Interview with Chad Bird

Hi, this is Jimmy, and on Theocast today, the guys had the opportunity to interview Chad Byrd. You may know Chad from the 1517 Network or from the popular podcast, 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. Chad graciously shares his story with us about sin, failure, repentance, and ultimately how Christ truly saved his life.

We talk a little law gospel, theology of glory versus theology of the cross, and what happens when we qualify repentance in the Christian life. It was a great interview, and we're excited to share it with you.

Enjoy. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Our hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and myself, Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota.

Chad Bird, Night Driving, and the Story Behind the Book

We have a fun episode today because we get to spend some time with a dear friend and brother who is on the line with us, Chad Byrd. And so, Chad, welcome to the podcast today. Hey, it's great to be here.

Thanks for having me on the show.

I've been looking forward to it. Yeah, it's great to have you here. Yeah, we scheduled this, I think, back in May or maybe even April, and we're not able to get to it. And so I'm glad we finally did. A little bit about Chad before we get on with this conversation, just for those of you that may not know who Chad is, Chad is now a part of the 1517 Network.

For those of you that have not been there, you can go to chadbyrd .com, and it'll shoot you over to their website, and more information about Chad and his books and information is there. Chad actually holds a master's degree from Concordia Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College, and he is probably most well-known to most of our listeners for his podcast, 40 Minutes in the Old Testament, which he hosts that with Daniel Emory Price.

And Chad has written several books, one that we're going to talk about today, but Night Driving, Upside Down Spirituality, and Your God is Too Glorious. And we're going to hopefully get him back on the podcast to interview him for those other ones.

But today, we're going to do it on Night Driving. A little bit of information about Chad that most of you may not know that back when Ryan and Jeremy and Byron were not able to continue with Theocast, I wasn't quite sure what to do and was sitting at my desk, and I think I had just read the last chapter of Night Driving.

So I texted Chad and said, Hey, can I talk to you? Which I think you were in the midst of unloading a truck at the time. And Chad convinced me not to shut down Theocast, which I was super thankful for.

And so I contribute Chad and Jimmy for keeping Jimmy Bueller, keeping the boat alive. So to those two men, I say thank you. You're very welcome. Yeah. Glad you guys are rocking and rolling on. I mean, the way I look at it, there's a lot of voices in the church today.

There's not a whole lot of voices that focus upon Christ-centered and grace-centered perspectives. So the last thing we need to do is lose a voice like that. So glad you guys are still going. Yeah. Absolutely.

So Chad, tell us where you're currently residing at the moment. I'm living in a little town, well, I guess mid-sized town right outside San Antonio, Texas called New Braunfels, kind of a river town. We get inundated with tourists in the summertime because we have a big water park here and rivers where people like to float and drink too much beer and have all that kind of fun.

Yeah. Yeah. So kind of South Texas, a little ways from Austin is where we're at. Yeah. We were having a conversation before trying to figure out what part of Texas you were from. I don't think any of us got it right.

Did we? I said San Antonio.

Oh, did you? That's what I said. Let the record show. Yeah, that's right. Two of us are right and the other one was John. That's right. Oh, ouch. Well, Texas is a big place.

It's easy to get lost here. Oh, that's right. So I have family in Texas now, so I get to go up there quite a bit. So I'll have to swing by and see you one of these times. How far are you from Austin? Oh, we're close.

We're like about an hour, I guess, from Austin, depending on how terrible the traffic is. But yeah, if you had a clear road, you could be there in half an hour. So we're pretty close. Awesome. Very good.

Very good. Well, what we wanted to do, Chad, is give you the opportunity to tell us a little bit about yourself, which is kind of what the book Night Driving is about. And let the listener kind of get maybe a 30 second to a minute overview of the book, which is kind of about your understanding of going from, well, I don't want to, I'll let you tell the story.

But so if you don't mind, kind of set us up and then we've got several thoughts that we just kind of want to interact with you on the book, things that we think are super helpful for our listeners. And then in the members podcast, we're going to give away actually one of your books for free.

We're going to raffle it off to one of our members for those of you that are over there. But the actual official title of the book is Night Driving Notes from a Prodigal Soul. So Chad, tell us a little bit more about the book.

Yeah. So some people have called it my spiritual autobiography, which is not a term that I had even thought of before I started writing, but I guess it sort of is like that. Basically what it tells the story of is where I was at about 15 years ago when I decided that I would completely blow up my life.

I was where I wanted to be as far as my vocation goes, I was married, had kids, and all these gifts that I had, I ruined, just destroyed through my own sinfulness. And I was in a very deep, dark place for a long time after that, for about 10 years, just a place of rebellion and anger and bitterness, and just trying to figure out who I was and where I was going and what the hell God was doing in my life.

And so I went from being a seminary professor and pastor to a truck driver in the oil fields of the Texas Panhandle. That's where it gets the name Night Driving. And so it kind of tells the story of the beginning and then the destruction and the darkness that followed and how after a long period of repentance and grappling with the darkness and being reshaped and reformed by Christ, he brought me out into the light of absolution and freedom.

And it's written for people who maybe are in the midst of something like that or are helping somebody who's in the midst of something like that to help them on their own journey to living in the freedom that we have in Christ.

So it's sort of, I guess you could say, my version of the prodigal son, that journey to the distant country and what it's like to feed pigs, if you will, and to hunger for home and what it's like to be welcomed home by that forgiving father.

The Prodigal Son and Forgiveness Before Our Return

Yeah. Before I turn it over to Justin, I will say that as I was reading your book again, Chad, I think it absolutely applies to the self-righteous person who's grown up and thinks that they've never had a failure in their life because you do confront people who try and present their own self-righteousness before the father and they're so blind.

They are the prodigal and they're blind to it and they don't even know it. So I would encourage if you think, well, I've never blown up my life, so Chad's book won't be helpful for me. The exact opposite, I think, is true.

So, yeah, right. Agree. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're all there in one way or another. It doesn't matter if we're the older son or the younger son or somebody in between. All of us, when we look at ourselves outside of Christ, well, then we have no righteousness that we can place before God.

In fact, any righteousness we have is, like Isaiah says, is just a filthy rag. So, yeah, it's applicable across the board. And that's the reason I wrote it. It's for everybody, no matter where you happen to be in the story itself.

Yeah. Well, Chad, appreciate you being on with us today, man. And there's a number of places that we could start and I'm sure we're going to go here, there and everywhere with a number of the things that you write in the book.

I might kick us off with this. You write, I think it's in the second chapter. You're talking about the aftermath of your life blowing up, as you put it. You write about loading FedEx trucks and you say this, I built a wall of atonement with those boxes you were stacking.

You know, I will be forgiven, I thought, when I am sufficiently sorry for what I've done, I will bleed out on the altar of shame, I will relive in my mind again and again, the mistakes I've made. If I hate myself enough for my actions, maybe God will love me.

And I know for us here at Theocast, we're pretty convinced that we all tend to think and feel that way. And for many of us, I think our experiences in the church have only reinforced that kind of thinking.

And so I know for myself personally, I'd love to hear you just riff on that a little bit, your perspective on that, that, man, maybe if I hate myself enough and if I do enough, God will love me.

Yeah, it's basically atonement by means of an adequate repentance, if you will. So we take Christ off the cross and we put our repentance up there and kind of a mannequin that we've stuffed with our regrets and with our promises to reform our lives and with just how terrible we feel about what we've done and our shame and everything else.

So we take Christ off the cross. We put this mannequin that's stuffed with all of these inner emotions and these outward promises for renewal and we're striving harder next time. And our sincerity and all of this stuff, all of these human efforts and human emotions.

And the idea is, you know, basically that the sacrifice of Christ was not adequate to atone for our sins. And really what we need is to contribute a little bit more to that, that if I am, that if I want God to accept me again, well, I need to demonstrate to him that I'm really sorry enough for him to accept me.

And, and it's a, you know, it's basically saying of God that God will not be pleased until he gets something from us, whether that be repentance or amendment of behavior or whatever it might be. So his love and his acceptance and his atonement for us is contingent upon some contribution that we might make.

Uh, and I think that's a, it's a very common idea of repentance that's out there in the church because it, I mean, it basically accords with a lot of our human experience, right? If I want somebody to, to forgive me for something I've done to them, well, then I had to, I have to convince them that I'm really sorry for what I've done.

And then, then once they see that, they'll be like, okay, well, I forgive you. But until I do that, they're not going to forgive me. So we, we kind of translate that those human interactions we have with regard to asking for forgiveness for something we've done to another person, we translate that into the vertical dimension and we say to God, well, God, just like everybody else, and he's not going to be happy with me.

He's not going to love me again until I grovel before him and show him that I'm, you know, truly, sincerely, completely repentant for, for what I've done. So it's a, yeah, it's basically, uh, taking Christ off the cross and putting my repentance up there instead.

The Father Runs to the Prodigal

That's good. Yeah. In your, in chapter four, when you're talking about the prodigal son, I found this, this paragraph helpful and I'd love for you to kind of expound on it. It says in the, in the parable of a prodigal, the father had forgiven his son long before his child decided to make the journey home.

He ran toward the prodigal with the absolution dancing upon his lips, but while, quote, but while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion and ran and embraced him and kissed him.

Let every one of these verbs be written in gold, saw, felt, ran, embrace, and kissed. And then later, later down the paragraph, you say nothing, not even abject contrition merits the favor of God. The father's love and acceptance are absolutely free.

Yeah. You know, that's a, it's one of the most comforting parts of that, uh, that particular parable, if not one of the most comforting parts of the whole new Testament, this, uh, image of the father running out to meet us.

And of course the prodigal, he was all mixed up, you know, even at that point, I don't think it was until he saw his father running toward him and loving him and embracing him that he actually realized that he didn't need to work his way back into the father's good pleasure that the father loved him, uh, before he left and when he was gone and now upon his return.

So when we, when we come to God, we don't come to someone who needs to be consent to forgive us. We don't need to come to a God who's just waiting until we demonstrate some kind of adequate repentance before he loves us, he comes to us and he comes to us with a forgiveness that doesn't waver.

It's not as if one day he's more willing to forgive us than another. It's forgiveness is constant because it's based upon the, the atonement of Christ, which never wavers, never goes, never goes away.

So yeah, that, that particular part of the, of the parable is, uh, it's just such a, such water to the weary soul because it, uh, it assures us that when we come to God, we don't, we don't have to wonder, is he going to forgive me?

Or am I going to be good enough for him to forgive me? What am I, what am I still going to need to do in order for God to forgive me? All of that was decided on the cross because it was on the cross that all of those sins were taken care of once and for all.

Yeah, that's good.

Assurance, Repentance, and Christ’s Finished Work

Well, Chad, I'm really grateful for, uh, your work here. And I mean, I can just tell you personally, I was reading this book, Night Driving, when I was kind of on a leave of absence from my job and this was a few years ago, and I was on that leave just because, frankly, I was in this place of being spiritually exhausted.

I was really working through what's kind of known as spiritual depression. And one of the things that always haunted me was this idea of assurance. And frankly, just a little bit of my background was kind of, kind of the things that you have been saying was I just, I never felt like my repentance was sincere enough.

I never felt like my contrition was weighty enough. And so I got to chapter seven of your book, uh, where you talk about when love repents us. And I vividly remember I was sitting at my parents' house and sitting right beside the pool.

And I just remember reading this chapter and it was, I mean, honestly, to use the imagery of the pool. I mean, it was like jumping into the pool on a hot day where I was just so refreshed by something that you wrote.

Um, and specifically this, this paragraph, no wonder our hearts fill with doubts about God's forgiveness. If we're the ones doing the work of repenting, yet there are very, there are very sinners who failed lives brought about the need for repentance.

We won't necessarily fail at this endeavor too. As long as the focus remains on us, assurance of absolution or forgiveness is tenuous at best, and our doubts will always loom large. And so I'm wondering if you could just speak to that just a little bit.

Um, I just know that for us, our podcast, our ministry, we just did a live recording where we did a live Q and A. And us as guys, we were just reflecting afterwards where we, we just said how many of the questions that we received circled around this idea of assurance.

And wondering if you could one, speak to why you think so many Christians today struggle with this idea and really kind of what was the watershed moment for you to, to write a, an incredible paragraph like that?

Yeah, I, uh, well, I think the, the reason people struggle with, with that is just, I mean, it's as old as humanity itself. I mean, we're, we, we constantly assume that if, if God is going to be pleased with us, if we're going to get right with Him, then something needs to happen.

Which, which is difficult enough, but when we've screwed up big time, when we're struggling with, with guilt and shame over who we are and what we've done and we approach God, then that's just going to be accelerated this, this doubt as to whether He's going to accept us because, you know, we're these broken vessels and we've got this whole closet full of, closet full of skeletons and we're covered with scars and, and we have all of these issues.

And so we are plagued by doubt as to whether when we approach God this way, He's going to be pleased with us. And we know, I mean, we all know that when we repent, none of us are fully repentant because there's, there's, we're never doing it for completely sincere motives.

I mean, people say all the time, well, are you sorry because you did it? Or are you sorry because you got caught? Well, both. Yeah. It's like that for all of us, you know, nobody is only sorry because they did it.

They're also sorry they got caught. They're also sorry because people are going to find out. And so, yeah, there's like a million motivations for repentance and we can't, there's nothing we can do about that because we're not, we're sinful people.

And so of course we're going to have sinful motives for repenting, you know, welcome to being a sinner. That's just the way it works. So when, yeah, so when we, to think that we could offer this perfect repentance to God, it's just, it's, it's an audacious proposal because I mean, if you can offer a perfect repentance to God, well then you're not a sinner because only non sinners can do something that's perfect except the fact that all your repentance sucks.

It's, it's always going to, uh, it's never going to be, it's never going to be adequate in and of itself. It's never going to be perfect in and of itself. It's always going to be this kind of this, you know, this concoction of good motives and bad motives and sinner motives and saint motive.

It just, that's just the way, the way it is. So thank God when he offered this to him, uh, that God is like, okay, you know, but, but that's not the reason I'm forgiving you. The reason I'm forgiving you is not because of this, you know, piece of trash repentance that you offer to me.

The reason I'm forgiving you is because of my son hanging on the cross over there. That's the reason I'm forgiving you. Yeah. If I could follow up on that, you know, as far as like the repenting goes, the, that God doing the repenting, that's where the old Testament is very helpful.

That's where I got this from, because in the old Testament, there are many occurrences where God is the one who does the turning, but there's a, I don't want to get too technical, but in Hebrew, the word for return or return or repent is all the same, it's the verb shoot.

And in certain forms of Hebrew, in certain verbal forms of Hebrew, there's a, there's a form of the verb that's causative. So you take a regular verb like turn and you basically say cost turn or return, cause to return or repent, cause to repent.

In other words, to, to cause someone to turn around, to cause someone to return to God, and that's used very frequently as a reference to God as a subject. So God is the one who returns Israel. God is the one who repents Israel, brings Israel home.

So with that kind of background, you understand that, well, when it comes to repentance, who's really the actor here? Well, of course we repent, but as Isaiah says, uh, you have done all our work. So God, well, you've also done our work of repentance.

So it's God who brings us home and God who repents us and God who restores us. And what do we do? Well, we just, we simply accept his activity and faith and rejoice in the fact that he does it all out of grace for us.

That's awesome. Yeah. So basically what you're saying is there's a, yeah. So basically what you're saying is we need to repent from our repenting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. If we make this role of our repentance, you know, it's kind of like if you have a little kid, you know, and they, and they're going to make you breakfast and they bring you like this bowl of mud where you're like, Oh, thank you.

Yeah. You accept it. You know, it's mud. You love your child. And so you accept it anyway. We bring the mud of our repentance to God and God's really nice. Thank you for, thank you for this. But, uh, ultimately what he's looking to is the perfection that we have in Christ, a pointing word for us.

Law, Gospel, and the Recovery of Lament

Yeah. We're excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our website called faith versus faithfulness, a primer on rest, and we, the hosts put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

And you can get this at theocast .org slash primer. And if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us. You can do that by joining our total access membership.

That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry. And you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org.

We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

Chad, I'm going to shift gears a little bit because there's so much good stuff in your book. In chapter three, appropriately titled, Where the Hell Are You, God? You talk quite honestly about your experience and you reference the Psalms in particular, Psalm 88 and some others.

And Psalm 88 I know is one of my favorite Psalms in the Psalter along with like 73 and others, just because of their breathtaking honesty, frankly. And they're even a little bit unsettling for us at times.

And it seems that we often don't let ourselves in the church go where the writers of the Psalms often do in terms of the language that they use. And you talk about in that chapter, reading the Psalms in your truck.

And I love this language. You said, I was regularly hurling the Psalms at heaven. And I would love to hear you just talk about that, man. In terms of the Psalms, that experience, like God, where the hell are you in terms of your journey?

Yeah, I was kind of the context here. So I was, I was, I had gotten, I got my CDL and I was driving a truck in the oil field at night. So I was stuck out there at night for 10, I mean, all night long.

I'd get in, I'd go to work at 5 PM, get up at 7 AM. So I was out there all night and by myself for the most part. So I had all this time to think, which was good and bad because I had a lot to think about.

It was good in the sense that this was God's way of working on me. But as bad as this is now, I was in a really, really bad place, really dark place, and just brimming with anger at everything. Anger at myself, anger at other people, and mainly angry at God.

But I didn't know how to, I didn't know how to talk about this. I didn't really, how do you, how do you tell God that you're really, really, really pissed off at him? I mean, nobody had ever taught me how to do that.

None of the prayers that I knew were adequate to express what was going on inside me. But I did have in the cab of the truck, I had a cup of coffee, the Psalms that I carried with me. And on occasion I'd pull it out.

And the more that I began to pray the Psalms, the more they began to realize that actually here is God's gift just thrown in my lap. These were prayers from God that I could pray to God that were full of just amazingly raw emotions.

Uh, crying out to God, where are you? Have you forgotten to be gracious? You know, are you asleep? One of my favorites is when, uh, they compare God to a soldier who gets drunk and he's like trying to wake up on the battlefield, but it's just some images in the Psalms that you never hear in church.

And if you did, people would think you were blaspheming or something. Yeah. The parking lot would empty. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. So, uh, when I discovered these, I call it the language of the languishing.

These, uh, these lament Psalms in which people protest against God. They express their, their anger and, and, uh, call upon God in this very lament to hear them and to be faithful to his promises. So I, I began to discover there's something that actually still fascinates me today.

In fact, uh, uh, just this morning before we started recording, I was doing some research on a presentation I'm giving in January on the recovery of lament in the church today, which I think is, uh, is crucial to actually expressing a lot of the sorrow and the pain that we feel and reference to, to the way that we at least perceive God as God is treating us.

So anyway, the, the, the lament from the Psalms that I hurled toward heaven began to be God's way in a kind of a crazy sort of way, it began to be God's way of actually pushing me toward the path of healing because he gave me these words.

So that's one of the beautiful things about the Psalms, the Psalms are God's words to us and become our words back, back to God. And not only that, but each of the Psalms is also the prayer of Jesus. So in a, in a, in this ironic sort of way, I'm crying out to God, but God was crying out within me as well, because I'm praying in and through the person of Jesus, who is the lamentor par excellence.

So Christ joins me in my darkness. He joins me in my lament and my words become his words to, to the, to the ear of the father. So those, the laments were instrumental in kind of helping me to, to give voice to what, what was happening inside me.

The Theology of the Cross and Suffering That Reveals Us

Yeah. Yeah. I'm mindful of Charles Spurgeon and how he would say that many times believers in the midst of their struggle and pain, they, they're not going to be comforted by your words about heaven. They're not going to be comforted by your words, even about Christ's atoning work and some of those things necessarily.

But what they need in those moments sometimes is the Christ of Gethsemane. You know, in that he, he has suffered, he has known the dark night of the soul. And like you just said, I mean, the, the Psalms in their lament, they're the prayers of Christ.

Yeah. You think of Psalm, Psalm 22, I mean, how did Psalm 22 begin, right? Right. That is a lament. Yeah. So yeah, lamenting even on the cross. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's hard for some people to hear that you, the song, because when most people read the Psalms, they read it because they're trying to either find some wisdom or there's some discouragement and they read people who are in specifically David at times who are screaming at God and that's just, that's, that's foreign for people to think that there can be a broken heart of so sad and despondent that they would scream out at God and, and, and then it's recorded in scripture as being a song, a song to be sung.

Well, it's like the way that it could be described, it's almost like the, the things that we yell at, like the roofs of our cars is what the Psalmists by the inspiration of the spirit write down, you know, and, and like, it's, it's immortalized for us and yeah, like you said, it's, it's the words God gives us that we then can speak back to him in our pain and in our anguish, you know.

And a lot of people I've talked to that have gone through some, some very, very seriously traumatic situations. When they're honest, they'll say, Oh yeah, I've done that all the time. I mean, I was just screaming at God.

I was so mad. Uh, or I just, I wrote an article yesterday about this where they just wanted God to leave them alone. Based upon one of the songs, you know, just, uh, turn your face away from me that I may smile again before I am no more.

And that's the way it is. That's like no happy note of triumph at the end of the song. Just like, just leave me alone. And that people who have gone through these intense, uh, pains of life and that just brutally honest about the way that they prayed to God.

So Chad, is this a transition? So when you were first in seminary and studying, um, would you say that this, the concept of, I mean, almost everything that you've mentioned so far of repentance, looking at repentance as it's a mud pie before God.

Did this transition happen well after your time in seminary or was this something you were learning in seminary, but it didn't take root. Yeah. You know, Luther talks about the three ways that, uh, the God makes theologians a lot feel, uh, and Meditatio and Tentatio.

So about two is prayer and Meditatio is meditation. So prayer meditation, but it's a third one that I think is so crucial. It's Tentatio, uh, or in German, it's, it's the, the afflictions that we, that we endure the cross during the pain, all of the agonies of life that is the schoolroom of the theologian.

And so you can, you can learn a lot by meditation. You can learn a lot by prayer, but when it comes right down to it, there's, there's hardly any greater teacher than, than suffering under the weight of various kinds of kinds of crosses.

I mean, yeah, I, I knew a lot of this, uh, in, in, in my head. I mean, I don't kind of like this head, heart distinction, but I think it applies here. Um, I knew it, I knew this theology in my head, but I hadn't really sunk down into, into something that was, was truly kind of part of, of who I am.

It's like, it's like when you know, like you can study something theoretically, but you've actually experienced it. You really don't know it. Right. And it was kind of like that with me. I mean, I, of course I knew theology of cross, I knew three ways that God makes theologians, but honestly, I'd had a pretty easy life, you know, I'd had, you know, my, my trials and tribulations here and there, but nothing that great, nothing like I was, was yet to go through.

And so, you know, I was, was experiencing what God does with each of us in various ways. He, he kills us, you know, he stomps us down, he buries us. And then he resurrects us. So he kills and makes it wise.

He wounds and he wounds and he heals. And, uh, you come out on the other side, like Jacob, after his wrestling with God, you come on the other side, limping and you're scarred, but you're also, you're also a lot closer to where God wants you to be as he is conforming you to the image of his, of his crucified son.

And, you know, nobody wants to go through this. Nobody asked for Tentato. If they do, they're nuts. Right. Yeah. There's, there's sadistic or something. Right. Yeah. There's sadistic. Nobody, anybody, anybody like goes looking for suffering, there's something wrong with them, but you know, it's going to happen.

It's just inevitable. Uh, whether, when it's going to happen and how it's going to happen. Well, that's, that's, that's to be seen, but it's all, you know, it's always going to, going to come along. So, uh, when it, when it does, then no, God is going to be at work in us in ways that we might probably won't perceive at the time and may or may not perceive afterward, but we do know that through that crucifixion, God is going to be bringing us out into a resurrection again, because that's the way that he always works.

Seeing Ourselves by Ear, Not by Eye

Yeah. So Chad, just to kind of continue on those themes, um, I was chatting with some friends yesterday and just thinking about, I mean, just the, the difficulty of life and how life is unceasing in its hurling of negative events and what you're speaking about, just suffering.

And so kind of speak to that person who is just in that season and not necessarily perhaps from a self-inflicted wound, you know, perhaps that kind of you're talking about where, you know, you made the mistakes, you, you committed the sins, and so you're just kind of sitting within the realities of your own self, but I mean, talk to that person who is just kind of going through that season where they're just, I mean, for lack of better words, they're just pissed off, you know, they're mad, they've been hurt, they're angry, they're upset.

Uh, perhaps they're a victim of something. Um, they're, they're walking through that kind of suffering. And, and what, what would you say? How would you encourage, how would you counsel and comfort, uh, the person that's in that season?

I think the first thing that I would say to them is what, uh, one of my professors told, told us years ago, it's a, it's an image that I've never forgotten and I've passed on multiple times. And that is, if you want to see the work of God in your life, then pluck out your eyeballs and stick them in your ears.

And what he meant by that, what he meant by that is that you can't, you can't use your vision. You can't use your eyes to see what God might be doing in your life. Because most of the time you have two liars that are embedded in your face.

Those two eyes, because what you see is most of the time, not in accord with what God is actually doing, because God likes to hide behind his opposite. That's the theology of the cross. God is always hiding behind what appears to be his opposite.

And that applies in our lives when things are falling apart. So you can't look and think, oh, I can see God at work here. I can see God that wasn't there. No, for the most part, you're going to see the absence of God.

If you use your eyes, so you pluck out your eyes and put them in your ears. And by that, he meant you cling to what God says. So the way that you understand who you are and what's going on and where God is, it's not through what you see, but through what you hear.

And that's why the word is so significant, because that word is going to promise you in the midst of the darkness, that God is there, that Christ is by your side. And when it feels like he's forgotten you and turned against you, the word will say, I am with you.

I will not leave you. I will not forsake you. And when it feels like he's become your enemy, then that word will tell you that Christ is your brother and God is your father and the spirit is your comforter.

And he will never leave you, never forsake you. So that's when it becomes so crucial to understand why we live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. And that's how we see God at work is by our ear vision, by looking through our ears and understanding life and all of its stupidity and joy and everything in between, by understanding it according to what God says and by not why we see or what we feel or what we experience or anything like that, that word becomes our stability.