You could laugh a little harder than I should have. Yeah, nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 1:All right, you actually brought this topic up. Oh snap, you called it the Christian process. Yeah, do you remember this?
Speaker 2:Man, I think we were just talking about the cycle of growth that kind of everybody walks through and what that actually looks like.
Speaker 1:Because I think it's different for everybody.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, and I guess the start of the process was the conversion almost right, of I'm not saved, but now I am yep, it's like what happens there yeah, you know it's, it's such a funny, um, such a funny thing.
Speaker 2:We, we tend to think about salvation in moments, you know what I mean, and it's not really a moment, it's kind of a. It culminates in moments. But it almost seems like those culminating moments happen again and again and again, in some kind of cycle as you slowly learn to lose yourself and gain Christ. You know, and I think we often times want it to be one magnificent moment where, poof, and now I am something else entirely and it's yeah, you're, you're a new creation, but, um, man, the process of coming face to face with jesus, you know what I mean, are those moments where you think you have it put together and having to drop back at his feet and, like, constantly be transformed by him and find out that you are a finite being, being confronted with the infinite, is so key and ultimately, that starts when you're a baby.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean, like I remember, I look back and sometimes, because I grew up in the church like you yeah, you know thought I was a Christian many times and then, a lot of times I wasn't, but a lot of it was. I want to be like Daniel. I want the superpowers, I want to walk on water and I'm told I could because I believe in God. Therefore, I can raise the dead and do all these awesome things.
Speaker 2:Have you ever done that thing, tim, where you close your eyes and you step out on the lake and you're like, okay, god, do it, nobody's looking.
Speaker 1:I haven't done that in a long time. Nobody's looking. Yeah, I was that guy. I was also the guy who Just God move the pencil.
Speaker 2:Move the pencil.
Speaker 1:When I had my apartment infested with cockroaches, I was praying that every day, I would stare at them and be like God. In your name, kill this thing out of here. It's a very true story.
Speaker 2:People are probably going to be more in awe that there was a cockroach infested apartment back in the day.
Speaker 1:I would take my Bible and just be like all right guy, what do you got? And just kind of close my eyes, put it up in the air and just scroll through the pages, yeah, and then just stop, yeah.
Speaker 2:Put a finger somewhere. I always joke about that. I'm like that's the Ouija board approach to the Bible. We're listening Guide my hand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it wasn't until well, I just really felt pressured by life and I first heard God and what he told me was what have you done for me? Yeah, and that was kind of the whole. And like two weeks later is when you asked me to start reading the Bible with you. So it was kind of this culmination. To your point, this culmination of moments in my life where I believed in God, I believed in power, but I wasn't following, I wasn't doing anything for him.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was a weird transition for me.
Speaker 2:It's more just I'll wear the badge. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:I'll speak the language. It's not hard to speak Christianese.
Speaker 2:It's not hard to fake it in the short term. It's incredibly hard to fake it for a long time. Yeah, that's very. It can be totally exhausting at that point and I think that's why there has to be this constant like confession, repentance, acknowledgement, obedience, hope, faith start over. You know what I mean. Kind of this, this process that we, that we, have to walk through, or else you end up, you end up being a liar, you end up you Kind of this process that we have to walk through, or else you end up being a liar, you end up faking your Christian walk.
Speaker 2:And I hate to say this, tim, but I think that can only be induced by steps of faith that produce the difficulty that's needed for you to anchor yourself to Christ and keep going. You know, like if you're always just in the kiddie pool, if you're always just waiting, then you don't really need Jesus. If you're great at services, you got that lockdown. You even tap your chest once in a while during a worship song. Maybe you have a rogue tear come to your eye as you thought about the. You know, whatever it was, you have to actually take steps of faith to do the thing where, when you think about the word sovereignty. It shouldn't be like a big, grandiose word that makes you feel good. It should be a terrifying word that makes you want to put your seatbelt on, take a deep breath and say, okay, it's a crazy thing to do and, um, you know, hindsight hopefully gives you some courage for that, although if you're a negative person, usually it does the opposite. You're like it didn't work out the way I wanted last time. But there's kind of a process that you walk through of um, of obedience, taking you to places where you have to leave more and more of yourself behind and grow more and more in these places that God is calling you to, and I was trying to explain this to my kids.
Speaker 2:I like to tell my kids bedtime stories, tim. I always make up these stories, and the last one I was talking about with them is I always love to talk about battles and dragons and everything else, and I was trying to explain to him in this story, um, the value of uh, let's say, wisdom and vulnerability in certain situations, and I was explaining that. You know, in this one particular battle, um to to actually defeat these people, he had to take his armor off and fight a totally different way than what he was used to doing and how everyone was telling him oh you, you can't fight without your armor. That's not going to work out. I mean, you know, in hindsight I'm like, oh, I'm telling the story to David and Goliath without thinking about it.
Speaker 2:But faith means, in a lot of ways, taking your armor off to engage in a fight, and that's the daunting part. If you feel safe, it's probably not faith. There are battles that God is calling you to where you're not going to be able to use the gifts and abilities and things that you lean on so frequently to be able to say I'm a Christian and I can do this. Often, the things that God is calling you to are more like yeah, you're going to have to leave the castle for this, but this is where all my armaments are. Yeah, that's actually. That's the problem. You're not growing anymore. You've topped out because you've built this thing and now you're living in it, and faith is leaving the castle and taking the armor off and trusting that God is going to be your armor.
Speaker 2:You know that's stupid passage in Ephesians 6, right, put on the helmet of salvation. How many people are like oh yeah, I'm safe. Now the sword oh, okay, sword of the spirit. Wait, it's not real. It's not a real sword. Hang on, you got the breastplate. Oh, thank God, a breastplate of righteousness. Wait, what I don't know? I realize that everybody talks about this, and we tend to talk about it in very masculine tones, like you're trying to make it sound cool, because, actually, what the whole passage is saying is you have no protection outside of Jesus. Yeah, yeah, that's cool, cool, cool, cool. Also, some real armor. Would be nice too, though, to walk through this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, helpful.
Speaker 2:Or in your financial situation yeah, but some real funds would be helpful to walk through this. Or like, yeah, god, but some real friends would actually be helpful. Joke goes right. Like everybody knows. It's the same lesson you have to learn again and again and again. If you are a father or a mother or a teacher or you know whatever, where you're in a position where you're supposed to guide other people, you tell them have faith, trust God, read the Bible, pray, just do the next thing that God is telling you to do. And then you got to go through it yourself. You're like, dang it, this sucks so bad yeah.
Speaker 2:I did the wrong thing at some point and God's punishing me now I think there's a there's a tax that you pay for ministry, and that taxes you must walk through what you're calling other people to walk through yourself, yeah, and it's a healthy thing. But if you start punting on it, you know, if you start doing this thing where I tell other people what to do uh, because I've done it before, not because I'm doing it now you, you get fat, you yell, you, you just start getting spiritually lethargic and at some point, man, if you don't change that you, you become that person that nobody actually wants to listen to.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:You're the person who you're the. You're the 50 year old man talking about how much you know about dating.
Speaker 1:Cause that girl you met at 17 worked out you know, he bought your house for 20 grand yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, pull yourself up by your bootstraps you know all the boomerisms Right and. I'm not, and I'm not hating on boomers. Okay, we all have our own foibles and problems, but there is a real Hezekiah problem, you know, and the next generation will just deal with it. I'll be okay, at least it won't happen in my lifetime.
Speaker 1:I feel like you're talking a little bit about comfort when it comes to our salvation and Christianity and how we're living. Yeah, you're talking about armor, armor, and you're talking about stripping that off and being vulnerable. Really, yeah, it's like the opposite of gosh.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to think of the best way to say this. The opposite of comfort is not discomfort, the opposite of comfort is life. You know, yeah, and I don't mean life in the generic. I'm breathing, I have air in my lungs, since because you can be dead walking around like that, just like you can be divorced with a marriage certificate. You know what I mean. Yeah, um, I'm talking about actually doing the things that god has called you to do means engaging in aspects of myself and the world around me that are uncharted territory, and I am afraid to go there.
Speaker 1:That's living, is that constant, though, like if I'm comfortable say, hey, things are actually working out pretty well, yeah, yeah, is it wise, is that sinful? All of a sudden now, like no, I just think it's impermanent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, can you think of somebody in the Bible who? You know what I mean? Everything went the way that they thought? Or is every story a series of ups and downs and just a crazy? You know? It might as well be a roller coaster ride for every one of them, where they get to the end and they're like, oh my gosh, I'm not dead. Oh wait, I am. Yeah, I'm on the other side. I think some of them were terrible. Others had those ups and downs. I think most of them are a series to me of crazy things.
Speaker 2:We look back with these rosy-eyed glasses on stories like David, you know, or Joseph, or all the heroes of the faith. I'm like dude, they had it awesome. God was with them the whole time. Yeah, you too. Wait a second. You're saying that can happen. Well, I'm saying, actually it's probably supposed to.
Speaker 2:Um, if you don't have to have faith that God is going to take care of you in the decisions that you're making, the way that you're living, the desires that you have, I don't know that it's real, In the same way that I would say if you aren't actually in difficult conversations with your family, if you're not working really hard through frustration, difficulty and good with your wife. If you're not wrestling with the things that are frustrating and take effort and intentionality and life to do, do you really love, do you really care about it? And I think Christianity is, unfortunately, something you can have an experience with once, like a marriage, and then put it on your shelf and just expect it to stay and it'll be fine, and I have that now. That's up there, but I have other things that I want to focus on now and those things are nearly as difficult as that was. But, man, I remember how difficult that was and I I did it then. I think that's a form of death.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I do. I think it's like this I'm going to stop living now. I did that once, man, it was crazy. I want to tell stories about it, but I'm not alive anymore.
Speaker 2:Um, I think, uh, jonah is the perfect picture of this right. God calls him the Nineveh and he's like actually, I'll choose death. I'm going to go the opposite direction. And the typological picture is it kills him, he dies, he ends up. He thinks he's going to be more safe, but actually no, the difficulty is where your life is, the monster that swallows you.
Speaker 2:You know, that's the uh, that's the actual end of a, of a life that punts on what God has called him to do, and it doesn't totally get out of them. You know cause? Cause he's still sitting under a plant later hoping for comfort. You know, while, uh, while the thing that God has called him to is, uh is sitting in front of him happening and he's just not, he's not involved, he doesn't really want anything to do with it.
Speaker 2:All of us are guilty of that in our heart at some level. Dude, we don't want to work. No, we don't want to. We don't want to have to have faith. It's faith is incredibly inconvenient and it's incredibly time consuming and it it it requires an immense amount of mental fortitude. It's something that's active, it's not passive and we deeply want it to be passive and it's not so much of the scriptures like.
Speaker 2:Your life is this. Now and now you're in a war and there's light and there's dark, and there's bombs going off, and it's inside the church and outside the church, and it's this there's dark and there's bombs going off, and it's inside the church and outside the church, and it's this unavoidable thing that you constantly have to walk through and our attention is like man. I don't really want to do that. I don't think you understand what Jesus was calling you to Right. This idea of dying every day is also the Bible's equivalent of living every day, as opposed to the death that it says most other people live in. They love darkness rather than light. Why? Because they don't want to acknowledge God. They don't want to actually do the thing that they were meant to do. That's a lot harder and the cost is way higher and all the things that go along with it.
Speaker 1:But yeah, but doing those things all the time it gets exhausting.
Speaker 2:I think there's rest in the process, but that doesn't mean you don't have to have faith, tim. I can sleep in the middle of an immense trial because I trust God, but that doesn't make the trial go away or the need for faith to go away. Yeah, right, yeah, I think simple stuff like you can either quit the job you know what I mean or stay the course and trust God through it, but the tension doesn't get removed, even when you're trusting God. The tension is perhaps alleviated by the fact that you have a God who's going to carry you and see you through to the end. But you know, I'm assuming Joseph didn't necessarily feel that when he was being thrown into prison for doing the right thing. I know he believed that God was with him. I know that he had convictions and was going to keep doing what he was supposed to doing in those situations, but it doesn't mean that in the moment you know he was like man. This is so restful. So God just had peace in Jesus, right, and I just think we think about those guys like skipping around, you know, doing whatever interpretive dance they have, because they just love the Lord so much in that moment. But I don't think that's the case. I think it's more of a roller coaster and that's how you know you're alive.
Speaker 2:I've brought this up on the podcast before. But if you think about like a heartbeat Tim, on a monitor, it's got beep. You know, beep is the up and it's the down and we want life to just be. Stop with all the ups and downs. You know what I mean. I'm sick of. I'm sick of the hilltops and then the valleys, and I just wish it could just be normal. And what we would call that is a flat line. That means you're dead, Flat. Flat lining is the equivalent of saying I don't want to do this thing anymore. Where I actually have to live and be engaged with the world and the circumstances around me and what's happening, I just want to flatline. And our culture shows this dude like. I don't know if you've seen this, but I think euthanasia, um, this assisted suicide, tim, I think it's the fifth leading cause of death in Canada right now.
Speaker 2:People are just opting to flatline, just ending it. They're done. They're like you have a lot of depression, you got a lot of anxiety. We'll find somebody to encourage you and help you and tell you it's okay to flatline.
Speaker 2:And the whole Bible is saying don't flatline, don't give in, don't give into Satan, don't give into the dragon, don't give into his schemes and his desires, because he desires death and destruction. That's what he is about. And living is this beautiful adventure where you're above the surface and you are catching the sunlight and the the. The sea foam has hit you in the face and it's work and you're having to take breaths, but you're enjoying the good thing that's happening. Flatlining is allowing to take a breath of water and sinking down to the bottom and it might be more peaceful and, you know, placid down there. But ultimately that's not life, that's death.
Speaker 2:And I think those thoughts wreck people, man, and oftentimes people are looking back like, well, if it wasn't like this? Or you know it wasn't like that. And I mean it's just the Bible. There's nowhere in the Bible that has this idea of gosh. What's the word I'm thinking of? Tim? Nowhere in the Bible is this idea of looking back fondly and wishing you used to have what you used to have. A good thing. Like you, look back in remembrance to get courage for what you need to do going forward.
Speaker 2:But yeah, reminiscing in that kind of way is really not in the Bible. In fact, I think it's Ecclesiastes 7, you know. It says do not say why is it that the former days were better than these? For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this Wisdom. This is that picture I was giving you of keep your head above the water, keep swimming.
Speaker 2:But the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the lives of its possessors. Consider the work of God, for who is able to straighten what he has bent. In the day of prosperity, be happy, but in the day of adversity, consider, god has made the one as well as the other. I mean, I think that's incredibly helpful and I hate that too, because it's literally saying hey, you know, god did both of these things right. You know the mountaintop? That's him. You know the valley? That's him too.
Speaker 2:And I don't know how people do it without a belief that God is the one driving their life and doing the things that he's doing. I mean walking in faith, dude, like I said, it's a crazy thing. Being married is a crazy thing. Having kids is a crazy thing, you know, when someone has quit, because everything around them starts to die, oh yeah and it gets peaceful, but it's not. That's not the way and everybody knows that.
Speaker 2:Tim, you remember when we were working at like senior living places back in the day, when we were doing different stuff, you could tell that there were some people who were going to live a long time and you knew it because they wanted to be there. They were still engaged in what was going on and they still love their family and they're calling people and they're engaged in life and some people you could tell are just done, they're waiting to die and I mean it is just proven fact. People that don't have a will to live died 10 times faster. They just do, they just go. Died 10 times faster. They just they just do, they just go, yeah and um, the the sad thing is is a lot of people, I think, die before they you know, before they actually die Um, yeah and uh, give up, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I think we uh, we've seen a lot of people resign themselves to um a life that is actually more of a a slower death, and I think Satan loves to use that and he pitches that it's going to be better. But honestly, all of those people are miserable. They're not more happy in their death. They're just terrified of what it might feel like to spit the water out of their lungs and breathe in fresh air and take the climb again.
Speaker 1:I started thinking of someone you brought up having difficult conversations with your family and all that stuff. That stuff is. That could be rough you know what I mean Especially if you're not seeing eye to eye on things.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I'm finding out instead of praying. God, give me wisdom, give me the right answers right. It's give me the strategy. Like, what's the strategy here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's not a bad thing. That's not a bad thing. That's not a bad thing. I find that God answers my prayers and strategy all the time. Or maybe a less weird way to say it would be a plan.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes God is like do this or don't do that, shut up right now, yeah, okay, okay, I can do that. You know that's not a bad thing to pray, but if the goal is, ultimately, I just want to get through this, that might not be bad thing to pray, but if the goal is, ultimately, I just want to get through this, that might not be the best heart posture.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, when you're trying to stand on truth right, and you have that, the opposing against that constantly that pressure it's. It's difficult to you start turning into this peacekeeper of a person.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Kind of like all right, well, this time I'll I'll let this slide, Can I? I just don't want to deal with this anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let me speak to that for a second, cause we've talked about the difficulty in being a peacekeeper and a peacemaker on the podcast. A lot, yeah, like being a peacekeeper is. I'm constantly avoiding the difficulty and I sweep it under the rug cause I don't want to, somehow, in my delusions that by doing that it will be better, all right, being a peacemaker is intentionally walking into difficult situations to resolve them, not so that they're swept under the rug, but so they actually go away. Right, here's the deal. What I mean by being a peacemaker is not that I am taking every fight that presents itself in front of me. There is an order of priority in the difficulties and things that you're dealing with. All right, if my son is reaching for boiling water on the stove and I'm in a difficult conversation with my wife, I'm going to go ahead and take care of my son real quick before he burns his face off. All right, that just common sense. Some people just love to fight and they think it is my moral duty to take every fight that comes my direction. That is not what I mean by being a peacemaker. A peacemaker is being strategic in the fights that you pick so that you can resolve the majority of what's going on.
Speaker 2:Usually one difficulty in somebody's life, tim, is producing three or four fronts where there is a battle. You need to be wise enough to know what battle I'm supposed to take to resolve the other four. And that's not. That doesn't mean I have to hit every one of those head on, just like when somebody says they're struggling with something, usually what they're struggling with is not what they say, it's what's something that's going on underneath that right, the sin under the sin, as most pastors will talk about. And anytime I do sit down and do some soul care with somebody or helping them work through something, it's rarely the thing that's coming up right up top. That's the actual problem. There's usually a deeper root that I'm trying to process and pull up. And, for the record, you're only good at doing that in somebody else's life if you spend an immense amount of time doing it in your own, because you can't spot roots in other people's lives if you haven't seen them in your own heart first. It's just true, um, and you can't help somebody find life if you're not actually living it yourself. Imagine trying to take somebody through a jungle you've never been through. It's not getting. We're all getting eaten by cannibals. You know that's how.
Speaker 2:But being a being a peacemaker doesn't mean picking every fight that presents itself in front of you. It means strategically knowing which fights are actually going to have the greatest impact, um, for what needs to get done and what battle actually you actually need victory over. And that doesn't mean you get to pick all the small ones to navigate around the elephant in the room. It means identifying Goliath and going out and killing him, even when everybody is telling you that's the one. You shouldn't. Don't do that, don't touch that. Those are the places that God is probably calling you to go.
Speaker 2:And David didn't just pick um how he was going to do it. It was timing too. You know what I mean. He didn't just immediately run out there. No, he got some stones, he talked to the King, he tried on some armor. Ironically, that wasn't going to work for him, um. And then he went out there and did it in a way that actually made sense, as opposed to a lot of people who just cannonball into the nonsense and create a bigger problem. Uh, you know who you are. You get swole on it and you love it. Sometimes, 24 hours before you address it is probably a better idea.
Speaker 1:I'm finding with people too is that they love confrontation, but they're terrible at conflict. Yeah, it's a weird thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, people knew how to fight. They'd save their marriage a lot faster.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or solve conflicts? Yeah. Some people just want that fight. They want the because they want like kind of what you were talking about. When it comes to the actual conflict of the matter, they don't know how to deal with it.
Speaker 2:They don't want to deal with it, but they'll fight you on it, or they see it as an assault on themselves as opposed to trying to solve a problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just getting defensive.
Speaker 2:It's hard to do. Admittedly, even in my own life, somebody wants to bring something up. My first thought is take it personal, tim, an area where I'm terrible at this. Just full disclosure. If my wife is struggling with something in her life, I immediately am like what am I doing wrong? My first tendency is to make it about me. I must be doing something wrong and that's why this particular thing is happening. And what did I just do? I just sucked the oxygen out of the room and made it about myself. Don't do that. Don't do that. Identify what the actual issue is and don't immediately let your insecurity compound the problem and make it far worse than it was.
Speaker 2:But these are the. These are signs of life. You know, being really angry about something is a sign of life. Being really, you know, wrestling with something hard is a sign of life. It's a sign that you haven't given up.
Speaker 2:It's a sign that you haven't lost hope and you think you can still fight forward, or that there's something worth fighting for getting after having faith in and that's every story in the Bible, dude, is this resurrection story of God meeting you in the lows and meeting you at the high points and traveling with you through all those different things that are happening and you meet God in those scenarios that you would not have chosen for yourself, that he chose for you so that he could begin to grow you in a place where you don't have your armor up, because the armor doesn't just protect you from the circumstances, it also protects you from the work that God is trying to do in your life and man. He's taking you to those places and it's so key that when that happens, you don't immediately hide and run and, you know, do whatever else.
Speaker 1:So this is my question, because you just brought up this Ecclesiastes verse.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But in these tough trial times, like I reminisce a lot on when God brought me through stuff.
Speaker 2:To gain hope.
Speaker 1:To gain. Okay, he did it before. He will see me through this now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, yeah.
Speaker 1:But that's bad. Like reminiscing is bad.
Speaker 2:No, Think about it this way If you're looking back to gain hope for the step that you need to take forward, that is incredibly biblical and everywhere you don't see any place where people are looking back in a godly way and be like man. Those days were so great. Ah, miss that. Wish we were there again.
Speaker 1:Wish I could do that again.
Speaker 2:That's not really a thing. That doesn't sound like a bad thing to me, I guess. I think it's trying to live in the past.
Speaker 1:What's the point of having a memory, you know, like having good memories.
Speaker 2:Well, I think memories are to teach you to learn. I think they're to teach you to move forward. But even Paul say things like I'm not focusing on what lies behind, I'm straining forward for what lies ahead. I want to remember the tools that I need to take with me to continue forward. But a lot of people are not looking back at the past, digging for tools to take them forward, but looking back at the past and psychologically living there instead of in the moment that they're actually in. And you can't really justify that position in scripture. I mean, that's kind of the whole point of this verse is he's saying don't do that. In fact it's not wisdom that takes you to a place so you can find some psychological comfort in what used to be. You're looking to the wrong place to try to find peace or hope, and actually it's kind of it's the Uncle Rico, if they would have put me in fourth quarter.
Speaker 1:And then you try to rewrite your own life in a different way that I can see right, because I do that too. It's like man if I didn't get the shoulder injury, would I be able to play baseball still?
Speaker 2:What would my life look?
Speaker 1:like, or if I would have married this girl instead, or something terrible.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You start kind of yeah, you try to rewind the clock and face what's in front of your face. You know you actually got to deal with what's there right now and you have to place your faith in the sovereignty of God. And we would way rather place our faith in man. If I would have made these decisions and done that, which is kind of another way of saying you know, I would be a really good God. I could plan this thing really well if I wanted to. I would be great. I mean, I got to believe that there's no way David picked the cave of a Doolam. There's no way that Joseph was like. You know, I hope all my brothers try to murder me and I end up in Egypt, thrown in prison. You know, getting hit on by Potiphar's underloved wife. You know like I what about regret, though?
Speaker 1:Is that a form of reminiscing?
Speaker 2:You know, I think regret can be a godly thing or an incredibly ungodly thing. If regret, regret is your way of punishing yourself so that you can continue to live in a place where you're being disobedient or frustrated or bitter or shameful, that's ungodly. And I would say regret is a complicated thing in that I could look back and be like man. I wish I would have done the right thing there. That's one thing. But if I'm wearing it as an identity of the things that I did not do and this is who I am now it's an incredibly powerful pull to live that way.
Speaker 1:Or an excuse to live the way you are now.
Speaker 2:You get to be sage, wisdom to others you know what I mean and you isolate yourself so that you can tell yourself that you know I had to go through this and nobody really understands. But I've drank this cup down to the bottom. Now the problem is you only drank the cup halfway and now you're just staring at it. You actually have to get through the whole process.
Speaker 2:Regret is meant to have an end point and that's repentance. If regret makes it to repentance so that you can have faith to take steps in obedience, then it's good regret. But if regret takes you to the past and reminiscing and sorrow and makes you live out a sin or a problem or a foible again and again and again, well, that's not repentance, that's not faith, that's nothing. That is you sitting in the mind of a condemning spirit that is making you relive the thing again and again and again, in hopes that you take all of your strength emotionally and put it there and remove all of your faith in God, by convincing yourself in that process that God won't use you anymore. You can't do that because I did this thing, which is ultimately just trying to erase the substitutionary atonement and what Christ actually accomplished for you.
Speaker 2:It's the uh, it's the chicken being raised as a cat. You know what I mean. I think I'm this, so I act this way and I've convinced myself of it. Regret has a funny way of putting you in a cage. Uh, bars, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:That aren't actually there, but you demand the world sees, yeah, and the world sees, yeah, and if they can't see him, then that kind of world that you've created with the regret turns into your own comfort.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, depression, anxiety, fear, all those things are more comfort, comforting If you live with them. They, they, these really negative, let's say psychological traits don't want to be. Let's say psychological traits, don't want to be, let's say friends. They want to be your life partner. You know what I mean. None of them want to be. I shook anxiety's hand and I kept walking. All of them want to be. No, you have to carry me around with you the rest of your life. You won't be comfortable if I'm not here. I have to. You know what I mean. They all become these friends that you become, you know, used to carrying around in unhealthy ways. None of them want to be. None of them want to be moments in your life or trophies on your shelf of things that you conquered. All of them want to be a ride or die partner and those things aren't supposed to be things that you carry with you. There are moments and enemies that you face, not friends that you make yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Going back to, like, the process of christianity, man, there's a I feel I feel kind of guilty for thinking this, but there are times where I see people who come to the faith and they get so excited and they're like on fire and they're just going at it. Man, in my head I'm like just you wait you got to burn. Just you wait. Enjoy this snowball while you can, but it's getting smaller and smaller, yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, there's a lot of excitement for people who joined the military at first too.
Speaker 1:right yeah, it's all new and stuff, and then all of a sudden kind of like we've been talking about, you know, life gets hard, like Christianity is one of the hardest things I've ever to do. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the, it's the tale is oldest time we look for the heroes of the faith. You know what I mean. To go back to the military, you know everybody wants to be the guy who is just amazing on the field commanding the troops getting it done.
Speaker 2:Nobody wants to go through what that guy had to go through to get there, you know, and if you punt on the trials and difficulties that go into that, then you never become that person, and I think a lot of people are okay with just not becoming the fullness of who God has called them to be, because it's it's just too painful. Yeah, but it's this again. It goes back to this Would you rather be a dead or alive? Though, you know, and I just think some people choose death along the way, I think there's a lot of Christians that are doing eight hours in front of the television every day, calling themselves a Christian, going to work, checking in, checking out and thinking like I'm doing it, I'm alive. No, you're not. That's not it. There's no way that God has called you to eight hours of television a day, working a basic job, not talking to people and just trying not to make waves. That is not life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but not making waves at work or watching TV eight hours a day, like you're talking about. What, then, do we do? Are we supposed to be constantly confronting people on a daily basis?
Speaker 2:Dude, let me man. That's such a. It's a great point, because everybody's scenario is a little bit different. Okay, so I am. I am plagued to, unfortunately, always give somewhat generic answers, unless I'm sitting with somebody helping them navigate the particular situation they're in, unless I'm sitting with somebody helping them navigate the particular situation they're in. But I would say you're always going to be choosing faith, and choosing faith means you're always headed for conflict, and that conflict means you're always going to encounter God and you're always going to encounter evil. And on the other side of that moment, whether you choose worship or you choose sin, is either opportunity for more growth, an opportunity to draw closer to God, or an opportunity to jump right back into the same problem that you refused to solve because you caved. You know what I mean. It really is like that.
Speaker 2:But there's this passage in Jude where he closes out the chapter this way, and I feel like it helps me think through conflict difficulty. What am I supposed to be doing consistently? I'll just read it to you. He said but you, beloved, ought to remember the words that were spoken beforehand by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. Okay, so he's immediately appealing to scripture that they were saying to you in the last times, there will be mockers following their own ungodly lusts. These are the ones who cause division, worldly minded, devoid of the spirit, basically. Hey, just so you know, crap's going to happen, you're going to have people, you're going to have problems, you're going to have issues. These are the ones that cause these things. But you, beloved, building yourself up on your most holy faith. Okay. So he's saying, I need you to keep growing in your faith, building yourself up on your most holy faith, like grow in this, take it seriously, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God. Again, this is like this active thing, like you're either green and growing or like ripe and rotting. Right, there's no in between with these things. And if you choose that in between, it's not going to go the way that you think it's going to go. It's not going to go well for you. You have to stay there.
Speaker 2:This is the word. Abide, right, menno, like to be with, to hang with, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life. Okay, so now hang on and just keep waiting for Jesus and that eternal life in my opinion, yes, that is this ultimate will meet him in glory. I also think it's an encounter with real life. Eternal life is also a person that we encounter in those circumstances. So I'm waiting for Jesus in every difficulty. I'm waiting for Jesus to meet me, grow me, teach me, give me peace, give me strength, whatever and he does.
Speaker 2:Tim, I don't know about you, but like every difficulty I've made it through, I feel like if I'm trusting in God, he meets me in that and sees me to the other side. Either you get to the Red Sea and you pray and you wait for God to part the waters and you get to see it, or you quit and go back into slavery before you get to see the miracle. And that's the tension I was saying between sin and worship, when the intersection of trusting God and the fact that he's taken me this far is at that same place where you're dealing with temptation to turn and run. That's the intersection of worship and sin. You got to choose worship and he says here, have mercy on some who are doubting. Like, not everybody around you is going to see the same things that you see. You can't just deal with it yourself. You're going to have to give other people's courage. And he says this save others, snatching them out of the fire, and, on some, have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by flesh. Okay, so some people are going to be doubting. You're going to have to give them strength. Some people are going to be trying to run the opposite direction and you need to grab them and you need to pull them with you to help them make it through this thing that's going on, but make sure in this process you're not getting caught up in sin and nonsense yourself.
Speaker 2:So there's this massive tension of like okay, trust God, trust what he said. Know the difficult things are going to happen. Keep working on your faith, keep abiding with Christ, keep praying, wait for God to show up ultimately, but also in the moment, and have mercy on the people around you when you're dealing with your own stuff, cause what happens when you're struggling is you tend to ignore the people around you unless you find them helpful in your particular situation. Don't use people. Be the person that can help other people through those things. And then he says this for those of you right now who, like me, are like well, that sounds incredibly daunting and difficult.
Speaker 2:Now to him, who is able to keep you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory, blameless, with great joy, to the only God, our savior. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority before all time and now and forevermore, amen. So who is ultimately going to make sure that you're able to do this, jesus, if you keep trusting and keep pushing and keep doing these things that he's telling you to do? What he's saying is, ultimately, one day, this map leads you to the feet of Jesus and you don't get that because you're not actually the guide. Jesus is the guide and he's walking with you and if you continue to follow him, it's going to be awesome. And it says that he's the one that keeps you from stumbling and he's the one who makes you stand in the presence of God and I said this here, I don't know if you guys caught it To only God and Savior through Jesus Christ, the Lord.
Speaker 2:Be glory, majesty, dominion and authority before all times, now and forevermore. What does that mean? He's not missing in my life or circumstances right now, and that's why I'm saying a lot of you listening to this might be at an intersection. Do I choose death or life today? Choose life why? Because he's with me now and if I don't punt, I get to see this Red Sea road made and it may not be the way that I want. Maybe I was hoping for another path and I don't punt, I get to see this Red Sea road made and it may not be the way that I want. Maybe I was hoping for another path and I wouldn't have to have the Egyptians, you know, running from behind me trying to cut me down in a giant pillar of fire falling from the sky and waves on a sea and everything looking horrible first.
Speaker 2:But you don't get to meet Jesus in comfortable places. You get to meet him in the uncomfortable places. While he's taking you to the comfortable places and newsflash, those comfortable places become uncomfortable again when he says, okay, it's time to pack up camp, let's go. You know what I mean. But that is how you find the promised land, that is how you end up at the feet of Jesus. It's this process of remembering what God has said, what he's called you to, knowing that difficulty is coming, staying in this place of prayer, building up your faith, staying in love with Jesus, waiting for him to show up in your circumstances, and then look to the people around you, pull them up, encourage them, help them and realize that God is with you right now in that process. He is your guide and he was the one who trailblazed the path not just to the cross, but through the cross, and he will be the one to do that in your life, not just to take you to the cross, but through the cross, so that you would be at the right hand of the father with him.
Speaker 2:So cool. Well, thanks, man. Thanks for talking today. Hope that's encouraging to some of you guys and to some of you guys. I hope so, and I know it's kind of maybe a weightier topic today, but I also feel like a lot of people are just they're in life right now. Y'all are living it, and I'd just rather encourage you to stay above the waves, keep swimming, keep trusting God and wait for him to show up.
Speaker 1:All right guys. Well, hey, catch you all next time Y'all have a.
