On The Road - Episode 1 - Living By God's Grace

God Centered Theology

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00:18

Hello and welcome to On the Road with Andy Cain. It's good to be with you this morning.

00:24

I started to think, you know, every day now that school's started back, I have this time here after I drop off my kid at the local educational institution and head on over to work.

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So I said, you know, be a good time just to cover some things that are on my mind.

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Maybe cover some questions someone may have or just talk about fun with post -millennialism or some random stuff like that.

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This isn't really going to be a super polished or necessarily professional setup here.

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This is really just me riding to work with an iPhone in my hand, voice recorder pro loaded up, hit the start button and we'll just kind of see what happens.

01:13

You may hear background noises. You may hear noises of cars.

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You may hear all sorts of things and I don't really know. So usually when

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I do one of these things, I'm really kind of really keen on making sure everything sounds really great and make sure there's a whole lot of things.

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Make sure I don't go um, um, um a lot. But this one is just raw. It's just me. It's just good old

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Andy Cain in the US of A in the year of our Lord 2024, riding to work, wishing

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I didn't have to go to work, wishing I could, you know, do things like this all the time, but sadly that's not the reality.

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So, but what's on my mind today? Well, the grace of God is on my mind because it is by the grace of God that we live, we breathe and we move everything that we have and everything that we are is by the grace of God.

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That tagline there, everything that we have and everything that we are is by the grace of God has been with me for many years since I started what was originally by his grace back in 2016.

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Now we have rebranded and, and changed things recently.

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And what I noticed is that I kept talking about how we needed to be God centered and I would say it a lot in my preaching and just talking to people, you know, and talk about how we need to be

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God centered and that starts with God reasons down to man and part of being God centered is starting with scripture, ending with scripture, seeing not what man thinks, but what

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God has said. So I've rebranded and that's, you know, I wanted to make sure that the ministry and what

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I was putting out was very consistent with the overall theme of what it is I try to teach. And that's really the crux of the matter, but it doesn't mean we can't talk about the grace of God here and there because it is true.

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Everything that we have and everything that we are is by the grace of God. And if you're like me and you have a diagnosed mental health disorder, disease, whatever you want to call it, mine being a major depressive disorder, you learn to live by the grace of God pretty quickly.

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And one of the things, you know, I want to cover in light of the grace of God is that if you are struggling with mental health, whether it's diagnosed or just, you know, just a period of trial or struggle, it's real.

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It's not made up. It's not fake. It's not whatever it is the idiots online call it.

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And you need to be taking care of it, especially if you're at a diagnosable level, which only your doctor can tell you that.

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And it takes medication and therapy, both of those together to tackle it.

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But one of the things we find is that the grace of God gives us strength to get through everything that we need to, but also taking the diagnosable part to the side, just mental health in general takes the grace of God as we grow in maturity and just are able to deal with things better, to make better choices, and as our maturity in Christ grows, our ability to handle things grow.

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Just as an example, if you work for a narcissist, you learn certain things like how to starve the narcissist, how to not react to the narcissist, how to do all these little things you have to do and be strong mentally to navigate those waters.

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If you have a tough job or a tough home situation, there's all sorts of things you can learn.

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Just learning to navigate ministry, how to be functional in the church.

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There's all sorts of things that are important for you to have strong mental health.

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It's not just our, you know, nobody questions physical health. If you had cancer, nobody would blame you for going and getting treatment.

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If you are working out to lose weight or become, you know, better in shape, nobody looks at you and says, well, that's fake.

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It's just in your mind that you're fat. Like, oh, no, actually I need to lose a little weight. So with mental health, we still, even though we've made great progress, great progress, there's a lot of things

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I'm seeing that I like. There's still a whole lot of issues where you have the old guard, you know, especially the kind that I grew up in, you don't have enough faith.

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I'm like, yeah, clearly. But then there's still those out there, you see it on Twitter and I've sort of learned to just let a lot of it go.

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It's difficult. One of the areas that I've had to grow and mature in with my mental health is just because an idiot says something doesn't mean you have to respond to it.

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It's very difficult not to. But also when you respond, both to idiots and non -idiots, sometimes you just respond to someone you disagree with, you know, learning how to do it.

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And because some people, and I used to be this way a long time ago, you get sort of a dopamine hit off of unleashing your opinion in an angry way.

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I've had to learn that it's better to be controlled and be calm and be respectful.

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I've grown in this way to where now you would think, okay, well now you respond to a bunch of things and just are very nice.

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Like, no, actually I just don't respond to much anything at all. It's better for me just not to say anything than to say something because it's very difficult to couch that sometimes.

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You have to learn to just control your body and control your emotions and control your mind.

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That's what mental health is about. It's about bringing your mind under control to where it's functioning correctly in the right way.

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And so I would encourage you to make sure you're growing in that manner and you can do so by the grace of God.

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I've seen the grace of God through my life so many times and how it's helped me through hard times.

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It's helped me grow, helped me in my ability to lead and my ability to teach and just my overall outlook on life.

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And, you know, you may be asking, well, why now? Why is it that now you are putting so much energy and time into God -centered theology whereas there was a long period there where I weren't doing hardly anything?

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Well, a lot of it, there was a lot of mental struggles. I mean, I went through having to leave my first church, which is,

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I mean, I don't say this in a mean way or anything, but I have to be, call it like I see it, it's a dying church.

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And there was power groups and all these things. And because of that, there was a lot of stress on me in the two and a half years

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I was there. I've had other things I've dealt with, but I've come through and over this five -year period. And so it was better,

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I think, for me just to kind of be not out there as much. I've had a few things I've tried and tried to put things out a few times and every time

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I'd stop and I was like, you know, it just doesn't feel right. Well, now it does. I feel like I'm in the right place mentally for it, the right place physically for it.

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I feel like I'm doing it for the right reasons. I feel like, you know, and this podcast

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On The Road, you know, thoughts with Andy as I travel from school to work is going to be very therapeutic probably for me in some ways.

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It might be therapeutic for you as well, just the talk here. But I feel like now is the time and I have a great gumption and ambition to accomplish a lot.

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And so, you know, the thing that changed my mind, I was actually in therapy with my wonderful, wonderful, loving and caring

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Christian therapist. And I kept talking about how, you know, I don't understand why any other churches would want me.

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How come every time I interview it doesn't work out? And, you know, here it is. I'm in what I guess you would say is the prime of my life.

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I'm 41 and years are just going by and I feel like I'm wasting so much time. And she challenged me to change that thinking to, well, you know, you can't control if a church will ever call you.

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But you can control how involved you in at your local church. And you also can control how you use your time and whether it's actually being wasted.

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And so I said, you know, that's right. I'm the one sitting back, wasting my years and wasting time.

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I need to get off of my lazy tail and get to work. I mean,

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I talk about my philosophy of ministry, which you can find on the about page at GodCenteredTheology .com

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about start small, do something, then build and grow. I was missing number two.

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I wasn't doing anything. You have to do something before you can build it, grow it and add to it.

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And so I was like, well, maybe I should get busy. And so here we are, GodCenteredTheology .com

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and we have Daily Bites of God's Word, Adventures with Calvinist Man. We're going to have this little daily podcast, which is going to be audio only on the road again.

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Can't wait to get on the road again, you know, on the road with ADK. And so, you know, what are we going to cover every day?

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I don't know. Whatever's on my mind could be a question that people want answered. Could be just something that pops in my head.

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It could be 10 minutes. This one's running about 10 minutes. It could be five minutes. I don't know. It'll be whatever it is every day.

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So for August 28th, the year 2024 of our Lord, God is on the throne.

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God is sovereign. Jesus Christ is ruling. He's building his kingdom. I'm a part of it.

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If you place faith in Christ, you're a part of it. So I need to play my part in the kingdom. And I feel like this is my part in the kingdom to be

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God -centered, God -honoring, and God -glorifying in every possible way I can. So remember, everything that we have, everything that we are is by the grace of God.