G'day guys, this is Matt Fradd. Today I want to talk to you about this important fact:
Are ya listening?
Who you desire to be in your heart of hearts
is, in fact, who God is commanding you to be.
Sometimes we believe — wrongly — that if we were to obey Christ,
follow God where he was calling,
be obedient to his call to a particular vocation
that we would somehow end up less happy, repressed, not fully ourselves.
This is a mammoth lie and we just need to dismiss it.
Who you desire to be is who God is commanding you to be.
C.S. Lewis once said,
“When we consider the unblushing promises of reward from Christ in the Gospels
it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.”
He says, “We are half-hearted creatures falling about
with drink, sex, and ambition while infinite joy is being offered to us.”
He says, “We're like a peasant who wants to go on
making mud pies in a slum
because he doesn't know what is meant by the offer to vacation at sea.”
And then he closes by saying “We are far too easily pleased.”
So as Christians, what we need to realize, is it's the saints who are fully alive.
That, if you choose to follow Christ,
if you choose to be obedient to him,
that your life will be as good, true, and as beautiful as it can be.
If you choose to reject Christ and instead live a life of sin
your life and my life, it'll become
insipid, uninteresting, sepia-toned, narrow, boring.
Let me ask you three questions to show you what I'm talking about.
Okay, so here's the first question: what kind of person do you want to be?
Now when you think about the answer to that question,
I don't want you to think, “What would Jesus have me say?
What would my grandma have me say? What should I say?”
No, just answer it honestly.
What kind of person do YOU want to be?
Second question:
What kind of people do you respect?
They could be dead or alive, fictional or not.
What kind of people do you respect? Think about that.
Third question:
How do you want to be remembered when you are dead?
Yes! Ay? Bit of good news for you: one day you're gonna die.
and all of your loved ones will put you in the earth
before your body becomes putrid and begins to rot.
Actually, before that, they'll wheel you into a church
and they'll say a few words about you.
What do you want them to say about you?
Here's the point of those questions:
Unless you're drunk, which is possible but hopefully you’re not,
you didn't respond in the following ways:
You didn't say “I want to be the kind of person
who never stands up for what he believes in.”
“When people think of me after I'm dead I want them to be like,
Man, was that guy addicted to porn!
I mean he ruined his entire career and family
‘cause the dude just couldn't get enough.
What a champion.” *laughter*
No! The answers you probably gave,
if you were taking this seriously, is stuff like this:
You’re like, I don't know, I want to be good.
I wanna love my family, I want to be good to my kids if I have kids one day
or if I already have kids, I don’t want to
pay more attention to my phone than them.
You know, I wanna be someone people can rely on.
I want to be someone who's faithful to his calling, to his duty
even if it gets difficult, right?
I respect — and then you might think of the Saints.
No one out there says “I respect Alfred Kinsey” unless you're an awful human being.
Nobody’s like, “I respect Hugh Hefner.”
Again, same thing.
We say stuff like, I don't know man, I respect...
whatever, fill in the blank.
And it's usually because of some virtue or some accomplishment.
Something that took courage, right?
And so those are the sorts of people you want to be.
Guess what? That's who God is commanding you to be.
So the next time you go to prayer say to our Lord,
“Lord I thank you that you are calling me to become fully alive
so that I can have a life that is true, good, and beautiful.
Give me the courage that I need
to follow you wherever you might be leading,
because I want to live this sort of life.”
Thanks so much for listening.
Leave a comment below, tell me what you thought about the video.
And also, if you want to ask me a question, just write #askMattFradd
and I will respond to you in an upcoming video.
Thanks so much!