Inspiration now in session. Inspire guys people. All the records. All the records.
All right, I'm ready. My dreams lined up with guys dreams. Now you know exactly what I mean. But this stays off the record.
Let's talk off the record. This is off the record. Let's get off the record. Yeah.
What's up, people? I am your host, Jay Will. And I would like to welcome you to inspire guys people off the record. In the beginning, God created.
Those are the first five words of the Bible. As a creative person, someone who loves being artistic and making things from scratch. I found myself maybe a year and a half ago reading a word and just stopped after that fifth word. And it just hit me that God made us in His image and He gave us the rare ability to create something.
You know what I mean? And we don't create exactly like God. Here's what I mean by this. God creates by taking nothing and He can make something out of nothing.
We create by taking the resources that God placed in this earth and we can make something out of a resource. Like as human beings, we can't make something out of nothing. Everything that we ever create is using some type of tangible resource that already exists in the earth. You feel me?
God, when He created heaven and earth, it's like He created it from nothing. But yet in steel, He gave us the ability to create. And sometimes we could use that ability and that gift for positive and good things in our lives. But it has a counterproductive effect sometimes because there are times that we can create bad things.
I was sitting amongst a group of people recently and this young lady, I'm not going to give names and stuff. I really don't even know these people that well. So I don't think they listen to my show. I don't even think they know I have a show.
So that's why I think this story is mostly safe. So sitting amongst this group of people and the young lady, her sister was there at the house with us and her sister left early and she was like, hey, call me as soon as you get home. So her sister leaves and maybe 25, 30 minutes go by and she starts panicking, calling her, she's like, my sister's not answering the phone. She's telling everyone in the room and they're like, well, how far does she live away?
And she's like 25 minutes and they're like, how long has it been? And I'm looking at the situation develop and it's literally created fear for no apparent reason. People create fear and put themselves through emotionally draining situations when they didn't have to. But when I look at that, I'm like, OK, cell phones are a great creation.
There's something that gives us access to each other in various ways and access to the world. You know what I mean? But at the same time, that access can be a bad thing because let's be honest, smartphones have existed for less than 20 years. So something that we feel like we can't live without it.
Like I can't live without my phone. We got to look at it every two minutes. I'm guilty of this as well. And so our phones are there.
We expect to have access to people. And when we don't have that access, we go crazy, not realizing like, hey, people have existed for several thousand years without cell phones and made it just fine. You know what I'm saying? Like, what did people do before you had a cell phone with you and just had to call people every time you took a step to the left or a step to the right?
And that access has created fear in us. And what I'm really working on in my personal life is continuing to strengthen my ability to see both sides of a coin, to be able to understand that both heads and tails make this coin what it is and not be so controlled by a political party or a certain movement to the point where my only goal is to be in alignment with that party or that movement and not necessarily understand the whole coin. And what I mean by this is, all right, let's keep it on cell phones. All of that access is great when I want to find my cousin in Florida or the person that was my best friend in third grade and we want to connect.
OK, cool. But what about the fact that, you know, world news? Like if something crazy happens in the world, we just get alerts to our phone automatically. Like, oh, the government shut down.
And now we have to be concerned and concerned with the news of the world. Do you realize how crazy that is? We are walking around with the world news attached to our hips and our hands and our screens. And like the moment something crazy happens in Japan, we find out within three seconds.
Now we have created fear. Like people get scared about everything. I'm not saying that things aren't important. I'm not saying that things shouldn't be talked about, thought about, read about, research that understood.
But what I am saying is like, yo, I can only control what I can control. And I can't live my life trying to be everyone in the world. And I think we have to be careful and understand like, yep, it's cool to have his cell phone and to be able to know what's going on across the country or in China or wherever. But man, I can remember growing up.
We had three news stations. They were all local. You pretty much only knew what was going on on East Side or the West Side. Don't get me wrong.
I'm not judging anyone who is into politics or all these things. But what I am urging everyone to do is let's be careful. And if you are part of a political party or a certain movement, don't be so consumed with the position of the party or the movement that you lose the ability to see both the good and bad in it. My overall point here is that I think it's important to be able to see life from different perspectives.
But at the same time, we have to try to prioritize those perspectives. And I know that could be tough because life is complex and a lot of these topics have many layers to it. But ultimately, what I'm saying is that I first need to understand my local news before I can be concerned with the world news or before I have to be concerned with everything that's going in the entire world because I'm not God. God is sovereign.
He is in control. I can't save the world. But God wants to use me potentially for some things that are right here. I also can't allow the world news or the media, social media, everything that's being said around the world to affect my reality.
And I think we see this very clearly in race relations. There are people who live next door to individuals of different ethnicities and different cultures. And they like each other. And their kids like each other.
And they've lived next door to each other for 20 years with no issues. But we see something on the news that happened five states away. And it causes us to start having beef with people that we never had beef with in real life. And those are some of the dangers of being concerned with everything that's happening in the world and having it at your fingertips.
Look, we got to realize it's not like things didn't always happen all across the world. It's just that people in the past didn't necessarily have to carry that burden. That's a huge burden to carry access to all the information in the world. Man, that can really mess you up.
But you got to balance it out. And you know what the greatest example of balance is in the world? It's the Bible, the Old Testament, and the New Testament. And how many times do we see people ignorantly approach that topic in those books?
You have some people that only focus on the old, that's all they want to preach, that's all they believe in, some that only focus on the new. And I believe that people do that because they can't come to grips with how this can be heads and tails and equal the same coin. So they just split it down the middle and only deal with what they know how to deal with. What I'm telling you is that the Bible is the perfect, complete story of balance.
Okay, now with that idea of balance in my, let's go back to the race relations example I used earlier. Heads was the example where the neighbors have been living next to each other their whole life. And they never had a problem. And they allowed the media and all of the world news and things to dictate how they feel about things that they're actually living every day and wasn't even feeling in reality.
And so they became consumed and burdened with the world news. That is, you know, really selective in how they come across these news stories, by the way, they get thousands of stories every day and they pick the ones that they know are going to trigger people or get a lot of ratings or clickbait. But that's a whole another show. Here's the other side of the coin.
Tails. This is for the people who have never lived around or been engaged with another culture or ethnicity. And so you're completely foreign to their lifestyle and why they do things and how they grew up. And I think many people are guilty of this because our country was largely segregated for a long time.
And let's be honest, in America, I can't speak for everywhere in the world. I have to always remember that this show has a lot of international listeners, which I appreciate y'all. But in America, we still live segregated. So there's still a lot of people who don't have experiences with other cultures.
So they literally get those experiences from watching television or social media or whatever else. Right. So if you tell them they should hate people because they're a different culture, then you actually insert hate because they don't have anything else to replace it with. This is why I think it's so important for us to come outside of our bubbles and understand our neighbor and the person across the road and in the next city, because I think a lot of the race relations hate is built because people don't understand the other side of the coin.
They only look at life through their own perspective. So you have people who grew up rich. They have no idea what it's like to be poor. So they live their entire lives with a horrible view of poor people because they never had to be in that position.
But guess what? This goes for poor people too. You have some people who've grown up poor and that's all they know. And so they don't understand the language of the people on the other side.
I tell people all the time, it would be like me. I only speak English. Now, imagine I want to elevate it with five people and they speak every language, but English and try to pour my heart out to them and preach the gospel about why they should be living for Jesus. I can be saying the right stuff, but I'm not saying it in a way that they can understand it.
So it means nothing to them. We have to engage people and understand their side of the coin. There was this episode of Fresh Prince and we'll walk around in a fat suit. That has always stayed with me because we'll was in a fat dude.
You know what I'm saying? He was used to getting all the ladies in that type of deal and he had to walk around and experience what it felt like to be bigger or different than he actually was. And it took him having to live life as that type of person to understand what those people go through every day. So imagine if you could put on a different suit and be someone else of a different culture or a different race and try to judge them with their own eyes.
That's what I think we should be trying to do before we become so passionate in trying to protect a certain political belief or a certain movement that we're part of. We need to make sure that we've tried to see the other side. You get what I'm saying? His heads and his tails is new Testament and his old Testament.
All right, Michigan weather is all over the place and it could be frustrating for people all the time. Every single year you hear people like, I'm moving to Florida. I'm moving here. I'm tired of this.
I'm tired of that and I get it. I understand. But here's my thing. There are some good things that come with being able to see the different seasons.
We get a little bit of snow. We get a little bit of sunshine. We get a little bit of rain. You know what I'm saying?
Some places that's hot is just only hot. That's all y'all know out there is just like heat and that's cool. I'm a little jealous. But at the same time, what I noticed in some of those places is the moment that it does get a little cold.
Y'all get two snowflakes in a whole city shut down. It's like, oh my God, we've never seen this before. What's going on? What's going on?
And it's like up here, we're looking like, oh man, it's like a whole lot for the schools to be closed, you know, in Michigan because we've seen a little bit of everything. We have different perspectives on the weather. One thing that happened recently that was very interesting to me was that we had experienced this like below four below five negative weather, right? And it was super cold outside three days later.
It was 4550. Now, here's the part that blew my mind. Usually 40 to 4550 degrees. That's considered kind of cool, kind of cold, right?
That's our perspective on that type of weather in general. But after experiencing negative four and negative five, man, when that 45 degree weather came, you would have thought it was summertime. People was outside with no jackets on the music was up, the windows was down. People had lost their minds.
Why? Because 45 feels different when it's coming off of that negative five. It's kind of like summertime and we're in 7580 and then the weather drops to 45. We're like, oh, man, this is horrible.
Hello. And then when it's the wintertime and it's cold and nasty outside and then that sun's start coming out and the snow melts and you get that 45 is like, Hey, hey, let's get it. A completely new perspective on the exact same thing. Notice the 45 degrees doesn't change.
It is what it is. 45 is 45. What changes is our perspective on a situation. It's our vantage point, the point in which we stand to look at something may change.
So in our lives, man, let's try to be grateful to what guy has given us and I believe that when you look at things from different perspectives, it allows you to be fair to people. And that's what this is all about on every side. Here's the tells. Today's show is brought to you by J.
Will Music, the Christian rapper, the different rapper. With over 60 songs released since 2011, J. Will has a music portfolio that will speak to your soul and challenge you to leave behind all things old while accepting all things new. He has a genuine soulful flow and a biblical point of view that makes his music one of a kind.
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Visit JWillMUSIC on YouTube by searching JWILMUSIC. Now, I'm tired of talking like this. I'm tired of talking like this. I'm just kind of fun though.
Doing this little mini commercial about me as me acting like y'all don't know I'm me and I don't know I'm me. It was cool with me man. But anyway, check out my music. I love, love, love sharing my art.
And I have a new album that I'm going to be dropping soon and tiring on Aspire Guys. People just got to wait until the time is right. It's got to be perfect timing for this one. In the meantime, JWILMUSIC.com.
Man, I appreciate every single one of y'all who check out my music and send me messages on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, Quoting lyrics and all that stuff. That's probably the dopest thing ever to me just because sharing my music is just super special. You know what I mean? It's like I'm speaking from my heart and my soul and to know that it's connecting with people is super cool.
So thank you for that. I'm trying my best to get better at sharing things that I do. That's one of the blessings of having this show is because I have all this content from years of working on things and this show is like a huge outlet in a platform for me to hopefully package these things together in a way that's valuable to you. So with that being said, I want to share a clip of a sermon that I preached entitled, Why Do Is Thou To This Thee?
Check it out. So class is going to be going to this white dog for a second class. In linguistics, homonyms, broadly defined are words which sound alike or are spelled alike but have completely different meanings. You got to test y'all.
We've been a class of five minutes and I'm going to be able to test. I want you to listen to this paragraph and I want you to identify the homonym. I was reading a book about people who love the color red. After reading the book of red, I'm convinced that it's the most colorful book I've ever read.
I can't wait to read it again. So as I take my glasses off, the definition of read, read, read, read is all based around the time of context clues. I argue it would be in about third or fourth grade and they talk me about context clues and about looking at it like it's you don't look at just the word. You look at everything that's around here to allow you to know what the word means.
You know what I'm saying? It's one of those situations where I don't think if I tell you that my favorite color was red that I was feeling. R-D-A-D even the red is spelled R-D-A-D. Because you see the words, my favorite color, the trick or the word, right here when I say color, you know that I'm talking about R-D-D, not R-D-A-D.
But what would happen if I was just so called it, it's just reading it and not here in the extension to anything around it and just reading that section is right away. If I hold the light, it's built off the extension because I didn't take the time to see the other things that were around it. Okay. Class, I'm going somewhere with this.
If you look at the word, Tim, it's spelled the same, it looked the same and it sounded the same. But based on the context that is written in the word, it will mean something completely different. Today's subject, all right. All right.
All right. All right. All right. All right.
All right. Why do it's not Tim? It's D. The word, Tim, has very significant.
All of them is spelled the same. All of them sound the same, but it means something something different. Okay. Let's look at this.
Tip. To try whether something can be done. That's where the word, the tip come from, right? So it's like just to try.
I'm up to see if this word isn't the tip. Here's where it's interesting. The second definition. I found this one is very interesting because if it's a trial to test, you're going to have a good side to it and there's a negative side to it.
But here's the interesting meaning about it. The word isn't spelled differently when it's in positive context or when it's in negative context. The only thing that will only make you know whether it means something good or whether it means something bad is to look at the context in which it is written. A good example.
A school test. We've already taken one today. That's a good example of tempting or testing or trying something. Let's look at it a couple of differences.
When you go to school first, the name's first. First things first the professor professor change is not trying to make you get the dance alone The purpose of when you go to school that's why someone teaches you something first We don't test you in school about something that we never talk to the good version of tipping This is what God does he takes me he tries you with a purpose in a desire to make you better God will never tempt you to try to make you get it wrong. Okay, okay? That example of the word tip is the mouse track I have never met or seen someone get that to the cheese or the mouse trap with the purpose when the attention to let them Become better mouse you only put the cheese on the mouse trap because you take the mouse and you know his weaknesses It's gonna teach you to kill him.
This is how Satan tense us One verse 12 to 15 her 12 says this bless is the man who remains steadfast under trial for when he has to do the test He will receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love them Love them. I've been tested in our trial it means it needs unblest but I can try all the way I can So God was to send it. It gets very interested in me in verse 13 Let no man say when he is tempted I'm being tempted by God where God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tends no one Oh, I just told you that God can send you this just said that God cannot send you Read live live right? What people get confused and say okay, but I was contradicting this up right right now to show you the Bible is not your big Because in one minute is your blessed if you try it is a very nice sense is he says no God Hey, you know, I want you to pay me.
I want you to get into some context moves in verse 13 This is this let no one say when he is tempted by God and then this is where the context comes in for God cannot be tempted With evil and he comes up tense no one evil is the context We remember I told you that there's a positive to me There's a tip of a guy brings something in front of each amazing better with this is saying this guy cannot sit you With evil God never puts the cheese on the mouse track So the context here is not that God cannot take you and you The one that was to say everything sounds say But what is actually saying is that God cannot take you in the evil causes The last part is very interesting to me because it says that he himself tips no one and he cannot be tempted with this means It's like oh, baby. Oh, I'll give you tip to Jesus on the hill and tip him right here Why say it's God can be tempted of no one God can never think about the word tip Because there's no I'm sitting in the stronger cheese take right now, right? There is something inside of you that feels the Intemptive because you like from your cheese take now I can try to tip you right now with the oil that don't come out I won't change the truth You know I'm sitting in you there's nothing in you that actually is tempted or feels the desire to play the w before But this picture is saying is that there will be a couple more Jesus They put evil in front of him. Yeah, but there is nothing in Jesus that actually never desires people Earlier, don't we know?
All right, we just look at the context verse 14, but each person But each person is tempted when he is lured in and talked about his own desire Man we have to understand our word. We have to look at the context Look, I took a 45 minute sermon and chopped it down to eight minutes. So hopefully that bless y'all Maybe one day I'll share the whole thing You don't like the show just act like you like