0:00:00 - 0:00:25 Going to be talking about value. Now, these are thoughts that I've picked out of a much bigger set of ideas with far more detail, with far more scripture uh that I have been working on for years now that I have not uh released. Although you'll see elements of those ideas developing in the books that 0:00:24 - 0:00:47 are out. Um I feel impressed to release this. Now, I am thinking of specific people that need it again though. This is the tiniest fraction of what I have to say about this. So I hope this gives you something to think about and work on. In the meantime, while I'm finishing the full uh length version 0:00:47 - 0:00:00 of this, which will have to be written out. Um Just for clarity for simplicity, we're just, we're just using this word things. And when I say things in this presentation, I'm referring to things, people, situations, ideas, basically, if it's an experience, immortality, that's what I'm talking about. 0:00:00 - 0:01:39 And this this uh generalization, it allows us to, to be a little quicker in how we run through these ideas. We're going to start up front with these very important points. You don't value what God values. You don't see what God sees now. I think most, uh, I think I'd find more agreement with people in 0:01:39 - 0:00:00 terms of not seeing what God sees. I think that sort of we, it's not hard to find folks who say they believe in God who admit that. They don't know what God knows, they don't perceive what he does. It's kind of obvious because if I asked, you, give me every detail of what's going to happen tomorrow, 0:00:00 - 0:02:17 you, you wouldn't be able to answer that question. But God could, I think where there's more pushback is this idea that you don't value what God values. Uh I think that the common conception of the Gospel is more like a light switch where and, and you could go to the extreme, you know, you say the sinner's 0:02:17 - 0:02:38 prayer and magically, your value system is exactly as God's is or something. Uh Or actually, I think it's more common to believe that it doesn't matter what your value system is. And that's a, that is an enormous error, but it turns out that you don't value what God values. You don't see what God sees 0:02:38 - 0:02:58 . And it turns out that both of these things need to turn into more like what God values and more like what he sees in order to accomplish the purposes of the Gospel. Chief among them is a fullness of joy. That's why we're here is to move towards greater joy. Um And to facilitate that movement for others 0:02:58 - 0:03:20 . And you cannot have a fullness of joy, uh, except to the extent that you are like God. And that absolutely includes valuing what he values and seeing what he sees. And so that's why value is such an important topic. Now, there are a lot more uh practical considerations and we'll get there, but it's 0:03:20 - 0:03:39 something that absolutely impacts every aspect of your life and yet, uh, you've probably never thought about it. Um And you, it's even less likely that you've ever heard about it at church. So we're gonna fix that starting with this short presentation. Ok. Diving into this a little deeper. If you explore 0:03:39 - 0:04:00 these differences with God, you would find that you have differences in belief of how good things can be, how bad things can be, how good things are, how bad things are and how many options there are. Um There'd be a great disagreement and what things are good and bad. This is another thing that blows 0:04:00 - 0:04:25 people's minds. Not only does the intensity of good and evil differ greatly between what God knows and what you believe, but the potential is very different and the assignment is very different. And I have talked about this many times. I'm not sure it's gotten much traction. I've presented it like this 0:04:24 - 0:04:47 at least twice where I tried to explain to you that good and evil, the assignment of things into the buckets of good and evil. It changes as you gain understanding, part of that understanding is understanding the cost and benefit of things or the be the value of things. And God's assessment of these 0:04:47 - 0:05:06 things are much different than yours, including how many options there are, right? So if I were to ask you what's something worth you can't say unless you know one, the cost and benefit of that thing which most people don't think about. And if they have thought about it in the past, they don't revise 0:05:06 - 0:05:27 that with new information. And two, you need to know how many options there are. And for each of those, you also need to know the cost and the benefit. So it turns out that while you can get very far, all things considered knowing very little, you cannot get anywhere near where God wants you to be without 0:05:27 - 0:05:50 knowing an awful lot. And that's a paradox because the in, in the face of common Christianity because in common Christianity, it's a, it's a religion of ignorance where you, you go into it thinking, well, God's got everything taken care of for me and all I have to do is quote unquote, believe in Him 0:05:50 - 0:06:14 , using a very vacuous definition of belief and everything's hunky dory. And now I'm saved, not just from sins that I continue somehow, but I'm saved from ever having to think about anything. And that's not what the gospel is. The gospel is a pathway to become more like God in anything presented to you 0:06:14 - 0:06:43 that doesn't overlay that completely is at best much, much, much less than what God offers. So let's look at some graphs, these are called distributions. And if you don't have uh a math background or it's been a while, basically, these are just graphs that show something on this axis against a count 0:06:42 - 0:07:07 of how often that something occurs. OK. So if we did uh human height, it would look like this. This is actually a really common shape. So if we had shorties down here and tall people up here, uh the average person, although it differs for men and women, but don't tell the lefties that uh there is an 0:07:07 - 0:07:28 average and most people are closer to that average than further away and it's uh symmetric around the average. So the bottom half looks the same as the top half just flipped and that's called a normal distribution. Sometimes people call it a bell curve. This is very common in many things in nature like 0:07:28 - 0:07:51 IQ for example. So uh we have the count here and then the value here because we're comparing how you see the value of things versus how God sees the value of things. It turns out that uh if we went down a list. So if I asked you to write everything, you know, of all things, people, ideas and situations 0:07:50 - 0:08:10 , you'd say that some things are really high value and, and, and those are kind of rare and some things are really low value. But those things are kind of rare, but pretty much everything is pretty much a decent value. How God sees the value of things is a Pareto distribution. This is a very important 0:08:09 - 0:08:35 distribution. It's extremely tied to humanity, it's tightly coupled to humanity. So anything that involves human choice in terms of value, um and now this is not my insight, this is, this is a sociology or psychology insight. It's been observed over and over again. Anything that involves human per performance 0:08:34 - 0:08:56 related to thought, not uh you know how, how fast you can run a quarter mile, not physical performance alone, but the whole composite of human performance. It follows a preto distribution, things like wealth, for example, follow uh preto distribution. It's inescapable again, don't tell that to the lefties 0:08:56 - 0:09:18 , but this is, this is reality and you can't get away from it. So for example, if you look at a company, this is uh an example of, of, of this uh distribution, any company, no matter what its size, 80% of the people produce 20% of whatever it is that that company produces. That's amazing because it's 0:09:18 - 0:09:49 across the board in whatever it produces. Um And you can, you can, it's also um it's a holographic principle, meaning if you take the top 20% and you isolate those people, you will see the same pattern again, among them, you also see that the top 20% produce, 80% of everything that group produces, which 0:09:49 - 0:10:12 is amazing. It's amazing. So this distribution is extraordinarily important to understand and it's how God sees the value of things. So if you laid out all people things, situations, everything that, that exists in this world, and you ask God, what are these things worth? This is the shape you would 0:10:12 - 0:10:32 get, you get a whole bunch of things that are worth very little and relatively speaking, of course, because even the things at least worth are immensely expensive here, I'm talking about, you know, you could consider the dust of the earth is something that's not very valuable. Well, it came at a great 0:10:32 - 0:10:58 cost. Creation is expensive anyway. But when you come up this way, all of a sudden the value drops down and then there's almost no count of high value things. But as that count reduces the the amount of value skyrockets, right? So because you have low here and high here. So if you're following me, what 0:10:57 - 0:11:19 this is very different between how people see the value of things and how God sees the value of things. And my question for you is what difference do you think that this makes? So, I don't know that you've ever thought about this, but now's the time if you haven't, how do you think of a perspective of 0:11:19 - 0:11:44 value that that resembles God's? How do you think that's gonna affect how you act feel and think versus this. So what's really interesting is um you know, going back here, how many options there are our perception differs from God's. The funny thing about human perception is it is dependent on human 0:11:43 - 0:12:08 choice because you only perceive what you attend. You have to choose to see something, you can see something with your eyes and not register it in your brain. It's a choice. In fact, even your eye is designed with a focal point containing almost all of the visual sensors. So you everything around that 0:12:08 - 0:12:32 is blurry. The amount of information you derive from what you focus on is immense compared to what comes uh peripherally. So what difference does this make? If you think that most things are pretty much the same and really bad things are super rare and unusual and really good things are super rare and 0:12:32 - 0:12:58 unusual. You're going to live your life in a completely different way than if you think most things are pretty much worthless. And the things of greatest value are so rare that you can't even quantify it because you've run out of zeros to put after the decimal. So so much could be said about this. But 0:12:58 - 0:13:26 again, we're just going to move on what is value values benefit minus minus cost. So in business values profit, but in life, there are also costs and benefits see that you know, when you're looking at value, you have to compare the outputs to, to the inputs. A key idea is we're considering this is you 0:13:26 - 0:13:50 just don't know how expensive things can truly be. So uh going back to this, so we have benefit and cost. This is a a graph that only has value benefit and cost are not here. This is benefit minus cost. So the question is if we broke this out, it separated benefit and cost, what would it look like? Well 0:13:50 - 0:14:22 , this is what it looks like. So here we have high benefit down here, we have low benefit. Here we have high cost. Here we have low cost and then this is the composite. It's the it's it's value. OK. So high value requires high cost. This is an important idea. Again, common Christianity preaches that 0:14:22 - 0:14:51 somehow the apex of value lies in this extremely low cost place. In fact, it's a lower cost than anything in real life. I I should say maybe temporal life, common Christianity preaches a gospel where God's way is magically devoid of any of the challenges of life. All you have to do is say the sinner's 0:14:51 - 0:15:15 prayer or accept your flavor of religion's quote unquote required ordinances or rights and shazam you're here at the highest value. It's up here somewhere because all you have to do is this super easy thing that doesn't require you to change in any way except the thing and bam you will receive everything 0:15:15 - 0:15:41 God has. Well, the funny thing is, is not one of those people have anything that God offers, accept a belief that they do, which is interesting. Ok. The truth is instead of being enticed by this low cost Christianity, we ought to actually open the Bible and read it and read where Jesus says again and 0:15:41 - 0:16:07 again, that following me will cost you everything again and again and again. And he's explicit. He says, family members, houses, reputation, comfort, material wealth, everything, even your life, it will cost you everything. And he says with this tower building example or the king going out to war. He 0:16:07 - 0:16:28 says before you even think about it, count the cost because it's going to cost you everything. So this is uh people that believe in low cost Christianity, they're diluted, they believe they need another set of scriptures because what they believe is not in that book, it's something totally different 0:16:27 - 0:16:46 . It's more like Aladdin because maybe that's the gospel of Aladdin because they rub their lamp and a genie comes out and says, what do you want? I'll give you anything. And the only thing you had to do is rub the lamp. Jesus says, I will give you everything if you become like I am. And part of what 0:16:46 - 0:17:09 I'm going to give you is a path to make that possible because without me, it's impossible, but I've paid the price, I'll show you the way come follow me. It's pretty simple. It's, it's pretty simple to understand. It's very straightforward. So we we should get a prize for messing it up so bad. Anyway 0:17:08 - 0:17:34 , the high benefit and high cost they're coupled. Now that does not mean you see this region of the graph, high cost does not mean high benefit. It doesn't imply high benefit because you can have something that's low benefit and high cost. So, you know, if I robbed you of everything you owned, uh I'm 0:17:33 - 0:17:58 not sure it has a super high benefit in most cases, but it sure has a high cost. Or if you put your life savings on one bet in Vegas, that's down here too, right? Because you're gonna lose it and it will have cost you everything or if you wanna start taking meth or something, right? So this is where 0:17:57 - 0:18:20 we wanna be and we, if we wanna be here, we ought to be looking for things that have a high cost because if it has a low cost, the best place we can be is, is somewhere in here, we're gonna be somewhere in here if it's got a low cost and that's low value. But if we look for high benefit, we also have 0:18:19 - 0:18:43 to look for high costs because they co occur. All right. So you need to know the benefit and you need to know the cost. This is so important that I've probably written five or 600 pages just on figuring this out. How do you actually measure these things? Now, this graph is gonna be familiar to those 0:18:42 - 0:19:04 of you who have dug into my stuff because I used it in teaching discernment. It's in one of or more of these presentations and I think it's in at least one book and, and part of that is just because it took me so dang long to draw this. No, I'm just kidding. It's a pattern that happens again and again 0:19:04 - 0:19:32 , in fact, I think the archetype of this pattern, the transcendent source of it is because this is how holiness works. This is how holiness works. God is the star. OK? Now you can see I left the axes labels the same for value. That's because Holy means different and better and this is what better means 0:19:31 - 0:20:00 higher in value. Now, I just broke out a whole bunch of stuff in plain this. So I hope you caught all that. It's a really big deal. So why does this matter? There are many differences between these two ways of thinking and there's an enormous difference in understanding this versus not understanding 0:19:59 - 0:20:25 this. If you orient your life to this point and you, you take your bearings to point to this and you do everything you can to get there and to keep moving towards it, you're gonna have a fundamentally different life. Now, one of the many differences will be that what you're willing to do will be fundamentally 0:20:24 - 0:20:50 different. You will be willing to make massive changes in your life for the better because you will believe that it's worth it. You will have a more accurate idea of the un attained value that God offers all people. The other reason this matters is when you look at this, what you see is this smooth flow 0:20:49 - 0:21:22 up towards the ideal. If you're anywhere on here, even if you didn't have vision to see this whole structure from start to finish, you don't actually need to see the whole landscape. All you need to know is no matter where you are go up, no matter where you are go up. If you're in a place of low cost 0:21:21 - 0:21:45 , start looking for things that require higher cost. If you're in a place and you, you see low benefit in your life, start looking for greater benefit no matter where you are. If you're in a place of low value, start looking, looking for higher value and then make the changes to come closer to the higher 0:21:44 - 0:22:20 thing as you do that, you will move closer to the ideal. This is true in all things and through all things, all value leads to all value. By the way, everything from God works this way. Of course, all value leads to God and in the true path to God, not a counterfeit path, but in the true path, you'll 0:22:20 - 0:22:50 find that all things increase in value. So as you ascend, everything gets better. That's the way it works with God. Now some people will push back on that and say yes, but there are these cycles of ascent and descent. I'm going to give you a massive key here. Cycles of descent only look that way because 0:22:50 - 0:23:17 your vision is flawed. Ironically, they turn into cycles of ascent most beneficially. God can pluck you out of it. But the other way that happens, the better way that happens is you learn how that cycle of dissent is actually also increasing benefit. And once you figure that out, you have the key to 0:23:17 - 0:23:38 very many things. So value is extraordinarily important to understand and to live. And I hope that this gives you some tools you can use to draw you further towards the ideal, which is God in everything he has to offer.