We are not here to talk religion, but we will talk about what it means to have a personal, daily walk with God. Our goal is to not waste your time and be under 5 minutes. Come! Join the discussion.

Show Notes

Fear Not: 365 Accounts of “Fear not” in the Bible.

1 account for each day in the year.

40 different calendars.

We need to be careful about how we look for and through the lens of fear. There are plenty of examples of fear and how to overcome them in the Bible.

Opposite of fear . . . is faith.

Whenever we feel fearful, look back and see where your faith was.

False Evidence of Appearing Real

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Thankfully, God uses cracked pots!  You do not need to be perfect for God to use you. In fact, those who you see that God’s using, they’ve learned to embrace their cracks.

My cracks and flaws are not my identity. They give me the chance to see true value.

Each one of us, YOU have unique, invaluable traits that no one else has been equipped with, but you. There are people that need to be shown the love of God, and you will be the only person who can show it to them because of your uniqueness.

Apparently the water was not getting to the flowers any other way, but through that crack.

It is our job to keep our eyes open to see the opportunities in our everyday life.

My Hope for you today is that you’re able to see them.

We are not here to talk religion, but we will talk about what it means to have a personal, daily walk with God. Our goal is to not waste your time and be under 5 minutes. Come! Join the discussion.

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Nothing New Under the Sun

Have you ever heard the statement “There is nothing new under the Sun”? Well, it comes from the Bible in Ecc 1:9 It says it plainly from a guy who was Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos (Bay-zose) rolled all into one. His name was King Solomon and he was one rich guy. He had everything he could ever want, and he famously said “there is nothing new under the sun”.

I guess once you realize this, the world could become a little boring. You may begin to see just the same things, over and over again. Life would become monotonous.

We often get into the habit of seeing the same thing over and over again in everyday life. We could even read scripture the same way time and time again and believe that it means just the same thing over and over again.

The culture in Rabbis they teach each other not to look at scripture the same way twice.

Our challenge is to look at the living, breathing, alive, word of God and let it speak instead of our memory trying to tell us what the scripture is trying to say.

I know you’ve heard me say this before, but the bible really is a cool place to find answers.

You see, in Genesis 2 There was this Garden of perfection called The Garden of Eden. Now I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but it was perfect. It had trees and flowers and all sorts of plants and food was abundant. In fact, there was one tree that produced eternal life and Adam was told he could eat from it. While he was surrounded with all of that perfection, he was told not to eat from one tree and if he did, he would surely die. Well, let’s face it, it wasn’t exactly like Adam knew what death was. He had no reference point of death. I guess we could say, he had no knowledge in the difference of Good and Evil, yet. You see, the tree that he was not supposed to eat from, was called The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Then along came a spider and sat down… no that’s not right. In Genesis 3, the serpent came along and quite frankly, lied to Eve in saying you will become like God having this knowledge of Good and Evil. Which implied the accusation that God wanted to keep that away from Adam and Eve. Now, I hope by now all of us know that we were made after His image anyway. So the accusation is a lie because we’re already like God. But that’s a side note we can talk about another time.

What I’m saying is, in the Garden of Eden we unplugged our source of eternal life from trusting God and we started trusting our knowledge of Good and Evil. That tree, The Forbidden one, became our source. Now we depend more on our knowledge than we do our faith.

When we read scripture the same old way that we always have,

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Fear and Superstition

I guess there are significant landmarks in podcasting and this must be another one. We hit one a couple of episodes back with double digits. This one is special too, but this one is topical. There can’t be a better time for us to talk about Fear and Superstition than Episode 13.

To give you some background, I wasn’t raised in a Christ following home. Wasn’t their fault, they just didn’t know. In addition to that, my earthly birthday falls on Halloween. When I was a kid, I thought everyone was dressing up for my birthday but that is an entirely different issue.

But in addition to that, later on in life, it prompted me to ask some deep seated questions about my place in creation. Halloween means Hallow’s eve, or the night before, what the Catholic faith celebrates as All Saints day. I grew up thinking that Halloween was evil so I must be evil. Look, I’m not saying that I believe it now. I thought that I was born to be evil just because of what a calendar said.

Now I can’t bring myself to celebrate anything that glamorizes fear.

It matters what you pay attention to. You only have so much attention. So whatever you pay attention towards, it will shape you.

When I was younger, I was also superstitious. I crossed my fingers for everything, I wouldn’t walk under ladders, I would be extra careful around mirrors, I wouldn’t say anything about the Bell Witch, I would stay clear of Black Cats, not to mention Episode #13!!!!

Could Stevie Wonder be right? “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, and you suffer?

Well, I’ve found that Mr. Wonder is right. Superstition ain’t the way. But many of us believe in varying degrees of superstition.

At its root, superstition is just being hopeful for a specific outcome. What if I want the XYZ team to beat the ABC team and I’m wearing my glasses upside down? Well if they actually win, some people may make the connection of me wearing my glasses upside down, towards their victory.

But you know, we treat God the same way. Now there can be hundreds of examples of what I mean by that and some of them can sound very religious.

All I’m saying is that we can easily get into a habit of trying to manipulate God and expecting Him to give us what we want.  

Of course we want good things in our life. But are we in search of only the good things, or the One who gives them?

If my children come to me only when they want something, it’s much different than when we get a chance to talk on a regular basis, there is a relationship there.

When the relationship is there, we don’t have to ask for very much. We learn to trust that it will be provided because we are loved.

Usually God Isn’t concerned about the mortgage or the water bill being paid as much as you are. Things like, should I turn left or turn right, should I quit my job, do I have a relationship with this person. All of those things, we get superstitious about.

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Can I Trust You To Hear Me?

Where do you go to be heard? When you have something on your mind that’s so private, so personal, and so vulnerable, where do you go to be really heard? When simply sharing just won’t do. Now, the church answer would be to Proverbs 3:5-6 trust the Lord and don’t lean on your own understanding and He will direct your path. And that would be right. But sometimes it’s difficult and not the reality we see.

The reality that is mostly seen is that we’re in a plugged-in world. When we need to be heard, accessibility is not the issue. We’re connected to computers, our phones, gaming consoles, TVs, and we can speak to all of them, but are we really ever heard? I’m talking about the things that really matter.

Do you stuff it down inside because you feel like you have nowhere to turn? I’ve gone to social media before, and it didn’t turn out well. Sometimes our emotions get involved and we lose sight on what’s appropriate to share publicly, when we want to be heard.

Well, now that begs the question, do you have anyone in your life that you can trust?

In order to trust someone, you have to get to know them. In order to do that, you must be vulnerable with them. They get to know you, and now, depending on how they handle the information about you, they will earn their trustworthiness.

How many of you have ever thought “Man, if you knew the real me, you wouldn’t like me.”

Remember, trust is not given, it’s earned.

Being vulnerable is not easy but it has great rewards. It’s the foundation of many a wonderful friendship. On the other hand, being vulnerable with someone that you know is emotionally abusive or emotionally unavailable, can steer you into the oncoming traffic called self-abuse. That’s dangerous.

I have someone that’s very important in my life and it has taken me several years to figure out that they are not emotionally available. Some situations may not be obvious as to their trustworthiness. But you have to make your–self available in order to find out.

You may be asking “How do I know?” Well, let’s break it down into simple steps as much as we can.

It’s kind of like dating. The first time you go out on a date with someone, you’re not supposed to just mug down on them. Open the door, say please and thank you, be considerate, honor her.

Remember what we said earlier? Trust is not given, it’s earned? Well, honor is given. And if you expect to go on a second date, you need to learn how to honor people. Maybe we’ll cover that in another episode.

On those first few dates, you share personal things about you with that other person. As the relationship builds, so does the trust level. Because they have handled that personal information about you with care.

A very important question I’ve asked a lot of couples is, how do you fight? The question is not whether you fight or not. Because it will happen. The question is how.

Even in a disagreement, does the other person use your vulnerability as a we...

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God Works in Mysterious Ways

Have you ever heard someone say God works in mysterious ways? He actually doesn’t work in mysterious ways. He doesn’t want to be mysterious to us. Quite the opposite, he wants to be very well known to us. Why then, would he work in mysterious ways?

God does work in ways that we don’t understand, but this saying is most likely a simplified paraphrasing of some verses that we’re not supposed to have confusion about.

Let’s put it this way, I don’t want my daughter to just blindly dismiss something she doesn’t understand because she thinks it’s mysterious. I want her to understand the ways that I am guiding her, teaching her, and equipping her for life. I don’t want any of it to be mysterious to her.

God doesn’t want that for any of his children either.

Jeremiah 33:3 Call to me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.

That doesn’t sound mysterious, that sounds inviting.

Isaiah 55:8-9  My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

That doesn’t sound mysterious either. That sounds like I can really trust him with him guiding me.

Ecclesiastes 11:5 Says, as you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.

Although I may not understand how He does this, I’m glad that He does because He makes everything. I don’t want that responsibility.

God works in mysterious ways. What about bad things happening to good people? We could open up thousands of ethical questions about God working in mysterious ways and why does He let those atrocities happen across the globe. That’s a mystery, right? I can tell you that I don’t have that answer.

But we look down our noses at God and judge Him for the limited amount of information that we have on the situation. We usually don’t have a fraction of the information needed to make a judgement call, on claiming that God is working in this mysterious way.

It would be like sentencing someone to life in prison because they said the phrase “I’m killing it” when describing their day. We don’t have near enough information about that situation, to make that type of a judgment. But we do about God.

Matthew 5:37 Let your yes be yes, and your no be no.

We have a saying in our family, Say what you mean, mean what you say. But we certainly don’t say that it’s from the Bible. Let’s make sure and not make the assumption, and find out for ourselves.

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God Will Not Give You More Than You Can Handle

I wish I had some confetti cannons, because it’s time to celebrate. We made it to the double digits! Welcome to Episode 10.

You know, when we first started this podcast it seemed like a pretty large task. But if we are to Live the Freedom Life, we need to  submit ourselves to what the Bible teaches.

Proverbs 11:14 says “There is safety in the multitude of godly counsel”. So before we started Living the Freedom Life, I sought out some guidance. This was a new way for us to minister that we believed, God was calling us into.

Someone very lovingly said to me, “You’ve got this. God will not give you more than you can handle”.

And that intrigued me. I heard that statement quite often and I didn’t want to be confrontational because this person was trying to offer encouragement, but inside, my heart was screaming “NO! That is not true! That’s not true at all!” God does give you more than you can handle. And I don’t say that with gritted teeth. There are many areas in which people try to apply this misinterpretation and call it scripture.

Then I began a journey of  introspective study through scripture.

I first landed at 1 Cor 10:13 “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to Mankind. And God is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.”

I guess when it’s left up to me in my comfort… of course, I don’t want God to give me more than I can handle. I want to have everything the way I want it, decently and in order (If we want to apply 1Cor 14:40 to this).

God won’t give you any more than you can handle.

We say this because we think any good Father wouldn’t want His son or His daughter to be overwhelmed and feel defeated. I believe that I know what is best for me. But we’ve already talked about that in an earlier episode. (LFL Episode 8 link)

God will not give you more than you can handle, is false. He does give us more thanwe can handle because it drives us towards depending on Him. We are not intended tocarry burden or be able to be self-reliant apart from Him. It is considered counterproductive towards the Kingdom.

There were some people in Babel that tried to build a tower, that didn’t work out well for them. They were trying to be self-reliant when posed with a problem larger than they can handle, which was getting to themselves to heaven.

You can find countless cases where someone faced something they couldn’t handle, but God could and did. Paul was writing to the church in Corinth and told them that God will provide a way of escape from temptation.

All of us love a good comeback story. In fact, I have my own comeback story. If you would have known me several years ago, well,

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Your Supply Line

How many of you feel like life is sometimes a war? That there’s some type of strategy that you’re missing out on, and is definitely being used on you.

In a war, the opposing generals they carefully study the weaknesses in order to find just the right way to exploit them.

They study when and where is the enemy most vulnerable? That is where their attack will come.

This strategy can allow a smaller Army to do considerable damage to a larger, well-equipped Army.

In the same way, it’s good for us to know our own strengths and weaknesses. If we know when we are strong and when we are vulnerable, it will help us guard against temptations and failures.

Think about it, when everything’s going great, where are you most attacked? Pride.

When it seems that the wheels are falling off, where are we attacked? We feel isolated.

As many of you are subscribers, we can show just as many examples of this.

In other words, when we know what areas we feel weak, we will be able to identify where the attacks are coming. We know where we feel weak, and that is where feel the attack always comes.

Looking deeper, this will be ultimately where we find our true strengths that the enemy is trying to prevent from developing.

Let me say it this way, your enemy is more strategic than that. He doesn’t just want to conquer you. He wants to completely destroy you. Where do you feel like you’re getting attacked? Why would you simply get attacked in an area where you are weak? Your enemy wants to prevent you from being the conqueror you were created to be. Because that will affect how you influence others.

There, I said it. Every one of us, without fail, has influence. And that influence is powerful. We will have more on this in a later episode.

One of the best military strategies is to cut off the supply line. If an army runs out of supplies of what they need to be engaged in the battle, they will run out of strength, ability, and can no longer be effective. If the supply line is cut off where the army cannot develop into the planned effectiveness, we are no longer talking about the battle, we are now talking about the war.

Lamentations 3:40 Let us examine our ways and test them.

1 Corinthians 3:16 asks Don’t you know that you yourselves…

If we don’t examine ourselves, if we don’t know where our weaknesses are, if we don’t know the strengths in which God made us, we will not know how to develop, grow, and strengthen them.

We believe that the Lord ask us to start Living the Freedom Life.

What if I didn’t hone the skill of speaking? Of Writing? What if I didn’t study? What if I didn’t spend time with Him? What if I chose not to have counsel in my life? Healthy people whom I trust. This would not be what it is today.

I understand,

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What Do You Want?

What would be your response if someone came up to you and asked what do you want? What would be your response? Yes, anything in the world. What would you want? Do we even know how to answer that question? Do we sometimes think we know what we want, and it truly not be the best thing for us? Of course.

What are you asking God for right now? What are you praying about right now? Or better yet, what have you stopped praying about? Because you feel like He’s just not answering.

If we took the time to think about it, how much different would our lives be, if we always got what we thought we wanted?

There are many times that I want dessert after a meal. But there are also times that I don’t want to look of feel like the guy who always eats dessert. There are times where I don’t know what I truly want. What I want, deep down. What I need.

You may think to yourself, “Wow Kyle, You’re not doing too good of a job describing this Living the Freedom Life, now are you?” It depends on what you’re listening with. It depends on you listening with something deeper than the things that are on the side of your head.

I may want to eat an entire plate of brownies, for example. That desire may have little to do with Hunger for food… and much to do with the hunger for satisfaction, comfort, affirmation or a sense of peacefulness. God wants to provide those things for us but it rarely looks like a full plate of brownies. God knows what we want.

In the opener we say the phrase “all of us want it, all of us need it”. What is it that we are talking about? It is Living the Freedom life. All of us need to Live the Freedom Life. And deep down, all of us want to Live the Freedom Life. Weather we realize it or not, there is a deep down  hunger, that you can’t satisfy. There’s an old song that says there’s a god-shaped hole in all of us. Some people spend their entire lives, searching for all sorts of things to fill that need, and don’t find it. All of us have a desire to Live the Freedom Life.

So we usually don’t know how to answer the question, what do you want? Why?

Because of the truth that’s in Isaiah 55:8-9 My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. Then He gives an example in verse 9, saying as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.

So He knows what we truly need. He’s the one that made us, He should know, right?

I am thankful for the truth that is in these verses.

Psalm 103:5 Who satisfies your desires with good things… God’s desire is to do this for YOU.

But we have to get the what we want out of the way so that we can see what we need. What we need will always satisfy both our need and our want.

How does He give us those things?  How does God provide those things that we need, those things that will satisfy our wants?

We are not here to talk religion, but we will talk about what it means to have a personal, daily walk with God. Our goal is to not waste your time and be under 5 minutes. Come! Join the discussion.

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We Always Have the Power

Jeremiah 17:9 Says that above all else, the heart is deceitful and it is beyond cure. Who can understand it?

In other words, beyond all else, beyond this podcast, beyond you and I having coffee, beyond any of my cognitive abilities, my heart is deceitful.

As it turns out, that story about the Garden of Eden isn’t just a story, it’s truth. Our concept of Truth may be for another episode, but here’s what I want to point out.

Romans 5:12 Tells us that through Adam, sin entered the world and death was passed on to everyone because all have sinned. This passed on sin, is known as inherited sin. Just as I inherited physical characteristics from my parents, I inherited a sinful nature from Adam.

What is sin? Anything that separates me from God. Let me explain it this way. In the Spanish language those same three letters s i n, are pronounced a little differently but the word means “without”. So when I sin, I am without God.

Above all else, if my heart is deceitful, then there’s no doubt that I will have a tendency to do things, and think in the ways that point me away from, or without God.

So, on days where I just want to be left alone, or I’ll wake up angry and really not knowing why, or the overly happy guy just really makes me a little more irritated than I should be, I’m just falling towards the temptation that my heart is deceiving me.

To go further, that same scripture in Jeremiah asks the question, who can understand it? (Meaning, my heart.) Well if we’re being asked the question who can understand it, doesn’t that imply that no one can? So what’s the point in trying to understand it?

I once had a boss that would say you only have 3 minutes to explain the problem, but I’ll give you the rest of the day so we can talk about solutions. How am I doing on time? Okay, let’s move on from the problem.

Here is the solution. You ready for this? We always have a choice. One thing we always have, is the power to choose.

Genesis 2:16 God told the man, you are free to eat from any tree in the garden.

Deuteronomy 30:19 On this day I call the heavens and the Earth as Witnesses against you that I’ve set before you life and death, blessing and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.

Isaiah 55:6-7 Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near. 7 Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and He will have mercy on them.

Joshua 24:15 Joshua says but if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you,