Episode 4 - Walking Boldly in Imperfect Faith

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Welcome to another episode of Guilt-Free Faith, where those of us of little faith gather to discuss our commonalities, our differences, and seek for a way to improve our walk on a daily basis.

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For today's lesson, we're going to continue on the theme of boldness.

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A few verses to inspire us.

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The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.

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Proverbs 28.1.

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And now, lord, look upon their threats and grant to thy servants to speak thy word with all boldness.

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Acts 4.29.

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Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication.

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To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints and also for me, and opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel.

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Ephesians 6, 18 and 19.

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Jeremiah was a very young man who was given a very big job.

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God told him that he had been called as a prophet to the nations.

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He was to be a mouthpiece for God.

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The thought of it frightened Jeremiah and he began to make all kinds of excuses about why he could not do what God was asking.

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He was looking at himself and he needed to look at God.

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He was also looking at people and wondering what they would think and do if he took the bold step God was encouraging him to take In answer to Jeremiah's fearful comments.

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In answer to Jeremiah's fearful comments, god told him to stop talking and just do what he was telling him to do.

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God said be not afraid of them, of their faces, for I am with you to deliver you.

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Jeremiah 1.8.

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Jeremiah gets the same speech that Joshua got.

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Don't look at the circumstances, just remember that I am with you and that is all you need.

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I am with you and that is all you need.

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Jeremiah was feeling the same fear that one little five-year-old boy experienced the day his mother asked him to go into the kitchen pantry and get her a can of tomato soup.

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He didn't want to go in alone.

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It's dark in there and I'm scared.

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She asked again and he persisted.

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Finally, she said it's okay, jesus will be in there with you.

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Johnny walked hesitantly to the door and slowly opened it.

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He peeked inside, saw it was dark and started to leave when, all at once, an idea came and he said Jesus, if you're in there, would you hand me that can of tomato soup?

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Toward the end of Jeremiah 1, god tells the prophet that if he continues to be afraid, running instead of confronting that, he would permit him to be overcome, that he would permit him to be overcome.

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Remember that God wants us to face things and not run from them.

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Whatever you run from will always be waiting for you somewhere else.

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Our strength to conquer is found in pressing forward with God.

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The Lord told Jeremiah in the final verse of chapter 1 that the people would fight against him, but they would not prevail.

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For one simple reason I am with you.

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It is interesting to note that Jeremiah was warned that there would be a fight, but even in that he was not to be afraid because in the end he would have the victory.

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Like Jeremiah, we must come to understand that, even through opposition to our efforts, god is with us, many times actually fighting the battle on our behalf.

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We must become bold.

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Even with opposition confronting us, we must not back down.

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Yes, sometimes there will be a fight, but God equips us to handle these outcomes.

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Stop avoiding action and embrace the mysteries of our Lord's protection.

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Many of us face the problem of wanting fellowship, wanting teaching, wanting guidance, in an atmosphere of no judgment, in an atmosphere of practicality, in an atmosphere of how we can apply a can-do attitude to what the Bible offers us as aspirational goals and directives, ones that we will surely fall short of, but we move towards because we are pressing on to learn about God, learn about faith and, let's face it, just get help with our lives.

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All of the things that we're coping with, we're facing, we're seeking counsel on, and perhaps even more importantly, the things that we're keeping to ourselves, the things that we're embarrassed by or have been taught, don't belong in the conversation with other Christians or in the institutional church.

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As for myself, jimmy James Johnson, this is what drove me to seek out supplemental or really alternative guidance, interpretation, alternative guidance, interpretation, counsel, advice, wisdom.

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One's humanity obviously and incontrovertibly flawed, is not really up for discussion, or if it is, it becomes yet another tired, disheartening repetition of how our performance figures into God's love for us, his aid, his forgiveness.

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And what really turns me off about that is that the way I read the New Testament, despite the fact that, indeed, there are many passages that we could argue back and forth in terms of is God really trying to say that we are free strictly by faith, and is faith indeed just a gift of the Holy Spirit, not something that we have to strive for?

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I choose to believe that, if God exists and is worthy of our praise and our confidence, he must be intimately familiar with our fallen, imperfect state.

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There are no surprises under the sun in terms of what God sees within our hearts and indeed the evils, the sins which spew forth from that heart from time to time and in various degrees From time to time and in various degrees.

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So I'm hoping that you're here because you too want someone just to really be down to earth and realistic about who we are and really how shitty we are in many regards.

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If we were to really line up a checklist of the properties of God and his exhortations and his examples and his commandments, we would check so few of those boxes over the course of our lives.

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So where are we to go when we just want to talk to some fellow strugglers?

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I'm not even going to say believers, I'm saying people are just struggling, you're just struggling out there in life and of course you want some help, of course you want a relationship with a higher power.

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Of course you want what may have been presented to you as an easy, as an easy gentle, reassuring love as a child.

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Perhaps that's the view that you were given Only later in life, as disappointments came and God was nowhere to be found.

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Did you perhaps begin questioning the ideal portrait of God that was imprinted upon you as a child?

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And then you may have went on to find that, oh, I go to church, I go to the house of the Lord, and nobody really go to church.

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I go to the house of the Lord and nobody really wants to hear me out.

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And what do I mean?

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I mean they don't want to hear about how I can't live up to a certain standard.

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They don't want to hear about how much I struggle and how much I still need God to come through.

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In spite of that struggling, in spite of that sin, in spite of having incorrigible, in spite of being uncomfortably candid about our thoughts and feelings and plans, for so many of us, walking into the church is uncomfortable, antithetical to who we really are and what we are actually in search of.

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For many of us, walking into the church is a process of donning a mask, a mask of deception.

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A mask of deception, a mask of private shame and embarrassment, a mask of unending, infinite joy in thanksgiving, cross that threshold that, even though something powerful is happening, perhaps it's in our lives, perhaps it's in the lives of others we've known or known of, perhaps it's just the influence of the biblical texts themselves.

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We have a sense that something important is missing from our lives and from our being, something that's leaving us vulnerable to life's hardships, perhaps in a way that's not necessary, but it's hard to realize those benefits when we can't be ourselves, when we can't dress like we would, we can't talk like we would, we can't complain and bitch and carp like we would, we can't doubt or dismiss or detract what's being said by our fellow congregants or the pastor, whoever's in charge of the teaching.

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So here we are, presented with this frequently unresolvable conflict between the reality of simply being human, vulnerability, and the despair and the foolishness and the greed and lust that comprises our hearts and minds to more of a degree than with which we're comfortable.

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And yet we know we don't control those things.

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We don't control our feelings or our thoughts.

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We can try, we can try, and we try to guide them or reshape them or pattern new habits, and that could be through therapy, it could be through prayer, meditation, but the fact remains here we are trapped in the muck and mire of the world, including ourselves and outside of us, and that's the problem.

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Outside of us.

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We're told oh, there's a God that loves you and he just loves you for you just as you are.

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Come unto him just as you are, and that's a very attractive message, you know, in terms of sales and marketing.

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Isn't that what we all want?

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Because what we really want is that from everybody.

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Imagine a world in which you could be yourself and be true to yourself and slip up and fall and trip and stumble through all of the phases of your life, through all of the phases of your life, and people just loved you all the same and didn't have a negative word for you and stood beside you as you continued to move forward and realize the goals that are important to you.

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We want that so much.

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This really uncomfortable dichotomy between who we are and who we are told God needs us to be in order to receive his love.

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So many of us are stuck in between in such need and, at the same time, we have a mountain of faulty beliefs about why we don't deserve to be within the circle of God's love, how we don't deserve to wield any of God's gifts or powers, that we are absent from the inner circle where God imbues those with the power to heal or to prosper, or to make it through the day, or to be a better friend, or father, son or daughter, daughter, we are on one side of a mountain that stands in the way between us and Christ's unconditional acceptance, and what I want to say about that is that mountain that's been placed in our path is not the work of God.

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So whose work is it?

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Well, I don't know.

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I mean, maybe it's like the devil's work, you know, maybe it's the work of just the imperfection of human beings who just can't seem to let go of this idea of performance-driven spirituality.

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But a mountain is erected between us and God's unfailing character of kindness and generosity and comfort, and that's really sad.

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And for millions and millions and millions of us, it's really an existential sadness that we can't feel God in our daily lives, that we can't rely upon him in the ways that he would have us, that he would have us, and not because that's the way he set it out or that that's the necessity of the situation, but because we miseducate one another on the matter.

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See, we forget that while God may be perfect, we are not that.

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So anytime we are speaking or trying to model, or trying to explain or teach the gospel.

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We fail in that we fail to convey that perfect love and acceptance, because, as human beings, we are taught from the very beginning of our lives that that is not how life works.

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You cannot simply go on doing whatever you want to do and have the powers that be around you, whether that's your parents, a spouse, a manager, manager they're not going to let you just go ahead and do whatever you want, without any consequences and without sometimes coming against you.

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They can't but help do that.

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None of us can escape how the imperfections of the human spirit just go round and round in a circle where we get frustrated, we get judgmental, we get picky, a policing of our spiritual grounds, always watching and waiting for the dropping of the ball, whether that's within ourselves or by others.

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Guilt-free faith is a place where we just take it for granted that we're all fucked up.

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We take it for granted and we embrace it.

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And what's the benefit of embracing it?

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Well, it allows you to embrace others.

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It allows you to embrace others.

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It allows you to stay beside others during their mess-ups or confusions or dastardly plans.

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See, the world is full of us that fall short of sainthood, and so guilt-free faith is about.

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How can we live guilt-free in our own imperfection and through which, find out more about our walk, find out more about God.

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Find out more about our walk, find out more about God, find out more about how he's trying to manifest in our lives or connect with us.

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I'm committed to doing that in an environment where we have nothing to be ashamed of.

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I would argue that we could use many, many, many more environments that are characterized by that type of acceptance and realism, because what I'm talking about is not at all fantastical.

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We are these broken people.

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Some of us may show up in church on Sunday looking better, sounding better than others, saying the right things, volunteering at the right events, but that doesn't change the fact All of us are broken, all of us have secrets, all of us wish our lives were better and often think about gee.

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Could there be something I'm doing to activate God in these areas of my life in which I find myself struggling, despairing?

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I believe there's an answer to that, and the answer to that is fellowship.

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It's hearing other people's voices and experiences.

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It's not taking anything off the table, not taking any discussion off the table.

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No topic off the table, no plea for help off the table.

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Let's keep everything on the table, let's pretend as if God really sent his son to forgive us in our entirety, past, present and future, so that we can truly come together and communicate in an atmosphere of joy, of celebration, of brotherhood and sisterhood, a place where we can truly relax about our shortcomings and just talk about them plainly, to break down the artificial barrier Between quote normal life or normal people or normal problems and the spiritual, the sanctified, the set aside.

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Because when we're trying to invite God into our lives, because when we're trying to invite God into our lives, we need help in so many areas that the idea of somehow slicing and dicing what God can or will or won't intervene in not only is it impractical but it's fundamentally dishonest.

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We can't separate who we are and what we do and what we think and what we feel and what we believe from our daily lives and then put on this mask and come into a building one day a week for an hour, somehow tune out everything that we've been through during that week and have a meaningful relationship with God, with Christ, with the Holy Spirit.

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By doing that, or accepting the teaching or encouragement to do that, or accepting the teaching or encouragement to do that.

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We've already missed out on the soothing balm of the Holy Spirit that we so desperately need applied to our heart by the time Sunday rolls around, because indeed we needed it applied every single day and Sunday, the morning, the noon and the evening we're in so much need.

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It's frightening.

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It's frightening to be in such a place of powerlessness and when you're in with that day, with what you're bringing to the conversation with him, no, we're in very great need and in order to have those needs fulfilled, we need to remove all the guardrails, all the limitations, all the fines and penalties around us, being able to be honest with the Lord.

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Honest with the Lord and hopefully at least with some subset of His children, regardless of who they are Young, old, rich, poor, every background, every step in their faith.

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People from other faiths, step in their faith.

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People from other faiths.

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We don't have anything to fear by congregating with other human beings.

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Quite to the contrary, we have so much to learn, we have so much to share in with others.

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But by the time the institutional church is through with you, too many of us are so compartmentalized that not only do we have 20 boxes that our fellow congregants need to check.

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But even amongst those, we feel comfortable, with the people that look like us or sound like us or dress like us or drive in the same vehicles that we do.

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Even amongst them, we frequently are not free to have the heartfelt conversations that we so desperately desire.

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So let's just throw off all of those shackles, let's just throw off the rules and just listen to one another and you may say Jimmy, jimmy, james Johnson, hey, jimmy, how do I do that?

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You're talking to me on the podcast?

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Call in.

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If you go to the website at Guilt-Free Faith, there's a way that you can call in and leave a message or send a note and then, if we have time, I'll be glad to address that on air.

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Or, if it doesn't fit into today's lesson, perhaps the next one.

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Or if it doesn't fit into today's lesson, perhaps the next one.

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But whatever you say is going to contribute magnificently to this conversation.

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No matter what you say and I know that's not something we're used to hearing in the spiritual world or in the Christian world the Christian world is about censorship, and I'm throwing off those shackles completely.

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You don't need to call in or make a comment or pose a question.

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That's censored, in fact, to the degree that you can express yourself in a way that's very candid.

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That's going to be of help to all of us, because that's going to encourage all of us.

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Help to all of us, because that's going to encourage all of us.

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That's going to allow all of us to feel more welcome at the table.

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So that's doing me a favor as much as anyone else.

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So please do, please get in touch, leave a message right now or send this, forward this podcast on to a friend or family or somebody could use this and have them send a message in.

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There's nothing that I'm above talking about with you, so please do make use of it.

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You're important.

Episode 4 - Walking Boldly in Imperfect Faith

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Episode 4 - Walking Boldly in Imperfect Faith

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