Praxis
Praxis
God Meets Us Where We Actually Are
What if God doesn't wait for us to clean up our act before loving us? What if He actually meets us exactly where we are—in all our messy, broken reality?
In a discussion about our second mental model for missional discipleship, we unpack the life-changing truth that "God bends to meet us in reality." This isn't just feel-good theology—it's the pattern we see throughout scripture and most vividly in Jesus himself.
From Genesis where God sought Adam and Eve after their sin to Jesus dining with tax collectors and sinners, we discover a God who consistently stoops down to meet humanity in their brokenness. The good news is that we don't need to fix ourselves before approaching God. The challenging news? We must be honest about where we truly are.
Many of us struggle with pretending, especially in church settings. We put on our "Sunday best" not just in clothes but in behavior and spiritual appearance. Yet authentic transformation begins only when we drop the masks and embrace reality—when we learn to "hug our cactus," as Mac puts it.
Whether you're wrestling with shame, struggling to trust God's grace, or finding it difficult to extend that grace to others, this episode offers practical wisdom for embracing reality and experiencing the freedom that comes with it. Because when we stop hiding, we discover God has been waiting there all along.
Listen now and discover how to live authentically in God's grace—no more pretending required.
Welcome to Praxis, a podcast where we explore how to practice and embody the way of Jesus in our everyday lives. Thanks so much for taking the time to listen. We're in a series focused on our mental models for missional discipleship a framework for living out our faith as disciples of Jesus in everyday life. Whether we're aware of it or not, we all have mental models, deep convictions and assumptions that shape how we see and take action in the world.
Speaker 1:Mental models are kind of like prescription lenses While often invisible when wearing them, they constantly and consistently shape the way we think, feel and act. So what were the mental models Jesus lived by? What convictions shaped how Jesus saw people, responded to needs, formed disciples and joined God's mission in the world? That's what the series is all about. Each week, we are unpacking a key conviction that shaped Jesus's way of life and explore how it can shape ours too, as we seek to be a community of disciples living on mission in the way of Jesus. Today, we're going to look at a second core conviction, and it's this God bends to meet us in reality.
Speaker 2:Let's get into it. Well, welcome everybody. My name is Josiah, I'm Mac.
Speaker 1:And I'm Katie.
Speaker 2:It's great to be here back in the room with you all. Hey, I was thinking about something from my childhood and I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on this. So, growing up in an era before streaming video, if you wanted to watch a movie, you either had to go to you know the movie store.
Speaker 1:We had movie gallery in our town. Yeah, we had this thing called mr movies weird.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've never heard of that one. Um well, you were in minnesota, right? Yeah, um no, but if you did, but if you didn't go to the movie gallery to go get a movie, you just had to watch whatever one was in your house, like whichever one you had. But I feel like every family had a movie that was like the go-to. If they're killing time, they would watch this movie kind of over and over again. It was like the family movie. So I'm curious, what was your like family movie that you watched when you were bored?
Speaker 3:well, my parents definitely had different ones. My dad loved the matrix nice, he's probably seen that movie so many times, I can't even count it is pretty cool uh, my mom loved the movie greece yeah remember greece, so that was played a lot in our house. I was probably when I was younger. I did a lot in our house. I was probably when I was younger. I did a lot of like the Disney Princess, little Mermaid, beauty and the Beast, stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't really remember like a movie that we watched as an entire family on repeat, but I do remember some of those like Disney movies. I had three sisters so I remember seeing the Little Mermaid a ton, but my favorite was Robin Hood, like the animated Disney.
Speaker 2:That one was my favorite. Yeah, that was one of ours.
Speaker 1:I watched that hundreds of times.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, my dad liked any of the big comedies like Dumb and Dumber and Tommy Boy. Oh, those are great. Um, but there is a. There's a movie. It's called the man who knew too little. Have you ever heard of it?
Speaker 2:no it's with, but it's with bill murray, it's, it's lesser known. Um, this dopey guy thinks he's in like, uh, this like theater performance thing that goes all over town in London. But really he answers the wrong phone call and he's like a hit man. But he doesn't realize he's in real life. He thinks he's acting the whole time.
Speaker 3:How funny.
Speaker 2:It's really funny and honestly I think it's really funny, but we used to watch that one all the time and our family quotes it, but I don't know very many other people who have seen them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard of it?
Speaker 1:Did you guys have McGee and Me? I mean, I've heard of it, don't think so.
Speaker 2:I know of it, but we didn't watch it. No.
Speaker 1:Classic, sort of like Christian subculture type quasi-animated films. It was ridiculous. But anyway, if you are listening to this and you've never heard McGee and Me, just go ahead and Google that and then you'll be like, okay, that explains a lot. Yeah, all right. Well, speaking of throwback movies, you know Right, that's a perfect segue into what we're doing today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Speaking of McGee.
Speaker 1:And me.
Speaker 3:And me. Yeah, we're on a series right now focused on mental models for discipleship, and if you've ever heard mental models before, I would encourage you to go back and listen to the first episode in the series. What we're hoping to do here is explore some of our core convictions or truths that anchor us and guide us as we go about being a community of disciples who live on mission in the way of Jesus. What's more, we believe that these were the core convictions that guided Jesus. These were the mental models that Jesus used when making and multiplying disciples to join God's mission in the world. So last time, we presented our first core conviction, and that's the idea that God's presence precedes our participation. So we talked a lot about God's mission and how the God who is on mission in the world invites us to be part of what it is that God is doing. We said that of course, we have a role to play, but it's a participatory one, and understanding this can literally shape how we engage every moment of life as we shift from doing things on our own to discerning and joining whatever it is that God is doing.
Speaker 3:So this week we're going to unpack our second core conviction of missional discipleship, and it naturally flows from the first one. It's that, if it's true that God's presence always precedes our participation and there's never a moment when God isn't graciously present, well, an extension of that is this God meets us in reality. So, again, god is always present and God's presence always meets us in reality, and by reality I mean where we really are. He meets us in what's true, what's true about us, what's true about our circumstances. So God meets us in reality, where we actually are, not where we should be. And I want to submit to you today that this is good news, but also really hard news. So let's start with the good news. Why is it that it's good news that God meets us in reality? What do you guys think about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the good news of this core conviction that God bends to meet us where we actually are not where we should be, not where we ought to be, you know, but where we actually are is that we don't have to clean ourselves up or improve ourselves. Rather, god stoops, he bends to meet us where we are, even when our lives are a total mess, and this is really good news, I think, because it means that we don't have to change ourselves in order for God to love us. And, of course, we see this most clearly in the gospel, which we'll talk about in a bit. But I kind of want to insist that this is actually how God we see, god relating to people throughout the Bible. I think sometimes I encounter maybe you have too, I encounter people who kind of have this perspective that like, oh, god in the New Testament is really gracious and loving and caring, but the God in the Old Testament is sort of like harsh and full of wrath and judgmental, and you know what I mean, full of judgment and it's almost like creates this discontinuity. And I don't wanna completely erase that, because I do think that when we consider and we'll talk about this in our next core conviction that God is like Jesus. When we take that seriously, it does create some questions about how we understand, for instance, god commanding genocide in the Old Testament and things like that. So there is some, I think, areas of discontinuity that are fair to wrestle with right, and that's probably a totally different podcast series. But when it comes to sin and the fact that we as human beings are broken, I wanna submit that there's a fairly uniform picture that we see throughout scripture, from beginning to end, and this idea that God bends to meet us where we are. It's good news, but it's not new news. This is how God has always related to humanity. So can I give like an example? Yes, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:So maybe one example of this where we just see God bending to meet people where they are is Genesis 3. The very first time sin enters the world and you all know the story God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It was sort of a loving way of protecting them. It was sort of a loving way of protecting them. And they get duped by the serpent and they end up eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and sin enters the world and shatters everything, their relationship with God, with themselves, with other people and creation itself, this fourfold fracture. Well, what's interesting is it's interesting to ask the question how does God relate to Adam and Eve right after they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? And maybe just to kind of bring this home for a moment, if we could imagine this as a pastor, and maybe you've experienced this too when you have people who come and sort of share their brokenness.
Speaker 1:I've had over the years many people who have sort of made some a big mistake or some big mistakes, and they're sitting in my office totally broken, right, and you ask the question something like hey, how do you think God sees you in this moment, or how is God relating to you in this moment? Most of the time I hear answers like well, they kind of a kind of a scary depiction of like God being really angry, upset with them, ready to Hulk out on them. I mean, I remember one vivid story that the guy said I imagine sort of like my grandfather beat red with a vein popping out of his forehead, just like imagine the intensity of that kind of anger. Right, this is how most people, when they find themselves their lives in a mess or sitting with the guilt of a big mistake, they imagine God being just really angry and upset. And yet in Genesis 3, that's just not what we see at all we see God, right after this incident happens, going out and looking for them to walk with them during the cool of the day, like he cries out where are you? That's his heartbeat. He wants to be near Adam and Eve, even though they just messed up, and he wants to walk with them and be near them.
Speaker 1:And so, despite some I think, bad theology that says that our sin separates God from us, it's actually the other way around Our sin separates us from God. We're the ones who go into hiding. God wants to meet us where we are, even in our brokenness, and he chases us down with grace and forgiveness. Know what I mean? Yeah, what does that, like I don't know, surface for you? Do you guys see this too? This dynamic? I'm naming that, if God meets us where we are, we don't have to clean ourselves up. And this isn't entirely new. We see this throughout scripture.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it kind of challenges the default of how we may have been taught to think about God. I think a lot of us were taught to think about God that way. Like I put on my best face, when I go to church and when I talk to God I have to clean myself up first. But I see what you're saying, mac. When you actually look at scripture through this lens, it challenges that narrative. And this is God all throughout scripture. The very first time we see him is him going where are you? And looking for them in love.
Speaker 1:Totally. And there's other examples. I mean you have Isaiah in Isaiah six, where he gets this vision of kind of God on the throne and they're singing holy, holy, holy is the Lord, god almighty, and he immediately is fearful, like woe to me, I am sinful. And then the seraphim, which are like these angelic beings, comes and touches him on the lips and like, cleanses him and this is again a depiction of like in God's presence, fearful of my sin and brokenness. And what does God do? Moves towards Isaiah and cleanses him and makes him whole.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think it's natural to, like you were saying, Katie, to view God as scary, especially when you have all these depictions of God being really big and he's creator of everything and God of the universe. Which is why it's so important to look at how Jesus embodied God's posture towards humanity, Because he gives us a better picture, like a clear picture of God's heart towards people, our verses, and take them out of context and then use them to conjure up this like fearful reverence, which is is not bad. It's only bad when that's the only thing you have of God, right, If the only thing you see is like a big um, like larger than we can imagine type of being, um. We also we need the depiction of the way Jesus showed up. Otherwise we get this skewed picture of God being distant and too big for our problems. But Jesus embodied something much different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know Jesus got accused of hanging out with sinners and tax collectors. And I would assume you know I talk to people in our church and when someone who has an obvious sin problem comes in there, the top concern I hear here is like well, if I'm close to them they might think I'm condoning their sin Right. And this was an accusation brought against Jesus all the time, that in befriending sinners he was sort of like condoning their behavior right. What's interesting to me? Again, this isn't new. Just going back to the Old Testament, we see it in Genesis 3, we see it in particular interactions like with Isaiah. But God continually bends and stoops to meet the people of Israel where they are, even though they're consistently caught in sinful behavior. And in some cases he even ends up accommodating that sinful behavior in order to continue in relationship with them. This is a bit scandalous for those who haven't noticed this before, but let me give you a few examples of this stooping, bending God in order to bear in relationship with the people and take them where they aren't. Yet he actually accommodates a sin, a break from his ideal. So one example of this is divorce right.
Speaker 1:God in the Old Testament, through the Mosaic law makes conditions for divorce, and yet it is a complete deviation from his ideal. And we're told elsewhere in the Old Testament that God hates divorce, and yet there's a redemptive through line to this accommodation. This is a culture where there's way more women than men and women had no way to provide for themselves outside of the protection of a husband. Right, and men were just flippantly kicking women to the curb without giving them a certificate of divorce, and then they were having to prostitute themselves or starve to death. They had no way to provide for themselves. And so God looks at this and goes this whole divorce thing is not what I want. And yet to protect women, you're going to provide a certificate so they can get remarried and aren't on the streets, but it's an accommodation. Another one is polygamy. Right, god's ideal is one man, one woman, covenanted together for life, and yet in the Old Testament you see that men often have multiple wives and have concubines and things like that. Again, this is a culture where, because of war and famine, there's way more women than men and with limited ability to provide for themselves. This was not an ideal. It wasn't God's ideal, but it was a way to accommodate a broken and fallen people and a broken and fallen culture with a redemptive edge towards justice, towards making sure people were cared for.
Speaker 1:Maybe most provocatively, every culture in the ancient Near Eastern world practiced some degree of sacrifice, sacrificing animals to deities. And yet we see verses in the Old Testament from David and so on like, hey, you know, sacrifice is not what you need. A sacrifice or an offering isn't what you want, you don't need this in order to forgive me. And God graciously sort of accommodates sacrifice in the ancient world, while also using it to redemptively point to the sacrifice of his son that is going to be coming.
Speaker 1:So I guess what I'm trying to name is this whole idea that this is good news, that God bends and stoops to meet us. In reality, it is incredibly good news because it means that we don't have to clean ourselves up or fix ourselves in order for God to love us. God loves us as we are, and this isn't brand new in Jesus, although I think we see it most clearly in him. We see this the entire way through scripture. This is God's posture towards broken humanity from Genesis 3 onward bending and stooping to meet people in their brokenness, and there's not a moment where God isn't doing this for you and me even right now, where God isn't doing this for you and me even right now. This is why I get really cranked up with people who are kind of self-righteous and judgmental, as if like, hey, now that I've kind of got my life cleaned up, it's like, yeah, my goodness, even right now God is bending and stooping me to meet me in my brokenness, in areas I don't even know about yet.
Speaker 3:You know what I mean. Yeah, he's not looking down at us with this sort of sense of condemnation or frustration. He's actually looking at us the same way. He's always related to humanity, which is all the examples you just pointed out in scripture.
Speaker 1:Yeah and I'm also maybe saying this works against self-righteousness, because I noticed this in the churches that usually people are really judgmental towards other people's sin. It's often sins they don't struggle with. Yeah. Right, and they seem to have lost sight of this fact that God is a bending God, a stooping God who meets us in our brokenness. And because none of us are fully formed yet, none of us are perfectly like Jesus, the implication of that is that even right now, in this moment, god is bending to meet me in my brokenness.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and when we fully realize that, I imagine that helps us relate to other people.
Speaker 2:Yes, relate to them and their brokenness. Yeah, yeah, it takes the edge of fear out of the equation and it allows you to just be, and I think that's really a beautiful thing to know that there's, I mean and we have scriptures to reference this but there's nothing we can do to separate us from God's love, knowing that is extremely empowering. God will. There's nothing I can do or say or go or anywhere where God's love isn't like chasing me down and wanting to be with me, like that's a really beautiful premise for life. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wonder if it's hard, maybe. I'm just curious Is that hard to believe, though? You know what I mean. Like part of the barrier is like is that so good, is it true?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it is difficult to believe. It's difficult to believe for myself sometimes, but I think there's an edge of so, like the angle of discipleship within churches. I would imagine and and I feel like I have like a like a voice of someone who might be more, uh, judgmental or rigid about some of these things in my head saying, well, that gives people way too much permission to be where they are all the time. It gives people too much permission to sin and do whatever they want, knowing that God will always meet them there. And I guess the analogy I think of is like if you're a driver so if you're learning how to drive and you're really scared of driving, you're afraid of crashing all the time. You're going to be a terrible driver. Like, if you're constantly afraid of all the dangers of driving, all the time you're going to be a terrible driver, you're going to be overly cautious and you're probably going to get into more accidents because you're always afraid.
Speaker 2:And, um, I think of it. It's in the same thing as the context of life is knowing that there's nothing I can do to to be separated from God and I and I and I'm with a God that is always chasing me down. That gives me the type of confidence that actually makes me a much better person. It makes me a lot more capable of deciding the right decisions. Fear doesn't enable us to live life better. It actually impedes our ability to live life with Jesus.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking of a couple of things. One is to illustrate your point that this past March I was in Indianapolis and I had rented a car and I was driving Jim and Tricia around and I was so nervous about, like, being a bad driver that I was a bad driver. And then, the moment they got out of the car, I was like woo, you know totally fine.
Speaker 1:So I think you're right and scripture teaches this motivation. I mean, it says perfect love drives out fear. Like you're right, we have like this addiction, this attachment to fear and guilt, as if we trust grace too much, right, it's gonna lead to a bad place. And this, as we'll get into later in this conversation, that was a primary concern many people had with Jesus's ministry. Yeah, you know. Okay. So maybe just to kind of summarize and we can keep going is like, hey, this is good news. It's good news because we are loved by God as we are.
Speaker 1:I've made the assertion right that this is a posture we see throughout the scripture, but we've also hinted at we see this most clearly in Jesus and this whole series is based on. These are the mental models of Jesus. This is how Jesus saw and engaged the world. So I thought it might be helpful to kind of zoom in on Jesus for a bit, and I might propose that we do that using a category that we present at our DNA class. At our DNA class, we make this distinction between the gospel of Jesus and the gospel about Jesus, and this isn't our creation. I actually first encountered this distinction from Michael Bender and then I read it in his dissertation and he got it from a guy named Robert Weber who was a professor at Wheaton for over 30 years. And then I noticed, man, a lot of scholars are making this distinction. There's a guy named CH Dodd who did it, but NT Wright does it quite a bit.
Speaker 1:He talks about how the message so real quick, the gospel of Jesus is Jesus's proclamation and demonstration of the kingdom of God. Okay, it's like God's reign is breaking into the world through me and this is what the good news sounds like and looks like. That's the gospel of Jesus. The gospel about Jesus is how the letters and epistles, mostly written by Paul, then focus on Jesus's death and resurrection as good news. Okay, and again many scholars point out to, we have to attend to both of these.
Speaker 1:Like NT Wright has a lot to say about how this is the message that Jesus preached and embodied, which honestly wasn't a whole lot about personal salvation and going to heaven after you die, but it was an announcement and inauguration of the good news of God's kingdom. And later we get more of the dots being connected about how that connects to our personal salvation. Right, yeah, okay. So I thought, hey, maybe we could use that basic distinction, to attend to how we see God stooping and bending to meet us where we are in Jesus, the gospel of Jesus and then the gospel about Jesus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So we see this all over in Jesus' ministry, his ability and his desire to bend and to meet people where they are. One example I thought of is a story of Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus, like the song the wee little man.
Speaker 3:I cannot hear that story without thinking of that song. I really can't.
Speaker 2:Oh man, yeah, it's pretty ingrained.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but yeah. So Zacchaeus, he's a tax collector and he climbs up in a tree to see Jesus walking by, because there's crowds everywhere and it does make the distinction that he's short, but whatever. But when Jesus sees him up there, he walks right up to him and he just says I'm coming over to your house today, which is a sort of a seems like a bold assertion that I'm just going to invite myself over and notice what he doesn't do. He doesn't try to pull him away and try to like bring him over to the synagogue or something like that. He just invites himself over and enters right in. And it's important to note that he was a tax collector.
Speaker 2:So the people that were hanging around him were not the good like, as we would say, like good people. These were the people that the Pharisees called sinners. So he's walking over and saying I'm coming over to your house and I'm going to hang out. Hang out with you for dinner, I'm coming over to your house and I'm going to hang out with you for dinner. Inviting himself and then hanging around people that would have given him a poor reputation and it was probably a party with lots of other stuff going on is not embodying a God who waits for us to come to him, but he's willing to bend towards us and to meet us in our reality. So do you guys have other examples?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I love that, I think you just can't get the song out of your head. I just cannot get that song. Gosh, that's a terrible song.
Speaker 3:But I just love imagining that we can read these stories over and over and hear them, but then to really just imagine what that would have been like to like, hey, I'm going to come to your house. I imagine he'd be like what? My house isn't good enough for you, it's not cleaned up, yeah. Another one that comes to mind for me is Jesus meeting the woman at the well, where it seems as though she's kind of embarrassed about the fact that she has multiple husbands. She's living with a man that's not her husband, and Jesus just acknowledges her reality and he seems to do so in a way that doesn't shame her, rather dignifies her. But it doesn't dignify her by being like oh yeah, no, it's, you know, it's good.
Speaker 3:Like let's not even talk about that, because that might make her feel weird. Like he actually. He actually, he exposes the full truth of a situation that would have made her feel shame. But instead of heaping on shame, he meets her with grace in that moment. But what sticks out to me is that the grace wouldn't be as deep or have as much potential if he didn't first meet her in reality. Does that make sense? Like if he would just sort of gloss over things, or reframe it or not really spend a lot of time there. It's like she wouldn't have been able to experience the depth of his grace and his love in that moment.
Speaker 1:I think it's probably a worthy exercise to read one of the gospels, or all four, simply through this lens of. How do we see Jesus bending and stooping to meet people in their brokenness? Because you see it from the very beginning, I mean even in the Christmas story of Jesus is God in the flesh. How does God arrive in the world? Well, he's born to a Jewish peasant couple, not an important, you know, not people who are notable or have a name of any kind. They're from a podunk town in the middle of nowhere. Nazareth wasn't even on the map.
Speaker 1:He's, you know, the first people who hear this good news are shepherds, which were like the bottom of the barrel in terms of a social hierarchy. It's almost as if when God arrives in the world, he's going out. God is going out of the way to go. I'm going to the lowest of the low, to the forgotten and to the marginalized, just to show that when I bend and stoop, nobody is outside of my reach.
Speaker 1:And then that just kind of continues throughout Jesus's life and ministry, whether it's Zacchaeus, or the woman at the well, or the woman caught in adultery, or the sinful woman anointing his feet, or even to other people, like healing the soldier whose ear was cut off by Peter's poor swordsmanship. Like you know, it's all over the place. It's all over the place. You constantly see Jesus announcing this good news and embodying it by bending to meet people right where they are, not where they should be, and the ultimate picture that he gives, I think, is not just the cross, but also we just got done preaching about the parable of the prodigal father. I mean, the entire context of that parable is the religious leaders, sort of like, griping about who Jesus is hanging out with. And then he tells this story of the younger son who makes a mess of his life, and the father runs out to meet him, as he is full of love, with arms open wide.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, yeah, right. So we're talking about how Jesus gives us this perfect picture of God stooping to meet us where we are. And, mac, you gave this distinction, which I think is helpful gospel of Jesus and gospel about Jesus. I agree, we very much see this in the gospel of Jesus and his life and ministry and the teachings that he proclaimed. I also think much see this in the gospel of Jesus, in his life, in ministry, in the teachings that he proclaimed. I also think we see this in the gospel about Jesus. So again, gospel about Jesus is the story of Jesus's life, death and resurrection, probably more what most of us would think of when we hear the term the gospel. The gospel tells us that Jesus came to earth as God in the flesh, engaged in the human experience, lived fully without sin, submitted to death on a cross, rose again on the third day and, through his resurrection, defeated the powers of sin, death and evil in the world. So that's a story we're all familiar with.
Speaker 3:But when we look at this gospel through the lens of what we're talking about today, I think we see that the gospel about Jesus gives us a picture of God meaning us in reality, because the truth of the gospel is that God moves towards us in Jesus, despite the fact that we are stuck in sin. Right that verse that says while we were sinners, christ died for us. So the gospel shows how God came to us, not the other way around. So I think if we look at this, you know, in the light of the axiom we're talking about, it shows us that, okay, the gospel isn't about escaping reality or pretending or cleaning ourselves up. It's about God entering our reality. The incarnation is God meeting us in our messy reality, and the whole story of Jesus and the story of his life, death and resurrection has this written all over it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost like the letters make explicit what we see Jesus doing in the gospels he who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God. Right. Ephesians 2 says because of his great love for us, god, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in our transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So I very much see the letters sort of making explicit what Jesus is embodying in the gospels, and that's why we never wanna drive a wedge between the of or about right. We need both. And a healthy church who accurately proclaims the good news is not only gonna announce the inauguration of God's kingdom in Jesus and embody that good news by living like Jesus, but they're also gonna be able to connect the docks and make explicit what this accomplishes for people, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1:In everyday life. So I think what you're hearing from us so far is just to say look, this good news we see throughout the scripture and most explicitly in Jesus, and it's beautiful and it's good, yeah, yeah, it is really good news.
Speaker 2:The good news is like we don't have to pretend. So we don't have to. We don't have to clean ourselves up, we don't have to make ourselves into something else for God to accept us in some sort of way of like oh God sees our potential and waits for us to meet it. We can just be honest. We can sit with God and tell him and be honest about where we are, even in our shortcomings, and that's really refreshing, being able to be honest in our mess and sort of like submit to what God is doing, no matter where we are, and in fact, I think we'll probably get to. It is like our most like when we're pretending less, we're actually going to. We're going to experience more of God's um, uh presence and activity because we're not deal, because God isn't going to deal with us in this pretending fake face, um that when we come to him as our most honest selves, um, we, we are going to be able to experience his love and his goodness.
Speaker 1:Like the biggest breakthroughs. I think what I hear you saying, josiah, is the biggest breakthroughs spiritually happen when we are where we are, and sometimes we're not even aware of where we are. This is why, in our leadership intensives, we often talk about not just being honest about our public beliefs and our private beliefs, but trying to get underneath the surface to our core beliefs. And one of the only ways to do that is to like look at how you show up particularly under stress. So, for example, peter, right Before Jesus goes to the cross, he's like I will die for you If everybody else falls away, I'm gonna stay true. Like he's confident that he's announcing. Here's my public belief I'm going to be faithful.
Speaker 3:And he really believes it.
Speaker 1:He really believes it and Jesus even says no, this is what's going to happen. And we see the initial, maybe desire to follow through on that when, again, due to poor swordsmanship, he like tries to strike out when Jesus is being arrested. But then stress happens, all the other disciples desert him and he kind of follows from a distance and you get like this little window into oh, there's a little bit more like self-protective behavior there than he thought. And then he's in the courtyard and all of a sudden the core beliefs start to come out hey, aren't you a Galilean, aren't you associate? And three times he denies him. And it's this brutal moment where, when the rooster crows, peter is full of self-regret and he weeps over the fact that he just disowned his beloved master and friend.
Speaker 1:But, look, it's that moment that creates an opportunity to be restored and to attend to something that otherwise would have never happened, and we've talked about this story before on the podcast. But when Jesus restores Peter, he allows him to proclaim his love three times right. And so life has this way of sort of exposing our core beliefs, what's really true about where we are, and then, as we see in Jesus, he meets us in those moments with grace and provides restoration and vision for moving forward. You know, what I mean yeah.
Speaker 1:And I so want that for my kids. I so want this for my kids when they mess up. I can't tell you how many times I've told them yes, when you mess up, we're gonna deal with that so you can learn and grow. But the most important thing is that when you mess up, you know you can come to me and be fully honest about what happened and grace is waiting for you there. Every time they mess up, I usually say that yep, what's waiting for you here, Grace? You can expect grace from me. And yet, when they mess up and make a mistake, do you think that they come to me without hiding or like partial truce or whatever? No, it's always like they're scared to trust it. Right, yeah, it's so innate.
Speaker 1:Yes, and, if I'm honest, I'm scared to trust it too. At times it's scary to kind of like look at all, that's there, what really happened, believing that God stoops to meet me right there with grace and love, rather than judgment or accusation or these other things we often impose on ourselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's scary when, when you mess up to to face the full reality of what you did, um sometimes and and the impact it has. I mean, we just talked about like right in our forgiveness uh series about some of the the process of like. When you have to like sit with someone in that, it can be really scary. It's easier to pick and choose the parts that I'm honest about.
Speaker 3:Of course. Well, pretending is not only easier, it's safer, right, and if I can go to a limb for a moment, I might venture to guess that the church might even be the very place where we are most tempted to fake it.
Speaker 1:Why do you say that?
Speaker 3:Well, I think church just comes with this idea that, oh, this is the place where we're supposed to be joyful, right, because why wouldn't we be? Because we've experienced the grace of God and he's present among us and, oh man, why wouldn't we be excited about that? And we certainly can be excited. But I think that can get, that can get skewed in a way that that we end up internalizing as, oh, I can't really be my true self in church or in spiritual places or with you know, quote unquote spiritual people.
Speaker 1:Struggle comes to mind. Struggle Like if you're struggling yeah, with sin or something.
Speaker 3:It's like a place where we're, you know we put our best foot forward right, yeah and I think, frankly, a lot of times we do get away with faking it. Like why do we fake it? Well, because it works. Like think about you know, think about I'm sure we all know. Like maybe a couple who announced that they were getting divorced and you're totally shocked because you thought they had a happy marriage and it comes to light that oh no, we've been struggling for years and no one knew because we didn't talk about it. It's easier to present an image that doesn't match where we really are and I think most times we get away with it, and doing anything different feels scary, scary.
Speaker 2:Scary, yeah, and I think that this brings a lot of things to mind. I think that it's like both sides of the equation are contributing to the idea of faking it in church, because I think most of us, when we go to church, are hoping to have a positive, happy experience where nothing goes wrong, and I wonder what it would look like if church was the type of place where someone could come in. Let's just picture someone walks in to church on Sunday morning and they're drunk from the night before. How uncomfortable would everybody be, right? I'm not advocating that people come to church drunk. What are you saying, josiah?
Speaker 1:I'm stating that if someone was really struggling, Adam, don't do it, don't come this weekend, so we can find out.
Speaker 3:Hungover maybe, but not drunk.
Speaker 2:Right, like everyone would be uncomfortable, the sea would part right right around them and then people would be like oh my God, you see that Right. So it's a little bit of human nature, I would. I wonder what it would look like if church was the place of safety where people could be, like really struggling, and they show up where they are because they want to meet Jesus. Right, and I'm not saying I know that's idealistic and there's like maybe it's romanticized a little bit of what it would look like for someone to be welcomed with open arms, who shows up Sunday morning drunk, right. I am just naming that. There's a reality on both sides of the equation where it's difficult to be honest and then the other side of it is like people don't always's difficult to be honest, and then the other side of it is like people don't always want you to be honest. They would rather exist in an equilibrium where everything's fine.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, like if you are in a tough spot because you had a rough night the night before, for whatever reason. Are you going to come to church? Are you going to stay home and hide? And I hear what you're saying. Saying is we want to?
Speaker 2:be a church where people can come as they are. Yeah, and then we figure it out.
Speaker 1:Seems like we've made a shift in our conversation, and it's a good one. We started Katie, at the very beginning, said hey, this is good news and hard news, and I think we're starting to kind of name like there are pieces of this that God bends and stoops to meet us where we are with grace and love. It's actually hard. It's hard, and we, you guys, we see this in the gospel. Despite the fact that Jesus comes embodying good news, full of grace and truth, not everybody experiences it that way. Right, the religious leaders, the very people who probably should have had a pulse on what God was doing in the world, certainly should have been able to recognize when God incarnate was standing in front of them, not only missed it, but experienced the proclamation, embodiment of this good news as a threat. Why? Well one, they were offended. They were offended by Jesus's grace and how he met people in their mess.
Speaker 1:We already kind of alluded to that. They sort of bristled at the people Jesus was keeping company with, but they were also disrupted by Jesus because they had all these theological certainties that Jesus was undoing, related to sin and how to relate to it. In addition to that, it seems like they had worked really hard to maintain or craft sort of a spiritual persona. They had a lot invested into their spiritual persona that they had cultivated, and Jesus, in meeting them, where they were involved, exposing that persona for what it is, you know. And so I guess my point is is that, yeah, this is incredibly good news that you don't need to fix yourself or change yourself, that God loves you and stoops and bends to meet you exactly where you are in reality. And it's also hard news because we have a hard time being honest with ourselves, right, and I think it'd be worth having a conversation about why that is. Why is it that we sometimes have a hard time meeting ourselves or being honest with ourselves about where we really are?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think this can be difficult news for those of us who and I say us because I'm human struggle with feeling like we can pretend with other people and we can show up with insincere motives with other people and convince them really easy, but in reality God does.
Speaker 2:God is not fooled by that. So just as we might be able to convince someone else where we're fine or we have it all together, um the more we try to pretend with God, um then then the good news becomes a challenge to our own news, if that makes sense. So the more fake we are, or the more we are pretending, the stronger this gospel, this good news that God is here in reality, becomes a challenge to our own narratives. The reality is we can fool ourselves and other people, but we can't, we, we can't fool God Like we convince the people around us. God knows what's really going on, every thought, every feeling, every action. He knows everything about us and he still moves in to be close to us. So I guess I just the challenge then is to identify which of that part of me I've convinced other people or myself that I'm fine when I'm not, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So maybe to just sort of think of an example to illustrate what I hear you saying is when we walk around saying I'm fine, everything's fine, even though it's really not fine. In order to meet God there, I have to confront the reality that I'm actually not fine, right, like I actually have to do the hard work of going okay. Well, god isn't fooled by my pretense and what is actually going on inside of me.
Speaker 1:Fine, but not fine. Remember, Fine, but not fine as some might say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's like my internal parts of like being able to be honest with what I'm really struggling with. The other part I heard, like you naming is like with the Pharisees. Now there becomes this the pretense is that it's not just that I'm trying to convince myself I'm fine. Now I am using I'm projecting that out onto other people that that I've got it and you don't. And Jesus was upending that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. It's like God bends to meet us in reality, but God doesn't bend reality for us.
Speaker 3:That's a good one Explain what you mean by that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll say it again God bends or stoops to meet us in reality. But I don't think God bends or distorts reality for us and we see that throughout the gospels. When people are coming at Jesus either self-deceived or with poor motives, they're trying to, like, manipulate Jesus, or they're coming at Jesus with pretense or they're insincere. What does Jesus usually do? Is he so clever? He finds ways to hold up a mirror and help them see what they're doing and where they really are. Like, here's reality.
Speaker 1:So, for instance, the rich young ruler right, very dramatic throws himself at Jesus's feet. What must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus says why do you call me good? So he's already kind of trying to cut through the performance, all these things I've kept my entire life. And he says one thing you lack and kind of holds up a mirror to where he really is Bending to meet him, stooping to meet him where he really is, but not bending reality or distorting it in the process. Um, you, you see this all over the place, like with some of the healings that happens the man with the withered hand at the synagogue or the paralytic um, you see the Pharisee, sort of snickering. Who is this guy? And he does it to, to hold up a mirror, not only to heal or embody the good news towards a person who has a physical ailment, but also to expose the false motives, the deceit, the stuff underneath the surface that they're not willing to look at or attend to. Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what comes to mind is like when the gospel and this good news about God's reality holds up a mirror in front of us. We have a choice, and I think that the mirror itself, as we see, did not bring transformation in the lives of the Pharisees. So we have a response to make. So we have a response to make. We can either choose to be real and choose to be honest about our motives, or we continue to, or we recoil and we try to discredit and we try to we dodge ourselves.
Speaker 2:We try to manipulate it into a form that meets us or reaffirms us, rather than trying to shape ourselves into the likeness of Jesus.
Speaker 3:We all pretend to be further along than we really are. I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and our pretending is often dodging ourselves. This is why, if you've been in a leadership intensive, you know this. But I notice many people have a hard time when they get into that space because of the vulnerability, authenticity and courage it requires. But it's a space where we're intentionally saying we're not going to avoid reality, we're going to attend to it, no matter how messy it is, as an embodiment of God's grace. And so you may have heard this phrase hug your cactus. Mm-hmm grace.
Speaker 1:And so you may have heard this phrase hug your cactus. You know there's a there's a clip on YouTube with Robert Downey Jr who's introducing um Mel Gibson. But this is after Mel Gibson has done a bunch of embarrassing and crummy stuff. You know public intoxication, anti-semitic remarks, you know drunk driving, all of it. And now he's kind of being welcomed out onto this stage and everybody's aware that Mel Gibson has messed up really bad. And Robert Downey Jr is sort of introducing him.
Speaker 1:And it's so clever because in a self-deprecating way, robert Downey Jr talks about his own struggle with drug abuse and substances and addiction, whatever, and he talks about how Mel Gibson is the one who took him under his wing at the worst moments and taught him how to hug his cactus.
Speaker 1:And he says it's embracing your ugly parts, moving toward the very dark parts of your soul, and how doing so actually allows you to take responsibility for wrongdoing and produces humility and character. And so he introduces him by saying "'Here's the guy who taught me how to hug my cactus "'Would you please welcome him'. You know, it's just this gracious moment, and so that's what makes this hard. Is that being not only inviting Jesus to meet us where we are. But being where we are involves hugging our cactus, really looking at those parts of our lives that are prickly and a little bit painful. It's not fun, but it's those moments that invite us into going. There is what invites us into freedom and to learn to trust grace. Right, and here's the thing you, you guys is avoidance. I'm convinced that when we avoid it, it just delays the work of real transformation.
Speaker 3:You mean? It doesn't negate the need for it altogether. If I pretend like I'm fine, I just can bypass the work of transformation, well, that's what we think, isn't it?
Speaker 1:We think, hey, if I can pretend it's not there, it's not there, it's not there, I don't have to deal with it. But what you dodged today becomes the wall you're going to hit tomorrow. You know what I mean. Have you ever kicked a problem down the road only for it to be so much worse? Later on Never. Never happens, never, right, like, putting it off doesn't make it go away, it just makes it harder tomorrow.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Avoidance doesn't erase the need to change. It just drags out the pain until you're willing to change. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it limits us right. Avoidance sort of keeps us in more of a spiritually immature state. I think if we want to grow in our maturity spiritually, emotionally If we want healing, it starts by getting honest about where we actually are. You got to move through it.
Speaker 1:I remember years ago I was into running and I started to develop this little pain on the outside of my knee, on my right knee, and I just ran through it for a while until I couldn't. It ended up being like two or three years of avoiding it and then finally I got to the point where I was standing in the kitchen and my knee started to buckle just standing there. I wasn't even doing anything and boom.
Speaker 1:And so I ended up going in getting an MRI and I had a meniscus tear in my meniscus but then a giant sort of cyst next to it because of the inflammation that hadn't been attended to for years and years. It made it worse. If I just like attended to it right away, you know, rather than ignoring it and pushing through it, it just would have been way easier in the long run.
Speaker 3:Sure, oh yeah, sure. I could think of so many physical examples that we would look at and go. Well, of course, if you're sick, yeah, you wanna acknowledge that you're feeling sick, so you can do what you need to do to get better, if you have cancer, broken boat, whatever. So why is it that we look at this from the spiritual perspective and think ignoring it will help us get better?
Speaker 1:You know what's interesting that's popping for me, as I just recall that moment in my life. The thing that got me to go in was Josie. She's like, hey, when your knee is buckling, this is often what it means. You need to get that looked at, you know, and it just highlights, I think, the need for community. When we hear like, hey, god meets you where you are, and like you need courage and honesty to hug your cactus and be honest about where you really are, man, we need community to do that.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We need community to do that, and it strikes me that this might be true on two levels. One is we can't see ourselves as we really are, so we all have blind spots and parts of who we are that we're avoiding or self-deceive, like we need other people who lovingly hold up a mirror and go this is what's really going on or this is what I see and it's hurting you or it's harming your relationships or whatever. But then, secondly, is those very people then, um, when they orient to us graciously, give us the courage to believe that God will meet us graciously, that God will meet us graciously, yeah, can reshape our perception.
Speaker 2:You know, I think it's really sad to see when people are met with these types of challenges to their own narrative or their own reality, which is why I think it's important to start with Jesus so that when they're challenged about something, maybe they're not doing well in loving other people. The mirror is the life and teachings of Jesus and not just our own opinions. But the sad thing is to watch people continually resist that work of just being real and honest and, um, to watch what it does to their relationships and you can watch what it happens to as they move from church to church to try to find the reality that most meets their form of it and, um, I don't know. I just find it really sad when people I think the work of avoiding it not only hinders your own transformation, but it's going to hinder your ability to walk alongside other people and in relationship with people who don't fit your exact box of what it's supposed to be.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean. I think honesty is where intimacy truly begins Like. Look at any relationship, look at your marriage. Do you feel closer to your spouse when they're being honest about what's actually going on in their lives?
Speaker 1:Sometimes, or do you feel?
Speaker 3:closer to them if they're like no, everything's great, I'm good. I mean, look at your kids. Would you feel better if they were comfortable enough to tell you when something's bothering them or when they're scared, or when they don't actually enjoy your homemade spaghetti or whatever? Or do you want them to just smile and fake it right?
Speaker 3:I think when we're honest and we invite other people to be honest with us, it's where real, true relationship begins. And so if we can look at other relationships and think, well, yeah, of course that makes sense, I would submit that it's the same with God. Why would it be any different? Like, true intimacy with God requires vulnerability, it requires honesty, and when we lean into honesty and we get real with God about where we are, we experience freedom, not shame. We might anticipate shame, but when we honestly get honest, what we experience, I think, is instead something very different.
Speaker 3:And if we look at the Bible again, we see this reflected. We've said this multiple times. Take a look at the Psalms. The Psalms show us what this honest prayer looks like. They're raw, they're unfiltered, they're sometimes angry, sometimes confused. So if the biblical authors can speak this way with God, then I'd like to think that we can too. Right that we should be able to approach him with total raw honesty. It's not going to scare him away, he's not. He's not scared off by your truth, he's drawn to it. And when we stop hiding, we actually find rest.
Speaker 1:I guess that's a good word, Katie, and it captures that dynamic of it's good news and it's hard news. It's good news that God meets us where we are. It's hard news because that means we have to be honest. But you can't get close without getting real. And once you get real with God honest with God about yourself and about the circumstances of your life, all of it it leads to breakthrough, just like any relationship. If you've ever had someone share something kind of confidential or a little bit vulnerable with you, what does that do? It creates intimacy, connection. And vice versa.
Speaker 1:When you entrust something that's sort of sensitive about your life to someone else, well, getting real in that way produces a connection, it produces some closeness, and so why would we assume it's any different with God? God is saying, hey, there's nothing in your life you can't share with me that I don't already know and you're loved anyways, you can get real with me. And as you get real with me, one of the byproducts is we get closer. I'm curious, you guys, where you've experienced how you've experienced this journey of learning to trust God's grace and being more honest with God, like actually trusting that he meets you where you are and that you can be honest Like how have you experienced that in your life? You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I. When I was younger, I had this idea in my mind that my prayers had to be well-formed before I could pray out loud to God. So I would be. I would have lots of my own thoughts and feelings, but then if I was going to talk to God, I needed it to be well-formed and perfectly articulated in order to say it out loud and hopefully rhyme. Yeah, that was great.
Speaker 3:A haiku.
Speaker 2:But what as over the years? As learning that some of these truths that God is like wants to meet me in reality, learning to just talk openly with God in prayer, has been a pretty big breakthrough. Cool, and being able to it's produced a lot of more intimacy, where you feel more connected and you realize that like I can say anything to God and he already knows everything about it anyway, it's like that feeling when you do something wrong, it's like it sits with you until it's addressed. There's this cathartic release when you're you want it's. It sits with you until it's addressed. Like there's this cathartic release when you're able to say it Um, it's not always just when you're doing something wrong, but I think there's something similar that happens when you're just willing and when you're willing to just talk openly about what's going on with God and and I've found that like physically out loud, is super helpful not just in my head.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have a few memories of doing this, and probably one in particular that's more vivid to me and I think for me these memories are of like this idea of sitting with God when I feel shame. So there are a couple of things that might trigger shame for me. Some would be like, if I don't show up the way that I want to with my husband or with my kids, like maybe I'm less than patient, maybe I'm barking orders in a way that doesn't reflect how I want to be present with them, that's how it can typically show up. There in my personal life, in the professional context, sometimes I feel a lot of shame around, looking like incompetent. So I have this vivid memory of it.
Speaker 3:Kind of in my prior career I did a fair amount of public speaking. I would give trainings, I would present at board meetings, sometimes pretty well attended board meetings with media there, et cetera, et cetera. And I remember one instance. I couldn't even tell you the details, but I just remember doing some type of public presentation at a board meeting or something, and I must've been asked a question and didn't feel great about my response. Didn't feel like it was as good as it should have been. And the next day I remember just ruminating on it and ruminating on it and beating myself up and then sensing that almost like God was inviting me to sit in the reality of that and that invitation from God really pushed against my defaults. Like my default would be either to like distract, like oh, don't think about it, that just feels yucky, so we're just going to go do something else or maybe to reframe oh, it didn't really go that bad, like it wasn't, like that.
Speaker 1:I crushed it. I crushed it it quick or to fix.
Speaker 3:Maybe I like oh, if I like send this email or say this thing, then I'll like restore my reputation and everyone will think I'm competent again. Whatever I can do lots of different things, but in this moment I remember God inviting me to sit and be honest about all that, that shame and embarrassment I was feeling and you guys literally gosh. I remember almost feeling like I was stepping into quicksand.
Speaker 3:That went all the way up to my neck and I just it felt terrible. I sort of had to admit all the ways I was beating myself up internally and like all that negativity. But until I was able to admit the shame I was living in, I couldn't experience the fullness of God's grace. And I remember that, like I remember sort of when I sat in that place it became clear that, well, god doesn't see me that way, I see myself this way, and once I can acknowledge that it's me that sees myself this way, I can actually experience the fullness of God's grace and his love. In that moment, and without getting honest and meeting him in that reality, I would have kept avoiding it and I would have ultimately missed that opportunity to get to know God and his love at a deeper level. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Totally. I can share similar examples, katie. The biggest one that I've shared it, I think, on our Ash Wednesday service was Josiah. You and I were on retreat and the guy who was leading the retreat had some work in AA. And the fourth step of AA is what they call a fearless moral inventory and I sense God inviting me to do that on the retreat, which involves kind of being honest about all of your sin and all the ways it affects people, and it took me a long time that weekend to kind of write it all out, get it all out on paper, but it was a big step of going.
Speaker 1:I can be honest about all this stuff, knowing you love me and you already see it anyway, so I don't have to dodge myself.
Speaker 1:And it's not just a one-time thing. I often do like a prayer of examine most days and, katie, I think that the story you shared is something that is sort of a gauge on how honest I'm being. In that prayer of examine it often starts with just sitting in God's presence and naming things you're grateful for, and then you replay your day in God's presence, going God, what do you want me to attend to or notice? And I can often tell how honestly I'm showing and how long I'll sit with the moments that I wasn't at my best Maybe a wonky interaction with Josie or the kids or something that happened at work. Like it's so easy to wanna go oh, I'll just gloss over that. But I've learned over the years to go no. When I sense the Holy Spirit wanting to sit, that's the moment to stop and just to be there and look at it as honestly as I possibly can, for as long as needed, trusting God's grace, and it's kind of become a breakthrough practice for me.
Speaker 3:And is it still hard?
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course it is. Because you experience shame, all the things that Adam and Eve felt I want to deflect and blame other people. If they had done this, I wouldn't have done that. I want to hide. I don't want to. You know what I mean. And again, this goes back to the point where, like, our sin doesn't separate God from us. He's waiting for me right in that moment. That happened that day, but it's me. I'm the problem, like I'm the one who goes into hiding. My sin is separating me from the grace of God.
Speaker 3:Yeah, newsflash, he sees it anyways. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1:So let's flip the coin because we're narrating, hey, there's a journey in learning to experience this ourselves, but there's also a journey in learning how to embody this for other people.
Speaker 1:And my goodness, you guys, like I had, like I don't have a conversion story, I don't have a time where I don't remember following Jesus. But if I had to narrate a conversion story, it's like a post-conversion conversion story where it's like, hey, the Christianity I sort of was exposed to and embraced, especially at the end of high school, ended up creating a pretty judgmental person right when I was constantly evaluating and sizing other people up and, of course, sort of subtracting worth from them. In a spiritual sense of, I could feel better about myself. It was very judgmental and it took me a while to learn like that isn't the posture, like that is not the posture of Jesus. So I'm curious for you guys how have you also not just learned to trust God's grace but actually to embody this kind of grace towards other people? If God stoops to meet you where you are, how have you learned to stoop and bend to meet other people where they are?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, one thing I've had to realize over time is that I can't control people.
Speaker 3:You know, sometimes I'd like to think I can but turns out I can't, and sometimes I forget that. But I think for me, just realizing I can't control people or make them be anywhere that they aren't, and so I might as well meet them with grace in the moment, as God does with me. God doesn't control me. I suppose he could, but he chooses not to, and so he gives me all this freedom and all this agency to go, make a mess of things and then experiencing him meeting me in that mess, that I could have prevented. But off I went on my own way, trying to get life for myself. And now here I sit, I think, sitting in that receiving his grace then allows me to take that mindset with other people rather than going oh how could you do that again? How, like, how are you here again? I can't believe you should have done this, you should have done that. I'm kind of a fixer, so I like to like fix people and set them on a path so they'll never make the mistake again.
Speaker 3:What I didn't notice, that oh yeah, um, if everyone would just listen to me, their life would be so much better. But I think, yeah, I think just remembering those moments, like I described, of sitting with God in my own messes certainly helps me then extend that grace to other people.
Speaker 1:I have an intensity disorder. I get randomly intense and this past week I got a text from someone that I really love and care about, who also has some moments of random intensity, and this person texted me saying they had gotten intense with someone the day before and then had a sleepless night just tossing and turning with the guilt and shame of intensity, Once again creating undo, unnecessary friction or tension in the relationship. And you know, you can just imagine the wave of shame when you didn't show up the way you wanted to. And it was so clear to me as we were texting back and forth that like, ah, the shame. This is like just ripe ground for you to confuse God's voice with Satan's voice, Like when we mess up.
Speaker 1:It's just like fertile ground for Satan to accuse and heap on the guilt and shame in a way that doesn't really represent God's posture toward us. And it was just really honestly fun to text back and forth about this incident because I felt like not only am I in the inside of God's grace having experienced it myself, but with this particular thing I've been there so many times and so that's kind of what I'm talking about, At least part of my experience, picking up on what you're saying, Katie, is when we learn to trust and experience God's grace in our brokenness, not only does it remove our judgmentalism and self-righteousness, but actually equips us to go. Hey, I'm not going to become an extension of the accuser, heaping on guilt and shame when other people are a mess, but I'm going to become an advocate that they can be where they are and trust grace.
Speaker 3:And that is especially powerful when it's truly from that place of your own transformation.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:I've been there too, in that exact same place, and like I can relate to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and this is what's true. God already sees it. Your intensity isn't a barrier to God loving you. In fact, most of the time it's a gift. And, yeah, sometimes it gets a little bit too hot and that produces shame and guilt, but God's waiting for you there once again to learn how to calibrate that underneath the leadership of his spirit. You're okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think experiencing God in my brokenness that way allows me to sit with people and let them share their story and not feel uncomfortable. Similar to Katie, I feel no need to fix. Um, when you've experienced how transformative it can be to just have God be present to you when you're broken, um, you realize that just being near people in their brokenness has a transformative power in itself. Obviously, there's next steps for people who have screwed stuff up, and it doesn't mean that they don't need advice. It's just I think experiencing it for myself has allowed me to understand how transformative it is to just listen to someone's story when they're broken, and that in itself sometimes can be. It's a very important part of a healing process for someone who's going through something.
Speaker 1:You created this hypothetical of someone walking into our church drunk you know, but maybe, by way of summary, what we're talking about today is this is a lens that Jesus wore.
Speaker 1:Jesus didn't have glasses, but if he did, we're saying this is a lens that he wore that as God in the flesh he was bending and stooping to meet people where they are, in their brokenness. What you're hearing from us and this really is the work of a healthy church is to learn to experience God's grace in our brokenness ourselves. Of a healthy church is to learn to experience God's grace in our brokenness ourselves and then to become the kind of people that know how to stoop and bend to meet people where they are so they can experience God's grace. Such that if you were to walk in on Sunday morning totally a mess there'd be a community of people that wouldn't be standing in judgment or sort of making snarky comments or casting weird gazes at you, but rather you might actually have people surrounding you with love and care, intentionally engaging you out of care and concern, right? Yeah, well, let's close this out. Let's start to land this plane. It's Praxis time, that's good.
Speaker 3:Praxis podcast. We's good Praxis podcast.
Speaker 1:We've got some practices for you, and I want to share the first one, and it's just simply this it's to hug your cactus, a practice being honest with God, and this is the only way you're going to learn how to trust grace. And so, katie, you and I were just kind of bantering about really slowing down and attending to those moments that maybe provoke the deepest shame when we mess up during the day, and that's what I'm talking about. One concrete practice for you to do is just to create some space, maybe a few times throughout the week, where you're reflecting on how you're living, and don't dodge those moments where you weren't at your best, but rather see those as the greatest opportunity to experience God's grace and love for you. That'd be the first practice I'd name.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And then I would name a practice of just being honest with others, like just practice getting honest. I think at one point one of you said being honest with others, like just practice getting honest. I think at one point one of you said, you know, being honest with other people helps us to get to have the courage to be honest with God. And I would say learning to be honest with God also helps us be more honest with other people. So, just you know, showing up honestly in what's true, in your relationships, in your marriage with your kids, with your parents, with your friends, coworkers, et cetera.
Speaker 3:And if this idea scares you, maybe something in particular comes to mind or something sticks out as like oh, this is an area where I haven't been completely honest.
Speaker 3:Or if that idea just feels sort of foreign to you, I'd say maybe two things. One is just like start small, like find an area where you can be honest with someone and lean into that. And the second thing I would say is that it does take courage, right, like it can feel scary and it does take courage, but it's worth it, because being honest with others is again an outflow of being honest with ourselves, being honest with God. You know there's the sort of the Catholic practice of confession, but I think it's more sort of the Catholic practice of confession, but I think it's more than just a Catholic practice. It doesn't because confession doesn't have to be in a booth with a priest, like we can practice confession with trusted friends or family members. So if that's a way that that's helpful, just to think about this, like where can I maybe confess something I'm struggling with, or show up vulnerably, or just show up honestly and authentically with someone that I trust.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean confession is one of the one another's in the new Testament. Um and and yeah, it's an incredible gift when you can be honest about something in your life where you're not at your best and you can hear someone else see some see it, see it on their face, their compassion, their kindness, announcing forgiveness to you.
Speaker 2:We need that yeah, a third practice I would name is to embody practice embodying grace to someone else. So use it as like a, as a lens to view um the next time you see someone who makes a mistake in your life or screw something up, um, practice embodying, um stooping down, uh and and give them grace. Um, I think that uh like, yeah, maybe you can uh think of someone you already know whose life is a mess and, um, maybe someone you've been avoiding because you're not quite sure how to engage things. So just practice figuring out what that looks like.
Speaker 2:To just be there with someone who's in the middle of a mess is another good example for this one is learning to meet with grace first and then discuss the next steps slash consequences or whatever repair needs to happen from something we're often like. Our instinct is to try to control situations by doling out consequences or disciplines or things like that Out of a place of anger, Like you're saying.
Speaker 3:the consequence comes in that place of anger and reaction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and often it's done out of a desire to try to control the situation rather than applying what's best for your kids. So practice the next time you feel that initial rush of anger If your kid, when your kids mess up um. Practice showing grace first, um, and then kind of flipping those two. Love that.
Speaker 1:Well, it's good news, you guys. You don't have to dodge yourself. You can receive God's grace right where you are and where to become the kind of people that know how to extend that kind of grace, to know how to extend that kind of grace to other people. Thanks for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Next time we're going to look at a third core conviction when it comes to multiplying disciples who live on mission in the world, and it's this God is like Jesus. Hope you'll tune in.
Speaker 4:Praxis is recorded and produced at Crosspoint Community Church. You can find out more about Hope. You'll your podcasts.
