I discuss our journey from paradise to paradise and how small steps can help. We are on an incredible journey from Eden to Heaven, and that journey is full of triumph, long days, fantastic sights, and loss. This is the introduction to the podcast, where we will talk about this great adventure.
Transcipt
[Music begins] We are not here by chance or by accident.
God put us on this journey called life.
We came from him and our greatest joy will be giving ourselves back to him and learning to walk with him every day until we return to him. – Billy Graham
Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast.
This is the first podcast in Small Steps with God.
I’m Jill, I have another podcast that is called Start with Small Steps, and this podcast is going to be very similar, but instead of having the productivity angle, we’re going to be talking about faith and issues of Christian living and how we can do better to get closer to God and closer to that eventual goal of heaven.
Today we’re going to talk about the podcast and why I thought it was a good idea to have a podcast like this.
As I mentioned in the trailer, I became a Christian in college and was pretty much an atheist with a Jewish background.
My dad was an atheist and I followed his leadings when it came to religion a little bit more than anything else.
I wasn’t an angry atheist, but I didn’t believe in anything myself.
I thought if you needed that kind of thing, okay, go for it.
But I don’t, so I’m good.
Someday in a future podcast, I’ll talk about my story and how I became a Christian and And what happened from there.
And as I became a Christian, I worked with my pastor.
He had a class when it came to Christian faith, and it was supposed to be a couple of weeks long, an hour each week.
And I think it ended up being 16 hours and multiple hours a week because I just had an endless amount of questions, trying to understand more.
And when you become a Christian, it is a wild roller coaster.
There’s ups and downs.
There’s things that just elate you and things that really depress you.
And as you meet people and you gain people on this walk, you realize what an interesting path this is.
A few years ago, I wrote a Bible study that was to cover us through most of the school year, which was called Route 66 because there’s 66 books in the Bible, and it was a guide to this journey we are on through faith.
was sort of in the analogy of a journey.
Our maps, our travel methods, the roadside hotel, the great restaurant we find along the way.
It was meant to really get people an introduction to the Bible and all the different parts of the story of this journey that we’re on.
And when we think about it, we start out in Eden and then pushed out of Eden.
And we’re gonna talk in the next episode a little bit about Eden and what we gave up and what we got when we left Eden.
And then we’ll talk about where we’re going to in the second episode, which is home, heaven, to be with God.
And we’ll be taking a look at a book called Home, which talks about heaven and what we can expect.
So, there’s our journey.
We start in Eden, end up back with Jesus, back with God, and that is not the end of the trip.
That again is only another start.
So, this journey will become an important piece of this podcast, talking about where we’re going.
So, I always talk about the journey itself, and someone joked about whether someone is a millennialist or a premillennialist and all the different varieties, and someone said, I’m a pan millennialist.
That means I think in the end it’s gonna pan out and that’s where I stand in it I do believe that as we go through this christian walk and we return ourselves to god’s presence it pans out regardless of what happened I said to someone I felt like I read the last page of the book and I know how this story ends but then the question comes in about whether or not this journey matters and of course the journey matters because We’re going to become this individual person who has likes, dislikes, interests.
I always think about 2 Corinthians where they talk about the body of God, and some people are an elbow, and some people are an ear, and some people are an eyeball, and we all don’t have the same interests, we don’t all have the same skills, we all are individuals.
And that’s not going to be gone in this trip.
We are meant to be individuals.
And so first of all, the trip matters because it’s going to form us into the person we are going to be using our skills and gifts.
Even with this podcast, I like my other podcast quite a bit.
I’m proud of the work I do there, but you know where my bread is buttered.
In Christian faith.
It’s the one thing that matters to me the most.
And so for me to be able to take skills, abilities, things I learned along the way and apply it to faith, that matters a great deal to to me.
So again, that walk will bring us into new places.
Then the next place that this trip that we’re on matters is it matters that we are going to meet people along the way.
Some people that increase our faith and help us on our journey and other people who need our help, need us to help them get to the journey point.
Everybody’s invited to go on this walk, but people sometimes just don’t come along and we can help people on that journey, learn more, and just re-invite them to the journey to come with us.
They estimate that at the time of the Babylon captivity, there were about 1.
3 million people of the Jewish faith in Babylon when they were told they could go back to Israel.
And who came back.
It said 53,000.
That was probably 53,000 head of households.
But that just means that it was 53,000 families.
Even if that number was somewhere around 200,000, it nowhere represents the 1.
3 million people who were in Babylon.
And it’s not like Babylon was a great place to be as a Jewish person, following God.
It was a place that you had to accept and worship other gods, including the king himself.
So you couldn’t have your Jewish faith in Babylon in the way that you were meant to have it.
And only 200,000 people thought it was worth the journey to go back.
We’re looking at people who are on the road and some of them are happy travelers and some of them are straggling back and some of them don’t wanna be on the path at all.
And it’s the people we meet along the way that’s gonna make all the difference to us and to them.
And so then the question comes in, how do we get back.
How do we go home, back to God.
And that’s a question that we’ve been talking about since the beginning of humanity.
We are on the path to increase our faith, to become closer to God, and to look at the life that He wants us to live.
He wrote the manual about our lives and about the best ways to live our lives.
And can we get to a place where we become closer to Him and learn our purpose, learn our value in God’s kingdom.
And so that pathway is gonna be the important thing.
And it’s gonna be something that we tackle all the time.
If you listen to my other podcasts, “Start with Small Steps”, it’s about breaking ideas down into smaller ideas, smaller steps, so we can actually tackle the issues, accomplish something and gain something bigger from it.
Where I got the idea for that podcast came from Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas speech, where she said, Of course, at the heart of the Christmas story lies the birth of a child, a seemingly small and insignificant step overlooked by many in Bethlehem.
But in time, through his teaching and by his example, Jesus Christ would show the world how small steps, taken in faith and in hope, can overcome long-held differences and deep-seated divisions to bring harmony and understanding.
Many of us already try to follow in His footsteps.
The path, of course, is not always smooth, and may at times this year have felt quite bumpy, but small steps can make a world of difference.
- That small steps matter.
Even the small steps that Jesus took to the cross, the small steps that Mary and Joseph took to Bethlehem, all were done with small steps.
We accomplish everything with small steps, And so that’s how we can too get back to heaven.
Taking small steps, tackling the things we need to tackle, but also enhancing the things that we’re great at.
So when we’re on this trip, you know, trips are always interesting.
If you go on road trips or go hiking, both things I love to do, you’ll find out that sometimes the road’s a little bumpy.
Sometimes it’s not going the direction you hope it would.
Sometimes you have accidents along the way, But the idea is that we’re gonna take the right road, we’re gonna make the road wide, make the road straight, and try to prepare the road and the walk with God as something that we can tackle.
There’s a lot of us on this journey.
We read about Paul, Moses, Abraham, they’ve been on the journey too.
And so we’re gonna look to see what we can do to walk that narrow path and do a great job of finding out who God means us to be and find out what God’s purpose for us is.
So in this podcast, we’re gonna do, like I said, a little bit like I do in my last podcast, where we’re gonna talk about an article, another podcast, a historical event, a historical writer, maybe a book, and see what exactly it is that the point they’re trying to get across.
And kind of start through if it’s a good point or a bad point or something that we can learn so that when we do take our small steps, we’re following a good path.
And so I hope that this podcast in general is going to put this all in the sense of the adventure we’re meant to be on and help us all, you and me both, get on that right journey.
One thing I learned by doing the other podcast is there’s no better way to learn a topic than to do a podcast about it.
I have learned so much with my other podcast.
I wanted to take that same learning and apply it to the topic of my Christian walk and your Christian walk.
And we’re gonna do this together.
We can be a community together.
You can always email me at jill@smallstepswithgod.
com or follow my Twitter account or contact me any way you can.
I will pray for you.
I will answer you back or I’ll talk about a topic that you’re interested in.
If you’re having a particular struggle or you’ve thought of a particularly great idea in your Christian walk, I’d love to talk about it.
So now, let’s see if we can go on this journey together and take as many people as we can find to go with us on the journey.
Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy the podcast.
By the way, each week is gonna have a challenge.
This week, your challenge is just to listen to the next podcast.
(upbeat music) [Music].