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Question for me for you today is Does I do I desire truth or softness?
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Would I like to know reality, or would I prefer to have it fuzzed up a little bit?
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Dallas Willard used to say the main thing God gets out of your life is the person you become, and that's also the main thing that you and I get out of our life.
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And the main barrier to becoming that kind of person is not my circumstances, it's not what happens to me, it's not even my psychological makeup, it is sin.
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It is this condition of the soul that all of us are in, not just sins, the list of particular wrong behaviors, but my readiness to do what's wrong when the right kind of situation emerges that makes it tempting.
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And so the question for today is now, do I want to know the truth about me?
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Do I want to know the reality of my condition?
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Or would I prefer to avoid dealing with reality in order to escape pain temporarily?
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I want to give you a little uh picture of this from a book by a historian, Peter Jones, called Self-Help from the Middle Ages.
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Peter Jones was teaching medieval history at the University of Siberia at all places.
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And he discovered a kind of coldness, something like depression in his own soul.
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And uh, this is part of what uh is written about the book.
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Jones marvels in self-help from the Middle Ages, that never before in history has so much energy gone into studying how the mind works, much as we pride ourselves in that today, as in the Middle Ages.
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Although today we think of the seven deadly sins as a catalog of forbidden behavior.
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In the Middle Ages, at the heart of their currency, he writes about there are all kinds of manuscripts and works that were dealing with these issues, they were a path to self-knowledge and actually forgiveness, including self-forgiveness, together pride and envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, lust, race psychological map that laid out seven basic patterns of thought showing how our thinking can go astray and how we can find our way home.
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And part of what he writes in this book is how he experienced that not just as a scholar who would teach and write about it, but as a human being who needed that wisdom.
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Would I rather know the truth about myself, or would I rather have things presented to me in a way that feels softer and more comfortable?
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He writes about that in this way when he was looking at his own life.
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As a university teacher, I've been trained to sugarcoat bad news.
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This is what my colleagues used to call the turd sandwich approach.
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I've shifted the language just slightly.
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First, you give the student a cause for hope.
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Your essay has a fantastic idea at its heart.
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You write with so much energy.
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That's the bread.
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A wholesome tasting outer shell.
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If you're in the workplace and you have to criticize an employee, you've probably heard about this same approach.
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But now comes the filling.
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I did wonder though, if you couldn't have structured this with more care.
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In a way it reads like a list of fragments.
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I suppose it doesn't really have an argument either, does it?
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Then, at the first sign of disappointment, you pat down this criticism with another slice of bread.
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I'm confident that this is your first step to writing history from the heart.
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That is university teaching at its finest, except when it's not.
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As I'm recording this, a great thinker, writer, uh farmer, follower of Jesus named Wendell Berry has just passed away at the age of 92.
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And lots of folks are reflecting on his impact on the world.
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His book, Jaber Crow, is one of the finest novels I have ever read.
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He's a wonderful person to read.
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A woman wrote an essay about how he was her teacher when she was at the University of Kentucky.
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She was going to be an English teacher, and she signed up for his class on writing.
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She was a senior in the last semester.
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She'd gotten nothing but A's in every one of her classes on composition.
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But when she wrote an essay for Wendellberry, it came back with an F.
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They didn't even give F's.
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The University of Kentucky at that time.
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They gave what were called E's, but he put an F on it.
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And uh she said, because we were going to be English teachers, he expected a great deal of us.
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Kind of like with God, not unloving, because we were going to be human beings, image bearers, he expected a great deal from us.
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Would I rather have the truth uh honest, var unvarnished, or would I like things softened up for me?
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She said, most of the students dropped out of that class.
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Eventually there were only
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twelve left.
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The metaphor of the disciples was not lost on us, she said.
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Uh and uh at one point she worked really hard on an essay, and it came back with a C.
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And um what Wendellberry wrote on it was, This essay is just good enough that I wish it would have been better.
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And the idea of that is I I can see what you're trying to do, and I can see something in you that might just possibly emerge over time with enough care and effort and grace.
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Now, uh many, many years later, 35 years later, whatever she's writing the essays, and all of those teachers that gave those nice little criticism sandwiches oh, you're wonderful, not perfect here, but you're so great, did not have anywhere near the impact on her life as the one teacher that cared enough, not trying to be hard nosed for the sake of being hard nosed, but cared enough about life and about its urgency, and about writing as one reflection of that one craft of that, one piece of that the scriptures, of course, come to us as writing.
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In the beginning was the word that he spoke the truth, hard truth, in love.
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And I think, of course, about our great teacher Jesus.
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Somebody wrote that uh uh uh uh that uh a good teacher lives on in the life of their students.
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Good teaching matters, good teachers are in a sense immortal, and that is ultimately true with our teacher Jesus.
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And there's Bible that's full of uh when Jesus would speak hard truth.
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So uh when Peter says to Jesus after Jesus talks about how he's gonna have to go to the cross and he's gonna have to suffer, and Peter says, No, no, no, don't say that kind of things.
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We don't want to hear that.
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That can't be true.
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Things have to work out differently than that.
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Jesus' response is not, oh Peter, good try.
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I'll love your courage.
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You know, what you said was not exactly right, so let me clean it up a little bit.
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But way to take the initiative and be willing to be wrong.
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No, no, no.
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His response is uh get behind me, Satan.
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That's not even a C.
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And then in the next chapter, Mark 9, when man's got a very troubled son, and the disciples can't help him.
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Jesus' response is, well, at least you gave it your best shot.
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His response was, How long will I have to endure with you, wicked and perverse generation?
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Jesus was very unvarnished in his description of the truth because uh since we are human beings made to be image bearers of God, God expects a great deal of us.
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And in our heart of hearts, we do as well.
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The main thing that God will get out of my life is the person I become.
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And sin is at work all the time to prevent that.
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It is my ultimate problem and your ultimate problem too.
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And it's much worse than we're generally willing to look at because we all collude with each other to uh have the truth appear much softer than it really is.
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So these passages come in scripture that seem so strange to us.
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I want to read these words for you, and now uh they will sound quite harsh.
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And what you need to do is you listen to these words is stop the image of these words being spoken or written by a finger wagging, Bible thumping, judgmental, hyper-religious, self-satisfied, self-deluded alarmist, accusing them and listen to these words as a calm, reasoned, thoughtful diagnosis of the human condition.
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Says that God gives people up uh outside of himself to a debased mind and to things that should not be done.
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They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, their gossips.
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Now it's interesting when I read through those words, because I grew up in the church, so I know how to separate sins into ones that are scandalous and that will really get you into trouble, and then ones that are really okay, like what's the big deal here?
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So, of course, murder.
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Oh man, I would never do that.
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Do I have any malice?
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Do I ever covet?
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Do I ever have envy?
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Do I ever deceive?
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Well, yeah, but what's the big deal there?
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I'd like to have a little uh little sin sandwich, a little soft one.
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Slanderers, God haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
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They know God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die.
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And yet they not only do them, but even applaud others who practice them.
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And now part of faith that I want to talk about today, I we're just about done here, but part of faith that I want to live in today and invite you to live in today is to be open to the possibility that actually uh my big problem really is sin, and it's a condition that's work at
work inside me, and it's so subtle, so insidious, we all collude with it so much.
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Uh, then actually the words of folks who have written like this in scripture and people who have been real thoughtful that have written about it in bygone centuries actually could see it more clearly than I can.
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And then now this is what's really important, and we'll talk about this more in order to be able to hear these words, in order to be able to receive truth, hard truth, unvarnished truth about who I am, that I most what I think is not true about myself.
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In order to do that, I have to have a place to stand.
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I have to know that I am loved.
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So I'll read a few more words from Wendell Barry.
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Uh, this is a poem of his called Original Sin.
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As you may know, that little phrase, original sin is not found in the Bible.
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Lots of debates over what does it mean and is that the right kind of language or so.
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So this is what Barry writes about it.
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Original sin.
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Well, anyhow, it preserves us in the pride of thinking we invented sin ourselves by our originality, that famous modern power.
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In fact, we have it from the beginning of the world, by the errors of being born, being young, being old, causing pain to ourselves, to others, to the world, to God, by ignorance, by knowledge, knowledge puffs up, by intention, by accident, something is bad the matter here.
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Now that's the truth in our world, and that's the truth in my heart.
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That today, not in despair, not neurotically, just quite calmly, I sit before God.
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I'd like to know the truth.
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Something is bad the matter here.
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Uh informing us of itself, handing down its old instruction.
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We know it when we see it, don't we?
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Innocence would never recognize it.
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We need it to, for without it we would not know forgiveness, goodness, gratitude, that fund of grace by which we alone live.
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So today, God, would you help me to see the truth about myself?
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Stop defending myself, stop shutting my eyes just to be open.
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And then would you give me the grace?
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Would you give me the grace to know that I am loved?
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That alone gives me the power to see the truth about myself.
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Because with God's help to move towards becoming the man, the friend, the father, the person that God wants me to be, what matters more than that?
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That's the journey we're on.
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When's the last time you felt defensive about yourself?
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Because that can be a really great clue into what John is talking about here.
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Recognizing that the problem isn't just out there, but it's inside of you.
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For me, coming face to face with my own sin, my own brokenness in deep and true humility was the beginning of the pathway of transformation.
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And letting God actually do a work in the deep places of my soul.
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And so I hope that you'll join us in that place on that journey of letting our defenses down, not needing to preserve our image, and letting God begin that work of inner renewal.
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I hope you'll stick around because there's more great teaching to come.
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At Become New, you can spend 10 minutes with Dr.
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John Oberberg every weekday to get a grounding perspective on life in the kingdom of God, to get a practice you can apply to your daily life that very day, and a scripture to take with you to meditate on and reflect on throughout your day.
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I'm Tim, the channel host, and I'm so glad that you're here.
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See you next time.