Being a Christian doesn’t give us the secret code the universe or guarantee us all the right answers in every situation. It also doesn’t give us superpowers to avoid making our own mistakes. If you wanted to boil it down, being a Christian is really just accepting God’s grace, trusting in His power and His answers.

Good things will happen, and we may react the way we should. We may also let our blessings overshadow the Blesser. Bad things will also happen, and we may react with patience and faith, or with fear and doubt. In both good and bad times, if the Spirit guides our hearts, we experience peace and freedom, and when we guide our own steps, we suffer, regardless of our circumstances.

Thankfully, God doesn’t rely on our obedience to do good things. He has the knowledge and power to do good things in all situations, and this is all He does. The gift of a relationship with Him is the freedom to know that we can’t mess up His plans. No decision we make or situation we encounter will outmatch His ability to benefit His kingdom. When things go well for us, He will do good things. When we struggle, He will do good things. When we make mistakes, He will do good things. Notice a pattern?

God doesn’t need us to get out of His way so He can work. He tells us to get out of His way so we can enjoy His work and trust that His plans are best, whatever they are.

I’m learning a lot about the power of simplification lately. Teaching a 9-year-old daughter to play golf and a 12-year-old son to shoot basketball, I’m always seeing my instruction get in the way of their progress. There’s a delicate balance between correcting the fundamentals and not paralyzing them with too many details. They both have a simple thought I can take them back to when I can tell I’ve over-instructed. Reese doesn’t waste time. Two bad shots after a ‘dad tip’ and she asks me “can’t I just go back to thinking about rhythm?” For Gabe, it’s even simpler. Look at the rim while you shoot (truly innovative stuff, I know).

Two things amaze me about this. First, how quickly it makes a difference, and second, how quickly I seem to forget. Our faith often follows a similar pattern. When we walk by the Spirit, we start to notice our actions naturally reflect God’s nature. We feel joy and peace, show kindness and gentleness to those around us out of a genuine love, and patiently have faith in God’s goodness.

Then we watch a Presidential debate and judge the participants and worry about our future. We scroll through Facebook to see who is bragging about what, thinking about how much more modest we would be if we had what we don’t want to admit we are jealous of. We see a misguided teenager at the grocery store and thank God we had better parents than they have, say a pray that our kids don’t turn out like that, and mumble about the cost of groceries thanks to those clowns in the debate.

Strangely enough, we become irritable and argumentative with the next person we talk to. By the end of the day, we are asking God why we aren’t experiencing the peace that He promised if we walk by His Spirit.

God never promised to give us what we want. He doesn’t even get everything He wants. Just look at us! He does offer us the desire to see Him get what He wants and the Spirit to help us do our part.

As Ben says, “the world is gonna act like the world”. We can’t change that. But we need to let God handle the world and try our best to walk by His Spirit so we don’t join it. How we do this is simple enough: Look to the Spirit while you walk.

Although we re-used the same title two weeks in a row, the topics are very different. Last week focused more on having patience with others and faith in God’s judgement over our own, and this week is much more about our internal battles. If there are two characteristics that the Holy Spirit should manifest in our lives, patience and faith will be on any short list.

This is a fun ‘chicken or the egg’ combo. Which comes first, patience or faith? Faith in God requires patience, that’s for sure. His time horizon is eternal, after all. Our arbitrary deadlines for Him to answer our prayers must seem awfully funny to Him, kind of like Christian asking me 12 times in the first five miles of a two-hour trip if we’re there yet.

On the other hand, faith itself also produces the patience that it requires, which comes in pretty handy when you’re waiting on eternity. Part of trusting God’s plan is remembering that His timing is a part of His plan. He is doing what is best, and we will see what, why and how, when it’s best for us to see it. Remembering His sovereignty frees us to relax and patiently enjoy the other parts of His plan He’s already showing us.

Even though Christian may not understand why I’m not driving 70 mph the entire trip, I know that stopping for red lights is the best call. And I don’t ration his Gatorade out of spite. I know that bathroom breaks will just make it take longer. Trust me, he doesn’t love every decision I make along the way either.

But even a 4-year-old intuitively knows that trusting his dad beats walking by himself.

All Christians are hypocrites. Don’t get mad at me. Kenny’s been saying it for weeks. And he’s right. Look it up.

Hypocrite: a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings (Webster).

That’s us. The Bible says we should be like Christ, and none of us are. At least not all the time. Sure, we are like Him when we forgive somebody or help someone in need. But anybody can be like Christ once in a while. Nobody can do it all the time. And the Bible even says that too, so thinking that we can only contradicts a different stated belief. It’s a real catch 22.

As Christians, we’re like those little kids from the 80s and 90s singing that they wanted to be like Michael Jordan, except we want to be like Jesus. None of them actually were either, but nobody called them hypocrites.

But there is another definition from Webster: a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion.

One of my regular sins is judging people who fit that description, which is ironically, yep, hypocritical. Jesus was pretty hard on this kind of hypocrisy though, so I guess I thought it was OK for me to judge them. But He didn’t confront them because their sin was worse than mine. I think He opposed them more because they were misguiding the people who were seeking Him.

Non-believers by definition don’t know Jesus. They may have heard the story, but they don’t know Him. We are the only tangible thing they have to see who He really is. They assume how we treat them is how He will treat them, since we are like Him and all.

When we judge the sins of others and ignore our own, we lead the outside world to think that you have to be perfect or God is out of reach, just like the Pharisees. And just like they did, we stand in the way of the ones looking for the same peace, joy and love that He gives us. Despite our hypocrisy.

“So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we have the key.”

Kenny shared an amazing story about halfway through this one, and as soon as I heard it, I knew it was going to be really hard to resist the urge to use this line from the Eagles.

Whatever we don’t surrender to God becomes the chain keeping us from the freedom He’s offering us. He says cast our worries onto Him. If we save a few for ourselves, He can’t help us. He wants to. He told us to. But if we don’t, well….that’s on us.

But here’s the thing; giving everything to God isn’t the cost of our freedom. Our freedom is the cost of not giving everything to God. He isn’t the chain, and He isn’t holding us captive. He is the universal key that unlocks any chain we give Him access to. But only the chains we give Him access to. We are welcome to stay bound by whatever chains we think are too big for Him to unlock. We just won’t be free.

It isn’t a one-time decision, and that’s a good thing. We don’t have to give over everything we are ever going to face today. We just have to give up whatever we are facing today and return to our freedom. The freedom that glorifies God and wants to share it with others. Unbound from our sinful nature and voluntarily bound to Him.

Accepting God’s love comes pretty easy for us. Unconditional forgiveness for our past sins and being considered a child of God despite them is the most generous gift ever. I had a friend who got saved about every Sunday of the seventh grade. He loved accepting the forgiveness.

Embracing God’s love asks us to know the Father, adopt His ways and seek His righteousness. This is a little tougher. We have to turn away from our sins and walk with Him, His way. It’s so easy to see this part as some kind of repayment, like having to give your aunt a kiss for the Christmas gift she got you. Even though you liked it, if you have to pay her back it wasn’t really a gift, was it?

Embodying it is the ultimate step. We are called not only to stop sinning, but to be like Jesus. Wait, that means giving out grace. We didn’t want to forgive others. We just wanted to go to Heaven. Now it’s just starting to feel like a really divine pay it forward project.

But embracing the love of God is the second gift we get from salvation. To stop at the forgiveness part is like getting a set of keys for Christmas and ignoring the new car parked outside. It allows us to feel an ongoing love like we’ve never felt and want to become more like its source. It gives us the love for others to want to share it. And that becomes its own gift, the fuel for the car that shows us why we were even given the set of keys to begin with.

So many things about God are counterintuitive to us, because we are not like Him. He doesn’t call us to be like Him because He’s selfish and petty. He calls us to be like Him because He is good, and He wants us to get to experience what that feels like. A little more each day, until it is eternal. That’s the gift.

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God really doesn’t seem to appreciate it when I try to box him into step-by-step guides and bullet points. He’s too big for that. What we need to do to grow closer to God depends on a lot of things. Sometimes we need to pray. Sometimes we need to show kindness. Sometimes we need to ask forgiveness, and sometimes we may just need to rest so He can use us later.

How we do the thing He asks also changes. Sometimes we have to ask for what we need to remind us of our dependence on Him, and sometimes we need to trust Him to provide it.

Even the “why” is a moving target. Sometimes it is so He can provide joy and peace. Sometimes He needs to comfort us. And sometimes He just wants to show us His love.

But the “Who” never changes. He never runs out of answers, or the willingness to share them with us, as long as He is the one we seek for them. His refusal to be boxed into a set of rules is His gift to us and shows us how unique and valuable each of us are to Him. He tried to give us lists and rules. We broke them. So, He sent Jesus instead.

Jesus paid for our sins. That’s pretty much lesson #1 in Christianity 101. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a very important one. But we can’t stop there, because it wasn’t a donation. It was a purchase, and with it, He bought us direct access to God. Not so we could discover a better version of the rules. He gave us access to God’s heart; the ability to plug into His Spirit so we could see the world through His eyes, and He could instruct us in real-time rather than with a predetermined set of instructions.

That is His will, for us to know Him. Not for what He gives us, how He makes us better people, or for divine answers. Just Him.

It’s nearly impossible to talk about staying in the present without stumbling into a cliche’. So, let’s just get them out of the way. Eating elephants one bite at a time, thousand-mile journey’s one step at a time, winning championships one game at a time, we get it. I’m a bit partial to Matthew 6:34 instead. Each day has plenty of trouble of its own. Why worry about more than that?

Oh, that wasn’t rhetorical. This seems like a great time to plug the new suggestions and comments page. Click the underlined words there and send a message. I’m all ears. But seriously, why do we spend so much time dwelling on the past and worrying about the future?

Life is a live action event. Everything we do happens now. Regret may result from something that already happened, but the feeling itself happens live. And we may be worrying about something that may (or may not) happen later, but the worry itself is a today feeling.

My favorite workaround this is to put a positive spin on regret and worry. I prefer to “learn from my mistakes” and “plan for my future”. That sounds responsible right? And I’m not technically disobeying Jesus that way. Except in order to slide past Matthew 6:34 on a technicality, I have to ignore Matthew 6:33 altogether. It’s awfully hard to seek His righteousness while daydreaming about being Marty McFly.

Maybe that’s why 6:33 came first. If you listen to that, 6:34 really goes without saying, doesn’t it? I mean play that conversation with God out in your mind: ‘Seek Me and I’ll give you everything you need’. ‘Gee, I mean thanks and all, but I’m still worried'. Seriously?! Even I wouldn’t try to wiggle out of that one.

Best I can come up with, there are two logical explanations for worrying. You don’t think God can take care of you, or you think He lied. Well, that, or you skipped 6:33 because you were busy “planning”.

First of all, I’ve gotta say that this show was so much fun. I had a really great time and just want to give a quick shout out to Kenny and Ben for their fellowship and doing this thing. It’s a real blessing every week to get to be a part of it, but I really had fun this week in particular and I hope they did as well.

It was a great reminder of the joy God provides His children. We cover some hard-hitting topics a lot, and our relationship with Jesus is definitely something that should be taken seriously. But sometimes we get so wrapped up in trying to grow, trying to serve, trying to “be better” at walking with the Lord, that we forget to enjoy His presence and the peace that comes with it.

Yes, God provides what we need in the hard times. But He also provides the joys of friendships & laughter and He loves to see us enjoy the world He made for us. And no, He doesn’t want us to walk in sin, but He wants us to repent and move on from it, not dwell in the guilt of our mistakes.

Above all else, God wants a relationship with us. We don’t need all the answers or to know exactly how to handle every situation life might send our way. We need to be constantly plugged into the Holy Spirit and trust that He will tell us what we need to know when we need to know it. But in the meantime, relax and just enjoy Him, because He is pretty amazing.

Christians are not immune to hardships, far from it in fact. We know this. We are called to follow in the footsteps of Christ after all, and nobody is going to argue that He had an easy life. But we also know that in the hardest moments of His life on earth, He was EXACTLY where God had called Him to be. The disciples certainly didn’t have a walk in the park. And the heroes of the faith walked on that alone: Faith.

I feel incredibly silly admitting this, but it didn’t even occur to me until recently that Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Joseph & Moses, didn’t even have the Bible to lean on. They had tradition. And they had God. But that was enough. And it still is.

And even though we know the stories and what they endured for the Faith, we somehow fall into a trap sometimes of thinking if we walk by God’s will, that everything will always be smooth sailing for us as modern-day Christians. When we face challenging times, we question ourselves, wondering what we might have done to deserve this. We question God’s love for us. And even our best efforts to block it out may even let the enemy slip some doubt into our minds about God’s faithfulness.

One of my favorite lines from a song goes “just know the Kingdom of God is within you, even though the battles are bound to continue.” But reality is, the first half of that line is all you need to know. God is with you. When we suffer loss, He provides peace. When we face illness, He provides comfort. When others hurt us, He provides love. And when we fail, He provides mercy and grace.

Not sometimes. Not for some people who deserve it. For everybody, always. And when we don’t know how that is possible, He provides Faith. We just have to take Him at His Word.

One of the reasons I believe God opposes the proud is because pride opposes faith, and without faith, it is impossible to please God. Pride stands directly in the way of faith because it is putting your faith in yourself. It is believing that you are in control. It is believing that your needs come first. It is believing that your struggles are more important than others, and it is believing that you know better than God.

Humility paves the way for faith. But it has to be a genuine humility. It isn’t avoiding the seat of honor to make sure you aren’t embarrassed by a more distinguished guest. That's pride. It also isn’t taking the last place at the table so you can be promoted in front of the crowd. That’s also pride. Humility is not caring where you sit because you know you didn’t deserve to be invited in the first place.

It is impossible to have a genuine faith without humility, but until that faith is tested, how can you know if either are genuine? When God gives you a chance to put that faith into practice, it isn’t so you can prove to Him that it’s real. It’s so He can prove to you that it’s all you need.

Ben makes a great point that Christians tend to confront the chaos of today’s world one of two ways: 1) we isolate to keep ourselves from having to deal with it (my personal favorite) or 2) we infiltrate by going on the attack of the evil around us. Maybe the “3rd I” Ben was looking for was that we should be imitating Christ.

For whatever reason, I just found it interesting today that the next book in the Bible after the Gospels is “Acts”. As Christians, our actions should encourage those around us to learn more about Jesus and to want a closer relationship with Him. And that should be true of everyone, regardless of their righteousness or alliance with your beliefs.

Yes, we should act in a way that encourages non-Christians to grow closer to Christ. But we shouldn’t forget that our Christian brothers and sisters should also have their faith reinforced by how we continually act in our faith.

Sometimes I do think we are a little too much like Peter, thinking Jesus needs more of our help. Jesus doesn’t need us to convict others of their sins. He just needs us to encourage them to have a conversation with Him. He’s pretty good at handling sin.

But He does need us to do our part. Information has never been more easily available, but information and truth are two very different things. The information is becoming less and less reliable as it becomes more available. And our complacency condones the world that it creates (get you some of that alliteration Pastor Ben!).

We do have to act. Act in a manner worthy of the calling. Act with humility and gentleness. Act with patience and tolerance. Act diligently to preserve the unity of the Spirit.

“I don’t care” is a powerful phrase I’ve learned works wonders with my kids. I’m sure it’s not popular in today’s world, probably even frowned upon in most circles. But it works great to end conversations about things like who gets the last Oreo, which braincell killing device is too loud and distracting from another braincell killing device, or which NBA team they should play on one day (sorry Gabe, I’ll answer that when you put down the Play Station and start actually practicing basketball).

Please understand, I love my kids more than I could ever describe. But no, I don’t care about those things, and I really wish they wouldn’t. I have more important things to worry about. Like money, checking my email, and figuring out why all these people on the news & social media have lost their minds. Oh wait……

It isn’t that God doesn’t want us to have money, or that He wants us to be rich. He doesn’t care how much money we have. It isn’t that God doesn’t want us to read our emails and do our job. He just doesn’t want our work to come before Him. And it isn’t that God doesn’t care about the sins of others. He just doesn’t care about our opinion of the sins of others.

Now, if my kids come to me with a serious problem, I’m all ears. And so is God. Want to pray for others to come to Him? You have His full attention. Looking for ways to help somebody? He has some suggestions. Want to get to know Him better? Ask, and you shall receive.

I don’t know how Biblical this is, but I’ve started to notice how selfish my prayers are. I’m always asking for what I want or think I need. But when I try to fill my time praying for others, well for one, I never run out of things to say, and also, I don’t have as much time to worry about myself. That also has the huge benefit of keeping me out of His way so He can take care of my needs. It’s almost like the more I do what He asks, the more He takes care of what I need.

Why do I feel like I’ve read that somewhere before?

If you want to really walk with Christ, then you better get comfortable being uncomfortable. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is. It’s not a bad thing. It’s a righteous discomfort. He just wants you to be more like Him, and well, you’ve got some work to do.

When you start working out, that first warm-up routine feels like it’s going to kill you. But over time as you build strength and get in better shape, the workout gets easier. It becomes second nature. But if you keep doing the same workout, you stall out. That discomfort is what grows you. It’s not fun, but it’s necessary.

We can eventually reach our physical goals. We can lose enough weight to fit into those pants. We can get our cholesterol to a level where our doctor leaves us alone. We can stop doing that thing we know is bad for us.

But our walk with God is the ultimate chase for an unattainable goal. You can read and pray 24 hours a day with the best of intentions and the most receptive heart in human history, and you’ll never come close to full sanctification on this side of eternity. But the overwhelming magnitude of it is enough to cause a lot of Christians to eventually throw up our hands at the fact that “we’ll never get it”. Or worse, we’ll think we actually have.

I love the way Ben said it once: God loves you the way you are, but He refuses to let you stay that way. In fact, He loves you SO MUCH THAT He refuses to let you stay that way. So get comfortable being uncomfortable. And be grateful that He loves you enough to want more for you than you do.

You know that trust exercise where you turn your back to your partner and fall backwards, trusting them to catch you? Until you fall, they can’t prove that they will catch you. Your faith has to come first. Likewise, until we trust God, He can’t prove that we can.

I think this is why it is impossible to please God without faith. Think about it. He can have anything He wants, and the only thing that pleases Him is for us to believe that we are the only thing He wants.

But it’s the ultimate paradox. As long as we doubt it, it’s impossible even for Him to show us. But once we believe it without seeing it, He can make it impossible for us to doubt.

One of the most interesting new technological advancements to me has been the “live photo” you can take with your phone. Not interesting because I’m amazed by it. More interesting because for the life of me I don’t know why we would want it. In all of my live photos, it just shows me how imperfect that perfect moment really was. It usually captures my kids slapping each other out of the way right before or after that brief instant I got of them all smiling at the same time.

Our walk with God is really no different. On the very first episode of this I talked about how we all like to be our perfect selves on Sunday morning, but that isn’t the real us. I wish my faith was as solid as this Podcast might portray it, but reality is I have an edit button and Ben gently redirecting me like the gutter guards at a bowling alley. Put that faith in motion and it gets ugly a lot of times.

No one is immune to this because having faith isn’t a snapshot of one moment in time. It’s an active walk down a path with more twists, turns and mistakes than you thought you were capable of.

But it’s also how God shows His love and reminds us that He didn’t call us because of our perfection. He called us so we could experience His.

Ben and I joke that when God speaks to us, it isn’t the cliche’ of a great booming voice from the clouds. But He has spoken from the clouds before. Take your pick of 3 different Gospel accounts of God speaking to Peter, John and James from a dark cloud during the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:5, Mark 9:7, Luke 9:35). What message did the Almighty God of the universe have for them?

"This is my Son. Listen to Him”.

God doesn’t hide Himself and His will from us. In fact, His Son said if we seek it, we will find it. And as complicated as we make Him, God’s will is much simpler than ours. Even we don’t know what we want. But all He wants is a loving relationship with everyone He created. And yes, by extension of that, for us to love and appreciate everyone else He created. And that’s definitely hard, but it’s not complicated. He told us how, in a great booming voice from the clouds.

Do you trust God? The Creator of everything you see and everything you never will. Who sent His Son to accept His wrath for your sins and raised Him from the dead to prove His faithfulness. We know we can trust Him (or we better!). But do you?

It’s easy to trust Him on Sunday morning while you sing Amazing Grace. But when nobody is around to hear your answer, do you trust Him to know what’s best for His Kingdom?

How about when His Word says to pray for that person twisting the knife into your back? When you’re waiting for the life changing call from the doctor? When He tells you to apologize to that person you’d rather never speak to again, or to hold the door for the stranger who just stole your parking spot? Do you trust Him then?

What if you never find out how He used your faith to further His Kingdom? Or who He spoke to through your kindness? What if the prayer they never heard you say saved your enemy from being punished for what they did to you? Do you still trust His Righteousness?

You can trust Him. But you have to do it first. Then He can do some really cool stuff.

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'God causes all things to work together for good'. This slice of Romans 8:28 is a feel-good classic from The Bible. But we like to gloss over the meat of that sandwich; the part that says: "God causes all things to work". It doesn't say God snaps everything together for us. He causes, things to work, for good.

I love a nice walk on the beach too, but God seems to be more interested in taking us hiking up a mountain than walking down a peaceful beach. And sometimes there won't be any footprints in the sand because He asks us to climb a rock wall with Him.

I suppose if you follow Him far enough up the mountain, it seems safer to stick with Him than to try to get back down by yourself. But I'm sticking it out for His company at this point. Plus, He said something about a beach on the other side.

The Book of John really boils it all down to the key points. You cannot earn God's love through works, because God's love is free. To us.

But it wasn't without cost. Jesus bought it for us. And it was expensive. He just has one simple request from those who accept His generosity. Love others and give them a break when they aren't nice to you.

Seems like a pretty small ask.