Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:01 <inaudible> well from the village church,
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Sermon Q and a on pastor Alex. And I'm here with pastor Michael and on June 20th, 2021, we preached a sermon about practical evangelism in a hurting world being authentic in the middle of our weakness. So pastor Michael, our question related to this today is how do I give God glory? When my spiritual growth was my decision? Like the emphasis on the mind. Yeah. That's important. Right? So, so to be clear for what it's worth, nobody explicitly is asking this question. Like, we know that it's wrong for us to like, be like, but I did that. Right. However, we've all thought this there's something in our hearts that keeps going. Yeah. But I didn't do that. Right. Look at all. I've done for you a little bit. For real. Yeah. The, uh, the hilarity
Speaker 2 00:01:00 Of this of this question is that it's like, it's like this 19 year old kid who inherits $10 million and a financial advisor, and then goes to his friends and says, I am
Speaker 3 00:01:09 Really good with money. No, you're not. That's ludicrous.
Speaker 2 00:01:14 Your entire life has been set up for you. And again, that's not bad. It's just, don't tell everybody you're like a financial wizard when you're actually just pretty darn lucky. So it's interesting because, um, there's an exercise that I heard a long time ago. And then our communications manager, Vicky Basinger, she took a couple of us through this and it's called the five whys. And the five why's actually came from the Toyota corporation, I believe in the 1940s. And, uh, they had this problem on their factory line and the workers kept like not solving the core issue. They just kept fixing like a broken belt. Well, why would they never asked why? Like, why was the belt broken? Right. And so here's a, here's a great illustration. So imagine you're you have a problem and your car will not start well, why this is the first one. We need to go five deep. Well, the battery is dead. Well, why? Well, because the alternator's not functioning. Well, why this number three, the alternator belt is broken. Why the alternative belt was beyond its useful service and not replaced.
Speaker 3 00:02:15 Why? Because the vehicle
Speaker 2 00:02:17 Wasn't maintained according to the schedule that the designer of the car set it to be
Speaker 1 00:02:21 Scheduled for. Right. Okay. There's the, yeah. There's
Speaker 2 00:02:23 The why you didn't do your maintenance. And so you're just keep replacing the battery. You know what I mean? It's like, no, like this is a symptom of a deeper, deeper pause, right? So when we talk about spiritual growth, there are so many factors that go into the person you are today, which is let's walk through a few of these factors. And I think each one of them force us to give God much glory and to give ourselves less glory for real. So what's the first factor.
Speaker 1 00:02:51 Yeah. So the first factor is your past. Like there's a reality. God has arranged everything that has made the person that you are today. Like your personality, you did not make your personality, right. God shaped that your upbringing, God arranged that your parents' marriage like, right. Uh, what you were exposed to and when you were exposed to it, all of these things together contribute to the person that you are today and you can't actually like claim credit for any of that.
Speaker 2 00:03:23 Right. I feel like it's somebody to say, if you grew up in the middle of the desert with divorced parents, or as an orphan, would you still be as awesome as you are
Speaker 1 00:03:31 Today? You would probably make decisions differently than you currently. And so
Speaker 2 00:03:35 The more mornings you pass them to as pivotal people that God has orchestrated really meaningful relationships. Like we did not choose our parents nor where our parents were born. We were put into a family sovereignly by, by God. Uh, but you also have like a mentor. Like I think about the mentors in my life. Um, God had been orchestrating something. Why did he bring those men into my life at that time? The amount of orchestration and then for us to connect and then, then to decide to pour into me. I mean, there's a lot of like,
Speaker 1 00:04:04 What if, what if, what if maybe
Speaker 2 00:04:06 It was an incredible Bible teacher, maybe you went to college and why did you get this teacher? And not that teacher in your English department or your science department or your Bible
Speaker 1 00:04:13 Department, and that made you make this decision. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 00:04:16 You know? And so you look at the Panorama of influential people and, uh, oftentimes the course of our lives, the habits, the patterns, um, are actually put into us by a really influential person.
Speaker 1 00:04:28 Yeah. Yeah. So I think another just reality to be aware of is the Providence of God, right? Like he is the supplier. He is the one who is giving resources at various times. Like, I think of like, I got into seminary, right? I didn't get into seminary without God orchestrating multiple things from multiple people who all kind of told me at the same time, I really think you should go into seminary. And then even then I didn't have the financial wherewithal to be able to handle that myself. So he had to orchestrate some other things to come alongside me. Like I could not be where I am at today. If he did not like sovereignly put his hand over each. And every part that contributed to
Speaker 2 00:05:13 It and like you and me here right now, um, you're not on staff at village church now, but like you were, and that happened because you started dating one of our elders daughter, our house is singles night, the amount of like things that had to happen for that relationship to be built. And we had a pastor resigned and I'm like, Hey, you want to go shoot,
Speaker 1 00:05:31 I'm going to go into kids men. Sure, sure. I'll figure that out.
Speaker 2 00:05:34 All right here, here's the next one God's designed for your body, your emotions and your mind, like these three things come together. Um, we have a daughter who has dyslexia and a few other challenging issues in terms of how she processes, uh, the world. Some people are born without limbs. Some people are born with emotional or mental health disorders. Like, like all of that comes together to form who you are. And there are some people who honestly, they don't have to deal with physical issues, psychological issues, emotional issues. Well, we'll praise God for that, but I've never met somebody who has a physical, emotional, or psychological or mental health issue, who is like, I chose that. I really, like, I thought, you know, today I'm going to be, I'm gonna have a mental health
Speaker 1 00:06:16 Crisis up and says, oh, that's what
Speaker 2 00:06:18 I want to do. Right. And so if the Lord is like giving you a physiological, biological, psychological, mental, emotional makeup that is allowing you to do these things, you take one of these off the table, your spiritual growth actually might look very different because you might not be able to do the things that you were doing. Right. This small example, I have a really hard time praying if I'm just sitting there, I need to be walking and using my body. If I'm a paraplegic, you know, it's going to be the hardest thing for me to overcome. How am I going to pray? Right. And that discipline would, it would be so much harder. I don't know at times if I would have the discipline to overcome it, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know what my life would look like. And so, um, just understanding even your body, mind and emotion and all that stuff.
Speaker 1 00:07:02 There's another category here that I think we need to talk about, which is so yeah, we have all of those pieces that God's sovereignly ordains. Right. But then we also have like, when you believe in Jesus, you get the holy spirit. Right. And who knows what, you know what wouldn't be there. If the holy spirit wasn't there, like what desires would be different if the holy spirit wasn't there, what, uh, what decisions would you not have made? What things would you not have thought of if the holy spirit was not living an active inside?
Speaker 2 00:07:34 Yeah. I often think when I look at, um, people who are really spiritually disciplined, I often think to myself, I wonder, I wonder if the holy spirit wasn't in you, if any of this would be happening. And if that's the case, well then at the, at the end of the day, when you go five wise, deep, right? Who ultimately is getting credit for this? Well, probably the reason I am doing what I'm doing, the reason I'm doing things that foster spiritual growth is because of a concoction of my past. Uh, my, at the Providence of God, pivotal people, the way God made my body, where he put me in time-space in history, the work of the holy spirit, you take all of these things and you aggregate them together. And how foolish of me to say,
Speaker 1 00:08:14 Look, I did humble pie. So
Speaker 2 00:08:19 Otherwise we become the kid who inherited $10 million in brags about how awesome we are with
Speaker 0 00:08:25 Let's not do that.
Speaker 1 00:08:26 Well, thank you so much for joining us for sermon Q and a remember,
Speaker 0 00:08:30 Give God every piece of the glory went for your decisions for your spiritual growth. Thanks for joining us.
