PAUL TRIPP MINISTRIES, INC. Survival Skill 1 November 9, 2006 Paul David Tripp: Life is bigger than your marriage. Life is bigger than your job. Life is bigger than your garden, or your car, or your vacations. Life is bigger than you. Kate Crowley: From Paul Tripp Ministries, this is Right Here, Right Now, connecting the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life. Here now is Paul Tripp. PDT: A little toddler just learning to talk runs to her mommy and says, “Mommy, mommy, I ‘thinked’ about what you just said. And mommy says, “No, no, dear it's not, ‘I thinked’, it's, ‘I thought.’” Now think about this for a moment. This little encounter is amazingly human. It's all about what human beings are actually like. Here's this little girl who, just with a desire to know, and understand, and her God-given ability to learn, has learned the distinct rules of human language. She has learned that if you want to form a verb in the past tense, you generally add an ‘ed’ to the present tense. Now what parent ever has that conversation with their child? You know, at about 18 months, you say, “Now dear, you’re going to want to conjugate the language in the past tense.” You don’t have to do that because you've given birth to a child who never, ever, ever stops thinking. Human beings think. They're always trying to figure out life. They’re always trying to understand whatever it is that surrounds them, whatever it is that’s on their plate. That's why a child growing up will ask thousands, and thousands, and thousands of questions, because inside him is this deep desire for life to make sense, this drive to understand, this desire to know, this craving for somehow, some way for it all to make sense. Music: “All Because of You”, Songwriters: Paul Allen Crosby, Christopher Jon Dabaldo, David A. Novotny, Joseph Scott Sappington, Wayne A. Swinny I was born a child of grace Nothing else about the place Everything was ugly but your beautiful face And it left me no illusion I saw you in the curve of the moon In the shadow cast across my room You heard me in my tune When I just heard confusion All because of you All because of you All because of you I am KC: This is Right Here, Right Now with Paul Tripp. Paul will be right back with more intriguing thoughts on, “Survival Skills for a Fallen World,” but first, we want to thank you for joining us for the inaugural week of this radio program from Paul Tripp Ministries. You can now hear Paul each weekday at 11 A.M., on WFIL. Paul's goal is to remind you every day that there really is help in Jesus Christ, right here, right now. So be sure to let your friends know about this outreach. For more information and encouragement, Paul has some great resources available on his website, including an exciting new book that he's written called, Lost In The Middle. Just visit paultrippministries.org, that’s all one word, paultripp, spelled T-R-I-P-P, paultrippministries.org. “You Have to Know Where You Came From,” Right Here, Right Now continues with Paul Tripp. PDT: You can go onto the Internet, and you could pick any topic, and you will find endless pages of endless articles about understanding what ever: Understanding marriage, understanding the family, understanding parenting, understanding adolescence, understanding…you fill-in the blank. I looked up, just recently, ‘marriage’ websites. There's the marriage first aid kit, there's examination of stages of marriage, the study of couples and the dynamics of their interactions, or a study of the dynamics of a quarrel between a married couple, or an article called, “Windows on the Intimacy Process.” You see, we just, we have that drive to know, to understand. There's a way in which you and I never leave our lives alone. We’re always searching; we’re always examining; we’re always investigating; we’re always analyzing. Think about it for a moment, where, right now in your life, are you struggling to understand something? I want to give you this concept: “You will only ever understand what you're dealing with now if you look at it from the vantage point of what it was meant to be in the beginning.” You will only ever properly understand what you're dealing with now when you're able to examine it from the vantage point of what it was meant to be in the beginning. It's only in understanding origins that you actually can understand the here and the now. You know, we’re always looking at things in our lives that need to be fixed. We’re always looking at things that are operating a bit dysfunctionally, and the only way you can actually fix something, the only way you can actually make it function the way it was meant to function is to understand what it was designed to be in the beginning. You have to be able to conceive and evaluate the thing in its original form in order to restore it to what it was meant to be. Think about this question, “Where, right now in your life, do you need to go back to the beginning? Where in your life do you need to understand things from the vantage point of origins?” God has done an awesome and loving thing for us in His Word. He invites us to go back to the beginning, and we get to go back to the very first moments of the world. We get to go back to the beginning of the very first moments of human life. He welcomes us to walk with Him in that moment where the world is being put together, and He does that so that we would understand now, in a deeper, fuller way because we are looking at it from the vantage point of the beginning. Music: “Lord of the Star Fields” by Bruce Cockburn Lord of the star fields Ancient of days Universe maker Here's a song in your praise. Wings of the storm clouds Beginning and end You make my heart leap Like a banner in the wind. O Love, that fires the sun, Keep me burning! O Love, that fires the sun, Keep me burning! PDT: Did you ever have this experience where you go to a garage sale or a flea market, and there’s something on the table that attracts your attention, but you pick it up, and you realize you don't have a clue what it is? You turn it over and over your hand. You examine it, maybe you open it up, or you take it apart, or you press a button, or you pull on it, and for the life of you, you can't figure out what this thing is. Now, I think that's often how it is for us in everyday life. We’re looking at life in sort of its old, flea market form, and we’re trying to figure out life. And so God has helped us. God is a God of wisdom, doesn't want us to be confused; He wants us to know; He wants us to understand. He is the source of all wisdom, so He takes us back to the beginning. He actually pulls back the curtain; He allows us to look in on those first early moments when this whole thing that we call life was actually being put together; it's an awesome thing. Now there are two things that I think are important to consider. If you’re ever going to survive life in a fallen world, if you’re going to ever live in a biblically productive way, you’ve got to get a hold of these two things. The first one is this, you need to know that as human beings, we do not live life based on the facts of our experience, but based on our interpretation of the facts. We’re never just responding to the situations and relationships around us; we’re never just sort of objectively responding to circumstances; you always bring a certain lens; you always bring a certain interpretation; you always have a certain perspective that shapes the way you deal with life. There’s a second thing that you need to know, and I’ve hinted at this already, but I want to reinforce it a little bit more. And it is that the only way you can ever properly understand anything is to examine what it was designed to be when it was first made. The perspective of origins is a principal explainer of what's wrong in the here and now. In order to get what’s broken, you have to be able to look at the thing as it was before it was broken. Now, let's go back to Genesis. Let's go back to Genesis 1. Genesis 1 is where we, in the Bible, begin to look at life in its original form. And as we do that, there are four things that immediately sort of jump out of the account, the story of Genesis 1. Here’s the first thing, this may seem obvious, but it is not always so obvious. God was on site before you were. There's a way in which you could say that the four most important words in all of Scripture are the first four words: “In the beginning God.” You see if God was on site, if God's existence was already there before the creation of the world, if God is, in fact, the preexistent Creator, then that means that this world belongs to Him.