Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey guys, welcome back to the Certain Success Podcast, Matt and Joe.

Speaker 1: 0:07

Here and today we're talking about one of the most important things that any human needs to learn about their relationship with the Lord.

Speaker 1: 0:22

But for business owners, I think it's even heavier, because as business owners, we try to carry the world on our shoulders and if you're a business owner, you're probably also the breadwinner for your family and all that stuff, and so it's so easy for us to walk around in the mindset that all of that's on us and if we fail, if we don't perform, if we're not good enough at everything, that it's all going to fall apart and it's our responsibility.

Speaker 1: 1:01

And I know I lived a lot of my life with that mindset, that worldview, and only in recent years, in my 50s, did I really, at a soul level, start to understand that that's all God's to carry. That's all God's to carry. And you know there's a difference between understanding that in your, between your ears, and having it resonate at your soul. And it just for me, just changed everything. And Joe and I were talking about this this morning in the context of business, but it also flows over into personal and, joe, I know that you've had a lot of that. Well, you probably had it both, but you certainly were using examples in the personal side.

Speaker 2: 1:56

Yeah, from business to our personal lives, there's those moments where it's not just a speed bump, it's a giant crater and we can go crashing quickly. If we're trying to hang on from our own strength and I can't and I know you can't do it on our own we always find scripture to be calming and the absolute first place we need to go to to find that peace, and I know that I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me. But that doesn't mean that, in the midst of being hit with a storm that we didn't expect, that was the first thought that came through my mind. It's usually the third or fourth thought that comes through my mind.

Speaker 2: 2:50

You and I were talking just a minute ago and I've heard this term used before and with my wife 17, 18 years ago, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Cancer is a horrible disease and I'm not certain who said it, I'm just very familiar with it. Disease is when the body is at dis-ease, something's wrong, something's amiss, and and then here we are and you know we, we hit COVID, everyone's getting hit with COVID and my wife, who already beat cancer, now she's diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. And you just look up at God and it's like, why has she got to go through this? Up at God and was like, why has she got to go through this? And uh, just like in in our personal lives and in business, and we've we've we've had these conversations that that, that crater, that we hit that uncertain wall, whatever, whatever term you want to give it Our first knee jerk reaction is to try to take it on ourselves.

Speaker 2: 4:08

And I'll be the first one to raise my hand, matt, and say I can't do it and I don't know how anyone can do it without Christ. I just don't see how they can do it. They may pretend that they're doing it and put up a good front, but it's been through prayer, it's been through scripture, it's been my wife and I holding each other and embracing each other and holding each other's hands on the drive home from that doctor's appointment, with tears flowing off of our faces, saying, all right, here we go again, but we do it, walking with Christ, and we know that we can do all things for him, who strengthens us. It's not a thing, not a strength that we have. It's not a muscle we can go develop on our own in a gym.

Speaker 1: 5:01

It's through his word in a gym, it's, it's through his word well, and you know it it. We talked, I think, on yesterday's podcast about how, over time, you develop that muscle of okay. It's another, another challenge, another moment, another thing, and every time you go through those things, you learn a couple lessons, that it's like another layer of the same set of lessons. So you learn that it's all going to be okay, god's going to work it out. You're not going to die Like there is. You know, it's going to resolve itself and God's got a plan to bring you through it. You learn that, oh, he was walking us through this too. We're becoming something better as we walk through this together.

Speaker 1: 5:57

And I think one of the big things too, and I always think that everything's amplified for business owners because we do more, faster, bigger, all the time, and so I think it's easier to see it for me for business owners, but I feel like one everything's going great and you're running ahead and your thoughts are about a year from now or 10 years from now and about all these great things you're going to go, do and whatever. And God hits the brakes one more time and says wait a minute. I thought we were just talking about today. I thought we were going to stay focused on today, and when you hit another wall, that's the first thing that happens is well, I'm only thinking about today, Like, how do I get through today? I love the phrase the next right thing. What's the next right thing that I need to do? Cause that's all I got headspace for, um, you know, and I was telling you, joe, about, uh, my uh event business that I ran for 10 years up until COVID, and um, that ended rather catastrophically during COVID.

Speaker 1: 7:06

But that that isn't actually the story. The story is all the years that I was running it and the stress and the pressure of, you know, event contracts and you know having to fill rooms full of people in order to make a profit and you know all of the intensity of what that business was. Um, and even though I considered myself a devout Christian, even then, I ran that business. When I look back, I ran that business on my power and my effort and I never really, at a soul level, understood that oh, god's doing all of this and I'm just here for the ride, and I think that's the piece that I want people to hear. If you're listening to this, is that the faster. You're just walking in what he's doing and he's the one who's going to make it all, make it all happen, bring it all to closure or not, whatever he, whatever he has in mind, but you were never in control of it anyway, and I think it took me, unfortunately, decades to to understand that, to you to understand that.

Speaker 2: 8:32

Yeah, and here we are. You know, we. We talked about uh, age, uh, earlier in the week. Uh, where I'm at, I'm at 60 or at 56. And if we could just go back to our youth and whisper in our, in our, in the ear of the younger versions of ourselves and say, hey, when this happens, this is what you need to do. It's almost like when Marty McFly looked at his parents in Back to the Future and he's standing there. He says, hey, if your kids should ever set the carpet on fire in the house, go easy on them. You know, and and that's probably the message we should give ourselves is one go easy on yourself. Don't, don't beat yourself up. This is, this is a. This is a marathon, and there's going to be times. You know. You get to the third mile and you get a cramp. And you get through that cramp and you're like, okay, I'm doing better now. You get to the 10th mile and you're like, okay, I'm in a good cadence. You get to the 15th mile and you're like what in the hell did I decide I wanted to do a marathon for Stacey and I?

Speaker 2: 9:46

One of the first scriptures that we leaned into in our marriage going back almost 40 years ago is Jeremiah 29, 11. And I think for the majority of my early fatherhood of raising my kids and trying to be in that walk with Christ, I fully didn't understand what Jeremiah 29, 11 meant. And it's for I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future. And I can tell you that during a diagnosis of disease you're like what happened to that part about plans not to harm you. Why is that not playing in and plans to give you a hope in the future?

Speaker 2: 10:40

And I believe it was probably uh, thinking back on it, there's probably rick war who wrote Purpose Driven Life, who talks about this scripture and said, when Jeremiah wrote that, remember, he's being fed the word of God from God. And hope in the future doesn't necessarily mean our time here on earth. Our hope and future is eternal. We're going to spend trillions of years in eternity compared to the 80 years we spend here on earth. There is going to be disease, there is going to be failure, there's going to be the hard times, there's going to be the great times, there's going to be the thriving or kicking butt and taking names. But when Jeremiah is being fed the word of God and he's sharing it with you and I, that hope in the future is an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So I think early on I didn't understand that verse.

Speaker 1: 11:49

As I understand it today, yeah, when you were talking about that, I was thinking too that when you I love the examples in scripture and they're just all throughout scripture of people going through these crazy seasons, and it's decades. It's not oh, I want this fixed in the next week, right or next month. It's like decades of struggle that took them to the place that god wanted them to go to. And you know there's no way, during those decades of struggle, that they understood that it's like maintain their faith, and some of them did, some of them didn't, um, but it's like there's just no way that you can see it in the, in the present tense. And you know it's so much easier to see God in the rear view for all of us to look back.

Speaker 1: 12:47

You know, when you take somebody through an example of, you know like what are name five times that you were in an incredibly difficult situation and God showed up and saved you, and he obviously did, because you're still here, you're still listening to this and we all have those stories and in the rear view they're much easier to see. And but just being able to find a place of knowing like he's he's going to do it again, Like he's going to save me again, I'm not going to die, you know, when I don't know what, what's happening or why in this, in this weird season that you might be in when you're listening to this, but it's going to be absolutely going to be. Okay, god's got the ball. You also have to let him have the ball If you want to keep wrestling the ball away. It's going to be a difficult wrestling match.

Speaker 2: 13:44

Yeah, I think we can read several examples in the Old Testament of individuals who really wrestled with God, and if there's anything that anyone who's listening to this could take from anything that you and I are sharing right now about God, your successful business over a 10-year period, you really I mean there's not a lot of people in this world that can say that they've had a business that lasted more than a year. Most of them are gone within a year. But that entire time Christ was with you and I know that you acknowledged him in prayer. But during the tough times where things were overwhelming, where you and I and the majority of people that walk this earth sometimes we forget in the middle of the storm, christ is there, in front of us. He's there. He's not behind us, he's already in front of us. He's already done all of this.

Speaker 2: 14:56

The devil took him for 40 days to challenge and try to swipe away. You know the reason. Christ came in the first place and tempt him and say all this could be yours and Christ was our example of no, my God is enough and I know we're going to continue to be tempted by the evil one, that's that he's been doing it for thousands of years. He's very good at tempting us and our first knee jerk reaction is to go to self oh, I got this, I can do it.

Speaker 1: 15:38

Yeah Well, and you know that whole idea of trying to control stuff so that you know you can call that wrestling with God and that's one of the things that I experienced during that 10 year run of that particular business, the event business, um, in the early years I was constantly wrestling for control and in the middle of that season probably five, six years into that, um, uh, a remarkable human came along in in the middle of all that and you know, sometimes somebody says something to you and it just hits right, you know, and like. So here comes along a person. I build a relationship with that person. The person says to me this is all going to go so much better and so much bigger if you just stop trying to control it. And for some reason it was. It was literally god speaking to me through this human and it just hit me in the chest of like, and and the business literally took off.

Speaker 1: 16:46

In the few years that followed, because I let go, because I I had a new level of freedom of allowing it to happen and allowing God to control it and not freaking out every time something bad happened and not worrying as much. And there were reasons why. You know, in the early years of the, I would worry and worry and worry, like not going to make this happen, this event's going to fail and we're all going to die. And over the years you learn, oh well, it's probably going to work, you know. And then, but that became, oh wow, okay, god's doing this. And the more I let go, the more I let him have control, the bigger and better the business is going to get. And so there's these really practical realities be better if I do these things that are in scripture, if I'm like, oh, I'm letting him control it, oh, I'm not going to worry, like what the practical reality of that is? Things start to flourish when he's free to move and you're not trying to control it.

Speaker 2: 18:14

I agree, and I wrote this recently and, as you know, I do a lot of journaling. I love to write and talk to God. But if God could show me a map of my future, I don't want to see it. I don't want to see it. I don't want to see it. Do you want to see yours?

Speaker 1: 18:39

No, I think what you're getting at and I completely agree now, I wouldn't have agreed 10 years ago, but I agree now. It's just that I want to live in the mystery of today, Yep, and I want to give him complete freedom to move. And you know, I love that, I've come to love that dance and I think that maybe that's all of life here on earth is to learn to love that dance of the mystery, of not knowing.

Speaker 2: 19:06

Yeah, Not knowing leads us to the one thing we're certain of, and the and I did not really mean for that to happen just now, but certain success is is what, a what a great name of a business that you know was laid on your heart when you, when you came up with it, and I'm humbled to be part of it because it really resonates with what I want to be for my wife, for my kids, for my seven grandkids. And when someone walks into a room and they meet us and they get a chance to learn a little bit about us, and then we walk out of that room, it's like I taught my oldest grandchild what are they saying when you leave the room? What are they saying about you, the human? Are they saying, god, I want to be more like them or like I don't want to be near that person ever again? It's the mark we leave on this world.

Speaker 2: 20:22

It's what Christ told his disciples and he told them. He says you guys are going to do more than I did. You're going to have more miracles than I did. You're going to go to the ends of the earth. You're going to do so much more than I was able to do in my time on earth and they're looking at him like cross-eyed and he's still saying it to us. He's still giving us the keys to go do it. He's just letting me be the engine. You know you've got a beautiful Ferrari, but you're not going anywhere without me and that's why he's he's such a important part of our walk. And, without trying to, you know, yank people into a conversation with us and saying this is the way I think you should go. I want people to approach us and say listen, I love where you are, help me, guide me, and that's what's exciting about the balance of my life is I want to get to heaven and I want to hear him say thanks for listening.

Speaker 1: 21:44

Yeah, I mean, I think we, as business people, and our friends who are listening here, as business people, and our friends who are listening here, you know it's, it's just. I think the message for today is is to let let go. You know that you, you are enough, you are everything that God made you to be. You already are it, you already are doing it. Everything that you do today is going to be sufficient. And he's carrying all the weight. If you let him, he's carrying all the weight and all you have to do is show up and abide and listen to that still small voice. And it really is not more than that. Right everybody wants like, well, okay, I'm going to listen, but then I have to go do, and if I don't do, it's going to fall. And and that's not it, it's literally just his voice. You said how many times this week have you said he's enough, he's enough. Guys, have a great day. Thanks for listening to the certain success podcast and we'll see you back here again soon. God bless.