Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right. Welcome back to Ecosystem. It has been a while, but we are back. I am here with my co host, Grant.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Yo.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And there is a familiar face to New Life and Church 307, but not to the ecosystem yet. He's new to our ecosystem. Yes, he is a new species.
[00:00:20] Speaker C: I'm.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:21] Speaker C: Bringing in all types of viruses and things that have not been introduced to this ecosystem.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: We might not be able to handle it.
[00:00:28] Speaker C: I've been quarantining, preparing for this.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: Good, good. I'm glad that's. That's helpful. Yeah. Well, this is Mike. This is actually. This isn't just Mike. This isn't just Pastor Mike. This is Dr. Oh, dang. Mike Wilson. Yes.
[00:00:46] Speaker C: We keep that under Reverend Dr. Mike Wilson.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Reverend the Right Reverend Dr. Mike Wilson. I don't know what right reverend means.
[00:00:54] Speaker C: I don't either, but sounds good.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: The honorable right reverend.
[00:00:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Well, if you've watched the last few episodes of Ecosystem, then you know how this goes. We like to pull the curtains back behind a sermon series that we're doing and talk about the big picture of scripture. There's only so much we can get into on a Sunday morning, but there's a lot more to the conversation than what we can get into on a Sunday morning. And we have been in a series about pain and doubt. Um, so the most common question that anybody asks that I get asked as a pastor, I got asked it after service on a Sunday morning just a couple of weeks ago, is why? How in the world could all of this bad stuff happen? How do you explain that? And we can hint at that on a Sunday morning, right?
[00:01:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: We can get into the ballpark, but we can't unpack all of that in 30 minutes on a Sunday morning.
[00:01:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: So.
[00:01:53] Speaker C: Especially because everybody who asks that question is coming from a different place.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:56] Speaker C: So you want to have a conversation around that question, not a lecture usually.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. So that's what we're trying to do here. And before we jump into the content, I want to tell you that are watching, there are a couple of reasons why you might have clicked on this, this podcast. One is you might just be part of the Church 307 or New Life, Family. So you're watching and we love it. I'm glad. Or you might have just stumbled on this video because you're interested. Apologetics, theology, the big questions, theodicy, all the buzzwords. And if that's you, this is a great conversation. We're going to have a lot of fun. There's another reason why you might have clicked this link. You might be in a season of pain and doubt right now. And if that's you, I just want to tell you in advance that this conversation is probably not going to make you feel better.
And there's a reason for that. It's because when we're in a season of pain and doubt, we are asking emotional questions, like human questions, good questions. An emotional question is not a less valuable question. It just comes from a different place in our being. This conversation, where we're going to go today, is largely an intellectual question. It's a question we are processing with my more mind and less heart.
And a good theology or theodicy, which would be the technical term for what we're talking about today, can give you a framework for a season of doubt that can help you weather that season of doubt or pain. But it can't get you out of it because we're answering mind questions when you're asking a heart question. So if you're here and we get it. I know Mike myself, to varying degrees, grants over the last few years and over the last few weeks have been going through this season. So we are kind of talking in that kind of uncomfortable place of. We know we're talking about intellectual things where we can get a grasp on an answer, but that answer just doesn't make you feel any better.
[00:04:04] Speaker C: Yeah. You ever watch the TV show Naked and Afraid?
I get all of my theology from Naked and Afraid.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Of course. Yeah.
[00:04:12] Speaker C: You see people in.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: Is that where the doctorate comes from?
[00:04:14] Speaker C: That's what it is, yes.
You see people in their rawest, like, most raw. Literally. Yeah.
In there, like, you just strip somebody down and say, go, survive. And you see a different side of people.
You see all sides of people.
I don't recommend you watch Naked and Afraid. Sure, sure.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Disclaimer.
[00:04:36] Speaker C: But on Naked and Afraid, they take two people, usually who don't know each other, a guy and a girl. They put them out in the woods and they say, survive. And inevitably there's conflict between the two people. One person is saying, we got to find water. One person is saying, we got to start a fire. One person is saying, we need to build a shelter. We need to find food. And so they've got different priorities in what are the first steps they're going to take. And so usually for some reason, it's always the girl, but the girl is always saying, let's build a shelter. Like the storm could come. We need to build a shelter for when the storm comes. And the Guy's like, no, I need food. Let's go kill something. Let's eat something.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: Are they usually in a warm climate?
[00:05:23] Speaker C: I've never seen it usually, but not. I mean, they did one in, like, the Arctic.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:05:28] Speaker C: They had to survive in the snow.
Yeah. But yes, usually South America, somewhere, like me.
And so, again, I don't recommend you.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: Watch disclaimer, but it's an awesome show. New life does not support the ecosystem. Podcast is not in favor of naked and afraid.
[00:05:50] Speaker C: So there's this battle between what do we do first? And inevitably, in some of these episodes, the storm hits early. There's always a rainstorm, and that's when hypothermia. All the. The fire gets doused. Like, all the terrible things happen during a storm, and that is the moment when everybody's thinking, we should have built the shelter sooner.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:06:11] Speaker C: And earlier. Because when the storm is happening, there's no shelter building happening. You're just hunkering down next to a tree stump, trying to survive, freezing to death. And.
And I feel like this kind of conversation when you're not in the storm is helpful because it's building the shelter.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: Oh, sure.
[00:06:30] Speaker C: For when the storm does come. Mm. Sorry. It took me way too long to get to that analogy.
But if you're. If you've got, like, three leaves over top of you and that's your shelter when the storm comes, it's like you're just grasping at the emotional answers and you need somebody to comfort you and try to warm you up in the moment, and you're not looking to build the shelter at that point. It's too late. Yeah, but when you're not in the storm, you need somebody who's going to say, let's build the shelter now so that when the storm comes. Because right now I feel like I'm maybe just getting out of a storm. Sure.
But I relied on the shelter that was built for me. The shelter was faith in God, was faith in his plan, faith in his purpose, even though in the moments it made no sense. And I'm just angry. My shelter that got me through this season was trusting God.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Absolutely. That's a great analogy. I didn't know where it was going in the.
He brought.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: He brought it in.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: He brought it around.
[00:07:32] Speaker C: Just so you all know, I applied for the show. I'm going to be on it next.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: I maybe watch then what? I would maybe watch the show then.
[00:07:40] Speaker C: I would not want you to.
[00:07:44] Speaker A: Let's move on to the content. Let's get into the conversation.
So there are three questions that are going to be guiding our conversation. So the first question for us to kick around a little bit is just why do bad things happen in general? How can we explain the amount of evil that's in the world?
Thoughts, Dr. Wilson or Mr. Austin?
[00:08:12] Speaker C: I. I think first of all, I want to throw this out there that a lot of people, when they ask this question, they say, because this is kind of the world's way of asking the question. They say, why do bad things happen to good people?
And sometimes I feel like apologists love it when the question is asked that way because then they can jump on the straw man and say, well, actually there aren't any good people. And so they just, it's kind of like a cop out answer that doesn't actually help anybody. And they get, they get to the theological statement, actually we're all sinners, none of us are good, only God is good. And so then they, they kind of hone in on that part of the question. When people who are asking this question are much more leaning into the part about why do bad things happen? Than they are making a statement that people are good people. And so both of those things come into the question, which is why it's necessary to dispel any idea that there are good people. Which is why it's necessary for us to remind us that we're all sinful because we believe that is part of the reason why bad things happen.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:09:13] Speaker C: Is because we're sinful people. But I feel like you have to start this conversation, even though it does feel a little bit like a strawman, you have to start this conversation by saying bad things are going to happen. In any scenario where there is free will, in any scenario where people are given the option to choose one thing or another, inevitably there's going to be a good choice and a bad choice. There's going to be a choice that has good outcomes and a choice that has worse to different degrees.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:09:44] Speaker C: One of the options will obviously be a worse choice. And so you take that to the exponential. I mean, everybody around the world making decisions day in and day out. Every one of those decisions have good consequences and bad consequences. And we will not always make the good decision, which means there will always be bad consequences. And so you got to kind of create that free will scenario where you recognize free will is really what all this comes down to.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. C.S. lewis coined the term chronological snobbery.
[00:10:17] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: Basically the idea that back then they were worse or back then they were dumber.
[00:10:22] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: Right. Now we know better. And I think when we pose this question, really what a lot of us are thinking is we're comparing ourselves to the most extreme of the bad person. You know what I mean? We're comparing ourselves to the Dahmers and Hitlers of the world. You know, we're not comparing ourselves to the average other person in the world. So when we're saying, how could a bad thing happen to a good person? And when we say something like, I'm good, we can kind of skip that theological for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And we can just say, okay, but in, in a altruistic sense, when you say good, are you making mostly generous decisions?
[00:11:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: Or mostly selfish decisions. And if you're comparing yourself to somebody you know on death row for eating people, then, yeah, your decisions were altruistic. But if you're comparing yourself to just the average other human, then our baseline is selfish.
[00:11:18] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: And an example of that is the fact that, you know, we can look back 100 years and we can say there was race based slavery in the U.S. right. Where the, the, the Constitution said, you know, people of a certain skin color were 3/5 of a human. And we can look back and we can say that was, how could they have ever done that? And fair question. That's an evil thing. Right. But also, most of us know our clothes are made by slaves now.
[00:11:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: You know, most of us are wearing things made by people who are making almost no money, working in toxic conditions. And that hasn't shut down Old Navy yet.
[00:11:56] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: You know, we like, we still shop at Walmart. Yeah. So we can say, well, we're not as bad as them, but oftentimes what we mean is we're just not as directly involved.
[00:12:07] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: As them.
[00:12:08] Speaker C: Yeah. You know, wait, Old Navy is not fair trade.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: Not that I know of.
Dang it.
[00:12:14] Speaker C: On it.
Yeah. When, when Jesus sets up this whole conversation or when God sets up this whole conversation, he does so with the Garden of Eden. And so you can't have this conversation without recognizing that God puts Adam and Eve. Whether you believe this story is literal history or you believe it's a metaphor, God sets up the whole history of humanity with a decision, a free will decision. Will you choose good or will you ch. Choose evil? Will you follow God or will you reject God? And every single time we choose to follow God, it leads to good outcomes. It leads to paradise, The Garden of Eden leads to heaven is what it leads to. But every time we choose to fall, to go Against God's plan.
His plan is for goodness. Our plan inevitably leads to pain. And so God, Adam and Eve are put in the Garden of Eden. You got the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you got the Tree of Life. You eat of the Tree of Life, God's tree.
That. Well, I guess they're both God's tree, but you eat of the Tree of Life, you live forever. There is no death, there's no pain. You eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That's the free will. That's the I am fully aware of all my options tree. Now, I have just entered a path where pain enters into the story. And so when Jesus casts Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and he talks about how now it's going to be difficult to work the ground, the soil will work against you. Thorns will fight against your crops, and the animals aren't going to cooperate when you're trying to eat them. I don't know if they. I don't know if they ate animals, but who knows? Yeah. And. And so all of this is set up by saying, just listen. If. If some people are going to choose anything other than God's absolute perfect plan, pain will always result. And that just compounds. Our ancestors made decisions that are going to compound and have consequences not just on them, but also on us. I think we have. We talk a lot about, obviously my choices have consequences for me, and it's easier for me to deal with the consequences of my decisions. I can say, okay, yes, I drank too much alcohol. That's what's causing my pain or whatever. It's harder for me to deal with me dealing. Me having to deal with the bad decisions that you made.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:14:39] Speaker C: If your bad decisions impact me now, I can see how I can get angry at God. God, why didn't you stop CJ from doing that thing that caused me pain? Now I can. Now I'm not only angry at you, I can be angry at God because he, I believe he has control over you.
Well, that same thing can happen with our ancestors who make bad decisions about the stuff that they put in our food that causes cancer. So now me getting cancer is not only nature that is not only the broken, it's also my ancestors making bad decisions, knowingly or unknowingly. I mean, the reality is people smoked cigarettes for how long saying that it was good for you, and they unknowingly made bad decisions. But inevitably, those bad decisions, those free will decisions, had consequences.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:15:28] Speaker C: That passed down to us.
Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: That makes sense.
[00:15:33] Speaker C: There's.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: There are two things, like, kind of conceptually that makes me think of. One is that we all want God to limit free will for the sake of justice until it gets to our free will.
[00:15:46] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: You know what I mean? Like, none of us want to imagine how much would be limited if. Because everybody kind of goes back to this. It's like, okay, well, that's going to change where you buy your T shirts and it's going to change how much they cost. You know, it's going to change where you drive your cars and what land you live on and all kinds of stuff. You know, it's just if we want God to force equity onto the world, then that's going to be painful for everybody.
[00:16:09] Speaker C: Yeah. Which is demonstrated in Jesus. Jesus comes to earth and he has control of all things. He has all power, and he comes to earth. Yet what does he decide to do? He decides to submit to suffering, submit to pain. And his free will led him to the cross. He could have chosen another path, but his free will led him to the cross. And so that shows us, okay, we need free will in order for love to be possible. If you force somebody to. If I force my son to hug me, it is a totally different scenario than if I walk through the door after work and he runs and gives me a hug. Yeah. That one demonstrates love and one doesn't. One is forced and one isn't. If my son chooses to love me, it means much more. And this is what. Why God gives us free will. He wants us to recognize that actually, if we have the gift of free will, there's better things available to us than if we are all just robots.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:17:11] Speaker C: That are just obeying his. If. If he is. If we have no free will, then really, what. What's the point? Now I understand. My dad's a Calvinist, and I grew up in circles with a lot of people who did not believe in free will, at least not the way that I do. And so you have to answer this question very differently. But because I believe so strongly that God gives us free will, largely because I believe in love, and love requires free will in my mind that I think we have to come down to. If the core tenet of Christianity is love, if the greatest command is love, then God's not going to adopt a system in which man is not capable of doing the thing that he commands us to do, and that is love. God's not going to create us without the ability to love. By removing our free will, he gives us free Will. Because he wants us to have the option of love. Mm.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: And there's a kind of tenuous idea here to talk about. But pain and love, love and loss are directly intertwined. You know, like to experience good things, the possibility of a bad thing is. Is required for that. You know the cliche absence makes the heart grow fonder. Right. That's just founded on the idea that if. That if your relationship with that person is guaranteed, then it loses its value. You know, in the same way that like another stereotypical thing to say. But you know, a teenager who gets given a BMW is more likely to crash it than a teenager who had to work minimum wage to buy a 15 year old Honda Civic.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:18:49] Speaker A: You know, it's just the possibility of loss and the cost.
There's value in that. We imagine, I think a world of ease as the ideal.
[00:18:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:00] Speaker A: For us a world with no pain is the opposite and the ideal of what we have right now. But we don't understand that a world without the possibility in some way of a negative is a world in which you actually cannot experience the inverse, which is the positive.
[00:19:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: So personally I. I don't believe that pre sin there would have been no difficulty.
[00:19:23] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: In the world. No missing someone. You know, I think there would have been no suffering.
[00:19:27] Speaker C: Right.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: I think we can differentiate between the suffering of someone dying slowly of canc versus the struggle of someone wanting to run a marathon. You know what I mean? But marathons wouldn't be valuable if it didn't hurt.
[00:19:39] Speaker C: It was easy.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Absolutely. No one would climb mountains if everybody could climb mountains.
[00:19:44] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: So there has to be this like what we look at in the world around us is largely that dialed up by selfishness. It's the natural ability to. Or the. The needed ability to struggle in some way dialed up by the selfishness that. Where we absorb things and take things from one another. You know. And so it takes struggle and turns it to suffering.
[00:20:08] Speaker C: My son plays Fortnite and the game in Fortnite that. Man, I sound like a terrible person watching Naked and Fray. And my 9 year old is playing Fortnite but the game he plays in Fortnite is called Battle Royale. And it's 100 people in a giant map and they're all fighting. And the one who wins is called. It's called a Victory Royale if you. If you get first place. And my son, if he ever doesn't get first place, he's losing his mind, angry. He has an anger issue like his dad. And. And I'm like, dude, you Got you. You got 10th place. You beat 90 other people. Like, that's pretty good. But if he does, if he's not the one out of a hundred, he loses his mind. And so he gets so angry. And the thing I keep saying to. To him is, like, if you won every time, would this be fun? Like, if you always got first place, would you enjoy? No. You would hate this game. And the designers of this game would be absolute if they made it that easy for you to win. And so the struggle is what makes things more precious to us. I talked to quite a few people who've gotten divorces, and they talk about never wanting to be married again because they don't want to go through that again. They don't want the pain that that marriage and divorce leads to. And so they want. They will avoid the good thing, marriage, because they don't want the bad thing. And I'm like, that's just not the right way to live. We don't live in fear. We don't live just so averse to anything negative that could happen that it just keeps us huddled up in a basement somewhere because we're so terrified of the possibility for something bad happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: Going through life in a safe spot isn't really living at all. It's. I don't know, it's just existing and not having the lows or the highs. You. You'll never experience what life is supposed to be. And if you're not willing to chance marriage, you're never going to experience the amazing highs that come from marriage just because you're maybe afraid of failure. And that can be crippling for a ton of people.
[00:22:13] Speaker C: My kids and I raise. Raise snakes. We sound like horrible people. I'm just going to.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: Snakes. Naked and afraid. Fortnite. Yep. Pagans, we.
[00:22:23] Speaker C: We raise snakes. And snakes are interesting creatures. They are different. Like, you cannot assign human or even mammal properties to a snake like a snake. Once we think, let's build them this awesome terrarium with all these growing plants and this big, free, open space. What a snake really wants is a box with no light. Like, cramp me up in as small a thing as possible and just shove food down my throat and never make me move. Like, that's. That's what a snake wants. That's its dream scenario. I cannot remember where I was going with this. Oh, yes, I do.
Because a snake is exactly what you're describing. They don't want to live a life of freedom. And I. I don't know. I don't. I Don't try not to get too spiritual. But when. When I observe snake behavior, like, it's hard for me not to think about the curses placed upon the snake in the Garden of Eden and apply it to so many things. Like, snakes live everything out of fear. The only time a snake bites is because it's. At least the snakes we raise is because it's afraid or because it thinks you're food. And so it would never do that. I mean, my snakes would never try to bite me because they've been around me enough to know that I'm not a threat and I'm not food, so they would never bite me. And so. But everything is a reaction to fear. And in a human who chooses to live the snake life, where they bottle up, they call it a hide.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: Hashtag snake life.
[00:23:56] Speaker C: Hashtag snake, snake life.
In every snake, snake terrarium, you put a hide, and that's what they call it, a hide. So that the snake can just go inside their hide, get as hot as possible, and never come out. And that's what they want. Just stay in that hide and hide.
[00:24:11] Speaker A: I know some people like that.
[00:24:12] Speaker C: Yes. This is the lifestyle that way too many people try to live. And the. I'm sorry to bring it up, but the left behind theology of there's an Antichrist around every corner leads us to that style of life. I'm gonna go hide from the world and just try to protect myself.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:31] Speaker C: I'm not going to go out and do the things that God called me to do or take the risks that would make my life or the people around my life better. I'm just going to hide. That's a terrible life to live.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And there's no, like, there's no way to remove yourself from the world to where you are not. Like, you can't be a neutral. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah. Like, basically what. That theory doesn't work. There's. From what I understand, I'm not a scientist, I'm a nerd.
There's. There aren't really things, especially not living things, that are neutrals in an environment. Right. So I grew up in the Southeast, where they brought in a long time ago kudzu to make tea with. It was like a medicinal herb. They could make tea. If you drive around the south, you see this plant that's going up telephone poles and along telephone wires, and it's choking out forests. And it's. It was brought into an environment it's not native to. There's no competitor. Same Thing with feral hogs in the South. Right. They're everywhere. Same thing with this giant rat called nutria. That's like eating away and out competing.
[00:25:37] Speaker C: The south is weird.
[00:25:38] Speaker A: Yeah, it is, but food and music, man, like everybody else is using ours, so.
But like there's no such thing as a neutral in ecology.
[00:25:48] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:25:48] Speaker A: You know what I mean? Like, you can't just do something that's, that's not. I'm going to introduce this living thing to this environment and it's not going to affect things positively or negatively. Yeah, but that, that's true in terms of energy as well. Like a battery has a positive and a negative side to it because of. I don't fully understand all of that, but I know that it gives and receives. There's. There's a side that takes and a side that gives and that's how you create a circuit because energy has to travel all the way through. When you get into the world of theoretical physics, metaphysics, that you're. It's theoretical, but there are people who theorize that like human beings, when we share emotions that we're literally like, if you talk with someone and you feel sad after that, it's a, an energy, not like spiritual karma energy, but in a more literal sense an energy exchange. Like, don't feel sad because they took energy from you. They feel good because you gave energy to them.
[00:26:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: So I think one of the ways you can even frame the entire question of why can evil exist in the world is because God is the one who does not take.
[00:26:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: But when we are not connected with God, we are not connected to that which we receive life. And we basically like, we take, we take more than we give.
[00:27:02] Speaker C: There's.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: There's no way to be a neutral. So I, the actions that I make, like you said earlier, are either taking life from the world or giving life to the world. There aren't actions that are just neutral.
[00:27:14] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And we talk about the good, the positive that comes out of the negative.
I think you have to reflect on the fact that we are better when we've come through suffering well, when we suffer well, when we grieve well, when we are in community and we, that circuit is created within the suffering, we come out of it stronger, we come out of it better. And there are lessons to be learned in the pain.
And I think all of us can talk about situations where we went through something difficult and we recognized how. Actually, even though I didn't enjoy going through that thing, in hindsight I can say, but I'm better because of it, or at least I'm stronger because of it. Now, the good thing about the Christian faith is we believe that's not just some byproduct. We believe that God makes good come out of all things. We believe that God actually gets involved in the process. And even if the thing that that was bad was not caused by God, it was caused by natural consequences, or even if it was caused by just the fallen world we live in, if the pain was caused by something other than God, God can still step in and use everything that happened for good. He can turn it off for good, and he can heal us from the pain that was caused or from the wound that was caused. And then he can make us better and somehow work it all together for his purpose. And sometimes we. We see that verse, God causes all things to work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. And that's. And we can use that in a very selfish way. But that in and of itself is also the give and take. Like, he's making it good come from it, not just so that. That my life can be good. He's making good come from it. So that I can now help build others up. And now I can use the lessons that I've learned that while others are in their storm, I can help them, I can shelter them, and I can teach others the lessons that I've learned as a result of the pain that I went through.
[00:29:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:20] Speaker C: Because I'm a called according to his purpose.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Which is ultimately the only way that I know of to interact in the world. And what would be truly altruistic motives, truly generous motives in which you are not doing good for the way it makes you feel. You are not doing good because it's a tax break or anything like that, but you are doing good because you are not trying to gain value, energy, life from anyone else. But you are reconnected to the Lord. So you're receiving from a. You are satisfied. So you are. Generosity is out of overflow, not out of need.
[00:29:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: You know, like, that's the.
[00:30:00] Speaker C: The famous love chapter, First Corinthians 13 talks about, if I can speak all the tongue, tongues, but I don't love, what good is it? He talks about If I make sacrifices or if I sacrifice. I don't remember the exact. If I sacrifice myself, kind of the Jewish sacrificial. Sacrificial system imagery. If I'm offering all these sacrifices, but I don't love, what good is it? It's like a noisy gong. It accomplishes nothing. But if. If I'm doing it out of love. And so, because love is this core motivating factor of the way God interacts with us, he's trying to teach us lessons not just for the purpose of the lesson itself, but so that it can get us to the point where we do accept better job of loving, where we do a better job of connecting and creating that circuit.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: Hey, thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this conversation so far. I say that because these guys are long winded and there's a lot to say, there's a lot to cover. So we're going to actually break this into two parts. And so next week, check it out, we will have part two of this video.
