Latest / CEO Kingdom Seekers / Ep 40: Who Are You Beneath the Armor? The Actual Purpose of Personal Development (Psalm 139: 13-14)

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Ep 40: Who Are You Beneath the Armor? The Actual Purpose of Personal Development (Psalm 139: 13-14) · CEO Kingdom Seekers

• 0:09
  Hey, y'all.
• 0:09
  Welcome to this week's episode.
• 0:12
  So the last few weeks, We've been examining the core concepts of what it means to grow in our seven motivational gifts that God gives us by his grace.
• 0:24
  So we've looked at how we can examine what God has given us.
• 0:28
  We've looked at how gifts can develop and whether their expression produces good fruit, both internally and both inside of us and through us.
• 0:37
  And then we've also looked at the difference between competence and primary motivation.
• 0:41
  And so today, I want to ask a question That I think is gonna be as surprising to some of you as it has been to me.
• 0:49
  and god's been forming this question inside of me for the last three weeks.
• 0:53
  If you've been in any of my previous teaching spaces, I say this often, that whenever I'm about to teach something pretty deeply, particularly in, In a program that we've designed or as a keynote, God takes me through a journey of practically embodying whatever it is that I'm about to teach other people.
• 1:12
  And I love him so much for that.
• 1:14
  And also, it, it is a lot.
• 1:17
  And so God's had me looking at how I've grown in my own gifts a lot over these last few weeks, and he's also had me looking at something very interesting, which is this concept of self-discovery and self-knowledge.
• 1:31
  And so today I actually wanna look at this question of: What is the point of us getting to know ourselves better?
• 1:37
  Like, what is all of this self-knowledge and self-discovery and self-reflection really for?
• 1:43
  Because for the average high-responsibility human, like, you do a lot of personal development.
• 1:47
  You love growing.
• 1:49
  You want to be better.
• 1:50
  You want to transform, and not just practically in your identities as a parent or a spouse or a friend or a coworker or a boss, as a CEO, but you, you want to grow in your identity as a child of God.
• 2:08
  And so mo- the vast majority of people who come into our space, like, they have done a lot of self-reflection.
• 2:15
  They have gained a lot of self-knowledge.
• 2:17
  They have done a lot of self-discovery.
• 2:19
  They can tell me their personality type and their strengths and weaknesses and their leadership style and their attachment language and all of those pieces.
• 2:26
  And a lot of people even know their spiritual gifts coming into our space already.
• 2:29
  And they still feel like there's some distance between them and God, and also there's some distance between who they are now and their true self.
• 2:41
  And I'm gonna actually define that term true self because I think that in a lot of new age and, like, general spirituality spaces, they talk about you being your, your best self or your true self.
• 2:51
  But we're gonna actually talk about that from, like, a biblical perspective, from a Christian perspective And we get to really examine this both by understanding a bit better who Jesus is and who God is and then through God's eyes looking at ourselves.
• 3:08
  That's how we're gonna become more surrendered to God in the development of our gifts and in the divine direction of our gifts.
• 3:15
  So here's my goal.
• 3:17
  I don't want you to leave this series or the Grow In Your Gifts program, if you decide to join us on the 21st, I, I don't want you to leave either of those spaces simply knowing which box to put yourself in or even to be able to very clearly say,"I know this about myself.
• 3:33
  Like, I know what my gifts are, and I know how I wanna form them." I don't want you to just have greater self-understanding to be able to say you have it.
• 3:40
  I want you to have it so that you can be more honest about the person that you are, the person that is standing before God at all times, whether you own that's who you are or not.
• 3:51
  So I mentioned that the last three weeks, for me personally, have been a, a pretty significant journey around this.
• 3:58
  And I think I've shared this on here before, but as somebody with a professor gift, Confirmation and revelation oftentimes come to me through books.
• 4:07
  All right?
• 4:07
  Like, books are my favorite thing.
• 4:10
  When I tell people that I read on average over 100 books a year, they're like,"When?
• 4:16
  How?
• 4:17
  Why?" I read on average two to three books a week, and that's a mix of a lot of different books.
• 4:23
  And I'm sharing that because I mentioned God speaks to me through books, so He'll do some really fun things with this.
• 4:30
  He will have me buy books that I'm like,"I'm not interested in this right now," or I'll start to try to read it and I'm like,"Meh, I don't want that," and I'll put it on a shelf, and then two years later, I will be walking by the shelf and bump the shelf, and the book will fall off, and it's the exact book that answers whatever I've been praying about for the last two months.
• 4:48
  That's happened to me on multiple occasions.
• 4:51
  Another time, I'll be in prayer, and I will see a book on my shelf, and He'll be like,"Read that one." I'm like,"Okay." And I do, and it gives me the exact answer.
• 5:01
  The other day, my eldest had been asking if I could take her to Half Price Books, and we were gonna go, and they were closed.
• 5:08
  And so I hadn't been home or sat down, like, all day, and I got this nudge, like,"Offer to take Ray to the bookstore." So I did.
• 5:15
  I was like,"Ray, do you wanna go to Half Price Books?" She's really into CDs right now because she just got a car, and it's got a CD player, so she's buying all of this music that I'm like,"Why did I not keep my CDs when I was younger?" So we go there, and she's in the CD section, and I always go over to the clearance section where they're like$1 to$3 because there are amazing books there, and they're typically books that are, like, out of print at this point, or they're not very popular, so you're not gonna find them on Amazon or in other places, like when you go search for certain topics.
• 5:45
  So I love going over there.
• 5:47
  And some Catholic person somewhere in the city of Columbus decided to donate a bunch of books.
• 5:53
  And I kid you not, like, I think I ended up getting 10 books, and they were all on topics that I wouldn't have even known how to search for online had I tried, and yet they were just answering every single question that has been coming up for me around this topic for the last several weeks as I've been preparing this program.
• 6:13
  And, and y'all, here is the wildest part of this.
• 6:16
  This is also how I get confirmation that I know that God is like,"I want you to be reading these things." This is the level of God winks that ends up happening around this.
• 6:25
  The daily mass readings for the day will have a Bible verse in them, and then the book I open will directly quote that Bible verse.
• 6:32
  And then a paragraph later, it will cite an author whose book I just finished reading two weeks ago.
• 6:38
  And then the next chapter will talk will mention an author that I bought that book along with the other book and they were in two completely different places.
• 6:47
  Right?
• 6:48
  Like, this is the kind of thing that starts happening, and the scripture, the books, the, the articles that I'm reading, all of it aligns.
• 6:57
  And it's all about the exact thing that I'm struggling with.
• 7:00
  Because when I pray, I don't pray for God to just show me things so that I can have the information.
• 7:07
  I pray and I ask God to give me His wisdom.
• 7:11
  And so a lot of times, these books are telling me things that I don't wanna hear.
• 7:14
  So the two books I wanna bring up today, and you're gonna laugh,'cause, like, look at how these are connected, okay?
• 7:20
  The two books are one by Father James Martin and one by Thomas Merton.
• 7:26
  And so the book by, or, and one by Henri Nouwen.
• 7:29
  And I actually mentioned this book by Henri Nouwen in, last thursday's podcast with Dr.
• 7:33
  Carron.
• 7:34
  So I read this book weeks ago, called The Wounded Healer, and it was all about owning the fact that we, as healers and as Christian leaders, are not here to serve everyone.
• 7:45
  We all have different gifts and different characters and different personality traits and different ways of liking to move through the world and as Father Martin says, like, different ways of seeing the hand of God move through the world.
• 7:59
  And so the idea that I should try to serve everyone is not a great idea And Thomas Merton actually has this incredible quote, and it doesn't come from Wounded Healer.
• 8:12
  It comes from a book called Being and Doing that I have not read, but this quote came out of, Father james Martin's book, and I just thought it was amazing.
• 8:19
  And this is what we're gonna talk about today.
• 8:22
  "Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something we would never want to be if only we knew what we wanted?
• 8:31
  Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped and stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we are made for?" Like, let's just stop there for a second.
• 8:45
  Just stop and think about that.
• 8:46
  Why do we spend our lives striving to become someone that we would have realized we never wanted to be if we just stopped long enough to discern what we actually wanted.
• 8:56
  Now, I think this is maybe a dangerous question for some people.
• 9:01
  If you have any past painful experiences around you desiring things, wanting things, feeling like you needed things, and that leading you down a, a slippery slope, to some places that weren't the best.
• 9:12
  Hi, nice to meet you.
• 9:15
  Same.
• 9:17
  The word desire actually means of the Father.
• 9:20
  Desire, of the Father.
• 9:22
  So our world has done something interesting with the word desire, and it's attached it to a lot of worldly urges or cravings, and that's not what a true desire is.
• 9:33
  A true desire is something that God places in you, that draws you toward something that God wants you to move toward.
• 9:42
  That is so important because as we ask this question of why we spend our lives striving to become something that we probably didn't wanna be because we didn't spend enough time in prayer and in reflection and meditation and contemplation with God, and understanding how He designed us, individually to be the true self that He created the full uncovered self that He sees when He looks at us, no matter how much we try to hide pieces or add parts on or, like, create illusions around other parts.
• 10:23
  No matter what we do, He sees the truth of who we are.
• 10:28
  So what's all this self-knowledge actually for if so many of us are going to spend our lives getting to know ourselves on this, worldly level, and not actually seeing ourselves through God's eyes, and also not getting to know God better, because we were made in His image.
• 10:48
  So if we don't spend time actually getting to know the truth of who God is, and we then don't spend time getting to know the truth of how He designed us and how He sees us, and the desires that He's actually placed in our heart, those intrinsic motivations, our primary motivational gifts, and also our personalities, our character traits.
• 11:11
  If we don't spend time actually getting to know that and accepting those parts of ourselves.
• 11:17
  And accepting doesn't mean that you like them.
• 11:21
  It just means you accept that they exist, that's how God created and formed you to be, okay?
• 11:28
  If we don't spend time doing that, then all of that self-discovery and self-awareness, self-reflection, that gaining of self-knowledge, that's actually not for a godly reason.
• 11:35
  That's not submitted to His will, because He wants us to get to know the version of ourselves that He sees all the time, that completely bare, stripped down, fully flawed, fallible, imperfect, beautiful, delightful versions of ourselves.
• 11:53
  So for high responsibility humans, we spend a lot of time constructing these false versions of ourselves that look very respectful.
• 12:04
  They look dependable, they look successful, they look knowledgeable, they look strong, they look like they're low need, they look like they're very useful, they look like they're always able to carry more, take on more responsibility, be more helpful.
• 12:17
  But for a lot of us, that false self is not something that we consciously chose.
• 12:23
  Those attributes are costumes.
• 12:26
  They are things that we learn to put on in order to experience the felt sense of safety, to feel like we belong, to feel like we were useful, to feel like we were respected, to feel like we were meeting other people's approval.
• 12:42
  And Father Martin talks about this.
• 12:44
  He says in his book, Becoming Who You Are, he says,"God calls each of us in every situation to be our true selves, nothing more and nothing less.
• 12:55
  God uses every part of us, even the parts that were developed in a distorted way, even the parts we think are useless." And so for a lot of us, what we're doing is we've constructed these false selves, and these false selves are made up of two different pieces.
• 13:12
  They're made up of these costumes that I mentioned, where we're adding things on, where we're trying to make things look different, where we're creating illusions.
• 13:22
  And they're also made up of armor, where we cover things up, where we both hide things behind this protective shell, so that other people can't hurt them, but we also hide them from other people being able to see them.
• 13:36
  So the armor goes on to essentially cut off pieces and parts of ourself from other people being able to access them, and the costumes go on top to make things look like they aren't, to make us look like we're different than we are.
• 13:50
  And comparing ourselves to others intensifies this because for a lot of high-responsibility humans, as they start to understand their primary motivational gifts, as they start to understand,"Wow, the way that God designed me is different than the way that I've been functioning in the world," and that cognitive dissonance starts to show up, you start seeing just how much you haven't examined.
• 14:13
  You haven't stopped and paused and prayed and contemplated and meditated and asked God to show you what things look like.
• 14:20
  And you've avoided that so much, or you've been too busy to even think about doing it so much that you've ended up constructing this armor and putting on this costume around somebody else's or a lot of other people's versions of success and leadership and usefulness or, and holiness and giftedness.
• 14:42
  So there's a deeper form of self-reflection that gets to happen here.
• 14:46
  And like I said, this is what I've been doing over the last several weeks.
• 14:49
  And y'all, I'm not going to sugarcoat this for you.
• 14:52
  It sucks.
• 14:54
  It has sucked.
• 14:56
  It has been so painful.
• 14:59
  And also, it has let me really just sit and reflect in these writings, in these books, and also I've written so much over these last few weeks, how much of who I have become is my true self?
• 15:16
  What has developed from the grace-filled gifts that God has blessed me with?
• 15:22
  What has come from divinely directing and developing according to God's design and according to his formation plan for me?
• 15:31
  And how much has developed, and maybe been diminished or distorted, from who I thought I needed to become in order for the world to love me, the world to appreciate me, the world to respect me?
• 15:46
  So how much of me is true, and how much of me is false?
• 15:52
  It's a ridiculously tough question.
• 15:54
  I understand if you decide to just turn off this podcast right here, okay?
• 15:58
  Like, maybe you're not ready for that.
• 15:59
  That's okay.
• 15:59
  So for the rest of this episode, we're gonna dive deeper into this question, okay?
• 16:03
  We're gonna look at personal development from like the worldly perspective versus the actual biblical perspective, the Christian perspective.
• 16:10
  And we're gonna look at how Jesus is, again, always a perfect model of this.
• 16:17
  And then we're also gonna look at how holiness, how as we grow in holiness, as we grow in sanctification, we're all gonna start looking different.
• 16:26
  There's actually gonna be more diversity, not less.
• 16:30
  And then we're gonna tie this all back in with how your spiritual gifts fit into this equation and how then you use all of this self-knowledge to better bring out your true self.
• 16:44
  So I think the next place we've gotta go is like being very clear that when we talk about becoming your true
• 16:50
  Speaker 31: self, and
• 16:51
  this idea of just being yourself, Like, that's a colloquial term.
• 16:54
  Just be yourself.
• 16:56
  That is something that is profoundly overused, and oftentimes very insufficient in helping us to actually draw closer to God and to understand how he has designed us and to see ourselves through his eyes.
• 17:11
  A lot of times in like the personal development spaces,'cause I spent the better part of 15 years there before I hit my knees, came back, declared Jesus was Lord and my savior, and like really surrendered to God again.
• 17:28
  10 to 15 years in that space.
• 17:31
  So in, in the personal development world, it's always about trying to better understand yourself and make progress and be more of yourself.
• 17:37
  Be authentic.
• 17:38
  Like the word authentic, authenticity is so overused at this point.
• 17:43
  All
• 17:43
  Speaker 32: right?
• 17:44
  Speaker 32: Authenticity
• 17:44
  requires obedience.
• 17:48
  Authenticity requires obedience.
• 17:51
  And that statement, you might have been like,"Ooh, Lee, okay.
• 17:53
  Swinging out the gate." Authenticity requires obedience because it requires yourself to look through God's eyes.
• 18:00
  Becoming yourself does not mean that you worship yourself.
• 18:03
  Becoming more of yourself means that you worship the God who created you.
• 18:07
  So in a lot of spaces, the self-awareness and self-reflection distorts into self-worship because we spend so much time trying to get to understand ourselves better and to more deeply identify our desires, and to just accept our limitations and not feel the need to like change or anything, and like to, to just own who we are and not own the fact that we are called to be more like Christ So, the whole idea of being more of yourself, that is not enough if it means that your desires matter more than God's, if it means that you are not going to grow in holiness the way that God calls you to grow in holiness.
• 18:58
  And by the way, if you're not Catholic and you're listening to this, or maybe you are Catholic these terms that we use a lot, like sanctification, holiness, all those, I'm gonna try to do a better job of just not assuming that y'all know what that term means.
• 19:10
  And also, if you ever have questions about this, like, i'm so happy to give you resources.
• 19:15
  Holiness is us becoming more like God.
• 19:21
  It is doing things in full alignment with God's will.
• 19:26
  All right?
• 19:26
  It's being fully connected to him, being unified with him.
• 19:31
  So one of my favorite books, by matthew Kelly, who is a phenomenal Catholic writer, but he does a really great job of, like, talking to a broad Christian audience.
• 19:39
  He has a book called Holy Moments, that book is short.
• 19:42
  It'll maybe take you an hour, two hours to read.
• 19:44
  The whole book is about in every moment possible, can we align our will to God's?
• 19:50
  And Matthew Kelly talks about in the aligning our will to God's, we become the best version of ourselves.
• 19:55
  He actually uses that terminology, which I love, being the best version of ourselves.
• 19:59
  He's saying the best version of ourself is our true self, and our true self is the self that God sees.
• 20:08
  So when we look at Father Merton and Father Nouwen's self-examination that they do in so much of their writing, because father Merton and Father Nouwen wrote a ton.
• 20:20
  They're both prolific writers, and they're teachers.
• 20:24
  Interestingly, their personalities are very different.
• 20:27
  And I highly recommend you read, Father james Martin's book, Becoming Your True Self, I'll make sure it's linked in the show notes, because he actually describes the difference in their upbringing and the difference in their character, the difference in their personalities.
• 20:38
  But the cool part is they both ended up becoming prolific writers.
• 20:42
  They had different levels of intelligence, different upbringings.
• 20:46
  One was way more contemplative, while one was way more public-facing.
• 20:50
  And yet they both published their writing and shared their own journeys of self-examination and how becoming their true selves was tied to freedom and love and honesty before God and the vocation that he had designed them to do, the calling that he was calling them to do.
• 21:13
  Not on endless fascination with ourself.
• 21:17
  And so when we participate in this self-examination, this self-reflection, this like pulling off the costumes and getting underneath of the armor, we are doing that to answer some very specific questions that help us to do things more in alignment with God's will.
• 21:39
  So we are using our discernment to look at, does this part of me
• 21:45
  Speaker 69: that
• 21:45
  I accept as a part of me, does it help me become more loving and generous and free and closer to God and more available to others?
• 21:55
  Because if it doesn't, it's either a part of me that God is asking me to develop or to, direct more divinely, or maybe it's not a part of me at all.
• 22:07
  Maybe it's a costume.
• 22:09
  Maybe it's something that I put on and I thought was me, but I'm realizing really isn't me.
• 22:14
  It's just something that other people told me was me for the last forty, fifty, sixty years of my life.
• 22:23
  Maybe it's armor.
• 22:26
  Maybe it's something that I told myself I was or told myself that I had to be.
• 22:32
  It's a character trait or a habit or it's a distortion of a gift that I went,"Yeah, I'm gonna wear this because it protects me from other people, and it also protects other people from me So when we sit down and examine these parts of ourselves, we've gotta look at"is this part aligned with God's will, and is it actually part of me or is it something that got added on?" And so this can lead us to some even deeper questions of"who am I underneath all of that?
• 23:08
  Who am I when I am no longer trying to prove, no longer trying to protect, no longer trying to perform, no longer trying to become somebody else?" And there are steps and layers to this because sometimes you're not ready to take off the costume or take off the armor fully and stand honestly before God and let him show you who you are But here's the wildest part of all of this.
• 23:38
  We can put on costumes and pretend, and we can armor up and cover up parts of ourselves But this is where the, the anchor scripture comes in for today, from Psalm 139.
• 23:53
  God already knows the person you are trying so hard to explain or improve or hide or distort.
• 24:06
  He already knows you.
• 24:08
  He knew you before you were born.
• 24:10
  He knew you before you were knit in your mother's womb.
• 24:15
  He knows every hair on your head.
• 24:18
  You may be standing very far away from him.
• 24:20
  He's right there.
• 24:23
  He sees everything, and he knows everything.
• 24:26
  And so you may not feel ready to take off the costumes, and you might not feel ready to take off the armor and to stand naked, honestly, vulnerably before God and say,"God, this is how you made me.
• 24:40
  This is who I am.
• 24:42
  How do you want me to grow?
• 24:44
  How do you want me to develop?
• 24:45
  How do you want me to change?
• 24:47
  How do you want me to become more holy?
• 24:49
  How do you want to sanctify me?" And so this is where the example of Jesus I think is so beneficial.
• 24:56
  And I always have to love when there is an author who's like,"Yeah, I'm gonna talk about these two really amazing guys.
• 25:03
  I'm gonna talk about Father Nouwen, and I'm gonna talk about Father Merton, and I'm gonna talk about how they're these prolific writers.
• 25:07
  They're so incredible.
• 25:09
  They were s-such good teachers." And what Father Merton then says is like,"Well, I'm not a scholar, and I'm not this, and I'm not that." He very clearly owns that if you're looking for a writer like Merton or Nouwen, you're not gonna get it in him.
• 25:25
  And I love that he does that because it makes the reflection he shares about Jesus, so much more powerful.
• 25:33
  Y'all, I cannot tell you the level to which I had my mind blown when I read this'cause I never thought about Jesus this way.
• 25:38
  I'm already in tears just trying to talk to you about it.
• 25:44
  Jesus was fully human and fully divine.
• 25:47
  And so Father Martin talks about how we have no idea what Jesus' childhood and his formative years, his development looked like.
• 25:57
  We get a few pictures of Jesus up until he's presented in the temple as a toddler, and then we get one more picture of him teaching in the temple when his parents misplace him for a couple days at 12, and then we don't see him again until he's 30.
• 26:19
  So we can only speculate, and that's what Father Martin does.
• 26:22
  He only speculates on those hidden years.
• 26:24
  But he looks at Jesus through this lens of becoming his true self as a human.
• 26:30
  And he talks about how in these hidden years, Mary, his mother understood him better than anyone.
• 26:36
  She's the only other person that we know of who was born without original sin and who never sinned in her life.
• 26:46
  So she knew what it was like to suffer and to respond in perfect holiness.
• 26:55
  So Jesus grew up in a home with a mother who only responded to him in perfect holiness.
• 27:01
  And a father who wasn't born that way, his father, Joseph, who wasn't born that way.
• 27:07
  So Jesus grew and learned and worked and spent most of his earthly life outside of this public ministry.
• 27:13
  He wasn't learning how to be a rabbi.
• 27:16
  He was learning how to be a craftsman.
• 27:18
  In the Bible, Jesus is called a carpenter so many more times than he is called a rabbi.
• 27:26
  And the word carpenter even doesn't do it justice in English.
• 27:28
  It's really a craftsman or a construction worker.
• 27:30
  So Jesus spent the vast majority of his time, being Jewish, going to temple, observing the practices and the law, and doing that perfectly, and we know he did it perfectly.
• 27:40
  We can make that assumption.
• 27:44
  But he did ordinary work, and he learned who he was, and he developed his capacity, and he developed in these gifts that God gave him, these seven motivational gifts perfectly.
• 27:56
  And I love thinking about this Because ordinary work and development of capacity and development in his gifts was preparation for Jesus the same way that it's preparation for us as humans.
• 28:11
  And notice, that wasn't the identity that he was going to end up truly owning.
• 28:17
  The identity that Jesus ended up truly owning as he stepped into his public ministry, as he stepped into his baptism, as he stepped into being tested in the wilderness, the same way that we get tested around our true selves and our false selves.
• 28:34
  The way that he stepped into his public ministry It all relates to his genuine human development.
• 28:41
  It all relates to him growing in his gifts and embracing his vocation.
• 28:51
  Now, I'm not saying Jesus was necessarily confused or uncertain like we are, okay?
• 28:55
  That's not what I'm saying.
• 28:56
  But the stronger point here is that Our faith as Christians really requires us to own Jesus' humanity as much as we own his divinity, to own the fact that he developed and became more of who he was as he grew up, while also being perfectly as he was divine.
• 29:14
  It's this very mysterious thing, right?
• 29:17
  But I love this connection because it just shows us how much more Jesus understands us.
• 29:23
  Jesus could have come to the earth as a 30-year-old man, and he could have immediately started in his public ministry.
• 29:30
  He could have come fully divine.
• 29:33
  Like, God could have saved us another way.
• 29:37
  Jesus didn't skip being human on the way to fulfilling his vocation that saved everyone.
• 29:46
  On his journey to suffering immensely so that we could be reconnected and unified with God.
• 29:51
  So maybe that's just one other place that we get to follow Jesus' example.
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  We get to stop trying to skip our humanity on the way to fulfilling our own vocations We get to stop skipping the development process.
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  Now, the next part of this is and I love Father Martin talks about this as well, he says the only person who could have kept the disciples together was probably Jesus.
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  And he says that we get to use that as an example as humans as well He talks about the saints and about the holy people that we have celebrated, their accomplishments and how they have shown up in their love and in their centering of Jesus through their lives.
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  The saints are all very different.
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  I actually love studying the saints because their personalities, their desires, their strengths, their limitations, the circumstances they grow up in, the vocations they choose, the modes of which they choose to service, like their primary motivational gifts, it's all different.
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  Some of them even fought with each other.
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  Like there, there's age-old, debates between St.
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  Augustine and St.
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  Aquinas, who are two of the most incredible thought leaders in the church.
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  People argue over,"Well, which camp do you fall in, Aquinas or Augustine?" Father Martin shares a few other examples of holy people who did not get along, and they both had the same mission.
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  But the thing is, grace builds on our nature.
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  And so faithful people can disagree and struggle and search and change direction and live radically different kinds of lives than one another, and they can still all be holy.
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  And we get to take that from our understanding of the saints and apply it to our lives.
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  Like, in order to become a saint, you don't become less of yourself.
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  In order to become more holy, more sanctified, you don't become less of yourself.
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  God doesn't want you to erase who you are on your way to making yourself holy.
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  He wants you to be more of who you are.
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  And so this applies to us as working parents, as entrepreneurs, as professors, as leaders, as caregivers, as artists, as builders, as employees, as different primary motivational gifts.
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  Our holiness is lived through our actual life that's entrusted to us.
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  So us becoming more Christ-like doesn't mean that we all become the same type of person.
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  It means that we actually embrace how different we are, and we own that we have different functions and different gifts according to grace as part of the body of Christ design, and we also all remember that we are unified as a body in Christ.
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  Jesus is the thing that connects all of us.
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  He is the one that unifies us.
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  So when it comes to our spiritual gifts and how those fit into all of this, the unique gifts that God has graced you with, the primary motivational gift He's given you, and the other ways that your seven gifts have been developed and directed versus distorted and diminished, aren't your identity.
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  All right?
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  I sent an email out a couple of days ago.
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  My husband, my son, and I all have the same primary motivational gift.
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  We have very different personalities.
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  So our gifts aren't our identity.
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  They don't make us who we are.
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  And our gifting is very important.
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  A framework around motivational gifts and understanding how God has graced us with His gifts and how we have formed those gifts with Him, how those gifts have led us to put on costumes or put on false armor?
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  That framework can give us language for understanding ourselves better, for more self-awareness and more self-reflection.
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  It can help us look at our patterns of desire and where we pay attention to things and how we pay attention to things, and how we contribute and where we find our joy.
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  It can help us become curious about the particular human that God has created in us.
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  So our Grow In Your Gifts and our Primary Motivational Gift assessment, like we don't want you to take that assessment or any other assessment, any other personality thing, and look at the results and go,"Oh, let me construct a new version of myself around this.
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  Okay, I'm a professor, so that means I should X.
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  I'm a coach, so that means I should Y.
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  I'm a steward, so that means I should Z." No.
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  We need to understand that our gifts are a part of how God graces us, and that they need to be subjected to sober judgment.
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  And that no matter what our gifting is, we still belong to the body of Christ, and there's interdependency there.
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  So our gifting describes function, and contribution, and motivation.
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  It doesn't replace our identity in Christ.
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  So in Grow In Your Gifts and just in general, in Regulated Roots, we don't study gifts because God is like,"Okay, let me sort them into seven different Christian personality types." It's because God intentionally created us differently.
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  And when we can understand, okay, this is what typically motivates me the most, we can be more faithful stewards, Because we can better understand what God's entrusted to us.
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  So when we return back to this question of what self-knowledge is really for, the primary most useful part of self-knowledge, of getting to know yourself better, is that it helps you surrender more honestly.
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  It exposes where you've tried to become somebody else.
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  It shows you where you've dismissed desires because they didn't seem impressive enough or spiritual enough.
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  It shows us where you've confused your usefulness with your identity, and it helps you accept the parts of yourself that you wish were different.
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  It helps you uncover.
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  It helps you take off the costumes and own both your gifts and your talents and how God created your personality and also your limitations.
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  And it lets you just stand bare before God honestly and vulnerably, and not be afraid of what he's gonna show you or what you're gonna see.
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  And it lets you do that instead of constructing this more acceptable Christian persona, because that's not according to God's will.
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  He would've made you different if he wanted you different.
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  Now, that doesn't mean he doesn't want you to develop.
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  It doesn't mean that he doesn't wanna take some of those character traits and help you learn something about them.
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  But The beginning of holiness, it starts when we recognize we need to accept who we actually are before God, including the limitations, including the parts that we'd rather remove, so that we can reveal our dependence on Him.
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  It lets us ask God,"What do you wanna do with me?
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  This is who I am.
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  How do you want me to grow?
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  What's your will?
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  And so if this resonates with you, I
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  Speaker 70: wanna invite you
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  one last time to Grow In Your Gifts.
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  It begins tomorrow, okay?
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  So I'm inviting you into a program about spiritual gifts, and one of the first things I want you to know is that your spiritual gift isn't gonna tell you who you are.
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  We're not gonna use your gifts to tell you who you are in here.
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  In this program, you're gonna get better language for what God has placed in you, how He's designed you, greater awareness of what motivates your contribution, greater recognition of where you've learned to perform, where you've put on those costumes, and where you've put on that armor, and greater discernment, and vulnerability, and willingness to surrender to God's will, and to steward those gifts in the way He's calling you to do it.
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  And so all seven modules will be available to you at the launch.
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  So the day Grow In Your Gifts opens, you will be able to go through all of them if you want, or you can take them week by week and chew on them.
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  The following seven weeks create space for us to study and integrate and to practice, rather than to just collect an assessment result, okay?
• 38:01
  So while the primary motivational gift assessment can give you information, the whole point of this program is to help you have a process for asking what that information means for the formation of your gifts and the development, for your stewardship of what God's given to you, for your relationship and your intimacy with God, and for the actual life you're living with your family, with your friends, with your colleagues, with the people that you take care of in your work, all of it.
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  So my invitation to you is to join if you wanna understand your gifts without turning them into one more piece of your costume or one more plate in your armor.
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  So I wanna just close in prayer.
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  In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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  Amen.
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  God, thank you so much for making each and every person who is listening to this intentionally and for knowing us fully, even when we pretend you don't.
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  I ask you to show us where we've spent our lives becoming someone that we thought we needed to be and where we've cut off pieces and parts of ourselves that we thought We shouldn't be, where we put on the costumes and the armor.
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  I ask you to give us courage to be the people that we actually are before you, the exact way you designed us, the gifts, the limitations, the desires, the strengths, and the questions, and the unformed, unfinished places.
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  I ask you to keep us from making our usefulness our identity, or from taking someone else's life and using that as a blueprint for our own.
• 39:29
  And lastly, I ask you to teach us to receive what you've given us, and to surrender it back to you, and in doing so, to become more loving, and free, and faithful as you form us into the likeness of Christ.
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  And I pray as we take off the costumes and take off the armor, that you will help us put on the armor of God, that you will keep us safe, and provide, and protect for us.
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  And as Thomas Merton says That you will write straight with our crooked lines.
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  And I pray all this in Jesus' name.
• 40:02
  Amen.
• 40:03
  All right, y'all, I hope to see you in Grow In Your Gifts.
• 40:06
  And if not, I hope that you'll tune in for Thursday for our next guest episode.