[0:00] Maybe there's a decision sitting in front of you right now, a job, a move, a relationship, a church community. You've prayed about it, and somewhere in the back of your head, the same thought just keeps running. What if God has one right answer here, and I pick the wrong one? So you wait for a sign. You watch for an open door, and weeks go by, and you still haven't moved. Or maybe it's the other thing. There's a temptation that you keep losing to. Maybe that's lust or, you know, the website you just know you have no business going to at all. Or maybe it's just something else that keeps coming back no matter how much you try to kill it. Last time you told God that was the last time, and then it wasn't. And now the thought in your head sounds something like, "Why can't I just be better? Do I have try harder? Everybody else seems to manage this thing." I know those two thoughts really well.

[0:47] I think I might have something that could help you find your way out of it, so let me tell you what I've got, and you can tell me if you think it's worth your time. Mm-hmm. I want to show you that those two problems, the decision you can't make and the sin you can't quit, are actually one problem. And trying harder loses to both of them, even when you mean every word of your prayer, and you white-knuckle your way through every decision. Turns out there's really only one path that actually wins, and the life on the far side of that path is roomier than you've been led to expect. Braver decisions, more joy, and a lighter conscience. Now, if you've been taught differently, you're in good company. I'm not here to pick a fight with anybody else's church communities. I just want you to look at what the text of scripture actually says because I think it says something kinder than what a lot of us grew up with. Maybe this is what you were taught. On decisions, God has one right answer for your life, and your job is to go find it.

[1:34] Pray hard, watch for the open door, and whatever you do, don't miss it. On temptation, maybe you were told, "Fight. More rules, more accountability, more willpower, more confession. Mean it harder this time than you did last time." But this is part of why I love so much about what Paul wrote in First Thessalonians chapter four. If we go all the way down here to verse three, he says very plainly, "This indeed is the will of God, the sanctification of you, to abstain from sexual immorality." When Paul finally says the words "the will of God" out loud way into the fourth chapter of this letter, the subject is your body, your desires, and who you're becoming. The thing that you've been hunting for in your decisions and the thing that you've been fighting in the dark are, in Paul's mind, one thing, a person being made whole. Which means the way you get free of the one is the way you

[2:23] get unstuck from the other. And Paul takes sin seriously in that passage, and so do I. But what I want to know is how a person actually gets free, free from sin and free for the life that they were made for in Christ, and how they ever make a decision again without their stomach getting tied up in knots. There's a really famous verse that the Book of Proverbs says twice word for word in two different chapters. "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death." A path can look straight and good from the start to the finish and still run off the edge. I think a lot of sincere Christians are walking a path like that right now, and I think they're trying as hard as they know how. That breaks my heart. You can lose while you're still trying to do your very best to win. So I'm hoping to be able to shed some light on why that happens and where the one path that wins actually goes. And there's actually a board game that we play at our church community's game

[3:12] nights, uh, that shows it better than anything else I know. It's called Tsuro, T-S-U-R-O. The box calls it the Game of the Path, and that's the game in four words. You get a square board, a little, you know, colored marker, a little rock thing like this, and a, a hand of three tiles that you keep drawing from. Every tile has these lines drawn on them, little curving roads that run from one side of the tile to another. On your turn, you set a tile down in front of your marker, and then the way I explain it to new people at the table, you'll put a little tile down, and your little guy has to follow the line all the way to the end. So let's say you started down here. You put this tile down. You'd go all the way to this little spot right there. Hopefully, you can see what I'm talking about. My mouse is kind of small. But then as soon as this tile gets put down, you follow that path all the way to the end, and then your little blue guy is right here.

[3:59] So wherever that road stops, you stop. Then you draw a new tile, and the next person goes. You never move your guy with your hand. The tile moves him. If a road carries your marker off of the edge of the board, way off to the sides here, you're out. Or if you bump into another player, these two are pretty close to each other, so they've got a pretty good risk of running into each other, you're out. And the last marker on the board wins. One more rule that I find really interesting and helpful, it's in the official rule book, and it's the reason this little game says more about the Christian life than it has any right to. You're not allowed to play a tile that sends your own marker off the board. The only time you may do it is when you have every tile in your hand would lead to that same outcome, and there is no other move left. Pause to think about what that means for a minute. Nobody at the table ever chooses to lose. The rules won't let you, and somebody still loses every single game. They lose the way I lose, which is by following a path that looked

[4:50] like a winner. I have watched it happen to myself more times than I'd like to admit. I lay a tile, the road on it kind of curls around in a nice loop and then drops my marker into a cozy open corner, and I feel really smart. And then four turns later, I look down and realize that that corner was a pocket, and every tile in my hand now runs to the edge. I started here, and it... You know this blue path. Everything looked so great, and then you know what happens is it turns all the way up here, and oh no, I wasn't expecting it to hook around that way, and now suddenly I'm off the board. And I had no other choice. Every tile in my hand now runs to the edge. The rules force me to play one of them, and off I go. Nobody put me there. I walked in smiling because the path looked straight and good every step in. The losing move got made four turns before the game ever told me I'd lost. That's the verse from Proverbs, the one the book says twice. "A way that looks straight in front of a man, and at the end of it is death." I'll add one thing that the English hides.

[5:39] At the end of that verse, the Hebrew says ways. It's actually plural. More than one. One way going in, many ways of death coming out. That is a Tsuro pocket exactly. One tile takes you in, and after that, every tile takes you off. And the first losing path in the Bible actually has the same shape. Genesis 2 says every tree in the garden was good for food and beautiful to look at. Genesis 3 says the one forbidden tree was good for food and a delight to the eyes. Same two things, the only thing that tree added was a promise to make her wise. It did not look like the edge of the board. It looked like a winner. So let's take a tour and walk the paths off the board together. Some of them are obvious, and I'll go fast. The two that scare me are the ones that look like winning, and we're gonna slow way down for those. The first way off of the board is the obvious one. You give in. Whatever it is for you, again, lust, the website you have no business going

[6:27] to, the bottle, the screen, the thing you told God was the last time. James chapter 1 draws that road from start to finish. Each person is tempted when he is lured away and enticed by his own desires. Then desire, once it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and then sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death. That's a path with an end on it, and the end is the edge. The road never turns toward your father, not once. I don't think I need to explain this one to you. You've felt the board run out under your feet, and sometimes we've chosen that deliberately. If any of us says we haven't chosen that path at least once in our life, then I think First John would say that we're a liar and the truth is not in us. But the second way off of the board is to try to white-knuckle it and just grit your teeth and not do it. I think that this is probably the path that most sincere Christians are on right now because it feels like the responsible one. More rules, more accountability, more structure, more willpower.

[7:17] Paul talks about this in Colossians chapter 2, where he says... He, he lists these rules, "Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch." And then he gives his verdict. He says, "These have indeed an appearance of wisdom, but they're of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh." Of no value is a pretty strong phrase. Paul says that a rule book makes you look wise from the outside and does nothing to the appetite underneath, because a rule just points at the thing that it forbids, which keeps the thing right in front of your eyes, which is the one place you do not want it. I can tell you from my own life that willpower by itself never once got me free. A fence of rules is a tile that looks safe, but it's a pocket, because you can keep a rule for years and never go find your father. I'm starting to kind of mix my board game metaphors, but laying my card out on the table so that you know where I'm headed here. But let's look at the other paths off. The third way, and there are many ways, the third way off is to live in fear, looking over your shoulder all the time.

[8:08] You've probably been able to watch people do this sort of thing for decades. Constant self-assessment, constant fear that you're not forgiven enough. Did I really repent that time? Did I mean it? Am I still in? Am I still stuck? Martin Luther lived on this path as a young monk. His biographer says that he confessed often, daily, and once for six hours on a single occasion. Six hours. His superior finally told him, in so many words, "If you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive," and listed parricide and blasphemy and adultery instead of all these peccadillos, meaning all these little nothings. Paul has a word for that kind of living in Romans chapter 8, in which he says, "You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons." Paul calls fear a kind of slavery. A slave checks over his shoulder because he can be sold tomorrow, or the slave driver can come with a whip.

[8:55] A beloved son or daughter has no reason to fear either of those things. And I want you to notice it's the same fear on the other side of the problem. The person who can't take the job because they might miss God's one right answer is looking over that same shoulder. The decision you can't make and the sin you can't quit are sort the same pocket. Both of them keep your eyes on yourself instead of on Him. The fourth way off is to just basically decide that you're this awful person. You're too far gone. There's no redeeming you. That one takes you off the board faster than any of the others because you stop playing tiles. You just sit there, and a man who, you know, just sits there never goes looking for his father. I'll only say this about it for now. Paul called himself the foremost of sinners and said that was exactly why he got mercy, so Jesus could show his patience to the next guy as an example. If you're too far gone, Paul got there ahead of you. Those four, you know, I...

[9:42] Chances are good you already knew. These are lots of ways of navigating the Christian life poorly, whether that is in wisdom and decision-making, or whether that's in trying to avoid sin. There are two other ones that came to mind recently that I didn't see for years because they don't look like edges. They look just like center of the board. It feels safe. One of them, somewhat ironically, is trying to do good. To try really hard to be sinless is another way you can lose if it means you're white-knuckling it and just committing to being perfect. I want to be careful here because this gets preached badly all the time. This is the mistake of the Pharisees, not a mistake about being Jewish. The Pharisees were not Israel's villains. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. Gamaliel, who stood up and defended the apostles, was a Pharisee. Paul, years after meeting Jesus, stood in a courtroom and said, in present tense, "I am a Pharisee." And their own teachers made fun of the overdone version.

[10:31] The Talmud lists a kind of a pious man who walks around with his eyes shut so he won't see a woman and then bangs his head into the walls. Jewish tradition, in some ways authored by the Pharisees, laughs at that guy. So the mistake I'm pointing at is a mistake Jewish teachers pointed at, too. The mistake, interestingly, is actually in their name. Their name in Hebrew is Perushim, and it means the separated ones. The name is the strategy. Separate yourself. Put distance between you and anything that could make you unclean. And the way that you build distance is with a fence. The Hebrew word is seyag, a fence around God's command. God said, "Don't eat." You add, "Don't touch," so you never get close enough to eat. Eve added, "Neither shall you touch it," to what God actually said, and ancient Jewish teachers read that verse as the first fence, adding a seyag to God's words, and they drew the moral out loud. The serpent touched the tree, nothing happened,

[11:21] and the fence became the lever he used to pull her over. Their own rule from that story, "Let not a man add to the words which he has heard." A fence is the tile that looks safest in your hand. It's a pocket, because now every tile you play is about the thing on the other side of the fence, and none of them is about going to find your father. Hopefully, you're starting to notice a theme now. There's really only one winning play. I can't wait to unpack it in some depth. But Jesus told a story straight to these men. Luke 15 opens with the Pharisees grumbling. It's a great word. grumbling, saying, "This man receives sinners and he eats with them." And Jesus answers with three stories, and the last one has two sons. Everybody remembers the younger one. We're to scroll through here. We know it as the parable of the prodigal son, but we're gonna take a little bit of a longer look at the older son. So when the party starts, way at the end, let's kind of skip through. If you don't know it, you should go read it.

[12:08] But this son really behaves in a pretty awful, profligate way, and conjures up some plan to return to his father and beg for his father's forgiveness. He's got the whole plan in, in place, and the father runs out and, and throws his arms around his son and accepts him back into the family. But all the way down here, verse 25, the son is out in the field and he won't come in. Then the father himself comes out and begs him, and then the older son says to his father, "Behold, these many years I have served you, and I've never disobeyed your command." He's not lying, or at least the father doesn't correct him. He never left. He seems to have never fallen off. He kept every rule for years, and he's the one standing outside his own father's house, angry while the celebration and the music plays. Jesus is telling the separated ones to their faces that you can keep every command and end the story outside the door, maybe even in conflict with your

[12:58] father. Path looks like winning the entire way until it isn't. Uh, a Pharisee got to the very end of that path and then reported back for us. Paul himself lists it in Philippians 3. He says, "As to the law, a Pharisee. As to righteousness under the law, I was blameless." Blameless. He finished the road, and then he says he counted all of it as loss in order that I may gain Christ, that I may know Him. One man who says in inspired scripture that he reached the end of the fence path told us that there was nothing there, only a person standing somewhere else that he'd missed. I've got a couple more that I think might, uh, might throw you for a loop. Here are some other ways off the Tsuro board. The first one is reading your Bible. Before you click off, hear me out. Jesus says something to this same crowd in John chapter 5 that your Bible translates one of two ways. You can check it tonight depending on your version. The old King James makes it a command.

[13:46] He says, "Search the scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life." The newer Bibles make it a description, "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life." The Greek word is ereunate, search, and the letters are identical either way. Greek writes search with an exclamation mark, and you search as a description of what you're doing with the same word. So the older English Bibles heard Jesus giving an order, and the modern ones hear him describing a habit. I lean with the modern ones because of the next verse. Verse 40 says, "Yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life." These were men who searched the text every day with everything they had and treated the searching as the destination. The ereunate was fine. The refusing was the pocket because the whole point of why we read the Bible is that there's a God who stands behind it. There's a being back there. That's why there's a book at all and why it has any power in

[14:34] any case. You read the Bible as the finish line, and you've built a very holy fence between you and Him out of his own words. You're starting to get the point. The only way to win is to go find your father and be in relationship with him. Why does this last one still not work? The last, the last way I want to just lay out for you is thinking about God, knowing things about Him. James says it flatly, "You believe that God is one. You do well. Even the demons believe and shudder." I could sit here and conjure to mind facts about Albert Einstein, and I could think about Abraham Lincoln all afternoon, but those don't change anything. So remembering facts about a person such as that God is three persons in one triune nature, that doesn't help me. That doesn't change me. Correct facts about a father are a

[15:21] different thing from going and finding him, and a tile that looks like the center of the board can still lead you straight to the edge. Which brings me to the man who ran the experiment all the way to the end and wrote it down. The Book of Ecclesiastes never gives him the name Solomon, so I'll call him what the book calls him, the preacher. It might be Solomon, it might not, might not be. In chapter two, he decides to find out what is good for a person to do with the few days they get, and he tries everything. He builds. I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. Those are Genesis 2 words, planted, garden, every kind of tree, water. He built himself a little Eden with his own hands, and the phrase, "For myself," shows up again and again in those few verses, and one thing is missing from his garden that was in God's.

[16:11] There's no tree of life. His verdict in verse 11 of that same chapter, he says, "All was vanity and a striving after the wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun." This video deserves, or really this word deserves its own video, but vanity there is the preacher's word for, like, vapor or smoke. All that work, and when he opened up his hands, there was just smoke in them. It looked solid, and he tried to hold onto it, but it just slipped through his fingers. Trying harder with a king's budget did not get him the garden. People stop reading right there, and then they'll miss it. If you keep reading to verse 24, the preacher leaves you a pointer. He says, is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also I saw is from the hand of God." The man who built a garden with his two hands says that the good in it comes from a hand that was never his. The enjoyment is handed to you, and I think that's the turn right there. If the good comes from a hand, then every other tile in your hand

[17:01] is a pocket, and the one move left is to go find the one that hand belongs to. This is your father, so go find him. That, I think, is the answer, and I also think it's the reason every path we just walked through turned out to be a pocket that's gonna send you off the edge of the board. They were all pockets for the same reason. None of them was ever going to find your father. Giving in walks away from him. White-knuckling builds a fence and stands behind it. Fear hides from him in the bushes. The shame of feeling like you're too far gone sits down in the hallway and stops moving or covers yourself over with a fig leaf. The elder brother kept every rule for years and never once walked into the house. Reading the Bible as the finish line of the Christian life, this is the ultimate of what I'm supposed to be doing, it stops at the book. If you read the book and then accumulate facts about God, it stops at the facts.

[17:47] Every one of those roads ends somewhere, and the somewhere is never Him, and the preacher told us where the good comes from. It comes from a hand. So in one sentence, anything at all that is not, "Go find your dad," is a Tsuro pocket. Finding him is the first move, and it's really the only safe one. But it is the path to a whole new board of beautiful, good, right, and enjoyable moves that you can never really lose again as long as you stay on that board. The move comes first. Paul writes about temptation in 1 Corinthians 10, and verse 13 is one you could probably finish for me. "No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability. But when the temptation comes, He will also provide the way of escape, so that you may be able to endure it." I grew up hearing that verse, or, you know, especially in my younger years as a, as a believer, as basically there's always a way out.

[18:37] Like, there's a fire exit sign somewhere in the room if you just look hard enough. The word that Paul uses for way of escape is ekbasis, and it means exactly that, an exit, the way out of a place. But if you go to that passage and you look at who the sentence is about, it starts with, "God is faithful." He is the one who provides the ekbasis. Paul puts a person at the front of the sentence and the door at the end, and the door belongs to the person. Which means that when temptation has you in a room with no way out, the exit is wherever He is standing. You find the way out by finding the one who made it. The way out is a person. I wanna... My kids might understand this better than I do, to be honest. For years now in our family, when one of my kids has had a nightmare or heard something loud in the night or something like that, the same thing happens. They get out of bed, they walk down the hall in the dark, they come into my room, they find me, and they wake me up and ask for help.

[19:25] And they come get me specifically, and I'll tell you why. I go in and out of sleep with no issue at all. My Google Fitbit Air tells me I fall asleep within two minutes most nights. My kids take a lot longer than that, and my wife takes another half an hour longer than I do if she wakes up in the middle of the night. So I'm the one who can get up, eyes still only kind of half open, handle whatever needs to be handled, lie back down, and, uh, be gone again before anybody else in the house is finished rolling over. My wife would like it known that this is nothing that I earned. But just pay attention to what my kids don't do. My kids never lie in bed working through facts about me. When they're in need of help, they don't lie there thinking, "My dad is six foot three. My dad's hair is brown. My dad's eyes are greenish blue with an island of sandy tan in the middle. My dad was born on August 12th, 1992." They don't think about facts about me. They think, "I need to go get my dad," and then they come and find me, and I'm there for them.

[20:14] We talk about it, and I hold them, and we pray, and I make sure they're settled again, and then I lay them back down for sleep. But they found me. That's it. They didn't grade the nightmare. They didn't make a plan to fight the nightmare. They didn't lie there trying harder to stop being scared. They got up and went to the one who could help them because they knew he was there, and they knew he'd come. Paul has a word for that sort of walk down the hallway. It's in the same verse about slavery and adoption in Romans 8, because that verse doesn't stop at adoption. It ends with, "By whom we cry out, 'Abba, Father.'" Abba is Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke at home, and it is the family word for father. You'll hear preachers say it means daddy, and that's more than the word says. It's the word a household used for its father, and grown sons used it too. what gets me is what Paul says we do with it. We cry it out. Abba in Paul's sentence is a cry, the kind that comes out of you

[21:02] before you've even thought about it. That is a kid in a doorway at 2:00 in the morning saying, "Dad." Remember the slave looking over his shoulder? A slave would never walk into the master's bedroom in the middle of the night, but his son does, his daughter does. A kid cries out, gets up, and goes to find their father because the one thing a kid knows for sure is that his father will come. There's, of course, one massive difference between me as my kids' father and God as our father that I want you to hold onto. My kids have to wake me up. Psalm 121 says that, "He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." You will never once have to shake Him awake. You'll never stand in the doorway wondering if this is a bad time. He's up. He was up before you were. That's the same thing. The only path that doesn't lead off the Tsuro board is to go find God. Go get Him. Go find your dad. Relate to Him. Express yourself to Him, what you're really going through, and find Him.

[21:52] The thing that leads to you winning is to go and find your father, because it's relating to the God who is your heavenly Father, who is already trying to find His way into relationship with you. That's the way forward. Let's slow way down on this part. It can change what the walk down the hall feels like. The one you're walking toward is already moving. If we go back to Luke 15, to the younger son this time, the one everybody remembers, he's coming home with a whole speech. He wrote it in the pig pen, verses 18 and 19. "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants." Three sentences rehearsed all the way home, and now we get to verse 20. "He went to the father's house. Still moreover, he still being distant or a long ways off, his father saw him and was moved with compassion. And having run, having run, fell upon the neck of him and kissed him."

[22:41] The word for ran here or having run is dramon. I want you to notice who it's attached to. The son is walking, elthon, walking, and the father is the one running. The son covers the last stretch of that road in his father's arms because his father closed the distance before he could. And then the speech, he's all ready. There we go. Said moreover to the the son to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. No longer am I worthy to be called of your son. Make me as one of the hired servants of you." Here's an interesting part. You see this part with the, uh, with the parenthesis? That means this sentence, this part of the sentence, was actually not written down in the earliest manuscripts. The earliest manuscripts don't even include this. What that means is that the original or closest to the original copies of this document, he's mid-sentence. He's mid-sentence, and the father cuts him off. Others added it because it's like, "Oh, well, he said it back here.

[23:29] This is what he was gonna say, so surely he said the whole thing." I actually don't think he said the whole thing. In Jesus' story, this is just not included. The father is already talking over him. The father said to the servants, "Quickly bring out the robe and the best clothes, and clothe him and give him a ring," right? The son wrote this whole speech about becoming a servant and never got to the servant part. Because his father ran out and the father is the one who decides who you really are. The son who really objectively did some awful things, the, you know, ancient Near Eastern equivalent of basically saying that he just wished his dad was dead so he could get all of his stuff sooner. Not great. He walked home on the, "Oh, surely I am too far gone," path, and the plan he made for himself got interrupted by a forgiving and loving father embracing him in a hug. But remember that that same father has to go out twice. The elder brother was standing in the yard angry, refusing to go in, and verse 28 says, "His father came out and begged him." We highlighted that word

[24:22] earlier. He came out to the son who never left. The father who ran down the road for the one who blew it and really objectively did live in an awful way walks out again into the field for the one who kept every rule and pleads with him. Because to that father, a son standing outside the house is a son standing outside the house, whichever road he took to get there. A loving father comes out to both of them. If you're on the path that thinks, "I just need to put a fence between me and doing anything wrong," keeping every rule and standing in the yard, your father is walking toward you, too. Because you're not living in the way that actually pleases Him keeps you from losing this war. I don't know if... This should... This is so comforting to me. This is who He's always been. The first time anybody hides from God in the Bible, or tries to anyway, it's Genesis 3. The two of them are in the trees and God is walking in the garden and what He says is, "Where are you?" It's a known answer question. He knows where they are, but He's the one out doing the looking.

[25:11] The Bible opens with a father walking through a garden calling for His kids, and what I'm trying to tell you is essentially that He just, He's never stopped. You know what you're going to find when you do that is you're going to find an impossibly loving father who just radiates forgiveness and grace and mercy and care and love, who meets you there, accepts you into His loving arms, and offers you a different path. He offers you something else to do. Something else to do. I have a feeling some people might argue with me about this, but it's... This is genuinely the only thing that's made a difference for me really. A lot of the advice that people give around, again, let's just go back to the example of lust and inappropriate images and sin and all of this other stuff, is like telling someone to not think about a pink elephant. Don't think about a pink elephant. Here's how you stop thinking about pink elephants. 10 ways that Christian men can stop thinking about pink elephants. Well, every time you bring up pink elephants, what is the guy gonna think

[26:00] about? He's thinking about the pink elephant now. You're probably thinking about a pink elephant now, even if you weren't before. You will be now. You don't get a person to stop thinking about pink elephants by telling them to stop thinking about pink elephants. You get them to think about something else. And if that something else is something good, if, you know, a person commits their attention to something else that's good and keeps their attention and pulls them forward and inspires them and, yes, even pleases them in a good way, then you've solved the problem. I used to think that was just me and my ADHD talking, but then I, I did some research in preparation for this video and found out somebody tested this. In 1987, a psychologist named Wegner put people in a room for five minutes and asked them to say out loud whatever came into their heads with one rule: don't think about a white bear. Every time the bear showed up anyway, they rang a bell. The bell rang more than once a minute, and then came the surprise. When he let those same people think about whatever they wanted, the bear came back harder than it did for the people who'd been free to think about

[26:51] it from the start. Pushing it away had wound it up. So he ran it again with one change. He gave the next group something specific to think about instead, a red Volkswagen, and the bear backed off. Decades later, another team tried it with smokers, a week of pushing away every thought of a cigarette, wrestling and struggling against thoughts about cigarettes, and the week after, they smoked more. So the lab says what my kids know and what Paul said. A rule by itself points you at the bear, points you at the pink elephant. But part of the way out is that we need somewhere else to go, somewhere else to put our attention, someone else to hold our attention. Jesus told a story about this. I think it's in Matthew 12. Yeah, it's in Matthew 12, kind of in the back half or the later, later parts of it. He's talking about His own generation when He says this, so I'm not gonna... I'm gonna be careful not to make it say more than it says, but

[27:39] the picture is the picture. An unclean spirit leaves a man, wanders through dry places, finds nowhere to rest, and then says, "I will return to my house from which I came." And when it gets back, it finds the house empty, swept up, and put in order. The word for empty here is, uh, scholazonta, and it means unoccupied, vacant, a house with nobody living in it. So the spirit goes and gets its seven friends, worse than itself, and they all move in. And the last state of that person, worse than the first. For years, the only thing I saw in this story was, was the demons. I can't stop seeing the house now. The man did the work. He swept. He put things in order. The house was clean and the house was scholazonta. Nobody home. Clean and empty is exactly where the seven other spirits come in. A swept up, empty life is a pocket tile in Tsuro, and it takes you off the board.

[28:26] You can't just clean yourself up and have that be the solution. That's why Paul writes Galatians 5:16, I think, the way that he does. He says, "Walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh." The order, the command is to walk. It's a positive thing with a person going somewhere. The not doing comes after it as the result, and the Greek there is strong. It's a "will not." It's as strong as the language has. Everything Paul tells you to do about the flesh is a direction to walk and someone to walk it with. The Spirit is the red Volkswagen, except He's a person and He's good and He walks back down the hall with you. Someone is home. It's not empty. You can't be empty. You shouldn't be empty. You you should have a person dwelling in your home. That's the house the seven can't move into. and I can tell you why these, you know, tiles that look like winners are actually bad tiles and, and why they keep coming back. It's when we drift out of being with our Father that those things enter

[29:17] our world again. The fence goes back up. The shoulder check comes back. The hallway gets long again. But the safe move is always the one where we come back to Him first and relate to Him and connect with Him, and then we have all of our good options back. And here's the best part. You, you walk through that one winning path on the Tsuro board... And again, we've, uh, I wish I could give you a better image than this, but you come out the other side to a whole new board where you never fall off. When you are in relational closeness to God, the world of good things available to you, it gets so enormous and vast and beautiful. David, I think, saw this in, in Psalm 16, I think it's verse 11, he says, "I want..." I, I... maybe I should go find it. Yeah, I wanna read all of it because the half people quote is the end of it. "You make known to me the path of life. In Your presence, there is fullness of joy.

[30:06] At Your right hand are pleasures forevermore." The Hebrew for path of life there is orach chayim, and it's one path, one. The same contrast Proverbs drew with the way that looks straight and the many ways of death at the end of it, except now it runs the opposite direction. Proverbs 5 spends a whole chapter warning about sexual temptation, and it uses this exact phrase, orach chayim, and the picture it draws of the person who's lost is that her ways wander, and she doesn't know it. One path in, many wandering ways. The Bible drew the Tsuro board long before anybody made the game, but where the one path goes, in Your presence, which in Hebrew is literally with Your face, there is fullness of joy. The path of life meets a face. It reaches Him, a person. And then at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore. So you need to know that your life on the other side of going

[30:56] and finding your heavenly Father is a life of at His right hand are pleasures forevermore. And people don't believe that. I don't think I believed that for a long time because a lot of what I had been taught about the Christian life was just about the edge of the board, what to avoid, where not to step, how to quit thinking about pink elephants. Nobody ever told me the one path ends in pleasure at His right hand forever. That's the game. That's what's on the other side of the one safe move that is always your safe move to make. The Bible has a name for the place where you are close to Him and every good thing is open to you, and it's the oldest name in the book. It's a garden, not one you make with your own hands like Solomon or the, the Preacher tried to. God's own presence in paradise. He walks you out of the bad tiles down a safe path into a garden that is roomier than you were told, and you don't have to wait until you die to walk in it.

[31:43] Now, I'm gonna pause here because I just know I don't want this to just stay as an idea in your head. That walk down the hall, the kid getting out of bed in the dark to go find his dad already has a name in the Christian life. It's prayer. Going to find your Father is what prayer is. Pray without ceasing is how this happens. It's a day by day, moment by moment decision to live in God's presence at His right hand, holding His hand and walking through every one of the circumstances of your day, throughout your whole day, and throughout your whole life. Going to find your Father. You get up, you go to where He is, and you tell Him what's really going on. My kids don't do it with a script, and you don't need one either. If you want a simple way to actually sit with God this week and walk with God this week instead of just thinking about it, I made a free prayer journal. It's called the Heaven on Earth Prayer Journal. The link is in the description. It is a gentle, daily way to meet with God. That is the one safe move, and the journal is one really helpful tool

[32:34] that might be able to help you make that choice more often. So picture where this path lets you out. You got up, you walked the hall, you found your Father, and He has walked you back out the other side, and the ground under your feet is a garden. I wanna camp out here for a while because this is the stretch of the Christian life that is often not described if you think that the Gospel is just only reducible to rescue from sin and eternal life when you die. Again, we're told an awful lot about what we're saved from, but barely at all about what we're saved for. David has a word for the safe place, the, the, the place on the other side of the one safe path. In Psalm 18:19, David says, "He," that is God, "brought me out into a broad place. He rescued me because He delighted in me." The Hebrew word for broad place there is merḥāb, and it comes from a root that just means wide. It's really fun to say.

[33:21] A roomy place. He brought me out into a broad area, a place with some elbow room. It's not the most common word, really. It shows up only, like, six times or something like that in the Old Testament, and four of those times, it's rescue language. Somebody was in a tight spot, and God brought him out into the open. Psalm 118 says the same thing in, in one breath. Your Bible reads, "Out of my distress, I called on Yahweh. Yahweh answered me and set me free." In Hebrew, the distress is a narrow place, and the answer comes in the broad place. Narrow going in, wide coming out. In Tsuro, the pocket was the narrow place where every tile ran to the edge, and you lost. The merḥāb is the place where the edges are so far off you can essentially forget they exist if there are edges to this thing at all. And read the reason David gives for all of this extra space, because He delighted in me. The room is a gift from a father who enjoys you. He likes having you around, so He gives you space to live in with

[34:12] Him. I'm calling this space a garden on purpose because I could have picked a field or a meadow or any other number of metaphors. I, I used to give, uh, discussions with people or have discussions with people decision-making and the will of God being like a parking lot or something, right? But the garden is actually the Bible's own favorite picture for being with God. The story opens with God walking in one, calling out for His kids. When Israel built God a house, the temple, and the tabernacle really even dating all the way back to, you know, the middle chapters of Exodus, they covered the inside of it with garden carvings so that walking in felt like walking back toward Eden and presence with God in the safe place. And the book closes in a garden city with a tree of life in the middle of the street again. So when I tell you that the Christian life is a return to garden life here and now, I'm using the Bible's own address for the place where you live close to God, and you walk in by finding Him.

[35:02] The first thing I want you to see in this garden is just how much of it is yours. Genesis 2 describes every tree in the place as beautiful to look at and good for food. And then God speaks, and the first time the Bible says He commanded anyone, it's a permission. You may surely eat of every tree of the garden. Every tree. One is off-limits, the one that looked like all the others, and we've already walked through that path with you. Everything else is dinner. It's, it's available for you, and it's good, and it's pleasing, and it's pleasing to look at. The ratio here is the killer, right? The, the proportion is what I want you to get down into your bones, because it's really easy to get this backwards. One tree, one failure point was the edge. The garden was everything else. So picture the edge. Bordering this garden is a briar, and the briar is called sin. You can't go in there.

[35:49] It'll shred you up. That's what a briar does. It tears your skin, it catches your clothes, and the farther in you push, the harder it is to get back out. That's the edge of the board. You can't go there. That's not where you belong. I'm gonna call it a briar because I think that is the exact right amount of respect to give to it. It's real, it's at the edge, and it hurts. And the entire garden inside that edge has one sign hanging over it. Everywhere that is not the briar inside the garden is called freedom. It has a nice sign over all of it, labeling it freedom. And Jesus hung that sign himself in the same story we've been living in. The elder brother is standing in the field, angry, and his father comes out to him, and the sentence after the pleading, the entire point here, he says, "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours." All that is mine is yours. That man stood in the field for years with every tree already deeded to him, and never once sat down and ate.

[36:41] The fruit was his the entire time, he just never believed the sign saying that he was free to enjoy it. Paul says the same thing in 1 Corinthians 10:23 in words that sound almost reckless. He says, "All things are lawful." The Greek is exestin, and it means it is permitted. It is allowed. You are free to do this thing. Some Bibles print that as a slogan Paul is quoting back to the Corinthians, and that's a fair way to read it, but notice what Paul does with it either way. He agrees with the permission and then adds a second question to it. And I'm gonna hold the second question open for a minute because it's the next thing growing in this garden. Permission first, exestin. You're free to do whatever is not sin. And then Paul tells Timothy how to pick and enjoy the fruit. In 1 Timothy 4, he's angry at a group of teachers who were forbidding marriage and forbidding certain foods, and he calls that kind of teaching demonic, which is strong language for a rule book, if it were if it were such a thing.

[37:28] But then he says, "Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the Word of God and prayer." The word for thanksgiving there is eucharistia. You already know that word because the Church took it and gave it to the communion table in the Eucharist. The same word for the bread and the cup where you remember Jesus is the word Paul uses for how you receive a plate of food. And that's a whole other conversation. I've done a nice long video about why that was actually a meal, but I digress. I've already rabbit-holed enough, I think. But, but what he says it does is he says it makes the thing holy. A sandwich received with eucharistia is a holy sandwich. So the line between a worldly pleasure and a holy one in this garden runs through one thing. Did you turn to your Father and say thank you for that thing? Again, as long as it's not sin, but my goodness, that's why I'm gonna say this part out loud. If I can eat and drink and do everything to the glory of God

[38:16] in this way, then boy, I had better be eating and drinking and doing everything to the glory of God. You can enjoy a sunrise. I can enjoy a walk outside. You can enjoy really good music. I can do anything I'm free to do and give God glory for it and thank Him for His goodness in it. Going to the gym, which is right across the street here, a glass of cold water. I'll be fair to Paul because that verse about eating and drinking to God's glory is in a paragraph about meat from the market and the conscience of the guy eating next to you and wanting to be in love. But the ground Paul puts under it is, "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." And the sentence right before it is about giving thanks. The glory in do all to the glory of God is a thank you with your mouth full of something good, even if somebody else thinks it's sinful. Now, out of love for them, maybe you don't eat the thing so that they don't stumble, between you and God, your conscience is clear with that thing.

[39:09] and now we get to what might be my favorite part here. Every tree in this garden is a tile that stays on the board. While you're in here with Him, you can't really lose because every move is a good move. Pick the sunrise. Pick the walk. Pick the hard conversation that you've been putting off with a friend. Pick rest. Thank Him for whichever one you picked. The losing paths are way out at the edge in the briar, and when you're walking with your Father, you're not near the briar. The only way the thorns come back into play is if you drift. You stop walking with Him. You wander toward the hedge. The old paths open back up in front of you. The old fear comes with them, and even then the move is the same one it was in the pocket. Come back to Him first. Find your dad. And again, He's probably come out of the house already, and you don't have to go find Him. You just turn around, repent, turn around, and He's right there waiting for you. And then He brings you back to the garden, and every tree is yours again.

[39:56] Now, the second question Paul asked, he says, "All things are lawful," but then, "Not all things are helpful." The uh, the Greek here is sympherei, and it means it does you good. It works toward your good. It carries you somewhere better. So Paul leaves the permission standing. He said it. He meant it. But then he sets a second thing beside it, and the two of them together are the sentence that I'm, I'm, I'm really hoping we'll be able to grasp here. You're free to do whatever is not sin, but not all you're free to do is wise for you to do. So we've got freedom, but there's a subset of the things you're free to do that are wise for you to do. Wisdom in this garden is the light. Some of the garden is full of sun. Some of it is in the shade. You generally want to be in the light because you can see what you're doing there. You can see what you're planting and where the roots are going. But a plant growing in the shade isn't sinning. It's just not thriving in the way that it could be. This is so important for so many people.

[40:46] Missing wisdom isn't necessarily sin. The shade is still inside the garden. It's still a long way from the briar. I'm free to get a job at the 7-Eleven down the road and work the graveyard shift. There's nothing sinful in that choice. Is it the most wise choice for me, given my career aspirations and what I'm working on? Probably not, but it's not sinful to do something like that. The Hebrew word for wisdom is ḥokmāh. It's a craftsman's word. In Exodus 31, God fills a man named Bezalel with ḥokmāh, and the thing he's filled with it for is for cutting stone, working with gold, and carving wood for the tabernacle. Wisdom there is skill, know-how, hands that have done the thing enough times to do it well. I think that might change, uh, the way you ask for wisdom. A skill is built. You get ḥokmāh the way a carpenter gets it, by cutting a few boards wrong first, and then by learning to cut along the grain of the wood

[41:35] instead of against it. That's what living wisely is, living along the grain of the universe the way God designed it to function. You can feel the grain. You learn it by working the wood. The preacher, again, maybe Solomon, maybe not, he saw this, too. The same man that built himself a garden and found smoke in his hands because there was nothing that he could hold onto and there was no joy in it. In chapter 11 of Ecclesiastes, he's been watching farmers, and he says, "He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap. The man who waits for certainty never plants." Then he gives his advice. "In the morning, sow your seed, and at evening, withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good." Both alike may be good. You should read that slowly if you've got a decision sitting in front of you right now. The job or the you know, this job or the other job. The move or staying put.

[42:23] The preacher's answer is that you might be choosing between two good trees, and the way to find out is to plant. Plant in the morning. Plant again at night. Let God decide which one grows. Make a decision. Pray about it. Go forward knowing you're free to do anything that is not sin. Consider wisdom, get the advice of counsel, and pray that the Spirit gives you guidance, but you might be freely choosing between two good options. This is where I, I, I wanna try to another... There's another thing that, you know, this could set people free, really, because it's where sin and foolishness get confused, and that confusion is what keeps you frozen. Sin is outright wrong. Foolishness just leads to bad outcomes, outcomes you won't enjoy, that aren't as good for you as they could be. They are different things. Take money, because money is where I, you know, I can see this pretty easily. There's no verse that tells you how much to put into savings this month. You can be foolish with money in two opposite directions.

[43:12] You can spend it like water with no thought for next month or next year, or you can go the other way and get so penny-pinching and stingy, so set on earning and keeping, that every other priority in your life falls out of balance and out of whack. Both of those are foolish. Both of them are the shade. Neither of them is the briar. You're free to do many things that are not good for you, and they are not yet sin, which means that God's usual will for your life, so to speak, is a road, and the road has a width to it. You can walk the left side or the right side and still be on the road. You can take the job and have it go badly and be standing right in the middle of God's will while it goes badly. In this garden, you have permission to risk. Failure here, as long as you don't leave the presence of your Father, is tuition. It's how ḥokmāh gets built into your hands.

[44:00] Fail often. Fail greatly even in pursuit of something good, and your Father will be walking next to you through every one of those steps, and the next cut will be closer to the grain. You'll gain wisdom. So stand in the light when you can see it, and when you find out later that you planted in the shade, you've learned something about this garden, and nobody's gonna shred you up for that. The third thing, sometimes rarely, you'll find one spot in this garden with your name on it. It's clear that it was labeled just for you. We might call that revelation. I wanna be careful with this one because it's the one that can get turned into a hunt, so let me show you what it looks like when it's real. 1 Samuel chapter 3 is a scene at night. An old priest named Eli is lying down, and his eyes have grown dim, and the lamp in God's house hasn't gone out yet, and Samuel was lying down nearby. The chapter actually starts in a really interesting way. The word of Yahweh was rare in these days. No vision had broken forth, or there was no frequent vision, depending on how

[44:50] you translate it. The word rare here is yāqār, and it means rare and precious at the same time, the way a jewel is precious because there are so few of them. One word carrying both of those meanings. God speaking out loud at this time to a person was a yāqār thing. And then God speaks to the boy, and the boy does what a kid does in the dark. He gets up and runs to the old man's bed. "Here I am, for you called me." Three times. The text even says Samuel did not yet know the Lord. Samuel did not know, did not know who Yahweh was yet. The boy has no idea what's happening to him, and it still finds him. Eli finally understands and sends him back to answer. Eli perceived that Yahweh had called the boy and said, "Hey, you know, Samuel, listen, go lie down. It's gonna come to pass if He calls to you that you shall say, 'Speak, Yahweh, for is listening your servant.'" The precious thing came looking for a kid and called him by name. And oh boy, this, uh, this brings to mind another, another section for me,

[45:41] one of the most remarkable passages in the entire Bible, I think. We're gonna go to the garden on the first day of the week. John is the only writer who tells you the tomb of Jesus was in a garden. And in chapter 20, Mary is standing in it weeping, and a man is standing behind her. John says she supposed him to be the gardener. That word gardener appears exactly once in the Bible right here. And the risen Jesus, in a garden, says one word to her. And Jesus says to her, "Maryam," which is her real name, Mary. And she turns to Him and says, "Rabboni," teacher, great teacher. Earlier, earlier, earlier in the same gospel, He said the shepherd calls His own sheep by name, and this is what that sounds like. One word, and she has herself back, and she has Him back. He gives you back your own name in relationship with Himself. That's revelation. yāqār, rare, precious, spoken by someone who knows what to call you. The boy didn't go hunting for it.

[46:29] Mary didn't have to decode it. It came to them in the dark and said their names. So if you've been standing in the garden with a clipboard, going tree to tree, looking for the secret sign that tells you which one God wants you to eat from and which one has your name on it while the fruit on all of them goes soft, I think that you've got the third thing confused with some secret plan. What it really is, is a father who every so often puts a hand on your shoulder and says your name and steers you on the path He wants you to take. He knows how to get your attention. You will not miss it. And I know that this puts me outside the way that a lot of churches teach it, so let me show you the verse that they teach it from. Jeremiah 29:11 was one of the most engaged verses in the world on the Bible app in 2025, and it deserves to be loved. You know how it starts, I'm sure. "I know the plans I have for you," and all that. But read verse 10, the one right before it. "When 70 years are completed for Babylon," and every you in verse 11 is a y'all, by the way.

[47:17] The letter was written to people in exile on a 70-year clock. It is a wonderful promise, and you can lean your full weight on it as one of God's people because He keeps His word to His people. But if you read it for what it says, it will hold you. If you read it as a hidden answer key for your next decision, it It will drive you out of your mind because there was never an answer key in it. Paul uses the rare word in another passage, I would say, I think, I think it's Acts 16. He has a plan to preach in Asia, and the text says he was forbidden by the Holy Spirit, which is wild in another video all in its own right. But he makes another plan, goes to Bithynia, and the Spirit of Jesus didn't allow that either. Then at night, a vision appeared to Paul in the night. A man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, "Come over to Macedonia and help us." Paul was moving the whole time. He made a wise plan, got told no, made another wise plan, got told no again, and then God redirected a man who was already walking to go

[48:07] to Macedonia instead. You can't redirect somebody who's standing still. He was still making decisions when God redirected his course, and he did not make it subtle. One, uh, check, uh, interesting detail, might be relevant, might not be, probably is. Those night words in Acts, Paul gets night guidance four times, and three of those times open with, "Do not be afraid or take courage." When your father does say your name in the dark, the first thing out of his mouth is comfort. I've watched sincere people freeze in the middle of this garden, so afraid of eating from the wrong tree that they don't eat anything at all, trying so hard to be faithful that they can't even take a step. And I'll tell you who that suits just fine, God's enemy. A frozen Christian plants nothing. A frozen Christian doesn't take the job, doesn't make the call, doesn't marry the girl, doesn't start the thing, and calls all that standing still obedience. It's a kid refusing to eat because he can't believe his father really did

[48:56] mean every tree, and you're not gonna live the kind of life that others will look at and say, "My God, he knows something I don't. I want to know the Father he knows." So that's the garden. Let me walk the edges of it once more so you can see it from above. There's a briar at the edge called sin, and it's gonna shred you to pieces, and you're nowhere near it while you're walking with Him. Everything inside that edge is freedom, every tree yours, received with eucharistia, with thanksgiving. Across the garden, there's light, and the light is wisdom, ḥokmāh, a skill you build by planting, and the shade is still a long way from the thorns. And every so often, rarely, yāqār, there's a spot with your name on it, and the Gardener will say your name Himself. You can't really lose in here. The only way out is to drift back toward the edge, and the one safe move is the same move that it always was. Come back to your Father first.

[49:44] Reach out to Him. He's waiting for you to turn from the thing that's gonna take you off the board. He offers you His hand, and He walks you back to the garden, where you're free to do any number of good and beautiful things at His side with Him as your Father, giving thanks all the while and enjoying the fullness of life that's yours at His side. So let's go full circle again, and let's talk about what that does to the two thoughts that you've been carrying around. One says, "What if God has one right answer and I pick the wrong one?" The other says, "Why can't I just try harder?" Those were never two problems. Hopefully, you can see that now. They get the same first move, the one safe move. Get out of bed, you leave the situation you're in, and you go find your Father before you do anything about the tile in your hand. The order is the point. He comes first, and the decision and the temptation both wait their turn. I think that's how we untie the knot in your stomach.

[50:34] I think the knot was there because you believed one wrong tile could end the game. You pictured God at the edge of the board waiting to see if you'd miss, arms crossed, disapprovingly expecting you to fail. But you've seen the board now. Inside the garden, a wrong guess is just being in the shade, and the shade is still a long way off from the briar, from sin. You can plant in the shade, find out later, and still be His kid standing in His garden with Him next to you. That's what a braver decision is made of. And the lighter conscience comes from the same place. The briar is still real, and it's still at the edge, but when you're walking with Him, you're in the middle of the garden with the fruit. A conscience doesn't have much to do out there except say thank you. I can tell you what the path looks like from the other side because I live here most of the time now, and it's good. You get to read the Bible because it connects you with the God who loves you and died for you and wants to rescue you and heal you. The have to drops off somewhere in the walk down the hall.

[51:24] You get to avoid sin rather than you have to avoid sin because you know it damages you, it damages other people, and it damages your connection to that God who loves you. The scrupulous weight of all of the shouldn'ts that are weighing you down, should do this, should not do this, it can just fall right off of your shoulders. And what's left is a person who doesn't want to hurt the people he loves or the Father who runs toward him. Sin not only starts to look wrong, it starts to look stupid because you can finally see what it costs you. You, you can learn to get intoxicated by the feeling of being accepted in the Beloved. I mean that word intoxicated. Being loved by Him changes how the garden feels. You can get to where you want that feeling more than you want the thing at the edge where the briar is. It's a skill.

[52:10] Wisdom is always a skill, and I think it's a skill we all need to cultivate more and more. But you build it the way any skill gets built. You keep looking for your Father. You keep walking down the hall, and you keep finding Him there with an outstretched arm, ready to hold your hand and walk with you back into the garden. I believe that for a reason. The truth is that I was actually... I was abused as a child, and I was first exposed to inappropriate images, use the softer version of this in case there are any kids watching this, when I was about eight years old. Learning to be accepted in the Beloved is the only thing that actually made a difference. I've wanted for a long time to be the kind of Christian whose choices matter, and I think that you have, too. That's what the sign hunting was underneath. You wanted your choices to, to count for something, so you were terrified of making the wrong one. The garden gives you the thing you wanted and takes the terror out of it.

[52:56] Your choices are real. God hasn't scripted them. He isn't grading them against some hidden key of whether you missed His will or not. An ordinary life is a million tiny choices. What to eat, what to say at the door, whether to take the call, whether to rest, which job to take, who to marry. Every one of them is a tile that stays on the board when you're walking with Him. He handed you the choosing on purpose. He does want you to make choices. Did you know that? And you pick up each tile the way you pick up the sandwich. In that same letter, the, to the Thessalonians, Paul says, "This is the will of God," one more time. Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. So when Paul tells you plainly what God's will is in one letter, he says it twice. Once it's about your body, once it's about your gratitude. You spent years hunting for the will of God inside of a job offer, and Paul says it's a thank you. eucharistia, every tree received with thanks.

[53:45] The preacher said the same thing ultimately. Eat your bread with joy because God has already approved of what you do. So picture some ordinary morning in the middle of your week. You wake up, and before you've graded yourself on how you did yesterday, you go find him. A few honest sentences like a kid at a bedroom door. Then you walk out into the day with a sign over your head that says freedom and your right hand in the hand of your father walking at your side. You drink your coffee and you thank him for it. The decision is still sitting there and you look at it in the light and you plant something and you let him decide what grows. The old temptation shows up around three in the afternoon the way it sometimes does and you recognize it for what it is, a thorn sticking out at the briar that's at the edge of the garden and you turn around and go find your father instead of fighting the hedge or trying not to think about the hedge.

[54:31] And the day keeps going with him in it, with a thousand good trees in it and the edge of the board, you find yourself in a place where it's a long way off. That's the life on the other side of this one path. It starts with a walk down the hall and the hall is shorter than you think and your father is actually running towards you with his arms outstretched looking for you. If you want that walk to be the first thing you do each morning, give it a page. Grab the free prayer journal and give this a place to land. The link's below. But make a habit, make a way of life of getting out of bed and going to find your father. The garden is open. He's in it. His hands are extended and the broad place with all the elbow room is waiting for you to live your life every second of it wandering through all the good things that are available for you as a father's son or father's daughter. Because there's an awful lot more to why you were saved than just what you were saved from.

[55:19] The real power, the day-to-day, the really good stuff is all about what you've been saved for. And what you've been saved for is eternal life face-to-face with a father who loves you and rescued you and wants life everlasting for you. And it starts right now in the garden. So go find your dad.