Transcript

0:00
Hi, welcome to the Christian point with Zack and Linda. And today we’ll talk about digging a deep well for a stronger godly foundation for the years ahead. So sack is something to think about. What if someone asked you what do you need to tear down and build up new for a more fruitful, godly tomorrow? Well, today I’m with my husband, Zack McConnell, and we’re here in Texas. Hey, everybody, my jumbo day lilies are blooming next to the pool right now. I love them. And we’ve got some roses blooming too. And I still have that white cotton flying in the air with those annoying cottonwoods on our property. And we’re talking about building a better tomorrow makes me think about cutting those cottonwoods down and planting more mighty oak trees, and how that relates to our Christian walk. So stay with us as we had this discussion on the Christian point.

0:56
Welcome to the Christian point podcast, where we are all about growing your relationship with God. As lifelong Christian believers, your hosts Zack and Linda McConnell explore topics that affect your world. Together. They are relearning and redirecting our path as we walk through struggles hangups, sins and purpose. The Christian point is a lively discussion that will help equip you with tools provide focus and encouragement from a biblical perspective. Always remember Christ is the point. Now here are your hosts, Zach and Linda.

1:32
Welcome to the Christian point. Thanks for listening today, guys. Well, we look at God’s word, and we take today’s hot topics, and we’re going to be talking about a topic of what issues do you need to bury in order to grow stronger roots in Christ, and we all have room to grow. And we need to spend more time looking for the log in our own eye rather than judging the splinter and other people’s lives. And that’s really hard for some people, and they don’t want to give up a bad habit. Say they’re overeating or drunkenness, or pride and arrogance or giving up control. There’s anger issues, jealousy, judging others, cheating, greed, self indulgence, materialism line, are you just scrolling on social media?

2:23
That’s a really long list, Linda, it is.

2:24
And then you have to think about worrying. So often, so many of us worry. And that’s really not putting our faith in Christ. So the list just goes on. And like we can’t sit here and act like we don’t have issues. And these issues actually are stopping our journey to become more Christ like, and in Matthew seven, three, verse five, it says, Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? And how can you say to your brother, let me take the speck out of your eye, when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, please take the plank out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. And God has so much more in store for your life. Christ wants to give you more but until you rid yourself of these roadblocks, your sin will just keep on popping up and causing problems. And God is up there patiently waiting for you to change. He wants to enlarge your territory. He wants to give you more blessings.

3:29
You know Linda, I’m excited about this lesson because we’re talking about self examination. What do I need to do to grow so when we’re going to talk about these deep wells in our lives we need to work on compared to the wishing wells you know wishing wells are just shallow, right? They are even a shallow well, if you dig a shallow well for water in the summertime, it’s probably going to run dry. Exactly. We’ve had that problem we have and but dig digging big deep wells, those stay and you have water and you have something that you can depend upon. So we have to compare this to our lives with God. There’s a quote by Charles Spurgeon Spurgeon writes, trials teach us what we are. They dig up the soil, they let us see what we’re made of. And you know, that’s excellent. In Matthew 724 through 27, Jesus states that those who hear his words and do them are wise builders, it but that’s a problem. A lot of people hear the words but they don’t do them. And they have built their homes on a rock solid foundation when you do that. So the winds can come in blow the rains come floods come, but the house stands firm, right? So God’s telling us that he puts us through these trials Absolutely. To build us up and make us stronger. You know, that foundation. It’ll get us through anything that comes our way. And sometimes in life, you just feel like things are overwhelming you and it just as to when you come out the other side, and you will, when you do, you will be stronger and have a better relationship and assure foundation that that we have built up, we’ve, we’ve dug up our soil, we rid ourselves of bad habits, and we’re bringing ourselves into a stronger future with Christ. And we can withstand whatever comes our way, a solid foundation, and a deep will, based upon God will for our lives produces a steadfast faith, and allows us then to be an example to others.

5:32
Absolutely. We’re all kind of a work in progress. But we really do need to look within ourselves and figure that out, what is it that we can really work on? To bring us a more Christ like, life? And so thinking about this, what trials are you thinking about sack that you would benefit from digging up?

5:52
I’ve got I’ve got one in mind, because there’s unfortunately, too many to choose from. But, you know, first, before I do that, I want to say that you know, life and I’ve used this example before Linda, life is like a roller coaster, it is up and down, you know, you’ll hit a high, you’ll plunge to a low, you’ll come back up to a high. And if you’re not expecting that it can make life really difficult. And guys, what I want you to hear is, life is not going to be perfect all the time, right? Not always going to be happy. It’s not always going to be that upside that we’re hoping for. There is downside. And if we get a mindset that life is a roller coaster, it’s going up and down. In and we know that it seems like it’s a lot easier to navigate.

6:38
And he said we’d have trials. It was very clear on that.

6:41
Absolutely. But you asked for an example, it makes me think back when you know, after college, we got married a few years after we get college. And we had a trial that happened. And we had gotten we were in the furniture business. And I was working with my dad. He was my business partner. He’s my mentor. My dad was my best friend. And we were in a high end furniture store with designer furniture in the economy just was going down and tanking. And no one was buying this real expensive furniture. And so we worked all the time. Oh, yeah. We were working, you know, six days a week. And then guess what, guys? We decided, oh, we need to be open seven days a week. That’s how we’ll make it. So we began to open on Sunday. And we were open on Sunday mornings are not Sunday morning, but Sunday right after lunch. But what that did, it created an excuse of why I can’t go to church. It was because well, I’ve got to go work at the store. Right? You know, and that’s what I’ve got to do to make this thing work. So, you know, I, we weren’t going to church. And it’s really easy to convince yourself if you’re not going to church, because work is getting in the way. And so the live chat challenging trial is that we turn to God and ask for wisdom and direction. And God. God heard me ask for that excavation of my life. And I’m like two weeks later, no, God, I changed my mind. I shouldn’t use the word excavate. I mean, to use the word, landscape, something a little easier. And, you know, once you to accessorize my life stopped digging up the yucky things that are in my life that I needed to get rid of, so that I could concentrate more fully on him.

8:26
Absolutely. And yeah, at that time, we were young, that we felt like God was closing those doors. And it really was no matter how hard we tried, we all were trying, we just couldn’t pull the business out of this downward spiral. And I remember talking about closing the store, and your dad had put up collateral for the business to start. Well then that brought on all these feelings of guilt from the rest of us. And the gallery rep of the furniture line was putting on pressure that the sales needed to increase and we needed to pay more in advertising. But we knew that we were in a recession. And it was so clear we were in a recession. So it just felt like God was allowing that door to be closed. And that is a really hard trial to walk through. For those of y’all who have gone through that it is not easy. And it was a really tough time in our life. We were just really turned with lots of prayers, asking God for wisdom, asking God to take away our sins so that we could do more for him. And, you know, we all went through this process together.

9:29
You know, it’s not very fun when you go through it, Linda, but it’s rewarding. After several years looking back on it. It’s actually a lot of our writings and teaching have come from some of the hardest moments in our lives. You know, James 1234, my brethren, count it all but joy, that’s a hard word to do. counted all but joy that you fall into various trials, knowing that testing of your faith produces patience, right, but let patients habbits perfect work, and that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. So, you know, we’re not supposed to react in a fit of rage and anger and walk through trials to help us develop patience and reliance on God’s will for our lives. You know, lately, let me kind of give you an old school illustration of this, I think about this is preparing a lot to build a house on. And if any of you guys see a big neighborhood getting ready to be put in, what happens is you’ll see the bulldozers come out, and they just wipe out everything. There’s all these trees and vines and ditches and humps and bumps. And what do they want to do, they want to get rid of it, so that they can go in and build a proper foundation. So the ground, you know, gets the water to run off properly pull those big boulders out, yeah, they have to get, you know, boulders and rocks and just all kinds of junk, they have to get out of the way, so that they can build a great house with a good foundation that will stand the test of time. And so as we’re building our relationship with God, somehow we kind of want to do it on our terms of, Well, God, I like all these things that I have in my life, I want to have a relationship with you. But I really don’t want to get rid of these things that I’m doing same thinking, that could be a stumbling block in having that close relationship where I’m reliant on you. And it could be getting rid of things that eat up your time, because you need to have more time with God. It could be thing, getting things that eat up your resources. It could be sinful things that you’re indulging in.

11:38
You’re just ignoring it, but just sure do see the other people sitting right. It’s obvious, like oh, look at that person. They’re angry. Oh, there’s road rage, whatever it might be. It’s very obvious when you witness things. But it’s hard to know what you’re doing. That’s right.

11:52
And you want to pull those things up. Right. And so that’s what we had to do. We have to clear it out. We have to come bulldoze those things out. So we have the proper foundation to build for a strong relationship with God.

12:04
Right? Well, if you think about it, in Jesus’s greatest moment, that was his most difficult moment. And here’s the situation. There’s a lot of people right now that and they’re out there, and they’re really discouraged right now. And can you imagine how discouraged the disciples were, when they saw Jesus hanging on that cross that had just been devastated to be awful to be there, that he was going to bring in a whole new kingdom, and they were just not processing what was going to happen. But the truth is, they’re actually seeing the answers to some of their prayers. And they’ve asked God to go into their life and create capacity to give them soil, that they can actually grow things that glorify God. And they kind of expected him to maybe leave some of the weeds for a while. So it kind of looked like maybe something was implies. But when God comes along, he usually kind of strips all of it down, and brings it down to a barren place. And he goes after the pestilence, and he goes after the things that are going to kill your future. So there’s a lot of people right now that are in such a trial. And in first Peter Oh, 416 through seven it says, In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if you need the that you will then grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ. So I know you feel the same way. And while you’re in that trial, and you’re killing all those weeds, you can’t see the good yet. So up front, we don’t see anything right.

13:51
You know, they’re not seeing anything. It looks like everybody else is prospering. Isn’t that how it feels right? When you’re going through your trials, you feel like everybody else is living the great life except for you. Right? Everyone else is fruitful. Everybody else is growing right now. And they’re like, I’m just a pile of dirt. Maybe, maybe I’m smoothed out dirt, but I’m still just a pile of dirt. And you know, I’ve got to go through some progress. I’ve got to get some rocks cleared up. But if I’m not seeing any fruit, and there’s a lot of people that are really discouraged about that, will their seasons in life, kind of like that roller coaster I was talking to you about earlier, and their seasons to plant and seasons to reap. So before you plant, I should say you have to excavate. And like we said, We’ve got to get rid of the rocks, the stumps. And so that’s an easy metaphor, but we have to look what are those rocks and stumps in our lives? Right, you know, is it is it greed? Is it sinfulness is it just, you know, I like to watch TV too much. You know, sometime I’ve just got to stop doing that in Spend more time with an on my relationship with God. You know, I remembered when I turned 50, I prayed a prayer that while I said, God, I feel like I’m at halftime, you know, 50 years old now. And, and when you go in the locker room in most games, you know, they’re one and the second half. And that’s more important than the first. And I said, God, it means in the next several years are the important, most important part years of my life. And so I said, if there’s anything in my life, I said, I need to root it out, cut it out, shake it out, burn it out. And I pray that prayer each night, but it’s a challenge to grow. And it’s a challenge to self X excavate things. And it’s hard to do that process. And in this past year, I’ve had several health issues. I ended up in the hospital. Yeah. And COVID affected our senior homecare business and our church, he was going through some trials, and as well, so yeah, the last couple of years, it’s been walking through some trials, right. And I remember, it’s almost like the Holy Spirit brought up to me to remember what you asked me to do to enlarge your territory, let God remove whatever sin I needed to be removed, to do more for God. I was like, Yeah, but, you know, I didn’t think I was gonna go through all that. And it was very scary in difficult during this past year. And now I’m reaping from those trials that I went through from those prayers that I prayed. So it’s not fun when you’re going through it at the least. Even the anger that I had, for some people, I had to forgive them. And the really tough one is to start praying for them. And the really tough one is to start asking for God’s blessings, to come on those people that I was angry with, in hurt with, absolutely, with all the hurt and destruction they brought. And you know, that was a tough one for me to do to pray for God’s blessings on them, and for them to have a great and fruitful life. But you know, what I know, it’s what God wanted me to do. In now, almost a year later, after all this started, I feel much better. And this pruning was just what we need for me and in the other people around me,

17:19
right? It’s so hard to walk through these trials. And, you know, we have a lot of people right now. And they’re in a position where they want results. But they really don’t want that process. That process is hard, right? And the truth is, you just can’t avoid the process. And we’re in a time when people need to go back to church, and they need to go back to their foundations, they need to go back to their roots, they need to go back to what is spiritual, and you really need to read your Bible daily. And if you’re not doing that, that’s something that can really benefit you. Yes, it is. And there are some tough questions that the world needs to face and you know, things like, Okay, someone says, What do I do my 17 year old daughter’s having sex with her boyfriend, you know, and what do you think I should do? Should I get her on birth control? Should I get her tested? What should I do? And then there’s other questions like a wife is lusting after another guy? And how about a friend who loves to gossip, and every time you’re around them, all they want to do is talk trash about other people. And what’s so interesting, all these stories are in the Bible. And just go back to what is the Bible say about this, and you don’t facilitate fornication, you flee fornication, and you refrain from gossip. And it’s so clear in the Bible, of what we’re supposed to do with our lives. And sometimes, our friends really don’t want to

18:46
listen to the Bible makes things more difficult.

18:49
Exactly. They’re not ready for that pruning. And they may come to you, and they want you to be spiritual. They might say, Pray for me, but they’re just going to twist the words of the Bible to suit the struggles that they’re ignoring. And with these difficult life questions, you need to be kind, do not be judgmental. But when they ask you reply, scripturally, right, and really our culture right now they want us to wish people well, rather than have a deep foundation based on God’s will. And if you look at the word of God, all the scriptures are inspired by God.

19:26
That’s right. That’s correct. You know, Linda, you said something I thought was really important. You said don’t be judgmental. That’s a problem that we can we really have to face. If somebody is going through a problem and they’re having problems with their kids or their spouse or, or whatever it might be, and something’s happening wrong with them or their lives. You can’t be judgmental, you’ve got to love on those people. And we don’t want to have that, you know, church lady, or church man, you know, type attitude. We’re we’re better than you are. We have you know, we handle our thing so much better. That’s just we all sin, absolutely single one of us. And we’ve

20:05
done a Bible to that we all said, Yes, it is. And we don’t

20:09
want to, we don’t want to judge people, we just need to love on them, help them. And, you know, help them work through this. So Okay, back to where we were you were talking about All Scripture is inspired by God. In fact, Second Timothy 316, through 17. All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped in every good work. That’s right. So the Bible is useful to us, teaching us what’s true, teaching us what’s right. It’s teaching us what’s correct. And that’s what we do to help others. We help bring them along. We don’t judge them, we help them. And I just really believe Linda as the as I’m getting older, how important it is to be grounded in the Word of God. If you look at Hebrews two, one, it says, we must pay very close attention to the things we heard, lest we drift away, absolutely drifting, never happens knowingly, right? It happens unknowingly, right? We don’t realize it’s going on. You know, I remember as a kid fishing, we’d be on a boat. And I was so excited about the fish, or what’s going on at one time, I remember the boat. 30 minutes later, I looked up, and I didn’t even recognize where we were, because we had drifted during that entire time. Right. And I had no knowledge in didn’t even see it. And that happens in our lives will drift away from from God, and His plan for us, and we don’t even see it. So that’s why we have to have something that we look at that it’s a fixed foundation for us on God so we can help ourselves to stay on course,

21:54
right. And it’s be so easy with the bombardment of information that the world is spewing at us constantly. And I think I heard something like in the 70s, you got 250 bits of information thrown at you per day. And now it’s like 6000 bits of information thrown at you a day. So what the what the world is throwing at us, we’ve got to go to that place where we have the word of God speaking into our hearts, or otherwise our hearts can become corrupted.

22:23
I think it’s a great point. We’re just being bombarded by the world in negative things all the time. We have no clue. We have no knowledge of it. So it’s very important that we make conscious decisions of surrounding our things that keep our minds on God, if you’re driving down the road in your car, have it on a Christian radio station. Oh, absolutely.

22:41
I love that that really uplifts me and Christian music. I love that too.

22:45
It makes a difference tournament Christian podcast. Absolutely. If it’s ours, hey, the Christian point, there you go or somebody else’s. Just keep yourself immersed. Talk to your friends that are Christians, during your day, anything to keep that focus. And you know, I think there’s so much pressure right now for Christian leaders, just to wish people well and say, I’m not going to preach the hard truth, I’m not going to do something might dig up some things that you don’t want me to dig up. So I don’t want to annoy someone. And you know, earlier this week, I had a conversation with our friends about Christ culture. And they said to me that Jesus always made it easy to come to him, but hard to stay. And Jesus said, Come, everybody come. But then he said, living by the scriptures, it’s going to bring a sower, between you and your children, and you and your parents. And like you went through all of these dynamics, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood and continually ask for repentance. And in we’ve made that easy. Well, it’s if we’re not careful, as leaders, when to this is what I keep hearing in my spirit. They’ve healed the wounds of my people, superficially, you know, right. And how they did that is to heal them superficially by saying peace, peace, everything’s great. And God loves you don’t worry about a thing, when in reality, God does love you. But there’s some very dangerous points right now in our lives, that we need to be corrected or altered on where we’re going to end up at a decimal destination that we don’t want to find ourselves in,

24:24
right? I mean, Christ said, You need to put on your cross every day and bear this. He didn’t say, you’re going to have this plush life, or everything’s going to go your way. That’s not what he said at all. We did a bear our cross for Him each and every day. And it is a daily mission that we all have to when we wake up. How are we going to be more Christ like and I love that you said that because I feel like the same scripture in my heart and it’s also about building lives with untempered mortar and in a steel 30 Tene 10 through 15, the prophet Ezekiel use those words symbolically to describe the flimsy spiritual work of the false prophets of Israel. And Ezekiel declares that the false prophets are like foxes in the desert who obtain their prey with great subtlety and prevent repentance by flattering promises, and false predictions much like the false prophets of today. And yeah, building lies with untempered mortar, that when the pressures of life come down on people, everything they’ve invested in everything they’ve had given their strength to their energy to their time, their attention to, well, it’s all going to come crashing down. And most Christians, right now they’re willing to settle with being well wished, right? Instead of doing what they need to do.

25:50
Yeah, if you look at what Jesus said, this goes right along with what you’re saying, Linda, he said that the man hears my words, and we have to dig deep, and lay the foundation, foundation laying, it’s not very attractive. I remember watching high rise, high rise crews in Dallas, they were excavating down there digging this huge deep hole in the ground to lay a proper foundation that knew that for maybe nine months, and you’d see nothing other than this deep hole, then all of a sudden, in two months, this massive high rise would be shooting up. And we’re like, well, they spent nine months on the foundation two months and getting the structure up in the air. And that’s because the foundation is what holds the building up. And when you look at those storms, it’ll hit you during your life. And they will that roller coaster again, God says, Where Where will your building be? How strong will it be? What can you endure, if a strong hits or little a strong storm hits our little shack that’s built on the rock or on a good foundation that checks stands in if the same storm hits a big, gorgeous, beautiful house and it falls? So the thing is, it’s not what we look like in the good times. It’s what we look like in the bad times. How do we look? And how do we stand with God after the bad times? That’s what really matters,

27:15
right? And how do we grow with it? And do you think it’s fair to say that a lot of Christians are settling with being well wished rather than getting what they actually need to become deep wells. And that’s why I’m so thankful for this message, because I really believe it’s going to cause some people’s roots to go down deep and need to be and need to be the wells of living water to serve other people. And right now we have a whole generation that really needs us to be that. Hey, guys, we really thank you for listening to the show today. And Zach, I’m gonna thank everybody for joining us. We are so grateful for all of y’all. And we hope this message spoke to your heart. We’d love to hear from you. You can write a review, subscribe or share this podcast through Apple podcast, Google podcasts. Or you can go to the Christian point.com. And thank you so much for listening to the Christian point with Zack and Linda, and let us know your thoughts by leaving a review. And you could subscribe, you can share these episodes.

28:12
That’s right guys, go out and share these with a friend. Send them over to a friend help us get the word about this podcast to others,

28:20
right. We would love that that helps us grow. You can check out our website, the Christian point.com You can make a donation that helps spread the message as well. And we encourage you to leave your testimony and give us a review and we would love to pray over you. So let us know your prayer requests and God’s blessings and peace be with you. And remember until next time, Christ is the point.

28:42
Thanks for listening to the Christian point. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and connect with us on Instagram Facebook, or visit us on the web at Deep Christian point.com. If you enjoyed the show, please share it with your friends on social media. Until next time, always remember Christ is the point

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