Transcript

00:00 Paul Tripp: So, Shelby, we're back to talk again about what in the world is this thing called faith. I'm always impressed that we throw around these terms. They become familiar to us. Everybody who's a Christian has heard the term "faith", but living active, everyday life-shaping faith, I don't think people understand.

00:29 Shelby Abbott: Yes, they might be able to understand the word, but not...

00:31 Paul: Yes, so I want to go back to verse 6. We're spending our time in Hebrews 11, which is the Bible's most extensive conversation about faith, and let me read verse 6 again because I think it's the core definition of biblical faith in this passage. ⁶And without faith it is impossible to please Him [God], for whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.

01:08 So there's two parts of faith here. The mental ascent — God exists; and then, the second part is living like He exists. And we ended our conversation saying that believing God exists must include three things that the Bible declares about who God is — that God is the creator, that God is sovereign, and that God is Savior; and where I'd like to begin today is to draw out the implications of what that means.

01:51 What does it mean to say I believe that God is creator? Well, I'm a painter by avocation and I have a studio here in this building; and immediately, I think about me creating a painting. And when I create a painting, guess who it belongs to at the end?

02:24 Shelby: You.

02:24 Paul: It belongs to me because I made it. So saying God is creator means I don't own me. God owns me. In fact, I don't own anything. I don't own my children. I don't own my wealth. I don't own my gifts, my mentality, emotionality, physicality, psychology.

02:52 Shelby: Your opportunities.

02:52 Paul: Yes, it all belongs to the Lord and if you track that out, it will have transformational impact on the way you live your life. Let's just say I don't actually own my wealth, my money. Well, most people view money as 'I've worked for this, this belongs to me and I'll give some to the Lord."

03:24 That is absolutely upside down because actually, I should say, "This belongs to the Lord. How much is right for me to keep for myself?" It's a total reversal of the way you think about and out of that comes a life of generosity and excitement about contributing to the work of God's kingdom and viewing the needy in a different way. I mean, it's a whole lifestyle that comes out of that just because I start with, "No, I don't own this. God owns this."

03:56 Shelby: Regardless of how much you make, too, because I think it's easy for people to look at more wealthy people and go, "Well, they're the ones who need to give." No, that has nothing to do with it. Everything belongs to God, regardless if you make a small amount a year or tons of money a year. It all belongs to God.

04:14 Paul: Let me give another example, sexuality. There are hordes of Christians out there still believe that "sex is mine for my pleasure" and the issue is "Do I do it in a way that's morally legal or morally illegal? Right?

04:37 Shelby: Yes, and "how far can I get to the line without crossing it.

04:40 Paul: Absolutely, and if you understand that God is creator, then sex is an act of worship. I'm either worshiping myself, I'm worshiping the other person, I'm worshiping sexual pleasure, or I'm worshiping God. So if you're in a marriage, the most important question is not, "Am I pleased by my sexual life or is my wife pleased by our sexual life," but Is God pleased?

05:20 Shelby: How many people are thinking that?

05:22 Paul: Very few, so I'll give you an example. There are many Christian men who use their wife as an object for their pleasure. They don't really care that much that their wife is satisfied and often, it's in the context of a husband who's not really loving toward his wife other ways.

05:50 So now, she's naked in bed — the most vulnerable of human conditions — little protection between her and her husband, he hasn't been that great to her and she knows she's just going to be an object for his pleasure.

06:10 No wonder she's uptight and doesn't look forward to these moments because if it's all about me and my only thought is I'm going to do this legally because God's given me a command, I've turned this thing upside-down again. Imagine if the two great commands are guiding me in the sexual bed, I should love God above all else and love my neighbor as myself. All of a sudden you have something that's beautiful.

06:50 Shelby: Yes, and totally different way of thinking about it, approaching it like even, I think you had said one point, what if a couple prayed before the act of intercourse? When you said that, it really struck me as so bizarre, but it's not bizarre. It's not bizarre at all. It's actually what should be happening, like giving credit where credit is due, knowing that that aspect of your relationship is a gift from God.

07:17 Paul: How about loving one another as I have loved you, Jesus said? So sex as an act of willing self-sacrifice for the enjoyment, pleasure of another person. Again, to say that God is creator just turns these things upside-down.

07:46 If God actually owns my property and possessions, then I'm not going to do war with my neighbor over six inches of turf or because their rose bushes are hanging over on my side of the house because the question is how do I serve God? How do I love God? How do I worship God with this land and God would say, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." You would just give example after example after example how saying God is creator changes everything.

08:29 Shelby: Yes, and the flipping aspect of things is an interesting way to approach the details of life. If you're constantly demanding your rights as a human being, whether it be you live in the West or not, or if you live in America or not, it's normal for people here in the West to demand your rights. The example that you say of, "This is my space. This is my property. Get your rose bushes off of my off of my property," or, "This is my wife. I demand to have sex with her whenever I want to."

09:08 Having that mentality of demanding your own rights is the opposite of what Jesus did when He was here in the world. All He did was lay down His rights from beginning to end and if we say we want to be like Christ, we need to be people who emulate the Savior and live as if He did, which is the opposite of demanding your rights.

09:27 Paul: So let me give you another example. The doctrine of creation, that faith commandment that I believe that God is creator absolutely changes the way you understand The Ten Commandments because most people's approach The Ten Commandments, again, is — whether this is spoken or just assumed — is "my life belongs to me and God has given me guardrails; and so, I have to stay inside of God's guard rails".

10:04 It's an incredibly self-oriented and legalistic way of looking at The Ten Commandments. The doctrine of creation reminds me that The Ten Commandments begin with what? Worship of God because if I'm God's creature, that's the most important thing.

10:29 As you've heard me say before, the four most important words in the Bible are the first four: "In the beginning, God". This world is not about me, it's about Him and so, what The Ten Commandments are not these arbitrary guard rails that God just decided to set for us.

10:51 The Ten Commandments are a living expression of the worship of God. So if you want to know how to worship God with your everyday life, here it is. How beautiful is that and how different is that, rather than, "Okay, God's sort of a pleasure-killer, but I want to be a good guy in His eyes, so I'll stay inside of His boundaries, even though I don't really want to."

11:18 That's not what The Ten Commandments are about. It's a living, active detail of how to live in a way that honors God's position in the universe and offers my life as worship to Him. So I find joy in those commands because I find joy in my Lord. I don't feel like I'm looking over the guardrail at everybody else and thinking, "Oh, man, if I wasn't a Christian..."

11:52 Shelby: Yes, the peeking over the fence of where God has placed, you know Psalm 16. Place that in your life, of the boundary lines that fallen for me in pleasant places. That's true for every single believer because it's not "freedom is on the other side of the fence".

12:10 Freedom is within that relationship with God and God puts those commands for us as an act of His loving grace to help us to understand how to live and how to put Him first because putting Him first is not a consolation prize. It is the best way to live.

12:25 There's nothing better than that. So we think, "Oh, if I could just get out from under that kind of restrictions that God has put there for me, I will then eventually feel freedom," and it's exactly the opposite of that. When you live under His guidance and protection and His care for His loving instruction on how to go about life, that's where true freedom is because that's where goodness is because it came from God Himself, not from our own idea about what it's supposed to mean to be a human being.

12:55 Paul: Yes, absolutely. So what we've been discussing is the first implication of that faith commitment that God is creator. There's a second thing. When I'm in my studio and I'm painting, I have never said to myself, "I hope this turns into something." I'm painting with purpose.

13:26 I know what I want the painting to look like. I know the chemical interaction with the materials. There are always some surprises along the way, but I'm guiding that process. So creation doesn't just teach us ownership, it teaches us purpose. So for everything God made, there's a purpose.

13:50 So the question in life is not this: what would I like to do with this while I stay inside of God's boundaries? It's, "What is God's purpose for this? What does God want me to do with this? When He made this in the beginning, what was His purpose?"

14:16 So that's marriage, that's parenting, that's your everyday life of labor. Everything goes back to the question, "The One who created this made this for a reason. What is that reason and how do I live that out in my everyday life?"

14:37 Shelby: Yes, intentionality, yeah.

14:39 Paul: So, let's talk about marriage and I want to play this out a little bit because I think this happens more than we'd like to think. So there's a young lady, let's say, who has a vision of what she thinks would be the perfect guy for her.

15:03 Shelby: So, pretty much anyone who's single.

15:05 Paul: Yes, well, she's thinking personality and that kind of thing. And so, she finds this guy and she's immediately attracted to him, and he's attracted to her because she's so ridiculously attracted to him because we love adoration; so they end up getting married. Now, think about this. They call this love, but she's not marrying this man because she loves him. She's marrying him because she loves herself.

15:43 Shelby: Okay, what do you mean by that?

15:43 Paul: He's the deliverer of her dream? She's not thinking warts, sin, failure, all that kind of stuff at all. And he loves that adoration and that's for him. That's about him and he's learned to play his part because of what he gets out of it.

16:11 Six months in the marriage, she says, "This is not the man I married." Well, this is the man you married. The man you dated was a fake and it's in those moments where they're either going to learn to hate one another or for the first time, actually learn to love one another because they've owned this marriage completely as a domain for personal happiness and a domain for my definition of personal happiness. And I've counseled these couples a thousand times.

16:48 "You start disappointing me. I start getting angry. I do irritated things. I slam the pans around in the kitchen when I'm cooking. I spend more time with my buddies than I do with my wife. We go out and we sit at a dinner table, and we have nothing to say to one another because we're mad, because you stepped on my dream. How dare you?"

17:12 What a perverse view of marriage that is, often in Christian couples. Marriage belongs to the Lord. He thought of it and one of the things you need to understand is the world's most comprehensive relationship — marriage — sits in the middle of the world's most important incomplete process: sanctification. How's that ever going to work?

17:45 Shelby: Seems like a recipe for disaster.

17:47 Paul: But that's the point because the point of marriage in God's design is way deeper than your momentary happiness, way deeper than romance. Marriage will expose you and, in the process, can be an instrument that God uses to transform you. It's beautiful.

18:10 Shelby: Yes, but often, not the perspective that — like what you said — that people have. I mean, certainly with non-believing people, that perspective would exist of, "Well, I'm afraid to give myself to another person and then, when we actually do, I want them to meet my dreams," but that's not just in the non-believing world.

18:35 In the Christian world, it's the same thing. I work with young people all the time and they think, "This person is going to be the deliverer of all good things when it comes to my ideal spouse." You mentioned a fictional young woman with an idea of what a man should be like. I have met people who have kept lists of character qualities they want a young man to have in their Bible, like "this is the kind of man I want to marry".

19:04 And some of them are great, you know, the "walking with Jesus, loves children", that kind of stuff. But then it's "plays the guitar" and it's kind of like, "Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?" It's just unreasonable and it's an improper perspective on what marriage actually is. Marriage does belong to the Lord. It doesn't belong to me. I was wondering what you were thinking when I said that. Wheels spinning.

19:29 Paul: I was again and again, I would listen to a couple who end up saying, if they tell their story, "I'm so frustrated with my marriage," and I would say, "That's wonderful! Praise the Lord!" And they would say...

19:49 Shelby: "What are you talking about?"

19:50 Paul: I say, "Now, real marriage can begin. You're at a huge God-given door of opportunity. Now, how about doing it God's way? How about stepping into marriage His way because you're here confessing to me your way hasn't worked and you can walk out of here and say, 'Tripp's crazy and I just want my way. And if this man won't do it, I'll find another man.' You have that choice or you can say, 'The Person who made me made this with a purpose. He knows better than I do and this is a moment of opportunity."

20:31 It's that place where hopelessness is a doorway to hope when you become hopeless and everything you've tried in your marriage. That's a faith doorway to say, "I'm going to believe in God. I'm going to believe He knows infinitely more than I know. I'm going to believe that His purpose is best and I'm going to grab hands with this person, and we're going to go."

20:59 And when that would happen in counseling, I'd be sitting there in tears because we were in a holy place at that moment. God had met us. But I've seen the opposite, too. I've seen people walk out mad at me because they're holding with both hands onto their dream. If there's a Creator, it was created and if it was created, it was created for purpose.

21:30 Shelby: What a scary place to be though, when you get to that point of... I think naturally, as human beings, we want to control stuff all the time, so when we get to that spot where it's like, "This isn't what I thought it would be. She's not who I thought she would be or he's not who I thought he would be; and I've tried everything else and it's not working. All we have is God right now," that's kind of a terrifying place to be, but that is what faith is.

21:56 Paul: What holy, redemptive terror. It's beautiful terror. It's hard. Sure, it's hard. It's hard to let go of anything that you staked your life on. Of course, it's hard. We don't want to diminish that, but this life of recognizing God as creator, His ownership and His purpose is the best life ever.

22:23 And I'm going to say to the people who are watching or listening to this podcast, do you have that kind of faith in your life? Is there this life-shaping knowledge of God as creator, life-shaping knowledge of His ownership, life-saving knowledge of His purpose?

22:45 Take parenting. It's not about what you want for your children or what you want from your children. I mean, parents attach their identity to their kids — what a horrible burden for a kid — and already have designed his future. It's, "What does God want for my child and what role has He chosen for me to play?"

23:18 So you know, when I'm finally watching the streaming thing I've been trying to watch and my kids are in bed, and they're making all kinds of racket, the way I move toward them is recognizing God as creator, ownership, and purpose, or it's not.

23:46 And if you do, you think, "Well, this is not an accident. God loves these children. He's put them in a family of faith. He revealed their need to me. This is not an accident, not an interruption. It's grace, and I want to walk down the hallway and be part of what God wants to do in the lives of these children." It's so hard.

24:16 Shelby: Like the perspective change. Yes, very, very difficult. I dare say, impossible.

24:21 Paul: Well, it is and that's why as you're walking down the hallway, you better be praying because that kind of thinking is... it's not impossible, but it's unnatural for us apart from divine intervention. But when God calls us, He goes with us and when He calls us, He empowers us. But again, parenting just sets on a different course.

24:55 Why do parents end up with just underlying bitterness and anger toward their children that fuels the way they respond to them? Because they've owned their children as theirs and it's not working. And so, it's easy to say, "I believe God is creator," but you got to take the second half of verse 6. Living like I actually believe that will turn your life upside down, but in a good and glorious way.

25:33 Shelby: And how many Christians are actually living day to day? Well, you talk about functional atheism — living your life, you say one thing, you would communicate all the correct theology about what the Bible says and how to live, but that your life actually lives in contrast to the things that you say you believe.

25:56 You walk down the hall and you're angry because you've been interrupted, because your kids aren't acting or your spouse isn't acting a certain way, your job isn't going a certain way. Anything that's wrong is the end of the world. We live in ways as if we don't believe that God is in control of all things, created all things, owns all things, including myself; and you get a lot of hypocrisy out there in the church as a result.

26:24 Paul: Yes, because there's only two alternatives here. It's me in the middle of my story or God in the middle of my story. Me in the middle of my story means I curse my car when I'm in traffic. I get mad at the lady who has too many things in front of me in the line. I'm impatient with my wife because she takes so long to get ready. I want my kids just to shut up and not be kids. And you know, this list goes on and on. And I'm endlessly competitive at work with people who are just trying to do the same thing I'm doing, trying to support their families.

27:09 And so, the good, beautiful, satisfying, happy life is on the other side of saying "I'm going to live like God owns it all and has a purpose for it all". I mean, it's not hard to demonstrate that a good long-term marriage happens when both those people forsake their selfish marriage dream and decide to be partners in a different journey that God has designed.

27:46 And so again, Shelby, when I was doing premarital counseling a lot, people asked me what I did do. I said I tried to cause trouble because what I want to do is I wanted to expose that selfish dream and then, I would say, "You have defined exactly what you want from this man. What are you going to do on the days when he is far from that? What about if that's a week? What if that's a month? What if that's a year? You've written a story for yourself about marriage. It can't work. This is a broken man. He's less than perfect. He'll never pull it off." I did that because I wanted them to enter into the relationship knowing that God's way is better.

28:36 Shelby: Yes, I wish I could been a fly on the wall during those moments of seeing you causing trouble, but better to have trouble on the front end of premarital counseling, going into it eyes wide open about what you're about to experience, as opposed to — like you said — six months in, a year, in two years in and going, "This is not what I expected it to be." Maybe there should be a book or something like that called "What Did You Expect? [Redeeming the Realities of Marriage]".

29:00 Paul: Yes, again and again, when I played it out to people where that would go, they would go, "Oh." It's beautiful and then, rather than, you know, I'm going to give them a few details on how to do finances and sex and you know, if they stay married, they got to think about retirement and get down to what really forms your marriage. And people are in that state tend to be so engaged in romance, they're not thinking at the deeper heart level and that was my job.

29:38 Shelby: And there's nothing wrong about thinking with romance, but if that's the only thing you're thinking about, then that's problematic. Yes, so that's good.

29:46 Paul: Okay, second thing. Believing that God exists means I believe that He's sovereign. Sovereignty means that this world doesn't operate by fate or by chance. There's One of infinite perfection, infinite wisdom, infinite authority, and infinite power who sits on the throne of the universe and determines everything that happens. Wow.

30:24 Now, what that means for me is that the goal of my living is not to see how much control I can have because the vast majority of the things that I face every day and I deal with everyday are out of my control. You can't actually control another human being. You can threaten them, but at the level of their hearts, you have no power to control that person.

31:07 You can't control situations, obviously. You can't undo the past. You can't rearrange the future. That life is a life fraught with anxiety, fraught with disappointment because I'm attempting to do something I have neither the wisdom, the authority, or the power to do — I just don't — versus basking in the fact that there is One who rules it all.

31:47 Everything I don't understand, He understands. Everything that's outside of my control, He controls. It's a life that's free of so much of the stuff that just beats people up and makes them emotional wrecks because they're exposed to so many things that are a concern to them that they have no ability to alter, but they have no basket to put that stuff in.

32:24 I'm going to go back to my counseling. I drew a picture for people. Again, I think I did this a thousand times. In counseling, I drew a lot of pictures. Steve, who is part of this ministry, was a counselor for five years and he has a whole notebook-full of my drawings.

32:49 But one I would draw is I draw two circles. One smaller circle and a circle outside of it. The inner circle, I would call the circle of responsibility and the way I define that is these are things that God has chosen for you to do that you can't give to anybody else. They're your responsibilities before Him and the only proper response to those things is carefully obey. But that's not everything in my life.

33:21 There's an outer circle and I call that circle the circle of concern. Those are things that are a concern to me, but not my responsibility or in my ability to do, produce, or change. What's the only thing to do with those? Those I entrust to God and you better know what is in each circle.

33:50 Shelby: Yes, you get it mixed up, it can be really bad.

33:53 Paul: What we do is we pull things in the circle of concern into the circle of responsibility. Like I had a mother say to me, "If it's the last thing I ever do in my life, I will get my children to believe," and I'm thinking, "I don't want to be one of your children," because you're going to do things that you shouldn't do, trying to do things that only God can do.

34:18 And so, the world to us will appear out of control, but we are limited in our understanding, we're limited in our experience, we're limited in our wisdom. But the Bible tells us that God is on the throne. What is it? Daniel 4:35 says, "No one can stay His hand or say to Him, 'What have you done?'" I love that.

34:54 So no one can stop the rule of His authority and He has to answer to no one. The only being in the universe who has to answer to no one is God. That's a definition of being sovereign. You do what is Your will. No one can stop Your will and You have to answer to no one.

35:23 Shelby: Which is terrifying if God is not good and loving, but He is and so, we can trust in His sovereignty. It's not just knowing intellectually that God is sovereign in control over all things, but putting our faith in His sovereignty is really where life begins to change for us.

35:40 Paul: Yes, and when it comes to any anything like sovereignty, you have to understand that God's fundamental characteristic is holiness. It's not one of His characteristics; it's the sum of His characteristics. He's holy in justice. He's holy in sovereignty. He's holy in faithfulness. He's holy in wisdom. He's holy in mercy.

36:08 He's holy and so, His rule, His sovereignty doesn't contradict His holiness. So the way that He rules, although it may not look like it to us — you know, who hasn't thought, "If I were God, I'd..." — that's because it doesn't look to us like it's holy, but He is infinitely perfect in every way and all of the time, so His rule is always right. "The ways of Lord are right and true," the psalm says.

36:49 Shelby: Yes, living that way functionally day to day is really the key to understanding what it means to live the Christian life and not live a life of anxiety all the time. So many people are caught up in anxiety in so many different ways, which is, you know, there's multiple aspects of anxiety.

37:05 There's a sinful way of not trusting in God's control and love for everything (Matthew 6), then there's also clinical anxiety of feeling a looming sense of dark anxiousness all the time. Those things have to be dealt with in different ways, but a lot of my problem has been — especially, when I was younger, growing up — is I just don't trust anybody but myself. I want to control everything around me. When you try to control everything around you, you're just going to be anxious all the time because you'll realize very quickly you don't have control over anything and nothing at all.

37:39 Paul: Yes, how beautiful it is to say all I have to do is do the job God has given me and He'll take care of everything else. I mean, it's just so freeing. Now, I want to speak to this generation because of social media, 24/7 global communication that we're carrying in our pockets or our purses, we are hit with daily concerns, heartbreaking concerns that actually have nothing to do with our lives but impact us. You better believe in the sovereignty of God or you're going to go nutso and it's happening.

38:27 Shelby: Yes, we've seen that all over the place.

38:28 Paul: People are falling apart, getting into ridiculous rage over things that they have no direct relationship to and surely no ability to alter. And I think it's always been important to rest in God's sovereign rule but, boy, when you got the world at your fingertips, it's even more important.

38:59 Shelby: Yes, and a lot of people get in the sense of anxiousness because they are more concerned about the million billion things that they have no control over and will never have control over to the neglect of the things that God has given them responsibility-wise, whether that be a spouse or kids or your friendships or your involvement in your local church, whatever that looks like.

39:25 Those things get neglected because we're so concerned about the million things that we can't control at all, when in reality, God has given us responsibility to be intentional about what He's stewarded to us.

39:37 Paul: Let me speak to something you said. I think that there's a generation that's come up with social media, they never knew anything else and with this 24-hour global information cycle that I wonder if we shouldn't just call them the anxious generation.

40:04 And I'm convinced that there are people coming into adulthood that have a form of anxiety that is rooted in trauma that they've experienced and they live with a sense of dread, but I think there's a lot more people that have worry, fear, concern, anxiety because they're daily exposed to dark things that they have no ability to alter, but they carry with them and they don't have a basket to put those things in.

40:46 Shelby: Yes, and you could see that even how they decide to live out their life on social media, where there's constant posting, constant chatter, constant commentary about what's happening in the world and I actually was thinking about this just this morning.

41:05 I have a friend who their Instagram stories would definitely communicate a life of continual anxiety about what's happening in the world, just post after post after post with commentary sometimes that they'll put or just different little post that other people make that they'll repost, that it's just like, "I don't want to live this way. I don't want to live in a way that's just constantly upset about the million things that are happening out there that I cannot control at all."

41:39 And this person, who's a good friend of mine, seems to be very, very concerned about everything that they can't control and I wonder how much is being neglected in their own life as a result of their constant frustration, constant anger, constant anxiety about what's happening in the world.

41:55 Paul: Because here's the deceit. "As I'm exposing myself to those things, I think it will get better [my anxiety] if I know more." That's the worst solution. So I become more and more addicted, spend more and more time, go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, more and more information. Somehow, that greater knowledge will give me some rest. Doesn't work. Doesn't work.

42:32 Shelby: Makes it worse.

42:33 Paul: Yes, you know, God's looking at every detail of the universe. We're looking into a thimble and that only creates obsession and addiction, and I don't think people understand that. They just go deeper and deeper. I got to know more, got to know more, got to know more, gives me a sense of control, but you're just losing control. And, like you say, being taken away from things that are in that inner circle, the circle of your responsibility because you're living in the outer circle. Wow.

43:23 You know, recently, there was a poll taken of the amount of time that kids high school-, college-age spend on social media and outside of the classroom, although many of them are on in the classroom; and the researchers finally just quit because the answer was we're never not on. This is what we do and some of that — not all of it, but some of it — is just rooted again in an amnesia to the fact that my world is under the best control ever.

44:16 Shelby: So what, maybe, would you say to a person who might hear what you just communicated about God's sovereignty, care, love, control over all things and yet, they would look at their life and see a constant sense of chaos?

44:32 Maybe they've been through something traumatic in the past or maybe they were abandoned by someone and they would go, "Hey, look at my life. All evidence to the contrary that God is in control of all things. How can He can be in control of all things when so many horrible things have happened to me?" That's a legitimate question, I think, to ask.

44:51 Paul: Yes, I think it is, but it's a reversal of the faith process. It never, ever works to start with your experience and try to understand God. It never works. There's just too much that I just do not have the ability to put together.

45:14 You have to start with God to define and understand your experience. So I start with who God says He is. If God says He's sovereign and He says He's holy, then that has to shape the way that I understand my story; and we've heard this again and again.

45:40 People tell the story of what appeared to be disaster in their life and then, they'll say, "Out of this, God brought the most beautiful things. I would have never gotten here if I hadn't gone through that." We'll just never put it together and so, first of all, I would say what I just said.

46:09 You can't start with your experience and the second thing I would say is, "I don't have an answer for you because my thoughts are not God's thoughts. I can only answer what He's revealed. His secret will is called His secret will because it's secret, so I can't. I can cry with you and I can mourn that you had those experiences, but I can't abandon God's declaration of Himself because if I do, I have nothing."

46:49 Shelby: Yes, and you and I have talked about this a lot in the context of our own different suffering and I have degenerative disc disease in my lower back. I have a disc that pushes on my sciatic nerve. I've been in nerve pain everyday for 16 years now and so, I hate it.

47:08 It's awful for the obvious reasons, but at the same time, looking back on what God has done in my life as a result of the pain, like a direct result of me going through the suffering and the misery of chronic nerve pain has been the most transformative element that God has used in my life to make me into who I am today.

47:27 And so, I can hate the pain because pain is awful, but I could also love it at the same time and go, "I never would have picked this for myself. Never. I would have immediately drop kicked it out of my life to the detriment of my own spiritual growth and development, to the detriment of my marriage now, to the detriment of my parenting, my relationship with God, I would have taken the pain and said no and chosen a life of comfort, and not been where I am right now in my relationship with God as a result.

47:57 And so, what would I pick? Well, I'd pick the pain because being in a better spot with the Lord and with other people is always going to be a better thing, but I had to go through the pain in order to experience that.

48:11 Paul: So I think there's a good way of silencing those questions.

48:20 Shelby: Great. I'll write this down.

48:23 Paul: Because you have to look at this more big picture. It's very clear. This is Paul's teaching on suffering in Romans 8. It's very clear that for our good and His glory, God has chosen for His children to live in a miserably fallen, dysfunctional world. That's not you being singled out. That's everybody okay.

48:54 Now, if God wanted to, the moment you believe, He could've just yanked you up to glory, but He chose not to do that and so, I never start with, "Why did I have to go through this," because it's not just me. It's God's global design for all of His children between the "already" of conversion, the "not yet" of the homegoing, we're going to live in this broken world and that means suffering.

49:35 It'll enter your door. If you're not suffering now, you will someday or you're near somebody who is. And so, every time I suffer, I don't say, "Well, who's God and maybe it's not true, and why does He to do this?" I say, "Oh, yes, this is my address. This is where this perfectly holy One has chosen for me to live."

50:02 And Acts 17, He chooses the exact place we live and the exact length of our days. I don't actually choose my address, God does; and my address is earth groaning, itself waiting for redemption. So for me, once I've gotten there, I don't have to revisit this all the time. I just go, "Oh yes, this is my address. I live in a bad neighborhood, but that's where I've been chosen to live. And the guy next to me, he lives in a bad neighborhood, too. And the guy across the street lives in a bad neighborhood, too. And the guy in the city over here lives in a bad neighborhood, too."

50:50 Shelby: Different way, totally different way of thinking about it.

50:51 Paul: "I'm not being abused by God. I'm not being forsaken by God." He's not choosing favorites. This is our address and being a believer doesn't give you a ticket out. Your ticket has been punched and it's going to happen, but it's not happening right now.

51:12 Shelby: Yes, and having that perspective, I think, can really radicalize the way that we view life's big problems and life's little problems. I've seen so many people caught up, myself included, in like, "Yes, there's the big problems with life." I have a tendency to deal with the bigger problems and go, "What is God doing here?"

51:29 I have a really hard time with the smaller problems where I'm, like you mentioned, like your car having trouble or you're late for something or all the life's little inconveniences, all that kind of stuff. I have a tendency to get caught up in the minutia of all that and be frustrated.

51:45 I become a functional atheist in those smaller moments, but having these intentional reminders, what you're talking about here is like, "Oh yes, of course, things aren't working properly. We live in a world that's tainted by sin." It's just poisoned by sin all over the place. It's not just the moral sin that's inside of us and in other people.

52:08 The earth is affected by the fact that sin has come into this address that we live at, and it's affecting everything. It'll be wiped clean, it'll be taken care of and restored completely, but why am I surprised when my car doesn't work the way that I want it to, when the little light comes on in the dashboard. Why am I surprised by that? I should expect that kind of stuff, as opposed to expecting things to move smoothly.

52:33 Paul: Yes, in the Old Testament, it's wheels falling off wagons.

52:37 Shelby: Yes, that's the check engine light for the past.

52:39 Paul: Yes, that's right. So here's what we're saying. Faith in God is the ultimate redefinition of everything that is. That's what it is.

52:56 Shelby: Faith in God... say that again.

52:57 Paul: Is the ultimate redefinition of everything that is. And so, you know, we just talked about something that's just very practical. You just say, "I believe God is in charge and He's chosen that this is my address, and I'm not singled out and I'm going to live a life of faith, attending to my responsibilities." Paul says, "A quiet life. Mind your own business, working with your hands and entrust the rest to my Lord."

53:44 God is creator. God is sovereign. Third is our God as Savior. This really interacts with this life in a fallen world. It means I can live in this world of imperfection, dysfunction with my own sin, weakness, and failures with hope because there's a Redeemer.

54:22 And with all the things that are heartbreaking to me, I believe that no one or nothing lives beyond God's power to redeem and so, I view all these things that are anxiety-producing through the lens of that hope and that redemption is God's job. I can't redeem all of this. I can be a tool of His work, but He has to do the work and it means I also know that ultimately, He is going to redeem everything.

55:12 One of the last promises of the Bible is, "Behold, I come to make all things new," that everything will be made new again, and we will live and reign with our Lord forever and ever in peace and righteousness. So redemption then becomes a lens through which I look at everything.

55:42 It means I don't give into the frustration of my own failure, the frustration of the failures [of] people around me because I know change really is possible. God turns thieves into generous people and haters into lovers and the proud into humble and the violent into peaceful. And redemption is such a beautiful way to think about all the things that give us concern and so, I want to be part of, I want to live part of the most important agenda in the universe — redemption.

56:28 Shelby: Yes, what would you say to someone who is in a situation where they have a person in their life... they're a believer, they would say that this person in their life is also following Jesus, they've experienced that redemption of coming into a relationship with Him, but the person that they're experiencing on a regular basis is not changed, is not transformed?

56:59 They don't seem to be living a life of redemption. They would call themselves a believer. They would say all the right things, but their life doesn't look much any different than it did before or they're kind of caught in a pattern or a habit. There's an area of blindness in their life that they're unable to address.

57:17 Let's say I'm dealing with that. There's a person in my life who won't change and I'm feeling the sting of that, the pain of that. How would you talk to me in dealing with someone who's not experiencing that?

57:32 Paul: Well, I would first say, if redemption is easy, it wouldn't have required the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension. If redemption were easy, it wouldn't have taken the thousand years of the plan of redemption to finally set up the situation where the Son of God would leave eternity and come to earth, suffer the fallen creation, live righteously on our behalf, defeat the enemy, and hang on a cross.

58:08 Shelby: So appropriately framing things to start. Let's look at it correctly.

58:11 Paul: Yes, you know and so, I want to understand that redemption takes massive divine intervention, the miracle of divine intervention, so as I'm frustrated with the seeming unchangeability of this person, I don't step in and try to do the Messiah's job.

58:45 That happens so often. "Maybe if I confront him enough," and I just become an ugly person that a person doesn't want to be around. So we know that change is the result of God's grace, so the only thing I can do is I want to be a living tool of God's grace in that person's life and entrust everything else to the Lord.

59:17 Shelby: Yes, so you're not saying don't confront people when you see obvious sin. It's just that you're not called to be the Holy Spirit in people's lives.

59:24 Paul: Yes, and the way that you confront... you know, the way Nathan confronted David was not to say, burst into the throne saying, "You're a murderer and adulterer. David would have never heard that. He told him a story. Story came out of David's life because he was once a shepherd and at the end of the story, David indicts himself. He says this man should die and Nathan said, "You're the man."

59:53 Shelby: "You're the man. You do the math." Yes, that's good.

59:58 Paul: So the Bible gives us examples of how to confront but ultimately, I can't change another person. You know of many believers [who] deal with unbelieving adult children. You have children in your house, they live in the same house, and one believes and one doesn't.

1:00:26 You can't grab that child by the back of the neck and throw him into the kingdom. You just don't have that ability and so, we're always going to be in situations where we are confronted with the fact that there is a Redeemer and we're not Him. And I would say it's very, very important with a person who's close to you, you see massive need for change and it doesn't seem [to be] happening, they're stuck to just embrace your own inability.

1:01:03 Shelby: Which is a pain in and of itself, like a form of suffering.

1:01:06 Paul: It is suffering and if that person is your husband or your wife or one of your children or your boss or a neighbor, you're going to suffer. And it again teaches you that you're not sovereign, but the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. You don't threaten a person into change. You just don't.

1:01:46 If you're screaming to your child up the stairway, "I told you to go to bed ten times. You do not want to have me come up those steps. If I come up those steps, it'll be on the news." Now, is that child thinking that moment, "Oh, he's right. I am a sinner. I do live for myself. What a wise person I have in my life. I'm so thankful." There's no way that child is thinking that. It just doesn't work.

1:02:22 I gave that in a parent-child thing, but you can say anything with it. If you're in the face of another adult so close that they can feel your breath and you're saying inflammatory things to them, mean, angry things, no one has ever been in that situation and been thankful. No one's ever in that situation searching their heart. All they want is for you to stop and they want to get away from you. It doesn't work because we're stepping into trying to be that person's messiah.

1:02:57 Shelby: Which is the M.O. of pretty much everything you see out there on the internet of people yelling at other people, which is why Jesus's approach is so revolutionary, for one, but the opposite of the inclination within our sinful desires to get other people to do what we want them to do or make them feel shame or that we want them to change, so we scream at them until they change, but they don't. Jesus comes in and does the opposite of that and that's where actual, real life change happens.

1:03:32 Paul: It's hilarious, in an important way, to think that raising volume can create change, to think that harsher language could create change. I mean, it's just so dumb when you think about it, but we all fall into it because we don't actually believe in those moments there's a Redeemer and He's not us.

1:03:57 Shelby: Yes, it's as if you're trying... you ever been to a different country and you're talking to someone who doesn't speak your language, and then you just start saying it louder, that then maybe they'll understand. It's like, no, they still don't understand what you're saying. We do the same thing all the time.

1:04:12 Paul: So I was lost in South Korea because I'm a wanderer and I don't mind being lost. And so, I walked into a little Korean bakery and I said, "I'm lost." And the guy says, "Where are you from in America, mister?" And without getting the clue, I said, "Philadelphia." He just started laughing at me.

1:04:45 Shelby: That's exactly... "You're the stupid one, not me. You're treating me as if I'm stupid, but you're the stupid one."

1:04:52 Paul: Not only did I try to bridge language by being loud, I didn't need to because he spoke English. So I want to say again, the most beautiful of lies is when I live like I actually believe that God is the creator, the sovereign, and the Savior.

1:05:14 And, you know, I'm a parent of four adult children and every night before Luella and I go to bed, we do this with our children. We do it every night and we're not going to stop doing it 'til we're gone. We once again entrust all the concerns we have for them, whether they're spiritual, physical, material, we trust to the Lord and because of that, we can go to bed and rest, and we're not tossing all night playing "if I can only do this, if I can only do that, if I can only do this, I could only do that."

1:05:56 And in our lives, we try to incarnate the love, mercy, grace, faithfulness of Jesus. And because of that, we have beautiful relationships with them because they don't think, "Oh, mom and dad are coming this weekend.

1:06:11 Shelby: Right, yes, you're not a burden to them because you're a source of life.

1:06:13 Paul: Because we haven't tried to be sovereign in their lives. We haven't set our purpose rules, like going into a house and sort of criticizing the way people keep the house, or all those things that you get into. And we surely haven't tried to be Redeemer. It's just such a better way of living.

1:06:39 Okay, so this paragraph... then the sinner has this definition that faith is believing that God exists and that He rewards those who seek Him, living like you believe it has three case studies in it: Abel, Enoch, and Noah. And they all picture something that only faith will produce in you.

1:07:13 ^4aBy faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous. Faith will produce worship that's acceptable to God. It doesn't mean that he was a perfect man, but he came with a heart that produced something that's acceptable to God. I want that and it's faith in God that produces that. Out of this life of faith comes this life of the worship of God.

1:07:59 Enoch. ⁵Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God.

1:08:09 Shelby: That was verse five, yes.

1:08:11 Paul: Faith produces a life of obedience. So isn't that great? We have worship. We have obedience. I mean, if you said what are two of the most important qualities in the life of a Christian, it's that you're living a life of worship and you're living a life of obedience.

1:08:39 And so, it's intentional that their stories are briefly told from the vantage point of what is faith because we're being given living examples of the second half of this. If you believe that God exists, you'll worship. If you believe that God exists, you'll obey.

1:09:01 There's one more. ⁷By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.

1:09:17 Now, what's the story of Noah? It's building this huge boat on dry land for 120 years to the mockery of everyone around him. Patience because faith is the willingness to wait and that's exhibited all throughout the rest of this passage because we do live between the "already" and the "not yet".

1:10:07 It's such as beautiful for me, it's a tear-inducing example of a man under attack who's just willing to wait and wait for him was work. Wait for us is work. Wait is not passive. It's active. You get at what God has called for you to do, but there are so many promises that you have to wait for. Don't stop. Don't get mad.

1:10:34 This is not the dentist's office where you're a man and you've waited for 45 minutes, and you're now reading Women's Day magazine or something. This is meaningful wait and waiting by faith is not just about what you get at the end of the wait, it's about what you become as you wait.

1:11:02 So what developed in Noah as he's waiting is reverential fear of God. The more he meditated on God — which he had to do or else, he would have just thrown down his tools and said, "This is [inaudible], I'm not doing this anymore — the more he became convinced that God could do what He said He was going to do.

1:11:22 Shelby: Yes, I think that a lot of people view the prize, the light at the end of the tunnel as the ultimate reward at the end of waiting for so long (patience), but I like your distinction there of saying it's not just this one thing, it's who you become in that process and there's no substitute for it. You can't shortcut your way into patience. You have to go through the experiences in order to become a person that God wants you to be.

1:11:56 Paul: Romans references Abraham and said, as he was waiting for this promised son, he grew strong in faith, being more persuaded that God was able to do what He promised. There's what we're talking about.

1:12:11 Shelby: But how many of us just throw in the towel and just be like...

1:12:16 Paul: Well, I think if your patience is a story of ever weakening faith, it's actually impatience. Because God didn't deliver quickly, your faith wanes. If you continue to go strong in faith, that's patience and a greater willingness to wait, more and more convinced that God will be faithful to His promise.

1:12:47 So it's really exciting to me that in the paragraph that is the Bible's single best sentence defining faith, you get these three examples. Faith produces worship. Faith in God produces obedience. Faith in God engenders patience. I mean, it's just gorgeous.

1:13:11 And so for me — if I could just say this — I read this and say, "Oh, God, please make that me. Please make that me. Meet me by Your grace. I want to worship You in everything I do. I want to be obedient." The heart of obedience is not seeing how close I can get to the fence. I want to be in the middle of the yard. I want to be content to be there. And for me, I'm an endlessly impatient person. If I have a spiritual struggle, that's it and I want to live a life of patience.

1:13:47 Shelby: Yes, I'd say that what if we shifted our default to a life of faith by all these examples that you talked about that we just read in the scripture? What if those were our default, as opposed to the natural inclination to be impatient, to try to control everything, to be frustrated when things don't work out the way that we want them to?

1:14:13 Those are usually our defaults. What if we just trusted God? What if we believed that He was good, that He cared about us, that He had our best interest in mind, that patience was an avenue to becoming a better person, becoming a more godly person, becoming a person of depth and character and integrity? What if we just trusted Him as our default? It's just so difficult to do that because our sinful life, our sinful inclinations, our sinful desires get in the way of becoming what God wants us to be.

1:14:47 Paul: Wouldn't you like to be near a person who worships God and not themselves, who obeys God and doesn't set their own rules, who is known for their patience? I mean, that's the relationship of everybody's dreams. Everybody.

1:15:10 That's the marriage of your dreams. That's the church of your dreams. That's the job of your dreams. This is the best way. How about praying that you would be that person? That's faith. Faith is saying, "I look at these examples, I'm not there yet. I'm not sure I'd be taken up because I'm committed as being righteous. I'm not sure you'd lift me, put me into your story as an example of patience and God, I want to be that and I know that much of what I still do is motivated by worship of self and not worship of You." I mean, if you want to have goals for your life, wow.

1:15:53 Shelby: And coming face to face with that is a means of God's grace, that God will reveal that to you, put the mirror in your face, help you to see who you truly are and just go, "I am way far away from where God wants me to be and where I need to be as a person. God, will you help me?" A neediness posture is a great place to be. It's an accurate view of reality.

1:16:14 Paul: So faith is "I make this my quest". There [are] so many things that can capture me, so many "if only or I would love to be or I would love to have". How about this? "I want to be an Abel. I want to be an Enoch. I want to be a Noah, not because I idolize those men, but I love what their lives represent and I want to live that way because I believe this God exists; and I believe He is who He says He is and I want to worship Him. I want to obey Him and I want to be willing to wait because His timing is always right."

1:17:00 Shelby: Yes, even in the midst of struggles and doubts. I just told you earlier before we got started this morning recording this podcast that I had a conversation yesterday over Zoom with someone who was in prison and one of the things that he said that really struck me was he's going through a lot of doubts right now, wrestling with eternity, whether the Bible is true, whether God is sovereign, all those kind[s] of things.

1:17:26 And he goes, "But at the same time, I am just living obediently. Even though I don't know for sure that this is the truth, if God is hearing me when I pray, if the Bible is actually accurate, I'm just living obediently." And I was in awe of that because he's already been in prison for eleven years. He's going to be in for another seven at least.

1:17:51 And he's like, "I'm just going to default to being obedient whether or not I know for sure this is actually real." I was like, "Wow, what a beautiful picture of faith." That's what he's living out behind prison walls. If only I were like that.

1:18:09 Paul: Yes, absolutely. So what the rest of this passage does is — and I don't know that people understand this — it's not just a bunch of random examples of what faith is. That's not what this chapter is. It's really quite organized and what it does is it connects faith to fundamental issues of life.

1:18:35 Verses 13-16 connect faith to identity and destiny. Two things we think about all the time is who am I and where's my life going. Every human being does. 17-19 is how does faith operate when life makes no sense at all and it tells the Abraham story, and we'll talk about that.

1:19:05 20-24 is the life of faith is a life that's propelled by God's promises, rooted in God's blessing. It connects faith to God's covenant, the blessing being passed down. So what orients me is not my complaints. What orients me is a sense of God's blessing and I want to pass that blessing down to my children and blessing down to their children. We'll talk about it. It's a covenant way of living life.

1:19:38 Next, it goes to how faith allows you to retell your history, to reunderstand your history, and it goes back to the story of Moses and tells it through the eyes of faith. Moses, Egypt, all that stuff is retold. It's told in scripture already, but it's retold from the lens of "this is about faith" and it's incredibly helpful to see the way that story is retold. And then, the passage ends — but that's 23-31 what I just talked about — it ends 32-40 with faith and living between the "already" and the "not yet".

1:20:37 How does faith operate when you know you probably won't see all of God's promises? You won't see the end of the story. Well, that's important because that's most of us. So this passage actually takes faith as a way of talking about some of the most significant things that we all have to face and we all struggle with. So it's not just random examples. It's actually quite well-organized to get us to understand the transformational nature of faith in God. That those blows my mind.

1:21:25 Shelby: Yes, I'm glad you fleshed that out, too, because people can read through Hebrews 11 and just go, "Okay, here's a little snippet, here's a little snippet, here's a little snippet." I'm glad that you kind of unpack the structure of the way the chapter is written and how it communicates very specific things, but overarching examples of what it can mean to be a person of faith, not just these individual, unrelated things. They're actually all interconnected with one another.

1:21:52 Paul: And I want to just talk about scripture. I think often scripture is more linear and developmentally logical than we make it and that's because logically began in the mind of God, being sensible, being able to interpret, unpack things — it all started in the mind of God and so, He laid out His revelation.

1:22:19 There's a reason that things fall down the way they do and I'm always looking for what are the markers of purpose, where are the divider lines, where are the places where the subject has changed because I believe that part of what the Bible means when it says that all scripture is profitable is that there's a reason and logic by the way the revelation unfolds.

1:22:49 And so, what we have here is not just a group of randomly picked examples of faith. They're quite well-organized to hit at issues that are either already in your life or going to come up as you think about a life of faith. So let's read Hebrews 11:13-16. Go ahead and read that.

1:23:17 Shelby: Okay. ¹³These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. ¹⁴For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. ¹⁵If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

1:23:54 Paul: So we've talked about this before, but human beings made in the image of God do not live life based on the facts of their experience, but based on their interpretation of the facts. Everybody's interpreter and everybody looks to something to make sense out of their life because we're rational. We want life to make sense. We get very, very frustrated, discouraged when life doesn't make sense.

1:24:25 And two of the most fundamental questions in the mind of every human being, not just Christians, is who am I and a corollary question of that is what is my life going, what is this all about? And so, identity and destiny are just intensely human thoughts. And so, faith again, flips the script. It defines those things for me.

1:25:09 Here it says "they acknowledge [this is identity] they were strangers and exiles". Now, that doesn't sound very positive. So there are two sides of this. A stranger, an exile is living in a land alienated to his home, different in endless ways. And because of that, the people around him will misunderstand him and misjudge him because he's connected to something else.

1:26:02 So part of what faith does is make me willing to accept an identity that many Christians struggle with. I'm going to be weird. I'm going to be different and if my goal in life is to get global acceptance, I'm going to compromise my faith all over the place because I'm different and it doesn't take long for the people around me to get the fact that I'm different. And that often results in misunderstanding, some mistreatment, maybe rejection. Am I willing?

1:26:59 Shelby: Yes, being a stranger and an... exile is not a word that we use very much anymore in our language today, but being a stranger in an exile on the earth is it taps into those feelings that we all experience starting in late elementary, early middle school where we want to be accepted.

1:27:24 We don't want to feel like an outsider, and we don't want to feel like we're weird and we don't belong; and that doesn't end when grade school ends. It carries on over into everything else, which is a lot of reasons why people don't share their faith, for example.

1:27:41 They don't want to be looked at as a weird person or an exile or a stranger. They want to be accepted and they want to feel like a part of the fold, and coming to grips with the fact that you're an alien here on earth, that this is not your home... well, actually, it seems like a negative thing, like you said, but it's actually quite comforting knowing that my permanent address is somewhere else and I'm only here for a limited amount of time, so yes, I will be different while I'm here and I need to accept that before moving forward. It actually really helps going about daily life.

1:28:22 Paul: Yes, and let's take that back to an even more fundamental level. Most human beings believe that identity formation is their job. My job is to find an identity that I'm comfortable with, live it out. No, no, no, no, no. If God's creator, identity is His job and if He's my savior, that levels that up because 1 Corinthians 6 says you were bought with a price. You are not your own. You are who I have chosen you to be.

1:29:05 And so, when it comes to stranger, I didn't have a vote. This is what God has chosen for me to be. It's actually an honor that I have been chosen for this because the reason is I have been transported from the kingdom of darkness and taken into the kingdom of His dear Son. How beautiful is that!

1:29:34 Shelby: Yes, it's not a curse.

1:29:37 Paul: No, it's not. It's an honor. Peter says it all the time. If you suffer for your faith, you are blessed. Now, we don't look at suffering as a blessing usually, but that's what faith does. Faith says, "Yes, I will take with joy, I will take this identity with honor. I'm not different because I just want to be different. I'm a provocateur. No, I'm different because constitutionally, my heart has been transformed. I'm different. I've been transformed. I've been changed by divine grace. I'm not the same as everybody else."

1:30:17 Shelby: Yes, and that's a good thing.

1:30:20 Paul: It's beautiful and that means then, I don't live for acceptance. I've said this to you and you laugh when I say it. I don't give a rip what people think about me. No, I mean that in the right way. I don't live for that human endorsement. You come to me with something that's from God's word and you have a concern about me, I'm going to listen, of course; but I don't enter a room thinking how many people are going to accept me because I know in many environments, they are just not going to.

1:31:03 I mean, I face it all the time. When people ask me what I do, I don't start with saying, "Well, I'm a pastor," because that kind of ends the conversation. I say I'm an author and they ask me what I write about and I say everyday life topics. "And what's your take on those?" And I say, "Well, I believe the Bible's an ultimate source of wisdom," I read from the Bible.

1:31:25 Often, people walk away at that point and I'm so thankful that God has brought me to the point where I don't think, "Oh, please don't walk away. Please like me." I'm sad they walk away because I want to get to the gospel with them, but it's not because they've rejected me because I know what I've been called to be, and my stranger, alien identity is the sign of something huge and wonderful that's happened to me. I'm living by the rules on another kingdom. I'm serving a better King. Praise Jesus. Praise Jesus. Praise Jesus and because of that, you're not going to understand me and you may reject me.

1:32:15 Shelby: Yes, it's that rooting your identity in the correct place that it helps you become not only a truer sense of who you are as God's child, but it helps you become this city on a hill that the Bible talks about of people going, "Why do they not..." I'm sure a lot of people would look at your life and go, "Why does he not care what other people think about him when I feel enslaved to the fact that I only care what other people think about me."

1:32:46 Some people live that way every single day and I know that they would look at a life like yours and go, "Man, I wish I could be like that." Well, it's right here. The invitations right here. Know whose you are.

1:32:59 So what we're saying is — and it's why this passage flows this way — is faith fundamentally changes the way you answer a question that all human beings ask, and between the "already" and the "not yet", God's told me what my identity is and I believe that a lot of Christians are running from that.

1:33:38 I'll give you an example. During the summer, there are churches across the nation — I believe these are well meaning, good-hearted people; I just think they get it wrong — who have a series called "At the movies", where they pick a movie and they redesign their stage and maybe even the lobby where you walk in to look like that movie; and that's trying to take an alien message and make it something else.

1:34:28 I want to bring people into a room, and they hear a message and they say, "What in the world am I hearing? This is the craziest thing I've ever heard." And I want to say, "Yes, it's nuts, but come tomorrow. Come the next Sunday," and all of a sudden, they begin to hear the message of the gospel.

1:34:53 One of my mentors, Jack Miller, used to say the best service to bring an atheist to is a prayer meeting. Confront him with people who are actually saying words to Somebody they can't see, they can't hear, they can't touch. Confront them with that. That's alien stuff. That's exile stuff.

1:35:14 And I don't think the way to share the gospel is compromising my identity. You don't have to be weird for weird's sake. Of course not, but if you distill it down to what's understandable and acceptable, you've distilled the message down so much, it doesn't exist anymore.

1:35:46 Shelby: Yes, trying to make it culturally relevant, pull it through the lens of culture, as opposed to showing people a grander vision of what the real story actually is.

1:35:56 Paul: So what is Sunday morning? It's a gathering of aliens embracing their alien identity and saying to their Lord, "We're willing," and hearing from Him His promises, His grace, His presence; and it shouldn't be anything else and we make it something else. It just doesn't work.

1:36:29 Shelby: Yes, and becomes a spectacle and becomes about the thing, as opposed to about Him.

1:36:35 Paul: Yes, yes. Well, in the time we have left, there's a second thing here. It's they desire a better country that is a heavenly one. That's godly, holy dissatisfaction because the reason I'm dissatisfied this world is I've been made for another world. That's C.S. Lewis.

1:37:02 And so, there are only two ways of living. You can work your best to make this a paradise and everybody tries to do that because Ecclesiastes says that eternity has been wired into our hearts, so we got paradise inside of us, a longing for paradise. But let me say you will never turn your marriage into a paradise. You will never raise paradise children. You'll never have a paradise boss. You'll never have a paradise vacation.

1:37:46 So you can't live with a destination mentality, that this is my destination and I got to do everything I can to make this the most pleasurable, comfortable destination ever. That again, leads to endless heartache and frustration, anger, depression, anxiety, whatever. That's not what this is.

1:38:12 This is a time of preparation for a final destination. That's what this is. Now, you know this. Preparation for anything is hard. I played football in high school. That month of summer practices in 90° heat, three hours the morning, three hours in the afternoon was like horrible. A lot less exciting than the game, but it was necessary and so, all that we're going through now is not meant to be paradise.

1:38:57 You have to live with eternity in view or you're never, ever going to be happy, joyful, hopeful, excited, courageous. You just won't be and again, sadly, Shelby, we're talking about the lives of many Christians who just live with frustration and anger; and you know, Christian men are punching a hole in their wall and Christian women who have just basically given up on God, and they're a shell of the faith they once had. It's all because they want paradise now and faith is embracing paradise, knowing you've been chosen for that, but living with that in view.

1:39:51 Shelby: Yes, but not yet. That, in many ways, this is a training montage that we're going through right now before we get to the actual thing. You mentioned the football practice and I remember my coach — I played soccer in high school — my coach saying, "Anyone who's playing soccer on my team for practice, it is not going to be soccer practice to start. It is going to be long-distance running. That is what we will be doing."

1:40:18 And I was like, "Oh, I hate the idea of running and running and running," but it's just necessary because then, when you finally get to the game, you're in shape and you can handle what the game throws at you. It's a training montage. It's patience. It's suffering. It's going through the difficulties, but there's an actual utopia on the other side.

1:40:39 As much as we try to make this into utopia, it will never happen. There is the perfect thing on the other side that God will eventually bring there, but until then, we can't have it. Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to try to make this world a better place. God calls us to do that and be part of the solution here. Be that city on a hill, but hoping that the right policy or the right behavior or the right wealth or whatever will get us to that utopia, it's just a pipe dream. It's never going to happen.

1:41:14 Paul: Yes, the most socially acceptable way for a Christian to give up on paradise is not to remove the doctrine of eternity from their belief system, but in their living to try to make paradise known and this is something I've repeated before on podcasts.

1:41:44 I will never stop repeating it, that the enemy of our souls will [be] glad to give us our formal theology, if he can control our hearts and so, your Lord isn't satisfied that eternity is in your theology if you're obsessed with making life paradise now. It's not faith. Faith is "I get I was made for another country. I get I long for another country." That longing is not a bad thing. That longing is a God-glorifying thing.

1:42:23 Shelby: Yes, that's an important distinction.

1:42:23 Paul: It's a beautiful thing, but this isn't it and the ardure of this — the Bible says this in a thousand ways — is meant to change me. The Bible never, ever backs away from hardship. It says hardship has a purpose. It's preparatory. It's character-developing.

1:42:53 It creates God-ward consciousness and all those good things that preparation is meant to do. Like in sports, every drill and practice has a purpose. It may not be the thing you like to do, may not [be] the thing you enjoy, but it's preparing you for that thing that is coming.

1:43:20 Shelby: Yes, can you help me understand, maybe with a practical example of what that could look like? I mean, you've used the parenting illustration already this morning and you talked about marriage. Is there another kind of a way that I can understand that maybe God is working in my life to prepare me for the inevitability of being restored?

1:43:46 Paul: Sure. I mean, so many people — let's take job, career — so many people look there for a level of heart fulfillment that that will never give you and so, they think, "Well, maybe a different kind of work or maybe a promotion," and they're always chasing this.

1:44:10 It's not what it's meant to do and when you ask it to do that, it just creates heartache and dissatisfaction. You have underbeat of hatred towards your boss or other people have gotten in your way. You're always looking over your shoulder. Maybe there's a better firm to work for and that paradise work is going to happen someday.

1:44:47 We're not going to float. We're going to live in a new heavens and new earth. We're going to be laboring. It's going to be perfect and with satisfied hearts, but we're not going to get that from our labor now. We're just not. It's not the purpose of it and all the faithfulness of work, all the discipline of work, all the self-sacrifice of work are all changing me in ways that prepare me for what's to come.

1:45:20 Shelby: Yes, super helpful.

1:45:23 Paul: And you can just put anything in there. Although all the domains where we live everyday, you can try to turn those into a paradise that they will never be. And so, I love the picture of these people just trudging along, looking for a country, knowing this is not it. It's just so beautiful. And so, here is faith completely altering the way we ask two of the most fundamental questions a human being could ask — who am I and where's my life going?

1:46:09 Paul: It just makes me want to get up and jump up and down because I don't think we preach how fundamentally transformational faith in God is. Now, we know that's impossible apart from grace and the growth of faith. Faith is grace. So we're actually being changed by grace, but faith is the vehicle.

1:46:36 It just changes everything and we just begun to see that in our conversation today. I just don't struggle with identity issues. I'm so thankful that faith in my Lord has just ended that for me. Oh, I did big time and I was enormously self-conscious, and always trying to achieve. I'm just so thankful that's... and I rest in the identity that has been assigned to me and has been given to me as one of God's child. I'm an alien because I'm not in this world; heart-wise, I'm in Christ.

1:47:28 Shelby: Yes, and I've seen that in you, not in just what we talk about here, what you preach from a stage, what you write in a book; but I've seen that in you as well. Sometimes, I'll be honest, it's a little off-putting for me to see that in you because I'm still struggling with it in many ways. I say, "Why doesn't he care about this or this or this?"

1:47:50 I'll ask those questions privately and as I work that out of my brain, I'm like, "Oh, the problem is not necessarily that he doesn't care. The problem is that I care too much about what other people think or whatever and he knows who he is, he knows whose he is and that shapes the way he lives his everyday life."

1:48:08 It could be for other people to see someone like that and go, "I kind of don't like that because it makes me feel insecure," but the problem is not the way that you're behaving. The problem is what's going on with my heart and I'm thankful to have someone like that in my life that can point me in that direction.

1:48:28 Paul: Let me explain. I love people. I love being with people. I just don't need them to validate me and I love when my labors achieve some success, but I don't need my labors validated by success. And so, it's not that those things are not important to me, it's that I've gotten my validation.

1:48:55 I got it vertically, so I don't need to shop for it horizontally and so, there are a lot of things that once bother me that just don't bother me anymore. I'm thankful for that. It's not that I don't care about things or I don't care about people. It's far from that, but that life of constantly seeking validation, I'd rather be an exile.

1:49:25 Shelby: Yes, and I've seen you live in exile in freedom. I've seen you live that way and I would encourage anybody who's younger, too, who might be watching or listening to this, is find a person. It doesn't necessarily have to be an older person in your life, just find a person in your life who lives that way consistently.

1:49:44 Find that person and then emulate that — someone who cares about what God thinks first and what everybody else thinks second. The fear of man is something that traps almost everybody on a continual basis, so find someone to help lead that way and then, follow the example.

1:50:02 Paul: And I would say the same thing about find somebody who lives with eternity in view, who's not just constantly chasing paradise. You know, there's a statistic that's out that says that 85% of the graduates from American seminaries are out of the ministry in five years. Not leaving a church, leaving ministry; and I think a lot of that is chasing paradise.

1:50:38 "I dream of what I want my ministry life to be like. I dream of what I want the church to be like. It never turns out that way," and being a pastor is a call to be willing to suffer and you have to deal with constant incompletion because people are not complete, and a surrounding world that doesn't get you and doesn't understand what this group of people is about. I mean, it's all those things and I think pastors end up disappointed, discouraged, burned out and they just want to sell computers.

1:51:23 Shelby: Yes, I've asked older people, too, who have been in ministry for a long time, "Was this your dream job," and they're like, "Oh, no, my dream job is a UPS driver," and I was like, "What?" "Yes, everyday, you deliver the packages and then, you're done. You don't have to think about it anymore." I'm like, "Oh, yes, that kind of makes sense to me." They're joking, of course, but yes, I get it. You're never going to close the book and be like, "I'm done." It just doesn't happen that way.

1:51:47 Paul: I think it's one of the things that motivates me as a painter is completion. I know that someday this thing is going to be complete. I can look at it and say, "Done."

1:51:59 Shelby: Yes, finished, behind the glass in a frame. It's finished.

1:52:01 Paul: So we're talking about things that are just profoundly important and I would ask again, the people who are watching or listening, be honest in this moment, where do you search for identity and are you hunting for paradise right here, right now and disappointed because you haven't been able to achieve paradise? That longing for paradise is not wrong in itself. It's been hardwired for God, but this is not a destination. This is a preparation for final destination and getting that is just so important.

1:52:48 Shelby: Yes, that's great.

1:52:50 Paul: I love this passage. I think whenever I studied again, it caused me to want God's help to be better and do better, and it causes me to love Him more deeply and more fully. As I was studying for today, I was just filled with thankfulness that this is what God does for us and all He says is this — "Would you believe in Me? Would you believe in Me in your life? Would you let that belief shape your life? Come, look what I have for you." It's beautiful.

1:54:00 Shelby: Yes, it's the best place to be. "Would you believe in Me?" I think that we all need to remind ourselves of that on a continual basis in the big things and then, in the small ones as well.

1:54:10 Paul: And be willing to look in the mirror of God's word like we're doing and ask, "Where am I not? Where is there subtle patterns of disbelief?" Maybe Creator amnesia, sovereignty amnesia, Savior amnesia; and how is that depicting itself in the way I live, my emotional state, the way I conduct relationships, the way I deal with my possessions and my money, my expectations for my marriage and my children, my work?

1:54:55 This can be a real helpful lens on how you're living in those areas and it shouldn't be discouraging because self-examination is only terrifying if you forget grace. If you remember that when Jesus said, "It is finished," He meant it, that everything you will expose as you look in the mirror of God's word has already been covered by His person and work, you don't have to be afraid.

1:55:33 "Why would I be afraid of being known, of my heart being exposed if all of that has been taken care of in the righteous life, the substitutionary crucifixion, the victorious resurrection and the royal ascension of my Savior?

1:55:57 Shelby: Yes, the diagnosis that we experience here is always going to be a good thing when you know that there's going to be healing on the other side, when God is the one holding the scalpel. It's really important to understand to not be afraid of that, that the diagnosis leads to healing.

1:56:14 Paul: And don't be afraid of admitting that you don't measure up. Jesus measured up in every way precisely because He had no expectation that you would.

1:56:26 Shelby: Yes, yes, He knew you were a failure.

1:56:28 Paul: God's not surprised. "Oh, my goodness, what is going on here?"

1:56:32 Shelby: "I can't believe you can't get this right and you've been alive for 80 years, and you haven't done it yet?" No. Yes, give yourself grace there and know that there's ample grace at the fountain of living water.

1:56:43 Paul: And admission of weakness, failure, sin is a workroom for grace. Denial will never take you anywhere. Fear of looking into the mirror of this passage won't take you anywhere good. The God who calls you to look in the mirror of His Word is in you and with you and for you.

1:57:14 Shelby: Yes, and will lead you to the right places that He'd want you to go. That's great. Well, keep going.

1:57:20 Paul: Yes, we got more of this passage to look at. I really think that wherever else you go in scripture, it's really helpful to first ground your understanding of faith in Hebrews 11. I think when God stops and gives this much word space to a topic, I should say, "Okay, I need to pay attention because God thought this was important enough to give it this much time. Thank you.

1:57:56 Shelby: Yes, thank you.

1:57:57 Paul: It's been fun.