How to seek guidance, find peace, and embrace God’s wisdom.
This week we are diving into the archives to revisit the fantastic conversation that Daron had with author and podcast host, Wayne Jacobsen.
They talk about living a life of healing and extend an invitation to us to see the world through God’s perspective and gentle nudges. Enjoy this reissue from the archives.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Wayne:
That’s what’s hard about it because now when I need that grace and mercy the most, I feel disqualified from it because of the lies I’ve been told about earning his love. I most need God’s love when I’ve just screwed it up or in something I can’t understand at all and I feel completely lost. That’s when I need to know his hands hold me when I’m feeling good and life’s just everything seems to be a blessing and everything’s working out really well. It’s still great to have it, but I don’t need it as much, but I do and I’m learning that and it’s just fun to realize that love is in God’s heart. Love is not an on off switch. Love is. That’s why I never used the term unconditional love because I don’t believe there’s anything as conditional love. If it’s conditional, it’s not love
Tagline: Created on purpose and for purpose,
Daron:
Everybody welcome back to The Daron Earlewine podcast. So excited to have a return guest on the podcast today, author podcaster, and a life changer of me, which is not a great way to say the sentence, but Wayne Jacobsen Wayne, we have been distant friends for many, many years and you helped me mow my lawn every single week when I listen to the God Journey podcast and I appreciate you helping me with that key part of my life.
Wayne:
Wow, that’s fun. I never got paid for that either. Mow the lawn.
Daron:
Yeah, I listen to the God journey every week when I’m mowing the lawn and I’ve had so many moments over the past, so many years, Wayne, whether it’s been you and Brad or you and different guests where it’s me and you guys as I’m mowing and having so many amazing moments of just kind of breakthrough moments with the Lord in my connection and walk with him and truly understanding what it means to live to loved. And so I thank you for that and thank you for coming back on the podcast again today.
Wayne:
You’re welcome. It’s great to hear and it’s a joy to be back and see what’s going on in your life.
Daron:
Well, wonderful. Well, we’ve had some changes. Last time you were on I was hosting Radio Theology here, a radio show on WZPL locally and Covid invited all of us to not have those jobs for 90 days, which then became 18 months. But we’re back with the podcast and making that happen. And a couple things I wanted to hit, Wayne, I kind of wanted to pick up our conversation last time and then I have a few questions that I have prepared for you, but I’m excited. The last question I want to get to and what I’m really excited to hear from you is really what you’re learning right now. And I know you’ve been working on some new stuff and God’s always guiding and directing you as he is with all of this in new and fresh ways, so I’m excited to hear about that.
But what I wanted to start with is we hit briefly last time you’re on just how often we can get into this kind of almost if you will, a tug of war of our connection and relationship with Jesus where so often we’re focused on getting from him. And I think about Sky Jethani I think wrote a book where he talked about the different paradigms where sometimes we’re life from God or we feel like we’re giving our life for God and there’s this giving and getting kind of tug of war that happens. Can you talk about how that can steal the real joy and the true connection that the father wants to have with us?
Wayne:
Yeah, I think we were talking to Matthew 6 a little bit when Jesus is talking about trying to get you to relax, not to be so preoccupied with getting that you can’t respond to God’s giving and that’s Eugene Peterson’s translation. That has been a very formative scripture in my life. It was already happening before I read it that kind of crystallized the thought that I’ve lived most of my life trying to get God to do what I think is best for him to do or as I was taught it in religion growing up, you kind of manipulate whether it’s faith or prayer, you’re trying to manipulate God to give us what we want. And as Bruce as God said in Bruce Almighty, the movie since when does Anyone know what they really want? Which is a profound way to think about it. What we’re really trying to do is get God on our agenda.
When somebody asked me How has faith played into my life? I’ll say, well, the first 42 years of my life faith was what I used to try and leverage God to get what I wanted. For the past 28 years, it’s been wow, faith is inviting me into God’s way of viewing the world, God’s way of seeing my life. And it’s helped me understand his insights that now he’s giving me everything that I need today, but I haven’t lived most of my life that way. It’s like he’s not giving me and if I don’t pray more, work more, read more, if I don’t do something to manipulate the outcome, then I’m going to live bereft of God’s goodness. So the constant thing of that is just frustration and exhaustion and how do I get God to answer this prayer, to fix this situation the way I want it Now I’ve learned to, I’m still learning, but how to live in that space of, okay, God, you’re giving me everything I need today. What am I missing? What is it that you’ve put in my path that I’m not seeing yet that if I could see it would change my heart about this or change the direction I’m living in it or whatever.
Daron:
What makes me think about right now, one thing that I’m walking through personally is two weeks ago my best friend, his mom died from, and I’ve got a mentor of mine right now, that they just had a huge kind of Facebook prayer thing for him yesterday because it’s not looking good without a miracle that he’s going to make it. Once again, he’s got double covid pneumonia. And I wonder if, or I guess I could ask like this, do you feel like it’s when we’re in these type of moments where we’re praying for God to do something we really want him to do and it doesn’t work out the way we were praying it to, that gets where that maybe stings a little more where I’m praying the things I need to pray or I did these things and I think sometimes people can get even way down the road where we need to pray this prayer this exact way and these scriptures in this order and all of it to get God to do what we want to happen. Do you think it’s heavier in these moments?
Wayne:
Certainly it is, particularly if we think we’re the linchpin to God doing something or not doing something. And I think religion gives us a lot of that. I had a prolonged exchange with a man whose wife was dying of cancer and he felt like he had this promise that she wouldn’t die and that if he just had faith enough and he thought he had all the faith, he believed that he jumped through all the hoops and then she dies and then his faith is lost. He’s devastated by this. I did everything I believe. So either God doesn’t exist or God’s not real or God’s a liar or scripture’s a liar. I mean just his crisis of faith and graciously he let me just walk alongside him as we had to put that back together. But yes, so much of what religion tries to sell us and it’s definitely what I grew up in is if you do the right things, you’ll get God’s blessings.
So when they’re not coming, then we’re thinking what are we doing wrong? And the guilt and the performance and the trying harder, all that stuff kicks in and now we’re in the least available space to listen and see what God’s doing. Even if God wants to heal, even if God has that in mind, our desperation, our white knuckling, it actually makes us less sensitive, which I think is juice’s point to the disciples. I’m trying to get you to relax so you can respond to God’s given when we’re not relaxed, when we’re anxious and when we’re thinking this all hinges on me and there’s this and I got 500 books on my shelf about how to pray about this, that the other thing. And there there’s a key in there and if I just saw it and found it and worked it and it’s exhausting and I think it diminishes who God is because it says that God may want to do this wonderful thing for us, but if we don’t find exactly the right key and work it just the right way, then he’s going to withhold it.
And so it really strikes first and foremost I think to how we view God. Does God love us? Does he care? Is he not at work in us to lead us into that space where he can work through us where he wants to, where he can change us, where he doesn’t. I had a friend diagnosed with melanoma a number of years ago, and I believe in healing. I’ve seen God heal. I was praying with him for healing and I just had this nudge in the back of my head, will you walk him to death’s door? And I don’t want to hear that nudge. I don’t want to have that thing in my head. And he’s asking me to pray for healing. I want him to be healed. He’s only 55, his wife and his family, his life. And yet as we prayed for healing and tried to manipulate all of that, I just had that persistent thing, will you walk him to death store for me?
And I knew that’s what I needed to do. I did. I didn’t tell him that he had hope. I didn’t want to destroy his hope, but I tell you, it was so much easier going down that road when I didn’t feel like this was up to me to fix it. But just be a friend to a brother who’s going to die earlier. And we all know in part and see in part Paul said that, so when I hear a nudge like that, I don’t know that I’m right. I’m not a hundred percent. Oh, that’s God. But as things played out, I can look back and say, yeah, that was God. And the better parts of what I did for my friend during that time was just to walk with him and love him and to help him have closure with things in his life rather than us trying to white knuckle our way into some healing.
Daron:
Wayne, do you feel like this is where my curiosity goes as we’re talking about this and specifically in the context of life and death? I feel like if it’s a job we wanted a promotion or something, not that it’s trivial it, it’s important to us, but it’s not as, what’s the word, final as death? Do you think it’s our misperception of I guess the finality of death or that we get, I don’t know that it seems like in the scriptures that God doesn’t struggle with death the same way that we do. Obviously he has eternal perspective, but I don’t know, what do you think we’re missing about God or maybe about life and death when for us it feels like if that doesn’t go the way we thought it should have or the way we were praying for it, that it can throw a complete faulty, I mean it can deconstruct someone’s complete faith like you were saying over this issue of life and death. Is that, I don’t know.
Wayne:
Yeah, I think God views it incredibly differently than we do. We’re finite beings. We’re trapped in space and time. And so we feel like this is this 80 years, whatever we get here, that’s everything. When someone dies at 55 or 15 or whatever, but a huge tragedy, it is, I don’t think, I mean death, he still says is his great enemy. God didn’t design us to die and sin introduced that. So there is a break in the creation at that point. But how I’m coming to look at it, I’m getting closer to that end. I look at it like the line to Space Mountain at Disneyland. That’s what life is here on the planet, man, the moment I die is when the real journey begins. So even this man with his wife dying, one of the things we talked about, the greatest day in her life, the day when she opens to all that is in Christ and eternity and liberated from flesh and all that is the worst day in his because he’s lost the person he loves.
And that’s the tension we live in. God talked about life here. If we could consider it like the do or a vapor of fog, it’s here for a moment. And God, if we could think that way, death wouldn’t seem so tragic to us. When I’ve been with someone who dies or I know a good friend who passes away, my first thought is always, I wish I knew what they knew. Now they know everything now they know exactly what frustrated them, what they didn’t see here. So yeah, death isn’t fun. It takes people away from us that we love and usually the throes of death are somewhat painful and cause us to be extreme and praying for healing. I mean, my goodness, that’d be one of the most unselfish prayers you could pray. Like you say, if we’re praying to win the lottery or praying for a better job, that’s one thing.
But I don’t think God sees death the same way we do. I think it’s like we’re all waiting in the lobby. That’s what this life is, and the real show is through those doors right there. And someday we’re all going to get to go through them. And yeah, it’s painful for what’s left here, but in terms of the person themselves, they get to have the greatest joy imaginable and one that still awaits the rest of us. And I’m getting up to the head of the line now, so I’m getting more excited about, man, I don’t like it when people cut in front of me, what, you’re only 35, what are you doing? Get back in the back of the line. But God know those things.
Daron:
I love that Wayne. And one of the beautiful things for my best friend, for his mom, and it was I guess beautifully tragic, but she died on her birthday and she was 77 amazing woman of God. And in that celebration of life we just talked about how poetic in some ways was it that the days we celebrate her arrival on earth, she’s celebrating her arrival in birthday, in heaven in an eternity. And you talked about the gentle nudges there as you walk through with your friend, and I want to talk about that next because it’s something that you have helped me, a vocabulary term that has helped me so much sense how the father is guiding and leading. And one of the interesting things with my friend is that as they were praying and believing for healing for his mom, he kept having what I think we would call a gentle nudge.
There were scriptures that were sent. He found his grandfather’s Bible and a scripture that he was drawn to in a card that was put in there for years later. All of these scriptures were speaking to God’s closeness through struggle and through pain and said, I said, Brendan, I feel like it’s some ways that maybe what God’s saying to you here is regardless of the healing, he just wants you to know how close he is to you in this moment that he’s going to walk you through this like a good shepherd. That almost became some of the theme of the process. We saw that through scripture, through conversations, and I know it brought him peace. I know it brought me peace as he walked through it. And those moments where you walking with that friend, how do we help people begin to tune their ear or their spirit to what you would call those gentle nudges as God’s speaking to us?
Wayne:
Yeah, and I think the gentle nudge, often people think that’s a little bit frustrating. Why isn’t God scream at us as loud as the world does? Why doesn’t God just write it in the sky, put it in your computer, send us an email every morning, it tells us exactly what it has in mind for that day. Our God is an incredibly relationally oriented God and part of the brokenness in the creation I think is what makes God’s voice seem gentle or seem distant. It’s not God saying, I don’t want to be obvious with you. It’s really that we’ve been acclimated to a world that as Paul says, seeks to compress us into its mold. So we’re kind of being pressed every day. The world comes at us aggressively with, and oftentimes we find ourselves doing things we wouldn’t otherwise freely choose to do, but we got manipulated into it or pressured into it or we didn’t feel like we had any other choice.
God is such a different reality in our universe, so that God’s not in that panic mode. He’s not in the pressing mode. I was telling someone the other day, I think we have to see everything about the kingdom of God as an invitation, never an imposition because we look at religion as very imposing. Here’s what you need to believe, here’s how you need to practice. Here’s the rituals you need to observe. It imposes itself over our life in a way that God never does. Jesus came, never pressed anybody to the kingdom, invited them to come, and there’s a gentleness in that. And how do we help people kind of tune into that frequency? One is to let ’em know it’s there. I think when God has something in mind. I love what you described about your friend, and I’m really sorry that he lost his mom.]
I went through that a few years ago with my own, it’s difficult time, but when would be a good time for anyone to die? Really, my dad’s 96 and still hanging in there, but it will be a sad day when he dies for sure. So there’s no good day for that. But how do what you described about your friend is what God had in mind, came to him from a number of sources, might be a scripture reading a conversation with a friend, an old note left in a Bible. I love the way when God has something he wants us to know, he doesn’t just whisper it over here in the dark and if we missed it, oh, too bad. We lost it. The whole universe. And I hear people who don’t know God yet tell me that they feel like the whole universe is leading them in this direction, and I recognize it as God.
They don’t know God yet. So now I put God’s voice to it. But I know for me when God’s wanting me to see something, I get a call, a friend had a dream about me and the dream makes no sense to them, but it makes sense to me. Or I hear a lyric in a song just walking through a store. It’s not even a Christian song, but that lyric underscores something that I read in scripture that morning or something I had in a conversation. I find when that gentle nudge comes towards us, yeah, it is not in the noise of the world and it’s not in the busyness. And so if we’re trying to hear God there and then we get really desperate and then we’re carved out some time to go fast and pray and beg God for an answer, and we don’t hear him any better there because it’s all in that same framework of intensity and desperation.
And I think where God invites us into is this place of resting in his labors. The first thing I would say to anybody who wants to learn to live in the nudges of God is ask him to show you how deeply loved you are. Because knowing you’re loved will put you in that space even when trouble comes of not panicking and not being desperate in a human fleshy kind of way, but being able to sit back and say, okay, God, I know you’ve got this. I know you’ve got me now. I’m in a better space to sense those nudges when people panic. I haven’t seen it with me. When people come to me for a word of thought or wisdom or insight about something they’re going through and they’re totally panicked and I’m just saying, what about this? No, they blow you off and when you go away, they never even heard you.
And I think that’s how God feels a lot, man. I’m telling you exactly how you can navigate this and you so want it your way or you’re so frantic with all the anxiety of it that it’s just going right over your head. You’re just missing it. And yet God’s faithful to keep whispering it to our hearts. And when people slow down enough that someone told me one time, this is a guy who works with burned out pastors at a retreat ground for a while, and he told me, all the pastors show up and they’ve all got their books for sermons, they’re going to study or they got their notes for a book they want to write. They come to this retreat ostensibly to heal from burnout, and they come in with their next project already cooking in their mind, and he usually sits down on the porch and he said, I’m going to tell you something that could change your life while you’re here.
He said, life moves at the speed of relationship, not achievement, not getting our way, not trying to make our life challenge, challenge free life moves at the speed of relationship that’s much slower than anything else we do. So I take a deep breath, exhale, try to just give God space to put things in my heart. And God doesn’t usually do it like when I’m on a walk and talking with him about something, I don’t usually get an answer right back. Well, William, this is what I’m thinking. But later that day, next week, a month later, things begin to fall into place and I begin to see where my father’s heart is in this, and then that grows over time that the other things kind of affirm and confirm that. So yeah, always starts as a gentle nudge, but in the end of it you’re going, oh God, you couldn’t be more clear with me and thank you, thank you.
That I know particularly I think what he’s asking us. I’m being asked to do the most difficult thing right now God’s ever asked me to do, and it has to do with some brokenness in the world and how it’s impacting my life and how I need to respond. And so I’m in the middle of doing the most difficult thing he’s ever asked of me, and yet my heart has never been more at rest. I know you’ve got this. I know if this is what we need to do, that this is better for everyone involved, not just me. It’s not just a statement made for what’s best for Wayne, it’s for everyone involved in this thing. And I’m amazed. I said, boy, the Wayne of even say 10 years ago could not do what God’s asked me to do right now. I wouldn’t have done it, didn’t have that trust enough to go, okay, I’m in.
And so I would resist and rebuke and say, I can’t be God. It’s not what I think is right. And yet the confirmations are there. I open the scriptures and I’m reading Ezekiel, and there’s a phrase in there going, oh my. It’s not even about what Ezekiel’s dealing with, but that phrase is there that goes God saying, see, I’m breathing this into your heart, and it’s a hard thing to do. So yes, do I want a lot of confirmation? I do. I don’t want to go do some horrible thing that’s at risk to me on a whim. I don’t. But I find when we hold, I love this word from, I’ve come to appreciate this more and more from Luke when Mary’s told she’s going to have a baby having never known a man, and she’s like, that’s got to be a freaky moment. And how do I know that it’s an angel?
Sure, but my goodness, did I eat too much of the wrong thing last night? She says, Mary just pondered these things in our heart. I think that’s a great thing for us to do if we sense God’s moving us some way. Don’t rush out God’s never in a hurry, ponder, hold, hold before God for weeks even until it becomes affirmed and clearer and confirmed in various ways. But living love is the most important part of that. If the creator of the universe is not on your side, if he’s against you, then you’ve got to brag it out of him and that’s going to put you in space. That’s not going to make it easy to see in here.
Daron:
I think that’s so good, Wayne. And I can say that that may be the single greatest paradigm shift for me in my life growing up in a very legalistic holiness tradition type of deal as a pastor’s kid, is that everything in my life was motivated by a question of whether I was loved in that moment. I knew I was probably loved yesterday, but today or 15 minutes ago, loved 15 minutes now, not sure. And that creates such a foundational anxiety, like you said, where everything becomes frantic, everything’s becomes a question. There’s almost no ability to get to a place of peace and rest in God because you’re constantly wondering whether he wants to smite you or not. And when you helped me discover that in the scriptures and just in a connection that is a place that it all starts, it does truly put you in an environment where everything else can flow from. That’s so beautiful.
Wayne:
Yeah. The lie under that, right, is that love can be earned. So I may have had a really great day yesterday and I knew, man, I was in tight with his blessing, but even if we’re honest, we never had a great day. We are muddling through this journey and we make as many mistakes as we get things right. But
Daron:
Paul Moody was saying with that filthy rags, righteousness, connection, he figured it out a while ago.
Wayne:
Yeah, God’s real aware of what’s broken in me and I’m more healthy when I’m aware of what’s broken in me and know that I’m still loved. It’s with my own kids. I don’t love my kids when they do well and treat me right. I love my kids all the time, and love sometimes hurts when they make hurtful decisions or they treat me in ways I prefer not to be treated. Love can hurt, but love doesn’t change. It’s not, oh, I hate them now. Oh, tomorrow I love them again. That’s not love. That’s something else. And you’re right, religion schooled us in this false notion that love is something you earn. And even those of us whose theology and my theology isn’t about the cross appeasing God anymore, it used to be, now I see it as the cure rather than God’s wrath being appeased by an innocent victim. But even those who teach appeasement and most of Christendom does, do you notice they’re still appeasing God every day with how much they go to church, how much they read their Bible. If they’re winning new converts to Christ, they’re always assessing their relationship with God or God’s demeanor towards them based on their performance. The people who believe in appeasement the most don’t believe that Jesus satisfied it on the cross. So they have to continue to do that.
Daron:
Yeah, it makes me think of the, it’s a church growth statement. This is like what you save people with, you got to keep ’em with or something like that. And it’s more of like if you’re going to win ’em with the show, you got to keep the show, but you apply it to this. It’s like if you got saved through appeasement, then what’s going to keep you continued appeasement? But then yes, that completely empties the cross of its appeasement in the first place
Wayne:
And never lets me wake up as the beloved of God in the mess I’m in. Yes. That’s what’s hard about it because now when I need that grace and mercy the most, I feel disqualified from it because of the lies I’ve been told about earning his love. And when I most need God’s love when I’ve just screwed it up or in something I can’t understand at all and I feel completely lost, that’s when I need to know his hands hold me when I’m feeling good and life’s just everything seems to be a blessing and everything’s working out really well. It’s still great to have it, but I don’t need it as much, but I do and I’m learning that, and it’s just fun to realize that love is in God’s heart. Love is not an on off switch. Love is. That’s why I never used the term unconditional love because I don’t believe there’s anything as conditional love. If it’s conditional, it’s not love, not love.
Daron: Yeah. So good.
Wayne:
So I talk about transformational because you live in that kind of love, it will transform you. It has to because what am I when I am fearful or anxious or desperate, I’m not the real me. The real me comes out when I’m at rest in his love, when I am at rest in his work and when I’m at play with my father. That’s where the best stuff comes from.
Daron:
Yeah,
Wayne:
Absolutely.
Daron:
Well, Wayne, it makes me think you’re following these gentle nudges and one of the things we talked about as we were setting this up is that there’s some new excitement or some new things that you are learning and that God’s inviting you into. And I’d love for you just to talk about that because it’s just so cool to see that as we journey with the Father, there’s really never an end to him bringing us into new places of revelation and opportunity and knowing of him and of life and of love. And so what’s captured your heart right now? What are you learn and what are you going after?
Wayne:
The biggest thing that’s impacted my life in the last six months, I’m meeting with the group of people who are praying about the delusion that’s in the world. And these are people from all over the world, people in their seventies and eighties who’ve known God for a long time and we’re just holding our world before God and praying as to what would happen that what are you doing in this time? And even, I know we blame social media, we do all that kind of stuff, but the delusions and divisions, it’s in our world. But the fact is, could we be in a tower of Babel kind of moment where God has confused our speech because there’s a greater purpose He wants to do so left and can’t even communicate anymore with each other. And if friends, good friends, if you don’t have the right view of the vaccine or masks or whatever, then the relationship falls apart.
So we’ve been praying about that and one of the things that God spoke to our hearts early on was don’t gaze at me. And that’s my prayer posture. I gaze at God, I hold things before God. I look at him, but he was saying gaze with me. And for me it was come, don’t just hold this. If it’s the earth holding it before God, come around to this side and let me show you how I see the things going on in your heart. And that’s not only changed the arc of that prayer time, it has changed. We meet every couple of weeks on a zoom thing from all over the world because it’s changed just the way I pray about every situation in my life. Instead of holding things before him and saying, God, what are you going to do about this? I come around and I’m a visual guy.
So I’m thinking of the revelation three, the Revelation four and five thing. When you get on that side with God’s throne, now you’re looking at the world, yes, but through the 24 elders, the cherub and seraphim, the myriads of angels and the whole of creation. Now, whatever it is that seems huge doesn’t seem so huge because this is the God who’s inside this me. And I think that’s part of what Paul’s talking about when he says, set your mind on things above, not on things below. And I’m finding great joy in my prayer life by learning no matter what I’m thinking about or praying about, how do I come around and gaze with you instead of gazing at you? And there’s plenty of room to gaze at God. That’s a lot of adoration and praise and gazing at God’s an awesome thing. But that’s all I’ve been doing. And now in my prayer time, I’m gazing with God. God, let me see through your eyes what you see. And it’s changed the way I’ve prayed about a lot of things and it’s changed how those things have unfolded in interesting ways.
Daron:
As you’ve changed that perspective in that gaze, what is something specific that you’re starting to get curious about that maybe God’s saying, Hey, see it. See what I see in this?
Wayne:
Yeah, part of it is what I just shared about maybe this delusion is something God has done and not just the frailties of man. Maybe that there’s a time of reckoning coming. As I read the Bible, I see there’s times even with Israel in the Old Testament times of great patience, Israel’s wayward, but God’s in treating them through the prophets. He’s inviting them back to himself. He loves them. He wants them. They keep refusing, refusing, refusing until they’re so hardened that a day of reckoning comes where, and it’s no less God’s love. I mean, we’ve always been taught that, okay, God loves here now it’s time for the wrath. No, it’s God’s saying you’ll not see if you don’t go to Babylon and I’ll go with you there, I’ll be in Babylon with you, but you’re not going to see if you don’t go there.
And we wonder if we’re not in a time of reckoning, is this the final reckoning I not a specialist on in times it could be we could be in the throes of God turning us over to ourselves and that hardship could be ahead and a greater place for the glory of the gospel to shine into a darkened world. I see both. I see a group of twenties and thirties rising in the world with God inviting them into himself in a wonderful way. I see that happening and I see also this division and anger and animosity on the planet that’s dividing people in neighborhoods and days of reckoning. I mean, if you went to Louisiana after the recent hurricane, you would find people don’t care about vaccines and how you stand on B l m or anything else, it’s man, we’re people in trouble and we’ve got to help each other.
And we always respond best in times of extremity. So I don’t think God is so afraid that if extreme times come that that’ll be negative, it will be more challenging. But then God’s light shines in a brighter way and people care about more important things than we care about in times of comfort and ease. So that’s one of the things, and we haven’t reached a conclusion about that. Yes, this is definitely a day of reckoning, but our hearts are stirred with that possibility, that delusion, you don’t talk someone out of a delusion. It has to empty itself. It’s the prodigal son in a far off land until he spends all his money, sells himself as a slave trying to covet pig food. That’s the only time he goes. Maybe my father’s a better person than I thought. That’s where the turn comes. Now could have happened short of that.
No, not in that case. And so it’s both. If your hearts are getting harder, then dark days are coming most surely. If you can in this season of your life recognize I don’t want to be there, man. I want a tender heart towards God. That’s what repentance is for, not the groveling and oh God, I’m a horrible person. That’s not repentance. Repentance is simply God, I’m not sure I’m seeing things the way you are, and I want to where you show me. That’s the prayer I think of repentance that changes a life. It moves me away from this hardening to the sensitivity back to the nudges and allows me to say, okay, God, I want to sit in your lap and see with you. I want to see what’s going on in the world and not with all I’m reading on the net and all the fears that are exacerbating my heart about viruses or inflation or political turmoil, whatever.
I just want to see what you see in the world and know you’ve never lost control of the planet. You just never have. You don’t have the anxieties I have and how if I sit on your lap can I see that way? So it’s that kind of stuff and it’s some of, like I said, the hard decision I’m facing right now, it’s really able to sit in his lap and say, this is the better way forward. It really is. And if I was gazing at God holding my problem, I would say, fix this, fix this, fix this. And now I’m going, you are fixing this, but you’re doing it in a way that I wouldn’t have chosen, but it’s the only way that will work. Why God chooses it isn’t choose it. I like putting people through trouble.
Daron:
That’s one thing that perplexed me. Even last year, quarantine and churches being closed and all these different things and riots and it was just, there was such a shaking of the world I felt like. And when obviously Christians are praying for God to be God and to do fix it like you’re saying, fix it God. And it didn’t get fixed and it feels like it just keeps getting almost worse. And then there’s just been times where I’ve thought about same thing of like, okay, God, what are you doing?
And I can see this, but I mean selfishly I don’t want to live through it. I can see that it seems like in most cases, humanity doesn’t ever learn anything in times of blessing or times of ease. I feel like learning things the hard way is really the only way that we learn things. I mean, I’m sure there’s some other examples, but you look, I mean through Israel, it’s like most of the time we just don’t. And he lets us get to the end of ourself and then he compassionately says, okay, here’s the consequences of your decisions. I’m sad that you’re going to choose this direction. You didn’t have to. But there have been times where I’ve thought to myself, is this finally God saying, okay, we tried the blessing route. We tried the extravagant, opulent blessing of the American church. That doesn’t seem like it’s worked out real well
Wayne:
Help a whole lot did it.
Daron:
So I get what you’re saying, and I’ve had inklings, but then selfishly, I’m like you read about hundreds of years of exile and different things in the Old Testament persecution in the New Testament, and it’s like, I think I’d rather live in the years of plenty and the milk and honey years, not the God is showing us a new thing about himself and us through the hardship. But I guess that comes back to our original point is if I’m here just to get God to do what I want him to do, I’m not really in a loving relationship with him. I’m just here to get and to selfishly try to manipulate the scenarios
Wayne:
Or at least inside the relationship, I’ve not embraced the purpose of my father because whatever my father is doing on the planet is for the best. It’s not because he lost patience and now is going to whack the world good. I don’t think it’s that. I don’t think it’s God saying, okay, I’m going to stop in treating you. He’s going to be in treating as they’re going off the Babylon God’s in treating. The moment of repentance is always there. It never goes away. It’s not okay now you’ve lost it, you’re gone. But in those moments of extremity, we find Father in ways that we don’t. That’s why Paul would come back from the missionary journey and say they encourage people with this through many tribulations or much trouble. We enter the kingdom of God. Now, that’s not encouraging. If the choice between blessing or trouble, it’s a blessing. When you’re in trouble and realize this is a great way God invites us in. And that’s what I think when trouble comes, this is a great way. God’s inviting us in all of us deeper knowing him more and a great way for his light to shine because he’s got a purpose in the world that is bigger than our personal comfort. He just does.
And if I really love him and I’m being not just him loving me, but I’m learning to love him too, then I’m really committed to his purpose. So if we’re going down this road, and that’s what he wants us praying about, I mean, if God were saying, I need three or four people to pray for a time of reckoning in the world, and it’s like, who’s going to pray for that? We’re all going to run no, no blessing God. We need Lord blessing. And that’s what our group is wrestling with. Is that what God’s inviting snake. So we felt like when we started that there was something in the Ephesians three scripture about where the church makes the manifold wisdom of God available to the rulers and principalities this world. And I’ve been involved in a lot of spiritual warfare stuff that I thought was just human hocus pocus stuff that never had any impact.
But he does say when the church comes into agreement with who God is and what he’s doing in the world, there’s a power. Even if only two or three come into that agreement, there’s power. If God needs an agreement from a group of people to have this reckoning that brings light into the darker places instead of just laying the darkness wind as it seems to have done through most of my life, and I’m a baby boomer generation. I lived through the most peaceful, prosperous set of decades that have ever existed in the history of the planet. I’ve lived through that and my generation has by and large squandered that. So it’s not going to be as easily accessible to generations that have come behind us, whether that’s the planet, whether that’s debt, international debt, what’s whatever, we squandered that. So now what does God need us to pray?
Where’s our agreement and then where is our trust that even if some difficult times are coming, we are still safe inside that father’s care. We just are. So it’s not about whether we’re going to be comfortable or not. God’s going to care for us. It’s about how God spills over into the world in a way that puts his light in places. It’s not seen now. And that part excites me when I focus on the light, a rise shine for the Isaiah 61 stuff, but the glory of the Lord’s being revealed, I get excited about. That’s the big part of the reckoning. It’s not the reckoning and the troublesome times. It’s that the light shines brighter and people turn. And that’s the wonderful thing which I love about Ezekiel. I’m reading that now. The wheel in the middle of the wheel, God exits the temple, holy of holies in their illusions of it. God didn’t really live in there anyway, but he’s going to captivity with them. It’s not you’ve displeased me. Go now I’m going with you because in captivity now your hearts will turn to something more real and I’m going to be there for it. That’s
Daron:
Beautiful.
Wayne:
Yeah.
Daron:
Well, I think it does come down to where it’s like you’re seeing it, like you said, like God’s mad and he’s been holding back this wrath and he just can’t do it. So now, man, he is stoked to just whack the world and he’s going to bring punishment and wrath and he’s going to pour it out and he’s really excited about it, his character, that’s a problem. But if he is love and he says, you know what? Well, what we’re going to do is we’re going to bring my light in my love that is unstoppable, and that has always been the agenda. So we’re just going to have to do it differently. But you’re saying, but if the result is more light and more love being seen, then I vote for that
Wayne:
And I’m going to put you speaking of humanity. I’m going to put you in a better place to see that
Because you’re not seeing it now so much you think you can control most of us, there’s a lot of people in need in this world that know they can’t control anything, and they’re right on the edge of collapsing in the midst. So I get that not everybody has that comfort, but those that do, and we in West have it in spades, it makes it more difficult to see him. We can indulge ourselves and think we’re being blessed by God. So it’s really about putting us in that space where back to where we started this, where the nudges, where the get it, the getting from God is more important, or the giving from God is more important than the getting that I want. That’s all the same thing. Really.
Daron:
So good. And we’re back. Oh, it’s a wonderful land with Wayne Jacobsen, bottom line told you it was going to be good. I love Wayne. I just love his voice and it’s mind blowing for me. I listened to his podcast every week. I have for years and years and years, usually why I’m mowing my lawn. Like I told Wayne in the interview, and I never get to see Wayne. I mean, every once in a while Facebook will pop up or whatever. And then even last time that I got to interview him, it was just over the phone. And so it was the first time that I can remember sitting down. So I was having little, I was kind of having a little fanboy. There are moments, so apologize. But it’s interesting because it changes when you can see someone, right? It did for me right in that moment.
And I love the point that Wayne makes, and this is what I want to be. Your takeaway is the understanding of perspective and being able to pray and say, God, would you give me the eyes to see the situations in my life and then pull it out, pull the lens back globally, all these things that are tearing us apart, all these things that are causing division, would you give me eyes to see the way that you see? And as Wayne talked about some of those puzzle pieces sometimes, well, I’m going to go with this. Every time you do that, it’s going to bring you to the place where you begin to distrust some of what you have as your tribe, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican or this or that. Whatever you say is, this is my deal. What we tend to do is we figure out what our little tribe is, right?
And we got to figure out what we believe, which means we believe these things, which means if I believe these and the other things that other people believe must not be right, and then we defend it, and then we just have perspective to see from our own viewpoint. And most of the times in that we get either or thinking and we actually miss the truth. There’s your side, there’s my side, and then there’s actual truth, Wayne inviting us to say, you know what? I got to get to an uncomfortable place where I want to see things as God sees them. I think about Isaiah five, verse five or chapter five, verse 21. It says, woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, in shrewd in their own sight. That might be the takeaway. If you’re at a place right now where there’s an issue that you feel like is divisive, that is pulling people apart, and in your mind, in your perspective, you go, you know what? I think I’m pretty wise and I’m pretty shrewd with my perspective. In fact, you know what? I’m probably right.
The word tells us there, Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa to you. Take it easy because you might not be as right as you think you are. It makes you think of what Jesus said in Matthew 1316 when he was talking to the disciples. He says, but blessed are your eyes because they see in your ears, because they hear. You see, Jesus was dealing with a lot of people who had believed their own tribe and were protecting their own perspective, and they were the people of God. And guess what? They missed the arrival of Jesus, God himself.
If there’s any situation where you have to say, whoa God, I think I got this one wrong. It’s that one. And I can tell you what I don’t want to do in the process of wanting to become who I was born to be, and I want to become who God wants me to be, meaning that I want to shine his light in his love in the world because I’m a reflection of that. If you and I are created on purpose and for purpose in his image, we’re there to be near for people, to be for people to show his light and his love. And I don’t want to create a blockade or a blockage in my ability to do that because I’m more in love with my perspective than I’m defending, than I am saying, God, help me to see the world through other people’s eyes so I can be more empathetic and compassionate and show up in a more loving way.
And then in the grand scheme of things, help me to begin to see the world the way that you do. What a thought, what an invitation from Wayne Jacobsen. I love it. There’s so much to think about on that one. I’m just going to let you think about it rather than rambling on and on and on. And maybe that’s just our prayer for this week is guys, is God, would you give me eyes to see as you see, and ears to hear as you hear, and a heart to love as you love? And I think if we just start there that probably in the next seven days we’re being invited as Wayne talked about, through some very gentle nudges into loving more like Jesus does. It’s a beautiful, beautiful hope. It’s a beautiful prayer. Thank you, Wayne. So excited to have him on the podcast, and thank you so much for listening.
Hey, I’d love to hear from you. Reach out to me. Send me an email daron@blackbirdmission.com. Reach out through any of the social medias. If you haven’t followed me on Instagram or Facebook, come join the party. We’d love to have you over there. And you can text me 317-550-5070. Would love to hear from you and see where God’s guiding you on your journey. Have an amazing week. Can’t wait to talk to you next week. Appreciate you listening to Daron Earlewine Podcast. We talk again. Remember these three things. God’s for you is not against you. God is near you, not far away, and God has created you on purpose and for a purpose. Thanks, friend. Until next time.