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Grace For The Race Pt 2 · Mental Health and the Mission of the Church

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning everybody.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sitting here in my little home office.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh just excited to be with you guys this morning.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Going to talk to you a little bit more about how some tools, some some uh mental tricks, you might call them, that I've learned to uh keep my heart open and strong toward people while they're working through their stuff.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um I hope you've come to the place to realize that we all have stuff.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: We all have things we need to work on and work through.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh, you know, so how do you how do you keep your heart open?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: How do you live in in uh you know what uh Erickson defined love as non-judgmental positive regard?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Play with those words for a minute.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Non-judgmental positive regard.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: How do you look at someone who thinks differently from you, acts differently from you, maybe even hurts people by some of their choices and actions?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: How do you maintain a non-judgmental, positive lean of your heart toward them?
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And um and that's kind of what we're talking about.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: The whole idea of uh grace for the race is a kind of a preacher tricky, cool way to say it.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's not so cool.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but uh John 1.14 says that Jesus, the only begotten Son of the Father, we beheld his glory, and it says he was full of grace and truth.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Grace and truth.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I believe uh the two words are important, and I believe the order is important.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's fascinating that the writer, uh, that's in John 1.14, uh, I think it's interesting that the words that he chose.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't say uh, you know, judgment, he didn't say um, you know, full of holiness, uh and all those things may have an element of truth to them, but what he said was we beheld, we saw, we felt, we experienced God in the flesh, and he was full of.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: What an interesting thing to choose as you describe having experienced Jesus in up close and personal, and you you choose to use words he was full of, full of, like up to here, grace and truth, grace and truth.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting combination.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: What we're talking about, we've talked a lot about truth.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, if you say it simply, I believe it this way: grace draws you, truth changes you, grace draws people towards you.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: When you're a gracious, graceful, grace-ful person, you draw people towards you.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: They feel your non-judgmental positive regard.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: They feel your curiosity.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: They don't feel judgment.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: They don't feel, well, how could you do that?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, no, no, no sane person would do that.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: No one who cares about any another person would act like you act.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: No one who has a lick of sense would make some of the choices you make.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of energy uh doesn't draw people.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of energy, quite honestly, doesn't empower people to change.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: It uh it basically empowers them to put up walls of protection, it empowers them to uh to just continue in cycles of fear, shame, and isolation, which is Genesis 3.10.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know what's interesting in all the years I've been doing this, um I've rarely, I would almost say never, but you know, you gotta be careful.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: I I had I would I've rarely met a person who needed you to tell them that something they were doing was wrong.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, probably I don't know, if I thought hard enough, I could probably think of somebody.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: But 99 out of 100, you don't have to tell somebody that what they're doing's wrong, hurtful, unhelpful, uh, not going to get them the result they're after.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's quite honestly, seeing what somebody's doing wrong is the easy part.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: The hard part is coming up close to them, caring enough, listen to me now, caring enough to hear their story, caring enough to figure out, find out, an explanation.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Remember a couple weeks ago we talked about the difference between explanation and excuse.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Being able to help them explain why they do what they do.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And as you've heard me say before, I believe a lot of what we deal with in our adult life goes back to our childhood.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us didn't get to pick the families we were born into, the cultures we were born into, the socioeconomic status we were born into, the uh the spiritual environment we were born into, the emotional healthiness that we were born into.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: So does that make us not responsible for the outcomes of our life?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: No, but it does make us not responsible necessarily for how we start life, and it makes us, if we'll wrap our head around that, it makes it easier, not easy, but easier for us to give grace to people when we realize that it's easier to give grace for the race when you realize we didn't start at the same place in the race.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh it's just helped me over the years to think that way, to think about how people become the way they are, and the fact that uh, like I said, high 90s percent of the time, people don't need to be told what they're doing is wrong, they need help figuring out how to stop it.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um an overweight person doesn't need you to be told their eating and exercise habits are not good.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: They don't need to be told that.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: They need to be loved and helped, supported, while they figure out why.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Why why, you know, I I read a phrase yesterday in a book I'm reading that said um it wasn't about food and exercise and weight and all, but it was using it to make a point.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it said this if you if your weight is not where you believe it should be, in other words, if you if you're you know you think you should be 100 pounds and you're 120, you think you should be 100 and your weight's 120.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: If your weight's not what you think it should be, then you have somewhere inside of you competing agendas, intentions.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Competing intentions.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: I I thought, gosh, what a what an interesting way to put it.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, one intention is I believe I should be 100 pounds.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: The other intention is, but I want to eat that today, right now.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: So you have competing intentions.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um what a person needs help with is love me now, right the way I am, and then come beside me and help me figure out how to change the way I am.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know what what what I'm talking about, we started in the last week or so, is uh in this whole area of toxins and um just our behavior, and all of us have behavior that's like uh you know, we do something that didn't work and we do it again.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And um the trick is okay, what's going on here?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Again, remember the difference between explanation and excuse.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: We're not excusing our behavior, but we want to explain our behavior in such a way that it leads us to a strategy, a plan uh to break the cycle and come out of that behavior.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Again, what we're talking about, and we'll be for a little bit here, is what I call grace for the race.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: How to how to keep our hearts flowing in non-judgmental positive regard, love.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: How to love, and remember, virtually everything I say starts with yourself, how to look at yourself through a filter of non-judgmental positive regard.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Your behavior is what it is, your choices are what they are.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of judging yourself for how stupid you are, how weak you are, how whatever, what if you just slow down and say, you know what, I'm gonna stop judging?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean to imply that it's that easy, but I want to start explaining, looking at the pieces of this cycle, and where is the need that's I'm meeting in an unhealthy way.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk more about it.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Love you guys.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, keep your eyes open.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: We might be doing some special things in regard to the uh you know, just the craziness crisis that's going on around us, the coronavirus stuff.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: So keep your eyes open.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: We might be doing some stuff around that.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: All right, love you guys.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: See you next week, if not before.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.