0:00:00 - 0:00:23 So the Lord told me I just woke up a minute ago. The Lord told me to make a video on a theme that I call palliative care. If you've ever known someone that was terminally ill, uh They get to the point where the doctors put them on palliative care, which uh just means try to minimize their pain until 0:00:22 - 0:00:54 they die. So, um I wrote a book called Through Faith and in that book, um I, I guess a one sentence summary of the book is uh let's, let's take a tour through the scriptures and try to dem muddle what faith means and especially put into practical terms, how we practice it. And the book is not written 0:00:54 - 0:01:26 as an academic treatise on faith. It's really focused on practical terms. Um how you can use this from day to day and why it works the way it does and how it connects to real life and the things you actually want, um which might uh give the impression that it's something like uh I don't know, a genie 0:01:26 - 0:01:55 lamp and you rub it and you get what you want. Um And that's very much not the case so don't uh don't think that if you read the book though, you'll see what I mean. Anyway. Um One of the themes in that book is that God gives us what we want and like a lot of simple ideas in the gospel. Most people who 0:01:54 - 0:02:25 profess to be faithful um to believe in God, they will strongly disagree with that statement. Um I am thinking as I say that of another contingent of people who do believe that sort of, but they don't actually ever have evidence for it. Um I had a grandmother who would always say just pray it into existence 0:02:25 - 0:00:00 , just pray it into existence and um it never worked for her and she still believed it. So, uh that's, that's called delusion when you, when you hold to a belief that you have sufficient evidence to disbelieve, but you keep believing it. That's, that's the dictionary definition of the word delusion. 0:00:00 - 0:00:00 Um Anyway, so, um yeah, God gives us what we want. Um And another idea from the book is the main reason that we don't see that is because there are set laws of cause and effect by which this universe is governed and um wanting something is not enough. You also have to find the path to what you want. 0:00:00 - 0:03:55 So um in a nutshell, you don't have what you want because you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. That's a really important theme. I'm not trying to give you a synopsis of through faith. Uh Whatever I say here is not equivalent to what I've written there. I'm just establishing a very brief 0:03:55 - 0:04:16 foundation before I say what I'm supposed to say in this video. Uh Because I know that there are people who haven't read that book and maybe you'll go read it as a result of this. Uh Or maybe you have and um just tapping on to these themes will make something click for you. I don't know or maybe not 0:04:15 - 0:04:47 . And we'll just get to the point here. Um So, um what happens is let me rephrase that one reason why it seems like it takes forever for God to give you what you want sometimes. Uh like I said, is that you're not willing to do or you don't know what it takes to get there. But there's another reason too 0:04:46 - 0:05:24 and I don't know if this one's in the book. So uh if you've read The New Testament, you know, that Jesus said um what he's trying to, to establish the, the fact that the Father knows what you need and he's not gonna send you anything that's not for your benefit. And he's, he talks about uh asking for 0:05:24 - 0:05:45 bread and getting a stone and uh asking for an egg and gay, a serpent. Uh et cetera. The details aren't right in front of me right now and I haven't looked at this in a little while, but there's some secrets in that, that are really important. And it's hilarious. I, well, when I say it's funny, you know 0:05:45 - 0:06:04 , Rob Smith funny is weird. It's not the world funny. Uh, my wife says no one thinks you're funny. Um, that sounds insulting. She doesn't mean it that way. She's, she's trying to help me, like, you know, you think these jokes are funny but no one, she says no one gets them except for you and she knows 0:06:04 - 0:06:25 me well enough to know why. I think they're funny. And um that just makes me laugh harder because I'm like, I know they don't care. That's, it's even funnier because I'm the only one that gets it. But you know, she says people don't get you. I say, I know, I know she doesn't get me either. But um she's 0:06:24 - 0:06:52 closer than most. So anyway, um God, he has like 15 layers with everything. He does sometimes a heck of a lot more. I don't even know if you can count all the things he's doing at once with one action. It's amazing. But um with that, with that little passage, uh he showed me once some connections to 0:06:51 - 0:07:19 a whole lot of other things and he just boom, put it all, he packed it all right in there. Anyway, on the, on the theme that we're on the relevant part of all this is that if you asked God for bread and he gave you a stone, what that would mean is that according to his perfect knowledge, a stone in your 0:07:19 - 0:07:40 case would be much better to ask for than Brett. So I hope that blows your mind a little because people read that and they're like, well, if I asked for bread and he gave me a stone or I'm sorry, they say he would never give me a stone if I asked for bread. That's what they think they're reading it like 0:07:40 - 0:08:01 , oh Jesus is reassuring me that if I ask a father for bread, he'll give me bread. That is not what he's saying, folks on one level, it is cause I told you, God will give you what you desire. But this is the funny thing like people read that for reassurance that God will give them what they want. Jesus 0:08:00 - 0:08:31 said he will, but first he's gonna give you what you should want. But uh do you realize the magnitude of that lesson? Cause it's all through your life, it's all through your life. Uh God called me when I was 18. I don't mean called me like oh calling. But so a lot of people use that in a different way 0:08:30 - 0:09:03 than I mean, I mean, he finally penetrated my thick skull to put the desire and motive inside of me to see and, and, and open my eyes to see that he was real, to search him out and find him and, and begin that path of drawing near to him because I was pretty, pretty oblivious. I say that. But my whole 0:09:02 - 0:09:39 life looking back at the time, I didn't realize it. He was calling me from birth. The earliest memories I have, I could see things and feel things that I should have understood were drawing me to him and I thought things and I experienced things but I was, I was an m really slow. So um he's patient with 0:09:38 - 0:10:12 that and he, that's the way he does it. He is so long suffering, but he loves us so much that he's willing before he sends us what we ask for, he's gonna send us what we should ask for. So, um he'll only break down and send us what we want when he doesn't have any more ways to show us why we should want 0:10:12 - 0:10:34 something better. Now that makes it sound like this reductive process that get like a like a ball rolling down a hill and once it's at the end of the hill, that's it. And like he wants you to come up to the hill and run up the hill and get as close to him as you can and get the ball early. But if you're 0:10:34 - 0:10:56 not willing to do that and you just sit there, finally, the ball will come to you. And um like I said, there is still a law appointed to get that bread you're asking for, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm saying. Uh before you get the bread, he's actually gonna send you stone and the stone is 0:10:56 - 0:11:16 a much, much greater gift. If you wanna know in particular, we could go through that passage. I'm not gonna do that this morning though. But in that particular pairing with the stone and the rock, they're both Jesus, but they're Jesus in two different ways. And, um, if you took everybody in the world 0:11:15 - 0:11:39 who said that they valued Jesus, they only value him for the loaves and fishes. Um He is the bread of life, but the bread of life is much more than the bread that he multiplied and gave to the people. And that's the reason they followed him is because they were seeking him according to their preconceived 0:11:38 - 0:12:02 notions of what Messiah would be, which were wrong and they wanted him so that he could make everything they currently wanted in life easier, more attainable, et cetera, more secure. But they didn't realize that what he had to give them was much better than what they were capable of even imagining at 0:12:02 - 0:12:27 the time. Now it says that in plain English, in the Bible that, that uh Paul talks about it. A lot of people talk about it. Um That what God has to give us is much better than what we know to ask for. Uh I don't have the words to say, but the spirit uttereth within me, you know, the groanings. Uh I have 0:12:27 - 0:12:51 not seen the things that God has prepared for those who love him and so forth. The, the fact is that um his ways are much higher than our ways and his valuation of things is much superior to ours. I was just talking with my kids last night. We do this thing every Sunday. Uh I ask them to come up with 0:12:51 - 0:13:14 questions and then they go and they try to figure out the answers and then at, at dinner time, uh I, cause I asked them to type them up. It's good practice for them. I want them to get used to uh, giving arguments for things and, and being able to give an answer for what they believe. Um So I, they type 0:13:14 - 0:13:47 them up and I read them at dinner and then we talk about them at the dinner table. But uh on that one of these questions we got to this idea of, oh man, I just lost my train of thought. Um shoot. Mm. They will come back to me. It's a bummer. It was a good thought too. Anyway. Um So how does this connect 0:13:47 - 0:14:12 to this theme of palliative care? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was uh we should want what God wants, not what we want because he knows more than us. So how did that tap into the dinner conversation? Um ah Right. So this isn't the theme of the video, but I'll just give you a little free sample on, on the idea 0:14:11 - 0:14:36 of holiness. Jesus made it very clear that in his mortal ministry, there were basically, there were three things he was doing. One was doing what he needed to do so that all mankind would be resurrected. Two was doing what he needed to do so that we could be forgiven of our past sins and the future sins 0:14:35 - 0:15:05 that we're ignorant of, um, through obedience to him. And three. And, and um, so the world focuses on one plus a made up one, which is this, this concept of, if I say I believe in him, then I'm forgiven of everything that that was not on the list. Um So you really don't hear much about the second one 0:15:05 - 0:15:25 . I said, I talk about that in my book on repentance. Uh It's all over the scriptures, but people don't read those ones, they just kind of pretend that they aren't there. Um But my favorite theme is actually number three, but we don't spend much time on number three because no one does number two and 0:15:24 - 0:15:45 you have to do number two before you get to number three for various reasons. Um But number three is he came to the earth to demonstrate to us what the father is like. And there's a bunch of reasons why no one talks about that 11 of them being, we all presume we already know, I guess, I don't know. Again 0:15:45 - 0:16:03 , plenty of scripture is indicating that that's not the case or maybe we, we already think that uh we know everything there is to know also plenty of scriptures saying his ways are unsearchable, et cetera. It's, it's uh Jesus had, he says no one knows the father except he who came from the father and 0:16:03 - 0:16:28 so on. Anyway. Um So he came to demonstrate the father. But here's a funny thing and this is my point with holiness. When I say holiness, you get all these ideas in your mind about what that means. Consider for a moment that Jesus lived for 30 years in a really small town. When I say small town, I told 0:16:28 - 0:16:50 my kids, it's like the neighborhood we live in and there's like 20 people uh and then nothing for two miles. Um And then there's a gas station and nothing else for 30 miles and that's in the direction that's closest to, to civilization anyway. Um I told my kids, Jesus lived in a place that's like our 0:16:50 - 0:17:19 neighborhood for 30 years and they knew so little about him who he really was. And, and what I said was they knew so little about the goodness in him or in what he did that when he came back after his initial initial foray in doing public ministry was a quick brief jot and he came back. Um They were 0:17:19 - 0:17:43 just shocked that this was the Jesus that, that they had grown up with and they were really confused, you can read about it. Um They did not say things like, oh, well, now everything makes sense or? Well, of course, of course, he went and did those things. This is the guy we've known our whole lives 0:17:42 - 0:18:11 . That's, that fits completely into his character. They didn't say that at all. And so some people, ok, some people take that to mean that uh he kept everything inside of him for 30 years and then just started doing it outside and then the miracles came and whatever, I'll tell you something, wisdom always 0:18:10 - 0:18:40 precedes miracles. So it's like I said in that post the other day about the lion roaring and it comes in waves of increasing intensity, the intensity increases. But it's not like saying, you know, if what we were talking about was money pouring out. I'm not saying $1 today, $5 tomorrow, $50 the next 0:18:40 - 0:19:10 day as the as the clarity and evidence of God's power increases, the blessings decrease, they don't increase, they decrease. And this again, this ties perfectly into the bread and stone thing. Um God has massively greater blessings than getting the blind to see and the deaf to hear. And even even raising 0:19:09 - 0:19:41 the dead. God has massively greater things to offer. And where are those found early? They're found earlier than the miracles. Jesus very intentionally arranged his ministry and he did so with cascading clarity. But the reason he did that was when you cascade the clarity, the blessings have to reduce 0:19:40 - 0:20:17 . Why uh I mean, the quality of them, not the quantity, but the quality. Why? Because all things happen through faith and the greater, the experiential reasons, the lesser the blessings must be again, if you read through faith. Um um it's all about logical reasons. That's what faith really, where faith 0:20:17 - 0:20:45 really lives in its, in its most condensed form. Its greatest power is not in the outward signs, it's in honest reason in your mind. So the greater the reasons you have. So, so there's this threshold, right? And you start on baseline, I have no reason to believe this idea. And God lays down reason after 0:20:44 - 0:21:07 reason until you get to this, this threshold where you now have sufficient reasons to believe this idea, right? That's you cover this right here. You're accountable. And by the way, if you have access to this, you're accountable even if you don't look at it, which is a scary idea, but it's true. But 0:21:07 - 0:21:31 let's just let's just not talk about that. So you get to threshold of accountability and he just keeps piling on the reasons. The problem is after this, what happens? I don't have another hand to make another graph. But, but once you get to this, here's your blessings at the threshold of accountability 0:21:29 - 0:21:54 . You're up here. God, God does, by the way, God doesn't want you to believe before you get there. Never asked anybody to believe without a reason. But once you have the reason you better believe. So once you get hit the threshold of accountability, you're a maximal blessing. And with every reason it 0:21:54 - 0:22:14 comes down and it actually comes down faster than it goes up. So it's a squared, it's like an inverse square relationship. Like like like gravity, the further you get away, there's a, there's a drop off or the, the further you walk out from a shore, the ocean gets deep really fast, way out there. Whereas 0:22:14 - 0:22:51 it might be almost flat towards the surf, the, the edge, the beach. Um, so, um, holiness. So, so Jesus, um, his hometown, so he was massively more holy than everyone there. And yet they thought he was such a regular person that, um, well, they assumed he was a regular person. So how can it be that the 0:22:50 - 0:23:15 human being who is most righteous of all who, who actually was the most righteous a human could be and who was so righteous that, uh, when people saw him, they could see everything a human could understand about the father. And yet people just thought he was a normal guy and not just someone walking 0:23:15 - 0:23:33 past him on the street, someone who knew him very well because they saw him almost every day for 30 years and they lived in a small town where everyone knew everybody and everything they did. There was no hiding and they had small houses too like they just, you couldn't hide. Right. Think about that 0:23:33 - 0:24:01 . The only explanation for that is that we cannot see holiness, not initially, it's a process and we have to learn. So I told that to my kids and getting back to the, the bread and the stone, the fact is that we don't know what to ask for and whatever we want to ask for is probably not the best thing 0:24:01 - 0:24:25 we could ask for. So again, Paul gives us the recipe that you have to appeal to the spirit and you have to develop your ability to hear the Lord's voice and he'll tell you, well, what do you do until then? Well, it's a process. It's not a light switch, it's a, it's a slider. Um But in the meantime, you 0:24:25 - 0:24:57 have to be humble, you have to humble yourself before God and learn to assume that the things that He's sending you while you're asking for. A and you experience B B could be one the precursor to A because you don't understand the chain of events that lead to A two B could be way better than a. So, um 0:24:56 - 0:25:27 I guess enough about that. So how does this tie into this idea of palliative care? Well, when you ask for something immediately God responds, ok. But since you're not willing to do what it takes to get that thing, most likely, and since you probably don't know the path to get that thing, most likely 0:25:26 - 0:25:53 , it seems like it's a while, but he is using every resource he has without breaking the laws he lives by to facilitate what you've asked for. But he starts with something better than what you asked for because he starts, his goal is for everyone to have the max level of eternal life they're willing 0:25:53 - 0:26:14 to receive and he reduces it down to whatever you actually asked for because that is the greatest gift, right? So you say like, man, I'm struggling to pay my heating bill this month and he goes, how can I turn this desire into getting closer to eternal life? All right, this will make this path point 0:26:13 - 0:26:35 some angels to go out. And I know some people, I know God knows some people uh I have some people around this person that I know will respond to me if I ask them to do this, this and this that are along the way to what this person wants, filling the fill in the blanks with angels from heaven, et cetera 0:26:34 - 0:26:55 , et cetera, et cetera, and shazam. Now, you have a pathway where he can use your current desire to take you to something greater. And if, if eternal life is too big of a jump, we'll, we'll downsize that down to the greatest possible thing we could give. And this is exactly what good parents do and God's 0:26:55 - 0:27:24 a lot better than the best parent. So um hopefully, this isn't hard to believe. So that's what he does. And then um uh what happens though, when you fight and fight and fight and fight, the greater thing that he wants to give you eventually, he's going to put you into palliative care. Ok. So now we get 0:27:23 - 0:27:42 to the 0.27 minute preamble, but those are all really important things. Um In fact, maybe God told me to make this video to say those things and he just knew we'd get there with this theme. I don't know. Uh I do also have to talk about what you're willing to do to receive those things. So maybe we'll 0:27:42 - 0:27:59 go there because I'm less likely to forget palliative care than this. Uh Let's say you have a question. What you want is the answer to a question. That's a good thing. It's very good to ask God questions. You should pepper him with questions, but I'll tell you a secret. Don't ask him anything you don't 0:27:58 - 0:28:28 care about first care about the thing before you ask him. And that is um that sort of desire and a willingness to actually live according to whatever he tells you. Uh those, those two things are keys to getting answers to questions. But the third key is what are you willing to do to get what you're asking 0:28:28 - 0:28:54 for? Not just the questions, whatever you're asking for in prayer. And let's say you have a question um many times uh in the early days. So 20 I've, I've, I've been in this for 20 years. Uh So closer to 20 years ago. If I had a question about something and I prayed frequently, I would receive an answer 0:28:53 - 0:29:18 in the form of go read this book of scripture. And I'd always be like, shoot, man, it's gonna take me forever. Do I really wanna know? And the answer was always yes. So then I'd hit the book and maybe if I was lucky, it'd be a specific chapter. Go read this book, this chapter, but sometimes it was like 0:29:18 - 0:29:41 , go read the entire New Testament, go read entire Old Testament. Go, you know, a lot of pages. Now, what I would do is I took a notepad and wrote my question at the top and I'd read the book. I didn't read it super slow, but I read it as fast as I could while looking for the answer to my question. And 0:29:41 - 0:00:00 so for an entire month or whatever, not, obviously, I couldn't read the Old Testament a month, but whatever the length of the book required the entire time, that question was in my mind and I read the book, you know, for a whole month or whatever, it took sometimes fast a week, sometimes fast a day. 0:00:00 - 0:30:28 There has never been a time where I didn't come out of that with the answer to my question back then. I, I have harder questions these days. Uh I've had questions that took 10 years to answer that, that uh I guess some questions were running 20 years now or close to it. Um So the, the question really 0:30:27 - 0:30:50 is not whatever you're asking. So you ask God, hey, why was this? What was this? What does this mean? What happens with this? His answer is, how much do you care? And the answer to that question is what are you willing to do to find out? I'll tell you, most people, they ask $20 questions and they're 0:30:50 - 0:31:10 only willing to pay two cents to get the answer. So they never get the answer. Uh We're just focusing on questions because it's a, it's a, it's a specific thing that's easier and faster to talk about than all things that you could ask for. But it works that way for all things. So in the terms of questions 0:31:09 - 0:31:32 , you got to understand when you ask something there, let OK, there's a right answer to the question, ok? But you have to think about all the barriers you've put in place so that God can't actually just plainly tell you what you're asking. He can't because you wouldn't believe him if he did. This is 0:31:32 - 0:31:50 a hard thing for people to wrap their heads around and I wish I could just download my experience into your brain and I'm not talking about it with myself because I have seen the craziest rejections of truth. You wouldn't believe it if I told you, you would not believe it. Um People say all the time 0:31:50 - 0:32:10 , I wish I had dreams. I wish, you know, I'd have visions and this would happen and now I'd hear a voice and no, you don't, actually. Probably, you probably don't. Because if it happened, odds are you wouldn't listen and then you'd be in a lot of trouble, you'd be worse off than if you had never been 0:32:10 - 0:32:35 born. Because when you get that plane of, uh, I don't want to say a sign but when information is delivered to you, like, if this is a threshold of belief, you're instantly way up here. If an angel comes to you and tells you XYZ and then you're like, uh, well, I don't really wanna know that you're in 0:32:35 - 0:33:03 trouble. Ok? Your whole life is gonna be terrible and, and it's, it's gonna extend way beyond that. You'll be worse off than if you've never been born. So, um, the question is, how many barriers do you have in place? I have, I've met people who were shown in, this is plural people. OK? Shown in dreams 0:33:03 - 0:33:25 . Exactly. All these future events, boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm not talking like millennium. You know, I saw the Gates of Zion type dream. I'm saying like they were showing what was gonna happen in the next week, in the next three years in their marriage, in their job, whatever. And with that was an 0:33:25 - 0:33:52 instruction to do something and it was something that or not do something and it was something that they never would have thought of that was much more important than what they would have done instead and had huge long term consequences. And they ignored it and all of those things happened exactly how 0:33:52 - 0:34:13 they dreamed them and, oh, did I say two? I don't know if I gave you a number now, I'm, like, distilling more and more examples in my head. There's at least three. I know that this happened to. Exactly. Right. And they completely ignored the dream and every single one of those things happened anyway 0:34:12 - 0:34:32 . And do you think they can't? So they lost out on the blessing they would have had for doing what God told them? But hopefully, like the residual blessing would be, well, at least they're gonna believe in God more for next time. Right. That one, I know of one case where that happened. I know someone 0:34:32 - 0:34:55 who was not religious at all and they were thinking about, uh, I have to be careful here so I don't get kicked off of youtube. It's too early for that. Uh, they were thinking about a certain medical decision that's relevant to present times and they're not religious and they heard the voice of God. No 0:34:55 - 0:35:30 joke. Tell them, do not do this. You will regret it. It will cause problems, don't do it. They ignored that voice and then they got massive blood clots, massive pain. And within two months I think, went to the, er, for life-threatening surgery and ended up uh I'm trying to anonymize this a bit. So subtract 0:35:29 - 0:35:52 details, but they were in intensive care for three months, I think and actually died on the table once during that time and they're still alive today. But as a result of that medical intervention, their lives are forever changed and really, really messed up. Do you see what I'm saying? So, and then the 0:35:52 - 0:36:10 other dreams are more detailed that I won't go into. But the point is that all those things happened and in the one case, the guy doesn't even remember the dream he told me and, and I forget a lot of things but that I remember and when I brought it up to him, when everything actually happened, he's like 0:36:10 - 0:36:38 what dream. So uh we have a lot of barriers and we're not willing to hear what he wants to tell us. And part of our blindness is not seeing the barriers we have. It's not like you can just sit, sit there and, and sit, sit down and say what are all and you should do this. You should try if you try to 0:36:38 - 0:36:57 make a list of all the barriers you have with God, with all the things He could tell you that you wouldn't listen to. Um you should work on that list to make it empty. But even when you, once you do that, it's really critical, by the way, even once you do that, there will be a ton of other things that 0:36:57 - 0:37:24 you are blind to. And that's where God's servants come in because they will have fewer barriers than you. The ones he'll use for you and the pe, the ones he knows the guys he knows and then he's, they're not all guys, but he'll send them to you and they'll try to, they'll just poke their finger right 0:37:23 - 0:37:44 on that thing. And they'll say, oh, you believe in God, what about that? And they'll give you a reason and they'll call it out and they'll help you and then you'll have the, the, the ability to decide whether to move forward or not. Ok. So, uh, this is good. I think I'm giving you enough that you can 0:37:43 - 0:38:09 , you can think about these things and get something out of it, work on it. Um, so what are you willing to do to get what you want? And a lot of the things that you want cost a lot more than you think they do. And sometimes you come away from that saying, well, I guess I don't want that. I thought I 0:38:09 - 0:38:32 did, but I guess I don't, and that's perfectly ok. That's great. That's actually one way God, he, one way God helps, um, us overcome temptation because temptation is just mismatched desire to how you actually get it and what it's actually worth. I don't know if you've thought about that, but 11 way he 0:38:32 - 0:38:56 helps us overcome temptation is he teaches us the true value of things. And uh spoiler alert, the true value of what you want is probably way less than what you think it is. And that's why he tries to guide you to better things because if you knew what he knew you'd want that instead. So, um, if you're 0:38:56 - 0:39:23 dead set that you will not receive what you would want. If you knew what he wanted, what, what he would want in your place. Uh If you're dead set against that, you get to uh palliative care. And that is a sad, sad state because what we use that phrase for humans means they're gonna die and there's no 0:39:23 - 0:39:51 way out with humans. Uh Sorry, it was a spiritual sense. Palliative care is also terminal. Uh what it means is he's exhausted every option. He has to help you see that there's something better and now we're gonna get into something really deep. So this is absolutely true in simple things that you're 0:39:51 - 0:40:15 probably thinking of when I'm talking about all this. So, um you have a kid we'll say and uh that analogy is not gonna be good enough anyway, I'll leave it to you. It's a simple idea and you probably have enough pieces to put it together now, but I wanna dovetail this into something more important, which 0:40:15 - 0:40:52 is, 01 of the, one of the misunderstandings we have is um a lot of people out there think that this life is all about getting back to God. So uh there are uh many people out there that think that uh this is our first rodeo that we were created at the moment of birth or something. I don't know. Um But 0:40:51 - 0:41:18 um quite a few Christians believe that we, you know, they read the scripture about the morning stars, sang for Joy and I knew you before you were born. And um they say, oh, well, clearly we existed before we were born. Um And we did, but what is not true is that we didn't know just live in the presence 0:41:17 - 0:41:47 of God before this world was. So you didn't come down from standing in the presence of God. Uh A few people did, but they're very rare. So folks who have seen what are called the concourses of heaven or seen the court of God, the throne of God, depending on how much they saw around it. Uh They know that 0:41:47 - 0:42:18 there are hierarchies of beings in heaven. Um There are so concourses of angels is uh boy, what's a uh I don't know how to describe that visually. Sorry. Uh But I'll put it this way. You can organize everyone in heaven by their distance from God. And the closer you get, the fewer there are, that's the 0:42:18 - 0:42:40 best way to put it. And you can appeal to scripture with this. Uh You don't have to take my word for it, but there's the father and there's the son and there are seven angels right there, I guess. Well, ok, let me describe that a different way. I, I don't need to get into nuances to, to trigger arguments 0:42:40 - 0:43:05 that aren't necessary to my point. There's the father and the son. There's four creatures, there's 24 elders, there's, and then after that, that's all right there. Right after that, there are layers of angels. So we'll leave it at that. But there's a hierarchy in heaven and that hierarchy is determined 0:43:04 - 0:43:38 by how much like God those beings are. OK. So it's not just some arbitrary thing, it's just how much like God are these beings, the closer you become, the closer you become. All right. So if that's the case, then we're not down here just to go back to where we came from. Jesus said, I've come to give 0:43:38 - 0:44:00 life and more abundantly. And that word life is the word for eternal life in Greek. And um more abundantly, it, it just means better than before, right? So that's, that's a very brief, simple argument. We could make that as deep or long as we want, but I have things to do. This is already too long. Um 0:44:00 - 0:44:33 So what does this have to do with, with palliative care? Uh for most people, most people are going to fail to achieve the full scope of what can be done here in terms of them learning about and becoming like God, they will fail so fully that this life is the place where they have greatest access to what 0:44:33 - 0:44:57 they desire. Heaven is an acquired taste. This is a very, very important idea. Heaven is an acquired taste. I said the holiness with Jesus, you wouldn't recognize it if you saw it until you go through a process. Um By the way, it's not some mystical process. The process is do what's good, beautiful and 0:44:57 - 0:45:21 true. Now, fully align your life to it for what you see as those things right now. And that's the gate to the next step of seeing it more clearly and correctly and you just go with that forever. And that's the process, it's called repentance. So um improve in every way you see that you can improve, ranked 0:45:21 - 0:45:48 by importance as you see it and do everything and that's how you go. That's the way, OK? Very important. But back to these people. So what they want you can't have in heaven because heaven is a holy place and holy means different and better. That's what it means. The word you look it up, it means different 0:45:48 - 0:46:18 and better. So it's not enough to be different, but it's also better and it is enough to be better, but something better must be different. OK? So as you ascend what you desire a sense and when you're in the presence of God, you, he can't tolerate, it, can't abide in his glory. There's lots of phrases 0:46:17 - 0:46:42 we could use the scriptural, but the point is the stuff that people want here you can't have there. That sounds restrictive, but it's actually quite the opposite. The really good stuff doesn't accept competition when you cleave to, when you obtain and hold to the really good stuff. It's consuming, it's 0:46:42 - 0:47:13 a consuming fire. There's no space for anything else. Um, that shouldn't be too hard of an idea to grasp because, um, there are many things in life that if you choose them, you can't choose other things. There's one slot, right? Um You can imagine that I don't have to go into that. Um So for most people 0:47:12 - 0:47:41 here are not going to draw closer to God as a result of this life because they don't make the choices they need to for that to happen. And so what they want here, even though those desires are ridiculously poor, that is the maximal joy that they can receive in their existence until they change what they're 0:47:41 - 0:48:05 willing to do right through faith. So in that case, the greatest thing God can do for them and God's servants can do for them is alleviate their suffering just a little bit, which is really sad. But you know, if we have more time and we're sitting face to face, I think we could dig up some examples of 0:48:05 - 0:48:35 this that we see all around us. Um because God wants that suffering to be in place as a call to something higher. See you get your desire for, for what's right increases through suffering. Uh Jesus, Jesus learned obedience, through suffering. That's what Paul says. And if he needed to do that, how much 0:48:35 - 0:49:05 more do we need it? So, um and that scripture could be phrased a lot better. It, it would be better to say something like Jesus learned the value of the father through experiencing the disappointment of everything else. That's one idea that's, that's buried in that and think about that. So people for 0:49:05 - 0:49:27 whom the limitations of all lesser things will not teach them at all. The best thing you can do is just alleviate their suffering a little bit because it's not gonna get any better than this for them. So when we get to that point with God is, is ourselves our individual selves. It's a sad, sad place 0:49:27 - 0:49:59 . So there's a sad note to this and a happy note to this. Um God as God, as Jesus descended below all things. He emitted light to all people. And while the vast majority of what he admitted was resisted, rejected and ignored, it did stick. Uh a whole lot of it stuck. And even if people were looking at 0:49:59 - 0:50:21 it through a straw, they saw something. There are a lot of interesting scriptures in the Old Testament about that, about a light in the darkness. And you can be that light for other people and you should be that light for other people. It's not some magnificent calling. It's just Well, of course you're 0:50:20 - 0:50:44 gonna do that. I mean, a candle doesn't pick and choose where the light goes. It just lights itself up and puts itself on a candlestick. Right. And not the point of video, but a candle is consumed as it's burned. That's a thought. You probably haven't thought, um, olives only produce oil when they're 0:50:44 - 0:51:09 crushed. We could say a lot about that. I hope this is beneficial. I am tired already and I need to go through the whole day now. But I, I hope this helped, uh, I hope you read through faith. If you haven't, I really hope you do. There are some powerful truths in that book. But, uh, these ideas, these 0:00:00 - 0:00:23 So the Lord told me I just woke up a minute ago. The Lord told me to make a video on a theme that I call palliative care. If you've ever known someone that was terminally ill, uh They get to the point where the doctors put them on palliative care, which uh just means try to minimize their pain until 0:00:22 - 0:00:54 they die. So, um I wrote a book called Through Faith and in that book, um I, I guess a one sentence summary of the book is uh let's, let's take a tour through the scriptures and try to dem muddle what faith means and especially put into practical terms, how we practice it. And the book is not written 0:00:54 - 0:01:26 as an academic treatise on faith. It's really focused on practical terms. Um how you can use this from day to day and why it works the way it does and how it connects to real life and the things you actually want, um which might uh give the impression that it's something like uh I don't know, a genie 0:01:26 - 0:01:55 lamp and you rub it and you get what you want. Um And that's very much not the case so don't uh don't think that if you read the book though, you'll see what I mean. Anyway. Um One of the themes in that book is that God gives us what we want and like a lot of simple ideas in the gospel. Most people who 0:01:54 - 0:02:25 profess to be faithful um to believe in God, they will strongly disagree with that statement. Um I am thinking as I say that of another contingent of people who do believe that sort of, but they don't actually ever have evidence for it. Um I had a grandmother who would always say just pray it into existence 0:02:25 - 0:00:00 , just pray it into existence and um it never worked for her and she still believed it. So, uh that's, that's called delusion when you, when you hold to a belief that you have sufficient evidence to disbelieve, but you keep believing it. That's, that's the dictionary definition of the word delusion. 0:00:00 - 0:00:00 Um Anyway, so, um yeah, God gives us what we want. Um And another idea from the book is the main reason that we don't see that is because there are set laws of cause and effect by which this universe is governed and um wanting something is not enough. You also have to find the path to what you want. 0:00:00 - 0:03:55 So um in a nutshell, you don't have what you want because you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. That's a really important theme. I'm not trying to give you a synopsis of through faith. Uh Whatever I say here is not equivalent to what I've written there. I'm just establishing a very brief 0:03:55 - 0:04:16 foundation before I say what I'm supposed to say in this video. Uh Because I know that there are people who haven't read that book and maybe you'll go read it as a result of this. Uh Or maybe you have and um just tapping on to these themes will make something click for you. I don't know or maybe not 0:04:15 - 0:04:47 . And we'll just get to the point here. Um So, um what happens is let me rephrase that one reason why it seems like it takes forever for God to give you what you want sometimes. Uh like I said, is that you're not willing to do or you don't know what it takes to get there. But there's another reason too 0:04:46 - 0:05:24 and I don't know if this one's in the book. So uh if you've read The New Testament, you know, that Jesus said um what he's trying to, to establish the, the fact that the Father knows what you need and he's not gonna send you anything that's not for your benefit. And he's, he talks about uh asking for 0:05:24 - 0:05:45 bread and getting a stone and uh asking for an egg and gay, a serpent. Uh et cetera. The details aren't right in front of me right now and I haven't looked at this in a little while, but there's some secrets in that, that are really important. And it's hilarious. I, well, when I say it's funny, you know 0:05:45 - 0:06:04 , Rob Smith funny is weird. It's not the world funny. Uh, my wife says no one thinks you're funny. Um, that sounds insulting. She doesn't mean it that way. She's, she's trying to help me, like, you know, you think these jokes are funny but no one, she says no one gets them except for you and she knows 0:06:04 - 0:06:25 me well enough to know why. I think they're funny. And um that just makes me laugh harder because I'm like, I know they don't care. That's, it's even funnier because I'm the only one that gets it. But you know, she says people don't get you. I say, I know, I know she doesn't get me either. But um she's 0:06:24 - 0:06:52 closer than most. So anyway, um God, he has like 15 layers with everything. He does sometimes a heck of a lot more. I don't even know if you can count all the things he's doing at once with one action. It's amazing. But um with that, with that little passage, uh he showed me once some connections to 0:06:51 - 0:07:19 a whole lot of other things and he just boom, put it all, he packed it all right in there. Anyway, on the, on the theme that we're on the relevant part of all this is that if you asked God for bread and he gave you a stone, what that would mean is that according to his perfect knowledge, a stone in your 0:07:19 - 0:07:40 case would be much better to ask for than Brett. So I hope that blows your mind a little because people read that and they're like, well, if I asked for bread and he gave me a stone or I'm sorry, they say he would never give me a stone if I asked for bread. That's what they think they're reading it like 0:07:40 - 0:08:01 , oh Jesus is reassuring me that if I ask a father for bread, he'll give me bread. That is not what he's saying, folks on one level, it is cause I told you, God will give you what you desire. But this is the funny thing like people read that for reassurance that God will give them what they want. Jesus 0:08:00 - 0:08:31 said he will, but first he's gonna give you what you should want. But uh do you realize the magnitude of that lesson? Cause it's all through your life, it's all through your life. Uh God called me when I was 18. I don't mean called me like oh calling. But so a lot of people use that in a different way 0:08:30 - 0:09:03 than I mean, I mean, he finally penetrated my thick skull to put the desire and motive inside of me to see and, and, and open my eyes to see that he was real, to search him out and find him and, and begin that path of drawing near to him because I was pretty, pretty oblivious. I say that. But my whole 0:09:02 - 0:09:39 life looking back at the time, I didn't realize it. He was calling me from birth. The earliest memories I have, I could see things and feel things that I should have understood were drawing me to him and I thought things and I experienced things but I was, I was an m really slow. So um he's patient with 0:09:38 - 0:10:12 that and he, that's the way he does it. He is so long suffering, but he loves us so much that he's willing before he sends us what we ask for, he's gonna send us what we should ask for. So, um he'll only break down and send us what we want when he doesn't have any more ways to show us why we should want 0:10:12 - 0:10:34 something better. Now that makes it sound like this reductive process that get like a like a ball rolling down a hill and once it's at the end of the hill, that's it. And like he wants you to come up to the hill and run up the hill and get as close to him as you can and get the ball early. But if you're 0:10:34 - 0:10:56 not willing to do that and you just sit there, finally, the ball will come to you. And um like I said, there is still a law appointed to get that bread you're asking for, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm saying. Uh before you get the bread, he's actually gonna send you stone and the stone is 0:10:56 - 0:11:16 a much, much greater gift. If you wanna know in particular, we could go through that passage. I'm not gonna do that this morning though. But in that particular pairing with the stone and the rock, they're both Jesus, but they're Jesus in two different ways. And, um, if you took everybody in the world 0:11:15 - 0:11:39 who said that they valued Jesus, they only value him for the loaves and fishes. Um He is the bread of life, but the bread of life is much more than the bread that he multiplied and gave to the people. And that's the reason they followed him is because they were seeking him according to their preconceived 0:11:38 - 0:12:02 notions of what Messiah would be, which were wrong and they wanted him so that he could make everything they currently wanted in life easier, more attainable, et cetera, more secure. But they didn't realize that what he had to give them was much better than what they were capable of even imagining at 0:12:02 - 0:12:27 the time. Now it says that in plain English, in the Bible that, that uh Paul talks about it. A lot of people talk about it. Um That what God has to give us is much better than what we know to ask for. Uh I don't have the words to say, but the spirit uttereth within me, you know, the groanings. Uh I have 0:12:27 - 0:12:51 not seen the things that God has prepared for those who love him and so forth. The, the fact is that um his ways are much higher than our ways and his valuation of things is much superior to ours. I was just talking with my kids last night. We do this thing every Sunday. Uh I ask them to come up with 0:12:51 - 0:13:14 questions and then they go and they try to figure out the answers and then at, at dinner time, uh I, cause I asked them to type them up. It's good practice for them. I want them to get used to uh, giving arguments for things and, and being able to give an answer for what they believe. Um So I, they type 0:13:14 - 0:13:47 them up and I read them at dinner and then we talk about them at the dinner table. But uh on that one of these questions we got to this idea of, oh man, I just lost my train of thought. Um shoot. Mm. They will come back to me. It's a bummer. It was a good thought too. Anyway. Um So how does this connect 0:13:47 - 0:14:12 to this theme of palliative care? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was uh we should want what God wants, not what we want because he knows more than us. So how did that tap into the dinner conversation? Um ah Right. So this isn't the theme of the video, but I'll just give you a little free sample on, on the idea 0:14:11 - 0:14:36 of holiness. Jesus made it very clear that in his mortal ministry, there were basically, there were three things he was doing. One was doing what he needed to do so that all mankind would be resurrected. Two was doing what he needed to do so that we could be forgiven of our past sins and the future sins 0:14:35 - 0:15:05 that we're ignorant of, um, through obedience to him. And three. And, and um, so the world focuses on one plus a made up one, which is this, this concept of, if I say I believe in him, then I'm forgiven of everything that that was not on the list. Um So you really don't hear much about the second one 0:15:05 - 0:15:25 . I said, I talk about that in my book on repentance. Uh It's all over the scriptures, but people don't read those ones, they just kind of pretend that they aren't there. Um But my favorite theme is actually number three, but we don't spend much time on number three because no one does number two and 0:15:24 - 0:15:45 you have to do number two before you get to number three for various reasons. Um But number three is he came to the earth to demonstrate to us what the father is like. And there's a bunch of reasons why no one talks about that 11 of them being, we all presume we already know, I guess, I don't know. Again 0:15:45 - 0:16:03 , plenty of scripture is indicating that that's not the case or maybe we, we already think that uh we know everything there is to know also plenty of scriptures saying his ways are unsearchable, et cetera. It's, it's uh Jesus had, he says no one knows the father except he who came from the father and 0:16:03 - 0:16:28 so on. Anyway. Um So he came to demonstrate the father. But here's a funny thing and this is my point with holiness. When I say holiness, you get all these ideas in your mind about what that means. Consider for a moment that Jesus lived for 30 years in a really small town. When I say small town, I told 0:16:28 - 0:16:50 my kids, it's like the neighborhood we live in and there's like 20 people uh and then nothing for two miles. Um And then there's a gas station and nothing else for 30 miles and that's in the direction that's closest to, to civilization anyway. Um I told my kids, Jesus lived in a place that's like our 0:16:50 - 0:17:19 neighborhood for 30 years and they knew so little about him who he really was. And, and what I said was they knew so little about the goodness in him or in what he did that when he came back after his initial initial foray in doing public ministry was a quick brief jot and he came back. Um They were 0:17:19 - 0:17:43 just shocked that this was the Jesus that, that they had grown up with and they were really confused, you can read about it. Um They did not say things like, oh, well, now everything makes sense or? Well, of course, of course, he went and did those things. This is the guy we've known our whole lives 0:17:42 - 0:18:11 . That's, that fits completely into his character. They didn't say that at all. And so some people, ok, some people take that to mean that uh he kept everything inside of him for 30 years and then just started doing it outside and then the miracles came and whatever, I'll tell you something, wisdom always 0:18:10 - 0:18:40 precedes miracles. So it's like I said in that post the other day about the lion roaring and it comes in waves of increasing intensity, the intensity increases. But it's not like saying, you know, if what we were talking about was money pouring out. I'm not saying $1 today, $5 tomorrow, $50 the next 0:18:40 - 0:19:10 day as the as the clarity and evidence of God's power increases, the blessings decrease, they don't increase, they decrease. And this again, this ties perfectly into the bread and stone thing. Um God has massively greater blessings than getting the blind to see and the deaf to hear. And even even raising 0:19:09 - 0:19:41 the dead. God has massively greater things to offer. And where are those found early? They're found earlier than the miracles. Jesus very intentionally arranged his ministry and he did so with cascading clarity. But the reason he did that was when you cascade the clarity, the blessings have to reduce 0:19:40 - 0:20:17 . Why uh I mean, the quality of them, not the quantity, but the quality. Why? Because all things happen through faith and the greater, the experiential reasons, the lesser the blessings must be again, if you read through faith. Um um it's all about logical reasons. That's what faith really, where faith 0:20:17 - 0:20:45 really lives in its, in its most condensed form. Its greatest power is not in the outward signs, it's in honest reason in your mind. So the greater the reasons you have. So, so there's this threshold, right? And you start on baseline, I have no reason to believe this idea. And God lays down reason after 0:20:44 - 0:21:07 reason until you get to this, this threshold where you now have sufficient reasons to believe this idea, right? That's you cover this right here. You're accountable. And by the way, if you have access to this, you're accountable even if you don't look at it, which is a scary idea, but it's true. But 0:21:07 - 0:21:31 let's just let's just not talk about that. So you get to threshold of accountability and he just keeps piling on the reasons. The problem is after this, what happens? I don't have another hand to make another graph. But, but once you get to this, here's your blessings at the threshold of accountability 0:21:29 - 0:21:54 . You're up here. God, God does, by the way, God doesn't want you to believe before you get there. Never asked anybody to believe without a reason. But once you have the reason you better believe. So once you get hit the threshold of accountability, you're a maximal blessing. And with every reason it 0:21:54 - 0:22:14 comes down and it actually comes down faster than it goes up. So it's a squared, it's like an inverse square relationship. Like like like gravity, the further you get away, there's a, there's a drop off or the, the further you walk out from a shore, the ocean gets deep really fast, way out there. Whereas 0:22:14 - 0:22:51 it might be almost flat towards the surf, the, the edge, the beach. Um, so, um, holiness. So, so Jesus, um, his hometown, so he was massively more holy than everyone there. And yet they thought he was such a regular person that, um, well, they assumed he was a regular person. So how can it be that the 0:22:50 - 0:23:15 human being who is most righteous of all who, who actually was the most righteous a human could be and who was so righteous that, uh, when people saw him, they could see everything a human could understand about the father. And yet people just thought he was a normal guy and not just someone walking 0:23:15 - 0:23:33 past him on the street, someone who knew him very well because they saw him almost every day for 30 years and they lived in a small town where everyone knew everybody and everything they did. There was no hiding and they had small houses too like they just, you couldn't hide. Right. Think about that 0:23:33 - 0:24:01 . The only explanation for that is that we cannot see holiness, not initially, it's a process and we have to learn. So I told that to my kids and getting back to the, the bread and the stone, the fact is that we don't know what to ask for and whatever we want to ask for is probably not the best thing 0:24:01 - 0:24:25 we could ask for. So again, Paul gives us the recipe that you have to appeal to the spirit and you have to develop your ability to hear the Lord's voice and he'll tell you, well, what do you do until then? Well, it's a process. It's not a light switch, it's a, it's a slider. Um But in the meantime, you 0:24:25 - 0:24:57 have to be humble, you have to humble yourself before God and learn to assume that the things that He's sending you while you're asking for. A and you experience B B could be one the precursor to A because you don't understand the chain of events that lead to A two B could be way better than a. So, um 0:24:56 - 0:25:27 I guess enough about that. So how does this tie into this idea of palliative care? Well, when you ask for something immediately God responds, ok. But since you're not willing to do what it takes to get that thing, most likely, and since you probably don't know the path to get that thing, most likely 0:25:26 - 0:25:53 , it seems like it's a while, but he is using every resource he has without breaking the laws he lives by to facilitate what you've asked for. But he starts with something better than what you asked for because he starts, his goal is for everyone to have the max level of eternal life they're willing 0:25:53 - 0:26:14 to receive and he reduces it down to whatever you actually asked for because that is the greatest gift, right? So you say like, man, I'm struggling to pay my heating bill this month and he goes, how can I turn this desire into getting closer to eternal life? All right, this will make this path point 0:26:13 - 0:26:35 some angels to go out. And I know some people, I know God knows some people uh I have some people around this person that I know will respond to me if I ask them to do this, this and this that are along the way to what this person wants, filling the fill in the blanks with angels from heaven, et cetera 0:26:34 - 0:26:55 , et cetera, et cetera, and shazam. Now, you have a pathway where he can use your current desire to take you to something greater. And if, if eternal life is too big of a jump, we'll, we'll downsize that down to the greatest possible thing we could give. And this is exactly what good parents do and God's 0:26:55 - 0:27:24 a lot better than the best parent. So um hopefully, this isn't hard to believe. So that's what he does. And then um uh what happens though, when you fight and fight and fight and fight, the greater thing that he wants to give you eventually, he's going to put you into palliative care. Ok. So now we get 0:27:23 - 0:27:42 to the 0.27 minute preamble, but those are all really important things. Um In fact, maybe God told me to make this video to say those things and he just knew we'd get there with this theme. I don't know. Uh I do also have to talk about what you're willing to do to receive those things. So maybe we'll 0:27:42 - 0:27:59 go there because I'm less likely to forget palliative care than this. Uh Let's say you have a question. What you want is the answer to a question. That's a good thing. It's very good to ask God questions. You should pepper him with questions, but I'll tell you a secret. Don't ask him anything you don't 0:27:58 - 0:28:28 care about first care about the thing before you ask him. And that is um that sort of desire and a willingness to actually live according to whatever he tells you. Uh those, those two things are keys to getting answers to questions. But the third key is what are you willing to do to get what you're asking 0:28:28 - 0:28:54 for? Not just the questions, whatever you're asking for in prayer. And let's say you have a question um many times uh in the early days. So 20 I've, I've, I've been in this for 20 years. Uh So closer to 20 years ago. If I had a question about something and I prayed frequently, I would receive an answer 0:28:53 - 0:29:18 in the form of go read this book of scripture. And I'd always be like, shoot, man, it's gonna take me forever. Do I really wanna know? And the answer was always yes. So then I'd hit the book and maybe if I was lucky, it'd be a specific chapter. Go read this book, this chapter, but sometimes it was like 0:29:18 - 0:29:41 , go read the entire New Testament, go read entire Old Testament. Go, you know, a lot of pages. Now, what I would do is I took a notepad and wrote my question at the top and I'd read the book. I didn't read it super slow, but I read it as fast as I could while looking for the answer to my question. And 0:29:41 - 0:00:00 so for an entire month or whatever, not, obviously, I couldn't read the Old Testament a month, but whatever the length of the book required the entire time, that question was in my mind and I read the book, you know, for a whole month or whatever, it took sometimes fast a week, sometimes fast a day. 0:00:00 - 0:30:28 There has never been a time where I didn't come out of that with the answer to my question back then. I, I have harder questions these days. Uh I've had questions that took 10 years to answer that, that uh I guess some questions were running 20 years now or close to it. Um So the, the question really 0:30:27 - 0:30:50 is not whatever you're asking. So you ask God, hey, why was this? What was this? What does this mean? What happens with this? His answer is, how much do you care? And the answer to that question is what are you willing to do to find out? I'll tell you, most people, they ask $20 questions and they're 0:30:50 - 0:31:10 only willing to pay two cents to get the answer. So they never get the answer. Uh We're just focusing on questions because it's a, it's a, it's a specific thing that's easier and faster to talk about than all things that you could ask for. But it works that way for all things. So in the terms of questions 0:31:09 - 0:31:32 , you got to understand when you ask something there, let OK, there's a right answer to the question, ok? But you have to think about all the barriers you've put in place so that God can't actually just plainly tell you what you're asking. He can't because you wouldn't believe him if he did. This is 0:31:32 - 0:31:50 a hard thing for people to wrap their heads around and I wish I could just download my experience into your brain and I'm not talking about it with myself because I have seen the craziest rejections of truth. You wouldn't believe it if I told you, you would not believe it. Um People say all the time 0:31:50 - 0:32:10 , I wish I had dreams. I wish, you know, I'd have visions and this would happen and now I'd hear a voice and no, you don't, actually. Probably, you probably don't. Because if it happened, odds are you wouldn't listen and then you'd be in a lot of trouble, you'd be worse off than if you had never been 0:32:10 - 0:32:35 born. Because when you get that plane of, uh, I don't want to say a sign but when information is delivered to you, like, if this is a threshold of belief, you're instantly way up here. If an angel comes to you and tells you XYZ and then you're like, uh, well, I don't really wanna know that you're in 0:32:35 - 0:33:03 trouble. Ok? Your whole life is gonna be terrible and, and it's, it's gonna extend way beyond that. You'll be worse off than if you've never been born. So, um, the question is, how many barriers do you have in place? I have, I've met people who were shown in, this is plural people. OK? Shown in dreams 0:33:03 - 0:33:25 . Exactly. All these future events, boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm not talking like millennium. You know, I saw the Gates of Zion type dream. I'm saying like they were showing what was gonna happen in the next week, in the next three years in their marriage, in their job, whatever. And with that was an 0:33:25 - 0:33:52 instruction to do something and it was something that or not do something and it was something that they never would have thought of that was much more important than what they would have done instead and had huge long term consequences. And they ignored it and all of those things happened exactly how 0:33:52 - 0:34:13 they dreamed them and, oh, did I say two? I don't know if I gave you a number now, I'm, like, distilling more and more examples in my head. There's at least three. I know that this happened to. Exactly. Right. And they completely ignored the dream and every single one of those things happened anyway 0:34:12 - 0:34:32 . And do you think they can't? So they lost out on the blessing they would have had for doing what God told them? But hopefully, like the residual blessing would be, well, at least they're gonna believe in God more for next time. Right. That one, I know of one case where that happened. I know someone 0:34:32 - 0:34:55 who was not religious at all and they were thinking about, uh, I have to be careful here so I don't get kicked off of youtube. It's too early for that. Uh, they were thinking about a certain medical decision that's relevant to present times and they're not religious and they heard the voice of God. No 0:34:55 - 0:35:30 joke. Tell them, do not do this. You will regret it. It will cause problems, don't do it. They ignored that voice and then they got massive blood clots, massive pain. And within two months I think, went to the, er, for life-threatening surgery and ended up uh I'm trying to anonymize this a bit. So subtract 0:35:29 - 0:35:52 details, but they were in intensive care for three months, I think and actually died on the table once during that time and they're still alive today. But as a result of that medical intervention, their lives are forever changed and really, really messed up. Do you see what I'm saying? So, and then the 0:35:52 - 0:36:10 other dreams are more detailed that I won't go into. But the point is that all those things happened and in the one case, the guy doesn't even remember the dream he told me and, and I forget a lot of things but that I remember and when I brought it up to him, when everything actually happened, he's like 0:36:10 - 0:36:38 what dream. So uh we have a lot of barriers and we're not willing to hear what he wants to tell us. And part of our blindness is not seeing the barriers we have. It's not like you can just sit, sit there and, and sit, sit down and say what are all and you should do this. You should try if you try to 0:36:38 - 0:36:57 make a list of all the barriers you have with God, with all the things He could tell you that you wouldn't listen to. Um you should work on that list to make it empty. But even when you, once you do that, it's really critical, by the way, even once you do that, there will be a ton of other things that 0:36:57 - 0:37:24 you are blind to. And that's where God's servants come in because they will have fewer barriers than you. The ones he'll use for you and the pe, the ones he knows the guys he knows and then he's, they're not all guys, but he'll send them to you and they'll try to, they'll just poke their finger right 0:37:23 - 0:37:44 on that thing. And they'll say, oh, you believe in God, what about that? And they'll give you a reason and they'll call it out and they'll help you and then you'll have the, the, the ability to decide whether to move forward or not. Ok. So, uh, this is good. I think I'm giving you enough that you can 0:37:43 - 0:38:09 , you can think about these things and get something out of it, work on it. Um, so what are you willing to do to get what you want? And a lot of the things that you want cost a lot more than you think they do. And sometimes you come away from that saying, well, I guess I don't want that. I thought I 0:38:09 - 0:38:32 did, but I guess I don't, and that's perfectly ok. That's great. That's actually one way God, he, one way God helps, um, us overcome temptation because temptation is just mismatched desire to how you actually get it and what it's actually worth. I don't know if you've thought about that, but 11 way he 0:38:32 - 0:38:56 helps us overcome temptation is he teaches us the true value of things. And uh spoiler alert, the true value of what you want is probably way less than what you think it is. And that's why he tries to guide you to better things because if you knew what he knew you'd want that instead. So, um, if you're 0:38:56 - 0:39:23 dead set that you will not receive what you would want. If you knew what he wanted, what, what he would want in your place. Uh If you're dead set against that, you get to uh palliative care. And that is a sad, sad state because what we use that phrase for humans means they're gonna die and there's no 0:39:23 - 0:39:51 way out with humans. Uh Sorry, it was a spiritual sense. Palliative care is also terminal. Uh what it means is he's exhausted every option. He has to help you see that there's something better and now we're gonna get into something really deep. So this is absolutely true in simple things that you're 0:39:51 - 0:40:15 probably thinking of when I'm talking about all this. So, um you have a kid we'll say and uh that analogy is not gonna be good enough anyway, I'll leave it to you. It's a simple idea and you probably have enough pieces to put it together now, but I wanna dovetail this into something more important, which 0:40:15 - 0:40:52 is, 01 of the, one of the misunderstandings we have is um a lot of people out there think that this life is all about getting back to God. So uh there are uh many people out there that think that uh this is our first rodeo that we were created at the moment of birth or something. I don't know. Um But 0:40:51 - 0:41:18 um quite a few Christians believe that we, you know, they read the scripture about the morning stars, sang for Joy and I knew you before you were born. And um they say, oh, well, clearly we existed before we were born. Um And we did, but what is not true is that we didn't know just live in the presence 0:41:17 - 0:41:47 of God before this world was. So you didn't come down from standing in the presence of God. Uh A few people did, but they're very rare. So folks who have seen what are called the concourses of heaven or seen the court of God, the throne of God, depending on how much they saw around it. Uh They know that 0:41:47 - 0:42:18 there are hierarchies of beings in heaven. Um There are so concourses of angels is uh boy, what's a uh I don't know how to describe that visually. Sorry. Uh But I'll put it this way. You can organize everyone in heaven by their distance from God. And the closer you get, the fewer there are, that's the 0:42:18 - 0:42:40 best way to put it. And you can appeal to scripture with this. Uh You don't have to take my word for it, but there's the father and there's the son and there are seven angels right there, I guess. Well, ok, let me describe that a different way. I, I don't need to get into nuances to, to trigger arguments 0:42:40 - 0:43:05 that aren't necessary to my point. There's the father and the son. There's four creatures, there's 24 elders, there's, and then after that, that's all right there. Right after that, there are layers of angels. So we'll leave it at that. But there's a hierarchy in heaven and that hierarchy is determined 0:43:04 - 0:43:38 by how much like God those beings are. OK. So it's not just some arbitrary thing, it's just how much like God are these beings, the closer you become, the closer you become. All right. So if that's the case, then we're not down here just to go back to where we came from. Jesus said, I've come to give 0:43:38 - 0:44:00 life and more abundantly. And that word life is the word for eternal life in Greek. And um more abundantly, it, it just means better than before, right? So that's, that's a very brief, simple argument. We could make that as deep or long as we want, but I have things to do. This is already too long. Um 0:44:00 - 0:44:33 So what does this have to do with, with palliative care? Uh for most people, most people are going to fail to achieve the full scope of what can be done here in terms of them learning about and becoming like God, they will fail so fully that this life is the place where they have greatest access to what 0:44:33 - 0:44:57 they desire. Heaven is an acquired taste. This is a very, very important idea. Heaven is an acquired taste. I said the holiness with Jesus, you wouldn't recognize it if you saw it until you go through a process. Um By the way, it's not some mystical process. The process is do what's good, beautiful and 0:44:57 - 0:45:21 true. Now, fully align your life to it for what you see as those things right now. And that's the gate to the next step of seeing it more clearly and correctly and you just go with that forever. And that's the process, it's called repentance. So um improve in every way you see that you can improve, ranked 0:45:21 - 0:45:48 by importance as you see it and do everything and that's how you go. That's the way, OK? Very important. But back to these people. So what they want you can't have in heaven because heaven is a holy place and holy means different and better. That's what it means. The word you look it up, it means different 0:45:48 - 0:46:18 and better. So it's not enough to be different, but it's also better and it is enough to be better, but something better must be different. OK? So as you ascend what you desire a sense and when you're in the presence of God, you, he can't tolerate, it, can't abide in his glory. There's lots of phrases 0:46:17 - 0:46:42 we could use the scriptural, but the point is the stuff that people want here you can't have there. That sounds restrictive, but it's actually quite the opposite. The really good stuff doesn't accept competition when you cleave to, when you obtain and hold to the really good stuff. It's consuming, it's 0:46:42 - 0:47:13 a consuming fire. There's no space for anything else. Um, that shouldn't be too hard of an idea to grasp because, um, there are many things in life that if you choose them, you can't choose other things. There's one slot, right? Um You can imagine that I don't have to go into that. Um So for most people 0:47:12 - 0:47:41 here are not going to draw closer to God as a result of this life because they don't make the choices they need to for that to happen. And so what they want here, even though those desires are ridiculously poor, that is the maximal joy that they can receive in their existence until they change what they're 0:47:41 - 0:48:05 willing to do right through faith. So in that case, the greatest thing God can do for them and God's servants can do for them is alleviate their suffering just a little bit, which is really sad. But you know, if we have more time and we're sitting face to face, I think we could dig up some examples of 0:48:05 - 0:48:35 this that we see all around us. Um because God wants that suffering to be in place as a call to something higher. See you get your desire for, for what's right increases through suffering. Uh Jesus, Jesus learned obedience, through suffering. That's what Paul says. And if he needed to do that, how much 0:48:35 - 0:49:05 more do we need it? So, um and that scripture could be phrased a lot better. It, it would be better to say something like Jesus learned the value of the father through experiencing the disappointment of everything else. That's one idea that's, that's buried in that and think about that. So people for 0:49:05 - 0:49:27 whom the limitations of all lesser things will not teach them at all. The best thing you can do is just alleviate their suffering a little bit because it's not gonna get any better than this for them. So when we get to that point with God is, is ourselves our individual selves. It's a sad, sad place 0:49:27 - 0:49:59 . So there's a sad note to this and a happy note to this. Um God as God, as Jesus descended below all things. He emitted light to all people. And while the vast majority of what he admitted was resisted, rejected and ignored, it did stick. Uh a whole lot of it stuck. And even if people were looking at 0:49:59 - 0:50:21 it through a straw, they saw something. There are a lot of interesting scriptures in the Old Testament about that, about a light in the darkness. And you can be that light for other people and you should be that light for other people. It's not some magnificent calling. It's just Well, of course you're 0:50:20 - 0:50:44 gonna do that. I mean, a candle doesn't pick and choose where the light goes. It just lights itself up and puts itself on a candlestick. Right. And not the point of video, but a candle is consumed as it's burned. That's a thought. You probably haven't thought, um, olives only produce oil when they're 0:50:44 - 0:51:09 crushed. We could say a lot about that. I hope this is beneficial. I am tired already and I need to go through the whole day now. But I, I hope this helped, uh, I hope you read through faith. If you haven't, I really hope you do. There are some powerful truths in that book. But, uh, these ideas, these 0:51:09 - 0:51:17 are really simple and they're critical and, uh God is very good in teaching us. These things. Have a good one.