When Kristen faced a daunting health diagnosis, her world seemed to topple, but through faith, she found an unexpected source of resilience. Her story is a testament to the power of perseverance and a cornerstone of our heartfelt discussion on navigating life's tumultuous seas. In this episode, we lay bare the often-unspoken truth: life's trials spare no one, righteous or otherwise. Yet, it's not about seeking a life devoid of problems but finding solace in the promise of divine support. Drawn from the wisdom of Psalms and Isaiah, our conversation turns personal as we share narratives of struggle and the discovery that prayer and unwavering faith can be the instruments of profound personal growth and fortitude.
Reflecting on the extraordinary faith of Horatio Spafford, we unravel the myth that we are only given what we can bear. Instead, we shed light on the idea that it's through God's strength we find the ability to endure and emerge stronger. Challenging the 'It Gets Better' sentiment, we emphasize the significance of welcoming life's challenges as mechanisms for building a more resilient self. We discuss how children who gradually face adversity often grow into well-adjusted adults, illustrating the importance of not shying away from life's tests. Our episode culminates with an open invitation to listeners to seek companionship and strength in their spiritual walk, reinforcing that the journey of faith is marked not by the absence of storms but by the courage to sail through them.
When Kristen faced a daunting health diagnosis, her world seemed to topple, but through faith, she found an unexpected source of resilience. Her story is a testament to the power of perseverance and a cornerstone of our heartfelt discussion on navigating life's tumultuous seas. In this episode, we lay bare the often-unspoken truth: life's trials spare no one, righteous or otherwise. Yet, it's not about seeking a life devoid of problems but finding solace in the promise of divine support. Drawn from the wisdom of Psalms and Isaiah, our conversation turns personal as we share narratives of struggle and the discovery that prayer and unwavering faith can be the instruments of profound personal growth and fortitude.
Reflecting on the extraordinary faith of Horatio Spafford, we unravel the myth that we are only given what we can bear. Instead, we shed light on the idea that it's through God's strength we find the ability to endure and emerge stronger. Challenging the 'It Gets Better' sentiment, we emphasize the significance of welcoming life's challenges as mechanisms for building a more resilient self. We discuss how children who gradually face adversity often grow into well-adjusted adults, illustrating the importance of not shying away from life's tests. Our episode culminates with an open invitation to listeners to seek companionship and strength in their spiritual walk, reinforcing that the journey of faith is marked not by the absence of storms but by the courage to sail through them.
Alright, good evening everybody, and welcome to another edition of the Jordan and Christian record show. Tonight's topic is facing life's problems, and I use the word facing very deliberately, because there are some problems we think we can avoid and some problems you want to go to the side of, and maybe some problems you want to push on somebody else. But, honestly, most of life's real serious problems, we just have to face them. We cannot run away from them, and so we're going to talk about that tonight. But before we do, kristin, go ahead and pray for everybody, please.
Speaker 2:Well, lord, even when we don't feel like we are making any progress, the truth is that we have already overcome in you. Because you have overcome, you have the victory, and there's the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony to prove it. God, we thank you for the healing that has already come. We thank you for the restoration. We thank you for the breakthrough. Lord, I just pray for anyone right now who's just facing a wall where they don't know what they're going to do next. God, that you would give them the wisdom and the peace that passes understanding, and we thank you for it In Jesus' name, amen.
Speaker 1:You know, I love opening the show with your prayers because I feel like even if we give a whole message here and have a whole conversation and nobody agrees with anything that we say, at least they've gotten the benefit of your prayer to start and the call to salvation at the end.
Speaker 2:So good job is always sweet. Thank you, honey. Well, at least you can't really mess up a prayer if your heart is right.
Speaker 1:Right, that's right. Yeah, all right. So today's Bible verse and we're going to start with Bible verses for now on, because I think it's important Today's verse is Psalms 3419, which says many are the afflictions of the righteous, many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. So you know, I heard Joyce Meyer say one time, kristen, that she knows that if she does a message on prosperity or she does a message on love or finding the right person, those will get tons of views, right. But if she does a message on righteousness, telling people how to live, right, okay.
Speaker 1:Or if she does a message on afflictions, well, nobody wants to hear those. And she knows that those are the podcasts that'll get the fewest views. Those are the books that aren't going to sell. So you know, we know what people want to hear, but I think people have to face the reality that becoming a Christian doesn't mean you're not going to have any problems. In fact, it means you're going to have many afflictions okay, but that God's going to carry out of them. So, kristen, why don't you start by telling us, I mean, what is this about and how do we deal with this?
Speaker 2:Well, I just really feel this is really relevant right now to my life, because I've been going through this annoying little health crisis and I just feel like God, how long is this going to persist? How long is this? I mean, I'm just so fed up, I'm so discouraged, and God spoke to my heart and he said how long is it going to persist? Well, have you persisted in prayer like you used to? And I was kind of really convicted by that because I thought back to other times in my life where I had gone through things and I just put my face to the carpet and prayed through every single day. I was praying every day, I was believing every day. I said this is the day.
Speaker 2:And I think back to those times and, yeah, there were difficulties that I didn't want to go through the difficulty again, but what came out of that? I wouldn't have traded that experience for anything because the intimacy I got with God, the faith building exercise, and I have to remember that going forward. You know, life has those challenges. You're either going into a crisis, in a crisis or coming out of a crisis, but truly, that's why we hold on to the Lord, because we don't have to live in that place. We can live above it, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know. Isaiah 41-10 says do not fear, I'm with you, do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. So there's two parts of that right. There's the last part, where God is saying I will uphold you with my righteous right hand, I will protect you.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll be with you but right before that he says I will strengthen you. In other words, he doesn't say I'm gonna prevent every, every bad thing that you can think of from happening to you. Things are gonna happen to you, but I'm gonna make you stronger, I'm gonna use these things to build you up as a person. And it's just like, you know, with weight training. I mean, god's goal is to make you more capable. Well, you don't become more capable by lifting light weights. You become more capable by lifting the heavy weights and then you're able to lift, you know, increasingly heavy ones.
Speaker 1:Now, nobody really wants to hear that. We want to hear that everything is gonna go right. All the time we snap our fingers, just like Jesus cured people of leprosy and blindness. All that we have to do is, you know, we open the Bible and we read the right prayer, like it's a book of spells or something, and abracadabra, all of our problems go away. And I think one of the frustrations that people have is that when they say the right prayer and they, you know, rest on faith for five minutes and the problem doesn't solve itself, then they say, well, it's Christianity stuff. This doesn't work. I mean, you know, I could be a non-Christian and still have this problem. You know how is this helping me.
Speaker 2:I came up with a saying a couple of years ago God knows the need beneath the need we think we need, and basically what I mean by that is we have a legitimate need. But even beyond that, god does not only solve that, but he goes deeper. Sometimes there's a deeper, underlying thing that we don't even realize and recognize, and we need to learn to trust him. But he's also cultivating this dependency because in life there is always going to be a deficit. We have a God-shaped hold in our heart for a reason, but even on the outside there's always going to be a deficit. You might be okay with your finances, but you might have a health thing going on. You might have a be okay in those areas, but you might have a relationship thing going on, or it could be more than one thing at a time. That happens too. But the point is God does that so he can fill those things and he can be glorified in them. I firmly believe that it's just an amazing thing that he does.
Speaker 1:You know, I told you, I think earlier before we started this taping, that we could very easily have just called this episode why God? Because we go through so many things in life and it's very easy to say God. Why is this happening to me? And you know that a friend of mine, age 30, healthy young woman, christian, just died this past week, just woke up one day and had a stroke and just dropped dead. And you know, you and I know people who are sick and people who have died early and where they find out that their kid has a disease or something like that, and it's very easy to ask why. And that's the great temptation and this is going to sound very bizarre what I'm about to say, but you know, I can't find any place in the Bible where anybody asked God why, other than Job? Okay, and Job was stiffly rebuked.
Speaker 1:What you find is that the people who are able to overcome these things and the book of Psalms is all about this are the people who they're going through stuff and they say yet, god, I'm going to praise you, okay, though my Redeemer slay me, yet I know that he lives. That's actually what Job says earlier on in the book, before he becomes more dismayed. You know, the Bible says the Lord inhabits the praises of his people, and so the challenge is when you go through something like this, can you still praise God? Okay, the Bible says be thankful in all things. In all things, rejoice.
Speaker 1:One of the more bizarre episodes in the Bible, christian, is when I believe it's Paul and Peter are taking prisoner and they're beaten to within an inch of their lives and they walk away and they're praising God for this because they've suffered for his glory. And I think, man, that's a level of faith that I don't know how I would ever manifest it. How do you go through the worst thing in life and praise God? And yet, if you're using this, if you're using this awful experience that you're having to strengthen yourself, but also to get closer to God and build up that relationship, then you are beginning the process and you're going through the process of overcoming this thing, and it doesn't mean that the bad thing might not happen, only that God's purpose for that bad thing happening is going to be fulfilled in your life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like when Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were in the fire. They knew God would deliver them, but they said, even if you don't I call it the even if faith, even if God, I know you can do this, but even if and that's that is a mature level of Christianity that, hey, listen, we're not perfect people. So even when you think you've reached that level, it's like you're always stretched and you're always. You have those remembrance stones to remember what God did, and then you have to go back to that place.
Speaker 2:I think of the man who wrote. I think his name is Horatio I could be wrong about that and I forget his last name. I want to say Algier, but I don't think that's right. But the man who wrote it Is Well With my Soul. The story behind that is that he wrote that song when his wife and daughters, his entire family, they were all killed in a shipwreck. And he wrote that song it Is Well With my Soul. And if you listen to those lyrics, it's just mind blowing what you talk about being challenged in your faith and saying, wow God, how could this person? But it's that thing that we can't do in our own strength. That's the answer. It's never in our own strength, it's his strength. Remember when you said to me when people say, god doesn't give you more than you can handle, well, it's not more than you can handle, it's not more than he can handle, right.
Speaker 1:God doesn't give you more than he can handle. You know, I told you one time and we did a podcast on this about this advertising campaign a few years ago about 10, 15 years ago and it was called it Gets Better and it was targeted towards teenage kids who were at risk of suicide because of bullying for whatever reason. Ok, and the idea was well, don't worry about the bullying now, because life gets better and you know, you just have to get through this one rough patch. And I thought, man, you are setting people up for failure if that's what you're telling them. Because I gotta tell you, like nobody likes going through the teenage drama and the high school nonsense.
Speaker 1:But that is nothing compared to you know real life consequences when you're a kid. I mean, I understand they're kids who have, you know, rough upbringings. But if you're like a middle class kid, you know what happens in your life. You get a bad grade on a test. Well, guess what? You're not going to lose your job, you're not going to lose your house, you're not going to go without eating that night because of that. There's no real consequences.
Speaker 1:If you get sick, you're probably not terminally ill, your parents are probably still both alive, that sort of thing. But when you get older, right then you face real trials and real tribulations. And if you've gotten to that point with the expectation that life is just going to get easier and instead you haven't used your troubles in the past to make yourself stronger, ok, well, you're setting yourself up for failure because you're not going to have the spiritual and mental muscles you need to deal with life. Life gets harder, you know, with age. But the idea is those of us who live successful lives, we become stronger with age so that we can get through those things. Ok, and then not just get through them but persevere and help other people do the same thing. That's the whole point. It's not just us getting stronger for ourselves, us getting stronger so that we can help other people who are going through the same thing.
Speaker 2:That's right. Actually, that causes me to think on all of those studies that people have done about how kids or who have been growing up have had to overcome difficulties and challenges in life incrementally, how much better they are adjusted to the real world when they're adults than people who have had every protective thing that have never had, you know like lived inside a bubble. And then they hit the real world and like, oh my goodness, I don't know how to deal with this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost like you know. I saw that thing the day about. You know a lot of animals that do, is. It was bears, wasn't it? These bears grew up in captivity and they're real friendly with other people, but then they couldn't be released into the wild because they couldn't, you know, feed themselves or anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was not that guy. That guy was like sleeping with the bears, which I would not ever not sleeping with you.
Speaker 1:Know, like he was laying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was. He was like in their den and and cuddled up next to the bears. Oh, my goodness, that's not. Not. That's the wrong kind of trust, the trust in God, not that a bear is not going to kill you.
Speaker 1:We were doing well before I got us off topic. Good job, All right. Kristin, why don't you say the call salvation?
Speaker 2:Oh well, lord, if you know, if anyone here who's listening has never received Jesus, this is the time to do it. Just follow after me, dear Jesus. I ask you into my heart, forgive me of my sins. I make you my Lord and Savior and I will follow you all the days of my life. If you prayed that prayer, just send us a message or write a comment or something so that we know, so we can help you get started in your walk of faith and be encouraged.
Speaker 1:All right, guys. Thanks for watching. We'll see you again next week, as always. In the meantime, be blessed and be a blessing Bye.