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Grace For The Race Pt 1 · Mental Health and the Mission of the Church

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Man, looking forward to being with you today.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, still talking about, of course, the eight-minute mind shift.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh lately, we started the year talking about toxins, and then I brought up this idea of mind shift mojo.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: How to uh, in other words, toxins led me to that because uh toxins weaken your system, make it not operate properly.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, your soul, your mind, can just get bogged down with misbeliefs and um just bad habits, you might say, of uh how you look at people and things and situations, and uh it just wreaks havoc in our relationships.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: So today I want to talk to you a little bit about something we touched on last week, and uh, of course, each week before I get ready for this, I listened to last week's just so I can make sure that I connect back to it, and uh I hit it pretty lightly, but I talked about something that I found uh really, really helpful in my journey with people.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, think about it now.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: I've been a counselor for uh about 40 years now.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: 40 years, right?
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, and um what does that mean?
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: It means I've heard lots of people do lots of things, good and bad.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, since I'm a counselor, they don't come to me when it's good.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I've heard lots of things people do, don't do uh to hurt and help one another.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um well, how do I how do I why do I still like people?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't just like people, I love them, and I find I find all of us just phenomenally um interesting and uh wonderful and complex.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And um one of the things that I've learned to do is I call it grace for the race, and um you know we might just share the whole outline of that next week, but um the first point that I usually cover when I talk about what I call grace for the race, and it's built on the whole John 1.14, Jesus was full of grace and truth, and the and the thought that what I want to learn to do is swim in uh grace and truth, equal amounts over my head, live in a world that's full of grace and truth, and I want to bring people into that world.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: I uh when when I meet with you, when I meet you, when I engage you, I want you to feel this overwhelming presence of grace.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: What is grace?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Grace is mercy and action.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Grace is when you don't get what you do deserve, and you do get what you don't deserve.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now you've got to chew on that one for a minute.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Grace is when you're granted, gifted, given, uh acceptance, love, encouragement, belonging before you've earned it or before you deserve it.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And um obviously it's what the gospel's built on, what the gospel really is all about.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so I I want you to understand that, I want you to feel that, I want you to live in that.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, but I also want to be equal amounts of truth when the time's right.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is that I want to be able to say to you that you know, you're you're as accepted and loved as you're ever gonna be.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing has to change for you to be loved, but your life's gonna go a whole lot better if some things change.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And um you could say it this way grace draws, truth changes.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Grace draws, truth changes.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so that's a big deal to me when we any of this stuff we talk about, uh, that whole idea of grace and truth is monstrously big.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so this little piece I'm talking about right now is Grace for the race.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, you know, a lot of times we we refer to the phrase, you know, uh what we call the great commandment, uh love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, we're around here we're really big on stressing that uh that's a two-like that's a three-legged stool, not a two-legged stool.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Most people read that, and here's what they come away with.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Our goal is to love God and love others.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: I I disagree.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Our goal is to is to be loved by God, which means in the process we learn how to love ourselves, and then we love our neighbors the way we love ourselves.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna slow that down and say it again.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew 22, uh, 34 through 40, the great commandment, Jesus, what's the greatest commandment?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Love.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: You could almost stop love.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: But he says, love God without your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And love your neighbors yourself.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And again, where where I believe the the wagon wheel's broken is we've missed the third leg of the stool, which is learning to love ourselves.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe learning to love ourselves starts with learning to receive God's love.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: God models how to love the broken, the bruised, the the crazy.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say crazy, I mean it figuratively, not literally.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know how to how to love yourself and others while you're still a mess.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because uh, I got a little secret for you, you are, by the way, and I am too.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you do that?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: How do you apply, how do you love yourself?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, that takes me to John 1.14.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: You learn to walk in grace and truth, you learn to walk in the fact that I've received forgiveness for so many things.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: How dare I hold it back from someone else?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: But that leads to a lot of interesting things because the bottom line is we do hurt each other.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: We do, uh, to be honest with you, gosh, we can do horrible, evil things to one another.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do you mean by this whole grace and truth?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, my first statement under grace and truth is I believe every person's doing the best they can with what they have.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: We talked last week about have you ever met somebody and didn't like them or you reacted negatively to them until you heard their story, and then you were like, Yao man, I I can't even relate to that.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows what kind of person I'd be if I had lived through the things they've lived through.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Which is a really grace gifting way to look at people um to give to give room for um no matter what condition someone's in, no matter what energy they give off, no matter how easy or hard it is to love them, connect with them, enjoy them, be with them, there's reasons for everything they do and don't do.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: There are reasons for everything they do and don't do.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I've just found in all my years of doing this that a lot of times the reasons for what we do are uh are not based on our own choices.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um I believe at least 70 to 90 percent of what we deal with in our adult life goes back to our childhood.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: I know very few people who got to choose their family, which tells me that eighty or ninety, seventy to ninety percent of the issues you deal with in your adult life came from situations you had no choice in.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And oh well you could choose to this and that and the other.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's that's really easy for you to say, but you say that based on the life you've had and the experiences you've had and the things you've been taught and the things you've learned, and the things you quite honestly just inherited through genetics and other things.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it's real easy to just, as we talked about last week, label people without hearing their story and without hearing a a bigger, cleaner picture of who they are.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I want to get into, you know, we're still talking about toxins, and maybe what we're talking about is how to um, you know, almost like some anti-toxins, and grace and truth are definitely one of them, and in that particular order.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: So next week we're gonna talk about uh just kind of furthering this a little bit and how, and here's the thing here's a key thought now.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: What's the greatest commandment, Jesus?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Love God with all your heart, so mind, strength, love your neighbor as yourself.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: I believe the first thing you need to learn to do is allow God to love you.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Learn to let God love you, learn to receive his love.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because that that teaches you the fundamentals of how to love something that is imperfect.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Guess what?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: That is you.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And learning how to love yourself is the hardest person you're ever gonna have to learn to love.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And from there, it's easy to learn to love other people.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: So uh we're gonna keep talking about this man.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad y'all keep hanging in there with me and uh love you dudes and dudets.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, see you next week.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.