00:00:46.000Whatever you think about the complex issue of Israel and Palestine, note that we are all now living in a kind of matrix world where everyone is an agent, everyone's in the media, everybody's making content, everyone's filming you.
00:00:58.000There's a famous person who used to once have to worry about paparazzi, now the world is paparazzi.
00:01:04.000It's a weird experience if you've never had it.
00:01:05.000They're kind of like locusts crawling around you.
00:01:11.000I tell you that it's not for the benefit of our kind that everyone is recording each other all of the time and trying to trip each other up, and that every other news item is a murder or a stabbing, someone filming some brutality or a complex geopolitical historical story that includes genocide and brutality and negligence and evil.
00:01:33.000I don't know what the solution is going to be.
00:01:34.000Over the course of the show today, we're going to be talking a bit about Michael Jackson.
00:01:38.000Contemptible paedophile or brilliant genius?
00:01:43.000Personally, I'm not sure that guy operated on a sexual plane, but you know, there is a Netflix documentary condemning him.
00:01:49.000But then I've had documentaries condemning me that are full of, well, I've got a trial, and it seems that half of the people involved in that trial, well, not even half actually, me, I'm not allowed to talk about those things.
00:02:03.000But I can talk about Michael Jackson, and then we can talk together about whether or not Michael Jackson is innocent or guilty.
00:02:09.000On the subject of UK politics, which we're going to talk about for a little while before our interview in a minute, and you're going to love that interview.
00:02:16.000The Green Party are one of the beneficiaries of the changing political landscape.0.65
00:02:22.000In your country, the wave that brought Trump into power created ripples elsewhere that brought Mamdani to New York.
00:02:30.000Me, I see that, I suppose, in a strange way, as a benefit of living in a democracy.
00:02:36.000That you might have people that are conservative, is that how you describe Trump, or nationalist, is that how you describe Trump, or you might have people that are socialist, is that how you describe Mamdani?
00:02:47.000In addition to nationalist parties like Reform or Restore in the UK, they are seeing an increase in support as people finally and belatedly recognise that the two main institutional parties,
00:03:00.000in my country that's the Conservative Party and Labour Party, have no credibility, have no viability, are unelectable stooges and servants of the globalist imperial system that will soon control whatever parties grow in power and influence as a result of forthcoming elections.
00:03:36.000We're all ending up in the same place if we don't quickly repent and turn towards the everlasting light that transcends our limited senses.
00:03:45.000I mean, just by wearing these glasses, everything looks different.
00:03:47.000So, how permanent can sensory reality be if it can be so easily inflicted and ordered?
00:03:53.000Let me know what you think about that.
00:04:13.000That's some commentary there on Genesis 1 6.
00:04:16.000If the Lord can create the world in seven days, surely you can change your life in seven days, particularly if you've had enough of the world as it is.
00:04:25.000And if you're living in the UK, you have particular cause for concern.
00:04:29.000The political diorama continues to unfurl and unfold.
00:04:33.000This is a moment where a reform candidate and a green candidate clashed over the subject of immigration, a very Contentious subject in the United Kingdom right now.
00:04:43.000Rob Kenyon, who I believe is a reform representative, argues rationally and with some numerical reliability, one would assume that more people means greater housing demand.
00:04:57.000And the Green Party, Sarah Wakefield, has made a facial expression that's become a meme.
00:05:01.000Now, I've been a meme once or twice in my time, and there's no greater honour.
00:05:05.000Let's have a look at Sarah Wakefield's facial expression and let me know in the comments and chat where you stand on this.
00:05:39.000I might see this as an indication of an advancing spiritual state.
00:05:43.000But it could equally be a kind of delirium.
00:05:45.000I sort of see it like a puppet show, like Punch and Judy or like Sock Puppets.
00:05:50.000You know, like that woman represents a certain type of mentality, sort of like, you know, beyond what she's saying, her facial expression is like, I know that mood.
00:06:05.000Like, it's like an archetypal energy is just sort of outpouring and flowing through.
00:06:09.000On the addition, issue of housing and migration, there's a simple solution.
00:06:14.000Continual referenda on every single subject, ask constituents of various boroughs and districts what they want, then what they vote for using technology simply deploy.
00:06:25.000Get rid of government and have instead administration.
00:06:28.000Public officials become public servants, they're not allowed to financially benefit in the outrageous ways that someone like Nancy Pelosi has.0.99
00:06:35.000Strip away the glamour and the ideology from politics, make it purely about the administration of resources.
00:06:41.000That's the idea, that's the idea that we can continue to tell you because when you remain within the limited paradigm of people that just Paul faces on television, you're not going to get any meaningful results.
00:06:52.000Whether you vote for reform or the Green Party, you're remaining in too small of a box.
00:07:01.000Do you not know that the most powerful interests in the world donate to both and all parties?
00:07:08.000And if there is a sort of a minor adjustment that is no longer Labour and Conservative, but it's instead Green and reform, I wonder if those same interests will go, hey, it's not Labour and Conservative anymore.
00:07:19.000So these are the people that we have to control in a number of insidious ways, whether that's compromising them in the way that the Epstein files reveal has been going on for ages, or just through bureaucratic inertia, or global institutions, or commercial incentives.
00:07:35.000You have to know, you have to, like me, know that what the COVID pandemic revealed is that there are global imperial forces that ultimately determine the trajectory of world power and the world's resources.
00:08:45.000Protect your money, get a Rumble wallet right now.
00:08:48.000If you've got a Rumble wallet, you can trade, you can interact, you can support protests that the British government, for example, and the Canadian government would ban you from participating in.
00:08:58.000Trudeau, I've seen the photos, you're Fidel Castro.
00:09:02.000And what are you doing with my ex wife?
00:09:04.000Something that I deeply, deeply regret.
00:09:09.000Get yourself a Rumble wallet, cancel all debt.
00:09:12.000Let's have a debt jubilee, ban usury, break down any systems of corruption and control.
00:10:34.000You'd probably be better off in a Soviet country where they go, there's your house, there's your job, there's your car, shut your mouth, eat your gruel.0.99
00:10:42.000Because the UK has become ugly and contentious and disgusting.0.99
00:10:48.000But when it comes to the sort of low ceiling of expectation, hope, optimism, spiritual connection, meaning in your life, purpose, identity, all that thing's just out the window.1.00
00:10:57.000Almost the most exciting and best thing you could do is go out and protest over the latest murder of some little child or person walking through the street by a Somali refugee.1.00
00:11:05.000At least there's some energy in it derived from tragedy, admittedly.1.00
00:11:10.000But at least there's something because you're not going to get anything else out of the world.
00:11:14.000And people, I think, are waking up to that, that this sort of endless chain of consuming, of acquiring the latest.
00:11:19.000Phone or hanging around some bar drinking expensive alcohol to deaden your senses for a half hour or hour or so before watching a World Cup that's been diluted to the level where it's about as effective as the piss weak alcohol they sell you.
00:11:34.000This is a country, an ideological crisis, and you're not going to solve that by changing the hues of the political inflections.
00:11:41.000The hues or political inflections green, reform, purple, beige.
00:11:45.000It don't matter who you put in those institutions.
00:11:47.000The institutions, by their nature, can you see what I'm miming, is a box.
00:11:51.000They can't break out of the box and they never will.
00:11:56.000Indeed, you have to create a political system where both that common sense bloke and the lady there from the Greens, who I'm struggling to find adjectives for, they say well meaning woman, like that, they can operate.0.92
00:12:07.000If they're called into public service, good.0.99
00:13:54.000Everyone knows that these systems are collapsing, and the only way to sustain them, even temporarily, is to.
00:14:01.000Demand that they are required because this country is in so much crisis.
00:14:06.000They all benefit from a state of crisis.
00:14:09.000Established institutions benefit from crisis because when there is a period of ease, people start to not be dependent, for example, on state or welfare, not dependent on sort of crisis information.
00:14:22.000The BBC never had it so good as in the COVID crisis.
00:14:26.000Look at the audience of people that have bothered to turn up.
00:14:29.000They still, it looks to me at least, feel a degree of contempt.
00:14:34.000For probably all of the politicians, and in my view, they're right to not because of the individual characters of either the lady that did the face or the man with the sort of easy common sense rhetoric, but because the system that they're participating in is so deeply, deeply corrupt that by the time you get into it, oh, you're in trouble.
00:14:51.000That's not to say there aren't brilliant people in it, there are, there are, but they're not going to get anywhere while they are in it.
00:14:58.000This country has an impact on housing, of course.
00:15:01.000All right, the numbers of people in a country that's not necessarily to do with immigration.
00:15:40.000What it is, is she's walked into the midst of things and now we're going to discover if she's equipped to cope in the furnace, the furnace of public life.0.98
00:15:48.000I mean, you know, you look at the Green Party politics, I think, policies, I think it makes the country a hell of a lot more dangerous with drugs on the streets and no prisons.
00:15:57.000So when you, you know, when the Green candidate is telling you.
00:16:08.000It's not just Henry's parents that are worried about their son, and it's every single parent of a son, a daughter, who's worried and calling them up and saying, Make sure you take the safe way home tonight.
00:17:29.000But division is precisely what's required, at least if you see decentralisation as division.
00:17:34.000Let people run their cities democratically.
00:17:36.000Let people run their communities and their boroughs democratically.1.00
00:17:39.000The only way that you can insist that there's a requirement for centralised government is with the assumption that people are too stupid to run their own lives.0.99
00:17:46.000And sometimes it does seem like that's the case.1.00
00:17:49.000The problem is the people that we're charging with and paying to run it are, at best, stupid and at worst, extraordinarily pernicious.1.00
00:18:03.000What would you say to the people that are listening to you today and think if you don't put this duty on public bodies to actively think about it, what you might be doing is damaging the cause of people who have faced discrimination for decades?
00:22:47.000Did you watch the nose getting chiseled out?
00:22:49.000I did because it was a natural change.
00:22:52.000A natural progression of Michael's nose.
00:22:54.000Well, what I liked was the innocence and the genius, and that Michael Jackson was a bringer of light, a sort of oddly apolitical figure, though, of course, the film does frame the time he intervened in LA gangs with his wonderful innocence.
00:23:16.000Now, of course, his later life, well, not covered by the film, understandably, was beset by allegation, accusation, rumour, gossip, and condemnation.
00:23:25.000And what I felt like the film when I saw it was oh, no, this tells you, even though it's not like a good fellas or the Matrix, but as a but it ain't even like something like Rocket Man, a more expressive biographical film.
00:23:39.000But Michael Jackson was, I think, a peerless genius as an entertainer.
00:23:43.000Like, maybe the best entertainer the world has ever seen.
00:23:47.000It might be, like, I mean, who's up there?
00:23:57.000And I thought in scenes like where the mum, his mum says to him, You're not like other boys, Michael, you never were.0.91
00:24:02.000Or when he wants to play Twisted with his brothers and they don't want to play because they're adults now and they're married and having sex with adult human females.0.97
00:24:10.000But he's like, You guys are no fun anymore.0.96
00:24:13.000And like me, I've had a lot of my opinions have been cast, I reckon, by South Park.
00:24:52.000But when you see him, I don't know, man.
00:24:54.000I feel like he was on a plane of innocence.
00:24:56.000Now, my mate Joe, who you guys know, did tell me that in that Netflix documentary, there are people saying, like bodyguards and that, saying, Well, I went in the shower and he was sadly, one has to say, performing a sex act on a child.
00:25:12.000So that is an eyewitness account, which is a type of evidence.
00:25:26.000But, you know, an eyewitness is an eyewitness and that's a type of evidence.
00:25:29.000Evidence is important in these matters.
00:25:32.000So, right, but what I feel about Michael Jackson watching the movie and you can't, obviously it's a biography about real persons, you can't review the movie without reviewing the man.
00:25:40.000And what the movie did so well is it gave us a chance to look at Michael Jackson once again as what I believe he was a genius, a very unusual genius who did some Unusual stuff, but my prayer at least is, and so far he's been found not guilty whenever he stood trial, now he's dead.
00:25:57.000My belief is that he's not a person that operated on that bandwidth, that he was an innocent, that he was a kind of an innocent, but hey, that's a controversy that other people can handle.
00:26:05.000What is not controversial is that the light came through him.
00:26:09.000And this I can tell you is that when someone has a propensity to bring light and love, and even in the most generalized way, says things like heal the world and we're all one, and it don't matter if you're black or white, you know, he's hardly Foucault, he's hardly Marx, he's hardly Sartre or Camus, he's not even Jordan Peterson or me and you.
00:26:30.000Character, but isn't that sad that even generalized love and kindness is seen as otherworldly?
00:26:36.000What do we think of ourselves that even the word matter, the most solid thing, the word from which the mother is derived, means things that are solid?
00:26:45.000What matters is what's solid, not as quantum physics would seem to suggest, that which creates matter, abides in matter, precedes matter, transcends matter.
00:26:59.000Hey, complicated, but when someone can carry that and hold that in song, in Peculiar parody in taking the pulse of a nation, then I think you have to call them what they are a genius.
00:27:09.000And you can see how the culture responds to them.
00:27:15.000And if that stops working, destroy them.0.92
00:27:18.000And heaven forbid that someone should wake up in their pod like Michael Jackson did and start talking about, hey, these people are telling me this and this is corrupt.
00:27:25.000So, yeah, no one will ever really know the story of Michael Jackson's private life.
00:27:30.000And perhaps blessedly now, after dependency on prescribed drugs and stuff, he's no longer with us.
00:27:38.000But what I feel is that Michael Jackson was destroyed by his genius, both inwardly to a degree, because he could never be at ease with himself, and outwardly by a culture that is dark.
00:27:49.000There's a darkness in the entertainment industry that destroys light, because light illuminates us all, lights up our hearts, gives us all hope, gives us all joy.
00:27:59.000And I know that the most powerful institutions, systems, elites, and individuals benefit from us hating one another.
00:28:08.000Regarding everyone as a pity, if someone's great, oh, they're a pedophile, Martin Luther King was this, Gandhi was that, Michael Jackson, like anyone and everyone that does anything unusual or brilliant, there's a reason why we should hate them because they want you to hate yourself.
00:28:21.000They don't even want avatars or examples of greatness.
00:28:24.000They want us to live in a kind of perpetual drudgery of hopelessness and despair because then the best you're going to get is a pint of beer or a shot of smack or a hit on a pipe or a wank.
00:28:35.000And that's exactly where they want you.
00:28:39.000In bolted down in some sort of virtual reality headset with piped in perennial advertising on a universal basic income dependent on their false system.
00:28:51.000And Michael Jackson, for all of his innocence in his simple brilliance, showed us that love and light and God are real.
00:29:45.000Check this out if you're a non Christian, because it's a pretty profound statement, particularly if someone like me was fascinated and infatuated and adored both the journeys that one can undertake with the use of psychedelics.0.53
00:29:59.000Although, really, I mean, I'm saying that as if I was hanging out with a shaman in the Amazon.
00:30:03.000I was at a bus stop in Grey's Essex, chewing acid tabs, or in squats in New Cross, South East London, doing acid with my mates.
00:30:39.000The basis of our total truth, which we're taking to the whole church in the whole world, Is that the human self has no nature of its own.
00:30:49.000It is the expressor of a deity nature, a God nature.
00:30:53.000Whether the nature of the false deity, the spirit of error, or the true deity, the spirit of truth, 1 John 4 6.
00:31:01.000Because we have all become accustomed to speaking of ourselves as having a human nature, it may make it clearer if we speak of the self as never being an independent self.
00:31:12.000It has never been a self operating self and thus has never operated by expressing a nature of its own.
00:31:19.000Norman Grubb is here claiming, and it's a claim that's similarly made in this book, Theosis, also sent to me by Rick from the Holy Monastery of St. Gregorius, Mount Athos, that there is no independent Russell or Laura.
00:31:34.000We are expressors either, Norman Grubb says, of the nature of God, the Holy Creator, or the alternative deity nature, the false God, the fallen one, the enemy, Satan, Lucifer, the fallen angel, the principle, in fact, of.
00:32:40.000So, this what is notable there, if you ask me, dear beloved Laura, is that the phrase I am is what, of course, is what when God asks Moses who's there.
00:32:55.000And later, when God makes further revelations, in particular, a revelation, not revelation, a response to the inquiry by Moses, look, I'm going back to this lot now, the Israelites, you know what they like?0.71
00:33:05.000They moan a lot, they don't listen, they're hard work, this bunch that you've put me in charge of.0.99
00:33:10.000Who am I going to tell them has sent me?
00:33:12.000And Yahweh, in the Hebrew, says, Tell them I am sent you.
00:33:20.000What fascinates me about that is when you say I am, and when I say I am, or when any of us say I am, We perhaps are expressing our true nature.
00:33:31.000Indeed, isn't the great mystery the hard problem of consciousness?
00:33:34.000No one can demonstrate how consciousness was generated.
00:33:37.000And it doesn't matter how deeply we carom in neurological spaces, it still remains mysterious.
00:33:43.000And what we believe as spiritual people is that consciousness precedes matter.
00:33:47.000What the naturalists believe is that somehow consciousness evolves out of matter, even though that is equally unprovable and doesn't have the backup of unbelievable and incredible literature and leaves you with an abundance of problems, including how did the universe and all of its laws emerge from a sub molecular explosion 13.8 billion years ago?
00:34:05.000Feel love and what is music and why geometry and why poetry and most of all why meaning and isn't it important, significant and defining that the maker of meaning comes into meaning as a storyteller who lives a story that renders the absolute meaning, the transcendent meaning that relieves us from the pagan world, the world of sacrifice, the world of sin and the world of self idolatry?
00:34:48.000And it just occurred to me when you're born, you are in the identity of your mother or the person that I suppose from birth raises you, the parent.
00:35:00.000Then when you've moved through that, is when you, I suppose, you go through all these different phases of identity.
00:35:07.000It starts with the mother and then quite probably around three, I guess, might be when the ego starts to.
00:35:14.000Activate, like when you start recognizing, I'm not my mother, I'm not part of the same thing.
00:35:22.000I guess people refer to them as the terrible twos or whatever.
00:35:24.000There's a lot of fighting and conflict as the child, the baby, starts to assert themselves.
00:35:32.000And I suppose we're at the stage with him, and we've obviously been through it having two other children where it's, I am me before it becomes, hopefully, the journey.
00:35:45.000Almost if you say no independence alpha site apart from God, that you want to get to the point that you accept your identity in God.
00:36:34.000And in fact, the reason it's so sweet when it's our little boy, and maybe your guys' kids too, that you feel the love and the openness of him.
00:36:43.000And when I think our Lord says, Come to me as little children, it's with innocence.
00:36:50.000Knowing that if your heart is open, open heartedness, when things become an idiom, you forget to examine what they both etymologically but also symbolically may mean.
00:37:02.000Open heartedness might mean that something can flow into you.
00:37:05.000In this instance, the love of God, the ever present love of God.
00:37:08.000Now, this process of individuation and individualization, separation from, well, yes, in psychological terms, but many of us that believe in God would dispute much of the provenance, heritage, and objectives of psychiatry and psychology, in so much as Freud, in particular, was attempting to negate the idea of a spiritual aspect to man's nature, saying everything could be reduced to the desire for sex, as a matter of fact.
00:38:03.000I can't remember, but it's like their relationship and their correspondence and the fundamental sort of schism that occurred between them where Jung.
00:38:09.000Continue to believe that there was some sort of meta reality, some ultimate spiritual reality.
00:38:51.000Ben Peterson here with Engage Your Destiny.
00:38:53.000Ben Peterson is a combat veteran, author, speaker, and founder of Engage Your Destiny, a ministry serving active duty military personnel, veterans, and their families.
00:39:04.000Through his work and on the Ben Peterson show, he explores faith, purpose, Leadership and the challenges facing modern culture.
00:39:12.000I recently joined Ben on his podcast, and what you're about to watch is the first part of that conversation.
00:39:18.000If you'd like to see the full interview, subscribe to the Ben Peterson Show on YouTube, where the complete episode will soon be released.
00:39:28.000All right, well, welcome to the Ben Peterson Show Faith for the Way Forward for our military veterans and the warriors at heart.
00:39:35.000I have the honor today to interview my new friend, Russell Brand.
00:39:42.000Uh, Gali at an airport, we were both holding our babies, and you walked over and we bonded over our children, and we've been staying in touch ever since.
00:40:24.000For Christ, I believed that God was real, and even that God was the ultimate reality.
00:40:32.000That, as C.S. Lewis says, even when you press a person on why they envisage God as God the Father, and that their paternal image of God is sort of.
00:40:47.000In a way, not that far advanced as someone envisaging Santa Claus.
00:40:52.000One can understand it because of the paternal imagery in like scripture and because of the artistic depictions of God as a kind of a type of super man.
00:41:05.000You can kind of understand why people would see it that way.
00:41:08.000But he goes on to say, C.S. Lewis does, that even if someone said they believed in like the force of the universe, if you pushed them on that, they would have to end up saying words like, I don't know, like a gas.
00:41:19.000Like, people wouldn't have a very sophisticated idea of what an all encompassing, immersive, ubiquitous, omniscient, omnipotent force would be because it's because of one, epistemological limitation, the limit of knowledge, and two, ontological limitation.
00:41:39.000Our beingness is held within a somewhat narrow frame because of the hardware, the bio hardware, the body.
00:41:48.000So, me, I suppose I'd done a bunch of drugs.0.52
00:41:52.000And also, have the advantage of coming from a place where a countercultural perspective, if you don't find one, would be a great loss.
00:42:01.000If you come from, like I do, Grey's Essex, which is like coming from somewhere like New Jersey, we're not talking about the projects, we're not talking about absolute destitution, we're talking about normal working class life.
00:42:18.000Now, that ain't deprivation of a kind that would make the thrilling subject of a galling documentary, but it's enough to know that if you are born, blessed as I am, with an enormous appetite for God, a great tendency for worship, it's enough to sort of know and intuit that the world is not going to provide you with it.
00:42:44.000But the world does offer you pathways.
00:42:47.000Now, in a way, what I'm describing is nothing other than.
00:42:50.000Bog standard addiction, and my spiritual precondition prior to Christ was an abstinent drug addict.
00:42:56.000I've been free from drugs and alcohol for 23 years.0.97
00:43:00.000Most people that are addicted to drugs, you could argue all, are looking for a spiritual solution and trying to synthesize that solution through chemicals or, you know, including alcohol or through behavior, sex, and food.
00:43:14.000Trying to kind of defibrillate dead and inert flesh into some kind of spiritual.
00:43:22.000So I can't, but what was hidden from me, what I didn't know and didn't understand till our Lord came, that I was worshipping myself.
00:43:31.000The reason I would have never thought that I was worshipping myself is because inside I knew that I didn't like myself very much.
00:43:38.000And the idea that I was worshipping something that I simultaneously didn't like seems anathema.
00:43:46.000But the truth is that most of the time, even though I had done a Some philanthropic work, even though I was very outspoken about human corruption, even though I think I've offered some pretty accurate diagnosis on some of the problems of imperialism, colonialism, globalism, the fallen condition of the world.
00:44:08.000What I didn't know was why that was happening and how it was happening.
00:44:11.000And importantly, when it comes to a personal spiritual question, which I guess is what you've asked, even though eventually the boundaries between the personal and the global or the cosmic collapse.
00:44:23.000Because where would those boundaries be?
00:44:27.000You know, at the edge of your skin, at the edge of the planet, at the edge of your breath.
00:44:32.000Who's determining where these contexts begin and end?
00:44:35.000Nonetheless, it was a kind of new age spirituality that I think is common to people that have taken hallucinogens, have autodidacts, have, or maybe not, you know, because I've met academically educated people that have pretty similar perspectives and have seen enough of the world.
00:44:57.000To know that the world will never ever work for you.
00:44:59.000Now, the additional privileges that I've had are that I've been granted some of the, you know, if we live in a stick and carrot society that offers penalty and incentives, I've, by God's grace, I suppose, you'd have to say, like, experienced some of those benefits.
00:45:18.000When a culture tells you that what you're supposed to be is famous, well, I began not being famous and then I became famous.
00:45:28.000Interesting about that is it was something I was deliberately pursuing and it was spiritually motivated, but I was worshipping the wrong God.
00:45:34.000It was like I will feel complete and fulfilled if I am able to become famous or wealthy, if I can overcome my economic conditions, if I can overcome my feelings of shame, if I can overcome my feelings of worthlessness.
00:45:47.000So, the spiritual position I had, having become sort of not only famous, but famous in a very interesting way, i.e., I'm opinionated and I talk and people listen and people like.
00:46:00.000Man, you know, I remember like a few years ago now, Ben, there's some magazine that annually publishes a list of who are the most influential spiritual thinkers of our time.
00:46:11.000And they, you know, it's always like Oprah Winfrey, Eckhart Tolle, the Dalai Lama.
00:46:16.000And, like, I was like number four on there, like me, Brene Brown.
00:46:20.000You know, like, you know, I'm like, oh, wow, that's what I am.
00:46:25.000Now, like a lot of people, I had sort of, certainly people with addiction issues, I struggle with the kind of peculiar paradox of being the piece of shit that the world revolves around.0.99
00:46:37.000I may not be much, but I'm all I think about.0.97
00:46:40.000A kind of low self esteem, but a peculiar sense of my own importance.
00:46:48.000What I could never have anticipated, and what I still, you know, obviously, definitively can't understand, is the reason I held off the idea of Christianity.
00:47:00.000One of the reasons is Christianity in my country, and I've met since coming to the Lord some really interesting and fascinating Christians, and to name them, you know, J. John, Nicky Gumball, Bear Grylls, Father, and, well, excuse me, now His Grace, Bishop Dave. Ball, I was lucky to encounter some like pretty early on in the walk and even prior to the conversion,
00:47:22.000some interesting Christians that have really gone out of the way to educate me and hold me and help me in a number of ways.0.83
00:47:31.000But in general, in my opinion, my experience certainly of Christianity have been bloody boring like, really boring.0.95
00:47:40.000Like, hello, welcome to the church.0.97
00:47:43.000Oh, I am the Lord of the Dark Sentry.0.95
00:47:45.000It's like, what this ain't, I'm gonna kill myself.0.63
00:47:49.000Like, what the f is this ain't gonna work?
00:47:51.000Well, what are you guys dealing in?0.74
00:47:53.000Like, this is some sort of Christianity for people that have given up and aren't gonna do anything anyway.
00:48:00.000Now, like, I recognize now that you know I brought a lot of those prejudices to the table, but now I've looked at a lot of different types of Christianity, and I'm gosh, you know, two years in willing to say that the challenge that Christianity has is one that I've noticed with other ideologies, specifically 12 steps, a willingness to be nested within the dominant culture.0.96
00:48:21.000And the problem that happens there is that the The dominant culture is the culture of the fool.0.61
00:48:35.000And the reason that after the visceral experience of Christ's coming, which happened on a dog walk on my own while feeling pretty despondent and despairing, something happened in my stomach that I described like this, although it's not entirely accurate.
00:48:53.000Imagine if you can, an invisible magnetic field.
00:48:58.000And that magnetic field is the shape of the cross.
00:49:02.000Suddenly, I felt that shape in my stomach.
00:49:06.000Then imagine this being a magnetic field that iron filings were in the environment of that magnetic field.
00:50:16.000Even recently, I was with some powerful people in DC, in our military, and in our government.
00:50:24.000And I'm seeing this theme, Russell, of men believing that they're not enough over and over and being driven to achieve and to fill that hole of I'm not enough.
00:50:38.000And I think about your story and what you were sharing in this.
00:50:43.000I mean, how lost you were and how low your self esteem was, yet you had so many things the world values.
00:50:49.000And what is your thoughts or your heart or your opinion around that feeling of not being enough?
00:50:58.000In Psalm 42, it says, now, you know, I have some precedent for taking a while sometimes to locate the correct verse, but in this instance, I do know what the verse I'm looking for is.
00:51:14.000Psalm 42 says, as the deer pants for streams of water.
00:51:29.000My tears have been my food day and night.
00:51:33.000This longing, this yearning of a deer looking for a stream of water, that's the image, is an image and a psalm that Carl Jung referenced in his correspondence with Bill W., the founder of AA.
00:51:51.000An alcoholic or a drug addict is looking to.
00:52:06.000And some of the fiercest, most effective men I've ever met, if you have the good fortune to talk to them, will reveal that they themselves have feelings of deficiency and inadequacy and even worthlessness.
00:52:19.000And I'm, you know, where I live now, mate, is in the Florida panhandle.
00:52:24.000And you're probably aware that that has a sort of A lot of veterans and a lot of servicemen and a lot of special forces and men that, you know, by any sensible metric you would consider ultra masculine.
00:52:36.000But I reckon the reason we feel deficient is because we're not told what the solution is.
00:52:42.000We are not told that your real identity is your identity in God.
00:52:46.000And if you don't reconcile or allow Christ's reconciliation to be effective in you by repenting and accepting Him as your Savior, you will be trying to undertake that work yourself using the tools.
00:53:00.000Measurements and metrics of a culture that's actually on the contrary, not only will it not fulfill you, it's designed to prevent fulfillment.
00:53:08.000It's designed to threshold you in constant need, constant deception, and constant want.
00:53:14.000As it says in our word in Ephesians 6 12, we fight not against flesh and blood, but against dark forces in the heavenly realm.
00:53:22.000As John says in his first epistle, children, watch out for false idols.
00:53:27.000As our Lord says, the prince of this world is come for me.
00:53:32.000The devil is in control of this world.
00:53:36.000And again, as Jung said in his important exchange between himself and Bill W, there is an evil principle prevailing in this world which leads the unacknowledged soul into perdition.
00:53:50.000It's the idea that if you don't find God, if you are not shown God, if you don't exercise that feeling of deficiency or craving or worthlessness, that is longing.
00:54:02.000That is, the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, God.
00:54:08.000But if God is not real, if you're told you live in a chaotic universe, there is no God, or worse still, you are that God, and whatever you achieve is what you will be judged by, men, women, children, me, all of us feel insufficient because we are insufficient, part of our incomplete until we abide in Him.
00:54:34.000And the culture hasn't, I wouldn't put it so gently as saying, lost that message.
00:54:42.000The culture obfuscates, hides, denies, tarnishes that idea in favor of its antithesis.
00:54:53.000That you, you are valuable, you are special.
00:54:59.000Recently, someone said, We're looking for rock stars to work at Subway, was the language.
00:55:04.000You know, like, you know, that you can somehow, even while being trapped in poverty, you know, role play some idea that you are an individual of value.
00:55:15.000Actually, unless we find our value and our identity in Him, which has happened to me involuntarily and suddenly and as a result of crisis, then you are going to feel that.
00:55:23.000And now I still feel sometimes deeply, but blessedly more frequently, peripherally, this sense of something's bugging me.
00:56:38.000And by accepting his sovereignty, of course, I'm invited to become a co heir with him.
00:56:44.000The scripture that I find useful for illustrating this is Romans 6 8, where he outlines the problem.
00:56:52.000Then illustrates his challenge in dealing with that problem before granting us once more that we are, as long as we're in him, he will work all things for good.
00:57:04.000Now, this can only be practiced in the present moment.
00:57:07.000So, my first problem before coming to Christ was Christianity is boring, it's not for me, or it's too traditional, it's too folky hokey, it's too.
00:57:18.000Since coming to Christ, my inquiry of you who's probably been with the Lord longer is do you feel that the institutions of the church are.
00:57:27.000Are doing enough to ensure that we understand and pay attention to ideas like the kingdom of heaven is all about us, the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.
00:57:38.000I knew you before you were in your mother's womb, I set you apart.
00:58:32.000Available to as many people as possible to help people to recognize that their relationship with Christ is fundamental and essential.
00:58:45.000It's the most important thing they can be doing.
00:58:47.000When I was approaching the same problem, the problem of evil being in control of the world, just to be specific, evil is in control of the world.
00:58:54.000When I was addressing that same problem from a somewhat secularized form of spirituality, a kind of new age spirituality, just to address the problem with new age spirituality, if you're picking a little bit of Buddha, A little bit of the Upanishads, a little bit of Nietzsche, and conglomerate in and constructing your own little religion out of that.
00:59:15.000And W.B. Yeats, the great Irish poet, said, All artists must create their own religion, and surely we must all create our own way or Tao or path in the present moment as we walk yoked to Him in His divine cadence and step, particular for each of us.
00:59:32.000But the problem is when you create and curate your own religious ideology, You are at the center of it still.
00:59:41.000And as Chesterton said, you know, in response to the times, in answer to your question, what's the problem with the world?
01:00:14.000And like on a good day, I can live with that thread between my fingers and just trust and allow that I'm getting taken where I need to get taken.
01:00:23.000And that while I might be suffering in any number of ways on any given day, he's in control and he's taking care of everything.
01:00:31.000Sometimes I let go of that thread, absolutely.
01:00:33.000I resume control and like, you know, trouble ensues maybe immediately, maybe 20 years down the line.
01:01:18.000And in this deep, deep surrender, the various stimulation signals that might surround you through your food, through your screens, through your culture, through the bad information, to try and find, address, and maintain the level of peace that he continually invites us to abide in with him, whether it's in the storm, whether it's after his apparent crucifixion.