Live with Certainty
You're not in control anyway. How to live without fear of anything in this world and create peace in your life and those around you.
Live with Certainty
Episode 6 - Prayer Is Meant To Change Us (Portion 45)
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We’ve all felt it: something goes wrong, and the first thought is “Why me?” That question can lock us into bitterness, doubt, and a sense that we’re walking alone. This conversation through Vaetchanan (Deuteronomy) offers a different path, one rooted in certainty: not pretending life is easy, but refusing to let pain convince us God has disappeared.
We start with Moses begging to enter the promised land, then use that urgency to examine our own habits. When we feel disconnected, we explore how negativity, judgment, and lack of inner work can numb our ability to notice comfort that’s already being offered. We talk candidly about the struggle to love your neighbor as yourself, including the tiny everyday moments that reveal what’s really in us and where we need more grace.
From there, we challenge “cheap grace” and the temptation to outsource transformation to a weekly routine. Eternal life isn’t only a future destination; it begins now, as our values shift away from materialism, ego, and greed toward love, obedience, and “receiving for the sake of sharing.” We also unpack a powerful practice for chaos: the Shema, and why its language of oneness can quiet the mind and re-center the heart. Finally, we close with “rav leche” and the discipline of perspective, learning to see blessings we overlook and trusting that some answers arrive later than we want, but not forgotten.
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Resources
https://soundcloud.com/immlutheran/sets
https://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Parashah/parashah.html#shalom
Welcome And Vaetchanan Setup
SPEAKER_00Hello, welcome to another episode of Live with Certainty. This week is portion 45, and it's Viat Kanan, and that means someone with a sense of urgency. So this is still in Deuteronomy, and this is Moses basically begging God to let him enter into the promised land. And he starts off, Dr. Foster. Um, again, I listen to the historical and the new portions that he does every year. So this year he's in the middle of um the Garden Within, but I go back and listen to Echoes of Eden and the Wilderness, Sun in the Scriptures, that kind of stuff. So he's got a lot of um historical context. So I I um and I put in the links to the past podcasts that I listened to, so you guys can listen to them as well. And then inside of there, it has which verses are included in this week's portion, and then there's also a haftara, which is the prophet, and it's Isaiah 41 through 27, is this week's uh haftara.
Stop Feeding Doubt And Negativity
SPEAKER_00So Viat Kanaan starts with kind of a uh theme that we had from last time, where negativity causes doubt, which is Satan induced. So anytime that we're being negative or doubtful within ourselves, that is Satan. And we have to get rid of that. We ask, why us? That's usually the question that that comes out of us when something bad is going on. We hardly ever do it when something good is going on. Do we ever go, you know, some windfall of money came into your life and you're going, God, why me? Why would you give this to me? We hardly ever do it when something good happens, but we almost always do it when something bad happens. And really evaluate that for yourself. Try to not ask why. Why me? You get good and bad in life, and and how you deal with it is part of your character and your growth and your on your spiritual path. So instead of asking why he's doing something to you or allowing something to happen, we should ask, when will I, with God's help, start making things better? So if you get stuck in hurt, you're in a place that you just feel like there's no exit from, there is no path to be comforted. So if you're gonna ask why, and you you just are not making sense of anything, God cannot bring you comfort and you feel like you're walking alone. Remember those footsteps in the sand, and when Jesus was carrying them, they only saw one footstep. That's that that poem that what cut that's what comes to mind on when we're talking about this. So you're not going to recognize that you're being comforted if you're stuck. So you have to ask, what do I need to change? What am I doing to cause maybe something to happen or to not receive the comfort that I should be receiving during times of trouble? Knowing is a part of that intimacy with God. So you have to know that He is there. You can't wonder, you can't, maybe He forgot about me. You have to know that He is there, and that gets back to this certainty. And that's why I think that's just such a powerful word. And when I I started hearing that, that really solidified what I think about when I think of God is certainty. I know that He is there. Sometimes maybe I don't like what's happening, sometimes I'm ecstatic about it, but I'm certain that He is with me. And that's part of the knowledge. So knowledge is that intimacy. And if you think about Adam and Eve, Adam knew Eve, that is that is an intimate knowledge, and that is what we should have with God: a knowledge of God. We can't know him in his entirety, but we have to know that he is with us, and that helps us get down the path when things are going wrong. He is there, and you have to seek him with all of your heart so that you can be comforted. When we know what is being offered, we could connect. A love for God results in obedience and it's not a burden. So when we know that he is there, it's that connection that brings us comfort. It's love for God and obedience that He is there and fulfilling what you know He wants you to do. And that's part of that disconnect that can happen. If you're feeling disconnected and you're not feeling comforted, look inside yourself. When will I, with God's help, start making things better? So you have to look at yourself, what is causing that connection? Because God is there, but maybe you're feeling disconnected and you're not being obedient. You if you pray and you meditate and you're quiet, it will be revealed what is being disconnected. This has happened to me so many times. And if I address it, I just feel the weight of the world is off of me and I feel that reconnection. And that's what's powerful about these portions. Every week you focus on something new that brings an enlightenment to yourself on what you're doing to cause disconnection. So every week is an opportunity to reconnect, to look at things from a different perspective and understand more fully what we are doing. It's all about us. And I think we talked about it last time. When I pray, I was praying for all these people, but I pray for me now. I pray for remove the log from my eye. And that's really what this is about. What do I need to do to change my behavior so that I can reconnect with God?
Loving Your Neighbor In Practice
SPEAKER_00The next thing they talked about is something that I struggle with, and I I know I've talked about this before is if you don't love your neighbor as yourself, you don't love God. And I feel like I love God with all my heart, but I do struggle with people. I don't like walking to the grocery store and seeing carts all over the place, and people walk right by the cart and they don't even take it inside. That's just irritating. But I don't know their full situation. Maybe they didn't see the cart, maybe they were distracted, maybe you know, the the person who brought it out to the parking lot had a screaming baby and just wanted to get back in the car and get home and they left their cart there. I don't know what the situation is, so I have to work on myself to love the person fully and understand, try to see a different perspective on what may have been happening in their life that caused them to just not put the shopping cart back. And I know that sounds so dumb, but I think we all do that. I think we let little things just poke, poke, poke, poke, poke, and I make it into a mountain when it was just a molehill. So I'm just revealing that that is something that I have to work on. I need to be better about loving everyone, where they're at, the whole person, and just love them for who they are and where they are. I'm sure I do things that are very irritating to other people. I try not to, but I'm sure I do. And I pray that they love me with their whole heart and give me grace where I where I need it, and I need to do that with others and give grace abundantly. And it's just something that I'm praying on and that I'm working on to just fully love other people so that I can fully love God, and that that's just a premise of the whole Bible. I've heard that if you summarize the entire Bible, love your neighbor as yourself is basically what it's all about. The rest of it is just commentary. Everything is love your neighbor as yourself. Can you imagine the world? If we did that, how wonderful it would be. And if you if you treated everybody as you would want to be treated, what a wonderful place this would be. It would be kind of heaven, right? So I need to do that in my life, and I I bring that up. That that is a premise of loving God is you have to love your
Cheap Grace And Real Commitment
SPEAKER_00neighbor. And then he talked about uh through everything that we just spoke about God's grace. So that connection, being comforted, knowing him is so intimate, that what has been offered to us is so incredible, that the church itself, religion, is full of cheap grace, that we don't really know, we don't fully appreciate what we have been given. We kind of go in, we say, God, Jesus has saved us, and we move on with our lives. And that's cheap grace. We don't work for it, we don't seek it, we don't get on our knees uh every day, twice a day, three times a day. Ask you know God's forgiveness, bless God, ask Him to bless us, to forgive our sins, to really work on that relationship with God and with Yeshua. We don't do that. We kind of go to church once a week, we sit in the pew and then we leave, and we feel like we've done everything that that's asked for us. And that's full of a lot of people that go to church, and that's what he calls cheap grace. And I I couldn't agree more. I don't go to church, I just haven't found one that is right for me. And um, I I work on this every day, and I feel like I'm I'm getting closer, I'm not where I want to be for sure, but I feel like I've I've grown a lot more doing this than I have when I was going to church. So that's something to evaluate for yourself.
Eternal Life And Misplaced Priorities
SPEAKER_00He then talks about uh the eternal life and how that's achieved, and that we don't even recognize it's here right now. He talks about um uh kind of a parable of a man moving from the Middle East to the US. So he's making this long trip and he's gonna stop in France for three to four weeks. He's going on a boat, they're gonna stop in France for three to four weeks and replenish supplies. And so this man knows that he's going to France and he learns French backwards, forward, speaks it fluently. He goes to France for the three weeks, he has a wonderful time, enjoys the food, enjoys the people, enjoys everything that France has to offer. And then after the three weeks are over, he gets on the ship and he moves to the US and he cannot speak one word of English. And so the people who receive him in the US are like, you know, your priorities were kind of screwed up. You learned French, but you didn't learn English, which is where you're going to spend the rest of eternity. So you kind of had your priorities mixed up, and that's what Dr. Foster relates to how we are in this world. We learn the language of materialism, of egoism, of vanity, of greed. Our priorities are all messed up. We think the physical things are what's most important, and we don't learn the language of eternal life, which is love for your neighbor, neighbor, and receive for the sake of sharing. That has been lost on many people. Now I know some very lovely people who just exhibit all those qualities, and it's just wonderful to be around. But most of the people I run into do not exhibit love for your neighbor and receive for the sake of sharing. So that's something to look at and understand that eternal life is here right now.
Moses And Prayer That Changes Us
SPEAKER_00He then moves into Moses kind of begging for and begging God to enter into the land. And he just he prays and prays and praise and praise and prays and keeps praying over and over and over. And God says, Do not speak to me anymore. Just stop, don't push me. This has already been decided. You know exactly why it's been decided. Stop pushing me, do not speak to me anymore. So when something isn't going well, we experience it as bad. And we pray that God will change it. This is brazen because we are asking God to change his desire. Maybe there's a reason that you don't fully understand why he's not granting or fulfilling your prayer. And do we ever look at it as maybe God's not granting it because it's actually not the right thing for me? It's not good for me or my situation or my family. So the purpose of prayer is not to change God, but it's to change us, to change our perception, to change our reality. If we do that, if we pray to not change God's mind, but to change us, we change ourselves into person B. So if we're asking us to change from person A to person B, the decree that he had in not granting your prayer is canceled. So if if you've been asking for a blessing of this, that, or the other, and maybe he's not been granting it because you have not achieved where he needs you to be, you change yourself through your prayer, that decree is canceled. And so now for person B, your prayer may be acknowledged. And that's what he talks about Moses. Moses was already at the highest pinnacle of what you can achieve in this life. So he couldn't achieve any higher, he couldn't change into person B. So the decree stood that he could not enter into the promised land. But for us, we're nowhere close. We can always change into person B. So that's something to look at is you need to look at maybe there's something about myself and why he's not granting my prayer. So ask yourself, ask God, pray to God to change yourself. He will tell you exactly what needs to be done. I know what I need to work on. There's no doubt in my mind what I need to work on. So that's something that helps you reconnect with God is praying to change yourself, to take the log out of your own eye. So eternal life is not limited to the hereafter. Eternal life begins immediately the moment you cleave to Jesus. Sometimes I call him Yeshua because that is the Jewish word for Jesus. I guess Jesus came from the Greek, all the Greek translations, but Yeshua is the is the Jewish word for Jesus. Yeshua wasn't concerned about life after death. He wants you to know that it's not in the future, that it is right now. And the church gets you a little bit complacent about that. The church wants you to submit to their thinking. So you follow them and you go to heaven with scare tactics. They don't want you to know, most churches don't want you to know that the hereafter is right now. You're already in it. But they want you to go every week, they want you to tithe, they want you to contribute to their building fund, they want you to do the bake sale, they want you to be there every week, they want you to do all the things to work in the physical world, but they don't give you the tools to work the spiritual word world. And I think a lot of times if you listen to their sermons every week, um, it's it's a guilt, it's to make you feel guilty, not to make you feel you have a way to overcome that guilt or things that you've done in the past. And it's not as simple as going, Jesus, please forgive me of my sins. That's not the only work that needs to be done either. We we really need to change. That change is what brings the everlasting life to us right now. And the church doesn't really focus on us changing, it's just feel guilty, keep coming, keep paying the money. Again, that's not all churches, but that's a lot of churches. That's religion in general. It is a business. Religion is a huge business. So I think it's wonderful to go to church and create those friendships and that fellowship and people that you can rely on, but it's no substitute for doing the work. And I don't know that if you're not finding the path to how to make the changes, you know, listen to these podcasts and look at these portions. And I think every week you will, like I said earlier, you'll get a different perspective on how to make the change and how to enter everlasting life right now. It's not in the future, it's not about life after death. The kingdom is now. Many look at life as something we have to endure, and he offers life of certainty. It's not of faith. The life he offers is more substantial than life after death. He offers life now. If you have absolute certainty in the Messiah, you will have life now. You don't have to wait to experience, you have to have certainty. Free from constriction of reading the Bible, believing in Jesus, going to church is to avoid hell. That's that's not right. Right now is eternity. So, like we said, just doing all those things isn't going to bring the hereafter. Just going to church, just believing in Jesus, just because you read the Bible is not a way to avoid hell. Making the changes in yourself is the way to bring eternal life right now. You don't have to wait, it's not after you die. You will have eternal life right now.
Shema Prayer For Calm And Unity
SPEAKER_00So the the last couple things he talked about was a prayer that the Jewish people pray twice a day, and he believes that Jesus prayed this prayer twice a day. And it's it's Jewish words, it's Shema, Israel, Adonai, Elohimu, Adonai, Ekkad. I may not be saying exactly right, but you can look it up yourself. It's Deuteronomy 6.4, and he talks about this in the Echoes of Eden. If you go to minute 35 and 50 seconds, this is where he starts talking about it. You can hear him pronounce it, which would be way better than me. Shema Israel Adonai Elohimu Adonai Ekkad. And he, like I said, believed that Jesus prayed this twice a day, or times when there is chaos. This prayer is to unify what is going on so that we can be one with God. So he goes through and breaks up the words individually in pairs. So Shema Israel, Shema is addressing the Israel on all of us. He's he's saying, listen. He's telling us to listen. It's a prayer to awaken the God wrestler inside of us and to quiet the mind. So if we remember, Israel is what Jacob was called after he wrestled with God. And so he talks about if if there would have been fly on a rock where Jacob was, he wouldn't have seen him actually wrestling with everyone. It was a spiritual wrestle. But he was, he did have a limp when he walked after he wrestled. So there was a physical aspect to it that God, that the spirit world enacted on him, but it wasn't a physical wrestle with God, but he did wrestle with God. So the Shema Israel is saying awaken the Israel. Israel in all of us, the God wrestler. So that Israel is one who wrestles with God and lives to tell about it. So that's who needs to listen. Inside of us is the God wrestler, the person who wrestled with God and lived to tell about us. That's who this prayer is trying to awaken inside of you. That aspect of you is in there and this prayer is to enact that part of you. The next pairs are Adonai Elohenu. Adonai is the four-letter word of God that we don't pronounce. It is the nothingness of God. It cannot be defined and it cannot be put in a box. So the moment you try to pronounce his name, the four-letter name, you try to put him in a box. You try to define him. And he can't be defined. The nothingness of God and the everything of God, the infinity of God cannot be defined. So that is the Adonai that you are referring to. It's the it's the everything, the nothing, the infinity of God. That's who you're praying to. The Elohinu is saying he's mine. He is here. We can relate to him, which is grace. It is grace to be able to call the infiniteness of God mine. It's a very powerful prayer to be able to say the creator of all worlds is mine. And that's who is being spoken to in this prayer. Then the last two pairs Adonai Ekkad is no matter how many ways we experience the divine there is a oneness. There's an ultimate level where there is no plurality. Two holes make a whole in a marriage two become one through love. So every letter in the Hebrew is a number if you total up the letters in ekkad it's 13. And if you total the letters in love it is also 13. So Ekkad is love which is creating that oneness. So if you go back through that whole prayer it's it's a prayer listen the Israel inside of us to the Adonai who is mine and the Adonai who we are one with. So in the middle of chaos if you say this prayer you will bring unity to the situation that you were in. You will try to eliminate the chaos. So I wanted to bring that here in case that's something that when you're just feeling out of control, none of us are in control anyway but if you're feeling a little more out of control than normal and you need to just calm your mind, say that prayer as many times as you need to but at least twice a day and bring that unity with God whenever you need it.
Rav Lika Gratitude And Perspective
SPEAKER_00So the last thing that he speaks about is when Moses was pleading with God to let him into the promised land God's response is rav lika you have so much rav you have so much. Go up onto the mountain and see what you have and he told Moses basically to go up on the mountain so that he would have a different perspective. Stop at fixating on what you don't have or what you want our expectations will sometimes blind us to what we already have. You're already on the ground you're already living the life you already have eternal life so get a different perspective so that you can see all the blessings that you have and I I think that's so true for so many of us do you really are you thankful for all the blessings that you have whether it's your your health a roof over your head a car to drive a relationship with God a relationship with Jesus your children all the blessings you you probably can't even recognize the blessings maybe you were driving and and you you were going to be in an accident but it was averted through the acts of grace and you don't even know about it. There's no way to even know all the blessings that we have so being thankful for all the blessings is a way to change your perspective sometimes when you're really down when you're asking that why it's always me. Again change your perspective pray to change yourself pray to be shown all the blessings that you have transform your desire from a prison to a vehicle for enlightenment live with the mystery instead of trying to always figure it out does allow Moses to enter the promised land if you go back to the New Testament in the Gospels when Jesus asked for his apostles to go up on the mountain with him who do they see? They see Moses. God did grant Moses's petition he just didn't grant it at the exact time and moment and space that Moses asked for it. So that's another thing to keep in mind. It may be in the future that God will grant your request it's just not right now but continue to change continue to be blessed continue to ask for God's help to change yourself to change your perspective to change your values to change whatever it is that's preventing you from connecting with God. So I think all of those things are a way to bring this portion into your life and continue on the path of being connected to your creator.
Final Blessing And Farewell
SPEAKER_00God bless you all thank you so much for listening. Have a great week