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He is-The Character of God: He is Loving and Patient · The Father's Business Podcast

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The Father's Business was founded by Sylvia Gunter to encourage people to a deeper relationship with God.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: I'm Elizabeth Gunter Powell.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: And I am Kimberly Roddy.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the Father's Business Podcast.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Hey friends, this is Kimberly.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We're so glad that you joined us.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: I want to personally invite you to join me and my dear friend Elizabeth for the Rooted and Resilient Conference October 3rd and 4th in Charlotte, north Carolina.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: This weekend is going to be all about helping you get refreshed, realigned and rooted in who you are in Christ.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: It's going to be a mixture of practical teaching and space to hear from God so you can exchange striving for rest, fear for sonship and depletion for a spirit-led life.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: It's $95 to register or if you bring a friend, it's just $80 each.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: I would love for you to come together, grow together and leave stronger in your faith by being with us this weekend, october 3rd and 4th.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Spots are limited.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: Grab your seat now at thefathersbusinesscom.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Go to our events page.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: It's Rooted and Resilient in Charlotte October 3rd and 4th.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: I can't wait to see you there.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to this week's podcast.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Everyone, we're going to continue in our series.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: He Is A Study of the Character of God, and one thing I just want to say up front is, it's obvious, I hope that we record these episodes ahead of time.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: So when our episode was released on September 11th, talking about God being compassionate and gracious, we did not know the events that would have unfolded the day before.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: And, as all of us have been watching the news, grieving with a family that has lost a loved one, also grieving for the parents who lost children in a school shooting, there's just so much devastation and loss that we have all nationally watched in the last week and I think it's kind of sweet of God that we were talking about compassionate and grace on a day when everyone was just so hungry for us to be compassionate, for us to be gracious.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: And so we want to continue talking about the character of God this week.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: We want to continue to pick the character of God this week.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: We want to continue to pick up in Exodus 34.6, walk through the next couple of characteristics of who God is.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: But my heart just breaks for all that has happened.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: My prayer has been as we asked everyone look and see.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Where do you see the grace and the compassion of God this week?
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: And I think what I saw in this past week, kimberly, is just our desperate need for compassion and grace.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: And as I was thinking about that, I was going back to that question that I asked in our podcast last week, which is why did God start with compassion and grace?
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: As horrific and tragic as everything has been that has happened in the last week or so, I go back and I think about where Moses and his people had been before they met with God.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: They had been in captivity, they had been in slavery.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: As graphic as some of the images have been that we have had to experience some of us like myself, I was surprised.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: It just showed up in my feed and all of a sudden I'm watching something horrific that I didn't want to see.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: I think of all of the things that the people of Israel not only saw but experienced as they were under captivity and in slavery.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: It just makes a little more sense that the first thing God needs to tell his people is I'm compassionate and I'm gracious.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: They didn't need to know about his holiness, his power, his, his authoritarian part of him.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: They will come to know that and they have seen his power as he's brought them through the desert, he's fed them, he's part of the red sea.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: They've seen miracles happen, but what he need, they needed to hear the most in that moment, was that he is compassionate and gracious.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: let's read that passage again together in exodus 34, starting in verse 6.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: It says and he passed in front of Moses being God.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: God passed in front of Moses proclaiming the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: Love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: And that's where the sentence ends.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: And that sentence is rich and powerful because, as we talked about last time, it is God showing up to Moses in the midst of brokenness, in the midst of sin, in the midst of a rebellious people.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: And he's showing up, showing his face and his glory to Moses, and he's saying he's a compassionate and gracious God.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: Elizabeth, as you were just saying, there is such power in that phrase and when we think about being confronted with evil, darkness, hard times, hardships, daily frustrations, everything on the spectrum, to know that we have a compassionate God who will hold us, who will care for us tenderly, who will pay attention to us, who will look at us and see us.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: And His graciousness, that unearned favor, where he leans towards us, where he again, where he pays attention to us and he sees us.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: And he, in his all-encompassing big, holiness, bigness, supremeness, god-creator-ness, he still has tender compassion and grace upon us, and we talked about that next phrase last week, where he is slow to anger.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: Well, I know, for many people, every day is full of an opportunity to be angry much less in our world and what we've experienced you know in the last few days, but there's always an opportunity in front of us to be angry.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: And, elizabeth, you and I were talking, and last week I heard you say something in our conversation you used when I was talking about being slow to anger and this kind of thing, and you said something about being patient and I thought we weren't really talking about patience.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: I was like, well, no, that plays together.
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: But you had an insight that you and I were talking about and I wondered if you wanted to talk about that a little bit more.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Oh sure.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: So as we're preparing for this series and kind of thinking through what characteristics to talk about and looking at this verse in Exodus 34 as kind of our jumping off place, as I was studying and reading about slow to anger, the word patience popped up and I'm like no.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: And much like you, kimberly, I was like no, no, no, we're not talking about patience, that's long-suffering, that's enduring, that's, you know, being able to hold on and wait.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: Oh, that word that I cannot stand when you have to wait on someone else.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: And as I dug deeper into things and God and I had a bit of a conversation about it, he's like no, if you really dig down into what patience means, it does mean long suffering.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: Actually, in the Hebrew it's the words for long and it's the word for nostril.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: And it's this idea of taking a deep, slow breath.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: And if you think about it, when you're angry or frustrated or tense, your breathing changes, right, you get these short kind of huffy breaths going on.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: So it's like we tell everyone just breathe, just take a breath.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: So this idea of patience is taking a long breath.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: But it also and this is where it got really convicting for me it's also defined as holding back anger and for me that was one of the first times I've connected that, because Kimberly you and I talked about last week, we both fully admit we have a temper and sometimes have an issue with anger, but the thought of being patient and having it connect to anger, that my, my problem with patience is actually at its root.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: It's a problem with anger because I'm getting short frustrated, whatever word you want to use, irritated, whatever word you want to use.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: There.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: I'm not having love for the person in front of me and I'm not being slow to anger because they're not doing something the way that I want them to do, or even turning it towards God.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: God is not acting quick enough on my behalf when God tells me to be patient and wait on him.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: I don't want to do that and it's real core deep down in there.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: That emotion that we're struggling with is anger and that just got way too convicting.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: So I had kind of put it off to the side and then, as you and I were talking in that first episode, you talked about being slow to anger and I was like, okay, god, here we are again.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: You're going to bring it back into my face that it's not just long.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: It is long suffering and endurance.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: But it's not just that.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: It's also a choice of holding back my anchor and giving space for there to be compassion and grace for another person.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: Right, and I think some of us myself maybe can fool myself a little bit, because I often think I'm a pretty patient person.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: I'm pretty, I can, you know I can, I can wait, I can do that, and then I'm like, but I, I will readily admit that I struggle with anger and I'm like those two are are connected.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: In fact I was looking this up after we talked and I was looking at Proverbs 15, 18,.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: That says a hot tempered person stirs up conflict, but the one who is patient calms a quarrel.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: And then I thought okay, what do I do?
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: For part of my living?
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: I'm a mediator.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: I am often dealing with people that are in conflict, that are stirred up, and I get to often be the third person in the room being calm, being patient, and I do see how that can calm a quarrel, how it can calm things down, and so what's happening there is that patience.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: The proverb here is connecting that patience to the hot temper or the anger.
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: So they're definitely connected there and I think when we think about God being slow to anger, then we automatically have to go.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: Well, he's also very patient and long-suffering, which we know to be true, but it's just a slightly different way of looking at it and really paying attention.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: That verse in Exodus also says that he's not just compassionate and gracious and slow to anger, but he is abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: So then we have this characteristic of not just love, simply love, which is critical, but abounding in love.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: So we have this context where it says he is abounding in love, which reminds me of several passages in Ephesians, where in Ephesians 1, it says that he lavishes upon us his grace and his love and that kind of thing in Ephesians 1.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: And then you go over to Ephesians 3.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: Paul is praying in Ephesians 3 that people would be able to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: So again, that is that all-encompassing the love that surpasses knowledge is what Paul says.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Encompassing the love that surpasses knowledge is what Paul says.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: And so when I think about God abounding in love and faithfulness, we as humans wake up every day wondering am I enough, am I loved, Am I secure?
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: Those are primal, basic insecurities that we all have.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: And I'm like man.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: Here we go again In Christ, I am deeply, deeply loved.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: You know more than I can fathom Right.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and again, kimberly, it goes back to that word that you brought up last week, which is one of my favorite Hebrew words, which is hesed, which is it's not love on the surface, as you know.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: Oh well, I love Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: I love Krispy Kreme donuts.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: It is a deep, covenantial love.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: It's a loyalty that runs deeper than any other loyalty type of love.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: It is that love that is never going to let us go, that is always going to show up in abundance as well.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: Because this is where I struggle.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: I like to play judge and jury a lot with the people in my life and the circumstances of the world, and I often say, if they would just let me be dictator of the world, I could get this whole thing straightened out pretty quick, right, because I think I know what is right and what is wrong, as most of us do, and so sometimes my love is based on your performance, love is based on your performance.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: You deserve you know 10% love, because you acted in a 10% way versus always.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: You deserve 100%.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: That agape love, that unconditional love, that hesed, covenantial love that God gives us regardless of our behavior.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: Now, of course, his father's heart wants us to be in right relationship with him and he wants us to follow him.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: But his love for me doesn't change when I don't perform well.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: We see that when we go back to Exodus 34.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: God is saying to Moses I am gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love, right as these people have decided to rebel against him.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: So he's not saying that to them as a reward.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: He's saying it to them in a way as to give space.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: So I think God's patience, his slow to anger, flows out of this hesed, abounding love.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: I think his compassion and his grace flows out of this abounding love he has for us that gives us space to repent and to grow.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: That is not quick to go up you messed up there, you messed up there, you messed up there.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: But he is patient, much like as a parent will be patient with a child that's learning to walk.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: If your child is learning to walk and it takes two steps and it falls down, you don't scold the child that they only walk two steps.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: You encourage you go, that's all right, get back up, we can do it again.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: And I think that is the picture of our loving father, who is there.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: He wants us to be more like him than we want to be like him, and so he is always reaching out to us with love and patience, and I thank God he is slow to anger, because I've done a lot of things to make him angry in my lifetime.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: I'm glad he has more patience than I do.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: But I agree with you, kimberly we wake up in the morning with that feeling of I'm not enough or I've done so much.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: How can you forgive me?
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: Or I didn't do enough for God yesterday, like all these performance type questions, and what God is showing up with every morning is I love you with a covenantal love that you can't even begin to grasp, right.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: And when I think about love, I think about, like you've said, it's that unconditional, covenantal aspect that cannot, that won't let go of us, that won't set himself free from us, right?
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: And so that love and that patience, those are directly linked.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: I mean, all these characteristics are directly linked because they flow from God.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: But when we think about love and patience in particular, that patience that he has flows from his love that is abounding, that is abundant, and so his patience is abounding and abundant and it gives space and it gives room for repentance and growth.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: We see that in Scripture.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: We see in 2 Peter, 3, 9,.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: The Lord is not slow in keeping his promises, as some understand slowness.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: Well, if we go back and really think about love in connection to that patience, in 1 Corinthians we see that connection.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: 1 Corinthians 13, which a lot of people talk about.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: What is love?
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: Love is this.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: Love is that?
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: 1 Corinthians 13,.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: If we jump in the middle there, in verse 4, it says love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking Love.
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: That is incredibly difficult in our day-to-day lives and it's incredibly difficult when we look at what's been going on in the US these days.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: Because we are not God Like, because we are not God, we are not abounding in love.
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: And yet we're called to follow God and we're called to be like this.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: We're called to be holy as he is holy and to have this love he has.
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: And I mean, I just think about like.
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: Love is patient, it's kind, it does not dishonor others, it's not self-seeking, it's not easily angered All those things that we're talking about.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: And if you take that and practically think about, well, how are we supposed to do that?
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: How do we know this?
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: Let's go back to a key passage in 1 John, 4, 7 through 10.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: It says Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: And in this the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: This is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us first and sent His Son to be the propitiation or the sacrifice for our sins.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: Elizabeth, that is like, help me unpack that.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: That is a rich, powerful scripture.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: Kimberly.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: I will love to unpack this in any way that I can, but I want to hop back to one little thought that just smacked me in the face one more time.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: God has determined that I learn about patience.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: I have heard 1 Corinthians for most of my life, memorized it as a child.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: I have heard 1 Corinthians for most of my life, memorized as a child, whatever.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: And I knew patience was in the list.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: But as you were just reading it, it's the first thing on the list.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: Of all the words God could start with with what is love?
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: The first one is patient, and I'm like dang it, I really have to live this.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: Okay, so God is chasing me around and prep for this podcast, and even in the midst of it going.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: This is where you and I are going to be for a little while, and so love is holding back my anger to give space, to allow other people chances to grow, other people chances to see God's grace and compassion.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: And that is a much stronger encouragement, admonishment, whatever word you want to use there, than just love is patient.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: Love is kind Because I always go on to the do not envy, does not boast, is not proud part, because I feel like I do better at those most of the time.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: I'm proud of how humble I am right, jump over the patient and kind yeah, yeah, those are sweet words and get to the other parts and then I start thinking about all the people that are envious or boast or do other things, self-seeking, all those other things.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: But he starts with patience and then he doubles down halfway through with easily anchored.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: So I've got a lot of thinking to do with God about what does it really mean to look and be patient?
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: And I think that dovetails back into the verses you just quoted in 1 John 4, 7 to 10, where that's a very strong phrase for him to say anyone who does not love does not know God.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: And that is a very high bar, and I think it's a bar that we can't reach on our own.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: I think that's part of why it is said that way, so that the last part of that verse can be the solution to our problem, which is we only love, because God loved us so much that he sent his son to be the sacrifice for our sins.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: It is impossible on our own to be loving and patient, and yet so much of my day I find myself trying to run under my own steam and then I run out and then there's the snapping, the explosion, the anger, all the things I don't want to be.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: That shows up because I didn't take the time to make sure I was truly, deeply rooted in the fact that God is love and we are in him, and so, therefore, we have at our disposal the resource of all of God's love that we can choose to use with the people around us.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: Now, in this culture, we don't often do that, and I think you know not to totally bash social media, but I think being able to sit at home behind a screen and write things, and I don't even necessarily have to put my name on it, has made us very quick to respond and react.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: Has made us very quick to respond and react Rather than being slow to anger.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: Abounding in love.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: We flip that.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: We're abounding in anger and we're very slow to love.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: So I guess one of my questions I have two questions, as we're talking about this idea of love One of my questions is how do we practically in the day-to-day, get those flipped back the other way, to where my first instinct is more towards love?
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: than anger.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: How do we do?
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: That is a million-dollar question, right?
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's where it comes back to.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: Not to give a simplistic answer, because I don't think it's simple, because I think in reality it's difficult, it's really hard and it takes a lot of exercise and work.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: But I think that's where it goes back to walking in step with the Spirit, moment by moment, minute by minute, second by second, hour by hour, day by day.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: We're going to have to make choices and we're going to have to be aware enough to make that choice to follow Jesus versus to follow our own instincts or our own reactions.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: I've said this before it takes choosing to respond rather than react.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: Anger, typically, is a reaction, love is a response.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: It's not natural for us to, and it's natural for us to love some people, but it's not natural for us to love at all times, in my opinion.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: And so I think that to really recognize, to choose a life of gratitude, I think could be a place to start as well recognize that God is compassionate and gracious, that he is slow to anger and he's abounding in love and faithfulness.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: To recognize that he is loving towards us and faithful to us and abounding in that and that goes to a thousand generations to be grateful for that.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: Enough to let that impact my heart is a great place to start because that is where I can then overflow in my own actions out of that gratitude.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: But again, it takes a regular mindset of that and I think that's where you go back, elizabeth, to many conversations that we've had about the importance of not having a victim mindset, right, like, if we can live out of the reality that we are beloved children of God, then we can more easily access at least more easily have access to living out of that beloved mindset.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's about living from that place of abundance and I mean, this is the way my brain works.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: When you're talking about abundance and being able to live out of that capacity of being full to overflowing and then being able to share that with others, my thoughts go back to times when there was scarcity.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: Let's go back to 2020.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: We're all in COVID lockdown and all of of a sudden, the thing that is like gold is toilet paper, right, and everyone's trying to hoard toilet paper and the attitudes and the actions of people to other people in the store, fighting over who gets to get the toilet paper versus.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: I was just at the store yesterday.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: There's abundant toilet paper available for everyone and no one was fighting in the aisle over toilet paper because there was so much of it there.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: And so this is again the way my brain works.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: I connect that back to if I'm living in scarcity, if I'm living in that victim mindset place, if I'm not living from the fullness of my true identity in Christ, living from the fullness of my true identity in Christ, I'm always going to react because it feels like scarcity, it feels like there's not enough love to go around.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: Therefore, I cannot be gracious with love towards someone else because I myself am not full, and so I think you're so right.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: You can't wait till you're in the moment where your husband or your friend or your child does something that irritates you, to then fill yourself up.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: It is that come and keep on coming.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: It's that abiding place that we talk about a lot on this podcast, where I need to be living in a place where I'm so saturated with the love of God so that I have capacity, I have an aisle full of love that I can give to the other people around me.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: I think so often I wait till I'm in the moment and I'm trying not to react to then figure out oh, by the way, you've been driving around with your tank on empty and so of course, you're going to react.
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: It's so much easier for me to be gracious and compassionate and slow to anger when I am abounding in love, which means I've spent time with the Father.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: Even the way Jesus would go away from the crowds and spend time with his Father, I think he did that Even as God.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: He understood the need to refill his tank full before he could give anything away to someone else, and yet, in the scurry, in the hurry of the alarm didn't go off.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: We were late, you know.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: Now we're on the run and all of a sudden we get halfway through our day and we're realizing I don't have what it takes to get through the rest of this day without being impatient or angry, or the opposite of the fruit of the spirit, because there was something missing in the rhythm of my life.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: And I'll be the first to admit it.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: I'm very quick when I wake up in the morning to look at my phone, because it's my clock, but also there is every email, every notification, all the other things are all waiting on me, and it's real easy to get caught up in the race that I have to run here on earth and not take a moment just to be and allow God's love to wash over me.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: So, therefore, I can be a reflection of that love to the people around me.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: I think what you're saying there, elizabeth, is you know, we all live in the tyranny of the urgent in a lot of ways.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: When you're saying that, I'm thinking about how hard it is for us to just maintain things right.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: It's hard to maintain things and it's why we have to keep coming back and coming back, and coming back.
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: And scripture says keep coming, keep coming, keep coming, because I think God knows we have a human nature that's going to go and then putter out.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: And, as you were talking, I was thinking about this challenge I saw recently, or a trend that I saw recently, called the Great Lock-In of 2025.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: And it's this idea that like, ok, we started off the year with these New Year's resolutions in January, and by January 5, we were done.
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: And so there's this trend that some people are doing that's like okay, it's September 1, so September 1 starts the great lock-in of 2025.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: We now have September, october, november and December.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: We got four months to get it done, so lock in.
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: And I thought that's it's so interesting, because we do have that mentality of like being on a little bit of a roller coaster with the way that we operate in life, and I think that that's also how we operate spiritually.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: We just have to continue to remind ourselves like there is growth in that, like you know, I've heard it said you don't stare at a plant or stare at a child and like see them actually grow, but you make marks on the wall to see your child's progress, or you water the plant and you see the fruit of watering it.
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: The same thing is true for us, spiritually, when it comes to discipleship.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: We see ourselves grow as we invest in ourselves and spend time with the Lord and allow other people to invest in us and allow His Word to take a deeper root in our lives and to allow these spiritual disciplines to take place.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: And so I think, over time I hope that many of us have gotten to places and will continue to get to greater places, further places, where we look and we say, okay, I reacted less there, I didn't get angry as quickly there.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: And then we hold on to those markers, those little ebonies or stones, sometimes when we do fail, when we do screw up, when we do go oh, I didn't do it here, I got to go back to that.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: I know I can because I've done it and God's given me the grace and the power that I needed to do that, it was His empowering and His Spirit walking by His Spirit.
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: So I think that's the encouragement.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: We have a human nature, we have a tendency, and yet God is bigger than that and I think the fact that he reminds us that he is abounding in love and faithfulness is because he knows that we will waver, he knows that we will wander.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: And so then we look and we think how has God shown me love and shown me patience in my seasons of wandering?
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: How has he been faithful to me, how has he been steadfast?
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: And that will allow us to continue hunkering down for the next season, you know.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, kimberly, I have a little bit of a different question to ask and you're not going to have the answer for it, so let me just go ahead and tell you that.
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: But as we're talking about the characteristics of God each week, as we're talking about a characteristic, god is God and he does not change.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: He has always been gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love, and he always will be, but sometimes will be.
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: But sometimes our circumstances make it feel as if he's not.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: And I'm thinking about people who might be listening to this podcast, who are grappling even with what happened in the last week, with people being killed, whether that's a school shooting or Charlie Kirk, or even just a neighbor who had a heart attack and died.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: There is loss that we have all experienced either recently, or we can look back in our lives and go.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: You know, that season of my life didn't feel gracious and compassionate or kind.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: How do we wrestle with and what would we have to say to someone who's like yeah, I hear what you're saying and I hear what the Bible says, that he's abounding in love and he's slow to anger and he's gracious and he's compassionate, but that's not what it feels like right now to me.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: What words of comfort or encouragement or wisdom from our own lives could we possibly share with people that are feeling that way?
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think sometimes you have to walk through the valley of death.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: I mean honestly, like we have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: We don't live on the mountains, we don't live on the mountaintops, and so you and I have shared plenty of stories on this podcast through the years of ways, that seasons where we have felt that and where God has shown up and where we feel like God has not shown up.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: And you're right, there's not a simplistic answer to that.
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: I have two thoughts that come to mind.
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: One is we have to cling to the truth of who God is, even when we don't feel it, because our feelings don't dictate truth as much as we feel like they can.
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: And my harder answer although that is hard, my harder thought is we have to just grieve and we have to let Jesus, god and the Holy Spirit and friends in the community of faith sit with us as we grieve.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: So for anyone who finds themselves in a place of grieving today, what do we say?
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: I think when you're grieving, it's about being honest with God and yourself and others, your community, about what you're feeling and what you're thinking, and they're not always going to line up with truth, but that's okay, and know that that's where God is also patient and faithful with us.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: I often think of the passage of scripture where it says the Holy Spirit groans for us when there are no words.
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure the context like the exact passage for that right now off the top of my head, but to me grieving is like just it's a sense of deep, deep disappointment and or loss.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: And when we're in that grief, I think we need to know that God will be with us, in that, that he doesn't abandon us, that he is in the valley of the shadow of death with us, that he is still walking with us.
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: There's the old adage of the footprints in the sand.
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: And why did I only see one set of footprints when I saw two for a while?
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: And the Father says well, that's when I was carrying you and that's the sentiment is like God has us, and I think you and I have talked about this the only way through the darkest night of the soul, which has been a phrase that's been around for a long time, so this is not a new experience to mankind.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: It's that reality that God has me helped me stay the course of walking with my faith and walking with Jesus has been, has been trusting in that reality that that he is still God and he is still in control, and I've been able to be not okay with that in the sense of like I like it.
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: Okay In a deeper sense of, okay, I can, I can trust him, yeah, and that's a deep sense of security that I know a lot of people don't feel, and I'm not sitting here today telling you that I felt that in those moments of grief, right.
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: But as my friend Allison would often say, I know in my knower, I know deep in my soul and my spirit and my gut and my heart and my body and my mind and my spirit, that God is with me in the valley of the shadow of death, in the midst of things that I don't feel like I can control.
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: There's the deeply personal grief that affects us and then there's our, you know, even with what's going on in our country in the last week, there is those things that happen, that the evil things in our world, or the dark things in our world, or the sad things in our world that grip us to grief, and those feel very different, but they also leave us in the valley of the shadow of death.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, kimber, the verse that you were referring to is Romans 8, 26 and 27.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: And it says in the same way the Spirit helps us in our weakness.
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us, as through wordless groans and he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for God's people in accordance with the will of God.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: That is so comforting in these places where it does feel dark that when we don't know what to pray, we don't know what to believe, we don't know what to feel this Holy Spirit is groaning, and so if you find yourself today in a place where life is hard and all you can do is groan, he's right there, groaning with you, and he is the God of all comfort.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: And so some of us are in some really hard places and grappling with some big questions about why does God allow things, or why did God allow these things in my past?
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: And so we want to invite you to bring all of who you are your spirit, your soul and your body up to his throne and just say God, I don't get you, but I'm coming to you anyway, and allow him to minister to you his comfort, his grace, his compassion, his patience with you, and he's okay with your struggle.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: It's okay to struggle, it's okay to question, it's okay to be angry.
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: God is big enough to handle your anger and he is patient with us, just as he asked us to be patient with others.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: And, most of all, he is abounding in love.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: There is enough love to go around for everyone, and even more.
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: God will never run out of love, because it's who he is.
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: So some of us are in places where we are celebrating that God has been gracious and compassionate and slow to anchor with us, and our challenge is to look for ways this week where we can reflect that long-suffering, slow to anger, abounding in love to the people around us.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: And others of us may just be in a place where you know what for this week, what you need to do is crawl up in your Father's lap and just let Him hold you and love you and reveal to you the depths of his love for you.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: So, wherever you find yourself this week, we pray that you would come to know God as your gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love, father.
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: As you walk through this week reflecting on the truths of this week, we would love for you to share those stories with us.
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: You can email us or you can go onto one of our social media accounts, where you can find us and you can comment.
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: We would love to hear the stories of where you see the abounding love and faithfulness of God, where you have seen that this week in your life, where you have seen that in the world around you.
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: In the world around you, you can also send us the stories of where you're wrestling and where you're grieving and where you're sensing God show up or not show up, and we will pray with you, we will pray for you.
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: So we encourage you to share those things with us and with others so that we can be encouraged and see all the different ways that God is showing up in our world and in our lives, because he is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness to a thousand generations.
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: So thanks for being with us today and we look forward to being with you again soon.
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: I want to thank you for listening to the Father's Business Podcast.
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: This podcast is made possible through donations by people like you.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: To donate, go to wwwTheFathersBusinesscom.
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: Be sure to follow us at the Fathers Biz on Instagram and Facebook.