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All right, I was just scrolling through social media and I took a break, quick break from writing. I need to get back to writing. So, I'm going to try to make this video as fast as I can. And they're huge topics. I just want to sort of sprinkle things on you here. We're going to bounce through a few scriptures and then I'll show you this this video. It's about a guy building a house. And what I want to focus on is the fact that God has tremendous opportunities prepared for you. I don't care who you are. I don't care where you are in life. I don't care what you're into. He has things prepared for you that are absolutely things that you would want if you knew enough about them. And so the the question becomes, why don't you have them yet? And again, I'm trying to just condense this down as much as I can. Any one of these ideas we could spend a lot of time on. Well, here's here's the first thing is to show you that Jesus, this is John 16, God has many things prepared for you. These are outcomes. These are opportunities. These are things he wants to teach you. And those are all connected together, but you're not ready for them yet. Look at this. I have many I have yet many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear them now. And he told this to his apostles before he was crucified. Now, he had spent three years full-time with them. And I want you to think about this. If you have if you want a a great study, go back to the New Testament and read the Gospels before this happened and see just how many times they he's just so confined in what he teaches them because he's limited by them. And we'll get just a little bit into the wise and wherefors about that just a little bit. But this is the puzzle of the gospel. It's that God and everything connected to him is so hard to communicate to people who are not like him. And that's not just the information, although that's tightly coupled with the outcomes. It's also the outcomes. And so everything has to be done step by step. It's successive like going up lungs. lungs going up rungs of a ladder. And he says right here in this same spot, he talks about the importance of the Holy Ghost in this process. And he says that after he leaves that the comforter will come and these are the things that the comforter will do. He will reprove the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment. And he explains just a little bit about what that means. But I want to focus on the righteousness part. The Lord said because I go to my father and you see me no more. And so the Holy Ghost would take the place of Jesus in being the the revelator of God because Jesus was the express image of his father. He did all things that his father would do in his place while he was here. And so now that he's ascended, the Holy Ghost has that role. It says right here, "When the Spirit of truth has come, he will guide you into all truth. For he shall not speak of himself, but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak, and he will show you things to come." He says, "I'll give him or it." Let's not get into that debate. and he or it will give it to you. Okay, so that's that one. Then we have this in DNC 888. We're we're taught that the the outcomes we receive, the blessings that we receive, our situation in life and in death and hereafter, it's all determined by law. and that we receive what we're willing to receive. Verse 32, and they who remain shall also be quickened. Nevertheless, they shall return again to their own place to enjoy that which they are willing to receive because they were not willing to enjoy that which they might have received. Now, this is very interesting because we have an indication here that that what you're willing to receive is connected to what you would enjoy. And I've taught this in a different place. Joy comes from value, but it's limited not just to the absolute value or the value that God would see in it. It's limited to the value you would see in it. And what you get is the lowest common denominator between those. You understand? So if you find great value in something that God finds very little value in, you might think you're going to get great value in it, but you're going to get very little value in it in the long run. That's the lowest common denominator. And you can flip that around. If you find very little value in something and God finds great value in it, you will still just get very little value out of it because that's the the lowest common denominator. Just because something's valuable in God's eyes doesn't mean it'll be valuable in your eyes. And you can give someone a gift, but it's only worth what they think it's worth. Right? Okay. Now, why are we so limited in the blessings that we receive today? Well, it's because how of how we acted yesterday? Again, going back to DNC88, what laws did we obtain and live yesterday? That's what determines what we get today. Now when I say determines, I fully acknowledge that in order to enable faith, God makes things a little bit offiscated. There's a delay. If we had time, we could read scriptures about this. There's often a delay in justice. He sprinkles his blessings on the just and the unjust to provide a space for faith. But eventually everything pans out and people get what they deserve. And so that's the law we have to optionally live by in order to maximize our outcomes. And so let's set aside the offiscation for for the duration of this discussion. Okay. So why don't you have more of what you want right now? Well, it's because you haven't obtained and lived the law to get it yesterday or before now. So, how do you invert that? Well, you learn to see a far off. That's obviously a scriptural phrase. Let's read this from Moses 6 27. And he heard a voice from heaven, saying, "Enoch, my son, prophesy unto this people, and say unto them,"Repent, for thus sayaeth the Lord, I am angry with this people, and my fierce anger is kindled against them, for their hearts have waxed hard, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes cannot see a far off." So, what's the key to being able to see a far off? Well, you have to open your eyes and open your ears and you have to repent. When you do the best that you know all the time, you are situated optimally for everything that that is to come that you can't possibly know about yet. And that is the only way. If you do anything less than that, anything less than your best all the time, you are choosing lesser outcomes. And often you're choosing really bad things because it's not just good things that you're missing out on that you could otherwise have. You're choosing bad things, problems that you would otherwise either avoid or overcome. You're you're actively asking God to send them into your life by rejecting what he's sending you that would avoid that or overcome it. And you have got to understand this. If I could touch your eyes right now and have the power of God go through my finger or my hand and touch your eyes or touch your your head and open your your eyes, the eyes of your understanding, you would be absolutely dismayed at how many of the problems in your life right now today are completely of your own make. They were completely avoidable and you had everything you needed to avoid those even though you couldn't see them coming. But you wouldn't do what you knew was best at the level you understood. And this is the reward. And it's not a punishment. It's just the natural outcome of what you picked. It's what you wanted. Do you understand that? If you did, your life would be fundamentally different. Okay, now let me give you this this silly little example that I found on social media. So, here's Russ and I'm going to hit play. And I have no idea how this is going to work with this recording. Good. It's still muted and everything. So, look, you we get our our captions. He wanted he he saw a timber frame house and he wanted to build one himself. So he he called for an estimate and he couldn't believe how expensive it was. So he said, "Well, I'll just do it myself, right? The Thanos option." And he took an online class. It was during COVID, so he had a little bit of time. Now, what's his profession? He's an underground utility contractor. It has nothing to do with carpentry. Look at this house that he built. and he says, "It looks like a daunting task, but if you put the time and the effort into it, you turn it into something beautiful. Look at how awesome this houses. It's amazing." All right. Now, how much did it cost to build? I have no idea. But knowing just a tiny bit about the construction industry, the labor was probably just as much, meaning he probably saved at least 50% on the build. Now, does that mean you should go out and do this? Let's pull this apart. Okay, let's uh let's freeze frame on not Russ or his wife. Jeez, this is uh now difficult to find. There we go. Okay, that's that's nice. Let's pull this apart a bit. Can anybody build a timber frame house? No. Absolutely not. Okay, some people just be total thumbs with this. Can more people do this than are? Yes. Would it be better for some of those people to do this than anything else? Yes. So that little subset of people. This would be an astronomical improvement over their present situation if it was a good thing for them. So huge life-changing value in their lives. Now, one thing he says here, I did want to zoom in. He says, "Every time I look at this place, look at this. It's a stress relief for me. When I pull up on this property, the stress goes away." I wanted to stress that because I'm telling you one one thing I'd like you to learn is that you vastly underestimate the power of your surroundings to affect how you feel. How we feel to a large extent is our choice. And one of those choices is what we decide that dictates our surroundings. where you live and what that place is like. And you might say, "Well, that's nice, but I can't just drop everything and buy a timber frame home, or I can't drop everything and build one." Okay, fine. Whatever. But in your circumstances, the question is, what things could change to vastly change your surroundings to some vastly improve them? And you know, if you're living in an apartment, that doesn't mean you can't live in an apartment anymore. If you're really constrained to that or it would displace more important things to change out of that, okay, fine. But there are probably things you could do even with that. What those are could be a long list is could be very individual. You know, you could plant a bucket garden on your porch or just redecorate your house or pay somebody to decorate your apartment or whatever. Could just clean the place up a bit, you know, whatever. But but backtracking here, the point is Russ 10 years before this didn't say, you know, 10 years from now I'm going to have the opportunity to build a timber frame house and that's what I'm going to do. But he lived his life in a way that he could watch an online class and learn how to carve these beams. And you know, he wasn't scared to buy the equipment to cut these mortises. And um he obviously he has at least a little bit of heavy equipment. There's a skid steer right there because of his business. And so he was able to stack together these things that he did way before he would knew he knew they would have an effect on a timber frame house or even that he would want one one day just by doing the best every day that he knew that day. Do you understand the point I'm trying to make? It is a huge freaking point. It is so important. And what happens is we look at God makes it much easier for us to see what is best than he does to see why it matters. And you need to carve that into your head and your heart. So when you're sitting there asking yourself, "What more can I do?" And answer is, "Hey, this little thing," you say, "Oh, but you know, it's not going to matter. I'd rather just sit here or I'd rather just have some fun or I'd rather whatever it does matter. And part of faith is assuming it always matters even when you don't have specifics to put in the slot of why. Now you can look in the past and that's your evidence. Look backwards. That's your evidence. It's a it's a an almost unlimited pile of evidence. look back and see how much it mattered for you to do little extra things before or even to make big changes. It matters a lot and it's not a mystery. It's really obvious. So, we we're dishonest when we look into the future and assume it's not going to matter. That's a change because we can see it mattered in the past. So, don't fall for that lie. Now, back to the Holy Ghost, the Holy Ghost empowers our understanding. And so, when we sit there and introspect and we think, "What's the best I could do?" And we take the time to actually make a plan for our life and and to diagram out what we currently understand is most valuable and to orient our life towards those things and people and making the changes in ourselves. that is doing what we read in John. We're pointing out our sins or when we did less than our best. We're we're extending our understanding of righteousness or what God would do in our place and we're stretching towards judgment or doing the things that we want God to judge us by. Living so that we merit what we desire. This is the office of the Holy Ghost. And we invite that as we introspect and ask, am I doing my best? What more could I do? And a lot more details about this are available in the book Joy on Purpose, which you can get for free. I give away everything for free. This channel, the books, everything is funded by your donations. And so, thank you for those who do that. I encourage all of you to do that if it doesn't displace something more important and to that extent. So hopefully this point is is now much clearer and I ask in your life what are some things that you could change so that if the opportunity to do something big and crazy like this came along where it had an effect on every single day of your life because every single day Russ drives home from his full-time job. He says all the stress just melts away because he looks at this beautiful place that he built with his own hands and it gives him tremendous meaning and Russ doesn't understand this but he has created something and when we improve things we increase the bandwidth of the Holy Ghost to us and guess what one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit is peace. So he gets bombarded with peace when he drives up on his own property and he could only do that because co came along and who expected that and then he had this opportunity because he had prepared his whole life for it. God is constantly preparing you for future opportunities that you cannot foresee. And the way he does it is by using the things that you can see. And when you take those lightly and don't do your best, you're actively choosing worse things.