September 11, 2025 • 39 mins
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” You’ve probably heard that verse before—but what does it really mean? Is it about being scared of God, or is it something much deeper?
In this powerful episode of The Impossible Life Podcast, Nick and Josh Craft dive into one of the most misunderstood biblical concepts: the fear of God. From Philippians’ call to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” to Solomon’s conclusion in Ecclesiastes, we unpack why reverence and awe for God are essential for every Christian man who wants to live with wisdom, strength, and integrity. You’ll discover:
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In this powerful episode of The Impossible Life Podcast, Nick and Josh Craft dive into one of the most misunderstood biblical concepts: the fear of God. From Philippians’ call to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” to Solomon’s conclusion in Ecclesiastes, we unpack why reverence and awe for God are essential for every Christian man who wants to live with wisdom, strength, and integrity. You’ll discover:
- Why “fear of the Lord” is not about being afraid, but about living in reverence, awe, and submission.
- How history shows what happens when people lose their awe of God.
- The connection between fearing God and building true wisdom, strength, and leadership in your life.
- Practical ways to live with reverence every day—in your home, your work, your marriage, and your walk with God.
Level up your life with IDLife nutrition by clicking here.
Apply to join Giant Killers here if you're a man that wants real accountability and training to become a leader.
Level up your greatest asset with us in Mindset Mastery. How you think will change everything in your life. Click here to learn more.
GET IN TOUCH
Advertise on the podcast by clicking here.
Growth focused content - https://www.theimpossible.life/blog.
Sign up for our Mission Ready Mindset Once-A-Week Motivational Email
Instagram - @theimpossiblelife
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
That's impossible. Let me tell you what I believe.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
It's your weakness, it's not your technique. Don't think you know.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
The Impossible Life Podcast and yes, sitting on a winning lottery. Second,
an idea that is fully formed, fully understood.
Speaker 4 (00:19):
That sticks. This is the Impossible Life Podcast because Nick
and I are attempting to live impossible lives. What we
know is that nothing is impossible. So instead of using
impossible as an excuse to not try, we'll use the
pursuit of impossible as an accelerant for greatness. If something's
(00:41):
never been done before, that just means it's unexplored. If
they tell you it's too hard, it's just waiting to
be simplified. Impossible as a default label used by uncourageous
people unwilling to take a risk. The real truth is this.
The solution to any impossible task starts with this question,
(01:03):
If I had to, what would it take? What would
it take?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Welcome to another episode of the Impossible Life Podcast. I'm
your co host, Nick Surface, and I'm looking across at
a man who will one day have monuments built to
his brain. That's right, friends, The modern day philosophizer Joshua
Craft is here, to join us again.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Josh, welcome, glad to be here. Man.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
The monuments will be right next to the porta potty
monuments that they're building in the toilet museum.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
That's actual where I get all my suits from is
at the toilet store.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
So I'm glad.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
I was going to ask you where monument right there
next to the suit store.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Dude, I was going to ask you what your monument
would look like. But now that I know it's in
the toilet store, I you know, I'm not all right,
did you?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah? Well done.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
You won that one. You threw me off, so yeah,
good job man. Well, I'm glad to have you back
on today. We're talking about the fear of the Lord,
and fear of the Lord is. It's one of those
things you read about all the time in scripture. If
you read if you're on the proverb of the day train,
which we always recommend you read the proverb for whatever
day it is. You know, Proverbs nine ten is, the
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and
(02:17):
knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
That's the NIV.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
So it's like, man, fear the Lord, and it's like
you see fear of the Lord all the time. There's
a clothing line that says fear of the Lord essentials,
and it's like worn by a lot of It's very
pop culture. Yeah, or fear of God. Yeah, that's the
fear of God. Sorry, yes, shows how cool I am.
I don't even know what the name of it is.
I don't own any of it for the record, but yeah,
(02:39):
I mean, so you've got like you've got fear of
God and all that sort of stuff, and people talk
about it. But like our in modern Christianity and in
the world today, I think fear of God is massively misunderstood.
I read John Vavia wrote a book called Awe of
God recently, which I cannot recommend enough if you want
to understand this topic, because that book completely changed the
(03:01):
way that I relate to God, because it gave me
such an awe and a reverence for God, and because
I think when you hear fear of the Lord, you
naturally think like, oh, we should be afraid of them,
and like, you know, you think about the Israelites drawing
back from the from the mountain whenever Moses went up
there because they were genuinely afraid. Like it's you know,
if you had a bunch of thunder and lightning right
on top of you. I don't care who you are.
You're not feeling too tough. You're afraid. And so that
(03:22):
that was like what we think of. But what how
would you define fear the Lord.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Josh oh Man.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
I think there's a there's a lot of Biblical definitions
that we can get into. I'm not I'm not like
a doctorate Bible scholar. I think there's a lot of
people that know a lot of word better than me.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
But I've studied them. I've studied the Bible good.
Speaker 5 (03:37):
Amounts so and it's pretty easy to execute Greek and Hebrew.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Now there you go.
Speaker 5 (03:44):
But you know, one of my one of my kind
of like I feel like I come back to this
passage of scripture a lot in my life, especially in
this season. It's Philippians two twelve, where the Bible says,
work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Yeah,
and that's that's what Paul encourages us to do. You know,
there's an in Mighty Man which we always invite everyone
(04:05):
to come to at our church on Saturday mornings at
seven am. Our key scripture is one Peter two seventeen,
which says, honor all people, love the brotherhood, Fear God,
honor the King. And these are like they all these
commands in scriptures. So the Bible says in the Book
of Acts that the early Church grew as they lived
(04:28):
in the fear of the Lord. And Paul in Second
Corinthians talks about how perfect holiness, like perfect closeness and
being set apart by God requires the fear of God.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
And so you know, when you're a kid, maybe or maybe.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
If you're listening to this, you don't really read the Bible,
or you don't have a lot of like maybe biblical understanding.
A lot of people just define that as being scared
of God, Like you should be afraid of God because,
like you're saying, the children of Israel climb the mountain
and he could kill him at any time. Like like
God is like a tornado that could drop on your
head at any moments. So just live your life in fear,
(05:10):
and there is that aspect to it, you know, really,
I mean in the New Testament when Paul says in Philippians, too,
work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. The
word trembling like in Greek is literally like you know,
like be scared, right, be scared that you could be wrong, though,
is what he's saying. So when all throughout scripture, like
(05:30):
there's there's a couple of key words in the Bible
that are used for fear, and they all kind of
mean the same thing. So there's this word phobos in
the Greek and that means to dread something or but
also to be in awe of something and to be.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Reverent, you know.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
Overall, I think the overall the definition that's throughout the
Bible is reverence and awe and caution, right, so like
profound respect. It's like it's like, uh, I'll give you
like a really simple practical example. Do you want your
children to like laugh and scream and play around at
(06:10):
a funeral? You know, like it's like your grandma's funeral
and everyone's crying, and then your kids are over here,
you know, messing with each other and laughing and stuff.
That that would be a lack of reverence right for
the moment. It's a lack of respect for what's taking place.
And so when the Bible's talking about the fear of God,
it's about living in reverence for him right, which which
(06:33):
I think, uh, you know, in the in the ancient
world as as much as well as this world, the
world that we live in today, we struggle with that
just as much like there is a cultural idea in
modern Christianity that God's like your buddy, and Jesus is
just your friend, and uh he just hey man, you know,
(06:54):
God just loves you and like you do you and
you're enough, and you know, there is like this very deep, wonderful,
amazing love that God has for all of us. But
also God is also God right, so there is a
there is a we can we can do wrong, like
we're capable of great evil. The Bible talks about in
the Book of Jeremiah that, and there's nothing more wicked
(07:16):
than the human heart. And so in our relationship to God,
there's still this gap between who we are and who
He is, which is what you know, which is what
John John Bavie talks about in that book. And so
this idea right of being in fear of God is
living your life in such a way the way I
(07:38):
like to think about it and say it simply, is
living your life in such a way that you could
be wrong. So like thinking about the decisions you make
every day and thinking about what you're doing and go,
I could actually be doing like an evil thing. And
I know that's hard for us to imagine because we
all have really great intentions and we all have really
(07:59):
good motives. C. S. Lewis talks about this in in
Mere Christianity. He talks about how all wickedness is the
pursuit of some good in the wrong way. And so so, like,
you know, you think about the person who's hurt you
the most, the person who you know, a lot of
people that's like parent wounds or you know, breakups or
(08:21):
different stuff like that, they were doing what they thought
was best. Now there's a definition there. Most people when
they hurt other people, they're doing just what they think
is best for them personally, right, But they're doing what
they consider to be a good thing. You know, they're
doing they're doing good for them, which is a really
selfish definition of good. But no one's doing wicked quote
(08:43):
unquote on purpose.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Right.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
A lot of people are doing what they think is
a good thing, and the problem is are personal. So
you think about the most wicked people on the planet,
which you know, historically we think about people like the
Nazis and things like that. They believe that they were
doing a good thing. Well in what way, right, They
believe they were doing good for their country. They believe
(09:07):
they were doing good for their race, right because of
how they define the Aryan race. They believe that they
were doing good for their careers. Like, there's a guy
named There's a guy named Adolph Eichmann, And there's this
really interesting story. This guy was basically like an administrator.
He just worked in an office. He was a paper pusher,
and he was the mastermind behind all the logistics of
(09:31):
the Holocaust. So all of the Nazi, all the Nazi
leadership are sitting around having a conversation going, you know,
we've got to figure out the Jewish problem, that's what
they called it. Right, So there's millions of Jews that
live in Europe. Right, six million Jews died in the Holocaust.
There's millions of Jews to live in Europe. So they're like,
we've got to figure out how to get rid of
(09:51):
these guys.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Well, this guy's just this.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
Really great logistical thinker and he comes up with all
the logistics of the Holocaust. Like, Okay, what we do
is we round him up and we moved him to cities.
You know, they didn't call them ghettos initially, but we're
going to move him to these cities, and these cities
or these parts of cities are going to be next
to train stations, and then we'll load them up on
trains and we'll take him out to camps and we'll
either have him work for us or will kill him.
(10:13):
It's like a logistical problem that he solved. So at
the Nurremberg trials, At the Nuremberg trials where they where
they you know, prosecuted all of the Nazis for war crimes,
they bring this guy, Adolf Fikman out. They found him somewhere.
They bring him out. I think they found him in
like Argentina or something. They bring him out, and everyone
thinks he's going to be like the epitome of evil,
(10:34):
like this consummate evil guy, like he's going to be
Hitler two point zero in front of them, and he's
just he looks like a secretary, Like he looks like
a guy that just worked in an office. And they
ask him, uh, they go like, what were you thinking,
Like why were you doing all these evil things?
Speaker 1 (10:52):
He's like, oh, for me, that you know, I was
just doing my job.
Speaker 5 (10:54):
I was just doing what I was asked to do,
and I wanted to really advance in my career and
I wanted to be close to people that were in power.
And there's a philosopher named Hannah Arendt that wrote a
book called The Banality of Evil, and she writes in
there about how people that do evil things, they're not
like evil like we imagine. They just think they're doing
a good thing in some way. So this guy, you know,
(11:17):
back to what I was saying, tell that whole long story,
but this guy thought he was doing a good thing
for himself and for his career and for the German nation.
And when he even talked about Jewish people, he just
saw them as numbers on a piece of paper. He
wasn't even thinking these are human beings and we're killing
millions of them. He was like, no, I'm just solving
a problem logistically. And so the danger like you and
(11:39):
this guy, Adolf f Eikman, was a very normal person, right,
And the danger of us and the way that we
live is we can live thinking that we're doing good
things and we're actually doing really evil things, but we
won't know that until later. So then the Bible gives
us this prescript for how we navigate that called the
(12:01):
fear of God.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
And that's not a negative thing.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
That's not like, Hey, live your life and be afraid
that God's going to punish you or God's going to
send you to hell right now, or if you sin
that your whole life's going to fall apart. It's like, no,
live your life understanding that you do have an element
of wickedness that's inside of you, that everyone's capable of that,
and live your life understanding that if you constantly put
(12:25):
yourself in a position where you submit to God right
like in Hebrews twelve, the Bible says, let us offer
to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe. So let
me live my life in a way where I'm in
awe of God, and I revere Him as holy, I
revere him as a higher life form than me. I
(12:46):
revere him and his commands as good and as helpful.
Then what that also does is that helps me avoid
the evil that I'm so capable of that I don't
believe myself to be capable of. Because we can have
the best motives, right, we can be we can be
so pure in our motives, and we can be so
(13:08):
good in our intentions, and we can have the best
intentions but also be sincerely wrong at the same time.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Yeah, right, you.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Took it to like a pretty far I didn't think
we'd be going through the concentration chance while No, but
it's a fascinating story. I've never heard it before. I think,
what's so interesting? So, like you, you used it an
example where we can all where every person listening to
this can go yeah, that's bad, right, and like you
could sit there and go like, oh.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Well, how do you know?
Speaker 2 (13:35):
But your point is is he he was just a
little diversion. It was I was just trying to do
my job. It was not It was a lack of
awareness about the overall of what was really going on.
And like you said, the tool that God's given us
is the fear of the Lord. Now, what I think
is so interesting is God, like there's a pattern in
scripture that you see when you read through the Old Testament,
(13:55):
in the New Testament, no matter which you know, you
could read just one. What happens is God moves and
he says something, and then he just reminds people over
and over and over again, because God doesn't change his
words like we like to think, like, oh, I got
this word back in, you know, in twenty twenty and
I got this one in twenty twenty three, and this
one in twenty twenty five. It's like God said something
(14:16):
and he's just like, that was my word, and everything
aligns with the word that he gave. And the reason
I say that is because when you look at scripture,
and this is the real warning for us is the
israel Lights. Whenever they went into it, they reaped all
sorts of terrible consequences for their lack of obedience. But
what preceded lack of obedience was a lack of fear
(14:36):
of the Lord. And I mean God told him, if
you know the scriptures through Moses, when he gives blessings
and cursings and Deteronomy twenty eight, he says, if you
obey these commandments and you know, and he tells them
all the things to do, you'll be blessed when you come,
and be blessed you go, and he goes, and if
you refuse to obey, and he like lays out exactly
what they end up doing, and it's right there. But
the thing that's wild is that by the time that
(14:57):
they're doing all those things, they they had stopped putting
God in his rightful place and having you know, reverence
a reverend offer him. That they lost, you know, they
lost the Ark of the Covenant, they lost the original Commandments,
and like whenever I think it's Josiah goes into the
restore the Temple, they find the Book of the Law
and they're like, hey, look, we found this book which
was literally the foundation for why they're.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
And they've completely forgotten about it. They didn't even know
any of the information.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Right, But that's that's all of us, is that we
can get complacent because you know, you look at the
Ten Commandments and like, you know, it starts off with like,
you know, you shall have no other gods before me. Okay,
honor God, fear him, have reverend put him in the
right place. You shall not make for yourself anything an
image in the form of anything in heaven or above,
on earth or in the waters below. You'll don't bow
down to him. He goes through the whole thing. Okay, right,
(15:43):
don't like put anything above God, have reverend offer him.
You shall not even misuse the name of the Lord
your God. It's like he's emphasizing, look, my name is
so holy, don't even take lightly my name. If you
know anything about Hebrew culture to this day, they don't
say like, they don't say yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Say yeah.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
They say yes shim and Yeshim is is Hebrew for
the name, right, and so they yeah yeah, And only
the priest, only the priest, the high priest was allowed
to say the tetragrammaton. So the tetragrammaton is why hw h?
And Hebrew it's we say yahweh, but we don't even
know how to pronounce it actually, because the only person
(16:20):
that was allowed to say it was the high priest
in the Holy of Holies once a year. There was
a whole deep thing on that, like in the ancient world, right,
But just like about the power of names, yeah, I
mean like, uh, you know, God's God's names all throughout scripture.
But even in the ancient world they would not say
the names of other of gods because what they believed
is when you said the God's name, it invoked whatever
(16:44):
that was. So when you see throughout scripture like words
like Jehovah, Jirah, Jehovah, Nissi, all of that, that's like
they would say that to invoke that aspect of who
God was in the situation.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
I mean, that's the power of what comes out of
your mouth.
Speaker 5 (16:58):
But that's that That's why I mean God took his
name so seriously because God's name in the ancient world,
in the ancient Hebrew world, God's name represented his whole identity.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, but here's here's what will throw us here. Yeah,
here's what we'll throw us. I'm sorry, you mean to
cut you off there?
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Please do?
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Okay, Well, I think I already did. But what will
throw us is like, so I was reading in Jeremiah.
I'm reading through the Book of Jeremiah right now, and
I had to take away whenever I was reading it
because I read these scriptures and I said, when you
lose the awe or fear of God, it becomes logical
that you go off and do your own thing. Losing
fear of the Lord is the key step to strain
(17:39):
because if once you lose that God, this awesome reverence
of like man, it's a it's a dreadful thing to
fall in the hands of the living God, is what
Paul said, right, But like Jeremiah, So Jeremiah in Jeremiah
two nineteen this scripture. Listen to this. Your wickedness will
punish me. You, your black sliding will rebuke you. Consider then,
and realize how evil and bitter it is for you
(18:00):
when you forsake the Lord your God and have no
awe of me, declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty. And
it's this thought process of how do you get to
that place? Well, I think it's a place a lot
of us can be. You do things your own way,
and you don't really see any consequences, right like, because
at this point they're still like, hey, they have prophets
tell them they're gonna have peace, they still have prosperity,
they still have some wealth, and they still have some
(18:20):
other things, and so you don't see this calamity coming.
And it's easy to be like, well, that fear of
the Lord's stuff can't really be liable because or be real,
because if it was, like, you know, why didn't that
guy get struck by light And you hear people joking
around by like, oh, I'm gonna move away from you
because here comes the lightning bolt. And I think that
it's little things like that that cause us We just
start to take lightly the things of God and it's
such a little it seems so harmless, right, But but
(18:45):
what we don't realize is that we are literally we're
following the pattern that so many other people have fallen
and reaped the negative consequences.
Speaker 5 (18:53):
Of Yeah, well, I mean on the positive side, the
Bible says in Psalms and Proverbs that the fear of
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
So like, if you want to live a wise life.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Being submitted to God and what God says to do
is the beginning of that which we don't do well. Right,
So imagine, like you know, all of us in our life,
Like if you're listening to this podcast, do you serve
at your church? Do you honor God by putting him
first financially?
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Do you read the.
Speaker 5 (19:27):
Bible every day? Do you really seek to apply God's
word to your life and live according to biblical principles?
Those are things that the fear of God is a
precursor for.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Right.
Speaker 5 (19:40):
So what a lot of people do is they live
a life where they have a belief system and they
go like this is what the ancient Jews did. Is
what you're talking about, is well, I believe like I
believe in God, like, yeah, he created us. And you know,
Jews to this day, like secular Jews have a belief
in God, they just don't practice fearing Him, which is Judaism, right, Yeah,
(20:02):
so they just don't have the practice of actually, like,
you can believe in Jesus and you can say, hey,
He's my Lord and Savior, but the practice of doing
that is following him, is living life, seeking to live
life like Jesus.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Right, let me let me ask you a question though, Josh,
I know I'm interrupting in midflow again, I'm I'm basically
Garrett on this podcast. It's me because I get to
do all the interrupting. Just Kang, love you, But the like,
I want to ask this question because I think it's
a really important point for what you were making. Where
where do you think someone's supposed to get this from?
Because I hear what you're saying, and like, I wanted
(20:40):
to highlight first, like my goals for doing this with
you is I wanted to highlight for people the importance
of what of fear of God what it is, But
like I also want to give some grace to people,
and like, if you've not been a brought up in
a good Christian household, or let's say even you have,
but they didn't have fear of the Lord, Like we
don't have this story. Like I feel like in the
Jewish culture they have this story of like we are people,
(21:00):
this is what he did on the mountain with Moses,
and at least like the whole foundation of their being
was there. But for a modern day, you know, we
would be Gentiles or American like this concept of fear
of the God, fear of the Lord, Like where does he?
Where do you even get this from?
Speaker 1 (21:14):
You know?
Speaker 5 (21:15):
Yeah, I mean I think that's a it's a big
question because in Matthew twenty eight, the last thing Jesus
said before I went to have any gave us this
thing called the Great Commission. Re said, go into all
the world and teach people to obey everything I've commanded you.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 5 (21:33):
Where should let's say, where we should get this from.
We should get this from the people that are discipling us.
We should get this from the churches that we're going to.
We should be being taught how to obey what we've
been commanded to do by God. And one of those
things is, you know the beginning of all of this
is fearing him and submitting to him, and that's that's like,
(21:57):
that's the context of fearing God. Well, the problem, right
that we have is the same problem that the Jews
had in the ancient world. They just expressed it differently,
and that's that we don't think the law is that
important and we just kind of believe in this stuff.
And hey, I identify as a Christian and I want
to I just like Abraham Lincoln is famous for saying
(22:18):
when he you know, they asked him if he was
a Christian or basically what his religion was, and he said,
you know, when I do good, I feel good, and
when I do bad, I feel bad.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
And that's my religion.
Speaker 5 (22:27):
Right, that's America, that's the American Christian lifestyle. Like, well,
as long as I feel good, you know, I'm gonna
because like people, you know, uh, generally, right in my experience,
people start coming to church or they start coming back
to church because they feel bad about some aspect of
their life. Right, so like, oh, we need to get
back to church, We need to get to church because
(22:48):
I feel bad about it. And then as soon as
they start feeling good, they kind of disconnect from obeying
and you know and this isn't about obeying the church
or obeying an individual pastor, right, this is about being
obedient to God's word.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
And so the way that like.
Speaker 5 (23:05):
True discipleship works is if I'm being discipled by somebody,
I'm not their disciple. I'm God's disciple and there and
God's using them to train me up into what God
demands out of me. So one of the ways to
know that you're being that you're being taught this stuff,
or at least if you have the potential to be
taught this stuff, is if someone is constantly telling you
(23:26):
to read the word. Hey, you know what, read the
word for yourself.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Read it.
Speaker 5 (23:30):
Like me and Garrett, one of the we're very different
thinkers where we think a lot of the same things,
but we communicate them a whole lot differently and we
come from completely different angles that stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
But if you hear me give.
Speaker 5 (23:41):
A talk or you hear Garrett give it talk, especially
in a church environment, the number one thing we're both
going to say is you got to read the Word.
And I'm not I'm not saying that as a pad
on my own back of like follow me, but I'm
saying if you have a spiritual leader who's not directing
you towards really like reading the Word and being in
the Word.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
And you're not.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
And if you are a spiritual leader and you're not
doing that, there's no way people can really understand what
it means to fear God. So Solomon in the Book
of Ecclesiastes, right, he or we say the writer of Ecclesiastes.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
We all believe it's Solomon. But the writer of.
Speaker 5 (24:18):
Ecclesiastes, he had tasted everything in life, he'd pursued everything
that was good, and he says all of this stuff
is futility. But he doesn't say it's futility like it's
not good. He just said at the end of things.
So at the end of it all right, he says this.
He says, the duty of mankind, the reason why God's
(24:40):
put us on the planet is for us to fear
God and keep his commandments. He goes, I've seen everything,
I've done, everything I've been with, the women, I've had,
the money I've experienced, the success, and all of that
was meaningless compared to the greatness of fearing God, not
like the horrible thing. Fear of fearing God is like
my my purpose is found in this submission, In this
(25:03):
submission to God, right, my reason for living, like if
you know the way, Like I'll just draw this thought line.
So if I believe God has a plan for my life, right,
you know, it's like it's you know, think about a coach.
If you think this coach really wants you to win
(25:25):
and be great at this sport, then what comes with
that is they have a vision for you that you
don't necessarily have for yourself. So they're going to coach
you a certain way and they're gonna say, hey, do this,
do that, don't do this, don't do that. You have
a a choice to listen to the coaching or not.
So God's like this cosmic coach. It's beyond a coach.
But God has this great plan for our life. And
(25:48):
then he says, Okay, I want this to happen for you,
and it's better than any plan you could create. And
all I need you to do is just to submit
to me. In the process. There's going to be trials,
there's gonna be tribulations. There's gonna be horrible there's gonna
be horrible things you go through. There's gonna be great
things you go through. In the midst of all of that,
what I need you to do is just continue to
(26:09):
do what I'm asking you to do, right, and you'll
live a great life.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Right.
Speaker 5 (26:13):
This is what the writer of Ecclesiastes is saying, that
fear God and keep his commandments. This is the duty
of all mankind, is that if you want to live
a great life, then what it requires is that you
submit to something higher than your own mind. You submit
to something higher than yourself. And for a lot of us,
the problem that we have is we just go, well,
(26:33):
you know, I'd rather do this other thing, or I
think this other thing is better. And that's the same
problem that all humans have. That's the same problem that
Israelites had thousands of years ago. Is they were commanded
to fear the Lord, walk in his ways, love him,
and serve him. And then they were like, yeah, you know,
but all this other stuff is also something that we like, right,
(26:55):
And so getting to this place where and I think
it's it's really simple to me.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
It's like living life with this perspective of.
Speaker 5 (27:07):
I feel like my motives are good, I feel like
my intentions are good, but hey, I could be wrong.
And so what I'm going to do is constantly check
to make sure that I'm doing what the word says.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
You know, I I so.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
So for instance, like I don't feel like I should
have to forgive this person. They've hurt me, they've wounded me,
they've they've mistreated me.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Oh what is the word? You know? But I could
be wrong, I could have to or what is the words?
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Well, the Bible says that you.
Speaker 5 (27:35):
Should that you should forgive them. Okay, Well, if I
fear God, right, then what I'm going to do in
a situation like that is I'm going to choose what
God says over over what I think.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Right, I think I think what precedes that though, because
I you know, I think fear the Lord can feel
I think a lot of stuff sometimes can feel like
we have to try and strain it out on our
own and like what my overwhelming desire Literally, like I
think I said a few months or a few weeks
ago on another episode, like the epitaph on my headstone,
(28:09):
the best thing that you could have not an epiitaph,
but you know, if it was all my tombstone, that
it was like here lies a man who made other
people want to know his God. That would be like
the greatest finish for me ever, because like at the
heart of this Josh Man, like everything in my life,
like I really believe that we can know God. I
believe that that's the desire for him giving his Holy Spirit.
(28:29):
I believe the same way he walked in the cool
of the day. I believe that when Moses and all
the Israelites saw him, they saw they No one had
to say, hey, be afraid because they saw him. When
Isaiah got a revelation of him in the in the
you know, when he saw him in Isaiah six, he
you know, he said, woe is me, for I'm a
man of unclean lips. No one had to say, like, hey,
that guy's pretty holy and you're not. Because his presence
(28:50):
and who he was was so overwhelming. And when I
read some of these like amazing authors, especially aw Tozer,
I can't recommend knowledge of the Holy or any of
his books enough to people. There is such a reverent
awe as they wrestle and grapple with what we can
know of God, because our minds are so unfit for
purpose to know a limitless God, who who's not like
(29:12):
growing in love, who's not limits and limitless in love.
He is love, and he's limitless and he's all powerful,
and he's outside of time. And it's like, how do I, like,
first of all, how do I even make sense of
something that you say, Oh, it has no start? And
I'm saying it because it's like, wait, wait, what do
you mean everything has a start?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
No? No, God has no beginning and no end.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Okay, now my mind's already like I literally can't even
find a way to make that work in my mind.
And so I sit there and when I come into
the God to like, I feel like the Lord has
brought me through a practice of his presence in my
own walk with him. And what that includes is just
coming in and just remembering who he is, setting my
minds on the things above, like literally sewing to the
(29:51):
spirit like it says in Romans, like it says in
Colossians three, and just getting before him and being like, Oh, God,
how awesome you are? Because to sit there and try
and fathom and try and understand this holy, all powerful,
loving God that I can't make sense of even whenever
I think about his attributes, let alone his you know,
some of his ways. Anonysed and Safia dropped dead when
they lied about there when they lied about what the
(30:13):
offering they gave was. But plenty of other people did
massive atrocities and either never got punished that we saw,
or they didn't get punished for decades later and they
got to go on with it.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
And it's like, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
None of this stuff is just You're a just God,
and we can get mad and like shake our fists,
and I just think, like God lives outside of time.
We're playing an eternal game and we're focused on like
the temporal, So how are we supposed to make sense
of it? But to get back to what I was saying,
I think it just starts from this desire, like there's
an eternal longing in all of us. And I would
hope that every person listening to this would believe that
God is real and that he wants to know them,
(30:44):
and from that place that they would draw into him
and push into him. In the word that to your point,
they it needs to be discipled. You said that people
should learn fear the Lord from who's discipling them. Well,
here I believe that we're we're discipling disciplers on this podcast.
And so for those of you that are listening, like,
please give the fear of the Lord to the people
that you raise for me with my kids, like I would,
(31:05):
I was gonna ask you how you think this works
out in practical faith, I'll just say for me with
my kids and my you know, in my family, we
do not like if someone's praying, you better you better
be showing reverence. Like we don't joke around about that.
We don't take lightly the word of God. We don't like,
we don't take lightly prayer like I just I just
don't ever want to be the type of person that
starts to allow that in because I just see who
(31:27):
God is and and and that he is truly a
holy God, and so I just you know, I see
that that that precedes the fear of the Lord. And
I really want to make the point of that because
I hope every person listening to this has a deep
desire to know God. And if not, man like like
it's I don't even know what to say. I would
just encourage you to to just ask yourself, you know,
who is God?
Speaker 1 (31:48):
What does he like?
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Because because that's the number one question you have to answer.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
Yeah, I think that I think that what you said
with your kids, is exactly right. I mean, my kids
like at night every night before they go to sleep
and pray and uh we you know, one of the
things they tend to do is mess around, like they
play with each other, they like, you know, laughing and
giggling stuff. I'm like, hey, we're not gonna do that.
We're gonna take We're gonna take God seriously right now.
(32:13):
And and so so that's that's the way to teach
it to your kids.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
But also in your life, like there's a there's.
Speaker 5 (32:19):
A Bill Hole who wrote this book, who's written a
lot about discipleship. He says, follow Jesus and He'll teach
you everything you need to know. And I think in
our minds when when we're like leading people or dealing
with people, we think we have to give them every
single step that they need to take along the way.
And this is why, like to me, this is why Moses.
(32:40):
You know, when Moses was dying at the end of
his life, what he said to the children of Israel
was hey, just fear God, like.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Just you know.
Speaker 5 (32:49):
So so it's like whether you say fear God or
you say follow Jesus, what what the starting point is is, hey,
put yourself in a position where you're just fully hum
and submitted to what God wants in your life, and
go to him and tell him what you want, tell
him all these things that you need, tell them all
these ways that you feel. But then at the end
of all that go you know what, God, nothing's better
(33:11):
than for me to just have you, you know, And
like like you talked about, uh, you know, going through
hard times and stuff like Job is a guy. You know,
if you read the book of Job, Job didn't do
anything wrong, you know, and really bad stuff still happened
to him. And at the end of the story, it's like,
you know what, it's it's wisdom to just you know,
(33:35):
he says, even if God kills me, I'll worship him,
and so like that's a that's a really deep theological
concept to explore. But what he talked, what what Job
talks about is the fear of the Lord is wisdom.
And so so like like you're saying, I have a
finite mind and I'm trying to comprehend the infinite in God.
(33:55):
And if I and if I admit that to myself,
then what I admit is that I'm not like the
High Power and I just put myself in a position.
And this is why the Bible so much talks about humility,
having this putting yourself in this position of man, I'm
doing my best, like like for me, a lot of
my conversations with God are like, God, I've just seen
your wisdom because I'm doing my best, and it's not
(34:16):
gonna be good enough to have a great marriage. It's
not gonna be good enough to have great kids, it's
not gonna be good enough to live a great life.
If I just lean on my own understanding, I just
I just want. I want what you want in my life.
I want your wisdom for my life. And that's what
fearing God is is putting yourself in a position where
you're like, I'm not gonna strive, Like you're talking about striving,
and I think I think to kind of land that plane. Practically,
(34:39):
you know you're not fearing God whenever you feel like
it's all up to you. Right, I'm in a place
where I'm fearing God and I'm submitted to him. I
don't have to strive. I'm just I'm gonna do my part.
There's a difference between striving and being apathetic. So you
can't be apathetic. But when you feel like it's all
up to you to make the dream happen, when you
feel like it's all up to you to make your
(35:00):
marriage work, when you feel like it's all up to
you to make it work with your kids, you feel
this NonStop sense of inadequacy that will always be there. Yes,
because the fundamental truth is that we are inadequate. But
the great thing is God makes up the difference. If
we put ourselves in a position we're like, God, I'm
going to do my very best, but I need your
(35:21):
help to make up the difference, and he always does.
So the best thing to me about asking God for
wisdom is the Bible tells us that when we ask
God for wisdom, he'll give it liberally and he won't
withhold it. So okay, So like, how do you ask
God for wisdom and in your life? Yeah, it's about
prayer and it's about asking him, but it's also about
putting yourself in a position where you're fully submitted to him,
(35:45):
and that's the fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom. You can ask for it, but then I've
got to ask for it and do the work. Well,
what's the work? To put myself in a position where
I open up. For me, really simple what I do
every day. I open up the Word the first thing
in the morning, before I get out of bed. I know,
people say, don't pull your phone out, Like I pull
my phone OUTX, I'm gonna read the Word. I pull
(36:07):
my phone out before I get out of bed, and
I read the Word before my feet hit the floor.
And for me, that's how I put myself in a
position where I'm like, Okay, God, you're going to get
this first part of my day, and I'm going to
read this and I'm going to apply some things to
my life. And that's how simple it is to walk
in fearing God is reading it and not just reading it,
reading it hearing the word of God. However, it is
(36:30):
that you interact with God's word and then applying it
to your life is when you start to walk in
the wisdom that He's created you to walk in so
that you can live the life He's created you to live.
That's really what the fear of God is all about.
It's not about you know, being scared that bad things
are going to happen. It's about understanding that there's so
much great things that God has in store for me
(36:51):
if I just if I just walk in his ways.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Yeah, man, I really want to highlight that as we
close out here. What you just said from a place
of wanting to revere God, you've taken some practical steps
and I didn't know you do that. I do the
same thing, man, I just I get out of bed.
But I do not allow myself to look at anything
like if I wake sometimes I'll wake up at stupid
o'clock and I and like, your brain just wants to
look at garbage, And I'm like, no, I read the Bible.
(37:17):
That's the first thing I do. And I was doing
it first thing, last thing as well, because for that
exact same reason, because I was like, Lord, this is
a small thing. That's a big thing, because it's it's
a desire of my heart that you would always be first.
The first thing I want to do is I want
to just seek You through your word every single day,
even down to like so, so what I would challenge
for you listeners out there, I hope you're going, man, okay,
I want to I know that I need to have
(37:39):
God in his rightful place and have reverent awe for him.
Look at the things you do and really like, don't
just go through the motions, you know, Like for example,
sometimes like at our church, you can set your tithe
to auto. I've never done that. I've been tithing since
I came to the church or whatever, so what five
years now, And I don't put on auto because every
week I have to remind myself and I don't just
go oh click click, I stop and I go, Lord,
(38:02):
thank you so much that you bless Like I want
to give it from a rightful heart because I don't
ever want it to become just.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
A line item.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
I don't want it to become something that goes out
like my cable bill or some other thing that I
just go like, okay, well whatever it was that expense
and you know it's gone. I like, it's so important
to honor God to me, so I'd make sure I
do it manually when it comes to blessing the food,
like I don't just have a said prayer that I
go through the same thing every single time, Like I
want to.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Talk to God.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
And that's what I mean. I hope that as you're
thinking about these things, guys, God cares so much more
about your heart than anything else that it's overwhelming. In scripture,
he talks about I don't need he doesn't need fasting,
he doesn't need sacrifices, he doesn't need anything.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
He's God.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
But what he what he desires is for our heart
to truly be towards him. And it says that he's
always looking at the hearts of men and examining their
hearts and examining their minds. So our encouragement to use
as your your is your is to as you fear
the Lord is in all that you do, whether you're
in your prayer, in your Bible, in your in your tie.
And the things that you don't necessarily think are sacred,
whether it be work, whether it be just driving wherever
(39:04):
you're going, like, be intentional about those things. Keep God
close to your thoughts, never have him far, and in
those ways, honor him, revere him, put him in his
rightful place, love him, and from that place you just
watch how he shows up. You watch how he shows
up in your life, because that's the great God that
we serve.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Thank you very much for listening. Guys, Remember to share,
like subscribe. If you think that this would be something
that someone would enjoy it, please send it to him.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
We appreciate it all.
Speaker 3 (39:33):
If you want to get in touch, you can follow
us on Instagram at the Impossible Life. You'll find us
on there. You can also email at Impossible Life Podcasts
at gmail dot com if you have any questions. If
you want to get in touch and find out about Carrot's
personal or business coaching, that's the way to do it.
Thank you again for listening. Go out there and think
better and live the impossible. You see again sooner
That's impossible. Let me tell you what I believe.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
It's your weakness, it's not your technique. Don't think you know.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
The Impossible Life Podcast and yes, sitting on a winning lottery. Second,
an idea that is fully formed, fully understood.
Speaker 4 (00:19):
That sticks. This is the Impossible Life Podcast because Nick
and I are attempting to live impossible lives. What we
know is that nothing is impossible. So instead of using
impossible as an excuse to not try, we'll use the
pursuit of impossible as an accelerant for greatness. If something's
(00:41):
never been done before, that just means it's unexplored. If
they tell you it's too hard, it's just waiting to
be simplified. Impossible as a default label used by uncourageous
people unwilling to take a risk. The real truth is this.
The solution to any impossible task starts with this question,
(01:03):
If I had to, what would it take? What would
it take?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Welcome to another episode of the Impossible Life Podcast. I'm
your co host, Nick Surface, and I'm looking across at
a man who will one day have monuments built to
his brain. That's right, friends, The modern day philosophizer Joshua
Craft is here, to join us again.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Josh, welcome, glad to be here. Man.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
The monuments will be right next to the porta potty
monuments that they're building in the toilet museum.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
That's actual where I get all my suits from is
at the toilet store.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
So I'm glad.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
I was going to ask you where monument right there
next to the suit store.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Dude, I was going to ask you what your monument
would look like. But now that I know it's in
the toilet store, I you know, I'm not all right,
did you?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah? Well done.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
You won that one. You threw me off, so yeah,
good job man. Well, I'm glad to have you back
on today. We're talking about the fear of the Lord,
and fear of the Lord is. It's one of those
things you read about all the time in scripture. If
you read if you're on the proverb of the day train,
which we always recommend you read the proverb for whatever
day it is. You know, Proverbs nine ten is, the
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and
(02:17):
knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
That's the NIV.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
So it's like, man, fear the Lord, and it's like
you see fear of the Lord all the time. There's
a clothing line that says fear of the Lord essentials,
and it's like worn by a lot of It's very
pop culture. Yeah, or fear of God. Yeah, that's the
fear of God. Sorry, yes, shows how cool I am.
I don't even know what the name of it is.
I don't own any of it for the record, but yeah,
(02:39):
I mean, so you've got like you've got fear of
God and all that sort of stuff, and people talk
about it. But like our in modern Christianity and in
the world today, I think fear of God is massively misunderstood.
I read John Vavia wrote a book called Awe of
God recently, which I cannot recommend enough if you want
to understand this topic, because that book completely changed the
(03:01):
way that I relate to God, because it gave me
such an awe and a reverence for God, and because
I think when you hear fear of the Lord, you
naturally think like, oh, we should be afraid of them,
and like, you know, you think about the Israelites drawing
back from the from the mountain whenever Moses went up
there because they were genuinely afraid. Like it's you know,
if you had a bunch of thunder and lightning right
on top of you. I don't care who you are.
You're not feeling too tough. You're afraid. And so that
(03:22):
that was like what we think of. But what how
would you define fear the Lord.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Josh oh Man.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
I think there's a there's a lot of Biblical definitions
that we can get into. I'm not I'm not like
a doctorate Bible scholar. I think there's a lot of
people that know a lot of word better than me.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
But I've studied them. I've studied the Bible good.
Speaker 5 (03:37):
Amounts so and it's pretty easy to execute Greek and Hebrew.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Now there you go.
Speaker 5 (03:44):
But you know, one of my one of my kind
of like I feel like I come back to this
passage of scripture a lot in my life, especially in
this season. It's Philippians two twelve, where the Bible says,
work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Yeah,
and that's that's what Paul encourages us to do. You know,
there's an in Mighty Man which we always invite everyone
(04:05):
to come to at our church on Saturday mornings at
seven am. Our key scripture is one Peter two seventeen,
which says, honor all people, love the brotherhood, Fear God,
honor the King. And these are like they all these
commands in scriptures. So the Bible says in the Book
of Acts that the early Church grew as they lived
(04:28):
in the fear of the Lord. And Paul in Second
Corinthians talks about how perfect holiness, like perfect closeness and
being set apart by God requires the fear of God.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
And so you know, when you're a kid, maybe or maybe.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
If you're listening to this, you don't really read the Bible,
or you don't have a lot of like maybe biblical understanding.
A lot of people just define that as being scared
of God, Like you should be afraid of God because,
like you're saying, the children of Israel climb the mountain
and he could kill him at any time. Like like
God is like a tornado that could drop on your
head at any moments. So just live your life in fear,
(05:10):
and there is that aspect to it, you know, really,
I mean in the New Testament when Paul says in Philippians, too,
work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. The
word trembling like in Greek is literally like you know,
like be scared, right, be scared that you could be wrong, though,
is what he's saying. So when all throughout scripture, like
(05:30):
there's there's a couple of key words in the Bible
that are used for fear, and they all kind of
mean the same thing. So there's this word phobos in
the Greek and that means to dread something or but
also to be in awe of something and to be.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Reverent, you know.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
Overall, I think the overall the definition that's throughout the
Bible is reverence and awe and caution, right, so like
profound respect. It's like it's like, uh, I'll give you
like a really simple practical example. Do you want your
children to like laugh and scream and play around at
(06:10):
a funeral? You know, like it's like your grandma's funeral
and everyone's crying, and then your kids are over here,
you know, messing with each other and laughing and stuff.
That that would be a lack of reverence right for
the moment. It's a lack of respect for what's taking place.
And so when the Bible's talking about the fear of God,
it's about living in reverence for him right, which which
(06:33):
I think, uh, you know, in the in the ancient
world as as much as well as this world, the
world that we live in today, we struggle with that
just as much like there is a cultural idea in
modern Christianity that God's like your buddy, and Jesus is
just your friend, and uh he just hey man, you know,
(06:54):
God just loves you and like you do you and
you're enough, and you know, there is like this very deep, wonderful,
amazing love that God has for all of us. But
also God is also God right, so there is a
there is a we can we can do wrong, like
we're capable of great evil. The Bible talks about in
the Book of Jeremiah that, and there's nothing more wicked
(07:16):
than the human heart. And so in our relationship to God,
there's still this gap between who we are and who
He is, which is what you know, which is what
John John Bavie talks about in that book. And so
this idea right of being in fear of God is
living your life in such a way the way I
(07:38):
like to think about it and say it simply, is
living your life in such a way that you could
be wrong. So like thinking about the decisions you make
every day and thinking about what you're doing and go,
I could actually be doing like an evil thing. And
I know that's hard for us to imagine because we
all have really great intentions and we all have really
(07:59):
good motives. C. S. Lewis talks about this in in
Mere Christianity. He talks about how all wickedness is the
pursuit of some good in the wrong way. And so so, like,
you know, you think about the person who's hurt you
the most, the person who you know, a lot of
people that's like parent wounds or you know, breakups or
(08:21):
different stuff like that, they were doing what they thought
was best. Now there's a definition there. Most people when
they hurt other people, they're doing just what they think
is best for them personally, right, But they're doing what
they consider to be a good thing. You know, they're
doing they're doing good for them, which is a really
selfish definition of good. But no one's doing wicked quote
(08:43):
unquote on purpose.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Right.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
A lot of people are doing what they think is
a good thing, and the problem is are personal. So
you think about the most wicked people on the planet,
which you know, historically we think about people like the
Nazis and things like that. They believe that they were
doing a good thing. Well in what way, right, They
believe they were doing good for their country. They believe
(09:07):
they were doing good for their race, right because of
how they define the Aryan race. They believe that they
were doing good for their careers. Like, there's a guy
named There's a guy named Adolph Eichmann, And there's this
really interesting story. This guy was basically like an administrator.
He just worked in an office. He was a paper pusher,
and he was the mastermind behind all the logistics of
(09:31):
the Holocaust. So all of the Nazi, all the Nazi
leadership are sitting around having a conversation going, you know,
we've got to figure out the Jewish problem, that's what
they called it. Right, So there's millions of Jews that
live in Europe. Right, six million Jews died in the Holocaust.
There's millions of Jews to live in Europe. So they're like,
we've got to figure out how to get rid of
(09:51):
these guys.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Well, this guy's just this.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
Really great logistical thinker and he comes up with all
the logistics of the Holocaust. Like, Okay, what we do
is we round him up and we moved him to cities.
You know, they didn't call them ghettos initially, but we're
going to move him to these cities, and these cities
or these parts of cities are going to be next
to train stations, and then we'll load them up on
trains and we'll take him out to camps and we'll
either have him work for us or will kill him.
(10:13):
It's like a logistical problem that he solved. So at
the Nurremberg trials, At the Nuremberg trials where they where
they you know, prosecuted all of the Nazis for war crimes,
they bring this guy, Adolf Fikman out. They found him somewhere.
They bring him out. I think they found him in
like Argentina or something. They bring him out, and everyone
thinks he's going to be like the epitome of evil,
(10:34):
like this consummate evil guy, like he's going to be
Hitler two point zero in front of them, and he's
just he looks like a secretary, Like he looks like
a guy that just worked in an office. And they
ask him, uh, they go like, what were you thinking,
Like why were you doing all these evil things?
Speaker 1 (10:52):
He's like, oh, for me, that you know, I was
just doing my job.
Speaker 5 (10:54):
I was just doing what I was asked to do,
and I wanted to really advance in my career and
I wanted to be close to people that were in power.
And there's a philosopher named Hannah Arendt that wrote a
book called The Banality of Evil, and she writes in
there about how people that do evil things, they're not
like evil like we imagine. They just think they're doing
a good thing in some way. So this guy, you know,
(11:17):
back to what I was saying, tell that whole long story,
but this guy thought he was doing a good thing
for himself and for his career and for the German nation.
And when he even talked about Jewish people, he just
saw them as numbers on a piece of paper. He
wasn't even thinking these are human beings and we're killing
millions of them. He was like, no, I'm just solving
a problem logistically. And so the danger like you and
(11:39):
this guy, Adolf f Eikman, was a very normal person, right,
And the danger of us and the way that we
live is we can live thinking that we're doing good
things and we're actually doing really evil things, but we
won't know that until later. So then the Bible gives
us this prescript for how we navigate that called the
(12:01):
fear of God.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
And that's not a negative thing.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
That's not like, Hey, live your life and be afraid
that God's going to punish you or God's going to
send you to hell right now, or if you sin
that your whole life's going to fall apart. It's like, no,
live your life understanding that you do have an element
of wickedness that's inside of you, that everyone's capable of that,
and live your life understanding that if you constantly put
(12:25):
yourself in a position where you submit to God right
like in Hebrews twelve, the Bible says, let us offer
to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe. So let
me live my life in a way where I'm in
awe of God, and I revere Him as holy, I
revere him as a higher life form than me. I
(12:46):
revere him and his commands as good and as helpful.
Then what that also does is that helps me avoid
the evil that I'm so capable of that I don't
believe myself to be capable of. Because we can have
the best motives, right, we can be we can be
so pure in our motives, and we can be so
(13:08):
good in our intentions, and we can have the best
intentions but also be sincerely wrong at the same time.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Yeah, right, you.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Took it to like a pretty far I didn't think
we'd be going through the concentration chance while No, but
it's a fascinating story. I've never heard it before. I think,
what's so interesting? So, like you, you used it an
example where we can all where every person listening to
this can go yeah, that's bad, right, and like you
could sit there and go like, oh.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Well, how do you know?
Speaker 2 (13:35):
But your point is is he he was just a
little diversion. It was I was just trying to do
my job. It was not It was a lack of
awareness about the overall of what was really going on.
And like you said, the tool that God's given us
is the fear of the Lord. Now, what I think
is so interesting is God, like there's a pattern in
scripture that you see when you read through the Old Testament,
(13:55):
in the New Testament, no matter which you know, you
could read just one. What happens is God moves and
he says something, and then he just reminds people over
and over and over again, because God doesn't change his
words like we like to think, like, oh, I got
this word back in, you know, in twenty twenty and
I got this one in twenty twenty three, and this
one in twenty twenty five. It's like God said something
(14:16):
and he's just like, that was my word, and everything
aligns with the word that he gave. And the reason
I say that is because when you look at scripture,
and this is the real warning for us is the
israel Lights. Whenever they went into it, they reaped all
sorts of terrible consequences for their lack of obedience. But
what preceded lack of obedience was a lack of fear
(14:36):
of the Lord. And I mean God told him, if
you know the scriptures through Moses, when he gives blessings
and cursings and Deteronomy twenty eight, he says, if you
obey these commandments and you know, and he tells them
all the things to do, you'll be blessed when you come,
and be blessed you go, and he goes, and if
you refuse to obey, and he like lays out exactly
what they end up doing, and it's right there. But
the thing that's wild is that by the time that
(14:57):
they're doing all those things, they they had stopped putting
God in his rightful place and having you know, reverence
a reverend offer him. That they lost, you know, they
lost the Ark of the Covenant, they lost the original Commandments,
and like whenever I think it's Josiah goes into the
restore the Temple, they find the Book of the Law
and they're like, hey, look, we found this book which
was literally the foundation for why they're.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
And they've completely forgotten about it. They didn't even know
any of the information.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Right, But that's that's all of us, is that we
can get complacent because you know, you look at the
Ten Commandments and like, you know, it starts off with like,
you know, you shall have no other gods before me. Okay,
honor God, fear him, have reverend put him in the
right place. You shall not make for yourself anything an
image in the form of anything in heaven or above,
on earth or in the waters below. You'll don't bow
down to him. He goes through the whole thing. Okay, right,
(15:43):
don't like put anything above God, have reverend offer him.
You shall not even misuse the name of the Lord
your God. It's like he's emphasizing, look, my name is
so holy, don't even take lightly my name. If you
know anything about Hebrew culture to this day, they don't
say like, they don't say yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Say yeah.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
They say yes shim and Yeshim is is Hebrew for
the name, right, and so they yeah yeah, And only
the priest, only the priest, the high priest was allowed
to say the tetragrammaton. So the tetragrammaton is why hw h?
And Hebrew it's we say yahweh, but we don't even
know how to pronounce it actually, because the only person
(16:20):
that was allowed to say it was the high priest
in the Holy of Holies once a year. There was
a whole deep thing on that, like in the ancient world, right,
But just like about the power of names, yeah, I
mean like, uh, you know, God's God's names all throughout scripture.
But even in the ancient world they would not say
the names of other of gods because what they believed
is when you said the God's name, it invoked whatever
(16:44):
that was. So when you see throughout scripture like words
like Jehovah, Jirah, Jehovah, Nissi, all of that, that's like
they would say that to invoke that aspect of who
God was in the situation.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
I mean, that's the power of what comes out of
your mouth.
Speaker 5 (16:58):
But that's that That's why I mean God took his
name so seriously because God's name in the ancient world,
in the ancient Hebrew world, God's name represented his whole identity.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, but here's here's what will throw us here. Yeah,
here's what we'll throw us. I'm sorry, you mean to
cut you off there?
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Please do?
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Okay, Well, I think I already did. But what will
throw us is like, so I was reading in Jeremiah.
I'm reading through the Book of Jeremiah right now, and
I had to take away whenever I was reading it
because I read these scriptures and I said, when you
lose the awe or fear of God, it becomes logical
that you go off and do your own thing. Losing
fear of the Lord is the key step to strain
(17:39):
because if once you lose that God, this awesome reverence
of like man, it's a it's a dreadful thing to
fall in the hands of the living God, is what
Paul said, right, But like Jeremiah, So Jeremiah in Jeremiah
two nineteen this scripture. Listen to this. Your wickedness will
punish me. You, your black sliding will rebuke you. Consider then,
and realize how evil and bitter it is for you
(18:00):
when you forsake the Lord your God and have no
awe of me, declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty. And
it's this thought process of how do you get to
that place? Well, I think it's a place a lot
of us can be. You do things your own way,
and you don't really see any consequences, right like, because
at this point they're still like, hey, they have prophets
tell them they're gonna have peace, they still have prosperity,
they still have some wealth, and they still have some
(18:20):
other things, and so you don't see this calamity coming.
And it's easy to be like, well, that fear of
the Lord's stuff can't really be liable because or be real,
because if it was, like, you know, why didn't that
guy get struck by light And you hear people joking
around by like, oh, I'm gonna move away from you
because here comes the lightning bolt. And I think that
it's little things like that that cause us We just
start to take lightly the things of God and it's
such a little it seems so harmless, right, But but
(18:45):
what we don't realize is that we are literally we're
following the pattern that so many other people have fallen
and reaped the negative consequences.
Speaker 5 (18:53):
Of Yeah, well, I mean on the positive side, the
Bible says in Psalms and Proverbs that the fear of
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
So like, if you want to live a wise life.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Being submitted to God and what God says to do
is the beginning of that which we don't do well. Right,
So imagine, like you know, all of us in our life,
Like if you're listening to this podcast, do you serve
at your church? Do you honor God by putting him
first financially?
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Do you read the.
Speaker 5 (19:27):
Bible every day? Do you really seek to apply God's
word to your life and live according to biblical principles?
Those are things that the fear of God is a
precursor for.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Right.
Speaker 5 (19:40):
So what a lot of people do is they live
a life where they have a belief system and they
go like this is what the ancient Jews did. Is
what you're talking about, is well, I believe like I
believe in God, like, yeah, he created us. And you know,
Jews to this day, like secular Jews have a belief
in God, they just don't practice fearing Him, which is Judaism, right, Yeah,
(20:02):
so they just don't have the practice of actually, like,
you can believe in Jesus and you can say, hey,
He's my Lord and Savior, but the practice of doing
that is following him, is living life, seeking to live
life like Jesus.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Right, let me let me ask you a question though, Josh,
I know I'm interrupting in midflow again, I'm I'm basically
Garrett on this podcast. It's me because I get to
do all the interrupting. Just Kang, love you, But the like,
I want to ask this question because I think it's
a really important point for what you were making. Where
where do you think someone's supposed to get this from?
Because I hear what you're saying, and like, I wanted
(20:40):
to highlight first, like my goals for doing this with
you is I wanted to highlight for people the importance
of what of fear of God what it is, But
like I also want to give some grace to people,
and like, if you've not been a brought up in
a good Christian household, or let's say even you have,
but they didn't have fear of the Lord, Like we
don't have this story. Like I feel like in the
Jewish culture they have this story of like we are people,
(21:00):
this is what he did on the mountain with Moses,
and at least like the whole foundation of their being
was there. But for a modern day, you know, we
would be Gentiles or American like this concept of fear
of the God, fear of the Lord, Like where does he?
Where do you even get this from?
Speaker 1 (21:14):
You know?
Speaker 5 (21:15):
Yeah, I mean I think that's a it's a big
question because in Matthew twenty eight, the last thing Jesus
said before I went to have any gave us this
thing called the Great Commission. Re said, go into all
the world and teach people to obey everything I've commanded you.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 5 (21:33):
Where should let's say, where we should get this from.
We should get this from the people that are discipling us.
We should get this from the churches that we're going to.
We should be being taught how to obey what we've
been commanded to do by God. And one of those
things is, you know the beginning of all of this
is fearing him and submitting to him, and that's that's like,
(21:57):
that's the context of fearing God. Well, the problem, right
that we have is the same problem that the Jews
had in the ancient world. They just expressed it differently,
and that's that we don't think the law is that
important and we just kind of believe in this stuff.
And hey, I identify as a Christian and I want
to I just like Abraham Lincoln is famous for saying
(22:18):
when he you know, they asked him if he was
a Christian or basically what his religion was, and he said,
you know, when I do good, I feel good, and
when I do bad, I feel bad.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
And that's my religion.
Speaker 5 (22:27):
Right, that's America, that's the American Christian lifestyle. Like, well,
as long as I feel good, you know, I'm gonna
because like people, you know, uh, generally, right in my experience,
people start coming to church or they start coming back
to church because they feel bad about some aspect of
their life. Right, so like, oh, we need to get
back to church, We need to get to church because
(22:48):
I feel bad about it. And then as soon as
they start feeling good, they kind of disconnect from obeying
and you know and this isn't about obeying the church
or obeying an individual pastor, right, this is about being
obedient to God's word.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
And so the way that like.
Speaker 5 (23:05):
True discipleship works is if I'm being discipled by somebody,
I'm not their disciple. I'm God's disciple and there and
God's using them to train me up into what God
demands out of me. So one of the ways to
know that you're being that you're being taught this stuff,
or at least if you have the potential to be
taught this stuff, is if someone is constantly telling you
(23:26):
to read the word. Hey, you know what, read the
word for yourself.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Read it.
Speaker 5 (23:30):
Like me and Garrett, one of the we're very different
thinkers where we think a lot of the same things,
but we communicate them a whole lot differently and we
come from completely different angles that stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
But if you hear me give.
Speaker 5 (23:41):
A talk or you hear Garrett give it talk, especially
in a church environment, the number one thing we're both
going to say is you got to read the Word.
And I'm not I'm not saying that as a pad
on my own back of like follow me, but I'm
saying if you have a spiritual leader who's not directing
you towards really like reading the Word and being in
the Word.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
And you're not.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
And if you are a spiritual leader and you're not
doing that, there's no way people can really understand what
it means to fear God. So Solomon in the Book
of Ecclesiastes, right, he or we say the writer of Ecclesiastes.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
We all believe it's Solomon. But the writer of.
Speaker 5 (24:18):
Ecclesiastes, he had tasted everything in life, he'd pursued everything
that was good, and he says all of this stuff
is futility. But he doesn't say it's futility like it's
not good. He just said at the end of things.
So at the end of it all right, he says this.
He says, the duty of mankind, the reason why God's
(24:40):
put us on the planet is for us to fear
God and keep his commandments. He goes, I've seen everything,
I've done, everything I've been with, the women, I've had,
the money I've experienced, the success, and all of that
was meaningless compared to the greatness of fearing God, not
like the horrible thing. Fear of fearing God is like
my my purpose is found in this submission, In this
(25:03):
submission to God, right, my reason for living, like if
you know the way, Like I'll just draw this thought line.
So if I believe God has a plan for my life, right,
you know, it's like it's you know, think about a coach.
If you think this coach really wants you to win
(25:25):
and be great at this sport, then what comes with
that is they have a vision for you that you
don't necessarily have for yourself. So they're going to coach
you a certain way and they're gonna say, hey, do this,
do that, don't do this, don't do that. You have
a a choice to listen to the coaching or not.
So God's like this cosmic coach. It's beyond a coach.
But God has this great plan for our life. And
(25:48):
then he says, Okay, I want this to happen for you,
and it's better than any plan you could create. And
all I need you to do is just to submit
to me. In the process. There's going to be trials,
there's gonna be tribulations. There's gonna be horrible there's gonna
be horrible things you go through. There's gonna be great
things you go through. In the midst of all of that,
what I need you to do is just continue to
(26:09):
do what I'm asking you to do, right, and you'll
live a great life.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Right.
Speaker 5 (26:13):
This is what the writer of Ecclesiastes is saying, that
fear God and keep his commandments. This is the duty
of all mankind, is that if you want to live
a great life, then what it requires is that you
submit to something higher than your own mind. You submit
to something higher than yourself. And for a lot of us,
the problem that we have is we just go, well,
(26:33):
you know, I'd rather do this other thing, or I
think this other thing is better. And that's the same
problem that all humans have. That's the same problem that
Israelites had thousands of years ago. Is they were commanded
to fear the Lord, walk in his ways, love him,
and serve him. And then they were like, yeah, you know,
but all this other stuff is also something that we like, right,
(26:55):
And so getting to this place where and I think
it's it's really simple to me.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
It's like living life with this perspective of.
Speaker 5 (27:07):
I feel like my motives are good, I feel like
my intentions are good, but hey, I could be wrong.
And so what I'm going to do is constantly check
to make sure that I'm doing what the word says.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
You know, I I so.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
So for instance, like I don't feel like I should
have to forgive this person. They've hurt me, they've wounded me,
they've they've mistreated me.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Oh what is the word? You know? But I could
be wrong, I could have to or what is the words?
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Well, the Bible says that you.
Speaker 5 (27:35):
Should that you should forgive them. Okay, Well, if I
fear God, right, then what I'm going to do in
a situation like that is I'm going to choose what
God says over over what I think.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Right, I think I think what precedes that though, because
I you know, I think fear the Lord can feel
I think a lot of stuff sometimes can feel like
we have to try and strain it out on our
own and like what my overwhelming desire Literally, like I
think I said a few months or a few weeks
ago on another episode, like the epitaph on my headstone,
(28:09):
the best thing that you could have not an epiitaph,
but you know, if it was all my tombstone, that
it was like here lies a man who made other
people want to know his God. That would be like
the greatest finish for me ever, because like at the
heart of this Josh Man, like everything in my life,
like I really believe that we can know God. I
believe that that's the desire for him giving his Holy Spirit.
(28:29):
I believe the same way he walked in the cool
of the day. I believe that when Moses and all
the Israelites saw him, they saw they No one had
to say, hey, be afraid because they saw him. When
Isaiah got a revelation of him in the in the
you know, when he saw him in Isaiah six, he
you know, he said, woe is me, for I'm a
man of unclean lips. No one had to say, like, hey,
that guy's pretty holy and you're not. Because his presence
(28:50):
and who he was was so overwhelming. And when I
read some of these like amazing authors, especially aw Tozer,
I can't recommend knowledge of the Holy or any of
his books enough to people. There is such a reverent
awe as they wrestle and grapple with what we can
know of God, because our minds are so unfit for
purpose to know a limitless God, who who's not like
(29:12):
growing in love, who's not limits and limitless in love.
He is love, and he's limitless and he's all powerful,
and he's outside of time. And it's like, how do I, like,
first of all, how do I even make sense of
something that you say, Oh, it has no start? And
I'm saying it because it's like, wait, wait, what do
you mean everything has a start?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
No? No, God has no beginning and no end.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Okay, now my mind's already like I literally can't even
find a way to make that work in my mind.
And so I sit there and when I come into
the God to like, I feel like the Lord has
brought me through a practice of his presence in my
own walk with him. And what that includes is just
coming in and just remembering who he is, setting my
minds on the things above, like literally sewing to the
(29:51):
spirit like it says in Romans, like it says in
Colossians three, and just getting before him and being like, Oh, God,
how awesome you are? Because to sit there and try
and fathom and try and understand this holy, all powerful,
loving God that I can't make sense of even whenever
I think about his attributes, let alone his you know,
some of his ways. Anonysed and Safia dropped dead when
they lied about there when they lied about what the
(30:13):
offering they gave was. But plenty of other people did
massive atrocities and either never got punished that we saw,
or they didn't get punished for decades later and they
got to go on with it.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
And it's like, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
None of this stuff is just You're a just God,
and we can get mad and like shake our fists,
and I just think, like God lives outside of time.
We're playing an eternal game and we're focused on like
the temporal, So how are we supposed to make sense
of it? But to get back to what I was saying,
I think it just starts from this desire, like there's
an eternal longing in all of us. And I would
hope that every person listening to this would believe that
God is real and that he wants to know them,
(30:44):
and from that place that they would draw into him
and push into him. In the word that to your point,
they it needs to be discipled. You said that people
should learn fear the Lord from who's discipling them. Well,
here I believe that we're we're discipling disciplers on this podcast.
And so for those of you that are listening, like,
please give the fear of the Lord to the people
that you raise for me with my kids, like I would,
(31:05):
I was gonna ask you how you think this works
out in practical faith, I'll just say for me with
my kids and my you know, in my family, we
do not like if someone's praying, you better you better
be showing reverence. Like we don't joke around about that.
We don't take lightly the word of God. We don't like,
we don't take lightly prayer like I just I just
don't ever want to be the type of person that
starts to allow that in because I just see who
(31:27):
God is and and and that he is truly a
holy God, and so I just you know, I see
that that that precedes the fear of the Lord. And
I really want to make the point of that because
I hope every person listening to this has a deep
desire to know God. And if not, man like like
it's I don't even know what to say. I would
just encourage you to to just ask yourself, you know,
who is God?
Speaker 1 (31:48):
What does he like?
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Because because that's the number one question you have to answer.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
Yeah, I think that I think that what you said
with your kids, is exactly right. I mean, my kids
like at night every night before they go to sleep
and pray and uh we you know, one of the
things they tend to do is mess around, like they
play with each other, they like, you know, laughing and
giggling stuff. I'm like, hey, we're not gonna do that.
We're gonna take We're gonna take God seriously right now.
(32:13):
And and so so that's that's the way to teach
it to your kids.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
But also in your life, like there's a there's.
Speaker 5 (32:19):
A Bill Hole who wrote this book, who's written a
lot about discipleship. He says, follow Jesus and He'll teach
you everything you need to know. And I think in
our minds when when we're like leading people or dealing
with people, we think we have to give them every
single step that they need to take along the way.
And this is why, like to me, this is why Moses.
(32:40):
You know, when Moses was dying at the end of
his life, what he said to the children of Israel
was hey, just fear God, like.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Just you know.
Speaker 5 (32:49):
So so it's like whether you say fear God or
you say follow Jesus, what what the starting point is is, hey,
put yourself in a position where you're just fully hum
and submitted to what God wants in your life, and
go to him and tell him what you want, tell
him all these things that you need, tell them all
these ways that you feel. But then at the end
of all that go you know what, God, nothing's better
(33:11):
than for me to just have you, you know, And
like like you talked about, uh, you know, going through
hard times and stuff like Job is a guy. You know,
if you read the book of Job, Job didn't do
anything wrong, you know, and really bad stuff still happened
to him. And at the end of the story, it's like,
you know what, it's it's wisdom to just you know,
(33:35):
he says, even if God kills me, I'll worship him,
and so like that's a that's a really deep theological
concept to explore. But what he talked, what what Job
talks about is the fear of the Lord is wisdom.
And so so like like you're saying, I have a
finite mind and I'm trying to comprehend the infinite in God.
(33:55):
And if I and if I admit that to myself,
then what I admit is that I'm not like the
High Power and I just put myself in a position.
And this is why the Bible so much talks about humility,
having this putting yourself in this position of man, I'm
doing my best, like like for me, a lot of
my conversations with God are like, God, I've just seen
your wisdom because I'm doing my best, and it's not
(34:16):
gonna be good enough to have a great marriage. It's
not gonna be good enough to have great kids, it's
not gonna be good enough to live a great life.
If I just lean on my own understanding, I just
I just want. I want what you want in my life.
I want your wisdom for my life. And that's what
fearing God is is putting yourself in a position where
you're like, I'm not gonna strive, Like you're talking about striving,
and I think I think to kind of land that plane. Practically,
(34:39):
you know you're not fearing God whenever you feel like
it's all up to you. Right, I'm in a place
where I'm fearing God and I'm submitted to him. I
don't have to strive. I'm just I'm gonna do my part.
There's a difference between striving and being apathetic. So you
can't be apathetic. But when you feel like it's all
up to you to make the dream happen, when you
feel like it's all up to you to make your
(35:00):
marriage work, when you feel like it's all up to
you to make it work with your kids, you feel
this NonStop sense of inadequacy that will always be there. Yes,
because the fundamental truth is that we are inadequate. But
the great thing is God makes up the difference. If
we put ourselves in a position we're like, God, I'm
going to do my very best, but I need your
(35:21):
help to make up the difference, and he always does.
So the best thing to me about asking God for
wisdom is the Bible tells us that when we ask
God for wisdom, he'll give it liberally and he won't
withhold it. So okay, So like, how do you ask
God for wisdom and in your life? Yeah, it's about
prayer and it's about asking him, but it's also about
putting yourself in a position where you're fully submitted to him,
(35:45):
and that's the fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom. You can ask for it, but then I've
got to ask for it and do the work. Well,
what's the work? To put myself in a position where
I open up. For me, really simple what I do
every day. I open up the Word the first thing
in the morning, before I get out of bed. I know,
people say, don't pull your phone out, Like I pull
my phone OUTX, I'm gonna read the Word. I pull
(36:07):
my phone out before I get out of bed, and
I read the Word before my feet hit the floor.
And for me, that's how I put myself in a
position where I'm like, Okay, God, you're going to get
this first part of my day, and I'm going to
read this and I'm going to apply some things to
my life. And that's how simple it is to walk
in fearing God is reading it and not just reading it,
reading it hearing the word of God. However, it is
(36:30):
that you interact with God's word and then applying it
to your life is when you start to walk in
the wisdom that He's created you to walk in so
that you can live the life He's created you to live.
That's really what the fear of God is all about.
It's not about you know, being scared that bad things
are going to happen. It's about understanding that there's so
much great things that God has in store for me
(36:51):
if I just if I just walk in his ways.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Yeah, man, I really want to highlight that as we
close out here. What you just said from a place
of wanting to revere God, you've taken some practical steps
and I didn't know you do that. I do the
same thing, man, I just I get out of bed.
But I do not allow myself to look at anything
like if I wake sometimes I'll wake up at stupid
o'clock and I and like, your brain just wants to
look at garbage, And I'm like, no, I read the Bible.
(37:17):
That's the first thing I do. And I was doing
it first thing, last thing as well, because for that
exact same reason, because I was like, Lord, this is
a small thing. That's a big thing, because it's it's
a desire of my heart that you would always be first.
The first thing I want to do is I want
to just seek You through your word every single day,
even down to like so, so what I would challenge
for you listeners out there, I hope you're going, man, okay,
I want to I know that I need to have
(37:39):
God in his rightful place and have reverent awe for him.
Look at the things you do and really like, don't
just go through the motions, you know, Like for example,
sometimes like at our church, you can set your tithe
to auto. I've never done that. I've been tithing since
I came to the church or whatever, so what five
years now, And I don't put on auto because every
week I have to remind myself and I don't just
go oh click click, I stop and I go, Lord,
(38:02):
thank you so much that you bless Like I want
to give it from a rightful heart because I don't
ever want it to become just.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
A line item.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
I don't want it to become something that goes out
like my cable bill or some other thing that I
just go like, okay, well whatever it was that expense
and you know it's gone. I like, it's so important
to honor God to me, so I'd make sure I
do it manually when it comes to blessing the food,
like I don't just have a said prayer that I
go through the same thing every single time, Like I
want to.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Talk to God.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
And that's what I mean. I hope that as you're
thinking about these things, guys, God cares so much more
about your heart than anything else that it's overwhelming. In scripture,
he talks about I don't need he doesn't need fasting,
he doesn't need sacrifices, he doesn't need anything.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
He's God.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
But what he what he desires is for our heart
to truly be towards him. And it says that he's
always looking at the hearts of men and examining their
hearts and examining their minds. So our encouragement to use
as your your is your is to as you fear
the Lord is in all that you do, whether you're
in your prayer, in your Bible, in your in your tie.
And the things that you don't necessarily think are sacred,
whether it be work, whether it be just driving wherever
(39:04):
you're going, like, be intentional about those things. Keep God
close to your thoughts, never have him far, and in
those ways, honor him, revere him, put him in his
rightful place, love him, and from that place you just
watch how he shows up. You watch how he shows
up in your life, because that's the great God that
we serve.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Thank you very much for listening. Guys, Remember to share,
like subscribe. If you think that this would be something
that someone would enjoy it, please send it to him.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
We appreciate it all.
Speaker 3 (39:33):
If you want to get in touch, you can follow
us on Instagram at the Impossible Life. You'll find us
on there. You can also email at Impossible Life Podcasts
at gmail dot com if you have any questions. If
you want to get in touch and find out about Carrot's
personal or business coaching, that's the way to do it.
Thank you again for listening. Go out there and think
better and live the impossible. You see again sooner
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