Stir the Pot | Kyle McMurray Coaching, LLC

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Have you ever cooked something in a pot? Yeah, I think that’s safe for me to assume, but you never really know. If you’ve ever cooked something in a pot and let it sit on the stove for any amount of time, what do you need to do on occasion? Right, you stick a spoon or ladle or something in there and give it a good stir. I mean, there’s a few reasons you need to do that and we’ll talk about them today on Living the Freedom Life. This is Episode 106 and today we need to Stir the Pot.

Okay, so a couple of different things I want to point out about stirring the pot here.

And yes, I want you to take this as an analogy to your life. Step back and observe your life and see how this has applied to your life timeline.

You go on Google and compare a couple of recipes on which one is the best, or you may dive into the kitchen drawer and find your ‘ol Aunt Flossy’s recipe that she hand wrote with a pencil that Uncle Harv made himself from a tree out on the back forty. That’s more true than you may be aware.

Your next step is to gather all of your ingredients. In life, we gather our ingredients by what we learn. Not just classes we take, but life lessons and experiences. Keep in mind that “how” we decide to take in those experiences matters quite a bit too if you remember from our last episode, Total Recall at a Bar.

Then we prepare the ingredients. Some may need to be chopped up. Others may need a slice, or diced up into smaller bits.

You may need other tools to prepare, like a blender, some type of fancy chopper to make things easier, or even something as simple as a jar opener, if you need to pour something in. But every ingredient isn’t going to be “made ready”. So there’s some preparation that needs to take place.

Just in life, all of our knowledge isn’t going to be boxed up and ready “as is” to be applied in every situation. Knowledge is meant to be used with our uniqueness blended in.

I have my favorite knife that I use in the kitchen. I have a cutting board that I use for certain things rather than others. Because I have a preference. Therefore it has a little bit of “me” in even the preparation of the ingredients.

Now that everything is in the pot, it’s time to turn up the heat and start cooking. Get on with life and living it. There’s a reason we called this Podcast Living the Freedom Life.

But occasionally, and this is really what I want to talk to about today, is when things on the surface seem to be going just fine, or we want to show everyone that on the surface, everything seems fine…something very different could be going on at the bottom; in the area that is getting most of the heat. As we talked about in the intro, if you leave it on the heat long enough, There will come a point where it will be necessary to give everything a good stir. Sometimes, it’s a healthy thing to stir the pot, to mix it up a bit, to disrupt things where everything is getting a more even amount of heat.

When that happens in life, it can feel like a disruption, it can feel like a challenge, or like the old timers would say “various trials and tribulations”. James 1:2

When our pot gets stirred, it can feel like God is just some kid on a bright, sunny day with a magnifying glass and using it to intensify the sun’s heat on your ant mound and just waiting. Well, I can tell you from my life experience, He’s not like that. I know it may feel that way sometimes, but I assure you, God is quite the opposite.

2 things that I want to point out, well, 2 different viewpoints that I want to call to your attention:

1.You see, there is a myth out there about the joy of the lord. Nehemiah 8:10 “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” Read the context of that scripture. We don’t have time today but I will have a link for you in the show notes. Joy doesn’t mean that things will be smooth but that is the expectation. This scripture, this promise from the Almighty Himself, means that you will have strength DURING the time when you need strength. The answer, look to Him. Hmmmm, that will probably be a time where your pot is being stirred.

2.This is something that is dangerous when we have our pot stirred. The second thing I want to point out to you today is explained when we read about Job’s life, we often confuse the events that happened to him with this, God didn’t DO those things, He LET them happen, but He didn’t DO them. And the thing that we are confused about is that we think by letting them happen, in other words, by permission, or the fact that God didn’t stop it from happening, that He took action. That His inaction was in fact an action. NO. That’s like saying all rednecks from Tennessee don’t have all their teeth. Well, I have a full head of teeth and you know the rest.

God doesn’t DO those things, He isn’t evil. He is Love. God is Love. Evil wants you to question God and His plan. That’s the same trick that has been used on us since the beginning. Evil wants you to question God and His plan.

See, it’s a healthy thing for the pot to be stirred. It’s a necessity. WHy? If not, there will be (at first) a layer that will be burned. Then, eventually the whole thing will be ruined.

It’s a requirement for growth.

We are not made to be stagnant.

We are made to Live the Freedom Life.