Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] God doesn't design us to fit. He designs us to be impactful.
[00:00:13] Welcome to Shifts and Ladders. You have found the podcast that is focusing on helping individuals make the shift spiritually, mentally, emotionally, relationally or physically. All five at once or maybe just one at a time. But finding areas where you can grow and then experience the God given potential in those areas of your life. I'm Ryan Robinson. Thank you for joining and tuning in to us today. Do me a favor, if you are watching YouTube, subscribe, give a thumbs up. Give a like if you are listening on Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you're listening to podcasts, send a review, let people know that hey, this is a great podcast to check out and listen to. But with that said, I'm going to go right into the pod today. There was something we talked about last week and we're going to talk about this subject and it is actually lacking these days and it is called trust. Not just trust in general, but trusting in God specifically. But we usually experience trust in our everyday experiences. I would probably say this example I'm going to give is probably the utmost, at least for me. High levels of trust. So getting a haircut if you hear me or feel me, if you have ever gotten a haircut at any point in your life, there are you get nervous. I have been my barber might be listening barber, a former barber might be listening to this.
[00:01:54] No shade though I had been with him for almost 13 years, he happened to move away. Got an incredible God given opportunity. So listen, I am so excited and happy but I'm also sad at the same time because I didn't have to tell. I can't tell you the last time I had to tell a barber the way I wanted to get my haircut. He just knew what I wanted when I went into the shop. Same thing with my son. He knew what my son hairstyle was like. I didn't have to take tell him too much. So me going and leaving him and going to a different barber was quite an experience for me actually. So much so that I was like I was super nervous. I was trying. I asked my big bro, I said hey man, who cuts your hair? He gave me a couple of people. I went, had a great experience. My wife was like, you know it looks good but it ain't it. My neighbor helped me out. I've been going to one particular guy for a little while now. But the part about it is trusting someone with your head is scary as hell. And yes, I said hell because you have no way of trusting them. You need some evidence, you need some credentials. The license these days doesn't even cut it. Like you could have a barber's license and still be terrible at cutting hair. And at this rate, I'm asking people that I have relationship with, check it out to tell me. And based on what I've seen them in the past with their haircuts and their styles and whatnot, I am trusting in the relational equity that I have with them, that they would not refer me to somebody that's going to chop my head up and have patches in my head. Okay? So trust is a very vital and very critical thing. Thing. It's very delicate because you can lose it fast, but it takes forever to gain it. There's a phrase that was said, I don't know who the quote, or at least the person who said this quote. It says that trust is lost in buckets, but is gained back in drops.
[00:04:07] So we literally have so many situations and challenges that come along with us in trust. But the thing is that helps us with that trust is the relationship that we have with someone else that helps bridge what we're going to work on with this other person that we don't know. Okay, so your trust is actually in a very, very cool and incredible way is a credit. Your trust in someone is actually a down payment for someone else in the future. So how do, how do we get to this? And how can we. How does this, how does trust have to do with God?
[00:04:51] The Bible says in Proverbs 3, 5 and 6, it says, Trust the trust in the Lord with all of your heart and lean not unto your own understanding in all of your ways, acknowledge him and he will direct thy path. It is incredible that what we just determined is that we said, hey, trust God. We hear that a lot.
[00:05:11] But the thing is, the only way to trust him is if you have relationship with him.
[00:05:17] And most of the time we are trying to learn about or trust in a God that we really don't know. So because we don't know him like we think we do, we don't trust him with the things that His Word says that we should do. Right? It's really crazy because if we hadn't done that or if we've gotten to know God, we would know. Oh, Bible says he would never leave us nor forsake us. It says that every good and perfect gift comes from above. Doesn't say it's always going to be easy. Bible says, Jesus says this actually says, he said, in this world you will have tribulation but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world, which means there's victory in Jesus. There's nothing that God can't do and there's nothing that God won't do for you specifically. So what ends up happening is because we don't have trust in certain areas, it makes it difficult to trust God, especially in areas that we have struggled in or we've been disappointed or hurt in. I'm going to say that again. It really gets challenging when we're called to trust somebody. When we have areas that we have been hurt in or, or disappointed by, whether it be a person, a circumstance, a situation, a job, a friend. You fill in the blank for whatever works best for your level of disappointment or experience that you've had. Most likely, maybe God has disappointed you. That's true.
[00:06:56] It's happened to me.
[00:06:58] But the thing is that we've learned is that in every relationship there are ideals and expectations that we have of others.
[00:07:07] But perhaps, may I challenge you that we might have put on expectations of God that God said he wouldn't do.
[00:07:19] It's in his word. Some of the things that he does, he would do. Or maybe we hadn't done our part and maybe we're finding out, you know what, even even though God is still good in spite of us, there might be some things that we haven't been doing in that relationship. Equity with him that shows that we can trust him or that he can trust us and that we can trust Him. Okay, so I'm going to kind of dig in on a couple things because trust in itself is caused by several things.
[00:07:55] I would say even trusting God, let's just be specific here. Trust in God is challenging, but it shows up in multiple ways. Okay, let me pull, pull up my notes real quick so I can explain this a little bit. All right, so honestly, we have areas of trust with God that, you know, depending on what's going on, we're going to use a couple Bible characters here to kind of get us an understanding of our trust in God. Okay. And we're going to go, I'll say I'm going to do four. I'm gonna try and get to four, probably just get to three. But the first one is when we have issues or trust issues with.
[00:08:38] Let's just with God, but also our relationships with God actually relate to our issues with other people is that we have some personal inadequacies or insecurities or self esteem issues to trust somebody.
[00:08:54] You know, there's a trust game. My daughter plays this a Lot.
[00:09:00] And I'm gonna tell you, it throws me off sometimes because I'm like, you know, she, she's young, so like she's just playing and learning how to do these kind of games. So out of nowhere she'll be walking and she's like, trust fall. And just like fall out of nowhere. I'm like in the kitchen or I'm in the living room or in her bedroom and she'll be walking and she's like, trust fall. And I'm like, emery, I'm gonna need you to not be do that. But why does she do that? Because she trusts me. She trusts that I am going to catch her.
[00:09:35] I drop everything. I mean you, you, I mean, crashing, laptop. Okay, laptop doesn't drop, but the phone drops. Anything I'm holding, I had to put down real quick. I catch her with one hand or something like that. She. I haven't dropped her, thank God.
[00:09:53] But there is something to be said about that, that she trusts that her daddy's going to catch her.
[00:09:59] And the thing is she just has. She just trusts that much.
[00:10:06] Okay. Do we trust God like that?
[00:10:14] I think sometimes this level of insecurity and self esteem issues actually keeps us from actually trusting God because we feel vulnerable or we don't feel like we are enough to be held. We don't feel confident enough that, you know, we would be able to be held by somebody like, oh, why would somebody hold me? And the perfect person who, who is an example of this is Moses.
[00:10:42] And there's a bunch of them actually. But Moses is one who, who believed that he couldn't speak. Well, he said, so he said, I'm gonna send you to Pharaoh. That's what God says in the, in the bush, burning bush. In the, in Exodus, he says, I'm gonna send you to tell Pharaoh to let my people go. He's like, well, you need to pick somebody else because I can't talk. Well, why did you pick someone who can? Who. Why don't you pick someone who can speak eloquently to the king or to the Pharaoh.
[00:11:10] He immediately thought that some. His inadequacy actually disqualified him. So that because he saw himself as such, he said, like God, you can't trust me with that? I can't. You mean to tell me you're picking me? All God?
[00:11:28] Forget that.
[00:11:30] And God made sure that Moses was able to eloquently speak. He had his brother Aaron with him. But that's. After that, there's nothing, you don't hear anything else of him talking about any Kind of speech issues.
[00:11:48] There's a couple other ones. Gideon, in the book of Judges. Judges, chapter six, he got an angel comes to him and calls. And by the way, Gideon is found hiding from the Midians in a wine press, threshing wheat. That's a big story. But long story short, an angel of the Lord says, hey, my. You know, calls him a mighty man of valor. And he's like, me? You talking about me?
[00:12:19] He's like, yeah.
[00:12:21] And he had a hard time believing that Jeremiah said the same thing, said something similar. He says, I'm a youth. Why are you calling me? I'm too young.
[00:12:31] So every individual. I say, most individuals in the word of God who have had issues with their calling had an issue with themselves that allowed them to almost disqualify themselves even though God already qualified them. Okay, so there's that one. The other one is the fear of the unknown and things to come.
[00:12:55] To be honest with you, y'all, nobody really knows what's going to happen.
[00:12:59] I mean, I wish I had a crystal ball or I had something to say. What's. I mean, what's going to happen tomorrow? I mean, we think the weather's going to be right. We hire and pay meteorologists to get it right. They don't. They don't know the future. They just understand the patterns.
[00:13:17] So sometimes we get fearful in those regards. But I'll tell you, there's a couple things here and I'm a focus on really this one, just for sake of time.
[00:13:28] Matthew, chapter 14, verse 28 through 31 is focusing on when Peter is walking on the water.
[00:13:37] Give you some context for this. It's right after the Jesus feeds the 5,000, not counting the women and the children. Jesus tells the disciples to go across the Sea of Galilee. And while they're going, Jesus goes up to pray. It starts to storm. It's really rough out there and the disciples are tired. But Jesus begins While they're about 4 o'clock in the morning on sea, he's walking toward them and they think it's a ghost.
[00:14:10] And they like. And Jesus says, don't be afraid, it's me. And then Peter says, hey, if it's you, bid me to come to you. And then Jesus says, come. So he starts walking on the water. Peter, the one who talks the loudest and gets in the most trouble because of his mouth, begins to walk on the water. Okay, now the Bible says this specifically. It says once he saw the wind, he began to sink.
[00:14:42] Okay, now I don't know about you, but when's the last time you saw some wind?
[00:14:51] I'll wait.
[00:14:53] You can't. You might have seen it on a cartoon as Little Squirrel, you know, swirly lines. But that is all that we can do. Because wind is not seen, but wind is felt. The impact of wind is felt. It just can't be seen. Okay, so what ends up happening is Peter took his focus off. Off of the individual and the person who was keeping him up.
[00:15:18] His trust was in Jesus, but he saw everything else and actually trusted these elements more than what was right in front of him.
[00:15:30] And what happens when we take our eye off of circumstances, individuals, as well as our own ability, and we get distracted? What happens? We begin to sink.
[00:15:48] We get frustrated. We start to gossip, we start to get angry.
[00:15:53] Name, name them. You can figure it out. You know, you know you and how you would respond when you get distracted. But what happens when you lose the trust? When you lose trust is because you lost trust. Focus on what matters. Okay? I preached this sermon long time ago. It's called Putting faith in focus. You won't find it anywhere. Maybe I might, if y'all interested. And I actually have the audio of it, if you're interested in that sermon.
[00:16:25] I don't know, just. Just put a little comment in YouTube or. Or something.
[00:16:31] Because the. The thing is the hardest thing about faith, and faith, the Bible says, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
[00:16:42] It requires trust in a future outcome that you can't see yet, but believe that there's evidence that will cause that thing to happen.
[00:16:54] Okay? And the hard part about it is there's no evidence of now in now. Most of us are looking for guarantees.
[00:17:05] Now, the thing is God's made guarantees, but it's hard to have any kind of material guarantee from God. The only thing we have is his word.
[00:17:19] I'm going to say that again. The only thing we have is his word to trust.
[00:17:24] We don't have a slip. We don't have no invoice. We don't have no IOUs. We have nothing. We just have his word to trust.
[00:17:34] And I think, ladies and gentlemen, that is where God really wants us. Man, people, we lose all that stuff all the time.
[00:17:43] People make promises, they break them.
[00:17:46] But this. What the. This is another thing that the Bible says that God is not a man, that he should lie.
[00:17:56] So if there's any being that you can trust, you can trust God. What I think that happens to us. And I'm a lean in a little bit more.
[00:18:08] Trying to not lean in too Much what we do is we apply our human experience that we've had with people, parents, friends, so called friends, and then apply that to God himself, as if he is like every individual that we have come across in our lives that has broken a promise, that has made big on a, that has made big, or taken advantage of our naivety, naivete, or just didn't know what the heck we were doing and benefited off of our ignorance.
[00:18:55] But last time I read God is good, God loves us and he can be trusted and he wants us to give Him a shot.
[00:19:12] Now I'm gonna say this one thing and I'm gonna close for the, for this time, but this is a longer pod than I expected actually. But I'm say this, what's important about this is that faith requires something in the future.
[00:19:30] It is an expected outcome. I talked about having vision in hd, but you can't have vision in HD if you don't have trust right now.
[00:19:42] If you have a vision and you don't believe or have any trust of what is going to come or how it's going to come about, then what's the point in having a vision?
[00:19:52] A lot of us stop having vision because we have disqualified ourselves because we think we're going to get disappointed.
[00:19:59] But the thing is, if you don't even try, you won't even know.
[00:20:03] And in fact, you might be experiencing something better than you even thought, but you're not willing to put yourself out there because of our history of being disappointed, of not having an outcome that we thought was best for us. You know, and like I said in the last podcast or last episode, sometimes we've got to give up our preference for what God prefers best for us. It only makes sense in reverse when we're going through it, but you got to go through it. And the next pie we're going to lean into, we'll probably lean into this. But future, how do you design that future?
[00:20:47] How can you trust that that future is going to be good for you?
[00:20:53] Yeah. And if you, if you haven't yet and you should, subscribe to this podcast on YouTube, on Apple, podcast, Spotify, wherever you are listening. I really believe, particularly in this year, that you need to have God in and around you to help make these shifts that are happening. You will begin to transform and become a different individual. Not just because you have been reading or you have made the declarations of your resolutions and all those things. No, it's because you involve God in the process that all of these things can begin to happen.
[00:21:41] God is not a genie, but God is a good dad.
[00:21:46] And we just got to know how the dad, how our heavenly Father operates, and we got to do it right. So with that said, thanks for listening, and we'll catch you in the next pod. Peace.
