Red Pill Christian Podcast Episode 1

For the spiritually interested but a little iffy on church.

Join us for a bite-sized preview of a modern Christian sermon with additional encouraging insights on taking your next step in exploring Jesus . . . when you're not necessarily ready for church.

Watch the full sermon on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1J5wbKuvVw&t=48s

Listen to the full sermon on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wise-warrior-queen-mothers-day-2023/id1518299117?i=1000613141964

Listen to the full sermon on Spotify: 
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5YMqnBG2aXdvXQ1cgYRv2n?si=7CZ-s9l6Qqe04q8uIm5GMQ 

Transcript

Pastor Mark Carter: 0:10

Welcome to the Red Pill Christian Podcast. I hope that this will become your go-to space for where the age-old can meet the cutting edge and the ancient paths can make more and more modern sense. My name is Mark Carter, i'm a Christian pastor and I'm not here to preach. We're here to explore together. We're digital natives. We're accustomed to the world at our fingertips. Yet there's an ancient book that holds stories, lessons and truths that are as relevant now as they ever were. Every episode we're going to navigate and evaluate bite-sized bits of scripture, not as dogma, but as a map. We're discovering how these age-old ideas connect with our experiences, hopes and challenges as members of the most diverse and socially conscious generation in history. It is time Let's reimagine, reframe and reflect. This is the Red Pill Christian Podcast. Let's go. Hey, what is up everybody? My name is Mark Carter, i'm a pastor and I like to help people understand themselves and God just a little bit better. I wonder if you want to hang out for a while.

Pastor Mark Carter: 1:08

I'm starting this podcast for people who might be spiritual, maybe even Christian, but if he about attending church. If that is you, this podcast is for you. I want to give people a taste of what Christian Bible teaching is like without having to go all in and find a church. We're going to take it in bite-sized chunks. My sense is that sometimes people come in to the church where I serve and it's like they're entering in the middle of a conversation. They don't actually know necessarily how to think about what's being said. There's lots of, maybe, things that are not normal in any other place in the world right now. They hear Bible-y things and Bible names. There's a whole Christian-ese thing that goes on. I just want to pull back from that and let's talk really simply about what are sermons saying. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to tee up a short sermon snippet, like you might hear at church, and then give a few contemporary church and then give a few thoughts on why that might be particularly important for people today. The first one we're going to talk about a little snippet different purposes for different life stages. This was during a Mother's Day sermon and I ripped off this word play Maiden Mother Matric. I ripped it off from a gal named Gabriel Cubie. She is an author, she writes, she critiques the sexual revolution and its impact on society and she used that little three-word play there Maiden Mother Matric. I adapted that, used it for this particular sermon. Don't be fooled, it's not just about gals, this is for everybody. God made women and men both, but women in particular for this sermon, to demonstrate His beauty at every stage of life. Here's what we're going to do We're going to listen to five minutes of me giving a little sermon and then I'm going to come back and we're going to talk about it.

Pastor Mark Carter: 2:59

Sometimes we get our vision wrong. Okay, so there's a lot of moms doing a lot of really great things, a lot of good things, but maybe they're not building on the right foundation, they're not seeing the main thing as the right main thing and therefore it's getting a little bit off. I studied a little bit about moths this week. That's because when you're a pastor, you have to study a bunch of weird stuff in order to have good illustrations. So I was studying moths.

Pastor Mark Carter: 3:21

Many of you know moths will fly toward light. They'll also fly right into a fire and die. One of the reasons they do this, scientists believe, is because moths are mostly nocturnal and they get their direction from the moon and from stars. They pick a light and they can just fly endlessly toward it because they're not going to run into it, so it's right for them to fly toward the light until they fly toward a fire and burn up. The point of that illustration is, sometimes we are doing something that seems very right, we're doing something that seems very like everybody's doing this. This is the right thing to do, feels like the right path, and yet it's the wrong way and ends in death. We can't always trust our instincts, we can't always trust what all the other moths are doing, and especially when it comes to mamas, i want to challenge all of us to get a little bit higher vision of what God made, what He called mamas to do and be when He invented them. You know, god is the one who invented mamas, and so He might know the best.

Pastor Mark Carter: 4:18

I am just a man. I know that I don't have the lived experience of a mama, but I've lived with a lot of mamas for a long time And, by the way, we're not even going off my lived experience. We're going off God's plan as revealed in His Word. So that's where we're going to be taking our counsel from today. What I want to pitch to you, what I want to get you to try to receive, is that, while mamas do a lot of awesome things, from time to time they're getting the goal wrong, and it's because of this fire, this false way, that the world pitches to mamas. And it is the false way. It's the false idol of perpetual maidenhood. Perpetual maidenhood You're like I don't know about that, carter, you will. We're gonna pull it apart right now.

Pastor Mark Carter: 5:03

Okay, see, there's certain ones that the world sets up and says this is what a woman should be, no matter what life stage you are. This is what you should be. You should be like Beyonce, or you should be like, you know, jennifer Aniston, or you should be like Michelle Obama, or you should be like JLo. There's these images of beauty that says no matter what's going on, no matter how long your body's been around, this is who you should be and you should always be trying to emulate this. And there's people that are they got muscle and they're traveling, they got wealth and they've got all this power and potential to do all kinds of stuff. And mommas can look at that and be like why can't I do that, or why can't I be that? or how do I get into that so that I can finally be fulfilled and make everybody happy around me?

Pastor Mark Carter: 5:42

Now let me just clarify. There's nothing wrong. It's very good for mommas to be powerful, to have muscle, to have some wealth, power to be helpful to their family and to others. It's great for mommas to be wise. It's great for mommas to be strong. All those are awesome, but really they're the garland of grace that should surround a greater foundation. Okay, and the foundation really, mommas here's what it is is you were designed to grow and develop in character and wisdom so you can impart character and wisdom on the ones that you're raising up for the glory of God. That's what it's for. It's for the glory of God. All this other stuff it's great, it's fine. You can have that, as long as you don't get the foundation wrong. You've got to have the foundation right, which is I exist to glorify God through my character and through my wisdom and my ability to help others rise up into character and wisdom. You're not saying enough amens yet, but that's all right, i'm sure you will catch up.

Pastor Mark Carter: 6:40

Now there's some images that we could look at. Okay, so we're gonna look for three stages of a woman's life. Okay, you've got maidenhood, motherhood and then matriarch. These are the three that we're gonna look at Now in any one of those stages. You're kind of a combination. You can be all those at different times, but they're more pronounced at different ages and different seasons of life.

Pastor Mark Carter: 7:00

When we talk about the matriarch, we're talking about the wise queen. Okay, this is the conquering queen, this is the fighting queen, this is the warrior queen, and we get pieces of her, but we don't always see her together. So let me give you some images and you can see if you can puzzle these together. And this is what we mean by a wise warrior queen. Okay, so on one level you've got a woman who is she's part of the matriarch's life Arwen from Lord of the Rings. She's part Beth Moore. She's part Joyce Meyer. Okay, she's part the Queen of Wakanda, whatever her name was, i don't even know what that was. She's part Supergirl. She's part Mary, the Mother of Jesus. She's this woman that is poised. She's this woman that is wise. She's this woman with a sword in the hand that's not afraid to fight but also has a benevolent protection of all those who live within the reign of her kingdom. That is the wise warrior queen that God has sent to conquer and raise up other queens.

Pastor Mark Carter: 7:56

I'm not just talking about the truth, i'm just talking about the world. But okay, so remember the purpose. We said there's different purposes for people in different stages of life. Now I would wanna clarify. I have not gotten this always right. Of course, like everyone else, i sometimes veer off track a little bit in my purpose. There's a lot of different kinds of purposes that can be advertising themselves before us, but what I found is that if I don't make some decisions about what are the overriding purposes of my life, i'll tend to float from thing to thing, whatever feels exciting at that moment or whatever's very particularly urgent at that moment, and what it leads to ultimately is a lot of wasted time and regrets.

Pastor Mark Carter: 8:36

I think this might be particularly important today, because comparison in the modern digital way it just creates all kinds of depression, as many of you know, especially with young ladies. I believe that is a real mental plague. Each person is no longer let me just think about this each person is no longer comparing themselves to their family or to the people in their neighborhood. Now people have the power to compare themselves to hundreds of millions of other people. Talk about overwhelming. I've got four daughters. I watch them grow up and since they had access to cell phones, it's like there's an extra weight added. It's not only that there's a lot of women who they could now compare themselves to in a physical sense, but there's different voices trying to convince them, sometimes contradictory, of what's important and what's not, and it can just lead to a sense of I don't really know what to think now.

Pastor Mark Carter: 9:30

So one might say, hey, your purpose is just to achieve your very highest potential, no matter who it hurts, no matter what. You gotta step on to do that. Others would say, hey, no, really, you wanna take your education as high as possible. Others would say, you wanna help as many people as possible. Here's what I would like. I would like my family and my church to care about people, to care about the environment and to do everything they can to be people of consequence while they're here on earth. I just don't want anyone else making those decisions for them. I want them to go hand in hand with God to find his purpose for them, which will override every other voice. It doesn't mean we don't do the other things. It just means there's one central purpose. There'll be lots of opportunities to course correct, but again the big idea there's different purposes for people in different stages of life.

Pastor Mark Carter: 10:19

All right, let's go on to topic number two. This is about the need to intentionally grow in wisdom at any point, but especially when we're younger. It's the way of the day to put preeminence on flash and how things look and doing things fast, but it's not nearly interested enough in this ancient thing called wisdom. Here's another short clip and then we'll talk about it ["Wisdom"]. ["wisdom"]. So that's what she does. She grows in wisdom. She's teachable.

Pastor Mark Carter: 10:51

Now, young maidens, i know this is not the age of hey, why don't you be teachable? I know that's not how it rolls. Typically, everybody tells you man, just stand up for yourself and claim you know what's going on, even when you don't. But that's not God's way. And so I want to challenge all the maidens Be a learner. Be one who learns, like Ruth, who's not afraid to say, hey, show me how. Man, i don't know how, teach me. I got stuff to learn. I'd love to be great at this, but I'm not just gonna be great at it overnight.

Pastor Mark Carter: 11:18

Grow in wisdom Now you gotta know one. That takes time, okay, so you don't just get it. Even when you get stuff, you don't just get it. It takes a long time And most of what you want if you're gonna grow in wisdom is not online, at least not yet. Okay, it's not there, because it's really the stuff that you really want, like the good and godly wisdom.

Pastor Mark Carter: 11:38

Here's the thing the world doesn't know nor care about that stuff, so it's still in the paperback books, it's still on the shelves somewhere. I mean, you gotta dive deeper, you gotta find it, you gotta go look and you gotta be like Ruth out in that field. You gotta be looking for it. And when you find it, baby, it's gold. Now see Paul the apostle. He said the world has lost all interest in me and I've lost all interest in the world. The world has lost all interest in giving you, so the search engines aren't gonna be your friend just like. Here's all the most godly wise wisdom you could possibly find. Now you're gonna have to ask other godly wise women. What should I be reading when I'm this age? My wife would recommend two books to you. One would be Passion and Purity by Elizabeth Elliott. Yeah, it's old school, but it's a good school. It's still in session, okay. Then there's also Captivating by Stacey Eldridge. There's a million others that you could be asking about. Hey, help me get the patterns down, and the patterns are important. She's growing in character, so she's practicing excellence.

Pastor Mark Carter: 12:36

People are kind of tripped out by Ruth. I mean, boaz, he kind of goes off a little bit. He's like honey, people like they're talking about you. You're amazing the way that you stuck with your mother-in-law. Everybody's excited about this, everyone's like applauding you behind the scenes. His mind is blown. She's practicing excellence.

Pastor Mark Carter: 12:53

And, young maidens, you wanna practice excellence. You wanna be coming in a little bit higher than you did the day before. You wanna be demonstrating. Hey look, i mean, god might lead me to a man, he might lead me to a mate, and if he does, that's awesome. But in the meantime I'm gonna do excellence all by myself. I'll be just fine, me and Jesus, me, the father, the son and the Holy Spirit. We are a majority and we can do it.

Pastor Mark Carter: 13:19

Now, see, this is what Ruth's trying to do. She's trying to grow in character and wisdom. Now, if there's another man who is also trying to walk in character and wisdom, that becomes a great team And God can put those together and they could kill it and crush it for the kingdom of God. But she's gotta demonstrate first. She ain't just waiting. She ain't sleeping on the couch. Where is she? She's at work. That's where she's at. Some people just waiting around.

Pastor Mark Carter: 13:46

When am I gonna know God's will, honey, i don't know. Go to work, go to work. You know what I'm saying. We're gonna find out often about the next step in God's will when we're doing the last step in God's will and just getting after it. We gotta be hungry And you know you're really not gonna work very hard if you don't have some kind of like goals. You should all have goals. You should have stuff that you're like look, i don't know, i'm gonna try it, but I'm gonna try, i'm gonna go after it, i'm gonna get this thing done, i'm gonna wrestle it to the ground. I'm not gonna believe anybody that says I can't do it. But she's also very open to while she's doing it, while she's going after her goals, she's allowing Boaz and Naomi to instruct her. She's building a wise foundation. Okay, so what's the big idea? We need to intentionally grow in wisdom, and the sooner the better. Wisdom is doing now what we will appreciate later. Wisdom has to do with how we're gonna live, how thoughtful we're going to be about decisions that are coming up.

Pastor Mark Carter: 14:46

I had a specific season in my early 20s. I was very kind of shoot from the hip. I was very wise in my own eyes. What that means is I think, hey, man, i already know, i don't need anyone to tell me, cause I already know. And it's not that we shouldn't be confident, but there's a lot of stuff we don't know, and so I needed an entire season of my spiritual journey focusing on valuing wisdom. It would have saved me a lot of time to be able to just ask people godly people or people that were better at something than I was, if I would have just had the humility to go say I mean, here's a bunch of stuff I don't understand. Can you help me understand this? But I was too honestly. I was too busy trying to impress people. I was too busy trying to show them that I knew what to do. I didn't need any help. I wasn't busy enough trying to get as much information as possible from people, and it would have saved me a lot of time. Probably would have progressed my family and I quicker. Probably people felt like they couldn't tell me much because I was wise in my own eyes.

Pastor Mark Carter: 15:43

Now here's the danger for this generation It's the preference for doses of content that are smaller. We see this in shorts. We see this in little 10 second videos. Nothing wrong with those at all. Again, proverbs has a bunch of short, little nuggets of wisdom. That's great that it's available, but what it can do is it can train us to not think deeply about wisdom, because that's usually what it takes most of the time.

Pastor Mark Carter: 16:07

To really get wisdom, we've got to internalize it by reflection and thinking on it deep. You know, again and again, and when everything is like tweet-sized, we just move on to the next thing and it never really becomes a part of our spiritual or personality DNA. It's kind of like seeing the trailer to a movie and being like oh, i saw the movie. Well, maybe, and maybe if it was a particularly bad trailer, it showed you everything about the movie, but most of the time you saw some. But there's a whole lot more to that situation And that's the way it is with wisdom. If we just get little tidbits but we never really dive deep and think deeply and get help with it, we don't really grow in wisdom.

Pastor Mark Carter: 16:46

Wisdom here's another benefit of wisdom. It transcends things like race, like gender, like class. None of those distinctions matter. Nobody gets a corner on wisdom. Everyone can always use more. Everyone can learn from others. Wisdom is one of those gifts that has no favorites. It is available to anyone who is hungry.

Pastor Mark Carter: 17:05

And one more thing I'll suggest about wisdom is that Jesus taught this. He taught that wisdom will defend you in the end, that's, and you can find that in Luke 735. Said wisdom is proved right by her children or by her results, meaning for a time when everybody feels like, online, they need to have a zinger, they need to have a comeback, they need to have something really kind of sexy to say, yeah, maybe, but that's not necessarily gonna be wisdom. Wisdom is proved long-term. You don't have to defend yourself. Wisdom says I'm just gonna do the right thing right now, and later my results will speak for me. And again, it's not as fast, but it's gonna go ultimately a whole lot further And in the end, we'll be much more defended. What's the big idea Wisdom is doing now? what you'll appreciate later. We need to intentionally grow in wisdom, and the sooner the better.

Pastor Mark Carter: 17:58

Well, hey, thank you so much for spending some time with me today. That's all the time we have for now, but there are some other supporting materials that you can take advantage of if you want. We'll put a link in the description to the full message that we talked from today. There's also two other podcasts that you might want to check out, depending where you are on your journey. There's also just the normal church podcast. That's like just getting the sermon every week. It's not bite-sized like this and it's not commented on like this. There's also for those who maybe have leadership gifts and are seeking to develop those, there's another podcast called the Bible Leadership Podcast that you might want to check out. Those are shorter little snippets where we talk about leadership. Hey, if this was valuable to you, would you do me a favor and go ahead and like and share it or do all the things that you would do with a resource like this? Thanks, guys, we'll see you next time. Good shaped'REl.