7 Steps to Discover Your God-Given Calling

Speaker 2: Okay, you can uh keep filling out that page two uh information, but uh we are gonna go ahead and get started. Um Welcome to the Center for Christian Study, and uh today's seminar entitled Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Godliness, a Biblical View Calling. Um, my name is Jay McCabe, and I'm the director of undergraduate ministries here at the center. And before I introduce our speakers, I want to share a little bit about what the Center for Christian Study is and why it's here and how it works. Um, so we describe the center primarily as a place for faith and learning. So it's clearly set here next to the university where there's a lot of learning going on, but um, we really want to be able to pair uh faith and learning and what happens here. So we host events like this where we try to be thoughtful about our faith and about our lives together. Um a couple things that you'll often find happening here on a daily basis. Uh, students tend to come here and study up in our library, um, just whatever they have for class, they'll uh they'll come and do their work here. And it's a great view of there, great study space. If you haven't been up, I highly recommend that you at least walk through and check it out while you're here. Um fellowship groups and local churches host Bible studies and prayer groups. Um, and this room, normally there aren't this many chairs out, someone just have an open space. We also have a prayer room and then a couple other rooms in the front of the building that people can reserve or just are open a lot of times. Um then in addition to seminars like this, we also have courses, um, talks, discussion groups that are happening on a pretty regular basis. We've got our programs listed out on the wall right here, and then also some of the stuff that's sitting in front of the front door. So feel free to grab any of that if you want to find out more. Um we also have a couple of our staff are here who I'll just point out so that you can recognize them. Um this is Ashley Wooden, she's our director of communications. Um works up on the third floor with Joey Albert Coffee Room. Feel free to visit her if you're back in the building. Um, who's over here, our director of undergraduate ministry for women. Um, and then Sharon Decker, who is our director of undergraduate ministry for the North Round, especially. So missing okay. Um and then also last thing I want to mention before I introduce speakers there's a card sitting on your seat. And uh we would ask you to pull out this card to help us keep track of who's here today, um, as well as take advantage of this offer that we're making to pair you up with someone who has a similar vocational interest or an adult in the community who's a Christian, who's living out their vocation currently. Um if you're interested in something like teaching, we will try and pair you up with someone who's currently teaching as a Christian so you can have a conversation with them about how that works out in real life. Um so if that's something you're interested in, be sure to note that on your card, your vocational interest, and also that you would want to do that. Um just as an incentive to go ahead and fill these cards out. Um, during the break, we're gonna have a drawing. So one of the cards will be drawn out, and you'll get a $15 gift certificate to the Switter Light bookstore, which has lots of great books on calling and other things as well. So be sure to drop that off in the basket that will be. Maybe that will only be in it. Yeah, that's perfect. That will only be in it. Okay, so um now on to our speakers. David and Krisan Marotta are here with us. They're both graduates of Stanford University, where David studied philosophy and electrical engineering, and Krisan studied communication. After graduation, they each completed a three-year master's in biblical exegesis at the McKinsey Study Center in Eugene, Oregon, and Dave got a master's in computer science from the University of Oregon. They moved to Charlottesville in 1990 and are active members at Trinity Presbyterian Church, where Dave is an elder and Krisan is a volunteer director of women's ministries. They both served as past four members here at the Center for Christian Study. And they run and own their own businesses, Murado Wealth Management and Crissan's Back Office, Inc., and they enjoy living and working where God has called them. Today they'll be addressing the subject of calling and especially what the Bible has to say about our time, work, and talent. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming David and Cassandra. David John Marotta: Thank you. Calling is uh is a unique, uh, a unique thing. You're born, you don't know who you are, you don't know what you want to do, and you're trying to find that. And what I'm what I'm gonna make is is a promise that I think is true, and that is that the deepest longings and desires of your heart can be fulfilled through a biblical view of calling. So I'm not talking about the world's wisdom of actualizing your own reality or the power of positive thinking or the path to the most income. I'm talking about a life adventure of success and significance, which I think every young person yearns for and desires. A life of discovery about who God made you and what good works he has prepared for you to walk in. Now, we're not gonna be able to answer all of the questions. That's part of why you need follow-up and you need and you need uh some additional sort of uh specific counseling for your area of of interest. But I hope today's seminar gives you a blueprint for understanding the different stages of calling and then what issues are key during each of these stages of calling. So the issue of calling is how do I find and fulfill the central purpose of my life? So, in other words, who am I, or what is the meaning of life itself? So, understanding your calling should answer those questions. What should I do? How should I live? What's going on? What has God called me to do? I love this quote by uh Friedrich Buckner, and that is vocation, where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. In other words, this is not a burden, this is your deep gladness, it's who God made you, fulfilling a call, which is something that the world needs. A biblical view of calling begins with the idea that it is God who calls us. So calling is not it's not this abstract vocational interest, it's a God who calls us, which is there's two great spiritual truths in life. There is a God, and you are not Him. So that's where it all begins. God made you, and God knows you better than you know yourself. And I will tell you, there are things that I'm still I'm 51 years old, there's things I'm still discovering about myself. I made a major discovery about myself in terms of calling about 10 years ago, and it sort of changed the course of my life again, yet again, and made me comfortable with where God was calling me and where I was to move next. So, just as we talked uh last time in the spring, and we talked about you needed an allegiance that was higher than marriage in order to keep you in a marriage when you weren't really happy with your marriage. So you needed an allegiance higher that would pull two people close together. Similarly, only a point outside of time and space can give meaning to our here and now. We need something outside of the here and now that gives significance to the here and now. And the secret is the secret of responsibility, the secret of mankind's longings and desires and what it means to be made in the image of God. God made us to be morally responsible for a portion of creation in order that every part of creation might be brought under his dominion. So we're gonna take a look in your handout. We're actually on page three of the handout, which is where we will begin, and we're gonna take a look at uh Genesis 126. Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him, male and female created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. So the first point is that man was created in the image of God, and what the image of God means is to have moral responsibility. God is a moral agent, we are moral agents. The rest of creation doesn't have a moral component. A rock is a rock, you don't talk about a bad rock and a good rock except in the terms of how we are using it. So we are the ones who give morality and usefulness to the rest of creation. And then the second, that we were given dominion over all of the earth. So, all of the earth. There isn't a single part that we're not to have dominion over. So we talk about the idea of full-time Christian service as though everyone else is just in part-time Christian service. And if there's one aspect of calling that you need to break, it's this idea that there is a secular calling and a sacred calling. Every calling in earth is sacred. Everything that you do, everything that is done is a sacred calling. God wants everything. So Christians who fail to have a biblical calling the first time in their work often just chuck their secular work and then they go into the ministry sometime and they fail to understand that we're to have dominion over all of the earth. So if you have that, you can be doing just about anything because just about anything is part of all of the earth. There's nothing that's not that's not there. So the next thing is that man was intended for work and keeping God's commandments. So y'all notice that this is before uh anything happened. We're going to look at Genesis 2, 15 through 17. The Lord God took the man and he put him in the garden of Eden to work and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. From the day you eat of it you shall surely die. So in every part of our creation, from the beginning before the fall, God intended man for work, and he intended man to keep God's commandments. So I we do a lot of career asset management in our financial planning business, and I would say one of the biggest pieces we do is when someone is about to, quote, retire. And what we basically tell them if you retire to go do nothing but recreating all day, you will die young. It's almost a universally true principle. So if you retire at age 65, you have another 30 years, you need to decide what is God calling you to do for that last 30 years. And maybe you don't need to work for money, but you still need to work for God. You still need to do something significant. And having a significant retirement is the best way to have a healthy retirement, it turns out. So man is intended for work and keeping God's commandments. There's a moral component to our work. And third, man includes male and female. So both men and women have unique callings, and it's part of a husband's responsibility to help his wife find and fulfill her own calling. It's part of a wife to help her husband find and fulfill his own calling. And couples have more than the sum of their calling. So if this is her calling and this is his calling, a good marriage should mean that not only is this his calling and this is her calling, but he helps her in her calling to expand it, and she helps him in his calling to expand it. And so it should be more than the sum of the parts, it should be the multiplication of the parts as one helps the other do what God has called them to do in life. And I can tell you in our marriage, um, I probably wouldn't be in my current business had my wife not been in her business, and have we not been working that together in order to be able to go through the lean times of starting a business when you have no income and you're loaning the business money, and the other person is needed to help support you in that. So that idea of when there's two, when one stumbles, the other one is there to pick them back up, is very much a picture of the way uh calling should work within a marriage. So we have this idea that um that man is made in the image of God and given dominion, and then the next piece is that it's important that God is sovereign, and so everything that we do is by God, to God, and for God. And that's everything from the smallest thing that we do to the largest thing we do. The second thing is that our calling should be secular, and by that I mean pervasive throughout everything. Everyone, everywhere, and in everything should be by God, to God, and for God. And Oswald Chambers, if you've ever read his work, the phrase he uses in his notebook the most is be absolutely his. Don't let there be anything that is not that is not his. Many of you probably know Rob Archer, who runs Archer's Frozen Yogurt. How many people have been there? Okay. Rob Archer is an incredible guy. He's a Christian, he's a Darden School grad, he's an assistant pastor, and if you've ever heard him speak, um, I've heard him once at the Darden School for Business, he was giving a talk, he's an alumni from there, and he writes up on the chalkboard, God loves, and we're all waiting for, you know, like what is going to happen from this point on. And then he writes, frozen yogurt. And the idea is that if you're not, if you don't believe that God loves what you're doing, one, it must not be part of creation, because God loves every aspect of creation. And if you're going to run Arch's frozen yogurt, you had better believe that God loves frozen yogurt and God is intimately involved in what you are doing. And so one of the things that I suggest you do is you put up God loves, and then whatever it is that is your passion in life, and you need to realize that God cares deeply about that passion. It is part of creation. And if you don't believe that taking that piece of creation is important to God, then you really don't understand calling. If there's one thing to get out of this first part of calling, it's that it's everything is part of God's. So this is a quote from Abram Kuyper. There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, this is mine, this belongs to me. Okay. If Facebook has told us one thing, it's told us that everyone is completely unique and individual. None of you have the same faces. That's how you recognize people, and every face is completely unique. Every person is completely unique. There will never be another you in all of creation. So you have a unique calling. So all of the things that you think, oh, I'm just like everyone else, no, you are unique just like everyone else. And that's the part that's important. And you may not even know yourself. When you're born, you don't realize how strange you are. You think, oh, I really like to do this. Maybe you really like to go to the movies. Well, everybody likes to go to the movies. But the reason why you want like to go to the movies is different than the reason other people like to go to the movies. So even when two people have the same interests, they are very different and they are very unique. And your goal is to understand your place in the world or your area of genius. And I'm using the word genius very specifically. Most people, when I say the word genius, they think, oh, Albert Einstein, he's a genius, and the rest of us are not. The classical view of genius is the individual instance of a divine nature that's present in every individual. So there is a piece of a reflection of God's character that only you reflect and only you will ever reflect, and you're the only one who can do it that way. And if you don't know that, you don't understand that your goal is to find your area of genius and figure out what that what that is. And it may be difficult for you to find your area of genius, and in the page two, on the very first thing, I asked you some questions about your dreams and abilities and passions and finding out who God made you. And the first was just a series of seven questions, just to answer yes or no. The more yes answers you have, the more you've been seeped in the idea that you have a unique calling. And this isn't supposed to be reflective on your parents. You can answer them all no, and it doesn't mean your parents did a bad job. It just means that you may need to overcome some of your early thinking. Maybe your parents said all that, but you didn't believe it. You know, and maybe you just need to get to the point where you believe it. So were you treated as though you had a unique kind of genius that was loved and respected? Were you told that you could do anything and be anything and try anything? Were you given real help and encouragement? Were you encouraged to explore all your talents, even if they changed from day to day? One of the best ways to find out who you are is to trice things on. And so you try on one thing, you try on ballet, and you decide you don't like ballet, and then you try on sports, and you decide you don't like sports, then you try on music and you decide you don't like music, and then you try on math and you decide you might maybe you love math. And so all of a sudden everyone else doesn't love math and you love math and you love the way numbers work, and you start learning something about yourself because you found a unique area that is just you and that you're interested in. And then maybe somebody else is better at math, but you find that this is the aspect. You like combining math with something else, and that you have a unique blend that way. And so if you haven't tried on a lot of things, that's part of what college is about, is trying tons of courses, and then you find out there are some you love and some you don't love. Uh, my freshman year, first uh first class I took was a philosophy class, I ended up being a philosophy major. I found out I love that. So, and then so that's the kind of thing that you try on and that you try out. Um, Psalm 139. O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up. You discern my thoughts from afar, you search out my path and my line down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You hem me in behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is high, I cannot attain it. For you formed my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, my soul knows it well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance, in your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them. So you were created in the image of God to exercise dominion in a specific area of life. You were created for work and keeping God's commandments, and every day of your life was written by God in secret to be discovered by you. Or as Psalm 137, 4 says, Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. That's a promise. If you delight yourself in the Lord, he will give you the desires of your heart, because you will find the purpose and calling of your life. And Ephesians 2, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. So this is the idea of calling. Next, I'd like to talk about one of the seven steps that we're going to go through in terms of the steps of calling. And the very first step is dream. It's this idea of finding your passion, finding what you love, that God gives you a dream. Very much like, say, God gave Joseph a dream, gave him a dream that he would be ruling, yea, even over his family. And Joseph had to figure out okay, so what does that dream mean? What am I supposed to do with that? How's that supposed to bring itself around? So on page two, one of the next places, uh, the next uh exercises was to pick one of your favorite colors and role-play that color, speak for it. Describe what qualities you have as that color. For example, I'm dark blue, I'm quiet and deep like the ocean. So, did anyone have a chance to sort of pick a color and speak for it? And be willing to share it. Okay, take a minute now on page two, and you have 20 seconds. Pick a color, pick one of your favorite colors, and speak for it. Krisan Marotta: Give them your example, though. David John Marotta: Here's my example. I'm steel blue. I am cold, factual, and engineered to be analytical, but my strength and design can hold up mountains of concrete. Of course I can. I s I'm steel blue. That's what being steel blue means. So go ahead, pick a color, one of your favorite colors, and pop for it. unknown: Okay. David John Marotta: Again, we're we're going to go through these relatively fast. Does anyone have one to share? Just throw it out. There's obviously not a right and wrong answer here. What's interesting is how embarrassing it is to speak for a color. Yeah, go ahead. Speaker 5: I would like to do it with a tender way. Speaker 6: I think all the dental action wash and wash against people until they're gone. Speaker: I love it. That's awesome. What poetry? Anyone else? Someone else. unknown: Yeah. Gray. Speaker: Awesome. I'm gray. I'm a little cynical. Who wouldn't be? Being gray, right? That's what gray is. Good. Someone else. Do you have any shades of red? unknown: Yeah. Speaker 9: I think gray with a pop of red. Speaker: A pop of red? Yeah, keep going. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Someone else? Come on, this is this is the easy one. Someone else. unknown: Yeah. I like green. I'm seeing red natural and right and rest. David John Marotta: I love people and that's awesome. That's awesome. My favorite one I've ever heard is I'm fuchsia. If you clash with me, it's your problem. Now, I I just I just want you to notice something. This is beginning, for those of you analytical and you analyze your personality a lot, you begin to understand a little bit of who you are. But but it's it's even hard on this just to say it because you realize you're talking about yourself. You're not just talking about a color. But look up here. You know, is is this is this person very flexible? Are are they very, you know, do they bend easily? Are they very accommodating? No, they're not. I know that about myself. I know I know that that's who I am. But but that's of course not. I'm steel blue. That's my strength. My strength is I don't bend. I'm very, I'm very, I can hold up a lot of stuff. So you begin to understand who you are, and I will tell you, for everything that you think is a weakness, it's a strength. And for everything that you think uh is a strength, it is. So you're beginning to understand who you are. God made you, I mean, God made you that way. Now, obviously, obviously, you can sin with this personality just as you can sin with one that bends too much. So, but there's a strength there. And and and I will tell you, everything I know about career counseling and everything else says you don't try to improve your weaknesses, you try to focus on your strengths. So you try to you try to know who you are, know what who the way God made you, and then you try to do the things that are in line with the way God made you. So, and maybe God made you that perfect, well-rounded personality, and then that's a strength. That there are things you can do with that perfect, well-rounded personality of being good in everything. But that's okay, but it but I would say focus in on what your area of genius is and begin to understand that. So, this first piece is just to say one of the biggest things is trying to find your passion, trying to find your dream in life. You need to do that by knowing who you are, and you need to notice in every situation that you can notice why things react, why you react to things a certain way that may be different from the other people. So maybe you're all enjoying the same thing, but you're enjoying it for a different reason. And you need to understand what that reason is to begin to understand yourself. And you don't understand yourself when you were born because you weren't there when God was making you. So now you have to discover it. And it is, you know, finding yourself in college is a good phrase. You need to find out who you are before God who made you, and that's actually a good thing to do, and that's a long process. I can tell you, I know 65-year-olds that are still finding themselves. So you need to be finding yourself as an odyssey of all of this life, and retirement is is is no different. Five lives. This is I'm down on page two. If you had five lives, what would you do with each one? Five complete lives, one exploring a different talent, interest, or lifestyle to the fullest each time. So if you need more than five lives, take them. If you can only think of three, that's okay. But try try to come up with five. It's a good round number. So go ahead and do that. We'll give you forty seconds for five lives. But we're gonna keep moving because we want to get through all everything today. Does anyone want to share some of the things that they wrote down? If they had multiple lives, one of the things they might waste a whole life on? I say waste in quotes because it feels like that, and that's why we give you five of them. Is because the first one is the one your parents want you to do, and the second one is the one you think you need to do to be respectable, and the third one, you know, is is one that might actually be okay. By the fourth or fifth, those are the ones you really wanted to do, but you didn't want to put them at the top. So I want to know what some fourth and fifth ones are. Yeah. Speaker: Inventor. David John Marotta: An inventor, that's great. I have a client who's an inventor, he loves it. And that's what he does. He just goes out and and and takes an idea and runs with it. It's incredible. Yeah. Anyone else? unknown: Yeah. Speaker 4: I'd like to be a director. David John Marotta: A director, right. That's that's awesome. Right. Good. Isn't it interesting? These are the things like inventor. It's like you don't, you know, you don't see in the new in the newspaper ad wanted inventor. And you never see wanted director. It's like you're not gonna get a director by looking in the wanted pages. Yeah, in the back. Speaker 7: Oh, running a flower shop. David John Marotta: Running a flower shop. Great. I have one of my clients in retirement who's just been running a flower shop now for a year and a half. Always, always, you know, one of their one of their dreams, and they're they're they're running a flower shop. Awesome. And they again they have to do these as their second careers because they weren't brave enough the first time around. That's that's part of that's part of the difficulty. Anyone else? Speaker: Yeah. Speaker 7: Farmer. David John Marotta: Pardon me? A farmer. Farmer. Awesome. That's great. So now I want you to know sometimes talents will skip a generation. So, you know, maybe your parents have certain expectations of you, and but maybe a grandparent is is one who really sort of uh sort of uh brought that along. So uh I put a number of things down here. Uh, you know, when I was young, I wanted to be um Bobby Fisher. I wanted to be a professional chess player. Um so I I put down chess over there. Or an astronomer, that was my next interest. But you know, just just take the the kid who wants to be an artist and is born to a couple of lawyers for parents, and the lawyers and the lawyer parents are like, when are they gonna start scribbling on little pieces of paper and start to do something real and meaningful, right? Right? Or even worse, you know, uh the poor little lawyer who's born to some artistic parents, why is she always arguing with us? You know? But you can tell, you know, you put that little lawyer with lawyer parents, and the lawyer parents are like, ah, Supreme Court material. We understand what that is. So parents aren't always good at helping kids, you know, explore every aspect of their personalities in every aspect of their lives. It's difficult. Parents are caught in their own sort of way in which we view the world, and it's difficult for us to say, you know, the way in which you view the world, that's unique, and that's okay to be unique, and it's okay to encourage uh kids into areas like that. So, more often than not, we're trying to be practical and we're not trying, you know, we're trying to help you cope with this thing called life, and we're not actually helping you discover the life that God wants you to have. Um, I'm gonna make a couple of recommendations. I think they're in your handout. One is I found Barbara Scherer's books very helpful. Uh so she wrote Wishcraft, uh, Trying to Find Your Calling. She wrote, this is my favorite book of hers, just because of the title, I could do anything I wanted to if I only knew what it was. And that book is a book where you read the first couple of chapters and then you find the area, the question that's really at the heart of why you can't seem to find what you want. And then there's one more chapter to read in the book. And that chapter, about 10 years ago, I figured out I was a completely different kind of person. I thought I was, I was a diver and I'm a scanner. I tend to do a lot of things rather than just doing one. And then Refuse to Choose or Teamwork. So these are all good books by her, and I recommend them all if you're trying to figure out who you are and what you want to do with your life. Another thing I recommend is, and I went through this program, your one degree. It's a um it's a Christian coaching relationship that guides you through exercises to help you find your unique design that is the way that God wanted you to be. I actually think it's more helpful if you have already been exposed to a lot, because it's going to ask you a lot of questions, and you may say, I don't know any of that because I've never tried it. I don't know if I really would like that. So you may go through that and be a little frustrated and say, Well, I haven't tried half that stuff, but maybe it'll just give you the list of things to try to try to figure out which ones you love and which ones you don't. This is a free coaching relationship. I think it's out of Texas. You sign up online, you fill out some questions, and they, you know, you email them off, and a mentor emails them back to you, and they're just trying to help people find their calling. Uh, and they love young people. So I, you know, I said it may be helpful if you if you don't know yourself, it may be hard to do, but if you if you begin to know yourself and you've done a lot, I would recommend going through something like that. So I just want to help you give you an idea that finding your dream and who makes you what you what you want to do is the first step, sort of, in this in this process of calling, is knowing who you are. Krisan Marotta: I'm gonna take you to the second step. Um so after you find your dream, usually, and I think to me, this is the most important thing we're gonna talk about today. If you didn't, if you learn nothing else, get this one. Because usually what happens is you get your dream and you think, this is what I want, God wants me to do, and I'm ready to go for it. And then your dream gets twisted by the world's idea of greatness. And you start measuring. Oh, I measure by fame, fortune, money, public recognition, uh, being the top of my field, top of my class, all those tangible measurements like did I can I win an Oscar or Pulitzer or Grammy or something like that. That is not how God measures greatness, it's not how He measures success, and it's not necessary to fulfilling your calling. So we can do a lot when we stop being concerned about glory and start being concerned about faithfulness, being faithful to God's calling. So we're gonna look at a biblical example uh of someone who got this idea twisted. So we're gonna look at Miriam, and this is on your handout on page four. We're gonna look at Numbers 12. Because Miriam had a calling, and her idea of success got twisted by the world's view of success and greatness, and God judged her for it. So uh in Numbers 12, I'm gonna read you one through three. Miriam and Aaron had spoken against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman. And they said, Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also? And the Lord heard it. Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all the people who were on the face of the earth. So Miriam is Moses' older sister. She has been used to uh spread God's word among his people. She's identified as a prophetess in Exodus 15. We see her leading uh the women in dance and praise to God. We meet her first at Moses's um, when Moses is put in the basket and floats down the Nile, it is Miriam who helps facilitate him getting into uh Pharaoh's household. So at that point, God was using her, the whole fate of the nation was resting on her role there. So she has been used by God in many ways. Now Moses is is coming into his own, if you will. His role is being um is growing and God is using him, and as Moses' roles grows, Miriam's role is diminished, and she resents it. So she's grumbling. She and Aaron both, and they're saying, Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? Basically, we have a we have a job here too, so she's jealous. So look what happens. Number this is uh 12, 4 through 8. And suddenly the Lord said to Moses and to Aaron and Miriam, Come out, you three, to the tent of meeting, and the three of them came out. And the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud and stood at the entrance of the tent and called Aaron and Miriam, and they both came forward. And he said, Hear my words. If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses, he is faithful in all my house. With him I speak mouth to mouth, clearly and not in riddles, and he beholds the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses? So at Exodus, something new begins to happen. God says, I'm working with this prophet Moses in a new way. Instead of dreams and visions, I'm speaking to him directly, mouth to mouth, as a friend, clearly and unambiguously. And now, as his as Moses is giving them the law, then more and more people are beginning to understand the law and what God values, and the kind of work that Miriam was doing is less needed. So God's giving a new and wonderful gift. People like Miriam are less necessary, it isn't her fault. God's doing something new, she's not done with her, her, it's just her calling, but she resents it. Because I think her her view of success is being twisted by the world's values. She's measuring herself by how much glory am I receiving, how much public recognition, how much fame, and she's beginning to resent someone else who has more of that in their calling. And God takes us very seriously. Look how he responds. 12, uh, 9 through 15. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against them, and he departed. And when the cloud removed from over the tent, behold, Miriam was lepros leprous, like snow. And Aaron toward toward Miriam, and behold, she was leprous. And Aaron said to Moses, O my Lord, do not punish us, because we have done foolishly and have sinned. Let her not be as one dead whose flesh is half eaten away when he comes out of his mother's womb. And Moses cried to the Lord, O God, please heal her, please. But the Lord said to Moses, If her father had but spit in her face, should she not be shamed seven days? Let her be shut outside the camp seven days, and after that she may be brought in again. So Miriam was shut up, shut outside the camp seven days, and the people did not set out on the march till Miriam was brought in again. So see what's now that seems kind of harsh, doesn't it? It's like all she did was grumble and kind of be a little envious about what her baby brother was doing. But it's more than sibling rivalry. At least part of her problem is her view of her calling is being twisted by the world's view of success. So she's measuring her greatness by glory and not by the good that's being accomplished. So she vents her frustration and God acts swiftly. He hears in verse 2, he calls a meeting in verse 4, he chastises them in 5 through 8, and he leaves in 9, and the result of this is she is leprous, which is probably the most hated and feared disease in the ancient world. So, what why did he punish her so quickly? Part of what I want you to see is he takes this seriously, but I think also he loves her too much not to solve this problem. Because her sin is subtle, it's hidden in the heart, but it's just as real as any of the other sins. So we know Moses killed an Egyptian. That was obvious. Uh his sin was blatant, undeniable. This man was alive and then he died. Aaron likewise, with the golden calf, had unmistakable concrete evidence that what he did was wrong. Moses comes down the mountain, flies into rage, and the idol was there to be acknowledged by all. But resentment is inside us. Resentment is something we can hide and no one else ever has to see. So it smolders in our hearts, and we kind of justify it. Well, it's not fair. Well, I I um you know, we I deserve this, or whatever. You can kind of justify it and cover it up. So she's comparing her calling to Moses' calling, and she's measuring her success by outward fame and the glory Moses is receiving, rather than saying, Am I being faithful to what God's calling me to do? So God makes her lepros because leprosy does on the outside what resentment does on the inside. So resentment disfigures your soul, leprosy disfigures your body. And now it's obvious something is wrong here. The leprosy is disfiguring her body, making it painful and ugly in the same way your soul is bitter and ugly when you're resentful. Resentment can make others stumble. Leprosy, the nation, had to wait. They had to wait seven days while she was in this in this kind of period of chastisement. And resentment isolates you from others in the same way a leper was quarantined. So God's essentially saying to her, look, I love you too much to leave this sin in your heart. I'm gonna show you on the outside what leprosy does. I mean what resentment does on the inside, I'm gonna show you on the outside with leprosy. And I want you to see that this is a sin, I take it seriously, I don't want you to live this way, and he wants her to learn and confront her sin. So, what are we supposed to learn from that about calling, other than be careful what you who you resent? There's a couple of other things. God never promised that we would be equally gifted. So some people have a some people have a glamorous upfront calling that everybody knows about, some others don't. You know, so not everybody gets to be Billy Graham. Some people are just teachers in a church that no one's ever heard of. God never promised us that life would be fair. He didn't promise that we would all be equally wealthy, that we would all be equally happy, that we'd be equally thin, equally smart, equally visible, or that our success would all be equal the way the world measures success. So your callings are different, and your job is to be faithful to it, but not measure it by the way the world measures callings. He did, however, promise us the same inheritance in the kingdom of God. So in the things that truly matter, we are equal. We have the same Lord, the same Savior, the same need for grace, the same salvation. Nobody has more of Christ's love or less of God's love. We are all in the things that truly matter, we are equal. So for us to argue over, well, he got that role, and I only got this role is like arguing over who has the most paperclips. It just really doesn't matter. That's not the important thing. So the roles that we've been given are nothing compared to the glory that is to follow. So we're missing the big picture if we start resenting each other for what we have and start measuring our calling by someone else's calling or what the world says is successful or what the world says is great. So what you want to do is after you get your dream, then strip away the world's idea of greatness and ask, how can I be faithful in that calling? So don't start to measure by fame, public recognition, money necessarily, but just strip all that away and say, How can I be great with what God has given me to do? So Miriam and Aaron were both at times, part of their calling was to make Moses great. And that was a role they both played at various times, and Moses could not have done what he did without them. And your calling may be to make someone else great, and they may get all the credit. That's okay. God is saying, This is what was going on with Miriam, and God said, Look what I've given you. Look at the inheritance you're gonna get. Don't measure by someone else's calling. So our goal should be good, not glory. We want to strip away the world's idea of greatness and say, how can I fulfill the calling God has for me and be faithful to it? And that may not look like what the world says is great, but that's how God measures greatness. Alright? David John Marotta: So, step one, you you find your dream, you find your passion in life. Uh step two, you try to make sure that your passion is in line with God's passions. You try to avoid your dream getting twisted by the world's greatness. You try to be the best chihuahua you can be, um, or the best Dalmatian you can be, whichever one God has made you. My favorite quote is from the gorilla Coco, who signs, and one was asked, uh, you know, gorilla, what or the Coco, what do you think of yourself? And Coco answered, I'm a mighty fine gorilla. You know, and I use that phrase sometimes about myself because I may not be the per I may not be made great, but I'm a mighty fine gorilla. You know, I'm a mighty fine gave Maratha because I'm going to be the best Dave Maratha I can be. So, uh God gives you a dream, your dream gets twisted by the world's view of greatness. And then the third step is that you get discouraged, often by those closest to you. This is uh, you know, Joseph has this dream about. Grooming even over his family. He tattles on his brothers and he taunts his brothers with his dream. So his brothers throw him in a pit and sell him into slavery. So, you know, this is sort of the progression of a biblical view of college. And the quickest way to get discouraged is to tell your dreams to those closest to you. So, just try going home over Thanksgiving and saying, Mom and Dad, I've got this great life calling. I'm going to raise Dalmatians and the Himalayas. And they'll start looking at you like, what are you doing? Why did we send you to UVA? What are you doing? And they'll tell you all the reasons why that's the most stupid idea they could possibly imagine. So, I mean, the good news is that you can still meet all of your dreams even if you get discouraged by almost everyone around you. Success really doesn't depend on how you feel. And you really have to get past the mistaken idea that you can only do well when you're feeling good. You know, the great souls and high achievers have had more emotional highs and lows than the rest of us. You know, they're out there in uneasy circumstances taking incredible personal and professional risks, and they do it every day regardless of how they feel. Go home and ask your mom, Mom, did you only, were you only trying to be a parent on the days you felt good? No. I mean, when you're a parent, you get up and you just do it because it has to get done. So it doesn't really matter how you feel. And the idea that, you know, if you're if you're in God's calling, that you'll just feel good every day is not the answer. You will be doing what you're made to do, you'll have incredible passion about it, you'll have incredible drive for it. That will be a deciding factor. But most days there'll just be a lot of dead weight work. And that, you know, you see someone who plays a beautiful musical instrument, and you say, Oh, that would be great to play the musical instrument. Well, but they also go through the hours and hours of practice that it takes to achieve that skill. So what you need is you don't need uh the power of positive thinking or feeling good, or what you really need is just structure and support. So we're gonna go through a little bit of uh structure and support of how you come about to get your calling. All true winners are people who have taken conventional wisdom as a sporting challenge instead of a pronouncement of defeat. So let's look at practical wisdom, and this is the most practical section of probably what we're gonna do today. So, how do you start being the most popular internet web comic at of all time? So, first of all, how many people have have read an XKCD comic? Okay, how many people have never read it? Ah, I'm amazed. About half of you have never read it. So um, this is the most uh popular web comic on on the internet, and this is the very first one. So it's got a guy in a barrel. He says, I wonder where I'll float next, and the next one is him floating. This is barrel part one. After about six of these, he gives you barrel part two, and then part three, and then part four, and the odyssey continues. This isn't even his normal. Now he does all stick figures, and he's, you know, all the stick figure stuff on the internet, and he's the most uh popular webcomic. Can you just imagine? This is uh Randall Monroe, can you just imagine uh at age 22 uh if he asked his parents, so should I continue working as a contractor for NASA, or should I quit my job and draw stick figures and scan them and post them on the internet full time? Can you imagine what his parents would have said? And his parents would have said, You're a contractor for NASA. What do you mean, stick figures? Why would you want to do that? Fortunately, he didn't have a choice because NASA hadn't renewed his contract, so he had to go do this full time, and he now sells thousands of t-shirts with his drawings on him every single day on the internet, and he's kicked off about seven other sites that he's done. So you have these sort of these dark clouds that hang over your dream, and you just don't think it's practical. You know, you want to be a director, or you want to be something that doesn't necessarily feel like you can do it. And generally, between you and your goal, there seem to be three clouds. Something usually falls into three clouds: experience, money, and credentials. And these are the reasons why you can't do what you really want to do. And these are the things that you're those who love you the most will tell you why you can't do what you love to do. Experience, money, and credentials. It will never work because you don't have da-da-da-da. And even if you can point to six people who are doing it, that doesn't matter because it won't work. And even if you can't point to anyone who's doing it, it doesn't matter, and then it that's just more evidence of why it can't work. So we're gonna take each one of these, experience, money, and credentials, and we're just gonna talk about how to look at them. So usually it comes in the form of something like um, I can't because I don't have X. X is filled in with experience, money, or credentials. So I can't because I don't have X. And so the next one is, well, how can I get it without X? That's one of the questions to ask. And then number two, how can I get X? You should only go to number two if you're sure number one, if you're 150% sure that you can't get it without X. So, and I can only think of three or four things. If you want to be a doctor, you have to go to med school. So, in in this country. Actually, you don't even have to go to med school in this country, you can go to med school in another country, but you do need to go to med school to be a doctor. So, how can I become a you know I can't be a doctor because I haven't been to med school. You can't get it without med school, so you have to get into med school. So that sort of precipitates it. On the other hand, a lot of times you can get it without X. And you just think that the experience and money and credentials are what you need. Let me give you an example. These are my credentials, letters after my name, which by the way, if you don't know, are the gods of Charlottesville. Krisan Marotta: Letters after your name. David John Marotta: Because if you don't have letters after your name, uh you're at nothing. So, AAMS, I'm a I'm an accredited asset management specialist, I'm a certified financial planner, and I'm an accredited investment fiduciary. So those are my credentials. And I now have a very successful wealth management firm. Let me show you the credentials I had when I started my wealth management firm. I think we reached 100 million under management before I had any credentials. So, and and everyone else in the firm, when they get credentials, we announce it, you know, and you know, big thing on our website, we send out press releases, all that. When I got my credentials, we quietly slipped them in at the end of my business card. Because it was an embarrassment that I didn't have the credentials when I started the whole thing. The credentials are probably about of the conventional wisdom about credentials is probably 80% completely wrong. Let me just tell you this, I'm gonna tell you very clearly. School is a big business. It is also a safe place for those who love to always be in rehearsal. So, education is wonderful. As you could tell when Jay was introducing us, we've both had a lot of education, but but the biggest education I ever had did not happen in a formal classroom setting, it happened elsewhere. So the most important things I learned, I didn't learn out of the classroom. Now I love learning, we both love learning, we love all of the life of academics. But if you don't love the life of academics and you think that's necessary for what you want to do, it's probably not. So, credentials are not all they're cracked up to be, go start doing it and get the credentials after you know something. Because it's a lot easier to pass those tests after you've been working in the field for seven years than it is when you're trying to learn it and you don't know anything about it and you don't have seven years worth of experience. So the next thing is experience. How do you get experience? Well, there's a whole bunch of ways you can get experience. So, for example, and I will tell you this the most exciting way of getting experience is by doing it. So you can just have the nerve, you can volunteer, you can start from scratch, you can write about it, um, or you can be the sorcerer's apprentice. These are all photos of me and my dad. My dad was a financial planner, and when I wanted to learn wealth management, he was my mentor. I learned more from mentoring him than I ever did for my CFP. And so he taught me all of the important lessons. You get the CFP, you learn all the kind of mechanics, and you mentor under the sorcerer's apprentice, and you learn all the alchemy, all of the magic that makes wealth management what it is. So I will tell you, if you want to go do something, just go do it. Just go find someone you can mentor under, just go hang out your own shingle. Um, do you I mean, do you know that the the certification that it takes to become a wealth manager or a registered investment advisor is smaller than the certification that is required to cut hair in Los Angeles. There's more certification for that than there is for wealth management. And I'm not trying to belittle any of the education I had, that was all valuable stuff, it was all great, but mentoring under my father was a hundred times better. So you've got experience, you've got credentials, the last one is money. Money is very peculiar. Any amount that you don't have is a mountain that appears insurmountable. So if you don't have $5,000, $5,000 seems like it's a showstopper, you can't get it. If you don't have $500,000, $500,000 seems like a showstopper, you can't get it. If you don't have a million dollars, a million dollars seems like too big an amount, you can't get it. Okay, so money's also a very emotional issue. It seems to be the poster child of I can't. So I'm gonna take a look at money, let's take a look at a million dollars. How, and I I can't because I don't have a million dollars. So, first of all, I just want to verify with you that the way in which the person who took the picture of this pile of money got this pile of money is with control C because every dollar on here has the same serial number. That's one way to get a pile of money, just create counterfeit money, and now you've got it. I don't recommend it, but uh that that is one. So let's take a look at an example. I can't I can't sail around the world because I'm I'm not rich, I don't have a million dollars. Okay? So here's the question: what is your touchstone in all of this? Is your and by touchstone I mean what is what really makes your heart sing in this in this sort of adventure? Is it being rich for rich's sake? In that case, you need the million dollars. Is it owning your own yacht? In that case, you need to get ownership of a yacht, or is it sailing around the world, in which case you want to figure out how you can get on a yacht? Right? So there's different touchstones. So you have to start figuring out where your heart sings and what you really want to do. Only if being rich for rich's sake is why you wanted the million dollars, should you go for the million dollars. You see that? And then the question is, do you want to own the yacht or do you just want to sail around the world? Which one? So let's just take being rich for rich's sake. Let's say you really do just want a million dollars, and the yacht is just, you know, a porch would have been just as good. You know, the yacht park wasn't that all important. You just want to be rich. Okay? And I'm I'm not I'm not trying to judge yet if being rich in and of itself is a good idea. But but I just just saying, let's say that that's what you want to do. Because there are people who are rich and are using those riches in ways to glorify God, and that's part of what makes their heart sing, is they handle riches well. And they're trying to do that. So if you want to get a million dollars, I'll tell you how. Save about $280,000 a year and invest it in the stock market for about 15 years. That's what it takes. $28,000 a year for 15 years, invest in the stock markets, on average will produce a million dollars. So if you're gonna try to get $28,000, you're gonna have to have a salary that's bigger than that and save and invest the rest. So $28,000, maybe you need to live off of $22,000 and have a $50,000 income, and you save and invest the rest. So maybe that means you're gonna live in a tiny little room where you're gonna live with your parents and you're gonna save every dime, and maybe you're gonna work two jobs to get there. But in 15 years, you'll be a millionaire. Being a millionaire is not all that hard. I will tell you that. My very first boss told me how to be a millionaire. He said, you just live like a church mouse and you and you shuffle everything into investments, and that's how you become a millionaire. But that's completely irrelevant. Don't worry about your salary. Because, as he said, um do what you love, and the money will take care of itself. So if your goal is to make money and have money to invest for some other reason, this is the path to do it. But that's not necessarily what's going to make your heart sing. So ask yourself, what is the million dollars for? And then you start getting at the heart of the matter. I can tell you, we deal with a lot of millionaires at Maratha Wealth Management, and very few of them come in the door and say, Oh, the money's just for its own sake. I'm just, it's the way I keep score. Very few of them say that. They always have other things which are their heart's desires, and the money is just tools to help them get all these other things. It might be family, it might be entrepreneurship, it might be nonprofits that they support. There's all kinds of things people want to do with their money. So let's go back to um, we let's say we've decided being rich for richest sake is not what we want. We really want to either own our own yacht or sail around the world in style. And so I'm just gonna take a minute and tell me, without getting a million dollars, how could you either get a yacht or get access to a yacht? Throw out some ideas. Tell me how. Speaker 7: Theft. David John Marotta: Theft, yes. You can steal. Now, it's interesting. When you get an idea like that, don't discount it immediately. That's if because what's what's and here's what I want to say, what's the good part about theft? Speaker 7: You don't have to pay for it. David John Marotta: You don't have to pay for it, right. So not having to pay for it is is the good part, right? What's the downside? Speaker 2: You're on the land. David John Marotta: What? You're on the land. You're on the land. Yeah, you you you gotta leave the country at that point and sail around the world, and you can only visit countries that don't have extradition laws, right? So you start asking yourself the question what's good and what's bad about each one. What are some other ideas? Speaker: Rent. David John Marotta: You could rent. You could rent a yacht and sail around the world. Yeah, good. What else? Speaker: Join the Navy. David John Marotta: You can join the Navy, yes. The Navy does have um does have uh sailing boats, and you could get assigned to one of those. Yeah, I mean they've got historical sailing boats that are beautiful. Krisan Marotta: You can get a job as a crew on a ship. David John Marotta: You can get a job as a crew, yeah. We we happened to spend a day on a on a sailing ship called the Bloodhound. It was it was owned by a multi-millionaire who then fell on hard times and had to start renting it out to tourists. Um and they had a crew, and the crew got to sail around all over the place, and they got to take people out, and they they moved it around the the world, and and they'd they'd land at some place, and then the millionaire would get on and he'd sail around with them for a day or two. And then the rest of the time they were on their own, crewing the ship all by themselves, going wherever their heart's contented, you know. And they'd usually sail the hard way and then he'd sail the easy way, you know, and stuff like that, and they'd they'd be able to do that. So, how what else how else can you get it? Speaker 7: Build it. David John Marotta: You can build it, yeah. You could you could buy it, you could buy a uh a wreck and rebuild it. So there's a lot of things you could do there. Speaker 7: You know, fix it up. David John Marotta: Yeah, you can get on a cruise ship. What else? Yeah, you can make connections and borrow it. You could go in with a whole group of people and each buy a piece of it, you know, and then sail together. You could marry somebody who owns a yacht. You know, you can you can begin you can begin to see there's a lot of ways of sailing around the world. And and each each one of them has some pros and cons. And if you if you if you spent even a day listing all the ways that you might be able to get access to a yacht, you'd have a huge list, and one of them would be, oh, that's the one I should try first. So just so you know, this uh this is a picture of Jessica Watson and uh on her Ella's Pink Lady, she sailed around the world at 16 by herself. She's the youngest to ever sail around the world. It was fairly controversial at the time, um, but she'd been sailing since for the first for the first 16 years of her life, and she knew the whole thing upside down and backward and forward. And she had she had Team Jessica to help her through, Team Jess, who helped her through sort of the whole process of preparing and getting ready for that. So, you know, at 16 you can sail around the world, and that was one of her life's dreams and life goals, and that's what she wanted to do, and blogged about it, and had hundreds of supporters. That's another way I saw someone on one of those uh social sites that said, you know, for $5,000, you know, I will be the uh you'll be the first one that I'll send a video to when I cross the equator. And for $10,000, and she had all these sponsors of people who wanted to kind of throw in some money and then be on her blog and get a uh baseball cap or something like that. Sure, everyone would like money, but for most of us, money shouldn't be the goal. But yet we we let it be the obstacle. So being poor is one of the best excuses for to not go for your dreams. It gets you much more sympathy than just being fat and lazy. So, so so go for it. Don't let money stand in the way. No one knows how to argue with poverty. People are too bamboozled by their own money hang-ups to be able to see past that as an excuse. Okay. No one reaches their goals by themselves. Even sailing around the world by yourself required a huge team jest to make it possible. So that's another thing that you need to realize, and that is that you live in a community, and I will say community is the answer to pathological individualism. Go to a group of total strangers and tell them that your life goal is to raise Dalmatians in the Himalayas and watch what a difference it is, how they react. One will tell you they have friends who breed dogs, would you like to talk to them? And another will say, hey, my cousin just came back from a visit to Nepal, would you like to talk to her? You know, they will try to find ways of helping you connect with whatever your dream is. People love crazy dreams, and people love, people love helping people who have crazy dreams. So um, so do that, and you can raise a barn in a day, whereas if you try it on your own, you'll most likely never get it done because it takes more than one person to raise a barn. So, especially you, you have a group of community, you have the Christian community, and if you're doing what God has called you to do, to take captive another piece of God's creation for his dominion, then you have people who are in line with your values and want to support you in your goals. And so I would make use of that. And you often you know, you can ask, and then if some people help, that's great, and if some people don't help, that's great. God's trying to call the people that he wants to help to help, he's trying to uh to move you in uh in sync with them. On page two, there was also a list of six people that you admire, and these are people who could be fictional, historical, or actual. Uh historical is actual, but living today. So um so list six people that you admire. Spider-Man was my early, one of my early uh heroes. I grew up with Spider-Man. I've known Spider-Man longer than anyone other than my brothers and sisters and my parents. So I've been a Spider-Man comic collector, and and and this is uh issue number 33, which is the the the quintessential Spider-Man is going to do this. He's trapped under tons of rubble. Aunt May's um uh medicine that she needs to live is just out of his reach. The whole thing is is filling with water, and he's got to lift this tons of rubble, and he just has to do it because it has to get done, and people are counting on him. And this is sort of one of my touchstones that I go back to for advice, and I say, What would Spider-Man do? Um so so did everyone get a chance to sort of list some of their some of the people they admire? If you don't, do this, and then I recommend that you maybe even uh keep pictures of them somewhere and that you use them as your board of directors. So sometimes you don't have, you don't have what it takes because you haven't been bitten by a radioactive spider. But you have an example of someone who has, and what would Spider-Man tell you to do is a valid question to ask because they might be able to loan you some of the things that you admire in them. So I made this, this is my board of directors. This is my grandfather, Donald Mortlock, and uh he was the most like me of anyone in my family. Uh, and so he was often the person I look to as an example for what someone like me might be like. Bobby Fisher was my early hero. He went off the deep end, but he was petulant, uh, is the right way of saying it, and he was a whined for all kinds of stuff, but he was determined to win on the chessboard, and so he had this focused attention on one thing. Isaac Newton, when I was interested in physics, I loved reading about Isaac Newton. Not only his life in physics, but also his life as a Christian. Francis Schaefer was one of my early heroes. Uh Ray Steadman was the pastor of our church and was fairly well known in his day. He wrote, I don't know, 50 books or something. And Martin Luther was one of the heroes of the faith that I read and wrote papers on when I was in college in terms of biography. I figured out what all these people have in common, and that's why steel blue was my color. These were all very, very um stubborn for things that they thought were right. And so that was one of the things that sort of I admired in that, and it's one of the things that sort of helps me through when I'm trying to figure out what I need to do in life, trying to be stubborn for the things that are right. So maybe y'all have different people. Maybe y'all pick uh you know somebody who's kind of sassy, and then you'll pick someone else who's very logical, and then you can go to your board of directors and you can get all these different sort of uh ideas about what it is that they would have you do. Biographies are the literature of calling, and few things are less mechanical than calling. So, one of the things I recommend is that if you can read uh a biography or personal letters or journals about your heroes, that you will take the time to do that. Because what you will learn is that all the struggles that they've gone through, you've gone you you know, you will go through, and they will have some incredibly dark moments, and you will have dark moments, and they will overcome. Obstacles one tiny little step at a time. Krisan Marotta: We're gonna do one more section and then we're gonna have a break. So we've talked about we're up to the fourth kind of stage or path in your calling. So you get a dream, your dream gets twisted by the world's view of greatness. So you overcome that. You often get discouraged by those closest to you. And the next one is you're tempted to take a shortcut. So this would be stealing the gut, for example. So this is the shortcut. And we often get impatient with God's timing and the pace at which he's giving us our calling or bringing it about. We get tired of the obstacles in our path, and we are tempted to take matters into our own hands. So instead of waiting on God to fulfill our calling in his way and his timing, we start wanting to cut those corners and take a shortcut. Now there are a lot of biblical examples we could look at of people who failed, who took that shortcut. You might, Abraham wait not waiting for Isaac, but taking Hagar and having Ishmael instead. So, you know, those examples are rife. But I want to look at one of the successes, one of the biblical characters who, when given the chance, did not take the shortcut. So we're gonna look at King David, and we're gonna now you think, oh wait, David and Bathsheba. But before he was king, he did two things that I think commended him. Twice he had the opportunity to kill Saul, and neither time did he take it. So let me just give you a little bit of background on the story, and then we're gonna look at uh 1 Samuel 24. So Saul was the anointed king of Israel. He was the first king, he disobeyed, and he You can go on to the next slide, I think. Yeah, he lost God's favor. Now, God had privately anointed David king when he was a young man, we think probably around 14 or 15 years old. Saul is still on the throne. As it becomes apparent that David has God's favor and the people begin to love David and respect him, Saul becomes insanely jealous and tries to kill him. He accuses David of treason, and um David has to flee from Saul's court and he goes into the wilderness. And this goes on for 16 years. So this you can see how you'd be tempted to take a shortcut. David knows he's going to be king, he's been promised it, he's he has been anointed king, and for 16 years he plays this game of cat and mouse with Saul, where Saul and his army are chasing him all over the wilderness trying to kill him, and he is just barely escaping his clutches. So twice David has the chance to kill Saul, and we're gonna look at why he doesn't. So this is 1 Samuel 24, and David and his men are resting in a cave. They're actually hiding in the cave from Saul. Saul's army is in the area, and are pursuing David, and of course, what happens? Saul chooses the very cave where David and his men are hiding to come in and relieve himself. So you can imagine the situation. David and his men are in the back of the cave. Saul comes in, he's blinded because he's just come out of the desert and the bright sunshine, and now he's in the darkness of the cave, and the stage is set. So David's men say, This is your opportunity. They are quick to interpret this as God has given Saul into your hands. Now, think about how many times you've heard on decision making. How do you know if something God's will? You you've probably heard this. You have the desire, you have the opportunity, and you have the counsel of godly people telling you to go for it. So that's what's going on here. David's in the cave. He's certainly got the desire to kill Saul. It's been, I don't know, at this point, probably 10 or 15 years of being chased. He now has the opportunity, he's got Saul literally with his pants down. You know, what better opportunity than that? And his friends are saying, do it. This is the right thing to do. But look what David does. This is 1 Samuel 24, 5. David cuts off a corner of Saul's robe instead, and says, and afterward, David's heart struck him because he had cut off a corner of Saul's robe. He said to his men, The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my Lord. The Lord's anointed to put out my hand against him, seeing he is the Lord's anointed. Did you notice how many times he says the Lord in that sentence? So David persuaded his men with these words and did not permit them to attack Saul. And Saul rose up and left the cave and went his own way. So instead of killing Saul, he reaches out and he cuts off a corner of his robe, and his men think this is unbelievable. How could he possibly do this? And the turning point of the whole scene is 24, where it says, David's heart struck him. So the question is, how did he know this was wrong? And why did he suddenly feel guilty about it? Because normally we think if you have desire, if you have opportunity, if you have godly counsel, then you have a green light. But we can want to sin, we can have the opportunity to sin, and godly people can unwittingly encourage us to do it. What's the difference? And the difference is David knew scripture. He knew what the word of God said. And the word of God says, justice belongs to the Lord, vengeance belonged to the Lord, no one shall strike their hands. He's actually quoting, no one shall strike his hand against the Lord's anointed. So God put Saul on the throne, it is up to God to take him off the throne. It is not up to David. So scripture trumps all of that. Desire, opportunity, and counsel are not enough without the word of God. That is the thing that you must have. Now, throughout the book, the robe of the king has functioned as a symbol of kingship. So in chapter 15, when Samuel tells Saul that he will no longer be king, Saul falls at his feet and tears a corner of Samuel's robe, and Samuel says, God has torn the kingdom from you just like you tore this robe. And chapter 18, the crown prince, Jonathan, gives his robe to David as a symbol of saying, You will be the next king, not me. He's handing him the kingship. And in 19, Saul goes to Rama to try to kill David. He ends up prophesying naked, that is, without his robe. It's again, it's a symbol that he no longer is king. So when David cuts off the corner of Saul's robe, it's rejecting Saul's kingship. And that's why his heart strikes him. Because he knows Saul is still king. God still got him in office. It's up to God to take him out of it. So after Saul leaves the cave, David confronts him, he pleads his innocent, he invites Saul to be, or invites God to be a judge between him and Saul, and amazingly what happens is Saul makes a full confession at the end of that chapter. He admits his guilt, he affirms David's innocence, and he even gives David his blessing as the next king. So by restraining his hand, he got something he would not have otherwise had. He got Saul's confession, he got Saul's blessing. If he'd killed him, he would have lost both of those. So there's when you wait on God, he always does something better than you imagined. So, as if that's not enough, he has a second opportunity to kill Saul, and this is in 1 Samuel 26. After locating Saul, David asks for a volunteer. Saul's army is encamped in the next kind of valley, and David and his men are on the other side, and he asks for a volunteer to go with him into Saul's camp, and his nephew Abishai volunteers to go with him. So they sneak into Saul's camp in the middle of the night, and Saul is sleeping surrounded by his troops. And like David's been in the cave, Abishai says, Let me kill him. Let me do this. This is God has given him into your hand. Let me kill him. I've got the spear right here. It takes one little thrust. You don't have to kill him. Let me do it for you. Again, this is the shortcut. This is taking matters into your own hand. But David says, No, again, he's ruled by theology and not circumstances. So this is 1 Samuel 26, 9 through 12. But David said to Abishai, do not destroy him, for who can put out his hand against the Lord's anointed and be guiltless? And David said, As the Lord lives, the Lord will strike him, or his day will come to die, or he will go down into battle and perish. The Lord forbid that I should put out my hand against the Lord's anointed, but now take the spear that is at his head and the jar of water and let us go. So they take the spear and the jug of water and they leave. And notice what David says. I don't know how God's going to work, but I know that God will work. If he wants me to be king as he's promised, he will make it happen. So either the Lord will strike him, his day will come to die, he may go into battle and perish. I don't know how God will work, but God will work. So this time, instead of taking a corner of his robe, he takes the uh Saul's spear and his water jug, which are a symbol of life and death, the spear being death and the water being the life, as vindication that he had Saul's life in his hand. This is symbolically saying, I could have killed you and I did not. So the next morning everybody wakes up. David's standing on the hill, he yells down to the army. He addresses Abner, Saul's general, and says, Look, I snuck into the camp. You weren't doing your job. I've got Saul's spear and water jug. I could have killed him. Now what's interesting about this is now he's in full view of both the entire, Saul's entire army and his own men. So in the cave, it's not clear how many people were there, probably just a few of David's hand-picked men, and Saul may have been alone. Now this is public. So now David's been accused of treason, of trying to kill Saul, and now in front of the entire nation, he says, I had the chance to do it and I didn't do it. If I was a traitor, wouldn't I have killed him? So he is publicly exonerated. And Saul calls out in front of his entire army, again confesses. This is 1 Samuel 26, 21. And Saul said, I have sinned. Return my son David, for I will no more do you harm, because my life was precious in your eyes this day. Behold, I have acted foolishly and have made a great mistake. So by waiting, waiting for God to act, David has now been publicly cleared, so that when he takes the throne, there won't be a cloud of suspicion. Was he a traitor or was he not? Did he kill Saul or did he not? Was this really God's will or not? Now he takes the throne in full innocence, and his innocence has been proclaimed. And in 2625, then David, then Saul said to David, Blessed be you, my son David, you will do many things and will succeed in him. Now, to our modern ears, that may sound like a pretty anemic blessing, but that is the kind of thing a father would say to a son. So that is Saul publicly saying, You will be the next king, and you are God's choice. So, in the strongest Hebrew possible, David has secured Saul's blessing and his promise from the reigning king that he is the next one. So when he waits on God to be given what he has been promised, he gets something better than if he had taken it for himself. And that's the when you're tempted to take a shortcut, you know, steal the yacht, take some shortcut, lie on the taxes, lie on a job form, whatever the shortcut might be, um, wait for God because what he promised is better than what you will get by taking it. So the two things to learn from this piece is well, one I've already alluded to, decision making. There is no substitute for knowing scripture. So, like if you're in the cave, David had desire, opportunity, and the council of wise people telling him something. Scripture trumps all of that. The first, non-negotiable, you can't skip it, there's no other way around it. You have to do it step, is you have to know scripture. You have to know what God values, you have to know what's right and wrong, the way God sees it. Without knowing that, you can't make wise decisions. So, without that, you're kind of shooting in the dark. So the first step is know your Bible, know your scriptures. The second point is wait for God. The temptation is always gonna come to take matters into your own hands, to take that shortcut, to jump right to the results, to skip all the uh intermediate steps, but you have to go through it. Now, here's the rub. Most often God's plan involves suffering. So David was gonna get to the kingship, but he had 16 years of running for his life first. Just go through the patriarchs, look at Abraham, Moses, Joseph. They all had this period of suffering and trials, and that is pretty much true today. You can almost count that on your path to calling, you will hit a really big obstacle, a hardship. And it's easy to say, I want to skip all this suffering and just get right to the end, but that's taking matters into our own hands. God's plan often involves suffering and trials, and we will be tempted to make that trade, to take the shortcut to get around it. But if you look to someone other than God to fulfill your needs, to fulfill the desires of your heart, that's idolatry. That is wrong. That is looking to someone other than God to fulfill the plan. And what they give you is shabby in comparison. So David could have taken a shortcut and gotten the throne, but by waiting, he got the throne clear of suspicion, clear of guilt, and his innocence proclaimed. Had he seized his opportunity and killed us all, he would have lost all that. And you can see that pattern over and over. So God's plan involves suffering, but it is the best way. So we are gonna take about a 10-minute break. I believe there's refreshments. Speaker 2: That away in the kitchen. And if you unfill out your car and put it in the basket, it'll be sitting over uh around here. Krisan Marotta: Then we'll come back and have two more, three more stages. Oh, it's a mask for questions. Speaker 4: Well, talking to Chris. Speaker: I've left us 15 minutes, so at 45. And then actually our timing is for 45. Okay, forty to forty-five. Speaker 6: You're next, right? Speaker 5: Um, I had a couple of questions. Well, first, are we doing a QA at any point? Um if we if we stay on tracking at least 15 minutes for questions. Some kind of some thinking about students, a lot of them, I mean they can should probably be experiencing different parts of all of these stages, but stage two is where a lot of them are living, obviously as students. And in particular, I was your point about people places too discouraging you because they're also trying to individuate as adult children. And then I hear about trying to figure out how to do it. And this is one of the most often repeated things. So I'm wondering if you might at some point maybe if there's a Q ⁇ A period, I'd like to sort of pose that question at that moment. But what are some ways to talk about what you believe to be your column and just how you're going about trying to explore your calling for those kind of closest to under their cushion or otherwise? Would that be our right? Krisan Marotta: Yeah. Yeah, Dave, I'm sure Dave would probably address that if I know him, but yeah. It's hard. It's hard from the other end too. I mean, where do you figure out the other end going? You want to do what you're like? And trying to let them say, okay, so in California starving. I actually thought we probably should have taken some questions before the break. Speaker 5: But one of you. I know. I think I'm just babysitting themselves. I meant to email before that, and I'm sorry. But there is a short term meaning I'm not babysitting. Speaker 6: Did you see that I uh coats to your office? Speaker 5: I did. And Shelby was really great for it. Okay, good. Speaker 6: Thank you for doing that. Yeah. Speaker 5: Any other coats that you have that need to be turfed elsewhere? Speaker 6: I mean, I have more coats, but I'm not actually pursuing find out who they are. Well, they all from that one closet. Yeah. I I know a lot of them are um the summer subletter from like three years ago, who's long since graduated, and she wants to pick them up but never comes back until I feel like after three years of people looking trying to find her, so I figured like I'm just keeping them in my closet. unknown: Very good. Thank you for doing that. Speaker 6: Okay. How's it gonna be taller? Probably. I feel taller. I'll let you get a drink. Krisan Marotta: How's it going fast? Speaker 6: Going well. Oh yeah. No, I mean he's kid. You could talk faster because then you can say more. Huh? We want you to um turn the fire hose on and then um shoot it at a piece of paper so that we can read it. Speaker: He says, Dave, we seem to talk for the same amount of time, but you say twice as much. Krisan Marotta: So aren't we gonna do questions for the last 15 minutes? I thought about I should have said questions before we went to break, but now it's good to take a break. David John Marotta: We could do questions when we come back and see if there's anything so far. Speaker 2: Okay. Hey, I I had a couple of questions. Speaker 5: Um that's funny. Krisan Marotta: We're just saying we should have taken questions before. Speaker 5: Um well on this on the second point, you said you're doing it. unknown: Oh, what do you have though? What did you find on the name brand? Speaker 6: Yeah, it's like directly behind the tower. Speaker: Um successful. I think that's the one that's not. So I I think I think that's why that's uh what the system was what we are saying. And I'm not gonna use it. David John Marotta: I've seen this, but I've even seen some Christian system like that. So one person has a bigger thing around to the other one. Aggressive in their it's not it's not that they're actually teaching people teaching people what people like to hear, and that they're hospitable. You know, it's it's they're pandering and aggressive. So we have we have we have to come up with a reason why we don't like something when something's more successful than we are. It's not like it's like switching like some more interesting things that probably need just knowing that that's actually okay, that's the way I can be put in. Krisan Marotta: Can you send it to me? Right, yeah, because I know someone else like this. Speaker 4: Yes, okay, yeah. Speaker 8: The uh well that's that is on the uh the buckle. Yeah, you can find cheap um bucklerless belts elsewhere. It took me three tries, and this one is still not I guess you can have my bulk in it. I could. I could have done it with the first one, but it felt like like I didn't want to. But I've only gone through two belt through two days We're watching Enterprise the uh David John Marotta: Latest one. Krisan Marotta: The one that's pre-original Star Trek. No, it's on Netflix. David John Marotta: On Netflix. A hundred episodes, no commercials. We're on 14. It's fun. They're still introducing each of the members of the crew. Each one recently each one has had an episode that's just about them. Speaker 8: When the minor characters get up. David John Marotta: Right. Krisan Marotta: And we say, ooh, extra is gonna get killed in this episode. David John Marotta: It's like we've never seen half of these people. What bad thing is about to happen and who's about to be. Speaker 8: And like lightly mocks the first uh season. But you can tell if they actually care. Speaker: Nice meeting. Speaker 4: Third year? How does it make it? Well, I want to be an applicational therapist. unknown: So I really like something. Krisan Marotta: So I think it would be when I was fine, I wanted to be a Bumboy dancer. I got too tall. No one could lift me and I'm asked to like. Yeah. Speaker 4: I'm a clogger because I can get. Oh yeah, a clogger with a team. Krisan Marotta: Well, we're teaching the beginner's class starting in January. I'm gonna come learn. Wednesday nights. Found at Greenwood Community Center, which is in Crozai. It's amazing. But it's a lot of fun. Speaker 6: So when I met Anna, we basically found out that everything that came out of our mouth was similar and incomplete. Speaker 4: So we connected and we need to bring this. Oh not obsessively, but I can appreciate it. David John Marotta: That's probably true of you too. Speaker 4: Yeah. David John Marotta: Not obsessively. You can just name them. Krisan Marotta: I can just name them. Because of you, though. Probably more than a little bit. David John Marotta: What was it? You were in a group of geeks and they asked, um, do you know Wolverine's real name? Speaker 6: No, they were they were all claiming that they knew Steph and I was like, okay, okay, do you know Wolverine's real name? And they were all like, oh, Logan? No. No, false. Actually wrong. You're right. They they asked it to test it. David John Marotta: Right, they asked it to test you because they knew it was Logan. Speaker 6: There you go. That was how it was. David John Marotta: And you said, well, you you would think it's you probably think it's Logan, but it's not. Speaker 7: Do you want to grab a little bit more than that? David John Marotta: We're actually okay until 40. So another four minutes. Speaker 6: Okay, yeah. Um I was Rose and it was just Black Panther and Matthews Gambit. And then uh Hesley was our professor X and Andrew Land washing. Speaker 4: When I first saw that, I thought it was all very, very funny. Speaker 6: I never saw his picture. All right. David John Marotta: One more. Speaker 2: One more? Okay. Anybody else? Speaker 9: Should be natural. Speaker 2: You do have to be present to win. Okay. Speaker 9: That would be funny when two people. Speaker 2: Would you honor and just pick one? There it is. The winner is Amanda Wright. So Amanda here. Krisan Marotta: He's not here. Speaker 2: He's not here. He doesn't win. Amanda Wright? No? unknown: No. Speaker 2: Hey Holly. Will you just check and see if anybody has stole it back there? Amanda Wright. Speaker 7: Amanda War. Speaker 2: Specifically Amanda Wright. First year. AKW2K. That's you? Yeah. Speaker 6: Alright, you won. unknown: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, you won the $15 to Splinter Mike, which I have right over here. So here, if you would come grab it. And thank you all for putting these out. We will be following up with you and if you didn't turn in yet, just do it at the end of the session. Alright. David John Marotta: Okay, welcome back. Before we get started, are there just a couple of questions from anything we've gone over for clarification? Yeah, we'll do some at the end. But is there any pressing questions that you feel like could be answered now? Yeah. Speaker 5: You might want to say this for the end if you like. I've been thinking about how to answer this for you who are either wanting to have a butterfly or in fact a part of the research. unknown: Do you have any advice for how you might talk about it? David John Marotta: I I do. Barbara Sher has a big section on how to gain the support of those who are in your family or your network for an idea that you feel like is your call. Because sometimes you feel like you have this calling, you know, you're very successful in your career, your wife and family have become accustomed to the money that it brings in, and you don't feel like that's what you should be doing, and you need to take a money hit in order to go do what you think you're called to do. And she's got a huge section in there. Um and one of the things I appreciated the best about that is she said when she was writing her books and going to do her seminars, um, and her husband began to say, you know, she she sprung this idea on him and he sort of began to get you know a little testy about the whole thing. And and she said, Well, you know, I I guess I don't have to go do it, or something like that. And she said, What do you mean you don't? And he said, What do you mean you don't have to go do that? I go do things all the time that you don't like. You know, do I have to like this immediately for you to feel like you're called to do it? Can't I just be mad for a while? And and I think that's okay. It's okay, you know, people don't have to accept it. They have to, they they don't have, you don't, you're not really asking sometimes for permission because you think that God's called you to do this. What you're asking for is blessing and support. And there's a difference between those two. And a lot of times we look to our family to immediately confirm what we're thinking. I'll I'll tell you, I started at Stanford and I was in the advanced freshman physics program, and I knew my dad especially, just loved to have a son who was involved in hard sciences and stuff like that. And after the first uh the first year and a half, I was thinking about changing from physics to mechanical engineering, and then I ended up in electrical engineering ultimately. And I was really afraid to do that because I was afraid that my father wouldn't be proud of me. And it's amazing how much a father's pride influences us. So I pulled my dad aside and I said, Dad, I'm thinking about making this switch from physics to mechanical engineering, but I know you're really proud of the fact I'm in this advanced freshman physics program, and uh, I just kind of wanted to, you know, to see if that would be okay with you. You know, just kind of, you know, a tender son of, you know, 18 or 19. And my dad looked at me and said, Dave, I'm not sure what the difference is. You know, I think I think you're really good at hard sciences, and I'd like to see, you know, you enjoy that, and I'd like to see you stay in that, but I don't know what the difference is between mechanical engineering and physics and electrical engineering and all that kind of stuff. I don't that's why I'm not in it. I don't understand all that stuff. So I think sometimes we put burdens on ourselves from other people's first reactions, and we're not willing to sort of help them work with us, and and and they need to sort of come along in the process. The second thing is sometimes we present it as I'm gonna go do this, and I don't need your help. Whereas really the thing is, I'm gonna go do this, but you know what? I don't even know what I'm doing, and it's scary, and I don't know if it's gonna make enough money, I don't know if it's gonna fly, and I'm really I'm really interested in you helping me reach my dream, and people like to be involved in it a lot more. And so, especially for immediate family members, spouses, and kids and things like that, I think it's it's important that they get to be a part of the process and in helping the process, and then it feels more like the team win rather than you're just going to do this and it's pulling you away from the rest of the family and they're not involved. So she has a number of things in there like that to sort of help get help get the support that you need. Because if you're not secure emotionally, it's very difficult to step out into something that's scary. And so that's a that's a great question, and that's where I recommend those books because I think they they help you through that process. And a lot of our limits are self-imposed limits. Um, that we think we can't do it because we don't have parental support or our family support or something along those lines. When in fact, that that's not the deciding factor sometimes. It's it's at least in my case, it was very much self-imposed. Good, good question. Other questions? Okay, let me send time for some questions again at the end. So, step one, God gives you a dream or a vision, a passion. You try to make sure that that dream isn't twisted by the world's view of greatness. You try to strip away everything that is the world's view of greatness. Uh, you get discouraged often by those closest to you. Uh you get tempted to take a shortcut and uh and have a quick path to success. And then uh in step five, you experience a moment of darkness where the dream looks like a failure. This often comes after some success. So you've done everything right, you haven't taken the shortcut, and now you think everything should work out, and it doesn't. Too often the world puts us down and beats us up, and the pattern seems to be we get this treatment after a success, but we're doing exactly what the Lord has called us to do. And during these hours of darkness is when the dream uh we've had looks like a failure and we're ready to give up. So, if you will, there's the passion that God gives us, there's the wisdom for how to get there in a godly manner, and then there is this period where what you really need is grit because it just does not seem to be working. It seems to be a failure. We're gonna take a look again at another biblical character. This biblical character is Elijah. James 5 tells us, Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. So James says, Elijah, just like you, sitting here. And he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Just like you. I don't know how else James could say this other than to say, Elijah did not think he was Elijah. Elijah thought he was just a person like you, with nothing more than you've got. You know, my favorite story about Gideon is, you know, Gideon, when they find him, when the angel finds him, he's hiding in a wine press, and and the angel says, Hail, great warrior. And then the angel tells him what God wants to do, and Gideon says, God used to work like that in olden times with biblical characters. That's actually what he says. So the heroes of our faith in the Bible are people just like us. They do not think that God, they do not think that they're characters in a biblical story. And Elijah did not think he was a character in a biblical story. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. He prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and three months it did not rain on the earth. And then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain. In 1 Kings 18, we're told the story of Elijah at Mount Carmel. All of Israel is gathered and sees the defeat of the prophets of Baal and the vindication that Yahweh is Lord. And the story ends with everything Elijah has dreamt of coming true. Let me just read that. And at the time of offering of the obligation, Elijah and the prophet came near and said, I'll just skip to the end. Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood of the stones and the dust and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, The Lord Yahweh, he is God. The Lord, he is God. So all of Elijah's hopes for the nation have come true. And after this display of power, Elijah thinks even Jezebel herself should repent and return to Yahweh. Because it's obvious that the Lord is God. Or at least the people should rise up in force and dispose, uh depose Jezebel and Ahab. But miracles cannot soften hardened hearts. Only God can do that. Let's take a look at what actually happened in 1 Kings 19. Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah saying, So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by this time tomorrow. Then he was afraid, and he rose, he arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there. So this is one of Elijah's darkest hours, all of 1 Kings 19. He's supposed to have had success instead. Now they're out to kill him. And he's trying to figure out, okay, what am I supposed to do? Because everything that I thought was supposed to happen when you have success has not happened. And so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to analyze what one moment of darkness looks like, because when you have these moments of darkness, you will be in Elijah's point of view, and you will succumb or not succumb to the same kinds of pressures that he did. So the first one is emotional reasoning. Elijah was afraid. He ran for his life and he felt like a failure. Emotional reasoning is always destructive, and it goes like this: I feel it, so it must be true. So this is emotional reasoning, and in the hour of darkness, this is what will happen. Continuing, but he himself, verse 4, but he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree, and he asks that he might die, saying, It is enough now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my father's. So Elijah judged himself and he found himself wanting. I'm no better than my father's, you know. I thought this was all going to work, it didn't work, and now I don't know what to do because I've just been a failure. So Elijah judged himself and found himself wanting. In comparison to whom? Ahab? Jezebel? The priest of Baal? Apostate Israel? I mean, who's he judging himself to where he finds himself wanting on all of this? And I think the answer is that we tend to compare our weaknesses with other people's strengths. We label ourselves, we use criticism, condemnation to try to motivate ourselves, we say I should have about each of our weaknesses. And each of us is unique and we react differently to different pressures, and the fact that Elijah runs off after being used greatly by God does not make him a failure. So he it is not our case to be judging ourselves. It's God's case to do that, and God's already handled that. So again, this is another case where we are not to condemn ourselves. I heard a great comment, and I use it every time I'm tempted to do this, and that is that the Holy Spirit, um the Holy Spirit convicts us to return us to God, but Satan convicts us in order to drive us away from God and make us feel like we are not worthy to be used by Him. That's what Elijah is thinking at this point. He is thinking he is not worthy to be used by God. Well, when was he worthy to be used by God? Just sort of ask that question. God used him despite his worthiness or not his worthiness to be a faithful prophet among an apostate generation. So again, do not let your own self-criticisms and doubts drive you away from being used by God. Next one, Elijah thought his life was over. It's enough, Lord, take my life. Elijah did not think that God could use him again, so he might as well die. Bear in mind that after chapter 19, Elijah goes on to rain fire on some worshippers of Baal, condemn both King Ahab and Ahaziah for evil, part the river Jordan with his cloak, and ride a flaming chariot to heaven. Other than that, God cannot use me at this point to do anything useful. So, no, might as well die. Let's take a look at uh verses five through eight. And he lay down and slept under a broom tree, and behold, an angel touched him and said to him, Arise and eat. And he looked, and behold, there was at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water, and he ate and drank and lay down again. This is gonna sound strange, but not to my family members. Elijah needed to drink water, eat, and go to good night's sleep. Megan will testify. This is my answer for almost any problem she brings me. You need to be hydrated, and she's now a uh a major in which she said she just read the reason for hydration in terms of emotional health, and it's scientifically proven. If not, here it is, biblically proven. Um, that you sometimes you just need to be well hydrated, get a good night's sleep, and eat something. And when things look really bleak, you need to take care of yourself in those regards. And if you haven't been sleeping well and you haven't been drinking enough, things are gonna look a lot bleaker than they are. Your parents, if they've ever told that to you, they're right. Get a good night's sleep, drink something. The principle from that is we are corporal and we have a body. So some of us forget that at times, and we taxed our bodies beyond the limits. But we are corporal, we do have a body. We are finite, we can only take so much, and we need to take care of our body so that its condition will not be the deciding factor in our mental state. Number verse 7. And the angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you. And he arose and ate and drank. If you didn't get it the first time, there it is again, and went in strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mountain of God. Elijah was worried, and God steers him toward a place where he will feel safe and secure. And Elijah's motions up to this point were fear, resentment, low self-esteem, guilt, anger, loneliness, and worry. In other words, he was human. So Elijah retreats to feel secure again and regroup. That is another valid principle for times of your darkness. You sometimes just need to have that time where you retreat to someplace you feel comfortable again, you regroup, and then you can go back into what God has called you to. It is okay to retreat, feel secure again, and regroup. Moving on to verse 9. There he came to a cave and lodged in it, and behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and he said to him, What are you doing here, Elijah? And he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with a sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life to take it away. So the first principle is that Elijah is taking on too much responsibility. Elijah takes a responsibility. For failing to change the nation. That is too heavy a burden for him to bear. He is taking on too much responsibility. We are responsible for our own actions, not other people's responses. And this is important. You may be required to tell someone the truth, but you are not required that they listen. So you can fulfill your duty by doing what God calls you to do in a situation where someone else is not going to listen. God tasks us with being responsible for only for our own actions, not other people's responses. And then in our hour of darkness, it looks bleaker than it actually is. There is still some good left in the world. Elijah is not the only one who's left. God has others which he will ultimately reveal to Elijah. So a lot of the things that Elijah says about all the things that have happened, and he's the only one left, that goes too far. It's bleaker, it looks bleaker than it is. And it's very difficult to see any of the good when you're in the midst of the battle and the darkness and the depression. Moving on to verse 11. And he said, God, that is, and God said, Go out and stand on the mount before the Lord. And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountain and broke it in pieces, that rocked the rocks before the Lord, and the Lord was the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. So another principle is that God speaks to Elijah in stillness and quiet. God reminds him of his presence, but God speaks to him in stillness and quiet. We can't hear God in our hour of darkness, but this is exactly the time we need to be still and listen. This is part of the reason for retreat. This is part of the reason for Sabbath. This is why we need times of rest, quiet, and security to be reminded of God's presence. I will tell you that one of the times I'm most able to listen to God is when I'm riding in my car and everything is quiet and I'm not listening to the radio, and I'm just there and I'm able to have a moment of quiet. It's very difficult in college to get a moment of quiet in any hour of the day. So sometimes you need to go someplace where you can sit quietly and you can just listen to the Lord and go over with the Lord, the things that the Lord wants you to go over with Him. And go through your day with the Lord and go through your calling and go through what you're planning and go through your stuff and just put it before the Lord and just be quiet and let the Lord speak into your heart and your mind. Again, the more seeped you are in Scripture, the clearer y'all be able to hear God at those points. But you need that quiet, you need that soulless, you need that that uh that ability to shut out a lot of the noise in our world. God will use his community, we're gonna see that coming up, but first, Elijah must refocus on God. So we first have to get ourselves right with God, and then the community around us will help us to reach that calling. And finally, let me just go on in verse 13 and 14. And behold, there came a voice to him and said, What are you doing here, Elijah? And he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the people. And he gets another chance to sort of blow off all of that steam. And then God recommissions Elijah. He gives him a new assignment and a new direction. Because self-doubt and self-confidence are all about you, but you are you are at your best when you're thinking about the Lord and the task at hand, not yourself. So look in verse 15. And the Lord said to him, Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus, and when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael to be king over Syria, and Jehu, the son of Nimshe, you shall anoint to be king over Israel, and Elisha, the son of Shephat, of Abel Meloth, you shall anoint to be a prophet in your place. And the one who escapes from the sword of Hazel shall Jehu put to death, and the one who escapes from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha put to death. Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him. Let me just start by saying that God was not surprised by Elijah's lack of success. God knew exactly that this was part of the plan, and so when he recommissions him, he still has a use for Elijah going forward in this plan that he's unfolding. God knew everything about Elijah, he knew what role he was to play, and now he's using Elijah and Jazel and Jehu and Elisha to bring about his purposes. Elijah's task was now one of anointing others for God's work. Judgment won't come from Elijah, but it will come in answer to Elijah from the other people that Elijah is about to commission. So even when we feel most alone and that the king and all the priests and people of Israel are against us, even then, God is raising up leaders and keeping an army that is not compromised. And that's the final point, if you will. We are never alone. God's agents are everywhere. And they will be bringing about the parts of his success that he wants to have happen that are not going to be part of our success. So even when we're breaking the ground up, someone else then is planting seeds, someone else is watering, and the harvest will come to pass. And so maybe some of us are called to the hard job of a prophet's work and find me a prophet that's ever been liked and successful and seen the harvest. They're the ones who are always breaking up the fallow ground and trying to make inroads into the idolatry of the nation. So the dark times will come, they will feel like they are awful, they will feel like you're worthless, they'll feel like nothing is working. What you really need at that point is theology, because you need to know that God is still at work, and uh and what he wants you to have at that point is grit and faith and endurance for the things that you can't see, knowing that they're still true. Krisan Marotta: Okay, so we're gonna move on to the sixth kind of step or stage of calling. So God gives you a dream, it gets twisted by the world's idea of greatness sometimes. You can get discouraged by those closest to you, tempted to take a shortcut, do everything right, and then experience this darkness or failure. But the next step is typically God will do something better than you ever imagined. So he will take your dream, and maybe you were expecting it to go this way, but now you see all along it's been headed another direction, and it's better than you ever imagined. And we already saw this a little with David. When he refused to take the shortcut and kill Saul, he did get the kingship, and it was better than it would have been had he taken matters into his own hands. So I want to look at someone else who went through this, and we're gonna look at the temptations of Jesus because he's in this darkness, but I want to show you how surviving them led to God doing something better than he would have had had he taken matters into his own hands. So I'm gonna look at the version that's in Matthew 4, and I you have that on your handout. And we're gonna go through these pretty quickly. So um, just bear with me because we're gonna fly a little bit. So, Matthew 4, this is verses 1 through 4. Then Jesus was led up by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting 40 days and forty nights, he was hungry. I like that. Forty days and like you couldn't figure that out, but he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, If you're the Son of God, command that these stones to become loves of bread. But he answered, Is it written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. So we're gonna look at each of these and ask, what is Satan asking Jesus to do and what's wrong with it? And then how does Jesus know it's wrong and how does he respond to it? So what's going on in this temptation is Satan is trying to shake Jesus' trust in God's goodness. And his logic sounds really good. He's saying, look, if God is good, he would feed you. And look, he's not feeding you, so he must not be good. And if he isn't good, then you can't trust him to take care of you, so you better start taking care of yourself. I have a good idea. Let's turn these stones into bread. Now, that's the sin. If God, for Jesus to take matters into his own hands is the shortcut we talked about earlier with David, it would be to stop trusting God to provide for his needs and start trusting himself to provide for them. The problem with that logic is the first statement. If God is good, he would feed me. Not necessarily true. God is good and he may not feed you. He may let you go through that time of darkness, he may let a need go unmet for a long time in order to teach you something. It's not a given that just because you want something, that God's going to give it to you. Or because it's a good thing to have, that God's going to give it to you. So that just uh the truth is God is good, but he does not always give you what you want. He does give you what you need, however. Look how Jesus answers him. He says, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. He's quoting Deuteronomy 8.3. And in that passage, Moses is talking to the Israelites as they are going um, that this is when God was feeding them manna, and the Israelites were in a very similar situation to Jesus. God had led them into the wilderness and seemingly didn't bring any food along. And so they're all grumbling, and God gives them manna from the sky. And so He says, I've heard your grumbling, I'm gonna give you this bread. So the Israelites had direct, unmistakable evidence that bread comes from God. So all the blessings of this world come from God because God put it there in the morning, he took it away again at night, and so they had this direct link that everything comes from the hand of God. Now we forget that because we think, oh, we just go to the grocery store and there's bread, and we don't have to think about the God behind it. But I think in the wilderness, God was trying to show them everything you have comes from my hand. So your education is a gift from God. The abilities, the talent you have, the calling you have, all of that is a gift from God. You have it. Yes, you worked hard, you studied hard, but the ability to do that, it all comes from God. And that's what Jesus is saying. I can't take a shortcut and try to take matters into my own hands because everything worth having, all the blessings in this life come from God. There is no other way to get them. So he has a choice. He can follow God and possibly starve to death, or he can turn his back on God and start providing for himself. And of course, he chooses wisely and obeys God. So that's the uh shortcut we talked about earlier. There's no other way to satisfy the deepest longings of your heart than to trust God for them. So let's look at the second temptation. This is Matthew 5, uh Matthew 4, 5 through 7. Then the devil took him into the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, If you're the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, He will command his angels concerning you, and on their hands they will bear you up lest you strike your foot against the so stone. And Jesus said to him, Again, it is written, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. So Satan is asking Jesus to jump from a high point of the temple, and according to archaeologists, that's about a thousand foot drop. So the question is, why is that tempting? Why would Jesus be even tempted to play that game? And I think what's going on here is Satan is saying, Look, God's not feeding you, so he must be angry with you, because that's the other possibility. He's not feeding you, maybe he's not good, but maybe he's not feeding you because you've done something to lose his favor, and now he's angry with you, and you did something wrong, and you need to do something to get back in God's favor. So I know, how could you prove how much you love God? I know, jump. Do this great, miraculous act of faith and show God what magnificent faith you have. He likes faith, he'll be pleased with that, and it will he will regain his favor. So go ahead, jump. So that would be tempting for Jesus, insofar as he's human. He wants to be loved by God just like all of us do. And Satan is challenging that need. Well, I don't think God loves you anymore. Maybe you need to do something. Now, how many times do we do that? Life gets hard and we go, oh, I what am I doing wrong? I must not be praying enough, or maybe I'm not studying the Bible enough, or I'm not worshiping enough, or I'm not doing whatever enough. What am I, what do I need to do to start getting back in God's good graces? That's sin. For the first place, you can't do anything to lose God's favor. That's what grace is all about. You didn't do anything to earn it in the first place, so you can't unearn it by now not doing whatever right. God loves you because of grace, not because of your merit. The second flaw in that is we can't do anything beyond the call of duty. There is no great spectacular leap of faith you could do to show God how much you love him, because if it's the right thing to do, you ought to do it. It's not above and beyond the call of duty. God has already asked you to do it if it's the right thing. So it's not possible to kind of go out of your way and impress God with how perfect or how how much faith you have. If it's right, you ought to do it. If it's not right, you shouldn't do it. So when life gets hard and you start thinking, oh, I've lost God's favor, stop right there. You you haven't lost God's favor. You didn't, there's nothing you can do to lose it. And that's what how Jesus answers him. He says, You shall not put the Lord to your your God to the test. He's quoting Deuteronomy 6.16, and if you go back and look at that, it says, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Massah. So we ought to go, hmm, what happened at Massah? Well, I'll tell you. At Massa, Israel is in the wilderness and they are doubting that God loves them. So they are thirsty, there's no water, and they start grumbling to Moses and saying, There is God brought us out here just to kill us. We're gonna die of thirst in the wilderness, and wouldn't it be better if we'd stayed in Egypt, at East in Egypt, we had meat, we had water, and they get so angry with Moses that they're ready to kill him. So they are demanding proof from God that God loves them. And you say, okay, well, what's wrong with a little proof? I mean, we ought to we ought to all have reasons for why we believe what we believe, but the problem is Israel already had ample evidence that God loved them. They had been given enough evidence and they are demanding more proof, and that therein lies the sin. That's the unbelief. God has already given us enough evidence that He loves us, He's given us ample evidence. To demand more is unbelief. It's like holding your faith hostage and saying, I'm not gonna trust you unless you prove to me whatever. So we have more evidence than even the Israelites had because we're on the other side of the cross. So to stand at the foot of the cross or the door of the empty tomb and say, I don't know, God, you gotta give me more evidence than that, that's unbelief. That is sin. And that's what Satan is tempting him to do. So demand further proof is unbelief. And that's one of those, when you get to that dark point, that point of failure where you think, oh, maybe my calling, I did everything right and people are trying to kill me, as in Elijah's case, that's where you want to start. You'll fall into this temptation of thinking I've lost God's favor. But don't walk away from that. And let's look at the last one, because this is where I think we're gonna see how God redeems everything. This is um verse chapter 4, verses 8 through 11. And again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, All these things I will give you if you fall down and worship me. Then Jesus said to him, Be gone, Satan, for it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. So Satan is asking here for Jesus to bow down. He's not asking for complete and utter loyalty. He's not saying, Switch sides and join my sides. What he's asking for is the gesture you a someone would give to their king. So if you read through like the Samuel accounts, and it says, Well, someone will come into David's presence and it will suddenly bow down before him. It's that deep bower, sometimes touching your forehead to the ground. It might have involved kissing their foot, which was an act of respect that you gave to a king. And that's what Satan's asking for. Just this little gesture of respect. Now, what makes that attractive is the promise he drags, he dangles with it. He says, Um, I will give you all these kingdoms of the world and their glory if you bow down and follow me. So this is the shortcut. Because what does Jesus know? As Messiah, he is going to get these kingdoms. He is going to be the King of kings, the Lord of Lords. Everything will be put in subjection under his feet. God has promised it. It must have been a longing of his heart, insofar as he wanted to accomplish God's will, that's what he would have been headed toward as Messiah. And Satan is saying, I'll give it to you now without the cross. How exciting is that? No suffering. You know, God's way of giving them to you, it involves the cross, beatings, being betrayed by your friends, being spit upon. It's going to be a lot of pain and agony. But look, I'll give them to you now. We know you're both going to win. We know it's going to happen. So just this one little act of respect, just kiss my foot just once. You don't even have to mean it. And I'll give it to you now. No suffering involved. Therein again is the shortcut. And that would have been very appealing. Because God's way often involves suffering. And that's how Jesus answers him. He says, be gone. He quotes again, Deuteronomy 6, you shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve. So God has said there's only one way to get the blessings he has in store for you, and that is to trust Him. You can't mix and match. You can't say, Well, I'm going to do it a little bit God's way. I'm going to do it a little bit the world's way. I'm going to mix, you know, a little bit of faith with a little bit of my own self-effort and law-keeping. If you're looking to someone else to meet those needs other than God, it's idolatry and it is wrong. And that's why Jesus didn't bow down. It would have been idolatry no matter how you cut it, because he would have been saying, I'm not going to wait for God to fulfill these his way. I'm going to take the shortcut and do it my way. Now, the point of all this, the extra point, is that idols offer counterfeit blessings. If we wait for God and we follow him, we get what is best. Not only what is what is the deepest longing of our hearts, but is best. And think of how this would have been true for Jesus. Jesus is going to inherit all the kingdoms of the earth, but he's not going to inherit the one Satan could give him, because Satan would have given him a corrupt and fallen world populated by sinful people. Is that the world that Jesus is going to inherit ultimately? No. In Revelation it says the kingdom Jesus will inherit will be the new Jerusalem, the new heaven and earth, constructed solely by the hand of God. It will come down out of heaven undefiled, untouched by the fall, pure, redeemed, cleansed. It will not decay, it will not turn to rubble, it will last forever, and it will be filled with redeemed people like you and me who have been proven and tested and now reflect the glory of God. So what Satan is offering is a cheap, shabby comparison. It is not worth, uh, it is nothing to compare to what God is offering. And that is true almost across, well, it is, I think it is true across the board. If you start taking those shortcuts, you you Satan may give you what you want, but it will be a cheap, shabby comparison to what God is offering you. Yes, his plan often involves suffering, and it may involve waiting, and it may involve trials. I almost guarantee it will involve trials, but it is best, and it will be better than you ever imagined. David John Marotta: So, step one, God gives you a dream. Step two, your dream gets twisted by the world to a greatness. Step three, you get discouraged often by those closest to you. Step four, you get tempted to take a shortcut. Step five, you experience a moment of darkness where the dream looks like a failure. Think about Jesus in the garden or Jesus on the cross, even. And then step six, as Krishna said, God turns the dream into something better than we imagine. The very death of Christ becomes our salvation, bringing about a kingdom that is free of sin and free of the power of sin. And I can't tell you how important the principles in the temptations of Jesus are. If you think about it, um a lot of Christian wisdom, rules of thumb that you hear is actually a little more than pinnacle jumping. It's like you need to go do this thing. Order to prove to God how special you are, and it holds up one level of service a lot higher than another level of service. And if you really want to be spiritual, you know, the real spiritual maturity, then you need to, you know, fill in the blank of whatever real maturity would look like rather than being faithful and serving frozen yogurt. And the two are really, really just as valuable. They're taking different parts of the kingdom. And one is only more important than the other in God's eyes if you believe that God can be impressed. And if you believe God that can be impressed, then go jump off the pinnacle, because that's pinnacle jumping. So you can see how God turns our dream into something better than we imagine really is taking our darkest hour sometimes and bringing the most light out of it. And the final step in the process is fruit. And the principle is that the fruit of our labor is up to God. It doesn't matter what the results are, the results are up to God. And sometimes God just wants you to be faithful, and sometimes you will have one type of fruit, and sometimes you will have another type of fruit, and that is up to God. If you're faithful in what you're doing, then God will bring about the fruit that he wants. And I will say that God has, if you just look at creation, God has some particularly strange fruit. It doesn't all look quite normal, and and maybe, you know, maybe you're called to be that wood apple in the middle there, and that is just strange fruit. But that's just different. So I mean, how many of you have ever seen some of these fruits? They're just unique. And uh some of them look quite normal, and and then you have the banana. You know, and the banana is just a completely different fruit all unto itself. And I've heard comedians say that if you want a joke to be a flender, it needs to have banana in it. Because that's just a part of the strange fruit. Um, so so you may have, you may be one of those unique fruits that God wants to do something unique with and do something completely new with. And quite often, if you go into a vocation and you figure out that God may want that vocation to be changed in a completely new and different way, that you may be just sort of the one who breaks that ground and sets the standard by which hundreds of Christians will follow you in doing it that way. And so if you think that so there are some uh aspects of the business world or the commerce world, and you think to yourself, I don't know how you could be a Christian and be in that business. That is right for an opportunity to change the business model of that business. So I mean, I'm my whole business was fee-only financial planning and it was uh it's fiduciary, and that was you know, the whole fee-only financial planning movement was only started in the 1980s by some people who said there ought to be a better way than trying to sell people financial products that they don't really want and trying to, you know, trying to be this pushing of salespeople. And so they said, why don't we just create something where you sit on the client side of the table? That's a whole aspect of financial planning that's only been around since the early 1980s, and I was able to step into that because when people broke that ground in the early 1980s. You know, so you can just ask yourself, you know, what's the sort of the area of commerce that lacks the most integrity? Some of you may be called to that area to bring it more integrity, to bring it more in line with biblical values, and to change the whole paradigm of the way that that that particular industry works. And that will be a whole new piece of fruit. And it will be hard because you're going to be going against the grain of our worldly culture and what they define as success. But if you do that, you may very well completely revolutionize a business. No matter what happens, while we dream, we might do anything. But when we act, out of the infinity of possibilities, we only can affirm one poor, insignificant fraction. Give us enough time and opportunity, we can develop limitlessly in any direction, but we have to live in this time in this life. We must live this chapter, and we have to plan for time as well as for eternity. At best, only a poor little fragment will be realized in the brief span of life given us in this world. We must somehow lay both the foundation and erect the superstructure. But when a small fragment is realized and we've beat back a small part of the darkness, the light of the whole ideal can shine through that. So even if you only do one really great thing in life, it shines forth of all the infinite possibilities that that one thing reflects. If you think about it, this is the way that artists and athletes are judged. You don't judge an athlete by all the high jumps he missed. You judge him by the world record he set. Same thing's true of artists. They may have done lots of movies, but there's one film that's their best movie, and they're judged by the best they've ever done. And I think God wants us to be judged by the best that we do, not the worst, because we're trying to show forth what his ideal might be like, and the closer we come to that ideal, that's what we're looking for. Yeah, there's lots of failures and things you didn't try. Think about Thomas Edison and the thousand things that didn't work for a light bulb. But he's known as finding the one thing that did work for the light bulb. So he's not known for all of the failures, he's known for the success. And so when you get that one piece of fruit that's really beautiful and really unique, there's a sense in which it's echoes of all of the fruit, and there's lots of fruit that could come of that. And I think I think that's also true that when success does come, no matter how long you've waited for it, it always comes before you're ready for it. And handling success is just as important as handling all the failures. And knowing how to do that graciously, giving the glory back to God, helping other people find that path that you found towards success, and being able to do that. So in the end, the results are up to God, but um but and he will bring about and use it in the world the way he wants. Okay, we have uh a few minutes left at the end for questions about anything about calling. And I hope this has been helpful. I learned from my father sitting in a lot of financial planning conferences that sometimes um I'd have questions, but I'd refuse to ask them because that would show how little I knew. And he knew a lot, and he'd ask all kinds of questions. And I think, yeah, I didn't know what that was, but I was afraid to admit it. So the only the only poor questions are the ones left unanswered or unasked. Yeah. Speaker 8: Is one always passionate about one's calling? David John Marotta: Yeah, is the question is, is one always passionate about one's calling? That's a great question. And I like to distinguish between um happiness and joy. Um and Eric Little from uh you know the movie Chariots of Fire, when I run, I feel God's pleasure. Um when he runs, he's also tired after running. He's spent, but he feels God's pleasure. And I think so. I think there's a difference between happiness and joy, and I think passion is something that you feel strongly about, uh, but you know, there's still all that deadweight work. And uh we underestimate the deadweight work in all the other disciplines because we don't see it, we only see the finished product, and so we overestimate the deadweight work in our own. So I, you know, you don't have to feel good, but you but that that's different than what I would call passion and feeling God's pleasure. I feel God's pleasure sometimes for a task well done that's worth doing because I know that that's good, um, even though I may not be happy at it. In fact, I don't stop to think, am I happy at it? I just think about I'm doing this because it's really important to do, and I'm passionate about it that way. So I think that's a better, that's a better answer for passion. It's passion. Passion is what, when you start talking about it, your eyes light up and you become more animated. You know, and I can tell the stuff I I'm not passionate about because I just don't want to talk about it, and it's just not all that interesting. And you can tell I'm more complaining when I'm talking about it than anything else. But I'm talking about something that interests me, it's like I'm so excited about it, I lose fact of the of the of how I feel about it. Is because it's just because it's just so interesting to talk about. And I think in a lot of Kurt Counseling, what you're looking for is you know, people are talking about things. Uh Barbara Sherer tells the story, um, you know, she's working with this woman and she can't find anything that she really likes. It's like, well, is there anything you liked in school? I kind of like biology. It was like, you know, could you be a biologist? And she said, I suppose, you know, and you can tell there's nothing. It's finally she said, you know, I'm not going to charge you for this session because you know I haven't found anything. And as as the woman's leaving, as the woman's leaving, you know, she she's reading a book, and you know, Barbara's always saying, So, what book are you reading? And the woman says, Oh, this is about Coco the gorilla. And she says, Look at that. You're happy. What happened? You know, you know, do you want to work with gorillas? Oh, Barbara, everyone wants to work with gorillas. You're a big ugly picture of a gorilla. And Barbara's thinking, no, everyone doesn't. You have to. She said, Well, I can never do that. She says, Well, you know, your life sucks. You can't do anything else anyway. You might as well try, you know, you know, go find something. So I think that's what you're looking for. You're looking for that thing where someone gets animated and their eyes light up because they're so excited about something. And I think, you know, some people have the problem of have passionate about a lot of things, and some people haven't yet found that passion, and so they're still trying to try things on. I think the more things you try on, the more you're able to see that thing that makes your heart sing. So that that that's that's the way I'd answer it. Yeah. Speaker 9: Do you think there's any risk in putting too much focus on what is God calling you to do that with maybe caution and like a free though of like fear to pursue or like get a job? Like how would you encourage someone to go start a career when they're not totally certain what they're calling? David John Marotta: Right. And and and again, you you when you're young, you don't even know who you are, and you should go try everything. You know, if you think you might like something, you should go do it. And and it's it's hard it's hard to be in preparation mode. I met a I met a young man who was uh an estate planning lawyer. He'd graduated about a year ago from law school, and he said, had I spent one day following an estate planning lawyer around, I would never have gone to law school. Because he hated it. And he wanted to go do uh wealth management and investment management. I said, Well, have you ever followed someone doing wealth management around? He said, No, maybe I should do that before I before I dump my career. So I would say the more things you try, the better. And so I try everything and just go and do it. Because while you're it's easy to go down a career path and then say, nope, that's not it, then go switch and over. Nope, that's not it. The hard thing is to go down the career path and then not be willing to bail when you realize that's not really what you want to do with your life. So I would say you don't often know until you've tried things on what you like to do. It's like it's like it's like you have this whole um buffet before you of life, and you're trying to figure out what to put on my plate, having never tasted any of it. Well, what do you do? You put a little of everything on your plate and you go taste them all. You know, and then next time, if you have the same buffet, you'll know here are the things I really like to do, you know, and and and this is the this is the mix I want on my plate. So I would say go do everything. That's the best that doing is the best way. And one of the problems I think I've seen among uh young people is they don't actually have jobs. So you can make it throughout all of your high school career and all of your college career, and you've never actually taken on a job other than lifeguarding, waiting tables, fast food, but you've never actually gone and tried to do some real things. And I think I think the way when I've seen kids, kids are ready to do real things between age of 10 and 14. And by 14, they just should they should just go be doing real jobs as much as they can during the summers and in their free hours. Because doing a real job is how you learn whether or not that's really what you want to do. And so, you know, a lot of us our parents discourage it, it's too inconvenient. I can't find a job that pays that's actually doing anything real, you know, and you've got all these sort of problems, and I think minimum wage has actually hurt us that way because we'd be willing to go do it for free to figure out who we are, and so we ought to just figure out how to do that and get paid for it as well. Other questions? So I would try everything to figure out who you are. Krisan Marotta: Can I just add to that? The other thing is most people will change their career at some in some way. I mean, even doctors change their careers in some ways, they switch to different kinds of medicine or they do the medicine they're doing a different way. Maybe they teach instead of see patients. So if you don't feel like I have I'm I at 22 I have to make this decision and I will never be able to change for them the rest of my life, chances are you'll change it in some way. So you're not it's part of the journey, but it's not like this is the only choice you'll ever have. David John Marotta: And sometimes if your goal is here, this is what you think you want to do, the skills you need for this, you need to do this, this, this, and this. And then you'll have all the skills you need to get to here. So that's another thing, is I start doing X, and I'm a junior assistant trainee for X. And then I can get a promotion to be an associate X, and then I can be an advanced ex, and those all pay more money, but you actually need to go do all these other things you're interested in to make it to your final goal of here. So in career asset management, we often don't recommend you just keep getting promotions doing the one skill set if what you really need is a whole range of skill sets to then reach what your final goal is. You want breadth more than uh than depth in one area. So that's another reason to keep switching jobs. And you can, I mean, especially today, more than anything else, you can switch jobs and do 17 different things. And no one's gonna look at that and say, who cares? I'll just throw in one more thing, and that is I would recommend that Christians as much as possible consider running their own businesses. Because one way of taking a realm captive is to be the owner of a company where you're hiring other people and making sure that that is captured for Christ. And one of the one of the most difficulties I've seen is a Christian who gets the boss from hell, literally, because Satan is their father. And and and and you know, I mean, I mean Jesus said, you know, if if they're not following me, Satan's their father. And so and so now you've got this position of you're you're reporting to someone who doesn't have Christian values, and if you could have your own business, then you could have people reporting to you, and it will be much better for both the people who are reporting to you and for you as well. So being able to run your own business is a is a great privilege. It's scary, but it's a good route to try to go. Other questions? Speaker: About anything. David John Marotta: Yeah, mentoring's mentoring's difficult because there's there's so much to learn, you kind of need to come alongside them and almost do join them in their business. And some people do that well and some people don't. I found it it's a lot more time on the mentors task to be able to take on someone like that, but it's very worthwhile if someone has sort of that heart to learn and and to get stuff done. So it's it's hard, but you'll find people whose calling in life is to help mentor others in their field. So you not only need to find someone in your field, you need to find someone whose calling is to mentor other people in your field. And and that that comes out of you know, sort of their own life process and figuring out if that's if that's their gifts. So one of the things we're you know trying to do with the cards is trying to figure out is there someone who will you know be able to match up. So if you have a field and someone's willing to try mentoring you, and believe me, the mentor might be just as scared as you are because they've never done mentoring before. And that may work, and they may find they're good at that, and then they may find. Because you have to be you know 40 or 50 before you even consider mentoring someone, and then you don't know if you're good at it. You don't know if that actually works or not. And so you're trying out a new skill at that point. So the mentor is is probably as scared as you are in in that whole relationship. And that's what so we're gonna try setting some of those up, and and you know, Jay's gonna run all of that, and if half of them work, it'll be great. That'll be half that you know that wouldn't have worked otherwise. And if half of them don't work, just say, okay, that didn't work, let's try that again. Maybe it's maybe it was the mentor's fault, maybe it was the mentee's fault, maybe that's just not the calling that the pairing that God wanted, and God has another pairing in mind. So, and I think that's worthwhile and it's worth doing. And even if you just get I find if I get two or three pieces of wisdom out of someone, it's invaluable because it's two or three things I didn't have to learn by trial and error. I can learn it by um I can learn it by by wisdom. Krisan Marotta: The other thing is shadowing. David John Marotta: You can where you Yeah, I mean, and and go ahead. Krisan Marotta: Well, we just we've had and like some of our nieces and nephews and were unable to get internships or formal kind of mentoring, but they were able to shadow, or they just went and hung out and followed the person and their profession around all day for a month to see what it was like. And it's not paid, but it does give you a real look at what this job would be like. So that's another option. David John Marotta: And you can follow someone around for a week or a day, and you'll learn all kinds of things about whether or not this makes your heart sing or not. And trying out, you know, if if you if you try out, you know, six shadowings for a week, there's six careers that you now feel like whether or not your heart sings or not, or whether or not that really looks like it would be fun and enjoyable, and and you'd feel God's pleasure when you did that. Okay. Let me just close this in prayer. Lord, thank you so much that you are a sovereign God who's prepared every day good works for us to walk in. You made us, you made us unique, you made us with uh with talents and gifts that you would have us use. We pray that we might uh learn the wisdom, uh, that we might learn uh more of you and uh and the combination of your word and our calling together. Just thank you for this group here, and I pray that uh each person would be uh following you today, making uh their lives wholly yours. In Jesus' name, amen. unknown: Thank you all for being here. Speaker: Thank you. unknown: If you have a card that you want to add, that's how that's uh oh yeah.