Video Transcript

Toggle Timestamps

All right. So, uh, partial paint job in progress. Um, one of our kids, um, when he's a tiny little toddler, he had a funny little voice and a, we had a dog, Charlie. He's a sweet, sweet friend of mine. And, um, one of the benefits of having a dog when you have small Children is that the dog will clean up all the food that the kid or kids, uh, spill on the floor from their high chair or wherever. And so I guess we had told this child many times when he spilled things, it's ok. Charlie will get it. And then the kid, when he started talking, he, he would, uh, he'd make a mess. It'd be some non-food item , like he'd spill dirt all over the ground or whatever legos, whatever the, the items were. And he would just really resolutely say it. Ok. Shall we get it? He had a gravelly voice it. Ok. Shall we get it? And a, he was so convinced that that was the case. He's that child. He's always been convinced of things. He's a very reason oriented child. Um, kind of startlingly. So, in fact, once, um, we were at my father-in-law's house. Ok. Yeah, he said, uh, he said, daddy, I need a poop. And I said, I said, ok, well, let's go inside. He said no, uh, I poop outside and I said, no, you can't poop outside . And he said, uh, but deer do like that. And, uh, he couldn't even really string together sentences, but he's reasoning with me. And I just thought, man, I just got stumped by a little kid. I don't have anything within the realm of little kid logic to counter that. Obviously, I could explain to an adult why that that doesn't work. But I was like, all right, you got me bomb's away. And so he pooped uh behind a bush and then my father in law's dog came outside and it was like a co ordinated attack. That dog ran straight for the poop in this dense foliage. Somehow I knew exactly where it was and gobbled it right up. My father-in-law was so mad but um he, he didn't find the humor in the situation. So um this brings up two points and one maybe I'll delve deeper into, although I might make a separate video. Uh So a lot of people have this idea about God and their scriptures, they use to, to try to um support this idea that whatever happens, everything will be just dandy, just um just kind of like Charlie's gonna clean it up and they don't understand that, you know, Charlie eats food but not most ve vegetables even. So, not even all food. Charlie's dead. Um, all analogies are limited but, um, Charlie was not gonna eat Legos or dirt. Right. So most things, in fact, Charlie would not eat and even though he was, he was definitely food oriented, he had a little problem, uh, with the food. So, um, so notwithstanding he, he, there were tons of things that he wouldn't eat Most things he wouldn't eat, including all known food items. And with God, these ideas like trusting God and everything is gonna be ok. That's 100% true. But what, what you're not getting is what it means to trust in God. You see, um, before this world was created, God came up with a design for it all and the design was perfect, but in that design were relationships of cause and effect and all things in creation. They're related, all things have a relationship and his law. On the one hand, it's the simplest thing in the world. It's so simple that it can be described in one word, but it's so sophisticated that I'm not sure I've ever met anyone that could understand it properly in just the one word from the one word. If you already understand it, you can say the one word. But uh you're just not going to connect the dots in any reasonable way. And so it's like my son's understanding of Charlie, cleaning up the messes. Now, here's what's funny about these people and why I consider them to be deeply dishonest, which incidentally it's like calling someone a liar. Uh, everyone is offended by that. So it doesn't matter if they just told a lie, it doesn't matter if the very next thing out of their mouth is gonna be a lie. They will be offended if you say you're lying to me or you're a liar. And dishonesty is a close second to that. It's not something that anyone gets excited about. And it's like, you know, I'm a real dishonest person. Someone will say they're an alcoholic or a compulsive gambler or they're addicted to this or that, or they get too angry or they're lazy or all these things, people will freely admit. But society still hasn't decayed to the point where people are excited about being a liar or about being dishonest. Uh, I should say where they won't excitedly admit those things. They do them earnestly but they won't admit it. So, um, I just wanna preface the fact that, you know, I just called all these people dishonest. But, um, most Christians by far and, uh, I just want to stress with this, that it, it's a really big deal and everyone should take it seriously and if it applies to you, you ought to be offended, but not at me it yourself. Um, but at the same time, I just want to make clear that in being so prevalent and applying to so many things in a way, it's kind of less of a big deal. Um, if that makes sense, I'm not justifying it. I'm just saying, um, it's like living in a place where the air is polluted. I did another video where I mentioned that, uh, recently and if you live in a place where the air is polluted, it is a really, really, really big deal. Um, if there's nothing you can do about it at the moment life goes on. Right. That's, you know, all analogies are limited with this one. Dishonesty is a choice , right? But it's something you can start working on right away. So striking that balance anyway. So, um, admittedly that's gonna offend everyone it applies to. But that's all right. So, um, here's how those people are dishonest, these people who say, well, it means that God is going to make everything in my life ideal as long as I just, um, think about the idea that he exists and do whatever I want. So they don't believe that that's true across the board in their lives. They're not consistent with it. And that's one huge pitfall of dishonesty. You think that to be dishonest, you have to do these horrifically overt one time. O only Hitler would do that kind of things, but you don't, actually, it's something that, that applies throughout life. If there's any aspect of your life that's not fully integrated with all the others that is a measure of dishonesty. So, um, with these folks and they say, well, God's gonna protect me no matter what. And I just, I don't have to worry about anything because God's got it taken care of. All right. When's the last time you went to the grocery store? Why, why didn't God just fill your fridge? When's the last time you flushed a toilet? Why, why didn't God take care? Why do you have to go to the bathroom multiple times a day, every day? God doesn't just take care of that for you. When's the last time you painted your house for most people? Not recently enough. And I'm trying to get, I'm overdue myself. Um because my shoulder was really, really jacked up for three years . Um and on and on and on every single day of your life is filled chock full of things that you have to exert nonna effort to do. You actually have to think about what you want, why you want it, what you believe will happen if you do it and on and on and on. And in short, you're actively using your faculties of reason to marshal all of your observations to date and predict what will happen if X then Y to choose among a set of available options and optimize for something to prefer one option over all alternatives for a reason. And so if you're the kind of person that says, well, God's gonna take care of it . I'd like to know exactly. How do you delineate when it's in his hands? And when it's not, now, if you ask me this, because I do believe that God takes care of everything, but there are conditions and I know what they are. Um, because he told me and he tells you too, it's, it's in the scriptures. So you have to understand cause and effect, right? Um You have to actively adopt his purpose as far as you understand it. And then all things will be provided for you. Seek ye first, the Kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you. So that's the condition. And you see when you're just sort of floating through life is whenever it's inconvenient to think about it and actually strive to do better than you would if you were just floating down life, like like a canoe on a river or a turn down a sewer line more accurately for the, for most people, um You're actively seeking what you want and all the convenient, fun, exciting ways in life like planning what you're gonna do this weekend or the next place you're gonna take your RV. But when it comes to the hard things, the difficult things actually adopting God's purpose in your life and saying, hm, with all these resources that God has given me, uh first and foremost, that every breath I take and my pulse my life. But everything else too. How do I further God's purposes? How do I, what can I do to make this place? Make myself those around me, my family, those I work with the random people I walk past on the street, the house, I live in the yard, my backyard, the apartment I live in the local library. It doesn't matter how do, what can I do to make all of those things closer to how they would be if they were in heaven. So to do on earth, what you would do in heaven and to make earth more like heaven, how could you do that? So it does not say taking no thought beforehand what things you will do when they stress you out or they seem like they're more than you can handle or you're not excited about them or they're not sexy or you didn't get a good night's sleep last night. It doesn't say that. Uh I've looked at the translations. No one's come up with that one yet. But you see Kim 1st, 1st, not second, not 10th, no other gods before me. And when you adopt the purpose of a king, you become his servant, you become his responsibility and he said he's like a, a hen, he gathers us under his wings. If you've seen that, if you have chickens , you've seen this, right? Well, I guess you'd have to have a mother hen and chicks. But I've seen this, I've seen this and I've lived it and through every tough thing I've been through, I testify that that is true that God will lead you to green pastures. It has to be done in his way because he has law, he has a process and it's not arbitrary. By the way, it's, it's like a maze. Reality is a maze and there's one path and he knows what it is. People get tripped up on that. It's a side note, but we're there. So we'll go there. We're already here. People get tripped up on this and they say, oh, how many ways are there to heaven? Stupid question, rephrase it. The fact is there's a path from wherever you are to God and people are different. And so depending on the differences between you and anyone else and where you stand, what you understand who you are, what you're all about, what you're not all about, then that path is gonna look slightly different on your very next step and then it's gonna look a little less different on the very next step and then a little less different on the very next step. And so that maze, it's not like when you give your kid a maze and they draw one line through it . It, it's amazed, but it has a bunch of starts and those starts converge at different parts along the way, they converge. And so when it's all done, it looks like an upside down tree and that's divine. That's the way, it's like a mountain. There's one peak and you could say there are a lot of ways to get up there. But they converge as you go. How many ways are there as many places as there are to start? It doesn't matter if you cut your own trail, it's a lot of work but it can be done and it might, when you're done you might make something better than anything else anyone has come up with so far . But one thing's for sure, the higher you go, the fewer the paths are they converge why? Because all things are one in Christ. He is the unity. He's the answer to every question. If you go far enough along, they all converge on him. He's already figured it out. So Charlie's not gonna clean it up. That's , that's the point. That's where I started. I'll come back to that. You have to actively think about what you're doing. So, what's one specific application of this? Well, people who have this mentality, I've noticed it seems to correlate with having tons of kids. I don't know why that is, but it is. And so they misinterpret what it means to multiply and fill the earth. And one reason is because they never um studied those verses. They've just taken someone else's word for it. And I say verses because it's something that God commanded multiple people throughout the history of the, of the earth. He said it to Abraham, he said it to Noah and he said it to Adam. Um He may have said more people that's just off the top of my head. So what does it mean to multiply and replenish the earth? Well, as with many translations into English from the scriptures. Uh It's a pretty terrible one. And what do I mean by that if you know what he actually said? And the meaning of what he actually said, sorry, almost drop my phone. Um And you know, English, um and you were writing it for the first time, those are not the words you would choose. In fact, they're just about as far from them as, as writing, I don't know , sophisticated dinosaur deap, decapitates hamburger or something. Some garble of words that doesn't make any sense. It's not that bad. I mean, I'm, I'm exaggerating but what it means is to do what you can. It's exactly what I said before and it's what it says in other places. Do everything you can to bring everything inside of your sphere of influence to its full potential in the eyes of God. That's what it means. Increase is the key idea in that phrase as well as potential. So get things as close to their full potential in the eyes of God because He knows, you know, it's not like you come around and you see um Jesse David's father, you, you come around, let's say that you God gives you vision and you see, um, when I always forget, is it Samuel or Nathan comes Samuel, when Samuel comes to Jesse to pick the king of Israel from Jesse's Sons. And you see, it's like the sound of music when the guy plays a little flute and all his kids line up except there's one kid missing and that kid is David the black sheep who's with the, the real sheep out in the field because no one likes him and they just sort of, um, no, what's the word for that? Uh, ah, they cast him out. That's not the word. They cast him out into the fields because they didn't want to be around him because he annoyed them big time. He was a very annoying person to them. And, uh, and so you're a fly on the wall or an angel in the portal or whatever you wanna say and you're watching this. And, um, and, um, it's quite a thing to see because you're, you're kind of reading the face of Jesse and you're kind of reading the face of Nathan. And plus you have an extra channel of information and you're trying to just put all this together in Jesse's view of things. The best way to advance the kingdom of God was for one of his, um, is more , we'll say attractive and I, I mean, not holistically in, in Jesse's sense of valuation, all of his sons were worth more than David and he probably had a favorite among them. Just, just a wild guess. But regardless this, the metrics he was measuring them against were different than God's metrics. And he saw David as far less than what God saw and when the interaction occurs. And uh Samuel says, uh is there one missing? Do you have another son? Because none of these are the one he goes. Well, I mean, there's David but he's, he's dead to me. And uh I mean, it's not funny. It's super sad. You feel for David, you really do. And it's, it's um it's such a testament to the fact that he wasn't a total psycho. He actually ended up having a heart close to God's in almost every way. So, um Jesse reluctantly admits there's another and um Nathan says, well, let's go look and Jesse protests and Nathan says, well, God doesn't look at people like we do. He looks on their heart and heart's another interesting word because it doesn't mean what we mean when we say it. Um sometimes you can substitute the idea of desire. But um one of the Hebrew words translated into heart is the inner man. And so it's, it's your , your desires in your mind or your heart and your mind in a scriptural sense. It's both those things. And um so uh we don't see naturally anyway, the potential that God does in things. And um that's an important part of all of this and um I've been thoroughly distracted by everything I can see in front of my face right now and I've totally lost my train of thought. I'm just gonna be straight up on this. So I'm gonna end this video and I remember we started on Charlie won't clean it up. We're talking about lots of kids potential I recover. Um So Jesse's thought on the optimal outcome of all that was super different than Nathan's thought. And Nathan's thought was way closer to God's thought than Jesse's. So when we talk about uh multiplying and repent, replenishing the earth, there's a lot more to it than just popping out as many babies as your body can, bodies can, can uh marshal. So that's not it. And that this is not the time to just throw up your hands and say like, well, God will find a way or God brought us this baby and whatever it's like uh you had a part in it at least, right? Is you, you, you were the controlling cause of this. This was you could have rate limited this um unless this was an immaculate conception. So, um which apparently happens, right? Um So if you really want to maximize the potential of the earth by bringing it into the closest possible alignment to heaven, you really have to think about it. And with kids, the needle goes both ways. This is almost everything, right ? If not everything you can be on one side of optimal and almost always, people are right on, almost always everything you can have too few or too many, but there's no one size fits all rule with this except always do what you sincerely believe Jesus would do in your place. That's the rule. But, but different people are going to disagree about what that looks like in their particular setting. And so you might ask, well, how do you righteously judge another person in this or any other situation? Well, you have to judge them from the knowledge that they have and that takes a certain degree of, uh , development will say to, to summarize a whole bunch of different attributes. And, um, the folks that throw their hands up and say, well, whatever God wants is what's gonna happen, um, while they are doing the deed that produces the kids. Um, and, and not exercising the same degree. It's like when Jesus said, you know, you guys are smart enough to figure out that when the sky is red, it's gonna be bad weather. But you can't see these other things that are way more obvious than that. That's dishonesty, right? You're using an unequal measure of reason. You remember how much trouble the money changers got into because they had two sets of weights. They, they used one set of weights for one side of the transaction and another side set of weights for the other so that they could skim some off the top coming and going and that was abominable to God. But in many more than the monetary for, for many more than the monetary reasons or even stealing, there was an even bigger sin there which was uneven application of reason. It's abominable before God. The reason it's so serious is maybe a topic for another day. But in very short phrase, I'll just tell you it's because all things are connected. And so if you short change yourself or other people by applying uneven reason in any way, you also short change everybody including yourself because you diminish your ability to exercise reason in all things. Those things are always completely coupled and that's why it's abominable. So, because it's so harmful , it's, it's, it's uh the, it's, it's the Hebrew word parish. It's a deep word that is connected to many, many, many, many, many, many things. But, um, it doesn't just mean to die. It means to wither to be less, to, um, constrict to reduce in a, in a bad way, not the mathematical way um to, you could go on and on, but it's bad. That's, it's very bad and it's diminutive in a terminal way. It, and uh, well, anyway, so, um, yeah, that's just use your reason evenly and, and set your heart to make things as good as you can make them and not just in your own desires and your way of seeing things, but in God's eyes and you might say, well, you don't have God's eyes, that's ok. Use the eyes, you have not. And you said you just said, well, don't use, don't use your eyes. And now you're saying, use your eyes. No, I'm saying, use your model of God as far as you have it as far as you believe Him to be, as far as you've got it figured out. And you know, like it's gonna be wrong, I'm just gonna tell you straight up, uh, a lot about that is just gonna be off, off, off and that's ok because if it's sincerely the best that you've got, it's actually the very way to make it better. It's the only way to make it best. It is the path. It's, I told, I told you about the tree before the vine upside down tree. That's what's going to get you closest to the highest point you can reach right now from where you stand and guess what that point is the next rung in where you go after that. So, I hope this is helpful .