0:00:00 - 0:00:24 I'd like to share, share some thoughts about sharing. Um Jesus said the following about John the Baptist. He said he was a burning and a shining light and ye were willing for a season to rejoice in his light. That's from John 535. So my question for you is why did the Lord say that the people were only 0:00:24 - 0:00:46 willing to receive him as a burning and a shining light for a season? Why was it only for a season? So there was a time when John the Baptist was very popular. A lot of people would come out to see him in the wilderness. There were people being baptized, there were people who were asking him questions 0:00:45 - 0:01:09 , they wanted to change. They recognized that what he was teaching provided grist for the mill of improvement. The people went out and they'd ask him, hey, I'm a soldier. How can I be a better soldier? I'm this, I'm that how can I be better in my specific situation? And he gave them suggestions and that 0:01:09 - 0:01:32 was preaching repentance, repentance is improvement. The gospel is improvement. But Jesus said that the people were only interested in this for a time. Why is that? Well, I'd like to explain this a bit and we're gonna use some pictures to start this off. So here we have an idea symbolized by a light 0:01:32 - 0:02:01 bulb and here we have a person who hears the idea and receives it. So they take this idea and then they change something in their lives, they improve themselves in some way, they change what they're thinking or feeling or doing or some mix of the three and that's receiving this idea. Great. That's fantastic 0:02:00 - 0:02:21 . Right? Doesn't matter where the idea comes from or, or what I mean is through whom, you know, this person could have seen a chipmunk watching a sunrise and got an idea from that or he might have heard or she might have heard someone's teach something or just see an example of something. It doesn't 0:02:20 - 0:02:41 matter where the idea comes from, but there's a person and they receive this idea and they're better because of it. Ok, great. Now there are two people. Now there are three people and we just go on and on until tons of people, different people with different thoughts, feelings and actions, they all interface 0:02:40 - 0:03:10 on this idea. It affects all of them, it improves all of them, they all receive it and this is wonderful, right? This is a great thing. So now what happens when there are two ideas? Well, now all of a sudden the set of people that receive both ideas it's much smaller than the set of people that received 0:03:09 - 0:03:42 one of the ideas. Why is that? It turns out that if we just keep laying out ideas, the set will get smaller and it gets smaller, much faster, then the speed at which we add ideas. If we had four ideas, maybe the set drops down to just one person who receives all four of them. Now, I've explained this 0:03:42 - 0:04:08 symbolically with this picture, but this is exactly what happens in real life. And if you have any experience with, with sharing ideas, you see this, you see this in other people and it's easier to see in other people than yourself, but it's a human quality. So it affects all of us. Here's why most people 0:04:08 - 0:04:39 are not looking to learn more. Most people are merely looking to reinforce what they already believe. If anything, what they're doing is they're looking for something they can smear into the gaps of their current belief system to make the signs that it is inadequate. Go away. Did you catch that? Maybe 0:04:39 - 0:05:03 I can try to rephrase it to make the point even clearer. Most people are not looking to improve, improvement requires change. Most people don't want to change. Most people want to change the negative consequences of what they already believe. They want them to go away. They want to assuage the negative 0:05:02 - 0:05:31 consequences of their current beliefs. They want to feel good without becoming better. That's what most people want and it doesn't make a difference if you subsegment most people by their say, belief in religion or not, or their self professed interest in improvement or not, it doesn't matter. This is 0:05:31 - 0:05:58 a, this is a generic quality of people in general. It's extremely rare to find a person who's actually interested in improving and learning. And so that degradation, the shrinking of the set of people is always going to happen as new ideas are introduced. And this whole discussion presupposes that we're 0:05:58 - 0:06:21 just talking about correct ideas. Obviously, not all ideas are correct and most aren't, but that's the property. And so if you want to grow an audience, which if you think an idea is valuable and you care about people, of course, that's what you want to do. If you want to do that in normal ways, here's 0:06:21 - 0:06:48 how you do it. You tell people what they want to hear and that's going to consist of what they already believe. But you also have to keep it very specific because the more you tell them new things and the more you expand your message into all things, the fewer the people who will remain, you'll lose 0:06:48 - 0:07:13 people every time you introduce a new idea. So if you're interested in doing this for a commercial benefit as a business, if you're say a commercial author or speaker, public speaker, a youtube personality, whatever, here's the formula, find something that a whole lot of people already believe that's 0:07:13 - 0:07:37 causing them some kind of friction in their lives. And then make your message centered on softening that friction and make it laser specific to that particular belief so that you can rope in every single person who believes it no matter how many other things they do or do not believe. So you unify the 0:07:37 - 0:00:00 crowd by specifying your message and you tell them exactly what they want to hear. Now, look at every single successful book speaker, whatever that you can find and you're going to find that that's exactly what they do. This is why when you, when you pick up a New York Times best seller, nonfiction, 0:00:00 - 0:08:29 you see 350 pages of a message that's really like a paragraph worth of content, maybe a page if you're lucky, a whole chapter, but not 350 pages. Never that it just says the same thing over and over and over again for all those pages. Why? Because if they filled the book with information that necessitated 0:08:29 - 0:08:54 those pages, they'd have to branch off into more ideas that would alienate people and result in fewer copies of the book sold and not just linearly, it'd be far fewer copies of the book sold with every additional idea. Many times authors will stretch this into even more than one book. And if one becomes 0:08:54 - 0:09:15 a best seller, they'll write another book that's basically the same book. And so it's through repeating this message of you're good enough how you are. The problem, isn't you? The problem is everyone else. Here's something that you can do. That's not really a change, but you can feel like it's a change 0:09:15 - 0:09:40 and it'll make you feel better about how you already are. That's how you become successful in this space of idea. Sharing is basically through not sharing ideas at all, but making people feel like they're on that track, guess how you become a popular preacher. Same thing. Look up any mega church, watch 0:09:39 - 0:10:02 any sermon from any mega church. What you're gonna find is there's like maybe one idea there throughout the whole sermon and it's presented in such a way that the real message is you're good enough exactly how you are right now and any problems you have either can be fixed with this super minor tweak 0:10:01 - 0:10:33 . That's not really a change at all. And guess what? It's not gonna work or it's someone else's fault. It's a universal property now as evidence that if you do it right, the attrition cannot be avoided. We're going to point to Jesus in John chapter six. This is where he tells people, he feeds them miraculously 0:10:32 - 0:10:57 and he says, look believing in me how you say you believe that's not enough. You actually have to become like me. You have to do the things I do for the reasons that I do them. And that's the reason I came here is to show you that that's this chapter. And here's the response when he says this in verse 0:10:57 - 0:11:18 60 many therefore of his disciples. When they had heard this said, this is a hard saying, who can hear it. And then a few verses later, it says from that time, many of his disciples went back and walked no more with him. Here, he had done one of his most popular miracles which was to miraculously feed 0:11:18 - 0:11:38 thousands of people. And yet in that moment, many of his disciples turned and went away. They wouldn't follow him any more. They didn't care about what he had to say any more because he upped the ante and he said, no, no, no, no, no. You can't just come here and listen to these things and, and go home 0:11:38 - 0:11:57 feeling better about yourself. That's not the point you need to change, you need to improve. And by the way, that means you need to become more like I am. And that was just too much. There's a bridge too far for most of those people because most people are not interested in improvement. Sure, they'll 0:11:57 - 0:12:17 take some free loaves of bread and some free fish. Sure. They wanna hear that, that all of their vain imaginations about their chosen status as a people are about to be fulfilled. That God's gonna put them into the prominence of power again and free them from Roman occupation and all these other things 0:12:17 - 0:12:41 that they imagined Jesus would come and do. And he said no, actually, I, I, I'm coming here to show you how to be better people. Well, we don't want that. That's not why we're here. And so they turned and went away. So if it happened to Jesus, it's going to happen to everybody who follows him because 0:12:41 - 0:13:02 the servants aren't better than the master. Now, here's the saddest part of this is that jesus' expectation of people turning away. It didn't end with those who, who were, who were distant to him. You know, folks who maybe they had come to hear him speak a few times, but he didn't really know them face 0:13:01 - 0:13:27 to face. He expected the same thing of his closest friends, the 12 apostles. So he says to them, will ye also go away. And this is the back story for this famous part that's quoted all the time where Simon says, Lord, to whom shall we go, thou hast the words of eternal life we believe and are sure that 0:13:27 - 0:13:53 thou art the Christ, the son of the living God. Now who said that Peter, the same one who would deny him three times after this. And so if we didn't know the whole story, we didn't know what happened after this. If we hadn't seen what happened before it, you might read this and then hear what Jesus says 0:13:53 - 0:14:20 next and think what the heck. That's such an abrasive thing to say. It seems completely out of order because what he said after Simon gives him this glowing endorsement, Jesus answered them, have not. I chosen you 12 and one of you is a devil. And so he crushes down Peter's professed belief. He says 0:14:20 - 0:14:41 , yeah, that's nice that you say that, but you'll see that. That's not really how you all feel. Now, this verse is specifically referring to Judas, obviously, but there's another interaction that we won't go over later on where Peter's professing his belief. And Jesus tells him, you're going to deny 0:14:40 - 0:15:07 me three times and Peter doesn't believe it because Peter says, no, I'm willing to die for you. And so from this, we see very clearly that a person's profession of belief is not necessarily how they will actually respond to new ideas. And I would go as far as to say, it's almost always the case that 0:15:07 - 0:15:32 it doesn't match it at all. Now, why would you say that? Well, if we go all the way back to John chapter two, we read this little tidbit that I don't think people pay attention to. Now, when he was in Jerusalem, this is Jesus at the Passover in the feast day. Many believed in his name when they saw the 0:15:32 - 0:15:53 miracles which he did, but Jesus did not commit himself unto them because he knew all men and needed not that any should testify of man for he knew what was in man. And this is one of many passages where people are reading through the scriptures and they say, well, that's cryptic and then they just keep 0:15:53 - 0:16:13 going. They don't stop and ask questions. But if you ask about this and you're faithful to the Lord, not only will he answer your questions about what this means, but he will show you in your own life. And you'll see example, after example, after example of exactly what Jesus went through with other 0:16:13 - 0:16:39 people now, maybe it will be at a lesser scale, but it's going to be the same exact principle, which is this, it doesn't matter how loyal someone seems to you, how faithful they seem to you how much of a friend they seem to you in the moment that does not accurately predict how they will be in the future 0:16:39 - 0:17:05 , especially if you are on a gradient where you're learning more and more from God and becoming more like him. Because every additional increment from God has the potential to completely derail people. It doesn't matter how faithful they've been in the past. A new challenge is a new challenge. That's 0:17:04 - 0:17:31 the additional light bulbs. It excludes circles, right? And if you walk that path, even just a little, you're going to see people drop out of your life and there will not be any exclusion because that person's your brother or your sister, or your parent or your best friend for your whole entire life 0:17:31 - 0:17:56 . And then suddenly they ghost you over nothing. You're going to see this. If you haven't seen it already is because you're not living fully what Jesus preached the second you do, you're going to see this and it will not stop. It's an inescapable quality of living the gospel of Jesus Christ that you 0:17:56 - 0:18:17 will have people completely turn away from you out of nowhere. And I'm not talking about, turn away from you like you become some public figure preaching the gospel and whatever I'm saying in your life, your, your most intimate relationships will follow this pattern. And it, it's because it's not about 0:18:17 - 0:18:39 you. It's about the light and it's about how people respond to greater light and truth. With every additional increment, there's a new opportunity to turn away and it will be too much for certain people and they will turn away. And that's why in another place, Jesus explicitly warned about this and he 0:18:39 - 0:19:02 said family members are gonna turn against each other. He, he said he came to divide like a sword and it, it, it doesn't mean that he's cutting people apart. It means the truth divides people because people react to the truth divisively. The same exact impulse of light will generate completely different 0:19:02 - 0:19:28 reactions across a set of people. Some fuel will come closer to the light and some much more than others. And most people will reject it because human nature is evil and most people have a lot of hidden darkness inside of them and the light exposes that and it's a wedge and it turns people away. Jesus 0:19:28 - 0:19:47 knew this because it's something he had to deal with his entire life. So even in John chapter two where he's super early in his ministry and he's just starting to do miracles. He's already well versed in this property. He's so well versed in it that he believes it through and through more than anything 0:19:46 - 0:20:17 his eyes see or his ears hear And when someone comes up and says, oh, we see the miracles and this is great and I believe in you says they believed in his name. He just kind of swats that aside and says, yeah, we'll see, we'll see. And this is why. So in the face of that inescapable atrophy, what's the 0:20:16 - 0:20:42 way forward? Because if we value the truth, we want to see it reaching more and more people and it doesn't matter by the way, it doesn't matter what the idea is or where it comes from. If you care about light and truth, you wanna share light and truth. And so you might have, you know, I'm, I'm just looking 0:20:42 - 0:21:01 down at my desk. You might, you may have found a pen that you believe is the best pen ever created. And maybe it's nothing fancy. You wouldn't even notice it on the shelf. It's not even some kind of special price or anything else. But let's say it works 10 times better than any pen you've ever used wouldn't 0:21:01 - 0:21:25 you want other people to know? Especially if you're some kind of, I don't know. You, you, you have particular attention to pens and maybe you've purchased every pen on the shelf just to see which one was better because you have this belief that most, most things are Pareto distributed when it comes to 0:21:25 - 0:21:50 quality. And that, that, in, in any situation, your, your prior belief is that there's something that's way better than everything else incidentally, this is true. OK? And so applying that belief to pens of all things, you bought every single pen on the shelf and you tried them all and you found one 0:21:50 - 0:22:12 that was way better than the rest and you gave the rest to your kids because they don't care, they don't notice it's like food for pigs, right? What would you do with that knowledge? Most people would do absolutely nothing. They'd enjoy their pen and go about their lives. Of course, most people would 0:22:12 - 0:22:42 never try that experiment in the first place. And now we're getting into massive differences in faith between people. But if you care about the information, you have to share it, the only solution to entropy is injection of new energy. That's it. There's no other solution to the problem. And so in every 0:22:42 - 0:23:07 situation where there is entropy and I've explained one to you, which, which is when you have sources of new light and truth, the number of people who are interested will drop with every new increment of truth. There are more and more people who drop out. The only solution is to get more people to replace 0:23:06 - 0:23:37 them. And the only way that can happen is if the people who find value in it, still go out and share it with others because the original source of the idea has already shared it with all the people they know. Do you get what I'm saying? In Luke 10? This is exactly what the Lord did. He had been up and 0:23:37 - 0:23:59 down in sideways, all across Israel preaching the gospel. And it got to the point where he didn't really have the next thing he could do. There weren't new people. He could reach, everyone had already made up their minds. So what does he do? He sends out the 70. It says after these things, the Lord appointed 0:23:58 - 0:24:19 other 70 also as he did it twice and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place whither he himself would come. Therefore said he unto them, the harvest truly is great but the laborers are few. Pray ye therefore, the Lord of the harvest that he would send forth laborers into his harvest 0:24:18 - 0:24:46 . This is what's required. Now, here's some proof, this happens to be screenshots of the, the analytics from this youtube channel and what you see is, and this is one particular time scale. I don't remember. I think it's six months, but I don't remember it's true on every time scale. This is about what 0:24:46 - 0:25:12 it looks like. It's flat. There's really no growth in watch time and there's really no growth in views because every time people add on as subscribers, some people leave the ins and the outs are about equal. And so there's, there's really an interesting pattern of churn over time where some people have 0:25:12 - 0:25:31 been watching this stuff for years and reading things for years and some people are much newer, but there's this turnover all the time where some people stay for a short amount of time. Some people stay for a long time and then they're gone and whatever. And obviously, these are all just proxies because 0:25:30 - 0:25:57 I don't have the kind of of granular data to show a more detailed story. But here's the question, why does it look like this? The answer is not because of me, it's because of you is because you're not sharing this stuff. That's why. So I'm continuing to reach the same set of people that I have access 0:25:56 - 0:26:23 to between youtube magic of recommending it whatever or people who just find it in some other way or whatever the case may be. It's maxed out that way of finding people is maxed out. You know, every time one of you shares this on social media, some some content on social media, there is an incredibly 0:26:21 - 0:26:48 obvious spike in traffic to this channel. And so it's so interesting because again, we're teaching generic principles here. I'm using this as an example, but the pattern is going to hold across everything in your life. If you're not willing to share something that has value to you, in one aspect, you're 0:26:47 - 0:27:08 not going to share it in others. And it means the light stops with you. It's meant to be a chain that cascades through the whole universe. That's how it's meant to go from the throne of God down and out through the whole universe. There are all as many channels that he has to use so that everyone is 0:27:08 - 0:27:35 reached. But if one link in the chain doesn't do what they can, the chain is broken and he's got to rely on other channels to reach around to the people that you had more direct access to. So here's an idea and here's a set of people who find it through whatever way this is not the way it's supposed 0:27:34 - 0:27:54 to end, it's supposed to keep going. And obviously it took a while to draw this. So I didn't keep drawing circles around this afterwards, but we could keep doing that and on and on and on. But that person, that orange person that's you. And if you're not reaching out to the people that you have access 0:27:54 - 0:28:26 to, that don't have access to the original idea, then the link is broken and that's not a good thing you see just to reiterate these low value ideas that are commercialized. In the world and best selling authors come out and start teaching them or whatever, those aren't going to fix the world's problems 0:28:26 - 0:28:54 . They can't, they don't have the power to the entropy in the world will always overcome such subtle and weak ideas. If we want to flood the world with truth, then a whole lot of truth has to flow through a whole lot of people. You can't just accept the way that the world does things and say, well, this 0:28:54 - 0:29:19 is the way it's going to be where ideas just, they kind of have a way of getting through and, and that's it, that's the way it's going to be. Look at what that results in the evil to good ratio is enormous things that go viral are, are much more likely to be bad than good or weak then strong, even if 0:29:19 - 0:29:44 they are good, they're very weak. And what's the evidence for this? You take any, I'll say, I'll say self-improvement influencer. Although I, I hate pretty much all of those terms, but self improvement influencer, it's got millions of views on whatever, how many people are actually changing their lives 0:29:43 - 0:30:09 in measurable ways, relative to the number of views, it's different for some people that, that ratio is gonna look a lot better than others, you know. But, but let's say that that person's message is narrowly focused on financial improvement, making lots of money. How many people that are into that person's 0:30:08 - 0:30:32 messages actually end up making any more money than they were before. Very, very, very, very few. The influencer makes a lot more money because he or she is selling a whole lot of content. There's always a book, whatever they're getting views, they're getting paid for that. Do you see? So this circles 0:30:32 - 0:30:55 back to maybe what the biggest problem is and why this is not happening. It's real easy to just chill here and consume content and feel like you're part of some club to feel good without becoming better. It's really easy and it's not all the people that watch this stuff, but a lot of you have this problem 0:30:55 - 0:00:00 . You're very happy to watch things and feel good and feel like you're part of a club, ra ra ra, right? But when it comes time to actually making improvements, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I didn't sign up for this. Wait, I got a change. Yes, you do. You have to become more like Jesus. Wait, 0:00:00 - 0:31:40 wait, wait. But I was looking for something where, where I could feel like I was righteous without actually changing. Well, you've come to the wrong place. Sorry. There are a lot of people who will preach that message to you. You're not gonna get it here. So the very first step is repentance. So I'm 0:31:40 - 0:32:00 not telling you to go ballistic, sharing the things that you've been taught, the things that you've found that have value, whatever they might be, whether it's parts of my content or some pen or whatever else, I'm not telling you to go far and wide sharing that if you're not actually living it yourself 0:31:59 - 0:32:30 . So, the pen example, if I'm not actually using this pen, no one should believe me when I tell them it's the most valuable pen I've ever used. Right. Why don't people who aren't Christian believe people who are? Because almost all professed Christians don't actually believe Jesus. They don't actually 0:32:29 - 0:32:53 live what he taught. And as little as these non-christian understand about Christianity, they understand enough to see the disconnect. They say, well, the God, you say you believe in, teaches this this and this, but you don't do those things. And what's the answer that comes from mainstream Christianity 0:32:52 - 0:33:22 ? Oh, yeah. But the beauty is we don't have to, the message of the gospel is that we don't actually have to do what Jesus taught and we can, we can be sinners and not feel guilty about being sinners. Um No, and the non Christians are not dumb enough to believe that. And that's the problem. So if you 0:33:21 - 0:33:44 want to connect with people, you have to actually believe what you're sharing with them. Any good salesperson will tell you this. There's something about sincerity that makes a connection and if you're selling a product you don't believe in, it's very hard to sell. You won't encounter much success. So 0:33:44 - 0:34:06 the first step is to repent and to live your life in accordance with what you believe is true. Not what I tell you is true, but what you believe is true. Not what anyone else tells you is true. What you believe is true. You align yourself with your own beliefs, you align your beliefs, with your actions 0:34:06 - 0:34:35 , your actions, with your beliefs, your feelings, with your thoughts and so on. That's step number one, the good news is that does not take time. It's a decision. And once you go through that you get off your butt and you share what you believe with other people. It is very important and it's not happening 0:34:35 - 0:35:01 as much as it needs to. So I hope you take up this gauntlet that I've thrown down and you start being more active in sharing these things with others. I wish there were a way that I could show you the examples of some people who have done this to share with you stories. Unfortunately, it's personal details 0:35:00 - 0:35:19 that I don't have permission to share stories of parents or grandparents, sharing these things with their kids and grandkids of people sitting down with their son and saying, hey, let's, let's make a life plan buddy. And the sons will make it an age range 18 to 28. And they're finally getting their lives 0:35:19 - 0:35:43 together. And it's, it's, it's hopeful to see people empowered to take control over their lives and aim them towards what they want with these practical tools, you know, or, or tell you stories of, of people who have manage to stop sinning and who are actually doing what they, they all day long, they're 0:35:43 - 0:36:01 thinking about what would Jesus do and then they're doing it and when they come across situations where they're not sure that becomes the focus of their scripture study until they find out there are people doing this right now. And so it's easy to sit there and think like, well, I'm just gonna do what 0:36:01 - 0:36:19 everyone else does. But you don't see these examples of these people. They're just taking off like rockets and their lives are changing for the better because they're actually living these things that they're finding through whatever source. But God is reaching them in their lives and they're putting 0:36:18 - 0:36:39 this to use, they're making use of the light that they already have and God is pouring out more on them. There's nothing stopping you from being one of these people except you. So, get out of your own way, get out of God's way and let him change your life for the better.