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Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
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This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
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Welcome to Bleeding Daylight, thanks for being here.
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Hundreds more episodes are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
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That's where you'll also find all our social media links.
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Please follow Bleeding Daylight on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
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Each of us travel a unique journey and most of the time we get to choose how much of that journey is on display for others to see.
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My guest today has written of her journey with God, allowing others to see the hard times and the lessons that she has learned.
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In this episode, we talk about the books that she has written that use her story to help others.
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I've always been drawn to stories of people who find their identity in something deeper than the world's expectations.
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And today's guest has certainly lived that out.
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Through singleness, a global pandemic and spending a lot of time in scripture, Moriah Hagel has discovered what it means to align her heart with God's rather than her own plans.
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She's the author of three books, including her latest release, To Live, Finding the Mind of Christ.
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She's also the co-founder of a young adult conference called Seasons, where she gets to encourage others in their 20s and 30s to find their footing in faith.
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Moriah, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
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Thank you so much for having me, Rodney.
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It is a pleasure to be here and speak with your people.
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I'd love to hear your journey of beginning to write.
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Can you take me back to the first time you heard God calling you to write for others?
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The first time God called me to write for others was when I was in college.
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I had been going to a college where I was feeling very single.
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Many of the girls who went there went to go get their MRS degree, find Prince Charming and get married and not really much for study.
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There were some of us that went for study, but it was very, very challenging.
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And so I wanted to start writing a book with my own plans and ideas and how I thought people should be approaching it, because I got to see many people and their different dating styles.
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But that was Moriah's plan, not God's plan.
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And so it didn't really go anywhere.
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But we started doing a Bible study on campus.
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It was a great time, actually, to be on that campus.
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And there were several Bible studies that broke out, and I got to lead one of them.
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We were studying through the book of Ephesians, which is where my first book comes from, First and Forever Singleness in Ephesians.
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We were getting to Ephesians 5, which is a little bit difficult to teach women, because we did all girls' studies and all boys' studies.
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When you have a whole bunch of girls dating, they're choosing whether or not they're going to submit to their boyfriend or something along those lines, and that's not what God asks of us in Ephesians 5.
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He asks of us to submit to our husbands.
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I don't know how to teach this, and it had been a very busy week.
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I hadn't had time to read over the chapter very much, and I was working at the campus coffee shop, and the song came on like a bride waiting for her groom, we will be a church ready for you.
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And I was like, yep, that is so hard, a bride waiting for her groom who's not even in the picture.
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God said, that's what you're going to teach on tonight.
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And I said, okay, what?
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And He said, that's all I'm going to tell you.
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And Rodney, I taught that night in a way I've never taught before.
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Typically, I like to do a Bible study where it's give and take, and everybody brings something to the table, and we get to learn from one another.
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Not that night.
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That night, it was lecture.
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And we sat, and God walked us through the entire chapter of Ephesians 5 in a beautiful way, because so many times, women especially, get a little bit chafed with the idea of submission.
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God painted it as such a beautiful picture, because marriage is supposed to be between Christ and the church.
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He got to show us the beauty of submitting to Him.
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My two sisters and I all went to college at the same time, and so we rode together, and we were commuters, so we were driving back after the Bible study, and I said, what did I say?
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Because it was as if I was outside of myself, just watching God do something through me.
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So they spent the whole hour's drive that it took to get back home retelling me what God did inside of the study.
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So when did that study that you'd been doing actually turn into the book that you wrote and published?
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So as the semester went on, I asked God to walk me through Ephesians again.
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He did.
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Every morning, we'd wake up in the morning, and He would walk me through just teaching me.
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We would read the chapter, and we would stop on a verse or two or three, and He would begin to open them up to me and show me the importance of setting Him first in our life.
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Because what I was dealing with a lot on campus was we all wanted to get married because we were young single girls, and most girls want to get married.
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But what He was showing me was that that's wonderful, but God's supposed to be first in our life in every season, and that that is who we are.
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Our identity is found in Christ.
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It's not found in being married or being a mom or being a CEO of some corporation.
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If God's not first in our life in every single step and every single aspect, we're not going to live a life glorifying and honoring God, and it won't have meaning.
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As we dug into Ephesians, the phrase first and forever kept coming up, which is why my book is titled First and Forever Singleness in Ephesians, because God was showing me, you choose me first because you choose me forever.
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And that's what matters.
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No matter what season of life we're in, God is first in every single season.
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And so it's a 30-day devotional study in the book of Ephesians, and it is my personal Bible time with God and questions that He asked me, personal stories, all of my books, First and Forever Singleness in Ephesians, alignment, God's will or mine, and to live, finding the mind of Christ.
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They're all my personal study time with God, because when God shows you something that changes your life, you want to share it with the world, and you want to give them the help that God gave you, because that's what we're supposed to do as Christians.
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We're supposed to help and encourage one another as we see the day approaching.
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I couldn't help but want to share it with people, because it changed so much of my perspective and my contentment with who I was.
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It doesn't mean that I didn't have trials and struggles or even wondering when God was going to send the right guy, but it anchored me to knowing that Christ was first.
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And in the season of singleness that He had me in, specifically in that time, my job was to choose Him first and to trust everything else to Him.
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And that becomes an anchoring stepping stone in your walk with God.
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And that's where God started to take my life and say, Okay, Moriah, now that you're putting me first, let's get to work.
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And so then we started the Seasons Young Adults Conference.
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It, again, was a difficult single year.
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It was a couple years down the road.
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And I said, God, if you're going to keep me single a while, I need a project.
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And He simply said, It's time.
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Even with Him just saying, It's time, I knew what it meant.
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I knew that He meant it was a time for a Young Adults Conference.
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It started off for singles.
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We've opened it up to young marrieds, because we saw people like me who were having a hard time being single, and we felt alone in our singleness.
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And Seasons is based off of Ecclesiastes 3, and it's to everything there's a time and a season and a purpose under heaven.
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My sisters and I, we wanted to be able to tell the young adults and the young singles specifically in our area that this season that they're in, first off, they're not alone.
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We had a good-sized group for our first year, and so many of them walked away and said, I'm not alone in this season of life.
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There are other people like me, and we're in this together.
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And so we wanted to encourage them in that season.
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And we also wanted to point them to Jesus and say, He doesn't waste a season of your life, so nor should we.
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And He's got a plan for this season, so do something with it.
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We're planning our eighth year.
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The 2020s was canceled, but beyond that, we have been able to execute the Seasons Conference and continue that encouragement and then try to use our season of singleness for God.
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As you've mentioned, you've written and published a number of books.
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So what came next after the Seasons Conference was set up and running?
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In 2020, God and I started walking through the book of James, which is where Alignment, God's Will, Our Mind came from.
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We had a lot of things happen.
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Those who lived through 2020 know a good bit of what happened.
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So many things shut down.
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The Bible study that we had blew apart, not just because of the pandemic, but there were also some disagreements, which is hard when you love them and you've spent a good bit of your life with them and you've poured into them and they've poured into you.
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There were a lot of things I had to work through.
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For everybody in 2020, there were a whole lot of fears and concerns, and God had to take me and to say, look, there's so much going on in your world and you may want to change so many things and you may want to help people here.
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You may want to open eyes over here because you see something differently and you want to help them, but you be in line with me.
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My mom used to say when we were growing up and we'd go talk about somebody else, one of our siblings and like, mom, mom, they need to change this.
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And she's like, you worry about you.
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I will worry about them.
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You worry about you.
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God wants to work on us first, and we have to trust him to work on those around us.
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And no matter if a pandemic is happening or not, are we aligned with God?
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First Time Forever is kind of setting our footing of being inside of God's will and choosing him first.
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And then alignment is checking our footing to make sure that we stay in alignment with God as he calls us to walk through difficult things and he calls us to walk through challenges and it's just creating a sure footing and to re-strengthen that.
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It's a 48-day study through the book of James.
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I love James.
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He is power packed with a very good punch, which sometimes you say, ouch, I needed that.
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Alignment is set up a little bit differently than First Time Forever, Singleness and Ephesians.
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We still have funny farm stories because I grew up on a farm.
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We have funny sibling stories.
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We have difficult stories of where God was stretching me because something that God has given me to share when I write and when I speak is my own shortcomings.
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If God can teach somebody through where I have struggled, then I will willingly show those so that someone else can learn from them.
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First Time Forever ends with questions and things to think about, things to look for in Bible.
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A lot of being aligned with God is through prayer.
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Most of the days are ended with pray about this or pray and ask God to grow you here because if we aren't taking those steps, then we're not growing and we're not making sure that we are in alignment with God.
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Some of the steps that it takes to be aligned with God, especially in difficult times, we can't do without Him.
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And so we pray and we ask for His holy intervention to help us, to establish us.
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I mentioned earlier your latest book, To Live, Finding the Mind of Christ.
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Tell me a little bit about that book.
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That one is about finding your identity in Christ and finding the mind of Christ because we are called to be like Christ in so many different areas of our life.
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And throughout Scripture, we're called to be holy as He is holy.
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We are called to look and to see Him as our example.
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There's so many things about Jesus that help us in who we are.
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As we find Him and as we find our identity in Him, as we understand His mindset, we understand how He sees us, we understand how He wants us to be.
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And with Jesus, when you're with Him and you find that identity inside of Him, you become at peace with who He made you to be.
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You become set.
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You become ready to accept and to grow how He asks you to grow because you understand that when He loves you and He asks you to stretch or He asks you to alter a little bit and to change and to grow, that He does it out of love and that He's going to be with you in every step.
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To Live, Finding the Mind of Christ is also just a hair different than the others.
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I share a story in there about my nephew who passed away.
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He was a miracle child.
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He lived for 49 days.
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How his life impacted and changed us and how it impacted other people and what God taught through that.
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God has something to teach someone else, not just me, about his life.
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There are sad stories in there, but there are strong stories because one of the beauties of finding your identity in Christ, we don't all have a happy life because that's not what we're promised here.
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But what we do have is we have security with God when we walk through good times and we walk through hard times like losing my nephew.
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God walks with us through every single step and that is a huge part in finding your identity in Christ because when you know that he's going to walk with you through the darkest and most trials in your life, then you know that no matter what he asks you to walk through, he's there.
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And when you know that, you can face anything because God is with you and God will be there and you know, you know when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we don't have to fear because we have come to the place where we know God more intimately just because of the hardship that he had us walk through.
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Don't get too down.
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It's not all hard stories.
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There's some, I say, funny farmyard stories because we had some goats and they were very interesting and taught us a lot of life lessons.
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It ends with questions.
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In a couple of the days, I send you to go find some scriptures and match them up so that you can seek the scriptures yourself and you can see where God illustrates this attribute of himself or you can see where he is speaking this truth to you and it gives you a little bit more of Bible understanding inside of your toolbox.
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We know that we have a very creative God and he's the one that gives us creativity, especially when we're thinking of disciplines such as writing.
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We know that there's that creativity that he gives us and yet even those who don't acknowledge God are using that God-given creativity but how much more important is it to match that creativity along with handling the scriptures well?
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When you come to writing the sorts of things that you're writing, you're saying that you're bringing in these various stories that illustrate points and there's your creativity, your God-given creativity on show but how important is it to make sure that it's not all creativity, it's not all imagination, it's actually following what the scriptures say?
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That is dramatically important.
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If I just tell you a funny story and you get a good laugh out of it, that's not going to grow us at all and what God wants us to do is he wants us to take his word.
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What Jesus did so often is he told a story, a parable, but then he always tied it back to the word of God or the attributes of God or to teach something that would help others grow.
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What I typically do is I'll write the Bible part and then I ask God to remind me of stories in my past that can help illustrate it, to help it be a little more tangible because we can all sit in a lecture, that's fine, and we can get stuff out of it but for me, if I have a story, I'm going to remember that truth better which is the whole point of the stories inside of all of the books.
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If it doesn't connect, then it doesn't need to be there and if it detracts, I don't want it to do that.
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I would say it's extremely important to make sure that they align with the lesson that God is teaching and to make that connection.
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My mom used to say a lot, was if you're not doing it and if God's not in it, then you don't need to do it at all.
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I'd rather have a point to my story and rather have a truth that the readers can walk away with than just entertaining them because if they want to be entertained by a book, you'll get some cute stories but go find a fiction book.
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But if you want to grow with God and if you want to dig into his truth and to, by the end of the book, have a better relationship with God, then I'd encourage you to pick up one of my books or another book that gives you a tangible story to help you understand it but that it doesn't take away from the truth that God wants to teach.
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It's very important to have a balance of scripture and to have it interpreted properly and to not take away.
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For those who've had the opportunity to read your books, what has the response been?
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I'm thinking particularly of that first book which talks about singleness and as you say, a lot of people are saying this is not where I want to stay but I need to know how to deal with it in the here and now.
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What's been the response of those who've had the opportunity to read that or your other books?
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I wrote First and Forever, Singleness and Ephesians for young women, people my own age who were having a difficult time but God loves to laugh and the first person whose life it changed was a married man who was in his 60s.
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What he began to do is he began to see how much God wanted him and how much God loved him and he was in one of my dad's Bible studies.
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My dad would come home and he would say let me tell you what this man said about your book.
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Let me tell you what God is doing in him.
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I had the privilege of teaching it to a couple different groups of people.
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I got to teach it in a women's Sunday school class over the summer.
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Most of them were older than I was and most of them were married so that was very interesting to teach it to a married group of people but one of them I know that it anchored her.
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She was going through a divorce and she didn't know it when we started the book and then probably two weeks in she felt comfortable enough to announce what had happened and that her husband had left and she held on to God so much and she would say I needed this study.
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I needed to be reminded where my focus has to be in this difficult time.
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I was humbled by some of their responses.
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I was humbled by the things that they learned.
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I was so proud of them and I was so amazed by their graciousness to allow me to teach it to them.
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Another one of the ladies, she is married but again it refocused and re-anchored her to loving God.
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I also taught it in a singles Bible study.
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Some of the truths that they brought out of it were very good.
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One of the questions inside of there we're talking about that God can give us anything so we trust Him when He chooses not to.
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One of the questions at the end of that day was what does God own?
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My point in writing it was what does God own?
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Look, He owns the cattle on a thousand hills.
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He can literally give us anything so if He chooses not to we trust Him in it then it's not for this time.
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But one of the guys in that Bible study he said, oh, I thought the question was what does God own of me?
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And it made him really focus inside of himself and say, does God really own all of me?
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And I was floored and I was like, God is amazing.
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He got you to get this deeper concept from this book and it's phenomenal.
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There were others where it encouraged them.
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I think that it helped set their feet on a good path.
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Part of it is the establishing that relationship with God now because when you get married you have another person to focus on too and to take care of and to do life with and so that adds an extra thing for you to have to balance and God calls us to love and to take care of our spouse.
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And then when you have kids there's more things to balance and so it's establishing that relationship with God now.
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I know that there are some of them whose lives it changed.
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There's some who read it and put it on the shelf and that's okay.
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I'm happy for God to sprinkle the seeds wherever they will fall.
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It also springboarded the Seasons Young Adults Conference and that has blessed so many young adults.
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We get so many that come, some that cry, I needed this.
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Our first year we had a line of people waiting to talk to our first speaker because they related to where she had come from and her singleness story.
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Overall I think it has caused people to grow and to realize and see what God has for them, what their relationship needs to be with God right now, that they need to focus on Him and then they get to see how much He loves them.
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Because when we focus on God and we take our eyes off of I don't want to be in this season right now, God can do so much with it.
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I encourage most single people that I meet, if they'll let me, pour into their lives a little bit.
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Because we're in the same boat.
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I try to encourage them and say, look, God has you in this season for a reason.
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So use it.
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And then when they do, some of the times God allows me to watch them take off.
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When they are called out of the season of singleness, they will be able to look back and say, wow, look what God has done because I've put Him first and God did not waste this season and neither did I.
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I want them to have a love for God.
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I want their relationship with God to be solidified, to be that foundation right now that they're going to build everything else on, whether they stay single for 20 more years or whether they get married and have kids or whether they become somebody huge and important.
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I want that foundation established now for them if they will let God do that.
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And if they'll take the steps to do that.
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Because there's a lot of hard steps in there that God calls us to do.
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One of my sisters said, Moriah, you ask a lot of them.
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You went through this study and writing it, it took you a couple months to write it and to process it and to go through it.
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She said, they only have one month, 30 days, so don't expect the exact same results that God did in you.
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But it is, if they will take the steps that God has put in there that He taught me, then I believe that it will springboard them into a place where they are content with God, content with where they're at, and ready to serve Him as He sees fit.
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God never wastes a season and He is going to fill the time in serving with Him, which is part of why we were created.
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One of the stories in there is, Why are you born?
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That's a question my mom would ask us to remind us that we were born to serve God.
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And we're born to love God, we're born to love His people, and how we do that, how we show that to Him, is serving Him where He asks us to, and in the season that He's asked us to.
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Certainly you've written with a single audience in mind a lot of the time, and yet as you've mentioned, there are married people who are reading the books, both men and women, and they're realizing the same central theme, and that is, if we're not seeking satisfaction in Christ first and foremost, then we're looking for it in the wrong place.
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How dangerous do you think it is for a lot of people in churches who are still seeking satisfaction in things other than Christ Himself, whether it be in marriage, or whether it be in a career, or whatever else it is that they're chasing after?
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I think that it's a danger of deceiving ourselves.
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Our identity in Christ is our true identity, and when we place it in marriage, when we place it in children, when we place it in even our service, where our service becomes our central focus and we forget who we're doing it for and why we are doing it, it becomes a secret identity that we don't understand and that we don't realize that we have, and then we shortchange God on it.
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When we do that, our foundation isn't on the rock.
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If we aren't constantly going back and making sure that we're right with God and that our relationship is with God and that our focus is on God Himself, then we're going to get focused on something else and our foundation will slip and be on sand.
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And when that does, it really hurts when God closes those doors.
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So, in alignment, God's will or mine, when the Bible study shut down, when the pandemic hit, my identity, I found out through those trials, was too much in my Bible study or too much in the things that I was trying to do for God or too much in who I was, how I thought the world should be, and God had to take that away and that hurts.
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But it's a good cleansing where God says, I love you and I love you too much to let you walk in this.
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And so sometimes when our love and our identity is found in our service of God, He takes that opportunity away because He wants our eyes on Him because that's how we're going to grow.
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That service thing isn't going to be the thing that's going to get us to the point where we need to be.
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We do want to serve God because that is one of the many ways that we show that we love Him.
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But He has to remain the focus point.
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And then when it comes with children and with spouses, with people in general, Bible studies, they're people.
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They're human.
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And they're going to make mistakes.
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And when that happens, it hurts.
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And we get back on our knees and we say, God, I'm sorry.
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I had my identity.
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I had my trust inside of a person other than You.
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Please help me to refocus myself.
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Even in ideas when we have it wrong.
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So Peter denies Christ three times because he's confused and he doesn't understand.
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And the idea that he had of who the Messiah would be was shattered because he was leaning on the idea.
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He was finding his identity in the idea and not in trusting Christ.
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It's detrimental but it's not unrecoverable because Peter goes and after he has denied Christ three times, the cock has crowed and Jesus looks at him.
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He goes, he mourns and he comes back and Peter becomes the rock on which the church is built after he has been humbled and after he has refound his identity and focusing on Christ and he is the main spokesman on Pentecost where the Holy Spirit comes down and he preaches to tons of people.
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So it's dangerous but it's never unrecoverable.
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Moriah, I want to say thank you for the books that you've written, for the studies that you've led that have helped people to understand who they are in Christ and that they'll continue to do.
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There is a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can get to your website to find your books and to stay in touch with you.
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But I want to say a huge thank you for spending time with me today on Bleeding Daylight.
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Thank you so much, Rodney.
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It has been a joy to talk about the journey that God and I have been on.
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Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
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Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
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For further details and more episodes please visit bleedingdaylight.net
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Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
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This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
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Welcome to Bleeding Daylight, thanks for being here.
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Hundreds more episodes are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
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That's where you'll also find all our social media links.
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Please follow Bleeding Daylight on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
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Each of us travel a unique journey and most of the time we get to choose how much of that journey is on display for others to see.
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My guest today has written of her journey with God, allowing others to see the hard times and the lessons that she has learned.
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In this episode, we talk about the books that she has written that use her story to help others.
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I've always been drawn to stories of people who find their identity in something deeper than the world's expectations.
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And today's guest has certainly lived that out.
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Through singleness, a global pandemic and spending a lot of time in scripture, Moriah Hagel has discovered what it means to align her heart with God's rather than her own plans.
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She's the author of three books, including her latest release, To Live, Finding the Mind of Christ.
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She's also the co-founder of a young adult conference called Seasons, where she gets to encourage others in their 20s and 30s to find their footing in faith.
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Moriah, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
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Thank you so much for having me, Rodney.
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It is a pleasure to be here and speak with your people.
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I'd love to hear your journey of beginning to write.
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Can you take me back to the first time you heard God calling you to write for others?
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The first time God called me to write for others was when I was in college.
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I had been going to a college where I was feeling very single.
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Many of the girls who went there went to go get their MRS degree, find Prince Charming and get married and not really much for study.
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There were some of us that went for study, but it was very, very challenging.
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And so I wanted to start writing a book with my own plans and ideas and how I thought people should be approaching it, because I got to see many people and their different dating styles.
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But that was Moriah's plan, not God's plan.
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And so it didn't really go anywhere.
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But we started doing a Bible study on campus.
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It was a great time, actually, to be on that campus.
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And there were several Bible studies that broke out, and I got to lead one of them.
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We were studying through the book of Ephesians, which is where my first book comes from, First and Forever Singleness in Ephesians.
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We were getting to Ephesians 5, which is a little bit difficult to teach women, because we did all girls' studies and all boys' studies.
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When you have a whole bunch of girls dating, they're choosing whether or not they're going to submit to their boyfriend or something along those lines, and that's not what God asks of us in Ephesians 5.
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He asks of us to submit to our husbands.
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I don't know how to teach this, and it had been a very busy week.
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I hadn't had time to read over the chapter very much, and I was working at the campus coffee shop, and the song came on like a bride waiting for her groom, we will be a church ready for you.
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And I was like, yep, that is so hard, a bride waiting for her groom who's not even in the picture.
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God said, that's what you're going to teach on tonight.
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And I said, okay, what?
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And He said, that's all I'm going to tell you.
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And Rodney, I taught that night in a way I've never taught before.
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Typically, I like to do a Bible study where it's give and take, and everybody brings something to the table, and we get to learn from one another.
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Not that night.
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That night, it was lecture.
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And we sat, and God walked us through the entire chapter of Ephesians 5 in a beautiful way, because so many times, women especially, get a little bit chafed with the idea of submission.
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God painted it as such a beautiful picture, because marriage is supposed to be between Christ and the church.
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He got to show us the beauty of submitting to Him.
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My two sisters and I all went to college at the same time, and so we rode together, and we were commuters, so we were driving back after the Bible study, and I said, what did I say?
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Because it was as if I was outside of myself, just watching God do something through me.
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So they spent the whole hour's drive that it took to get back home retelling me what God did inside of the study.
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So when did that study that you'd been doing actually turn into the book that you wrote and published?
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So as the semester went on, I asked God to walk me through Ephesians again.
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He did.
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Every morning, we'd wake up in the morning, and He would walk me through just teaching me.
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We would read the chapter, and we would stop on a verse or two or three, and He would begin to open them up to me and show me the importance of setting Him first in our life.
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Because what I was dealing with a lot on campus was we all wanted to get married because we were young single girls, and most girls want to get married.
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But what He was showing me was that that's wonderful, but God's supposed to be first in our life in every season, and that that is who we are.
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Our identity is found in Christ.
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It's not found in being married or being a mom or being a CEO of some corporation.
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If God's not first in our life in every single step and every single aspect, we're not going to live a life glorifying and honoring God, and it won't have meaning.
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As we dug into Ephesians, the phrase first and forever kept coming up, which is why my book is titled First and Forever Singleness in Ephesians, because God was showing me, you choose me first because you choose me forever.
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And that's what matters.
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No matter what season of life we're in, God is first in every single season.
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And so it's a 30-day devotional study in the book of Ephesians, and it is my personal Bible time with God and questions that He asked me, personal stories, all of my books, First and Forever Singleness in Ephesians, alignment, God's will or mine, and to live, finding the mind of Christ.
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They're all my personal study time with God, because when God shows you something that changes your life, you want to share it with the world, and you want to give them the help that God gave you, because that's what we're supposed to do as Christians.
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We're supposed to help and encourage one another as we see the day approaching.
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I couldn't help but want to share it with people, because it changed so much of my perspective and my contentment with who I was.
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It doesn't mean that I didn't have trials and struggles or even wondering when God was going to send the right guy, but it anchored me to knowing that Christ was first.
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And in the season of singleness that He had me in, specifically in that time, my job was to choose Him first and to trust everything else to Him.
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And that becomes an anchoring stepping stone in your walk with God.
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And that's where God started to take my life and say, Okay, Moriah, now that you're putting me first, let's get to work.
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And so then we started the Seasons Young Adults Conference.
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It, again, was a difficult single year.
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It was a couple years down the road.
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And I said, God, if you're going to keep me single a while, I need a project.
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And He simply said, It's time.
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Even with Him just saying, It's time, I knew what it meant.
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I knew that He meant it was a time for a Young Adults Conference.
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It started off for singles.
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We've opened it up to young marrieds, because we saw people like me who were having a hard time being single, and we felt alone in our singleness.
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And Seasons is based off of Ecclesiastes 3, and it's to everything there's a time and a season and a purpose under heaven.
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My sisters and I, we wanted to be able to tell the young adults and the young singles specifically in our area that this season that they're in, first off, they're not alone.
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We had a good-sized group for our first year, and so many of them walked away and said, I'm not alone in this season of life.
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There are other people like me, and we're in this together.
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And so we wanted to encourage them in that season.
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And we also wanted to point them to Jesus and say, He doesn't waste a season of your life, so nor should we.
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And He's got a plan for this season, so do something with it.
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We're planning our eighth year.
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The 2020s was canceled, but beyond that, we have been able to execute the Seasons Conference and continue that encouragement and then try to use our season of singleness for God.
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As you've mentioned, you've written and published a number of books.
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So what came next after the Seasons Conference was set up and running?
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In 2020, God and I started walking through the book of James, which is where Alignment, God's Will, Our Mind came from.
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We had a lot of things happen.
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Those who lived through 2020 know a good bit of what happened.
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So many things shut down.
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The Bible study that we had blew apart, not just because of the pandemic, but there were also some disagreements, which is hard when you love them and you've spent a good bit of your life with them and you've poured into them and they've poured into you.
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There were a lot of things I had to work through.
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For everybody in 2020, there were a whole lot of fears and concerns, and God had to take me and to say, look, there's so much going on in your world and you may want to change so many things and you may want to help people here.
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You may want to open eyes over here because you see something differently and you want to help them, but you be in line with me.
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My mom used to say when we were growing up and we'd go talk about somebody else, one of our siblings and like, mom, mom, they need to change this.
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And she's like, you worry about you.
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I will worry about them.
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You worry about you.
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God wants to work on us first, and we have to trust him to work on those around us.
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And no matter if a pandemic is happening or not, are we aligned with God?
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First Time Forever is kind of setting our footing of being inside of God's will and choosing him first.
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And then alignment is checking our footing to make sure that we stay in alignment with God as he calls us to walk through difficult things and he calls us to walk through challenges and it's just creating a sure footing and to re-strengthen that.
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It's a 48-day study through the book of James.
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I love James.
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He is power packed with a very good punch, which sometimes you say, ouch, I needed that.
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Alignment is set up a little bit differently than First Time Forever, Singleness and Ephesians.
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We still have funny farm stories because I grew up on a farm.
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We have funny sibling stories.
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We have difficult stories of where God was stretching me because something that God has given me to share when I write and when I speak is my own shortcomings.
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If God can teach somebody through where I have struggled, then I will willingly show those so that someone else can learn from them.
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First Time Forever ends with questions and things to think about, things to look for in Bible.
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A lot of being aligned with God is through prayer.
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Most of the days are ended with pray about this or pray and ask God to grow you here because if we aren't taking those steps, then we're not growing and we're not making sure that we are in alignment with God.
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Some of the steps that it takes to be aligned with God, especially in difficult times, we can't do without Him.
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And so we pray and we ask for His holy intervention to help us, to establish us.
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I mentioned earlier your latest book, To Live, Finding the Mind of Christ.
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Tell me a little bit about that book.
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That one is about finding your identity in Christ and finding the mind of Christ because we are called to be like Christ in so many different areas of our life.
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And throughout Scripture, we're called to be holy as He is holy.
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We are called to look and to see Him as our example.
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There's so many things about Jesus that help us in who we are.
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As we find Him and as we find our identity in Him, as we understand His mindset, we understand how He sees us, we understand how He wants us to be.
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And with Jesus, when you're with Him and you find that identity inside of Him, you become at peace with who He made you to be.
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You become set.
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You become ready to accept and to grow how He asks you to grow because you understand that when He loves you and He asks you to stretch or He asks you to alter a little bit and to change and to grow, that He does it out of love and that He's going to be with you in every step.
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To Live, Finding the Mind of Christ is also just a hair different than the others.
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I share a story in there about my nephew who passed away.
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He was a miracle child.
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He lived for 49 days.
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How his life impacted and changed us and how it impacted other people and what God taught through that.
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God has something to teach someone else, not just me, about his life.
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There are sad stories in there, but there are strong stories because one of the beauties of finding your identity in Christ, we don't all have a happy life because that's not what we're promised here.
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But what we do have is we have security with God when we walk through good times and we walk through hard times like losing my nephew.
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God walks with us through every single step and that is a huge part in finding your identity in Christ because when you know that he's going to walk with you through the darkest and most trials in your life, then you know that no matter what he asks you to walk through, he's there.
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And when you know that, you can face anything because God is with you and God will be there and you know, you know when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we don't have to fear because we have come to the place where we know God more intimately just because of the hardship that he had us walk through.
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Don't get too down.
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It's not all hard stories.
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There's some, I say, funny farmyard stories because we had some goats and they were very interesting and taught us a lot of life lessons.
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It ends with questions.
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In a couple of the days, I send you to go find some scriptures and match them up so that you can seek the scriptures yourself and you can see where God illustrates this attribute of himself or you can see where he is speaking this truth to you and it gives you a little bit more of Bible understanding inside of your toolbox.
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We know that we have a very creative God and he's the one that gives us creativity, especially when we're thinking of disciplines such as writing.
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We know that there's that creativity that he gives us and yet even those who don't acknowledge God are using that God-given creativity but how much more important is it to match that creativity along with handling the scriptures well?
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When you come to writing the sorts of things that you're writing, you're saying that you're bringing in these various stories that illustrate points and there's your creativity, your God-given creativity on show but how important is it to make sure that it's not all creativity, it's not all imagination, it's actually following what the scriptures say?
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That is dramatically important.
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If I just tell you a funny story and you get a good laugh out of it, that's not going to grow us at all and what God wants us to do is he wants us to take his word.
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What Jesus did so often is he told a story, a parable, but then he always tied it back to the word of God or the attributes of God or to teach something that would help others grow.
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What I typically do is I'll write the Bible part and then I ask God to remind me of stories in my past that can help illustrate it, to help it be a little more tangible because we can all sit in a lecture, that's fine, and we can get stuff out of it but for me, if I have a story, I'm going to remember that truth better which is the whole point of the stories inside of all of the books.
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If it doesn't connect, then it doesn't need to be there and if it detracts, I don't want it to do that.
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I would say it's extremely important to make sure that they align with the lesson that God is teaching and to make that connection.
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My mom used to say a lot, was if you're not doing it and if God's not in it, then you don't need to do it at all.
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I'd rather have a point to my story and rather have a truth that the readers can walk away with than just entertaining them because if they want to be entertained by a book, you'll get some cute stories but go find a fiction book.
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But if you want to grow with God and if you want to dig into his truth and to, by the end of the book, have a better relationship with God, then I'd encourage you to pick up one of my books or another book that gives you a tangible story to help you understand it but that it doesn't take away from the truth that God wants to teach.
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It's very important to have a balance of scripture and to have it interpreted properly and to not take away.
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For those who've had the opportunity to read your books, what has the response been?
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I'm thinking particularly of that first book which talks about singleness and as you say, a lot of people are saying this is not where I want to stay but I need to know how to deal with it in the here and now.
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What's been the response of those who've had the opportunity to read that or your other books?
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I wrote First and Forever, Singleness and Ephesians for young women, people my own age who were having a difficult time but God loves to laugh and the first person whose life it changed was a married man who was in his 60s.
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What he began to do is he began to see how much God wanted him and how much God loved him and he was in one of my dad's Bible studies.
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My dad would come home and he would say let me tell you what this man said about your book.
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Let me tell you what God is doing in him.
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I had the privilege of teaching it to a couple different groups of people.
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I got to teach it in a women's Sunday school class over the summer.
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Most of them were older than I was and most of them were married so that was very interesting to teach it to a married group of people but one of them I know that it anchored her.
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She was going through a divorce and she didn't know it when we started the book and then probably two weeks in she felt comfortable enough to announce what had happened and that her husband had left and she held on to God so much and she would say I needed this study.
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I needed to be reminded where my focus has to be in this difficult time.
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I was humbled by some of their responses.
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I was humbled by the things that they learned.
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I was so proud of them and I was so amazed by their graciousness to allow me to teach it to them.
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Another one of the ladies, she is married but again it refocused and re-anchored her to loving God.
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I also taught it in a singles Bible study.
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Some of the truths that they brought out of it were very good.
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One of the questions inside of there we're talking about that God can give us anything so we trust Him when He chooses not to.
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One of the questions at the end of that day was what does God own?
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My point in writing it was what does God own?
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Look, He owns the cattle on a thousand hills.
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He can literally give us anything so if He chooses not to we trust Him in it then it's not for this time.
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But one of the guys in that Bible study he said, oh, I thought the question was what does God own of me?
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And it made him really focus inside of himself and say, does God really own all of me?
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And I was floored and I was like, God is amazing.
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He got you to get this deeper concept from this book and it's phenomenal.
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There were others where it encouraged them.
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I think that it helped set their feet on a good path.
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Part of it is the establishing that relationship with God now because when you get married you have another person to focus on too and to take care of and to do life with and so that adds an extra thing for you to have to balance and God calls us to love and to take care of our spouse.
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And then when you have kids there's more things to balance and so it's establishing that relationship with God now.
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I know that there are some of them whose lives it changed.
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There's some who read it and put it on the shelf and that's okay.
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I'm happy for God to sprinkle the seeds wherever they will fall.
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It also springboarded the Seasons Young Adults Conference and that has blessed so many young adults.
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We get so many that come, some that cry, I needed this.
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Our first year we had a line of people waiting to talk to our first speaker because they related to where she had come from and her singleness story.
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Overall I think it has caused people to grow and to realize and see what God has for them, what their relationship needs to be with God right now, that they need to focus on Him and then they get to see how much He loves them.
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Because when we focus on God and we take our eyes off of I don't want to be in this season right now, God can do so much with it.
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I encourage most single people that I meet, if they'll let me, pour into their lives a little bit.
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Because we're in the same boat.
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I try to encourage them and say, look, God has you in this season for a reason.
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So use it.
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And then when they do, some of the times God allows me to watch them take off.
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When they are called out of the season of singleness, they will be able to look back and say, wow, look what God has done because I've put Him first and God did not waste this season and neither did I.
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I want them to have a love for God.
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I want their relationship with God to be solidified, to be that foundation right now that they're going to build everything else on, whether they stay single for 20 more years or whether they get married and have kids or whether they become somebody huge and important.
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I want that foundation established now for them if they will let God do that.
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And if they'll take the steps to do that.
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Because there's a lot of hard steps in there that God calls us to do.
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One of my sisters said, Moriah, you ask a lot of them.
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You went through this study and writing it, it took you a couple months to write it and to process it and to go through it.
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She said, they only have one month, 30 days, so don't expect the exact same results that God did in you.
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But it is, if they will take the steps that God has put in there that He taught me, then I believe that it will springboard them into a place where they are content with God, content with where they're at, and ready to serve Him as He sees fit.
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God never wastes a season and He is going to fill the time in serving with Him, which is part of why we were created.
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One of the stories in there is, Why are you born?
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That's a question my mom would ask us to remind us that we were born to serve God.
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And we're born to love God, we're born to love His people, and how we do that, how we show that to Him, is serving Him where He asks us to, and in the season that He's asked us to.
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Certainly you've written with a single audience in mind a lot of the time, and yet as you've mentioned, there are married people who are reading the books, both men and women, and they're realizing the same central theme, and that is, if we're not seeking satisfaction in Christ first and foremost, then we're looking for it in the wrong place.
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How dangerous do you think it is for a lot of people in churches who are still seeking satisfaction in things other than Christ Himself, whether it be in marriage, or whether it be in a career, or whatever else it is that they're chasing after?
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I think that it's a danger of deceiving ourselves.
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Our identity in Christ is our true identity, and when we place it in marriage, when we place it in children, when we place it in even our service, where our service becomes our central focus and we forget who we're doing it for and why we are doing it, it becomes a secret identity that we don't understand and that we don't realize that we have, and then we shortchange God on it.
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When we do that, our foundation isn't on the rock.
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If we aren't constantly going back and making sure that we're right with God and that our relationship is with God and that our focus is on God Himself, then we're going to get focused on something else and our foundation will slip and be on sand.
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And when that does, it really hurts when God closes those doors.
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So, in alignment, God's will or mine, when the Bible study shut down, when the pandemic hit, my identity, I found out through those trials, was too much in my Bible study or too much in the things that I was trying to do for God or too much in who I was, how I thought the world should be, and God had to take that away and that hurts.
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But it's a good cleansing where God says, I love you and I love you too much to let you walk in this.
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And so sometimes when our love and our identity is found in our service of God, He takes that opportunity away because He wants our eyes on Him because that's how we're going to grow.
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That service thing isn't going to be the thing that's going to get us to the point where we need to be.
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We do want to serve God because that is one of the many ways that we show that we love Him.
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But He has to remain the focus point.
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And then when it comes with children and with spouses, with people in general, Bible studies, they're people.
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They're human.
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And they're going to make mistakes.
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And when that happens, it hurts.
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And we get back on our knees and we say, God, I'm sorry.
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I had my identity.
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I had my trust inside of a person other than You.
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Please help me to refocus myself.
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Even in ideas when we have it wrong.
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So Peter denies Christ three times because he's confused and he doesn't understand.
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And the idea that he had of who the Messiah would be was shattered because he was leaning on the idea.
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He was finding his identity in the idea and not in trusting Christ.
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It's detrimental but it's not unrecoverable because Peter goes and after he has denied Christ three times, the cock has crowed and Jesus looks at him.
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He goes, he mourns and he comes back and Peter becomes the rock on which the church is built after he has been humbled and after he has refound his identity and focusing on Christ and he is the main spokesman on Pentecost where the Holy Spirit comes down and he preaches to tons of people.
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So it's dangerous but it's never unrecoverable.
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Moriah, I want to say thank you for the books that you've written, for the studies that you've led that have helped people to understand who they are in Christ and that they'll continue to do.
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There is a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can get to your website to find your books and to stay in touch with you.
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But I want to say a huge thank you for spending time with me today on Bleeding Daylight.
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Thank you so much, Rodney.
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It has been a joy to talk about the journey that God and I have been on.
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Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
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Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
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For further details and more episodes please visit bleedingdaylight.net
