How to Feel Closer to God? The Lord’s Prayer and Spiritual Simplicity with Allen Ratta

Hey, and welcome back to Faith you're Living.

Today, my guest is going to talk to us about how can we simplify our faith.

And we can do this because there's one prayer that draws us into the rhythm of God.

It renews our affections, and it restores our life from the inside out.

If you're ready to walk with Christ, but you want to take away all the noise and you just want to get to posturing our hearts in the right direction and stepping out in love, this is the episode for you.

Because instead of adding more to your plate, we are going to clarify and start with one simple prayer.

Welcome to Faith Filled Living, the podcast for women who want to find joy again, grow closer to God, and rediscover the woman he created you to be.

I'm your host, Kristen Fitch.

Each week you'll find encouragement, honest conversations, biblical perspective, and practical tools to help you experience more joy, purpose, and peace in everyday life.

Because the woman God created you to be is still there.

And it's never too late to come alive to the life he created you to live.

Hi.

Today on the show, I would like to welcome our guest, Alan Rata.

He is the author of the book Spiritual Simplicity.

And we're going to talk about his story, and we're going to talk about why he wrote this guide and this book.

But really, it comes down to sometimes, you know, following Christ.

Being a Christian can feel like it's just more things to add to our plate, and it can get exhausting.

So today we're going to talk about why that's actually not what Jesus is calling us to and how we can live and follow him in a different way that just aligns better with the way God designed us to have relationship with him.

So, Alan, welcome to the show.

Oh, Kristen, it's good to be here today.

Thank you.

You want to start off with just telling us a little bit about life and why you decided to write this book or kind of walking us through what you learned on your own faith journey?

Sure.

Well, as a pastor of many years, I understand ministry, the work of ministry.

I was a pastor, a denominational leader.

I did seminars, 36, 40 cities a year, four pastors.

And one thing I did know is ministry and ministry systems.

I wrote a book, the Optimized Church, on processes that help churches to be healthy.

And I started a software company that grew into a market leader.

But I want to tell you that knowing ministry and knowing all about God and.

And it's not that I wasn't praying and that I didn't love the Lord because I did.

But it's different than intimacy with God and when you face a crisis.

I came home from conducting a pastoral seminar on the East Coast.

Now just imagine this.

I faced a crisis I never dreamed I would face.

That led to me being a single dad of four children ages 2 to 15.

What a crisis.

I want to tell you all that I knew about ministry, all that I trained people over the years, didn't do me a lot of good.

In that moment I really, I got a little angry at God and I, I struggled.

How can this happen?

And you start looking for answers and really began a journey of years for me, of discovery that has really brought me back to the first love that I had when I found Jesus as a teenager in Southern California and was so on fire and in love with Jesus.

I'll never forget my pastor, just a brand new Christian, got me up to testify in front of the church.

I was scared to death, but I was so excited about God, you know, and, and I, after I had shared, I walked to the back of the worship center and there was one of those old saints sitting there and he looks at me and he says, ah, don't worry Alan, you'll calm down after a while.

I, I wish he hadn't have said that, but really, I wish somebody had gotten a hold of me as a young believer and said, look Alan, you are going to look, you're going to learn a lot.

You're going to go to seminary, you're going to learn a lot of theology, you're going to get degrees, you're going to pastor, you're to going, you're going to learn a lot about how to, how to lead people and a lot about how to grow churches.

But never forget the one thing, the main thing, the do all thing, the only thing that Jesus said, what Everything hinges on it.

All the law, 600 plus laws by Jesus's day.

All the laws.

Jesus said they hinge.

That's the word in the Greek.

It's a hinge.

It's like a big brass hinge or another imagery would be a big hook where you have too many hoodies on it and you can't get one more to hang on it, right?

And they all hinge on one thing.

Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.

So, so simple.

Jesus made spirituality so absolutely simple.

A child can understand it, but yet we drift and you know, we live in a World that, you know, so production oriented, you know, that we want to produce and we are driven that way.

In fact, mankind has corrupted the very framework of time.

Yeah.

God created a day and He.

He spun the earth.

Think of it.

He spun the earth at an exact speed so the sun would come up and go down every 12 hours.

And he called it a day and he said it was good.

Who did he make the day for?

For us.

Yeah.

And then he came down and we forget this because we.

We live in concrete jungles and with blaring horns and speeding, you know, to get to our next appointment and cell phones buzzing in our pocket and.

And God created the rhythm of a day.

And then he created rhythms of a week and the Sabbath and rhythms of years, the year of jubilee, rhythms of months, the Jewish worship calendar.

They blew the trumpet the first day of every new moon.

Their entire worship was oriented around the rhythms that God himself embedded into creation.

That is an amazing thing.

Yeah.

And.

And so that's how God created us.

But we live in a world with hurried minutes, frantic hours, desperate seconds created by man enforced for the.

For the entire end of making an almighty dollar.

Productivity.

And we're held hostage to it unless we really become aware when the Lord said, be still and know that I am God.

That this is the big problem and this is the problem we struggle with.

And I tell people this in my teaching all the time.

If you're.

We know more about God than any other generation.

And if you're so busy for the Lord, but the joy isn't there, there's your first love warning sign.

Yeah.

Because the joy of the Lord is our strength.

Right.

Yeah.

And so.

And why is so much of the church anemic today?

I'll tell you why we're out of rhythm with God.

Yes.

I often say you have to slow down.

God's never in a hurry.

You have to slow down to catch up with God.

Yeah.

And.

And I do guided prayers.

We have a bunch of free guided prayers on our website, Spiritual simplicity dot com.

We have hundreds of people every day logging in nature video.

The Lord's Prayer, an extended version that expands it.

Because the Lord's Prayer, it's the word of God and the word of God, the Holy Spirit can expand one word into a world of thought in our mind.

Right.

Yeah.

And so we have to get back in sync with God and into the rhythms that God made us for.

And, and that really takes.

And not only did he say, look, this is the one thing.

Yeah.

And people can say to me, well, Alan, Yeah, stay in love with God.

That's the main thing.

But you don't know my neighbor or, or some of the relatives I have.

Well, actually, I probably do.

But apart from that, Jesus didn't just give us a commandment, the great commandment, loving God.

He gave us one prayer.

Yeah, one prayer.

Not three, two, one.

And every word, 55 words, depending on the translation, is God's word.

They came out of the mouth of Jesus, who is the word of God.

And the Holy Spirit will quicken every one of those words to us.

And within the Lord's Prayer, there's five mini prayers.

In fact, through church history, the Lord's Prayer was considered a treasure of the church.

Right.

Well, so before, and I do want to talk later about sort of those smaller prayers and sort of, you know, the order, if you will, of those smaller prayers within the Lord's Prayer.

But let me ask you this.

So you, you told us earlier that you found yourself in this situation, right?

You know, you're very busy, like you said, in ministry and pastoring and then, you know, teaching and leading other pastors.

And you found yourself in the situation and, you know, you were starting to grapple with what was going on in your life and you knew, you knew you already had a relationship with God, but how did you start shifting from what you were feeling and what you walked through to become more, have a more intimate relationship with God and start yourself slowing down and realizing that it's about the presence, right, and the stillness in order for us to get our hearts, you know, back to where God or take us where he wants us to go with him and with others.

Yeah, well, you know, it wasn't that I wasn't praying when I pastored and did all.

I was so busy doing seminars everywhere and pastoring a fast growing church and, and it wasn't that I wasn't praying.

Sure.

What the Lord began to show me was I got up from the table a little too soon.

Jesus said, taught us to pray, give us this day our daily bread.

There's a portion for us every day that the Lord has.

And I was in such a hurry, I prayed every day.

I love God, my heart, but I often got up from the table before, a little too soon, before I had my full portion.

And I came to realize that over time, it's what I now call slow spiritual malnutrition.

You and, and when crisis comes, you're not equipped for it because you haven't been eating that full portion.

And we've drifted and people say to me, well, why do we drift?

And it really is one main reason.

Productivity.

Productivity can be measured.

It feels like we're making progress.

Yeah, I'm doing this and I'm doing this and I'm doing this, and it feels that way, right?

And I'll never forget I went to a.

A retreat that Dr. Eugene Peterson, the author of the Message, great teacher, writer, and I was at Regent, and I heard he was.

He was my professor and, and he was doing a retreat, and I thought, I'm signing up.

I'm all in.

Wow, what a chance to get a.

A retreat, a small group of people with Dr. Eugene Peterson.

Then I find out it's up at an abbey, which is not in my comfort zone of spaces, but.

Oh, well.

But then I found out when I went to pick up the paperwork that it was a silent retreat.

And I. I gotta tell you, I thought silent.

And I realized there's no way I can get out of this because I'm going to have to face, you know, Eugene next Monday.

I'm going to have to face him in class.

And I ditched his seminar, that there was a very few spaces for it.

So I'm in.

I'm hooked.

And I went and I sat in this circle and the first word out, words out of his mouth floored me.

He said, this weekend is totally purposeless.

I gotta tell you, I thought, what purposeless?

I patted my laptop next to me on the chair, thinking, thank God, you know, because I've got a lot to do.

I've got a growing church.

I mean, we've got where things.

We're launching.

We're in a building program where, you know, I'm doing seminars.

And.

And then he says.

And I think he saw me touch my laptop because he says, no laptops, no reading other than your Bible.

Go quiet down.

And I spent two hours under this huge tree with birds chirping over me, feeling so out of sync with all of creation.

And about two hours later, I heard a still, small voice.

And the Lord began a journey with me of learning how to.

To slow down.

And, you know, even though I went through an utter disaster, resigned, my church broke my heart.

Single dad had to go heal, take care of children.

The loneliest times any single parent will tell you it's at night when you're putting the kids to bed and you're alone, or in the morning when you're hurried getting ready for school.

Those are tough times.

And.

And yet the Lord, amazingly, I thought, how am I going to even provide for my kids?

By degrees or I Don't have any degrees in business.

Right.

And yet the Lord amazingly, restored my ministry to greater measure than I ever imagined before because God was faithful to me.

But along the way, and I'm a little dense sometimes, I have to get the message not just once, not just twice.

So it took really a few years.

And then the Lord finally opened the spigot in my heart to write this book called Spiritual Simplicity.

And it was.

I've never written a book like it.

I've written other books, one published by University Press called Making Spiritual Progress.

But I'll tell you, I've never experienced an outflow of pouring of the spirit.

And I have pastors reading this book saying, alan, this book is just pungent.

In fact, I would stop writing as fast as my fingers could fly.

And I turn to my wife with tears coming down my cheek saying, wow.

I don't know where half that stuff came from that just came through my fingers, but it's better than I can think of, let me tell you.

And the response has been amazing.

Our YouTube channel, we just at this two months since we went live.

It's already over 6,000 subscribers.

Great.

And we're getting, you know, five to 15 product subscribers every day on our website.

Spiritual Simplicity.

Getting into spiritual journeys.

Because this is.

We are in an insane society.

Any previous generation would have looked at us and said, hey, you people are nuts.

You know, we grab our cell phone before we get out of bed, it buzzes in our pocket.

You know, we're kind of on demand living and we're out of rhythm.

Absolutely.

I so agree with that.

And there's one something a pastor said, and I'm trying to remember.

I think it was Jace Pastor Jason Laird.

But I'll have to double check that.

But he said the rhythm of rest is woven in or is basically designed into creation.

Right.

In other words, though.

But most of us don't rest.

We definitely don't get still.

And.

And like you said, we don't slow ourselves down much.

Like you said Eugene Peterson said.

What did he say?

He said, go.

What did he tell you when he sent you off?

Go get still.

Is that what he said?

Yeah.

But I think most of us are very uncomfortable with silence, with solitude, and with stillness because of the environments that we've.

We now live in.

Right, everybody?

Everything's on demand.

As you said, everything's streaming.

We don't know how to even stand in a grocery store line without picking up our phones because we don't like that feeling.

Feeling right.

Of just standing around.

So for Somebody that's thinking.

Yeah, I do feel busy and overwhelmed.

And, you know, yes, I. I'm somebody and I, you know, I open my Bible and I pray.

But to be honest with you, I don't feel the presence of God in my life the way I want to.

What would you say is the.

The small first, simple first thing or two that somebody can do to try to deepen that?

Well, first of all, feeling the presence of God and starting to hear God.

Very good question.

You know, I. I have people say up to me, pastor Allen, how do I start?

Yeah.

And I tell them, you don't have to make up the words.

Right.

Jesus already gave you the words.

Pray this way.

It's interesting.

Pray this way in the Greek.

It's a double emphatic.

It's active voice, imperative, tense.

It's a double whammy.

It's a very strong command.

It's sort of like when you're a kid and you heard your parents yell out the door, alan, dinner time.

Get in the house.

You knew that wasn't optional, right?

That was active imperative right now.

And Jesus gave us a command and he gave us the words.

Yeah.

So we don't have to try to make them up.

He said, pray this way.

And it's interesting that, you know, he didn't tell us a lot of religious stuff.

In fact, he didn't tell us any religious stuff.

Water baptism, look, you know, do it.

And he didn't say, sprinkle them.

Submerge him.

I believe in submersion, but he could have stopped a lot of arguments if he gave us some details.

Or what about the Lord's Supper, you know, do it every third Sunday in church.

No, he just said, do it in remembrance of me.

Why did he not give us a lot of religious jargon?

He didn't want us to turn into Pharisees, where we started following these routines and patterns.

But when it came to prayer, Jesus did not pull back 55 words in detail.

This.

Think of the backstory.

God leaves heaven, comes to earth, of course, to die on the cross, but before he went to the cross, he has a business to take care of, to look us in the eye and say, this is how you talk to me.

Yeah, this is the pathway.

And those words, you do a study of church history.

They uncovered something called the Didache, which is a manual, the oldest Christian document other than scripture, that we have from the first century.

Believers who were on fire for Jesus.

John the Apostle was alive then.

People who saw Jesus.

And it was a church manual on how to do church for first century believers who were on fire for God and they walked in the spirit.

And you know what the dedicate taught.

Pray the Lord's Prayer three times a day.

Now, I'm not into that kind.

Any patterns, but I am into what Jesus did teach us.

You go to Augustine or Tertullian, to the early church fathers, they called it the treasure of the church.

Luther called it the school of the heart.

And in fact, many said, if you pray a prayer that's not in the Lord's Prayer, it's carnal.

Stop praying it.

Because the Lord's Prayer covers the full gamut of Christian living.

People don't realize that.

Yeah.

There's five prayers within that prayer.

Yeah.

And I could dig into that right now if you.

Yeah, I'd say let's.

Yeah, so let's do that.

But I guess.

Yeah, so we'll just kind of highlight.

Let's just go through and highlight them, you know, because I know you talk about also, as you're breaking down, that there's a kind of an order to it, if you will.

So.

Sure.

Why don't you start us off with the.

With the honoring, you know?

Yeah, sure.

Well, Jesus gave us the order because he gave us the words.

Right.

So it's not something I made up or.

And it's amazing how the Lord's Prayer today has fallen on hard times.

Luther said one of his greatest missions in life was to bring the most abused prayer in church history back to the center of vitality of the Christian life.

Wow.

And Luther was a reformist.

Mm.

So the Lord's Prayer begins.

Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be youe name.

It's a prayer of adoration.

Yeah.

What do we learn from the Word?

We enter his gates with thanksgiving.

Yes.

And so it starts in heaven.

Our Father who art in heaven.

You know where it ends?

It ends in hell.

The last word of the Lord's Prayer isn't the little addendum that isn't in most Bible translation, because it wasn't in the original text.

The last word of the Lord's Prayer is evil.

It starts in heaven.

And then deliver us from evil.

It goes from heaven to hell and covers everything in between.

The full gamut of Christian living, really.

Right.

And it is a prayer.

You know, we pray prayers.

We're trying to bring God into our world.

The Lord's Prayer brings us into God's world.

Radically different proposition that's going on.

Yeah.

So we start out, Our Father who art in Heaven.

It's a prayer of adoration.

And then we go to your kingdom come.

It's a prayer of surrendering our will to his, you know, and then give us this day our daily bread and prayer of dependence.

And then a prayer of repentance.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who've.

Who've sinned against us.

And then a prayer of trust which lead us.

He is the good Shepherd.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Yeah.

And I have an acronym called H E A R T Honoring, expecting, asking, repenting and trusting.

Because it's all about the heart.

But the bottom line is this.

And I tell people this is really important to understand about the Lord's Prayer.

And you're praying it reflectively, you can pray it in a minute under your breath.

But when you're praying it reflectively, if you have a little hesitation, maybe you get to that part where you're saying your kingdom come, your will be done.

And we have a little bit of a hitch in our heart, a little hesitation.

We can't pray it with full hearted your will because we're a little busy, too busy building our own kingdom at the moment.

Right.

Or forgive us our sins as we forgive those.

And we, we're having a little hard time with that one because we've got.

Somebody has really wounded us.

Yeah.

What this prayer does is five movements that reorder the heart.

Why do we need to pray something daily?

Because heart work requires daily attention.

We have fallen natures.

We live in a fallen, broken world with people around us.

And we drift so easily.

Sometimes we're pushed.

Right.

Not just drift.

And so when we learn to pray the Lord's Prayer.

And one of the things that I mentioned at the beginning is on our website we have.

If you go to spiritual simplicity.com and click prayer, there's prayers for every season of life.

Healing from hurt, struggling with anger.

You know, season of life.

Open up each heading and there's a bunch of the Lord's prayers recorded music underneath nature videos.

And it takes you deep into reflective version 11 to 15 minutes.

And when people start that, we have hundreds of people a day.

It's a free resource.

But when people start that.

I remember when I did this in church the first time in our church, one of the pastors got up and said when Alan started, I kept saying, speed it up.

Going too slow because there's pauses in there for 4 seconds, 6 seconds.

Which feels like an eternity to our sped up souls.

Right.

And yet he says then when we got further and I'm like, Alan Slow down, because he started to slow down and get in sync.

And I would encourage people, if you want a place to begin, just start going to those guided prayers.

The words are there for you, but then I expand them.

Like, you know, we could say, our Father, who art in heaven, Our Father.

And then that tells us, lord, thank you.

I'm not arriving here uninvited.

This is home.

I'm family.

You're my father, I'm your child.

I come joyfully.

And each of those phrases unpacks, and depending on where you are in life at the moment, unpacks in different ways that the Holy Spirit quickens to us.

And I took the time to do these recorded prayers because I discovered in my own life, in fact, I often get on.

My wife and I, we.

I don't care whose voice has done the recordings.

We get on.

And our outer deck, we have an outdoor living room looking over the river.

And we'll just sit back and listen to the Lord's Prayer expanded together because it slows us down, and you don't have to work at it, right?

And so any event.

So let me ask you this.

So we've already touched on this, but one of the things I think, you know, so obviously people listening, they're gonna hear us talking about, you know, this is the prayer, right?

Jesus, you know, said, directed us to do that.

It has all of these smaller prayers and order in it.

But I think so many people, so many Christians still, we're still trying to do all of the things.

And I'm not saying they're not good things, right?

Like you said, we're helping out at the church or, you know, maybe we're doing something in our neighborhoods.

These are all good things.

But how do we stop trying to check off a list of all of the good, faithful things we're doing and realize when we get our heart right, everything else lines up.

And it's not about trying to be perfect.

I mean, like, perform, right?

To be performative.

So what would you just share with us about that?

Because I think sometimes.

Sometimes so many of my Christian friends or people I talk to, they go through seasons where they're just taking on too much and you can see the burnout coming, see the overwhelm, but they know it's the right thing to do.

So instead of saying to whomever, their church or their whatever, like, you know what?

Maybe I need to take a break from this.

They just feel like they just keep piling more on instead of focusing more on, are we having that stillness that time With God that, you know, learning to have that relationship with him.

Yeah.

And that is such a great question because people ask me that all the time.

But I've got responsibilities, and I'm busy for the Lord, and I can't let people down, and I can't let God down, and I can't let myself down.

And.

And it comes to this.

Spiritual simplicity is not about doing less.

It's about having a center.

Yeah.

We.

This is important to understand, and this is one of the greatest truths that I really try to help people to understand.

Our minds are incredible multitaskers.

We can go, go, go, go, go.

But your heart was never designed by God to be multitasker.

Your heart was designed.

You can't love God and mammon.

Yeah.

Our hearts were designed for one loyalty.

What we need is a center.

We need to become centered in Jesus.

In the children's videos that we do in our whole children's ministry that we offer now to parents and to children church pastors.

I have a graphic that shows a bicycle wheel and all the spokes are twisted out, going to different things.

And we warn them, don't try to ride that bike.

Then you see a healthy bike wheel that has one spoke in the center, and it supports everything.

Yeah.

And that's a good visual to really understand that we have to be centered in God.

What we try to do is we try to multitask our souls.

Doesn't work.

Right.

So we need to be centered.

And then somehow, amazingly, everything finds its place.

When Jesus is at the center of our love, everything finds its place, and then we understand.

Okay, Jesus did say this.

The branch that bears fruit, he even prunes that one.

Sometimes something has to be pruned out of our lives.

But I encourage people.

Don't stop.

You know, people think, well, spiritual simplicity is shallow, and I just laugh.

It's.

It's anything but shallow.

Yeah.

It's a whole lot harder to love God passionately than it is to do a bunch of religious things.

Right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And, I mean, and you already brought this up earlier, but that is why every day we have to come back, Right.

And get our full portion of daily bread.

Because, you know, I find the same thing when there's days where maybe I, you know, I didn't quite get in my time in the morning.

You know, maybe I shortened it or something.

I can tell a difference in the more time I spend with God, especially in the morning, on how my day goes, how my attitude is.

Right.

Like that I am calmer no matter what it is.

I'M working on getting done, you know, and so, you know, you just start to see the difference, right.

The fruit of your life.

Like you said, you can still have a busy, pretty full day of meetings or whatever you're working on.

Right.

But if your heart is centered and if you're, you know, why you're there, you know, why you're, you know, they are to love God and love others and you keep getting back to that place, it makes, it makes doing any of the work we're doing, right.

Whether it's because all the work we're doing is still ministry.

Even if it's your business, you know, even if it's your know, in your home, all of it comes back to, you know, who are we and who are we pointing people to?

And so our center.

Yeah, yeah.

What's your, what's your center?

You know, you know, we happen to have in our generation an individual that has squeezed about as much juice out of the orange as you can get.

Right.

He sleeps on the floor with product rollouts.

He's the richest man in the world, first trillionaire on the planet.

People want to be like him.

He lives his life in five minute increments.

And I just asked this question, at what price?

Yeah, yeah.

What's the cost?

Because this is not who God made us in his image.

And you know, God gave us drive you look at in Genesis.

I mean there's a five fold purpose for mankind to fill the earth and conquer it and you know, rule those drives are from the Lord.

But without him being the center, we start to become not just out of sync with God rhythm wise.

Yeah.

But really our priorities start to get confused and, and that begins to hinder us.

You know, God spun the earth at a certain speed for a reason.

Now we have artificial lights.

We keep our computers on and work till 2 in the morning.

And it doesn't help our health.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, if you want to be a workaholic, go live on Venus.

From sunset to sunrise is 354 Earth days.

That's a workaholics paradise.

But it's not the planet God put us on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, and I think you even talk in one of your examples in the book, you know, you shared that you were, I think you were when you were pastoring and you were getting ready to build maybe a, a new church or an extension, I can't really remember.

Or extension.

New campus.

New campus.

There you go.

And you know, you obviously were just, you were kind of burning the candles at both Ends, right, Because you had deadlines, you had fundraising to do.

But, you know, even then, I think you point out that you.

Well, you can share the story, but you point out that you basically had to step away so that you could get back in the presence of God, right?

Get your center back, you know, and I thought that was a good example because even, like in this next week, my mom's coming in town and I'm always the one that hosts.

My family, host people all the time.

But I have to always remind myself, and I'm pretty easygoing about it, but it's like the Martha Mary story, you know, that at the end of the day, it.

It all works out.

Nothing has to be exact, you know, and if I can do prep ahead of time, so I'm not doing as much, and people are here, that that's a good thing because I can be present with them instead of, you know, because I can get the.

Be the busy one because it's at my house, you know, and I have to keep.

You have to remind myself of that, right?

And then I can ask somebody, can you.

Can you cut the bread up?

Can you do the thing?

I don't have to do it all.

And, you know, but it's.

It's also just reminding ourselves, you know, that it's about the presence, being in the presence of people, you know, and, you know, loving people.

Not just going through, like you said, much like the example you gave, Right.

Of musk, just not just being so productive that we miss being present.

And, you know, that's a great story.

I share it all the time.

Martha and Mary.

Yeah, and there's Mary in there, the lazy one sitting at Jesus's feet while Martha's in the kitchen doing all the prep work.

And Martha gets frustrated with her sister and she catches Jesus.

Maybe he came into the kitchen to check on her.

We don't know the exact scene, but she says, don't you care that my sisters left me to do all the work?

And Jesus must have said, it's not recorded, but he must have said, yes, I care.

And misunderstanding his comment, she says, well, then tell her to help me.

And Jesus says, martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered by the way that word bothered in the Greek, it's the only time it's used in the New Testament.

Jesus reached outside of biblical language and grabbed a secular Greek word that if you do a word study on the word bothered, is an absolute description of modern living today.

You are worried and bothered about so many things, but one thing is needful and the good part will not be taken away from her.

That's the one thing.

What loving God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.

And then there's a parallel story to that that I would share with all those who just feel so important with all they're doing for God.

Jesus shared a story that right after he shared the Lord's Prayer, Sermon on the Mount.

It's one of the scariest stories in the Bible.

He said in that day and he was speaking about our times, the end times in that day.

Many I wish he had not used the word many.

I wish he said there's going to be a few.

But he said many will come to me and say, lord, we did this in your name.

We did that in your name and we did that in your name.

And Jesus will turn to them and I can hear the sorrow in his voice.

But I never knew you depart from me.

What a warning to a hyper productive world.

People multitasking with their spirits that, that we that are out of sync and out of rhythm with God.

I can't think of a more fearful warning because this has always been.

It goes back to the Old Testament.

Hosea said it, you know, God desires love, not sacrifice.

And the word love in Hebrews Hasid, which is covenant love like marriage love, not sacrifices.

I'm going to do this for God.

I'm doing that for God.

Doing that for God.

We've assuaged ourselves I think on many occasions with well, I'm doing it for Jesus.

Yeah, yeah, but at what price?

And so in spiritual simplicity we really consider this a movement now.

Yeah, with the people signing up for spiritual journeys.

The book we just went live yesterday with a you version, the Bible app devotional called the Way Home.

And that's taking off.

Yeah, because it's resonating because people's hearts, they realize their hearts, I call it this way, people's hearts are out of breath.

Yeah, so true.

Okay, so let me ask you this.

What would just be a word of encouragement that you'd want to share with people listening today's episode that we haven't already talked about yet, just as we start wrapping up the episode.

Well, I think there are maybe five precepts that I might share that are encouraging.

First of all, you're stronger than you know.

Secondly, you are less wise than you think.

Thirdly, you are more loved than you can imagine.

Fourthly, God is nearer than you feel.

And fifthly, the Christian life is simpler than you make it.

So good.

So let me ask you, I always ask people as I'm wrapping up the episode.

What is fueling you right now?

It can be something related to your faith.

It can be something fun you're doing.

It can just be the change of season.

But what is just.

What is one thing that's fueling you right now in your life?

I think my pastor's heart.

I retired from pastoring and my pastor's heart is a flame again for people.

People who, I see them, I see them in our church.

I see them all over.

Christians who are trying so hard and then churches need volunteers.

Where's the church going to be without volunteers?

Yeah.

So churches are recruiting and sometimes very persuasively recruiting.

And we feel compelled.

Well, who's going to watch the children if I don't volunteer and who's going to do this and who's going to do that and what we have to do.

And I read this, I thought this was a very potent thing when I read about your podcast.

We have to understand our mission.

We really do.

Yeah.

What is God calling me to do?

It's so much so easy to onboard things.

And then once we're obligated, we feel very guilty about how do you back out of this?

And so what I'm on fire for?

What's fueling me is the testimonies.

We had a retired neurologist who attended one of our live spiritual journeys.

We had almost 100 people in that spiritual journey.

And people can do spiritual journeys themselves with a book and journal.

They can do them in a small group.

They can do them church wide campaigns and children can do it with them.

We have whole children's spiritual journey.

But the testimonies, this retired neurologist said, this is the most spiritual thing I've experienced in my life in decades.

Talk about an overachiever.

And yet when I see the lights go on and, and as we.

It's kind of interesting.

We, we took some video testimonials about four weeks in and people were saying, wow, I'm just now really getting it.

Yeah.

When you see the lights go on, to me there's nothing more thrilling because you got to understand something.

I paid a very dear price, probably one of the dearest prices a human being can pay for a lack of spiritual simplicity.

And this is not something that I teach Kristen.

This is very personal to me.

Yeah.

And this is a fire that God's put in my heart.

I thought I was retired.

I thought I'm done writing books now.

We've got two websites up, huge ministry.

Really a discipleship ecosystem, platform, spiritual simplicity.com and spiritualprogress.com is a site for pastors and all kinds.

Spiritual simplicity.com we have tons of free resources, whether it's prayers, whether it's a three week spiritual journey, whether it's 52 weeks of spiritual emails coming that remind you every week of the year how to stay spiritually simple.

We have free resources because that's our passion.

This is really about, I love that.

This is really about helping people to connect and, and to get our hearts again where.

Okay.

My heart was designed for loyalty to one thing, one person, and that's the center.

Right.

I love it.

So good.

Well, thank you for coming on and sharing with us just how we can deepen our faith, how we can really just show up and truly love the Lord and love each other.

And how like you said, if we can understand that, if we every day we can come back to that and we can get centered on that, that, you know, we are going to be, you know, a light in the world.

We are going to show up for our purpose.

You know, we are going to show up in whatever season we're in, whether we think we're done with one thing or then God calls us into something else because he always will, whatever that is.

And so, yeah, just thank you for writing or writing the book, but coming up with the resources and just continuing to show up in ministry in this new way, you know, or that, you know what I mean, since you've retired new way.

So just thank you for your work and thank you for coming on and sharing your story and sharing or breaking down the Lord's Prayer for us a little bit more and just how we can all realize that Jesus is calling us to a simpler way.

Not an easier way always, but a simpler way.

So thank you for that.

Amen.

Hey, thank you.

Thank you for inviting me.

I love it.

May God bless your listeners and watchers.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

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