Hey friends, I hope that you are having a very lovely day. I am currently driving home. My parents asked to have my little boys for the weekend so that they could take them to the South Carolina State Fair. So my kids are pumped and just got dropped off with granddaddy and so I am driving back home but just been thinking more and more and more about our The Chosen series. And so the next episode you'll see my most, my famous, my most favorite part of The Chosen is watching the scene between Nicodemus and Jesus. If you're not watching the show, I would highly recommend that you even just Google it and watch like the YouTube clip or whatever you can find because it is so, so touching. And I feel like, I don't know, it opened my eyes to the way that Jesus interacts with us or would like to interact with us and helps me to just adore him and feel adored. I know in one of our earlier videos we talked about how when Jesus asked the little children to come to him and he said that you had to have a childlike faith to receive the kingdom of God, I likened it to when Jesus was talking to Nicodemus because Nicodemus, like all other adults, was, he was a Pharisee and so even more than us regular Joes, he had spent his entire life memorizing the Torah, teaching, and literally just, like his entire life being everything was devoted to not just the Torah but doctrine. And so by that point of history, the religious leaders had taken God's law and created their own list of laws of how that should look for them living in this day and time, or that day and time because that was still a thousand years later, two thousand years later maybe, I can't remember when Abraham was, but it got to the point where they were making religion the thing, not God. Now they would probably not have been familiar with having a relationship with God because remember before Jesus died on the cross, we did not have access to the Holy Spirit. We are so blessed to live post-ascension because that means that we can receive the Holy Spirit and that is how we get that deep feeling and connection with God and how he brings up thoughts and just, you can have just such a genuine relationship with him. And that's basically what I wanted to just remind you is so often we make faith harder than it is and the thing to remember is to make the thing the thing. In our day and time, we are exposed to all sorts of media. There are different things about Christianity that are being broadcast far more than just the regular stuff and so I would challenge you, so keeping the main thing the main thing for us might look different. We don't have, depending on your denomination or where you go to church, your specific church or your own beliefs and upbringing, we do not have a list of do's and don'ts like they would have in Jesus' day and time. We are very blessed with that, but we have made other things the main thing besides him. I can get so distracted with worry, worry becomes the main thing. I can get so distracted with my kids and I make them the main thing. I can get so distracted with even reading the Bible, wanting to get it right. It doesn't have to be a bad thing, we tend to make something the main thing and if we want that childlike life of just light, faith, joy, and freedom, all we have to do is make the main thing the main thing and I do that. I hate when people say cliche sayings like that and then don't explain what that means. So basically for me, that means making sure I get my quiet time in every day. The way that my life is right now with a couple of side jobs of writing and studying and I'm a TA at Gordon Conwell. I just have a lot of stuff going on just like you do and so I make getting up in the morning a priority, but there are plenty of days that I don't wake up with my alarm on time and I can tell that those days are far less peaceful and joyful. When I take the time to pray and have my quiet time in the mornings, those days go a lot different and notice I said that I have both of those. It doesn't mean that I am a type A person, I don't really understand those, but typically I feel like type A talk about being rule followers. So if I set for myself like hey I'm going to do my quiet time at this time every day, I tend to beat myself up on the days that I oversleep or don't get to it or whatever. And that's the grace that you're going to get by keeping the main thing the main thing. It doesn't have to look any certain way, it just means get yourself in his presence. Some people that's through worship music, some people that's through a run, some people that's through journaling, reading the bible, praying, there's a billion different ways. Try different things and figure out what works for you, but then that way you can keep the main thing the main thing.
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