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The Long Road: God Cares Too Much To Overwhelm Us · The God Who Sees You Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: God never overwhelms us with information.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: He never overwhelms us with our calling because he gives us one step at a time.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, friend, and welcome back to the podcast.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: We are on a series right now called The Long Road.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about how God takes us through these long roads sometimes and teaches us things, and also we grow in the depth of our relationship with Him.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of you know through my writing and through my videos that I was a runner in high school and in college, and just a college runner athlete.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then post-college I went on to run like half marathons and stuff, and this was just a big part of my life.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was a big part of who I was and my identity.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: But there came a point where it got really stripped away, and I really struggled with health issues.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden, running became just unbearable to me.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was causing my body to flare up and have all these issues.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to quit.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Then a few years later, I kind of tried running again, and I said, I just I just want to see if I can get back to it.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: But this time I came down with more of an injury, and that was rough.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was in my foot, and no doctors could really help me.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: That lasted for a good maybe year and a half.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, I just felt like I had I had started to go to this one doctor and I started seeing some healing happen.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I started to see like the pain in my foot started getting better, and I thought, God, is this are you opening the door?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because for so long it felt like he was just closing it, right?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And like, no, it's not time, you can't right now.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it was really hard to hear no from him for so long.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: But all of a sudden, I had started to hear like maybe yes, maybe an open door.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so immediately, as soon as I started feeling good, I I tried to get right back into running the way that I had done it before.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I really in that moment burned myself out.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I I tried to run the way I used to in college, and I went too far too fast.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it would actually take days for my legs to even start to recover from this.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was just trying too hard to be something that I was before.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And my body was really screaming at me like, slow down, like you're going way too fast.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So from there I decided to go slower with it.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I did maybe 10 minutes of running at a time, 10 minutes of walking, you know, just a little on, a little off.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: My body responded much better to that, to this slow introduction of it.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sharing all of this with you because I feel like this relates to our spiritual journey and how God takes us through things slowly and how we're not supposed to go all out all at once, and we don't want to set ourselves up for burnout.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And here is today's big idea for this long road journey that we're talking about.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: God purposefully takes us on the long road because he cares too much to overwhelm us.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I can't tell you how many times I have tried to go head first into something, run ahead of God.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I truly believed that this was something that God had for me or wanted me to do, but only to find out that this very thing was too overwhelming and I couldn't keep up with it, and the way that I was going about it was going to overwhelm me.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: God never overwhelms us with information.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: He never overwhelms us with our calling because he gives us one step at a time.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the way that I like to think about this is that he gives us one puzzle piece at a time because he's building this masterpiece, right?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: But he's only handing us one piece at a time because he does not want to overwhelm us.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where trust is built, right?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because you don't have to trust something if you know the full end picture.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know the whole puzzle, what it's going to look like.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: But you have to trust if you're only given one piece at a time.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's where trust is built.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: The human heart was never meant to hold the fullness of understanding that God has.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: We were never meant to know everything.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe this goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, right?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: We were never meant to eat from that tree and have the knowledge of good and evil.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: That was never meant to be held in the human mind.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So God can know these things, but it's it's too much for us to know.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Where to follow Him, where to let Him hand that one piece of the puzzle to us at a time.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And this actually reminded me of the story of Joseph, Jesus' father.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking just about for a minute, how crazy this must have been for him.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: This, you know, trying to take care of Mary, baby Jesus had just been born in a stable, right?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: In a manger amongst all these animals, just less than ideal, the whole thing.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in all of this, like all of that was hard, but there was a part that was even harder for Joseph, and that was King Herod was out to kill all the baby boys in the region, right?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so Joseph and Mary were really on the go, like trying to flee Herod this whole time.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's a moment where Joseph is fearing for his family's life.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: The Lord sends an angel to visit him in a dream.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: It says in Matthew 2, 13 through 15, when they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Get up, he said, take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Stay there until I tell you.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: For Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night, and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what stood out to me about that story.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: God gave Joseph one puzzle piece at a time.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Here, Joseph, let's go to Bethlehem.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Then he said, Joseph, let's get up and let's flee.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go in the middle of the night.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: These were one puzzle piece at a time.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: There was even the puzzle piece of where was Jesus going to be born, right?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like where there was no room in the inns, all around.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: There was no room for them to have this baby.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the puzzle piece was have him in a manger, right?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And he didn't tell Joseph that all ahead of time because that would have overwhelmed him.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: If God would have told Joseph all of this, it would have been so overwhelming to him, right?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to remember, I want you to remember that if God told you everything ahead of time, it would also be overwhelming.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: He has your best in mind.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: He knows that giving you everything right here and right now would be too much.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that all of this reminds us of God's loving and gentle character that says, I want what is best for you.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: As we take this long road with him, let's remember that this long road is not meant to overwhelm us, but to teach us how to accept one puzzle piece at a time.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let me pray for us, friends.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Lord Jesus, grateful for you and the way that you reveal yourself one piece at a time, because we know that your glory and your plan and everything you have ahead would overwhelm us if we knew it all.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: But Lord, we're like sheep.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: We're just following our shepherd.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we pray that we can follow you this week, this very day, just with the puzzle piece that you hand us for today.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that we can trust you and that we can grow in trust as we walk this faith journey out with you.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And Lord, we know it's long and we know we don't have all the answers, but we trust you anyway.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And we want to walk in faith today.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: In your name.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Friends, thank you for joining me today.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to go a little deeper, I created a study called The Long Road, and I'm gonna put the link for that below this video.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next time.