0:00:00 - 0:00:25 I wanted to share some brief thoughts on the concept of the highway of God. These are picture rich thoughts um and they are not. So you don't want to just listen to this and they are not meant to be exhaustive in any way. But I'd like to just present one pictorial idea and in doing so provided I think 0:00:24 - 0:00:49 substantial building block towards a more fuller understanding of concepts that are extraordinarily important in your life and in the life of everyone that's alive right now in the end times. So here's a graph and this graph represents a bit of information. So let's go through it. The green bars represent 0:00:48 - 0:01:16 a praised true value. So um I guess let me just explain what one of the bars is any bar here you could think of as an idea, a situation, a person, basically anything you can categorize in your life. So the green portion of the bar is how much value you see in that person, thing, situation, whatever idea 0:01:16 - 0:01:48 that is true. And here in this world, true value means value that God sees in that thing, person idea situation, et cetera. And for simplicity from here on out, I'm just going to say thing, but I mean, all things. So the green is the the the intersection between the value you see in it and the value 0:01:48 - 0:02:17 God sees in it, the white outline of the bar, that's the entire value that God sees in it. The red portion of the bar is how much value you see in it. That is actually not there. It's an illusion, you're mistaken. God does not see that value so far, so good. So I drew a bunch of bars here so we could 0:02:16 - 0:02:44 have some sort of representation of how this looks. Obviously, there would be as many bars as things in your life. And that's a whole lot of bars and none of the bars are independent. Uh More factual representation which would be far too complicated to draw or uh derive much understanding from would 0:02:43 - 0:03:08 be a network, there would be connections between things and each bar would actually be a collection of things looked at from a certain perspective and that gets super complicated. Um So this is a simplification, but it, it will be an illustrative one. So this is how you probably think about value in 0:03:08 - 0:03:32 your life. Oh, I have a dog and I love my dog. My dog means a lot to me. I really like to cycle, you know, I, I love playing basketball with my buddies, whatever. OK. And uh those, those are, let's see that we had a dog, we had activities, there are ideas too, I love communism, you know, whatever. So 0:03:32 - 0:03:55 and, and it could be specific ideas, not just sets of ideologies. So you might see and, and, and the other thing about this graph is we're only looking about looking at positive value. So, so we're not distinguishing between cost and benefit. We're only talking about net benefit and there's nothing on 0:03:55 - 0:04:12 this graph that has a negative net benefit. Those are complexities that are real and that you need to think about. But we're just introducing this. So all of this is, is just a disclaimer to say, hey, this is simplified and it will illustrate a few things to get us started on this. But you could build 0:04:12 - 0:04:33 this out to include all of those subtleties and, and in many cases, they're not subtleties, they're massively important, but whatever details. OK. So here it is these things change through time. By the way, we could animate this through time and see those changing. But there are some problems with this 0:04:32 - 0:04:52 representation and I don't mean it's fidelity to reality. I mean the fact that this, I said this is how you see your life. You probably haven't even gotten that far. But if we took the time and you and I sat down and I didn't show you this and we walked through and asked you questions about different 0:04:52 - 0:05:17 facets of your life. We would build this out and, and I'd I'd help you see that you have an amount of value that you appraise in each and everything in your life doing that would be immensely helpful. Because right there, without even injecting any additional structure, we'll say into this set of ideas 0:05:16 - 0:05:39 , we could expose many things in your life where you're not aligning your actions to the value that you see if we oversimplify this down to two things like there as if there are only two things in your life. And we could just pick two random things. What I say in my example is a dog in cycling. And then 0:05:39 - 0:06:04 I asked you which of these two is more important and why? And how does the pie chart of your resources in life? How does it align with or deviate from that ranking? And just by going through that and adding more than two things back into the equation, we would, we would enumerate a whole lot of areas 0:06:03 - 0:06:35 where you could live in greater alignment to your current beliefs through ranking your actions to match your expectation of impact of the meaning of those things. No, I'm just spitting out massively valuable information here. I'm just running through it. I'll come back and, and treat these in different 0:06:35 - 0:06:55 places and in different ways, but you can run with it. Now, if you'd like if you have the faith to do so, if you have eyes to see the value and, and the brain to apply it to your life. You can run with it now and it will make incredible differences in how you live your life. And as we get through this 0:06:55 - 0:07:20 short slide show, there's only nine total including the title slide. Uh You'll see why that's absolutely important. Anyway, so with this representation, here's some, here's some problems. Um how do you search this space? So if I handed you this, this graph and I said, all right, well, here are all your 0:07:20 - 0:07:39 present values and whatever, how do you find what's better than what you already know? Because if you can see, I included this giant bar here with no green or red on it. This is hidden to you right now in this, in this graph, this would be something that you had no idea about. You have no idea it exists 0:07:38 - 0:07:59 . I have not seen the things God has prepared for those who love him. Romans eight, we read that there are many other interesting scriptures that say it's possible to know those things. It's by default, you won't see them, you won't have any idea about them, but they exist. They're already here and you 0:07:59 - 0:08:25 can have them if you want to. And a whole bunch of people have in the past scripture say so, so how do you find those things? And furthermore, how do you get more of the volume of, of the empty boxes? How do you make the green bars match the white boxes? How do you improve to get more of the value that 0:08:24 - 0:08:51 God sees in things. Now, that one's particularly painful because you've already paid for every bar you have. It's not the case that you know, let's say this bar here, let's say this is your marriage. This representation does not suggest that over time, you'll find more value in your marriage and you 0:08:51 - 0:00:00 just have to develop it more to get there. That's not what this says. This says there's already this much value in your marriage, but all you see is this much or there's already this much value in your cycling and all you see is this much or whatever, whatever the, the thing might be. So that's sad. 0:00:00 - 0:09:33 Uh It's like, it's like paying a mortgage on a house, but you only know about one room in the house, you already are paying for the whole thing. You just don't get to enjoy it. So, or if you have your adult Children living at home and not paying rent, you gotta kick the bums out and get the whole bar 0:09:33 - 0:09:57 . Uh All right. What is, um, the other thing we haven't talked about here is what is the, the cost of these things? The red bars? Well, there are a lot of costs for one. You will lose those things. You absolutely will come to a point where you realize that they don't have that value that you placed in 0:09:57 - 0:10:21 them and that will cause loss sorrow. It will be very bad. It's not just I had something and now I don't think about your life. Has there ever been a moment of loss that was like that where you're like? Yeah. Uh, at least I had it when I had it. No one does that. Ok. It's, it's always painful. Part of 0:10:20 - 0:10:43 you gets cut out. That's what it feels like. If something is getting cut out of you, it hurts and not only do you not have it going forward, you experience what I call retroactive revision of value. It is a mouthful but it's a pretty, it's a pretty rich phrase. So retroactively, you look back on all 0:10:43 - 0:11:11 the experiences you had where you, you felt this red value and it changes, retroactively, it changes and, and all those sweet memories turn bitter and it's equal and opposite, if not worse than whatever good you experience. And so you pay the piper and it's a hefty bill, it's a hefty bill. What it's 0:11:11 - 0:11:30 like is like running up your credit cards to buy stupid things and then needing to pay off the interest for the rest of your life. The, the total amount you're going to pay is way less than the benefit you got from the stupid things you bought that you couldn't afford. So those are some serious problems 0:11:30 - 0:11:53 . In fact, here's one way of, of quantifying if you will, those, those problems. So this, these are all the, all these bars are from that graph, I just took them and, and changed the orientation and group them. So this is the value of what you get to keep. That's the, the intersection between the value 0:11:52 - 0:12:16 you see in your life, the things in your life and the value God sees. And then here's the potential value of those things, which is AAA combination of the things that had greater value than you appraised and also the things you don't know about. You don't have them yet at all. We could have broken those 0:12:16 - 0:12:33 out. But I didn't. So some of these you've already paid for and you don't have and that's the saddest part because that's the easiest thing you already have them. All you have to do is shift your perspective of what they're worth. And that's an idea. No one else has to do anything to you for you to figure 0:12:33 - 0:12:55 that out. That's choice and you know, information would help. But we have brains and hearts and eyes and ears that God has given us and we, we have the ability to receive revelation. So that's the actual true value. And then like I said, this is very bad. We want this to go to zero the appraised false 0:12:55 - 0:13:20 value that's going to hurt us big time when we figure it out. So to sort all this out, which is to make all these things green so that these first two categories become the same and to completely rid ourselves of this error. What we need is, um, an easier way of doing it because going back for a second 0:13:19 - 0:13:42 , how would we get rid of the red bits of the bars here? Well, how do you even know what they are? Because no one's handing you this graph. And uh that's a very loaded claim because actually someone is, it's just not, it doesn't look like this life hands you this, this graph. God has very precisely created 0:13:42 - 0:14:05 this world so that the signals of red bars are slapping you in the face all day, every day. And then when that's not enough, he sends humans to slap you in the face either because they love you or because they hate you. And both of those slaps those kinds of slaps, give you information that you didn't 0:14:05 - 0:14:28 notice before. And then we have the scriptures and, and revelation and all that. Um all that fun stuff, the very valuable resources. OK? And, and life shows us this, it's designed to but, but we're blind and we're deaf and we're stupid and that's the problem and we're greedy. Uh We're greedy in time 0:14:28 - 0:14:49 . So we, we prefer things right now rather than later, we're greedy in type because we don't put the most important things first and all of these things are connected. They're not random properties, they're all in network together. So the question is, is there a way we can orient this that makes it a 0:14:49 - 0:15:14 much easier puzzle to solve. Because if you look around, people aren't doing so hot with this. They're, they're not, they're struggling to do this well. So it turns out there is a way to reorient this and the reorientation of a representation is, is called mapping it. Now, I could show you examples of 0:15:13 - 0:15:42 this because this is a very, a very um a very common idea in math and in uh data visualization and computer science, machine learning artificial intelligence, all that jazz. But there's no need, there's a much simpler way of understanding this. It's just a question of clarifying information. So just 0:15:42 - 0:16:03 off the top of your head, you could probably imagine any anything in your life, you could probably imagine ways you could make it more complicated, right? OK. Can you go the other way if you think about anything in your life? Is there a way to make it simpler without losing information? That's the key 0:16:03 - 0:16:23 without losing the good things about it. Can you simplify it? Sure you can in many cases and a bunch of other people have worked very hard on simplifying things for you already and you have those simplifications all around you. If you're watching this on a phone or a computer, whatever you're watching 0:16:23 - 0:16:46 this on is an example of this. Do you have any idea how the guts of this device you're watching this on work? You probably don't, right? I mean, I have advanced degrees in computer science and I wouldn't be able to build a computer for nothing. If I was on a desert island somewhere, I wouldn't, you know 0:16:45 - 0:17:12 , do the Tom Hanks castaway thing and end up creating a supercomputer. So, but these things are all around us and isn't that great? So, here's an example of, of resenting something to make it more simple to measure and to interact with a car, odometer, probably wouldn't have thought of that a car down 0:17:12 - 0:17:35 there. So, you see, um, well, now they're digital, right? And that's even, even more direct. But many of you are old enough to remember the analog car odometers with, with the uh disks that had numbers on them and they rotated around. And it was always an exciting thing when the odometer was about to 0:17:34 - 0:17:57 roll on some of the, the left uh oriented digits because you'd hit some milestone. And that was exciting or really not exciting because your car is about to die, the older it gets. But what's that actually measuring? So, it's kind of an analog for the age of the car. But I think in, in uh most of the 0:17:57 - 0:18:16 time it's not so much in a calendar age. It's the age of the engine, the use of the engine. Now, if you have a tractor, tractors don't have odometers, they have hour clocks. Heavy equipment does too like a bulldozer and it's a timer because that it tells you how long the thing's been running because 0:18:16 - 0:18:33 that's what you really want to know. You don't really care so much how many times the wheels turn. But that's what an odometer measures on a car is. How many times the wheels have turned. And because you've never thought about it, you didn't have to invent it. It's probably never occurred to you with 0:18:33 - 0:19:00 a stroke of genius. It was to connect the number of times the, the wheel rotates to a measurement of, of, you know, the age of the car or the well being of the car, it's, it's, uh, it's not so obvious, right. But that's what we use it for. And it's really useful. I mean, you go change your, your engine 0:19:00 - 0:19:19 oil based on how many miles you've driven, you change your brakes, you change your spark plugs, whatever it's all based on your mileage. So it's not exactly connected, but it's super useful. It's correlated enough to be extremely useful. Right? And we could, we could walk through the same ideas with 0:19:19 - 0:19:42 the example of an analog thermometer and, and that is used to measure temperature and without it, you know, and we didn't go into the details of this on the car. But how would you, how would you measure a car engines where without knowing how many miles it's been driven, you, you could, um, you could 0:19:41 - 0:20:02 just count the time that the car has been running for, but physically what you, what you really are after is you don't actually care how long the engine's been running. You care about how much it's worn. You'd have to take the engine apart and know a whole ton about engines and you need really precise 0:20:02 - 0:20:22 calipers and things to, to measure, measure bore, um, engine bore wear and you'd have to know what to look for with seals and, and all kinds of crazy things. Lots of precision, lots of expertise, lots of time and, you know, you're gonna probably put the whole thing back together and have three bolts 0:20:21 - 0:20:43 left over. And so there's risk in, it might not go together the same way it came apart. You're not gonna get that checked every three months or six months or a year, right. So we have this handy dandy, easy to use measuring device to avoid all that and get most of the benefits out. Same thing with the 0:20:43 - 0:21:03 thermometer. How would you tell what the temperature is outside? You could tell if it was freezing or not, if you have some water available. But other, I mean, and, and then you, I mean, obviously it's gonna feel colder or warmer, but how would you detect what temperature it is? It's not that easy. You'd 0:21:03 - 0:21:24 have to look at a lot of characteristics of a lot of things and still you wouldn't be all that precise. So with the car odometer, you have an ease of use argument and a massive reduction in complexity with the thermometer, you have a whole ton of precision. Why? Because you found an analog for all the 0:21:24 - 0:21:48 things you care about and that's liquid mercury, that's what's in the, in the glass. It's mercury and it expands at a certain rate that correlates really well to the temperature. And so you use that to measure it and that's what determines the height of the bead. So what does this have to do with righteousness 0:21:47 - 0:22:17 ? Everything, everything because it's possible to change this around from what we started on to this over here. Now, these green bars, what this is is I took all of the white boxes. I sorted them by height and then I made them green. This is the outcome we're looking for. Remember we went back to here 0:22:16 - 0:22:42 , this is making all of these boxes green, making all the reds go away. That's what you get. And what I did was I sorted it. Now, do you recognize this shape? Have you seen this shape somewhere before? It's the Pareto distribution? Fancy that fancy that now it's flipped from how we usually see it cause 0:22:42 - 0:23:12 usually the largest bars on the left, but this is the Pareto distribution and it just so happens. That's the way value works. You can flip it around too and, and, and change the access labels. And uh so, so what, what this is doing is it's, it's, it's showing you um how rare things of very high value 0:23:11 - 0:23:38 are. So the height is value here and the X axis would be um not particularly meaningful. It's just each bar is a, is a thing. So you're taking the set of all things and sorting them in ascending order of value and, and you get a shape that looks like this if you wanted to measure a histogram, so the 0:23:38 - 0:24:03 count of things. So now you're binning them by the category of quality and you start with really low quality and you go up from there, that's what would flip this graph from left to right. Anyway, this is what we're looking for. A way to make value, easy to find and measure. Wouldn't that be great to 0:24:02 - 0:24:25 , instead of having to find bars in here and then tweak them to just have a ramp, wouldn't it be great to just have a ramp if the task is to find the things of greatest value, all you have to do is keep walking up the easiest thing in the world. Now, there's still work and walking up, but it's a billion 0:24:25 - 0:24:47 times easier than this because 100% of the work results in the best improvement you could get. Whereas here you're just wasting all kinds of energy trying to find things and test them. Well, it turns out that this exists, it's a thing and it's called the highway of the Lord or the way of holiness or 0:24:47 - 0:25:13 the highway of righteousness. It's called a lot of things or the way. So I've chosen three scriptures here, which happened to be my own reflections. These are not translations, but these are reflections on passages from Isaiah. And uh there are many, many, many, many more verses in the scriptures. And 0:25:13 - 0:25:44 they don't all have to be uh reflected on to highlight what we want to understand about this. But for the sake of brevity, I just grabbed these three again, we'll talk a lot more about this later. So instead of reading these to you, I just invite you to pause and read and then I can keep moving. So in 0:25:44 - 0:26:05 those verses, one theme that we see is and there are many themes and they're all very important is this idea of, you can visualize it. I could have drawn a picture. Maybe I should have, there's a bunch of rocks all over the place, maybe we'll just do the slide if you wanna do that. So let's add a slide 0:26:05 - 0:26:41 . And what we're going to do is say, call this building a ramp out of the stones and we need a rock and we need to make these different sizes. I won't read your scripture, but I'll make your wait as I draw things. It's because it's not easy to pause these videos in the way that I'm recording it. It's 0:26:41 - 0:27:12 shocking how limited technology is when you start trying to do things. OK. So here we have a bunch of stones, right? And what we'd like to do is take these rocks. Let me arrange these a little better and then I'm going to put a line here. Oh, that's not straight. Come on. Ok. And then what we'd like 0:27:12 - 0:27:48 to take is this field of rocks. And then we'd like to put them together in a way where we're just stacking them up and making a ranch. You've ever built a rock wall? Know all about this? Ok. So here we have a ramp. Now, this would actually work. I did it. Ok. See the ramp, maybe this one's not the greatest 0:27:47 - 0:28:34 to have right there, but some small ones here. All right. There you go. That's what, that's what we've got to do. The stones are all already here. So, um, there's a ramp but also, um, there's another way of, of looking at this which is removing the obstacles. Now, here's the interesting thing. Veneer 0:28:33 - 0:29:13 road. Oh, and we need to make this some color that's not white. So we could see it. It's gonna be yellow brick road and like that. So we've got some rocks. Well, let's not do it that way. Let's just put it to the back. They're in the way. But what we do is we make a ramp out of them and I guess a mix 0:29:13 - 0:29:39 of metaphors and it's not the clearest thing in the world. So let's just separate the metaphors. So we take the rocks off the road so that they're not in the way anymore, literally in the way this is the way. OK? So these are the two things that happen is one, we don't know which way is up, right? So 0:29:39 - 0:29:58 we make which way is up and the other thing is everything's scattered around. So we, we don't really know path and when you line all these things up, you get a straight path. This isn't straight in case you haven't noticed, but we're dealing with limits of clip art. So don't get too uptight about it 0:29:58 - 0:30:20 . Ok? So here's where I'm going to drop a bombshell on you. And I'd like you to remember this because you will live to see it fulfilled and when it's fulfilled, you will be tempted to not see how big of a deal it is. I don't know how to state that more clearly. So I hope you're understanding the value 0:30:20 - 0:30:44 of what I'm saying. There will be things that are presently regarded as sin that will be shown to not be sin at all. So I want you to imagine that you are struggling with something in your life that you really, really, really wish you could get rid of or uh that you really, really wish you could start 0:30:44 - 0:31:12 doing and you just can't seem to get it and it's tearing you apart because you feel like you want to make that change with all your heart and yet you find that you're not making it time and again, it's tearing you apart, you will, you will find things in the future given to you that show that that some 0:31:11 - 0:31:43 of those things are not sins at all and they will immediately cease to be an obstacle to you. The other thing that's going to happen is the the other ones, the ones that our sins are going to be removed as you receive new information and have new experiences. So neither of these things violate your agency 0:31:42 - 0:32:17 . You will still have to make the choice and there will be people who, who respond to the greater ease with which this can be done by choosing to do evil. Those people exist. But some people will respond to this by becoming sinless. The barrier will be reduced and they will respond by surpassing it by 0:32:17 - 0:32:48 overcoming other people will respond by becoming more evil. Another difference that's going to happen is that there are things that, that some people regard as righteousness that will be clearly shown to be sent. And you ask, well, how is that an obstacle to be removed? Here's why, because those people 0:32:48 - 0:33:17 provide a continuous example to those who might follow God as to why everything they're associated with should be disregarded. There are many people in this world who are spiritually intelligent enough to see that those things that the supposedly righteous people treasure are actually worthless at best 0:33:16 - 0:00:00 . And it's, it's a repellent to keep them away from the truth that they would otherwise receive and be uh stalwart in living. And so it removes the obstacle for them. And you say, what about the people that, that uh regard those things as righteousness and it will be shown that, that it's sin. Well, 0:00:00 - 0:34:05 they either change or they leave same as the previous group. They'll either get better or they'll get worse. These, the, the removal of obstacles is a wedge in every case, it makes it easier to be righteous and therefore it increases the penalty of choosing to not be righteous. It leaves people without 0:34:04 - 0:34:31 excuse. Another way that obstacles will be removed is that people will be shown how to make practical progress in the things that are directly before them, which for the most part, they overlook at present and that will build their momentum and strength to continue on to things that are too great for 0:34:31 - 0:35:10 them to handle right now. This is a slide you're going to want to remember. So, in a nutshell, because this is a very brief presentation. What is the highway of righteousness? And how do you use it? This is the final slide. The, the highway of righteousness is Jesus Christ. He is the way that's uh if 0:35:09 - 0:35:39 you, if you know Hebrew, the word for highway, it also means the way it also means a journey. So righteousness, the definition of the word, it's, it's to be like Jesus God is righteousness. He is the definition. And so if you want to travel in the way of righteousness. You want to live in the way of 0:35:39 - 0:36:03 righteousness. The way to do that is to learn all you can about Jesus and to live all, you know, it's very simple. What that contains is not simple, but the paradigm is the simplest thing in the world. Learn what Jesus is like and be exactly like him as far as you know him. And how is that a process 0:36:02 - 0:36:26 ? It's not a process in you becoming like him as far as, you know, it's a process in how much you know him, you will only traverse that process by fully living up to what you presently understand about him. This is not negotiable. There's no such thing as I'm just going to try a little harder every day 0:36:25 - 0:36:50 . That means you're not doing it yet. You're not in the gate yet. You're somewhere else before that you're still walking towards the gate, you enter the gate when you say being like Jesus is the most important thing in my life and I submit all other things below that, I will give up everything. I will 0:36:50 - 0:37:11 do anything. And if you can't say that you're not born again, you're not in the way, you're not on the way. You don't actually believe in Jesus. So don't say any of those things come up with some other phrase that, that shows that you're not actually ready for any of that. And it's because you don't 0:37:11 - 0:37:41 choose it's not because someone else hasn't done something for you yet. The Lord's voice is the voice of improvement. Again, it's the simplest thing in the world. Is there anything better? If so be better, do better obtain better rinse and repeat? That's it. Now, finding what is better. That's complicated 0:37:41 - 0:38:15 . But the idea of, of finding and doing whatever is better. That's the simplest thing in the world measure goodness through maximal global benefits. That sounds a little complicated, but it's just precise. Do the greatest possible good all the time be the greatest possible, good all the time, do the 0:38:15 - 0:38:44 greatest possible, good for all other people all the time. And to do all this obviously requires you to understand reality, which is complex. But the idea is the simplest thing in the world. And so it might seem that making this claim is outlandish and you imagine that some fantastic thing must be done 0:00:00 - 0:00:25 I wanted to share some brief thoughts on the concept of the highway of God. These are picture rich thoughts um and they are not. So you don't want to just listen to this and they are not meant to be exhaustive in any way. But I'd like to just present one pictorial idea and in doing so provided I think 0:00:24 - 0:00:49 substantial building block towards a more fuller understanding of concepts that are extraordinarily important in your life and in the life of everyone that's alive right now in the end times. So here's a graph and this graph represents a bit of information. So let's go through it. The green bars represent 0:00:48 - 0:01:16 a praised true value. So um I guess let me just explain what one of the bars is any bar here you could think of as an idea, a situation, a person, basically anything you can categorize in your life. So the green portion of the bar is how much value you see in that person, thing, situation, whatever idea 0:01:16 - 0:01:48 that is true. And here in this world, true value means value that God sees in that thing, person idea situation, et cetera. And for simplicity from here on out, I'm just going to say thing, but I mean, all things. So the green is the the the intersection between the value you see in it and the value 0:01:48 - 0:02:17 God sees in it, the white outline of the bar, that's the entire value that God sees in it. The red portion of the bar is how much value you see in it. That is actually not there. It's an illusion, you're mistaken. God does not see that value so far, so good. So I drew a bunch of bars here so we could 0:02:16 - 0:02:44 have some sort of representation of how this looks. Obviously, there would be as many bars as things in your life. And that's a whole lot of bars and none of the bars are independent. Uh More factual representation which would be far too complicated to draw or uh derive much understanding from would 0:02:43 - 0:03:08 be a network, there would be connections between things and each bar would actually be a collection of things looked at from a certain perspective and that gets super complicated. Um So this is a simplification, but it, it will be an illustrative one. So this is how you probably think about value in 0:03:08 - 0:03:32 your life. Oh, I have a dog and I love my dog. My dog means a lot to me. I really like to cycle, you know, I, I love playing basketball with my buddies, whatever. OK. And uh those, those are, let's see that we had a dog, we had activities, there are ideas too, I love communism, you know, whatever. So 0:03:32 - 0:03:55 and, and it could be specific ideas, not just sets of ideologies. So you might see and, and, and the other thing about this graph is we're only looking about looking at positive value. So, so we're not distinguishing between cost and benefit. We're only talking about net benefit and there's nothing on 0:03:55 - 0:04:12 this graph that has a negative net benefit. Those are complexities that are real and that you need to think about. But we're just introducing this. So all of this is, is just a disclaimer to say, hey, this is simplified and it will illustrate a few things to get us started on this. But you could build 0:04:12 - 0:04:33 this out to include all of those subtleties and, and in many cases, they're not subtleties, they're massively important, but whatever details. OK. So here it is these things change through time. By the way, we could animate this through time and see those changing. But there are some problems with this 0:04:32 - 0:04:52 representation and I don't mean it's fidelity to reality. I mean the fact that this, I said this is how you see your life. You probably haven't even gotten that far. But if we took the time and you and I sat down and I didn't show you this and we walked through and asked you questions about different 0:04:52 - 0:05:17 facets of your life. We would build this out and, and I'd I'd help you see that you have an amount of value that you appraise in each and everything in your life doing that would be immensely helpful. Because right there, without even injecting any additional structure, we'll say into this set of ideas 0:05:16 - 0:05:39 , we could expose many things in your life where you're not aligning your actions to the value that you see if we oversimplify this down to two things like there as if there are only two things in your life. And we could just pick two random things. What I say in my example is a dog in cycling. And then 0:05:39 - 0:06:04 I asked you which of these two is more important and why? And how does the pie chart of your resources in life? How does it align with or deviate from that ranking? And just by going through that and adding more than two things back into the equation, we would, we would enumerate a whole lot of areas 0:06:03 - 0:06:35 where you could live in greater alignment to your current beliefs through ranking your actions to match your expectation of impact of the meaning of those things. No, I'm just spitting out massively valuable information here. I'm just running through it. I'll come back and, and treat these in different 0:06:35 - 0:06:55 places and in different ways, but you can run with it. Now, if you'd like if you have the faith to do so, if you have eyes to see the value and, and the brain to apply it to your life. You can run with it now and it will make incredible differences in how you live your life. And as we get through this 0:06:55 - 0:07:20 short slide show, there's only nine total including the title slide. Uh You'll see why that's absolutely important. Anyway, so with this representation, here's some, here's some problems. Um how do you search this space? So if I handed you this, this graph and I said, all right, well, here are all your 0:07:20 - 0:07:39 present values and whatever, how do you find what's better than what you already know? Because if you can see, I included this giant bar here with no green or red on it. This is hidden to you right now in this, in this graph, this would be something that you had no idea about. You have no idea it exists 0:07:38 - 0:07:59 . I have not seen the things God has prepared for those who love him. Romans eight, we read that there are many other interesting scriptures that say it's possible to know those things. It's by default, you won't see them, you won't have any idea about them, but they exist. They're already here and you 0:07:59 - 0:08:25 can have them if you want to. And a whole bunch of people have in the past scripture say so, so how do you find those things? And furthermore, how do you get more of the volume of, of the empty boxes? How do you make the green bars match the white boxes? How do you improve to get more of the value that 0:08:24 - 0:08:51 God sees in things. Now, that one's particularly painful because you've already paid for every bar you have. It's not the case that you know, let's say this bar here, let's say this is your marriage. This representation does not suggest that over time, you'll find more value in your marriage and you 0:08:51 - 0:00:00 just have to develop it more to get there. That's not what this says. This says there's already this much value in your marriage, but all you see is this much or there's already this much value in your cycling and all you see is this much or whatever, whatever the, the thing might be. So that's sad. 0:00:00 - 0:09:33 Uh It's like, it's like paying a mortgage on a house, but you only know about one room in the house, you already are paying for the whole thing. You just don't get to enjoy it. So, or if you have your adult Children living at home and not paying rent, you gotta kick the bums out and get the whole bar 0:09:33 - 0:09:57 . Uh All right. What is, um, the other thing we haven't talked about here is what is the, the cost of these things? The red bars? Well, there are a lot of costs for one. You will lose those things. You absolutely will come to a point where you realize that they don't have that value that you placed in 0:09:57 - 0:10:21 them and that will cause loss sorrow. It will be very bad. It's not just I had something and now I don't think about your life. Has there ever been a moment of loss that was like that where you're like? Yeah. Uh, at least I had it when I had it. No one does that. Ok. It's, it's always painful. Part of 0:10:20 - 0:10:43 you gets cut out. That's what it feels like. If something is getting cut out of you, it hurts and not only do you not have it going forward, you experience what I call retroactive revision of value. It is a mouthful but it's a pretty, it's a pretty rich phrase. So retroactively, you look back on all 0:10:43 - 0:11:11 the experiences you had where you, you felt this red value and it changes, retroactively, it changes and, and all those sweet memories turn bitter and it's equal and opposite, if not worse than whatever good you experience. And so you pay the piper and it's a hefty bill, it's a hefty bill. What it's 0:11:11 - 0:11:30 like is like running up your credit cards to buy stupid things and then needing to pay off the interest for the rest of your life. The, the total amount you're going to pay is way less than the benefit you got from the stupid things you bought that you couldn't afford. So those are some serious problems 0:11:30 - 0:11:53 . In fact, here's one way of, of quantifying if you will, those, those problems. So this, these are all the, all these bars are from that graph, I just took them and, and changed the orientation and group them. So this is the value of what you get to keep. That's the, the intersection between the value 0:11:52 - 0:12:16 you see in your life, the things in your life and the value God sees. And then here's the potential value of those things, which is AAA combination of the things that had greater value than you appraised and also the things you don't know about. You don't have them yet at all. We could have broken those 0:12:16 - 0:12:33 out. But I didn't. So some of these you've already paid for and you don't have and that's the saddest part because that's the easiest thing you already have them. All you have to do is shift your perspective of what they're worth. And that's an idea. No one else has to do anything to you for you to figure 0:12:33 - 0:12:55 that out. That's choice and you know, information would help. But we have brains and hearts and eyes and ears that God has given us and we, we have the ability to receive revelation. So that's the actual true value. And then like I said, this is very bad. We want this to go to zero the appraised false 0:12:55 - 0:13:20 value that's going to hurt us big time when we figure it out. So to sort all this out, which is to make all these things green so that these first two categories become the same and to completely rid ourselves of this error. What we need is, um, an easier way of doing it because going back for a second 0:13:19 - 0:13:42 , how would we get rid of the red bits of the bars here? Well, how do you even know what they are? Because no one's handing you this graph. And uh that's a very loaded claim because actually someone is, it's just not, it doesn't look like this life hands you this, this graph. God has very precisely created 0:13:42 - 0:14:05 this world so that the signals of red bars are slapping you in the face all day, every day. And then when that's not enough, he sends humans to slap you in the face either because they love you or because they hate you. And both of those slaps those kinds of slaps, give you information that you didn't 0:14:05 - 0:14:28 notice before. And then we have the scriptures and, and revelation and all that. Um all that fun stuff, the very valuable resources. OK? And, and life shows us this, it's designed to but, but we're blind and we're deaf and we're stupid and that's the problem and we're greedy. Uh We're greedy in time 0:14:28 - 0:14:49 . So we, we prefer things right now rather than later, we're greedy in type because we don't put the most important things first and all of these things are connected. They're not random properties, they're all in network together. So the question is, is there a way we can orient this that makes it a 0:14:49 - 0:15:14 much easier puzzle to solve. Because if you look around, people aren't doing so hot with this. They're, they're not, they're struggling to do this well. So it turns out there is a way to reorient this and the reorientation of a representation is, is called mapping it. Now, I could show you examples of 0:15:13 - 0:15:42 this because this is a very, a very um a very common idea in math and in uh data visualization and computer science, machine learning artificial intelligence, all that jazz. But there's no need, there's a much simpler way of understanding this. It's just a question of clarifying information. So just 0:15:42 - 0:16:03 off the top of your head, you could probably imagine any anything in your life, you could probably imagine ways you could make it more complicated, right? OK. Can you go the other way if you think about anything in your life? Is there a way to make it simpler without losing information? That's the key 0:16:03 - 0:16:23 without losing the good things about it. Can you simplify it? Sure you can in many cases and a bunch of other people have worked very hard on simplifying things for you already and you have those simplifications all around you. If you're watching this on a phone or a computer, whatever you're watching 0:16:23 - 0:16:46 this on is an example of this. Do you have any idea how the guts of this device you're watching this on work? You probably don't, right? I mean, I have advanced degrees in computer science and I wouldn't be able to build a computer for nothing. If I was on a desert island somewhere, I wouldn't, you know 0:16:45 - 0:17:12 , do the Tom Hanks castaway thing and end up creating a supercomputer. So, but these things are all around us and isn't that great? So, here's an example of, of resenting something to make it more simple to measure and to interact with a car, odometer, probably wouldn't have thought of that a car down 0:17:12 - 0:17:35 there. So, you see, um, well, now they're digital, right? And that's even, even more direct. But many of you are old enough to remember the analog car odometers with, with the uh disks that had numbers on them and they rotated around. And it was always an exciting thing when the odometer was about to 0:17:34 - 0:17:57 roll on some of the, the left uh oriented digits because you'd hit some milestone. And that was exciting or really not exciting because your car is about to die, the older it gets. But what's that actually measuring? So, it's kind of an analog for the age of the car. But I think in, in uh most of the 0:17:57 - 0:18:16 time it's not so much in a calendar age. It's the age of the engine, the use of the engine. Now, if you have a tractor, tractors don't have odometers, they have hour clocks. Heavy equipment does too like a bulldozer and it's a timer because that it tells you how long the thing's been running because 0:18:16 - 0:18:33 that's what you really want to know. You don't really care so much how many times the wheels turn. But that's what an odometer measures on a car is. How many times the wheels have turned. And because you've never thought about it, you didn't have to invent it. It's probably never occurred to you with 0:18:33 - 0:19:00 a stroke of genius. It was to connect the number of times the, the wheel rotates to a measurement of, of, you know, the age of the car or the well being of the car, it's, it's, uh, it's not so obvious, right. But that's what we use it for. And it's really useful. I mean, you go change your, your engine 0:19:00 - 0:19:19 oil based on how many miles you've driven, you change your brakes, you change your spark plugs, whatever it's all based on your mileage. So it's not exactly connected, but it's super useful. It's correlated enough to be extremely useful. Right? And we could, we could walk through the same ideas with 0:19:19 - 0:19:42 the example of an analog thermometer and, and that is used to measure temperature and without it, you know, and we didn't go into the details of this on the car. But how would you, how would you measure a car engines where without knowing how many miles it's been driven, you, you could, um, you could 0:19:41 - 0:20:02 just count the time that the car has been running for, but physically what you, what you really are after is you don't actually care how long the engine's been running. You care about how much it's worn. You'd have to take the engine apart and know a whole ton about engines and you need really precise 0:20:02 - 0:20:22 calipers and things to, to measure, measure bore, um, engine bore wear and you'd have to know what to look for with seals and, and all kinds of crazy things. Lots of precision, lots of expertise, lots of time and, you know, you're gonna probably put the whole thing back together and have three bolts 0:20:21 - 0:20:43 left over. And so there's risk in, it might not go together the same way it came apart. You're not gonna get that checked every three months or six months or a year, right. So we have this handy dandy, easy to use measuring device to avoid all that and get most of the benefits out. Same thing with the 0:20:43 - 0:21:03 thermometer. How would you tell what the temperature is outside? You could tell if it was freezing or not, if you have some water available. But other, I mean, and, and then you, I mean, obviously it's gonna feel colder or warmer, but how would you detect what temperature it is? It's not that easy. You'd 0:21:03 - 0:21:24 have to look at a lot of characteristics of a lot of things and still you wouldn't be all that precise. So with the car odometer, you have an ease of use argument and a massive reduction in complexity with the thermometer, you have a whole ton of precision. Why? Because you found an analog for all the 0:21:24 - 0:21:48 things you care about and that's liquid mercury, that's what's in the, in the glass. It's mercury and it expands at a certain rate that correlates really well to the temperature. And so you use that to measure it and that's what determines the height of the bead. So what does this have to do with righteousness 0:21:47 - 0:22:17 ? Everything, everything because it's possible to change this around from what we started on to this over here. Now, these green bars, what this is is I took all of the white boxes. I sorted them by height and then I made them green. This is the outcome we're looking for. Remember we went back to here 0:22:16 - 0:22:42 , this is making all of these boxes green, making all the reds go away. That's what you get. And what I did was I sorted it. Now, do you recognize this shape? Have you seen this shape somewhere before? It's the Pareto distribution? Fancy that fancy that now it's flipped from how we usually see it cause 0:22:42 - 0:23:12 usually the largest bars on the left, but this is the Pareto distribution and it just so happens. That's the way value works. You can flip it around too and, and, and change the access labels. And uh so, so what, what this is doing is it's, it's, it's showing you um how rare things of very high value 0:23:11 - 0:23:38 are. So the height is value here and the X axis would be um not particularly meaningful. It's just each bar is a, is a thing. So you're taking the set of all things and sorting them in ascending order of value and, and you get a shape that looks like this if you wanted to measure a histogram, so the 0:23:38 - 0:24:03 count of things. So now you're binning them by the category of quality and you start with really low quality and you go up from there, that's what would flip this graph from left to right. Anyway, this is what we're looking for. A way to make value, easy to find and measure. Wouldn't that be great to 0:24:02 - 0:24:25 , instead of having to find bars in here and then tweak them to just have a ramp, wouldn't it be great to just have a ramp if the task is to find the things of greatest value, all you have to do is keep walking up the easiest thing in the world. Now, there's still work and walking up, but it's a billion 0:24:25 - 0:24:47 times easier than this because 100% of the work results in the best improvement you could get. Whereas here you're just wasting all kinds of energy trying to find things and test them. Well, it turns out that this exists, it's a thing and it's called the highway of the Lord or the way of holiness or 0:24:47 - 0:25:13 the highway of righteousness. It's called a lot of things or the way. So I've chosen three scriptures here, which happened to be my own reflections. These are not translations, but these are reflections on passages from Isaiah. And uh there are many, many, many, many more verses in the scriptures. And 0:25:13 - 0:25:44 they don't all have to be uh reflected on to highlight what we want to understand about this. But for the sake of brevity, I just grabbed these three again, we'll talk a lot more about this later. So instead of reading these to you, I just invite you to pause and read and then I can keep moving. So in 0:25:44 - 0:26:05 those verses, one theme that we see is and there are many themes and they're all very important is this idea of, you can visualize it. I could have drawn a picture. Maybe I should have, there's a bunch of rocks all over the place, maybe we'll just do the slide if you wanna do that. So let's add a slide 0:26:05 - 0:26:41 . And what we're going to do is say, call this building a ramp out of the stones and we need a rock and we need to make these different sizes. I won't read your scripture, but I'll make your wait as I draw things. It's because it's not easy to pause these videos in the way that I'm recording it. It's 0:26:41 - 0:27:12 shocking how limited technology is when you start trying to do things. OK. So here we have a bunch of stones, right? And what we'd like to do is take these rocks. Let me arrange these a little better and then I'm going to put a line here. Oh, that's not straight. Come on. Ok. And then what we'd like 0:27:12 - 0:27:48 to take is this field of rocks. And then we'd like to put them together in a way where we're just stacking them up and making a ranch. You've ever built a rock wall? Know all about this? Ok. So here we have a ramp. Now, this would actually work. I did it. Ok. See the ramp, maybe this one's not the greatest 0:27:47 - 0:28:34 to have right there, but some small ones here. All right. There you go. That's what, that's what we've got to do. The stones are all already here. So, um, there's a ramp but also, um, there's another way of, of looking at this which is removing the obstacles. Now, here's the interesting thing. Veneer 0:28:33 - 0:29:13 road. Oh, and we need to make this some color that's not white. So we could see it. It's gonna be yellow brick road and like that. So we've got some rocks. Well, let's not do it that way. Let's just put it to the back. They're in the way. But what we do is we make a ramp out of them and I guess a mix 0:29:13 - 0:29:39 of metaphors and it's not the clearest thing in the world. So let's just separate the metaphors. So we take the rocks off the road so that they're not in the way anymore, literally in the way this is the way. OK? So these are the two things that happen is one, we don't know which way is up, right? So 0:29:39 - 0:29:58 we make which way is up and the other thing is everything's scattered around. So we, we don't really know path and when you line all these things up, you get a straight path. This isn't straight in case you haven't noticed, but we're dealing with limits of clip art. So don't get too uptight about it 0:29:58 - 0:30:20 . Ok? So here's where I'm going to drop a bombshell on you. And I'd like you to remember this because you will live to see it fulfilled and when it's fulfilled, you will be tempted to not see how big of a deal it is. I don't know how to state that more clearly. So I hope you're understanding the value 0:30:20 - 0:30:44 of what I'm saying. There will be things that are presently regarded as sin that will be shown to not be sin at all. So I want you to imagine that you are struggling with something in your life that you really, really, really wish you could get rid of or uh that you really, really wish you could start 0:30:44 - 0:31:12 doing and you just can't seem to get it and it's tearing you apart because you feel like you want to make that change with all your heart and yet you find that you're not making it time and again, it's tearing you apart, you will, you will find things in the future given to you that show that that some 0:31:11 - 0:31:43 of those things are not sins at all and they will immediately cease to be an obstacle to you. The other thing that's going to happen is the the other ones, the ones that our sins are going to be removed as you receive new information and have new experiences. So neither of these things violate your agency 0:31:42 - 0:32:17 . You will still have to make the choice and there will be people who, who respond to the greater ease with which this can be done by choosing to do evil. Those people exist. But some people will respond to this by becoming sinless. The barrier will be reduced and they will respond by surpassing it by 0:32:17 - 0:32:48 overcoming other people will respond by becoming more evil. Another difference that's going to happen is that there are things that, that some people regard as righteousness that will be clearly shown to be sent. And you ask, well, how is that an obstacle to be removed? Here's why, because those people 0:32:48 - 0:33:17 provide a continuous example to those who might follow God as to why everything they're associated with should be disregarded. There are many people in this world who are spiritually intelligent enough to see that those things that the supposedly righteous people treasure are actually worthless at best 0:33:16 - 0:00:00 . And it's, it's a repellent to keep them away from the truth that they would otherwise receive and be uh stalwart in living. And so it removes the obstacle for them. And you say, what about the people that, that uh regard those things as righteousness and it will be shown that, that it's sin. Well, 0:00:00 - 0:34:05 they either change or they leave same as the previous group. They'll either get better or they'll get worse. These, the, the removal of obstacles is a wedge in every case, it makes it easier to be righteous and therefore it increases the penalty of choosing to not be righteous. It leaves people without 0:34:04 - 0:34:31 excuse. Another way that obstacles will be removed is that people will be shown how to make practical progress in the things that are directly before them, which for the most part, they overlook at present and that will build their momentum and strength to continue on to things that are too great for 0:34:31 - 0:35:10 them to handle right now. This is a slide you're going to want to remember. So, in a nutshell, because this is a very brief presentation. What is the highway of righteousness? And how do you use it? This is the final slide. The, the highway of righteousness is Jesus Christ. He is the way that's uh if 0:35:09 - 0:35:39 you, if you know Hebrew, the word for highway, it also means the way it also means a journey. So righteousness, the definition of the word, it's, it's to be like Jesus God is righteousness. He is the definition. And so if you want to travel in the way of righteousness. You want to live in the way of 0:35:39 - 0:36:03 righteousness. The way to do that is to learn all you can about Jesus and to live all, you know, it's very simple. What that contains is not simple, but the paradigm is the simplest thing in the world. Learn what Jesus is like and be exactly like him as far as you know him. And how is that a process 0:36:02 - 0:36:26 ? It's not a process in you becoming like him as far as, you know, it's a process in how much you know him, you will only traverse that process by fully living up to what you presently understand about him. This is not negotiable. There's no such thing as I'm just going to try a little harder every day 0:36:25 - 0:36:50 . That means you're not doing it yet. You're not in the gate yet. You're somewhere else before that you're still walking towards the gate, you enter the gate when you say being like Jesus is the most important thing in my life and I submit all other things below that, I will give up everything. I will 0:36:50 - 0:37:11 do anything. And if you can't say that you're not born again, you're not in the way, you're not on the way. You don't actually believe in Jesus. So don't say any of those things come up with some other phrase that, that shows that you're not actually ready for any of that. And it's because you don't 0:37:11 - 0:37:41 choose it's not because someone else hasn't done something for you yet. The Lord's voice is the voice of improvement. Again, it's the simplest thing in the world. Is there anything better? If so be better, do better obtain better rinse and repeat? That's it. Now, finding what is better. That's complicated 0:37:41 - 0:38:15 . But the idea of, of finding and doing whatever is better. That's the simplest thing in the world measure goodness through maximal global benefits. That sounds a little complicated, but it's just precise. Do the greatest possible good all the time be the greatest possible, good all the time, do the 0:38:15 - 0:38:44 greatest possible, good for all other people all the time. And to do all this obviously requires you to understand reality, which is complex. But the idea is the simplest thing in the world. And so it might seem that making this claim is outlandish and you imagine that some fantastic thing must be done 0:38:43 - 0:39:02 to make this. So and yet I just explained it to you on the last slide in about 30 seconds, maybe a minute. The ramp is already built. Question is what are you going to do about it?