0:07:54 - 0:08:05 know, you're lacking and you find people for whom those things are strengths and then you see what you can learn from them. This is what God would have us to do. 0:00:00 - 0:00:26 There was once a, a pretty young woman, she had gorgeous eyes, she had nice skin, she knew how to dress well. But one thing she hadn't figured out is how to decorate her hair. She had very plain hair and she was, she was interested in how to make that look better. So she hit Pinterest and she looked 0:00:26 - 0:00:46 for pictures of hairstyles from people who knew how to do it better than her. Now, she was looking at these pictures. She really didn't care about the other attributes of the ladies in the pictures. She didn't care how well read they were. She didn't care how athletic they were. She didn't care if they 0:00:46 - 0:01:10 were particularly kind people. She didn't care if they had the same religion as her. She was just looking for hairstyles. She found what she was looking for very quickly and she was able to incorporate those skills into her own repertoire. So there is nothing exceptional about this story is a very specific 0:01:09 - 0:01:35 example of principle that we manage to live. Um I'm not gonna say daily but all the time in our lives and this is when we sense that we're weak in something, we go figure out how to get better at it and what do we do? We look for examples of folks who know how to do it better than we do. There's nothing 0:01:35 - 0:02:01 offensive about that. There's nothing strange about that. There's nothing new about that. So, explain to me why it is such a foreign concept when we flip the bit and start talking about religion or things that could be seen as connected in any way to religion. So, suppose we're talking about, uh, personality 0:02:00 - 0:02:29 traits and suppose that you feel like you could be better at being kind to people or you could be more charitable, you could be more patient. Why is it that, that your go to, is that there needs to be some other way of learning how to do that? Either that it's not the right thing to then think. Hm. Who 0:02:28 - 0:02:53 do I know already? That's more of this than I am or is better at this than I am? And what can I do to pick up on how they do it better? It doesn't have to be an explicit conversation. Doesn't have to be weird or anything. We do it all the time with everything else. But for some reason when your mind 0:02:53 - 0:03:16 gets on religious things, most people immediately think, well, there has to be some other way here. Or maybe I'm just gonna pray about this where all I'm gonna do is read the scriptures on this watch you use your eyes and ears and mine like you do on everything else. So 11 limitation we have here is 0:03:16 - 0:00:00 we think there's some other way. But let me tell you another one, you know, the, the girl in this story, she was fine at looking at other people for, for to try to find someone who does hair better than she does. She didn't care if they were totally disastrous people in other ways, let alone normal. 0:00:00 - 0:04:04 She knew what she was looking for. You know, it's just one thing. Why is it when we switch over to religious things, we refuse to use anyone as an example who's not as perfect as God himself. That is a two fold problem. First off, we, we, we have the standard of uh of completion of perfection. Whereas 0:04:04 - 0:04:28 we're fine in temporal issues, we're fine just trying to find somebody who's good at the thing we're looking for. We want them to be better than us at everything or else we won't even consider them. Um I, sorry, I said two fold. I don't know how I was going to divide that. Maybe that's sufficient. It's 0:04:28 - 0:04:54 a real, real problem. And so with all issues of judgment, the best thing you can do is back, test your metrics against Jesus and or against other people you consider to be holy. Like for example, Paul, there's a lot about Paul in, in the New Testament. Now some people don't particularly like Paul. Fine 0:04:54 - 0:05:15 , whatever whoever your people are. But certainly Jesus needs to be on the list at the top. If, if you're not gonna do it for anyone else, do it for him, if you have this mentality, that one fault disqualifies someone in being able to be an example to you in anything else. Even things completely unrelated 0:05:15 - 0:05:45 . Would you have disqualified Jesus? Now, if you're naive, you'll say no because he was perfect. Yes, he was perfect. He is perfect. But he lived a perfect mortal life. Sure. But would you recognize that? And herein lies the rub. No, you would not. The key here is that we can only recognize light and 0:05:45 - 0:06:12 truth just beyond our own. If it's too far ahead, we will actually interpret it as evil, neutral at best, but more likely evil. And usually we interpret it with the same magnitude as it is distant from us. And God said his ways are so high above us in Isaiah that it's like the distance between the earth 0:06:11 - 0:06:36 and the heavens. So if Jesus were hanging around today, around you in your mortal life as a mortal, you should not be so confident that you would interpret everything he did as being the holiest example of that thing. It would be, but you probably wouldn't see it that way. You know that that's one way 0:06:36 - 0:07:01 of phrasing the challenge of all of this is that he can't just drop, kick us out of the heavens with a full idea of what holiness is. It's an acquired taste. There's a process for us to come up to all that, not just in being able to see it, but in desiring it. And so he leads us along line by line to 0:07:01 - 0:07:30 get to that point. So let's please not judge people in ways that will cause us to, to judge Jesus is evil. Obviously, if we're doing that, then something's wrong with our system and we need to tweak it. So, so I've given you one very simple way to, to achieve that modification. When you sense that you're 0:07:29 - 0:07:55 weak in something, find someone who's strong in that thing and pay attention to them in that thing. Withhold the temptation to do the opposite, which is to take your strengths and hold them up and compare other people to that. So it's a much more positive outlook where you take things that, where you