Ep 015 || Can I Really Trust God with This?

What's up, Pando family? Happy New Year! It's 2026 already, unbelievably, but we're excited to be back with you here with Southeast Christian Church with SC Online for our Pando exclusive podcast. My name is Derek, this is Justin Lewis, he's on our staff here at Southeast, and if you remember, I think it was maybe a couple months ago, something like that, you were on here doing this, and Justin, but for anybody that didn't get to watch that, set us up, who you are, what you do here at Southeast, all that kind of good stuff. Yeah, so Justin Lewis, I am the Senior Director of Stewardship, so kind of known as the money ministry to an extent, but we obviously think that stewardship involves a lot more than that, so that's what I do here on staff. Joined last March, so coming up on a year, so that's exciting. But very passionate about the Pando app and prison ministry, because before I came on staff, I have played on Seekers softball team since 2009, so we go into prisons and play softball throughout the state of Kentucky. Man, love that, love that. So you say, you know, you like to think about stewardship ministry at Southeast being a lot more than just about money, and so what do you mean specifically by that? Well, so time, talent, treasure, that sort of thing, but you know, my kind of unique path to stewardship, this position was more so with my eyes, and going through a battle about two years ago with glaucoma and the scare of losing my sight, and so you know, for me, tithing and biblical financial stewardship, that's always, I think, come pretty easy to me, but you know, I got to a point where I had to say like, God, they're your eyes, not my eyes, and so that just gave me a really unique perspective on stewardship, and I think when you have to pray certain prayers around your health, the money becomes easy, but it also, for me, I have to ask myself, how am I stewarding my marriage? How am I stewarding my kids? How am I stewarding my job, my career, ministry? So it truly is, God owns everything. He calls us to manage everything, you know, according to his will, and to glorify and honor him. But that said, here within Southeast, there is a marriage ministry. There's obviously our children's ministry, so the one thing that...so that's just why we focus, you know, a lot of our classes focus on

financial stewardship, and specifically, you know, I think just in America, money is...man, it's just so central to so much of what we do in our everyday lives, and it just...it's the thing, I think, that gets between us and God so quickly, and it's so sneaky of what it can do to our hearts. So that's what we do, we just try to kind of plant those seeds, get people, you know, we want them to experience financial freedom and not be overwhelmed with debt and those sort of things, but really we just want people to have margin in their lives so that when God calls them to, you know, a step of faith or obedience, that they have the margin in their lives to be able to do that. I love that. Yeah, it's such an important ministry in our church, and I mean, really, like, you guys have so much influence and dealings in every single campus, every single part of our church, because, you know, we talk about stewardship, like, that's people. Like, that is such a people thing, and a lot like what Tripp talked about in his message this past weekend that we'll get into here in a few minutes, I'm sure there's a lot of times where it's people may be asking for one thing, right, but the best way to help them may be something entirely different, you know, and it's trying to help them kind of navigate through that, I'm sure, in case by case and instance by instance over the course of time, and so grateful that you're back on here with us. Pando family, we hope that you're excited to have Justin back as well, but today we're gonna be talking about Tripp Lee's message from Sunday, and if you guys had an opportunity to watch that, I'm sure you loved it. Tripp's awesome, he is a Christian artist, he has put out a lot of music and albums over the years, if you got to watch Service with us this past weekend at the very end, Stephen Pericelli on our staff actually had a little bit of an interview with him after Service, just talking a little bit more about how, you know, Tripp applies what he talked about on Sunday to his own personal life, right, because I think there's a... it's one thing to talk about these things theoretically, but to apply them... a totally different ballgame. But Justin, one of the pieces of Scripture that he had us dive into was in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 7. And it says, this is Jesus speaking. He's saying,

Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds. And to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake? If you then, being evil, knowing how to give good gifts for your children, how much more will your Father, who is in heaven, give what is good to those who ask him? Justin, so as you read that and have listened to the sermon on Sunday from Trip, why can it be so hard for you, or just as you see with other people, why can it be so hard for us even to ask? God's asking us, inviting us to ask, but why are there times it can be so difficult to ask? I think for me, it's been a lack of understanding of who God is. And I think for a long period of my life, I thought of God as this kind of angry God who's just waiting for me to screw up and waiting to punish me. And when you've got that perspective, of course you're not going to ask for anything, right? It's kind of like, it's similar to having just an angry parent here on earth, right? Like you're going to avoid them, you're not going to ask them for anything. So I think that's certainly part of it. You know, I think, again, for me, being a little bit vulnerable, it's, do you trust God? You know, even going back to my eye situation, I've wrestled with that for a long time, and A, wrestled with, God, why are you punishing me? Like, what did I do to deserve this? And then coming to the realization that that's not who God is, that's not what this is, but ultimately just understanding that He's just drawing me closer to Him. And, you know, when I look back on that situation two years ago, like, I might as well have had a t-shirt on that said, like, I don't trust God. I don't trust Him to heal me, I don't trust Him to provide for me after He doesn't heal me kind of thing, and I think for me, like, I just spent so much time wrestling and asking for healing as opposed to really just leaning on the relationship with Him and asking Him to reveal what He's trying to do in me and through me in that season. For sure. And so again, it just comes down to not asking because I spend so much time focused on my own will as opposed to trying to understand His will. Yeah, and that can be scary, you know, it can be intimidating, and, you know, when we feel like, okay, like, is God angry with me? Like, does He care at all? Maybe we're in a season where it's like, man, I just don't trust Him right now, you know, so it's hard to ask. And so for you, like, you were talking a little bit about how your view of God was, where do you think some of

that has, like, where did that come from for you? Is that something that you learned growing up? Something that was just kind of instilled in you? I think instilled is the right word, but, you know, I had good parents that loved me, provided for me, all that, and I can look back and see that it was, at least from my perception, it was a little bit performance-based. Okay. So if I, you know, do X, Y, Z, then, you know, life is good, versus if I sin... So I've always kind of had that relationship with God a little bit. The less I sin, the more He blesses me, you know, versus, yeah, you know, the more I sin, then He withholds blessings from me. And I read a book, so I'm doing DDG, and read The Good and Beautiful God, and that was a really, really impactful book for me. You know, it really just focuses on the person who knows God the best is Jesus. And so it goes through all these false narratives of who we think God is at times versus who Jesus says God is, and it really just debunks a lot of those. So that was something that was really helpful to me. So yeah, you know, from a childhood perspective, I don't think I, like, encountered anything crazy. Sure. But you know, something else that I pointed out to somebody recently was growing up, I always went to big church, like with my parents, and never really went to like age-appropriate type things, and I've just questioned more so later in life, like how did that, you know, impact me? Like going into a bigger church, talking about adult things without having kind of that age-appropriate understanding of the Bible. So anyway, it's just, it's been a period for me of kind of looking back and re-examining who God says I am and who Jesus says God is. Yeah, I mean that can be so difficult, you know, even when, I think that's such a good point, because like we can even have good childhoods, right, and still end up with this impression of God that is kind of misaligned from truth, you know, and one of the things you mentioned was DDG. Tell us a little bit about what that is here at Southeast. Yeah, so it's a nine-month program, so there is a group of six guys that we are doing it together, we've got two leaders, so we basically read a book a month, got a memory verse, we've got each one of us does like a net out of a book of the Bible, so we've read... what are

all the books we've read? So we started with Four-Chair Discipling, Good and Beautiful God, Free at Last, I think, by Tony Evans, that was a good one. We just read this month is Reggie Campbell, What Do Radical Husbands Do?, so it's focused on marriage and relationships. Last month was Kyle's book, which Kyle's book was it? I've read it like several times, now I'm gonna go blank. Was it not a fan? Yes, not a fan, yes, thank you. So yeah, and then you know, we'll do True Riches at some point and talk about finances, so he really just talks about all the different... we studied, or we read books just that focus on different areas of our lives that we tend to silo or compartmentalize, and but yeah, I've done Man Challenge Bible Study on Thursday mornings for probably 15 years, and DDG is just kind of a next step from that, a little deeper dive into the Word, and it's just really good community, too. The six guys, I mean, we know the darkest secrets of one another, and it's just a brotherhood of walking through life together. I love that, and you know, the reason why I wanted to sit on that for a second is that I hope that for y'all that are watching this, that you see just how important having Christian community is to be able to do life with, and you know, again, like if you don't know who the chaplain is, where you're at, like I would encourage you to figure out who that person is and ask them, like, hey, are there other people like me that have the same faith that I can be meeting with? Because like, Justin, like you're mentioning, like that is so... it's so formative, because there's a lot of times we're coming into life and situations where, you know, like we may have been in church, like you may have like read the Bible a couple times, but we can have some like misaligned views on like who we believe God is, and that was one of the things that Tripp had mentioned, because the funny thing is is that one of the titles or the title of his sermon this last weekend was Extravagant Generosity, right? Extravagant Generosity, and wasn't necessarily talking about money, right? But what he was talking about was this this idea that God asks us and invites us to ask for good things, right? And like we read in Matthew 7, like you know, if he asks for a fish, like God's not gonna give you a snake. Like if even you, who are not as holy or not as perfect as God,

talking about all of us, like if someone asks you for a good thing, like you're not gonna give them an evil thing. But there's a lot of times that maybe because we're afraid of how God might react to something, or he may be upset with us, because we don't understand his true character, right? We can almost be afraid to make that ask, or make that request. You know, but not only that, is that, well, God's also not a genie, right? He's not a genie, where it's like, hey, okay, I'm gonna ask for this, this, this, this, and this, and he's gonna give me this in all of the specific ways that I asked. But what he is gonna do is that he loves me, he loves us enough, and knows us well enough to sometimes answer those prayers, but in a way that's actually gonna benefit us. And sometimes it's a no, sometimes it's a not yet, sometimes it is a yes. But Justin, I'm curious for you in your life, as you were listening to that sermon, have there been... moments of your life where an answer to a prayer has been no, but you have seen God work through that and the reasoning behind it, or even like, hey man, just not yet, let me do this other thing. Yeah, no, and I think I kind of said it on the podcast a few months ago, but my eye situation. Like, if God wouldn't have done that in the timing that He did, I probably would have, you know, I'd sold a business and two weeks later is when my eye just went sideways on me, and if He wouldn't have done that in the timing that He did, I probably would have started another business. I wouldn't have slowed down, I wouldn't have grown closer to Him, I wouldn't have become a better father, I wouldn't be doing DDG right now, I wouldn't be on staff right now. Like, that was God's will for my life. My will was to start another business, probably make more money, things like that. So for me, the prayer was, God heal me, like, heal me right now, please. And instead, I mean, it was a almost a year-long battle where He molded me and transformed me, and at this point, you know, my left eye is still kind of jacked up, but I'm thankful for it. It's a reminder every single day that, I think Romans 12 too, He's got a good, perfect, and pleasing will, and it's so much better than anything I could imagine. But without that health scare and health situation, I would still be pursuing my will instead of His. For sure. And you know, I think, and as you've gotten even deeper plugged in here at Southeast and deeper into your faith and in your walk with Christ, as you mentioned just a few minutes ago, you've had to walk through that season of struggling to trust God's will and His planning

and His timing and all of those things, because that is a physical thing that's going on with your eyesight that, you know, would impact the rest of your life, like the day-to-day rest of your life. You have family, you have a wife, like that's very frustrating. And so, you know, it's not even one of those things, it's like, man, I'm just hoping this thing happens in my future. It's like literally every single day dealing with this issue. And so even for you having to walk through that season, I think just shows that all of us are going to walk through seasons kind of like that, where, man, there are going to be times when we are going to question God's character. We're going to question like, okay, does He love me? Like, does He really have a good plan for me? Like, really? Because like things in my life right now don't seem to be going very well, right? There may be, you know, someone watching this right now, you may be watching this and you're like, man, like my family doesn't talk to me, my kids don't talk to me, I've made mistakes and maybe I'm willing to own that, but man, I'm not sure that God has any plan for my life. And I think what we continue to see is that God does have plans for us, even when we tend to mess things up, you know, along the way. But one of the things that sticks out to me was from this past sermon that Tripp was talking about, you know, like if it was child protective services about his son, like, hey, do you think your parents are good? And his son would be like, well, no, like they don't let me eat candy all day long. You know, it's like, well, because he's a kid, he doesn't always know like what's going to be the best for him. But as a parent, you know, like Tripp was talking about that, like, hey, we have to make the best decisions that sometimes they don't like, and I think we see that. We see that through the lens of a child, and God is our Father oftentimes. Yeah, I think, you know, knowing I was coming on the podcast today, when he was talking about point number three, that God parents us, right? And, you know, I use the Sour Patch Kids and watching Paw Patrol, which my kids would also do all day, every day. But I was thinking about it, like, what is the best good thing that could be dangerous for our pando audience? And it's freedom. Oh, okay, yeah. And, you know, over the years, had so many conversations where guys have come up and talked about going up for parole, or potentially getting out soon, and my first question is always, are you ready for that? Right? And it reminded me of John 5-6, when Jesus heals the lame guy next to the pool, and he says, do you want to be healed? Meaning, you know, it's a deeper inquiry about spiritual readiness for transformation. And, you know, we hear all these statistics about recidivism, right?

How many guys get out of... jail, get out of prison, and then they're right back in six months later." And I think, again, as I was listening to the message and thinking about the podcast today, how many guys are like, oh, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready, but they haven't truly been transformed, they haven't been pruned, they haven't focused on what God's will is for their life. Mm-hmm. And then, and God not answering that parole prayer. Yeah. Which is a big one. Which is a big one. Very big one. Right? Because if that guy gets out and goes back to the streets and gets killed, because he goes back to the same lifestyle and the same decision, it is a good gift for God to say no to parole. Until you have made that decision that you want to be transformed, and want to focus on God's will. Same with my situation. You have to get to that point that you surrender to God, and then you're asking, again, your prayers are aligning with God's will, not your will. Yeah, I 100% agree with that, and I think what that brings us back to is this question of, who do we believe God is? And not even just like, okay, do you believe that Jesus is God? For us as a church, that's a yes, we believe Jesus is God, we believe he's the Son of God, who's fully human, fully God at the same time. But it's talking about the characteristics of God in his heart, of like, okay, if you have a parent, and there may be several of you that are watching this right now, and you're like, man, I just never had a mature mother or father in my life that parented me in a way that I could trust. And I can understand, that's gonna be a tough journey. Not impossible, definitely not impossible to understand who God is, but it's gonna be a tough journey. Because all of us, even with good childhoods, we can have some skewed perspectives on, okay, who is God? But it's a lot, not easier, but it's a lot better when we face suffering, when we face difficult circumstances, that if we know the character of God, and then it's like, okay, he's not doing this as an evil king behind the scenes who just wants to see me punished, right? He's not doing this as an angry dad who just kind of wants the best thing for himself. He's not doing this as a parent that is just trying to punish me for something that they think that I did. No, he is all-knowing, he loves us, he cares for us, he wants what's best for us, and a lot of times what that means is it doesn't

mean watching Paw Patrol and eating Sour Patch Kids all day, or even having our parole prayer answered. Because he can look at the scope of our life, and everyone else is all together, and balance all of that in terms of his goodwill. But you're right, I'm sure that idea of freedom, having parole answered like that, that's a very enticing thing for God to say yes to, but sometimes that may be tough to say no. Yeah. Yeah, and it also brought me back to James 4-3, you ask and do not receive because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. But then also in James 1, if any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. Right, so just pulling some other scripture into, you know, that same Matthew 7, 7-7 scripture, there's just several verses that give us guidance on how to ask God for things. And again, back to Romans 12-2, do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, His good, pleasing, and perfect will. I almost think that's like a first step to praying, right? You have to understand what God's will is for your life. And I think going back to your point, foundationally, knowing who God is, knowing who Jesus was and why Jesus came for us, that just makes everything else make sense. And it's borderline depressing for me how long it took me to start to comprehend and understand that. So it's certainly, you know, the drum I am beating right now is, with anybody that I'm trying to disciple or mentor, do you know who God... really is, because I got it wrong for a long time. And to your point, and I think I said this on the last podcast, I don't have statistics, but I'd kind of say like 90% of the guys in prison have no dad or a bad dad. I would typically say the guys with bad dads are worse off than the ones with no dads. And it's so easy for us to compare God to our earthly fathers, and whether that's abandonment or abuse, anger, all those things, and it's just not who God is. And the sooner we can comprehend that and understand that, the more the rest of the Bible just makes sense, and the more I think we can comprehend what it looks like to pray for Paw Patrol and Sour Patch Kids, and what it means to pray for God's will, and to trust that God's will. Because sometimes God's will is a five-year or ten-year parole deferment, and at surface level, that's God being angry and punishing you. But it could

be God protecting you and setting you up for ten years of transforming lives within a prison, and bringing people to God that way, and growing yourself and preparing you so that when you do get out, you don't go back to the same bad decisions or lifestyle that got you in. Yeah. Yeah, I think that is great wisdom, and I think it's that question of, okay, do we know who God really is? No matter what our past is, do we know who God really is? Do we believe that he loved us so much that he sent his son Jesus to die on the cross for us so that we could have a relationship with him? Because what Scripture tells us is that the only way we could have a relationship with God because of our sin, because of our imperfectness, was for his own son, his perfect son Jesus, to die on a cross for us. And within that, he gives us an opportunity to put the full weight of our life on his shoulders. God wants to carry the full weight of your life, and so when we talk about that, this idea of, okay, do you trust God? Are you trusting God? Well, think about if you had a big plate or a big platter in front of you, and you can put all of these areas of your life, like your kids, maybe your spouse, maybe your finances, maybe it's your worries, your fears, all these things, are you willing to put all of those things on this plate and give it over to Christ? Well, you're not going to do that. You're not going to give that to somebody that isn't worthy or can't handle that. And there are going to be times throughout our lives where, man, things aren't going to go exactly the way that we want them to go. And it's going to be really easy to ask the question of the person holding all of those things in their hands, like, do you know what you're doing? Like, now I'm starting to maybe have a little bit of distrust, right? And I think that's the journey. That's the encouragement I would have, is that that's the journey, is that it's not easy for anyone. And for so many of you that may be watching this right now, you may be like, man, that's scary for me to even think about. And it might be. You know, it might be. It is for me too at times. Many times, actually. You know, but I think it's like Justin, you said, kind of as we wrapped this up, is that, you know, do we know who God really is? Because if we really knew who He was, right, we would have undeniable trust in Him. Undeniable, because He loves us. It has nothing to do with anything we've done, right? Actually, in spite of all the things we've done, God still loves us. And so, y'all, there is a God out there who loves

you. He wants you to be able to give Him all of the trust, all of your worries, all of your fears, all of your insecurity, your family, your parole, your time, your freedom. He wants to carry those things, right? And as we ask, you know, of the Lord, we know that God's not a genie, right? He's not going to answer everything exactly how we want Him to. But He will answer them in the way that's good for us, and in that we can trust Him. But Justin, thanks so much, man. Thanks for being here with us. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, we'll have you on again. And y'all, thanks for being here, thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.