Journey to Oneness to God - ACCEPT God's Love for You

The Love Shaped Life podcast is discussing the journey to oneness with God. They talk about the importance of seeing and meditating on scripture to understand God's love. Accepting God's love is the next step, and they compare it to accepting a marriage proposal. They discuss how accepting God's love can be challenging, but it's important to not rob others of the blessing of giving. They emphasize that accepting God's love leads to knowing Him and experiencing eternal life. Hey, I'm Nathan, and I want to welcome you back to the Love Shaped Life podcast, where our dream is to see, experience, and live the love of God. I have with me in the studio today my good friend Bob. We are on part four of our five part pod in our called Journey to Oneness with God, and we've looked at, so far, two steps. First was an invitation into the journey, but then two steps. The first one, see, and that idea was that in scripture we see who God is, and this seeing has this profound power to transform when, as we talked, number two, we meditate. We begin meditating, and again, that was the A to today's B piece, this episode's B piece. The A is meditating, mulling it over, as you said, kind of ruminate like the cow regurgitates and chews, or like the stone tumbler polishes it. Or processing it as well, or reflecting, however you want to see it. We need to go over in our mind, again, this is not fast food restaurant. No, that's right. This is about intimacy with the creator himself and processing what he's saying to us. Yeah, and so then number three today, of those four parts, number three is accept. Number four is rest. That's our last episode in the pod. Today is, this episode is accept. So we're going to process that today, but let's just step back for just a minute, kind of break the ice here. We've kind of reviewed, and before today's episode, we said, hey, let's have a little conversation, a little side conversation about pets. Do you have any pets in this house? I do, yeah. A dog. Yeah, yeah. Chico. Chico, and where's Chico right now? He's in the bathroom because we're having this podcast, and he needs to be quiet. He needs to be quiet. Chico likes to bark. Chico loves to bark, and he's got this little beeper thing, right, that reminds him not to bark. Yeah, that beeper thing doesn't hurt him. It doesn't hurt him. No, no, no. Bob's the same pet owner, right? We don't want any misunderstanding about Bob's pet habits here. We have a couple of pets. Our dog, we'll just leave it at that. Our dog is a 200-pound, 200-plus pound English Mastiff, beautiful, kind of a leopard pattern. They call it Brindle, so beautiful English Mastiff, so that's a little bit of our pet story. Okay, I'm going to ask you, what's the greatest lesson you've learned from your dog? You know, the greatest lesson I've learned, wow, that is a great question. I guess on the spot, I would say don't assume you know the dog when you see the dog the first time, because you might see me interacting with the dog and think he's a friendly, safe dog, or you might see the dog's response to the guy delivering the food from Uber Eats or whatever, and think the dog is unsafe, so you've got to be aware that your first encounter with the dog may or may not tell you the truth of who the dog really is. So what I've learned from my dog along the way is he's the most amazing animal in regard to unconditional love. Even when he gets in trouble, he comes back a few moments later and he's just, he's still your greatest friend, he won't lick you. The other day I was getting a little emotional about something, I just kind of closed my eyes and I was reflecting on it, he must have picked up on it, all of a sudden I felt him licking my hand. He doesn't usually just come over and lick your hand, right? So what I've learned from him is just to love, and it's an interesting thing learning from the dog this unconditional love, and it's really how God designed him, a dog, and put it in their heart. They're very loyal, and if I go upstairs, he goes upstairs, if I go downstairs, he goes downstairs. He'll follow you around, he sits at my feet, it's just amazing. So little insights, even in daily life, as to little windows peeking into the rhythm of life as God meant it to be, and that's what we're talking about, right? This love-shaped life, and specifically in the pot in our journey to oneness with God, we're talking about seeing God's love, we're talking about meditating, processing that, and today talking about accepting that love. So let's jump into today's pod in our episode on accepting, and for me, accepting God's radical love is taking the idea, we've meditated on it, and now I'm taking it, and I'm saying, okay, if I accept this thing, this truth about God's love for me as fact, what lie does that displace in my life? So this is the deliberate process of taking things I've meditated on, I'm getting clarity about them, now I'm taking them, and in a concrete step, saying, okay, this truth is going to displace this untruth. This perception of myself is going to be reframed with this truth of God's love for me. We're going to get at the end, we're going to talk about mantra as a very practical step to applying this, but that's where we're headed in this acceptance step, this step number three. Yeah, and acceptance is not always easy for all of us, but I just want to start off with the simple story about a relationship, you know, a boy and a girl, they'll start to court because they see each other, right, and they're courting along the way. And our kids are getting close to that age, right? They are getting close to that, I do a lot of praying, right? So they're getting to know each other, right, in the process, and they're seeing that they can trust each other, right? And love is developing, and there's this sense of, hey, I think I can spend the rest of my life with this person. Relationship's growing. Relationship's growing. And there comes that point where he's going to get down, right, on his knee, and he's going to propose to her, you know? I love you, you're the best thing that ever came into my life, I want you to spend the rest of your life with me, will you marry me, right? So he's making an offer, will you marry me? She gets to say yes or no, right? If she wants to move in that journey, she has to say yes. So let's just say for this sake that she said yes. She said yes. According to the Bible, right, Genesis chapter 2, verse 24, this explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one. Because they say yes. They say yes. They say yes. So they're going to get married in a marriage, a biblical marriage in God's eyes, and they're going to become one according to God. Two become one. It's an object lesson for all of us of God's desire spiritually, because he's inviting us to become one with him. So you know, I think of Hosea. So can I just throw this out there? Yeah, keep going to Hosea, but just throw this out there. Can it be that Scripture is God's great proposal to us? Will you let me be your God? Will you step into relationship with me? I'm bending my whole life, my whole world to facilitating that. Will you be mine? Yeah, one author put the Bible this way, that it's the story of God constantly trying to demonstrate to us that he is who he says he is, and that we can trust him. Yeah, that's good. You see? That's good. So because we're full of fears, we're full of doubts, we have these negative pictures about God, so we're filtering through all of this, but God is this constant, right? He's constant. He's loyal. He's faithful. He just continues to pursue after us, right? Hosea says this, I will betroth, right? That's an old word. Super old word. Super old word. Sorry, I don't have a more modern translation here. This is the New King James Version. I'll marry you. It means marry, right? Yeah. So I'm going to substitute the word marry. I'll marry you to me forever. Yes, I'll marry you to me. This is what he's saying. In righteousness and justice and loving kindness and mercy, I'll marry you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord. And I think it's important in this motif, God is offering this to human beings. Correct. Exactly. This is Almighty God saying, I'll do this for you. So he's trying to say, look, just like in human relationships, there are marriage that he had instituted of two individuals becoming one. So he's saying, look, look at that. Now is what he's telling us in Hosea. I want to marry you, right? Yeah. And look at what he's saying he wants to marry us in, in righteousness and justice, right? In loving kindness and mercy, right? I'll marry you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord. So if we accept that proposal, like we talked about in previous podcasts, that invitation, this is God offering us to marry him in that sense, right? We're trying to get this through our finite minds, that this is what he's offering us, this marriage, and he's the faithful one. That's right. That's what I was just thinking, his faithfulness offered to us. His faithfulness. If you accept this, you will know me, right? Which Jesus equated to eternal life in John 17, verse 3. This is this journey to oneness, right? But we have to accept, just like the girl has to accept the proposal, we have to accept it from God. Now for me, I'm just telling you where I came from. I come from a background where my dad had to pay for everything growing up. He just didn't allow anybody to pay for everything. Well, that was fine. That was where he was at. But it taught me to do the same. So it was very hard for me to not just pay for people, but to accept something from people. I was willing to even give somebody a gift, but it was difficult for me to accept a gift. On the other side. On the other side. And one day, somebody said to me, Bob, don't rob me, right? Don't rob me of my, I'm trying to figure it out, don't rob me of my blessing, of giving to you, right? Don't rob me of that blessing. Right. That's good. Don't rob me of the blessing. That really hit home to me. Because by not accepting the gift, I was robbing her of giving me the gift that she wanted to give me. Just out of gratitude, out of something that I had done. And I couldn't help but think, is that the way I'm relating to God, right? Am I hindering the blessings of God because I'm still in this, my own me mode, right? Trying to do things myself, right? Trying to even live up and help out God a little bit. And so again, back to George Mueller, I quoted it before, he said, don't allow the sense of your unworthiness to hinder you from experiencing the promises, the fulfillment of the promises of God in your life. That's what he was saying, right? So don't allow that sense. So I couldn't live in that world that I was living in. I had to embrace, again, to live in the reality of what God was offering me. And so we need to accept. You see what I'm saying? That's the whole thing that we're talking about, seeing, meditating, right? Going over our mind, but then realizing this is God offering this to me, to you, and to every other human being. And what are we missing out? That's a big question, right? What are we missing out on if we don't say, okay, I'm willing to take the risk. I'll take one step, open my heart to this one step, and just see where this thing goes. We're robbing God, we're robbing ourselves, we're robbing God of giving us a blessing. Everything that he's gone through, he's talking about Jesus becoming a human being, Jesus living a life that we couldn't live, Jesus conquering the devil for us, and all of his temptations, never yielding it, Jesus sacrificing his life on the cross of Calvary. All that he went through, we're robbing God of giving us what he's gone through, what he's created us to give us through Christ. We're robbing it, right? To know and be known. Yeah. To know and be known. See? I accept to go on that journey. I'm in this journey, and I'm accepting. And again, this is a continuous journey, right? It's the rhythm of life, as you would call it, right? To continue to press forward in our journey with God. That's right. And this comes into, there's a text, Proverbs 4, the path of the just, people following God. It's like the shining sun that shines ever brighter. You can think of the sunrise. You're out in the morning, near my house, there's old blueberry fields. And there's one housing development that just goes along the back of this blueberry field. And it's beautiful to see the light change over that field. And that's what the writer, that's what the wise man of Proverbs has in mind, is the sun. We're battling it here in the studio. We've got the sun changing position as we've been recording. And so, the path of people following God is like, you know, the sun rises, it's the soft morning rays, and it, over time, you know, if you're sitting in the shade, that picnic day along the lake in Florida here, you're going to move your chair a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, because the sun is rising and the shade is shifting. And for the follower of God, that's the process. One step, and that sun is rising, that sun is shifting. And that's all we're inviting you to do, is say, okay, just step in, lean in, and be part of that process of the sunrise. It doesn't happen overnight, but it's a process. So, it's more and more. Exactly right. It's a journey. It's just a journey. Enjoy the journey. Enjoy the process of knowing God, of having the opportunity to know God. You know, you mentioned about the sun rising. I'm an early morning person. I love to see when the sun is coming up, and it reminds us every day that as the sun is rising, the darkness is dissipating as the sun is rising little by little. So, the darkness that has clouded our minds about who God is and our perception of God, as we're on that journey, right, the shining light more and more into the perfect day, the picture of God, we're seeing God clearer and clearer and clearer until he gets rid of that darkness. So, the Bible says that perfect love casts out all fear. It's amazing. Right? So, God wants to bring us to the point where we're so wrapped in him by his love that all fear is gone. And that's the focus of the next episode. Not specifically this fear, but resting in the fullness, the overflow of God's love. Love comes in, God's love is intended to come in, as you said, to cast out, to evict from our heart's fear where we're no longer driven and motivated, whether it's the monkey of shame, the fear of rejection, the fear of failing, whatever it is, God's love comes in to displace all of that. And really, that's the acceptance piece. We rest in it, but we've got to move through the acceptance piece where we're taking that in and allowing, taking God's love and allowing it to displace the lies so that we can then rest in the truth of God's love for us. Correct. You know, I'm just going to want to read another verse here in Ezekiel 16, in verse 8. Listen to what God says. When I passed by you again and looked upon you, indeed, your time was a time of love. So I spread my wing over you and covered your nakedness. Yes, I swore an oath to you. Right? Again, a marriage commitment, right? I swore an oath to you, and it entered into a covenant with you, and you became mine. Look at that. So God's walking by us. He sees our nakedness. Nakedness in Scripture is referring to sin, right? Our sinfulness, right? So God sees us in our sinfulness, and he says to us, it's time for you to fall in love. He doesn't say, get your act together. He doesn't say, go clean yourself up. He doesn't say that at all. He doesn't remind us of what we've done. He's not even concerned about that. He's concerned about you. He's concerned about pulling us out of that nakedness, of that sinfulness, pulling us out. And then he's saying, it's time for you to fall in love, right? And I'm swearing an oath to you. I'm making a commitment to you, a promise to you. This is the God of heaven. This is God himself again making the promise, the faithfulness. It reminds me of the text in Jeremiah. I have loved you with an everlasting and undying and unbroken and unending and always faithful love. And then he says, that's the reason. There's a little bit of paraphrase on my part. That's the reason I've drawn you in with my loving kindness or my faithful love. Amen. Amen. Which we're talking about, right? To see. See God's faithful love. And it's with that he's drawing us in. Not deceiving us. Not tricking us. Not swindling us. Showing us the truth about himself. And that truth is a power to pull us in. To draw us in. To trust us. And you remember in Peter, right? 2 Peter, you're going to have to help me out with the chapter and the verse. Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises. It's like 4 or something like that. Precious promises that by these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. Right? So God has given to us rich promises. Powerful promises. Casting all of our sins into the depths of the sea. Forgiving us. Offering us a new heart. Right? Giving us the power to live a new life. Right? To be our God and that we would be his people. Rich promises. And on and on the promises go. This is God basically signing a check. Here it is. Signing a check. It's the check. I have to say, Lord, I'm unworthy. I have nothing to present to think that I'm worthy of these wages, so to speak, if I'm working for it. There's nothing there. It's what God has done. Right? Right. So I'm really trusting God's faithfulness towards me. Right? So I'm receiving the gift so that God can be happy and I can be happy. And I can experience all that he's offering me. Right. It's a fullness. It's a fullness. So the Bible calls it faith. Right? Right. This is faith. That's right. Faith is simple trust. And I like Galatians chapter 5 verse 6 where it says, If we are in Christ, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but only faith activated and expressed and working through love. Right? So notice that faith or trust is activated and expressed and working through love. Right. What activates trust? What activates his faith? God's love. God's love. Yeah. My friend Ty, this is a perfect, I've thought about this more than once. He writes in his book Shades of Grace, The fuel that ignites faith into action is the truth of God's unearnable love manifested in Christ. My, that's beautiful. You read that again. The fuel that ignites faith into action is the truth of God's unearnable love manifested in Christ. And this is the thing that we mentioned it before. And I just want to double down again. The thing that fuels a life of radical love is the radical love of God for us seen, meditated on, and accepted. That's it. That's the fuel. You don't have to move on somewhere. You don't have to go find some self-help. Just center. Rest. Lean in. Settle into God's radical love for you. And that experience will have a profound impact. It energizes the fuel that activates us to respond by making a choice to trust. Because trust or faith really boils down to a choice, right? What is earned? God showing his love, right, is what awakens. And I'm saying God's earning the right to be trusted. By showing up his love. I'm not earning that right. He's earning the right. He's earning my trust. We talk about that in a relationship. Parents say, you know, Johnny comes in late or whatever your kid's name is and comes in late. Hour after curfew. Lies about it. And then the parent says, you know, Johnny, you kind of broke my trust. You're going to have to earn it back. And that simply means demonstrate that you're trustworthy. Well, this is what God, through scripture, is demonstrating. As you said before, God demonstrates he's faithful. Working to, literally, God in heaven working to earn the trust of human beings. Think about it. Like Ty mentioned there, that, you know, it's not something we earned. I can't remember the exact quote, right? It was demonstrated that... Unearnable. Unearnable love. So who does that in an earthly relationship, right? We always feel like people need to earn our trust. They need to earn. We're not demonstrating that we're just loving them and embracing them even when they're not lovable. We try to help them. But God does the opposite of human love, right? God loves the unlovable. God loves us when we're, like I read from Ezekiel, we're in our nakedness, right? We're in our filthiness. All broken. And then he says to us, even when you're broken and messed up, it's time for you to fall in love. Like, come on. I want you now. I want you now. Whoever you are. Right. It's hard for our minds to wrap around it. Right. But it's true. It's the story of scripture. Yeah. Of who God is. And we've got to allow it. We've got to say, look, I can't understand it, but Lord, I'm choosing to embrace you. I'm choosing to take that step forward so that it can become a reality. I'm going to accept the truth of your love as reality. As the shape of reality. The shape of reality. Right. And that's the choice. That's the simple choice to believe is that decision. That's okay. This is reality. God loves me wildly. God loves me wildly. And then I think of that scripture verse that says that the just shall live by faith. Right? So the just, those who are choosing to follow God, are going to live in a relationship with Him of trust. Of trust. Right? So in this journey, right? In this journey with God, this journey to oneness, I'm going to choose, because I have to make a choice, to daily to embrace sitting in God's presence, drawing life from Him. We talk about setting aside time. Yes, setting aside time. Right. Whatever that is. Because God is a source of life. Right. And He wants to put new life into us every day, so to speak. It's not just like we need physical food to get energy and to survive. Right. We need spiritual food in order to survive. Right? When you think of the big industry right now that's really gaining speed, at least in my state of Maine, is the solar industry. You look at satellite photos. In fact, I was flying, wherever I was flying in, maybe it was North Carolina the other day on my way down here, and looked down and there was just this field of solar panels. And that's basically what we're saying. The solar panels don't create any power. They just are oriented toward the sun that's emitting these powerful rays, and those powerful rays received by that solar panel are converted into energy that charges our vehicles, our phones, our homes, powers our lights, our air conditioning. That's what we're talking about, is just orienting our heart, the solar panel, toward the magnificence of God's love. And that is energizing and empowering. It flows into us and leads to that metamorphosis, that transformation. Yeah. In Psalms 34, David expresses, Envy is the fountain of life. Right? Envy is the fountain of life. Yeah. God is the fountain of life. That's good. We have to choose to come. I'm living by faith and trusting Him. That's what He's asking me to do, to come and drink from that fountain on a daily basis, to receive His life. Not just for myself, but to impart it on others. So just to live by faith, I'm seeing what God is saying in Scripture, and I'm leaning into it. Yep. I'm leaning into it. I don't care what my thoughts are telling me, how unworthy I'm feeling, I'm going to embrace what God is saying and accept that. That's right. Like, for instance, the New Covenant promise, that in Ezekiel 36 we see this promise, where God is promising a new heart. That's one of my favorite promises. Yeah. It's really a beautiful, beautiful promise. Listen, He said, I'll give you a new heart and I'll put a new spirit within you. I'll take the heart of stone out of your flesh and I'll give you a heart of flesh. I'll put my spirit within you and cause you or enable you to walk in my statutes and you will keep my judgments and do them. So it's a promise of God. Right. That God is saying, look, I'll give you a new heart. I'm going to take away your stony heart. Stubborn, unresponsive. Unresponsive heart. Right. Now I'm going to give you this new heart. It's a divine act. It's a divine, yeah. That's right. It's a supernatural power coming into our life. It's God. Right. And when we talk about that idea of a new heart, it can sort of be sort of lost in translation, but a new heart means a change in our attitude, a change in the way we think, a change in the way we feel. Right. An internal makeover. An internal makeover. That's what God's metamorphosis, that's what God's after, is that internal makeover. And the Ezekiel language is just this way of capturing that stony heart to flesh heart is the biblical way of capturing this internal makeover. But, you know, here's the problem. There's a problem. Yeah, we got a problem. What's that problem? We have a problem that you know, the average human being needs... Oh, yeah, that's right. We think about 4,800 negative thoughts a day. You're talking about almost 5,000 negative thoughts a day, average human being. Humanity's pretty much a negative thing. No wonder I deal with them all the time. So, you know, humanity, you know, as human beings, we tend to lean on the negative side. I'm not going to start counting, by the way. I'll just take this. So what happens is sometimes we've embraced some of those negative thoughts. I mean, is it sometimes? There are some of them that seem to be on replay. Right, yes, that's what I'm talking about. Since we've embraced them, they're on replay every day. So those thoughts, or what you could call them voices in our head, but God is saying this, right? So here's the truth of God, and we've got to identify how our thoughts are lining up with Scripture. Yeah, so let's get to that. But there's this text in Proverbs which is right close to this part of the conversation. Proverbs 23 says, as a man thinks in his heart. So this onslaught of negative thoughts is, as the man thinks in his heart, so is he. What's in your head is forming who you are in your relationships. It's forming who you are on social media. It's forming who you are as you are present in the world. So when we're talking about these thoughts, we're not just talking about some private space where I can just live my imaginary life and then I have my real life. We're talking about an imaginary life that is informing and shaping my real life. I'm a continuum of what's in my head forming who I am in the present. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he. That's who he is, right? So a thought, reap an action. So an action, reap a habit. So a habit, reap character. Character is who you are. I just want to add to that, reap a character, reap a life. So a character, reap a life. Your character becomes your identity as well. It eventually becomes the life you've lived. This was Bob Hayes and Bob Hayes is the sum total of his thoughts. When I was much younger, years and years ago, much younger. Make that clear. I was doing a construction business. I was traveling. Actually, this sounds strange, but there was a nursing home that would allow people to stay there. They had rooms. I come out of the room. They were very nice to me, but I looked at all these people. There were lots of people in the assembly room. When you looked at them and dealt with them, you saw different characters. Some were sweet as can be, but a lot of them were not so nice. For me, when I was much younger, I thought, wow, look at this. This is who these people have become. One thought at a time. I need to look at my life because I want to be like the sweet one. Right. That was just really nice. We look in the mirror. When we look in the mirror, we've got to realize who we are as a result of our thinking. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he. Again, Romans 12, verse 2, don't be conformed to this world but be transformed by metamorphosis. Metamorphosis, same word again, transformed by the renewing of your mind. A change in your mind. A change in your thinking. This is the problem I'm talking about. God is saying this to us. We're getting to something. I know where you're headed. Just a real pause there. There's a lot of hope here. The hope is this. Wherever you're at today does not determine will you be tomorrow. Amen. That one thought step today eventually accumulates with other thought steps that form a new you. We're not talking about self. We're talking about taking the seed of the Word of God. One little piece of that seed. Receive it today. Don't look at the long game. Don't worry about the long game. You just do the thing today. Sometimes when fighting the negative voices feels like I'm going crazy. Not so much lately but back in 2015 I was going through a real personal crisis. There was a time of significant internal transformation where I felt like I was losing my mind. It's probably like turning the volume up on a sound system. It's like a screaming match in my head. The music gets turned up in the negative. Right. I had to out scream. It wasn't really screaming but I had to basically out compete those voices from my current mental framework that needed to be displaced. Let's go there because I think that's where we've been going. Let's talk about it. This is what we're talking about. We're talking about substituting the truth. What God is saying about us. About your past. About your present. About your future. About how you see your neighbor. Whatever the case may be. We're taking the truth and we're accepting it. I'm accepting that truth so it's becoming a part of me because God is implanted in me. The new thoughts. We call them mantras. Mantras. It's a weird word maybe for this context but a mantra. The example I use is one of the negative thoughts that can come is I'm a nobody. I have issues with negative thoughts and taking this adventure with you is like there's something called the imposter syndrome that people in various positions in life, professionals, etc. tend to run into it where they feel like one of these days the mask's going to fall off and everybody's going to figure out that I'm not the person I appear to be. It's not that that person is unprofessional. It's not that person is not successful but it's this internal insecurity that says I can't really be who people think I am so eventually it's all going to collapse and I'm just going to be this little puddle of a failure. We're talking about that is a kind of mantra that says I'm a puddle of a failure in the skin of a hero. That's a negative mantra. It is a negative mantra. The solution to that is realizing that's a negative mantra and then pressing into the love-shaped life because that's not where God wants you to live. Faith says I'm not going to live in this world anymore. I'm going to embrace what God is saying to me and what God will do for me. He'll give me a new heart. He'll put His Spirit within me. He'll enable me to walk in His ways. I'm embracing that. We have to move forward. The just shall live by faith. I'm pressing in. I'm allowing God to do in me. Praise God for Him identifying things in our lives that we don't have to live in that space anymore. We don't have to live in that negative zone anymore. As a pastor through the years, one thing I've noticed, if you said to me, Pastor Bob, over 30 years, what did you see most in your congregation of the things that were bothering people the most? I would say guilt and shame. Guilt and shame. That they embrace a Savior who's died for their sins. They speak words of I'm forgiven. And by embrace, you just mean they say they believe that. Yeah, well, they embraced it and they went even to go on as far as baptism and they're coming to church and they're singing their songs. But when you talk to them, when you talk to them, they're still beating themselves up. The old lines are still playing along. The old thought patterns are still playing along. So, that's a lie. That's a lie. And an example of a counter-mantra, a truth mantra, if I'm saying I'm just a puddle of failure in a skin of success, that's a negative mantra. The true mantra would be to say I am in fact the treasured child of God. Amen. So, this is the fact. It is not a fact. I've come to recognize that in fact I'm not a puddle of failure in a suit, in the suit of a hero. I am in fact a treasured child of God. Right. And so, when that negative thought comes back, the mantra is really, the practice can simply be to say I am a treasured child of God. In this moment, as these thoughts are flooding in, the truth is I'm a treasured child of God. Amen. Same thing with guilt and shame, right? What killed Jesus on the cross? What killed Him on the cross? Was it the nails? No, He was taking the load of all our stuff, all of our sins, right? He died of a broken heart. The guilt and the shame, our guilt and shame broke the heart of the Savior. So, He died for our sins that He might be able to remove the effect of sin in our life, right? Forgiving us for where we've done wrong, right? Empowering us to be set free from anything that holds us back. Enabling us to live a new life knowing that we're free. All of our sins, the Bible says all of our sins have been cast into the depths of the sea. I baptized somebody recently in the ocean just a few weeks ago and the woman was saying to me I'm having difficulty letting go of my past. It keeps haunting me. And I said to her, look out at the ocean. You see how big that is? I said, when we go down into that water today and I baptize you, the Bible says that your sins have been cast into the depths of the sea. You have to choose to leave them there. You have to make a choice that you're going to leave them there. You see, so we have to embrace. Like you said, the positive mantra that you were saying in your life, now we have to have a positive mantra saying, I'm forgiven. So, you could say this woman in a practical sense could have a mantra that when that starts coming back, she could say, no, I left all of those at the beach that day. Like something very concrete That old life, those old memories, those old mistakes, I left them at the beach. And I am a new person in Christ. I have a new identity in Jesus. That old life is back at the beach. It sounds weird, but those simple things when we're talking about and accepting, is not simply talking about the idea, but actually formulating a concrete way of owning the truth about who you are, the truth about how God is, where we couch it in a factual, practical language that says, a declaration this is the truth of my reality as it is informed by the truth about God. And Jesus said, you should know the truth and the truth will make you free. What does He want us to be free from? He wants to be free from all of the devil's things that He's put into our hearts and our minds. He wants to be free from the bondage of sin, from the effects of sin in our life. He's setting us free. So He set us free. Yes, we still have sinful natures to deal with, but through Christ, I'm a new creation. Through Christ, I'm enabled to walk in newness of life. The other thing I wanted to mention here to you was that, look, reality is that our sins have been cast into the depths of the sea. Reality is that we can still remember our sins. They're not washed in that sin. But you know, a bird can fly over your head. So you don't have to allow them to make a nest. That's what we're saying, right? You don't have to make a nest in your hair. So the devil may come along to put these things in your head, but we don't have to own them. We've got to look back to what is God saying and embrace what is God saying and say, no, I'm a free child. I'm forgiven. I'm a new creation in Christ. If any man be in Christ, he's a new creation. It's beautiful. I want to add one thing to that. Sometimes I've felt that when I say something, if I say I'm a new creation in Christ, that means maybe the way I shouted at my kids, the cross voice, just the ugly manner in which I related to my kids who needed to clean their bathroom, right? I can truly say as I look at that moment, that's not who I am. And I want to say this. Sometimes that feels like you're telling a lie about yourself. But the Bible says we're a new creation in Christ. Here's the truth. There are two identities. There's the identity where there's that me that is that cross, unkind, self-interested person. But then there's that new identity that is a true, real identity that I can look my kids in the eye, even when I've made the mistake and say, you know what, that's not who I am. That's another way to have a mantra to say, I'm going to own it. I made that mistake, but this isn't the identity that I'm embracing by faith. This is not me. I'm a new creation. I'm going to lean into that and let that begin to increasingly displace these times where I'm unkind. And that has a power to reframe how I interact. That's what we're talking about, reframing. To go back to your child instance, the Bible says walk in the spirit and you won't fulfill the desires of the sinful nature. So you're choosing to walk and embrace in God's ways. This is who I am. This is who I am, but you were crossed. Perhaps you'd handled your children in a wrong way. It's just as much evidence that you're walking with God when you turn around and say to your kids, look guys, I know you had to clean the bathroom, but I reacted in a wrong way to you, so I just want to tell you I'm sorry. I'm not changing the fact that you didn't need to clean the bathroom. What I'm changing about how I react to you is in all right. So it's just as much evidence that you're walking with God because you have the sensitivity to turn around and deal with it and own it and apologize because you're on a journey of being transformed. And that's no longer who you are. That's no longer who you are, right? And don't own it, right? So the new mantra, this is really big, right? So for all of us when you're thinking about your thought patterns and the areas where you're living in your thought patterns, we want to look at Scripture and say, well, how does God see this? How does God want me to see it? In other words, allow your thoughts that are shaping you to be filtered through the Bible. Imagine the Bible is a filter, so I'm just filtering my thoughts through Scripture. I get to keep whatever makes it through. Right. What we want to do is allow what God is saying to be on the other end. And that's what we're keeping. So this takes effort. Here's the deal. This takes effort. This is a journey. I'm accepting it, but it's taking effort for me because I've thought a certain way for a long time. I have patterns in my mind that lean in negative thoughts, and the devil has used it to hold me back, tear me down, do whatever destructive pattern he wants for me. And we've got to say, I'm making a choice to embrace my Savior. I'm making a choice to embrace God and allow God to do for me what He's saying He'll do for me. And as unworthy as I'm appealing, whatever the case may be, I'm going to embrace it. And that deliberate act is the choice. Yeah. I'm owning this. Yes. I just want you to know that we have a booklet for you. We mention it in every episode in this podinar. This is where the worksheet comes in. We've provided some worksheets in the booklet for you to literally, physically put the negative mantra, take what you find in Scripture, and put the new mantra, a physical space. Certainly you can create your own digital space. I have a sheet in OneNote where I have started working through mantras, saying, okay, there's this in my head, here's the counter-mantra to that. So this is taking the very practical step, that accept step, is making this ruggedly practical. So that's the again, be not transformed to this world, be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. You're putting forth an effort by the grace of God to embrace the new mind. And you can get that booklet, by the way, at loveshaped.life. loveshaped.life Just look at our name at a period between shaped and life, loveshaped.life. That's the space to get the booklet. We'd also like to invite you to this very special cohort experience. Journey to Oneness Cohort because it's in that cohort, the purpose of having that cohort isn't just for us to do another Padanar for you, not just for us to have a Zoom class, but we're creating a digital space where you can connect with other individuals who are wrestling with this experience, who are wrestling through the journey of displacing negative mantras with the truth of scripture. This is a space where we're peer support, there's teaching support, and there's one-on-one support to help in this work of processing, of applying, of experiencing a love-shaped life. And again, you can sign up for that, find more information on that, loveshaped.life. I just want to ask you, what if somebody out there has a question they want to communicate to us? How do they do that? Hello at loveshaped.life. Hello at loveshaped.life. Very simple. Hello at loveshaped.life. If you want to communicate with Pastor Nathan or myself, but also, we are seeking to develop that digital community. So if you want to be part of a community where people want to embrace this love-shaped life, to see, to experience, and to live the radical love of God, we've been inviting you to join that. Go to loveshaped.life. And you'll see how to connect to that community where we can share thoughts and ideas along the way. We're all here. So until next time, lean in to the love-shaped life. For more information, visit loveshaped.life. www.loveshaped.life