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[00:00:01] What would your life look like if you weren't looking for the acceptance of others?
[00:00:08] What would it look like if you weren't looking for their reactions, their rejections, or even looking at their faces in response to all of those?
[00:00:26] God doesn't design us to fit. He designs us to be impactful.
[00:00:33] You know, there is something, and I can honestly speak to this myself, where we have looked outside of ourselves to get validation for the things that we every day need.
[00:00:48] We typically are trying to look for a good response when we do something. Well, especially when you're a kid, you know, you do something good, you look at your parents to get the affirmation that you need. But at some point, the affirmation needs to come from outside of you and then coming internally from you being that voice that isn't criticizing you, but actually cheering you on, that it is the.
[00:01:16] The sound of the voice in you that's creating the positivity that you need to continue to press through to a calling or an expression of oneself that you're confident in. In fact, you're probably going to be the only person that believes in themselves before other people see it. If you have a dream, an aspiration or a calling of some sort, you have to believe it first.
[00:01:42] God may be giving it to you, but at the end of the day, you need to have the faith to believe in it for yourself first and then continue to move forward. The Bible is actually honest, literally littered.
[00:01:57] It has so many individuals who have struggled with the conflict that they don't feel worthy of a calling to which God is presenting to them. And one of them that I can relate to is Jeremiah.
[00:02:16] And Jeremiah is considered the weeping prophet. Yep, I cry too. Many of us do. But this one in particular is something that most of us at some point in our lives have felt.
[00:02:32] I'm going to read this in Jeremiah chapter 1.
[00:02:36] And most of us have heard one of this scripture, actually, but no one reads after it. No one reads after it and really understanding what is the source of God saying what he's saying. Okay.
[00:02:56] And to provide some context, Jeremiah is a prophet who is being presented to a rebellious nation of Israel. They had gone through several years, but all those years they have since forgotten about God. They forgot about his commandments, they've avoided. They had been worshiping other gods. And you know, there's all kind of mayhem taking place. And Jeremiah is here to and called to bring people back to God, but to no avail.
[00:03:31] So Jeremiah chapter one brings us to a point where it was the days of Joachim One of the kings of Judah speaking during this time. So I'm gonna read is Jeremiah, chapter one. We'll start at verse four, and then we'll go to verse eight and kind of start our time there.
[00:03:56] Says, now the word of God came to me saying, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I sanctified you and I ordained you a prophet to the nations. That's what we hear a lot of. Okay, then here is. Here it is. Then I said, ah, Lord God. Truly, I cannot speak, for I am a youth. But the Lord said to me, do not say I am a youth, for you shall go everywhere I send you, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Here it is. Do not be afraid of their faces, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord. Then the Lord touched forth his hand and touched my mouth. And the Lord said to me, now I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have this day set you over the nations and over the kingdoms to root out and to pull down, to destroy and to throw down and to build and to plant.
[00:05:01] Okay, there's a whole bunch more that happens after that that I can get into, but we want to start with that one.
[00:05:11] Don't be afraid of their faces. I will have to say, in my time growing up, I have been afraid of people's faces.
[00:05:22] Yeah, you are looking sometimes for reaction, and sometimes you don't have words for it, Right? Jeremiah has the words. He knows exactly how he is feeling, that the call from God is something that is so big and so grand that the first thing in his response is to communicate his deficiency. And many of us identify well with our deficiencies, but we actually do not identify well with the thing that we have been blessed with, the things that we have been called to do, our gifts and our talents, because they are literally easy to us.
[00:06:02] Isn't it crazy that you don't know, let's use sports here. Or just being a kid, you don't know how fast you are until you run against other kids.
[00:06:15] You don't know how strong you are until you start lifting with other people. Why? Because you have nothing to compare it to. You are literally living your life, and the only way you know you are better than or have a gift in it is that if you compare yourself to other people. But even in that instance, you still think, oh, this is something natural, y'all. I can. I've been doing this for a long time. Yeah, you've been doing it for a long time. And you do it at a level that no one else can do.
[00:06:47] So you have to trust people. You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable enough to hear that perhaps you actually have something different, especially if it's something not tangible, like speaking or communicating or relating. Those kind of gifts are something that is. You can't measure. It's hard to measure. You can see the impact of it if done incorrectly, but you can.
[00:07:15] It makes it harder over time to see gifts like that in motion. Right.
[00:07:21] But the piece that I got stuck on with this was God told Jeremiah, do not be afraid of their faces.
[00:07:34] So the fear of people's faces, perhaps at times we get afraid of what people are going to say. The look that they give you when they don't accept you, that they reject you, is probably something many of us don't like.
[00:08:03] Celebrities, musicians, artists, they pour their heart out into their work.
[00:08:13] And to be wrestled down by a critic or 12 of them.
[00:08:22] To say that it wasn't your best album, that perhaps the film you just spent hours and hours writing is not one of your best films, that perhaps your writing isn't your best writing.
[00:08:39] To see the face of rejection is challenging. No one can prepare you for it.
[00:08:49] And to have such a call that Jeremiah had on his life.
[00:08:55] Having some kind of acceptance when you're bringing some kind of news, whether it be good or bad news, isn't fun.
[00:09:04] He has to bring news to a city and a people who were not following God's direction.
[00:09:13] And the first thing that he was afraid of, it wasn't really him in his youth, probably.
[00:09:22] But God gets right to the issue.
[00:09:28] It's not the fact that you're young. It's the fact that you don't like the faces that they're going to give you because they're going to look at you with disgust. They're going to reject you like they rejected me. There's going to be some kind of response that's going to make you feel as if you're the worst.
[00:09:49] But that doesn't mean you're not doing things on purpose that you have not been uniquely designed to carry out. If everyone loved what you enjoy doing or what you were happening to do, is it really a calling my coach, and we're going to have him on here pretty soon again. It's been a little while.
[00:10:16] My coach always has to remind me that I'm not for everybody.
[00:10:22] And I'm reminding you you're not for everybody.
[00:10:26] You may not necessarily be.
[00:10:30] You know, I'm not your favorite podcaster. I'm sure. There's people who you would rather listen to or you listen to in conjunction with, with me or anything like that. At the end of the day, there is. You're there for someone. You just have to find those someones.
[00:10:50] But you have to be okay knowing that you're not going to be loved by everybody.
[00:10:58] And that is okay.
[00:11:01] It is one of, if not the, One of the most difficult things I personally struggle with.
[00:11:08] Just for something, just to be vulnerable, to know that you may have a word for somebody, that you have a word of encouragement.
[00:11:22] You can't make people like you.
[00:11:26] And I've had to learn that over the years. You can be the nicest, most kind person or you can be the nicest person there. Let me just. Let me rephrase that. You can be the nicest person, but at the end of that, you can literally be so nice that you have no boundaries, that you can be disrespected, that you can be trampled upon and emotionally abused because you're trying to be nice.
[00:11:58] If Jeremiah wasn't so convicted about what he'd been called to do, he wouldn't keep the boundaries. He would compromise the calling of which God had literally touched his mouth to give him.
[00:12:14] So now we find that this young man who loves God clearly, but is conflicted on the external validation versus the internal affirmation that God has given him purpose for him and designed him to do.
[00:12:32] The crux of it is somebody's face and somebody's opinion. We find this in the Bible all over, right? We found it with Saul in 1st Samuel. Say it's chapter 15. When Saul does not destroy and follow the orders that Samuel gave to him. And he essentially does something different because his soldiers wanted to keep some of the things. So he, by disobeying. Excuse me, by disobeying God loses the kingdom of Israel from his hands because he did not follow instructions. Samuel says to him, says, obedience is better than sacrifice.
[00:13:23] Sometimes we compromise our convictions and the instructions that we have because we want to be accepted. He actually, Saul had a very big issue about being accepted from other people.
[00:13:41] When he was actually anointed king, they looked around to try and find him. And when they displayed him and presented him to the public as the anointed king of Israel, but they found him amongst baggage, hiding.
[00:13:57] And I feel like that is a visual of how much Saul had on him because he needed. He had some kind of internal conflict of being accepted by other people, that even though he was king, he still needed the people to affirm that he was king.
[00:14:18] And a lot of times we are looking for individuals to affirm the very thing that we're walking in.
[00:14:25] It's a real dangerous place when you need the people that you serve, you need the people that are applauding you when you're on stage, that you don't create the things that you feel called to create because the people won't clap for you.
[00:14:47] They won't give you an encore.
[00:14:50] They won't clap their hand like I'm just, I'm pulling the Jay Z bar, Jay Z Black Album song. But you know, you know, I just thinking about the song Encore. He says, do you want to encore. Do you want more?
[00:15:05] And, and, and when you start doing things for the people, it is the tail wagging the dog. They came to see you, you didn't come to necessarily see them.
[00:15:19] And then when you start changing that disposition, you compromise yourself and you don't feel fulfilled because perhaps you're the real. You may be polarizing, the real you may be a little edgy, the real you might have a little conflict, but you have to live with the real you, not everyone else.
[00:15:48] There's a whole bunch of other folks out there that people can connect with.
[00:15:55] But for some reason, your voice, your tone, your connection, that's what they need. For whatever reason, God has uniquely designed you to reach, connect to a certain group of people that can only be attuned to the voice that you have.
[00:16:15] That's why if you have a burden to speak, a burden to teach some kind of thing. I'm talking to myself right now.
[00:16:24] You've got to do it.
[00:16:26] Because there are so many preachers in the world, pastors and speakers and all those kinds of things, all those kinds of people, professions, whatever, they're all not going to find the right person.
[00:16:42] But perhaps they may find you and they may connect to you because of what you represent.
[00:16:49] You've got to, you've got to at least try.
[00:16:54] There's somebody looking to you who is admiring you, who looks up to you, who is inspired by you simply because you're you.
[00:17:08] God does not make copies.
[00:17:11] And if we're, if we're trying to be copies of other people, we are robbing the world of the unique design that is you.
[00:17:22] That's why I feel like every time we see individuals, great men and women of God, struggling with their identity, with the fact that a omniscient, powerful God chooses a flawed, broken and just irrational vessel to use to speak to nations, of course I'm just going to bring up my My issues. Because my issues don't deserve to be able to speak the perfect word of God.
[00:18:00] But God doesn't have no problem.
[00:18:02] Why should we?
[00:18:06] And in fact, doesn't God already know who he's dealing with?
[00:18:12] Bible says he knows the heart.
[00:18:16] I think it's 1st Samuel, chapter 16, the book, the chapter of this one. Bible says, man looks at the heart, looks on the outside, but God looks at the heart.
[00:18:27] So do we not believe that God knows who he's picking?
[00:18:33] And then we end up reminding him, like, do you know who you pick?
[00:18:38] And he's like, oh, yeah, I know who I picked.
[00:18:43] Here, I'm gonna give you this. Now go on out there and do what I told you to do.
[00:18:51] If God be for us, who can be against us?
[00:18:55] And whose face matters at that point?
[00:18:59] I know we all want to be loved and accepted, including.
[00:19:07] But do you want to sacrifice the acceptance. Sorry, do you want to sacrifice your individuality for the acceptance of others?
[00:19:23] I think we'll just leave it there. There's a couple other things we'll talk about, but we'll bring it up and kind of stop right here. But if you have been inspired, if you've been encouraged by this message, share it with somebody, put it share on YouTube, share it on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, podcast. Just to share and let someone know that the unique you, the fully present, confident you is someone that. That is needed in this world, that once you own who you are, because God's already accepted you, he's created you in his image and likeness, nothing that you're dealing with has caught him off guard.
[00:20:17] And he knows who he picked.
[00:20:20] So perhaps we should trust in his. In his selection process.
[00:20:26] All right, we'll catch you in the next pod. Take care.
