Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Christian Podcast Central

Home
Evangelical - Sponsored
Live A Life With Meaning – Brad Stine Mini-Cast

Live A Life With Meaning – Brad Stine Mini-Cast

Last updated on: August 27, 2021 at 12:40 am by Christian Podcast Central

Live A Life With Meaning – Brad Stine Mini-Cast 2021-08-27T00:40:10-08:00 Christian Podcast Central

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Brad Stine Mini-Cast

Live A Life With Meaning

Hi, everybody. If you’ve just tuned in and you think I’m a little late, I’m not. I actually started my podcast on my other channel. My son, Wyatt, who you all know and love, though you’ve never seen and never will, put me on the wrong channel. He’s never actually prepared me for camera before on my Facebook page, so he didn’t realize I had a private one, which is my personal one. And then my comedian one. So I’m going to pretend like you guys haven’t seen anything from anywhere and we’re going to start all over. It’s going to go something like this.

Many of you have been wondering to yourself, is there a way to make life more livable, more beautiful, more amazing? You’ve probably thought to yourself, perhaps I should sell everything, get in a camper and go see the world, loving God, loving country and caring about things that matter the most. Maybe it’s time for me to truly commit everything to those simple things and the important things in life. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s, what’s expected of somebody that truly wants to be whole. Then again, if that’s too much trouble, stay here. It’s the Brad Stine Show.

You know, I am a Christian. If you guys are new and watching me for the first time, I am a Christian. What that means is a Christ follower. I believe that Jesus Christ was God and actually proved it through miraculous… First off, arrived on the scene from prophetic utterances, did miraculous things to show that he was not constrained by nature, died and rose back from the dead to show that even death, the thing that most of us fear, the very thing that drives Neo-Darwinism. Evolution is driven by the idea of survival. Think of that. Their entire machinery that drives them is survival.

Now they’ve never… And you should ask them if you want to have an interesting conversation, why should survival matter? Why should living be better than not living? Why should it matter? You’re going to die anyways. And once you do, you go into eternal unconsciousness, which means not only are you not going to have any more to think about, you’re not going to know you ever thought it in the first place. You’re not going to know you existed. You simply don’t. There’s nothing for you to participate in anymore. You had no value, no purpose on earth, no reason to be here. I don’t care if you murdered a million people and died, you don’t care. You’re dead. I don’t care if you saved a million people and fed them. You’re dead. You don’t know. It’s passed on. Those people will soon die. They won’t remember you. You’re going to just vanish into oblivion.

And no matter what you do, think about this, if science came up with a way to keep you alive forever, eventually the universe is going to burn out and you’re still going to die. You’re not going to be able to defeat the universe. So you’re going to cease to exist no matter what. No matter if we ever figure out how to stay alive for 5,000 years, we’re going to die. And then you go into nothingness, if there’s no God, if there’s no purpose, if there is no teleology within the structure of the world.

Now my son Wyatt brought up an interesting point, and this is something you will always hear evolutionists or atheists talk about. They will admit, if they’re honest, there is no meta narrative. There is no grand narrative. There is no major story. We’ve already discussed this before in another podcast. There is no meaning to life, literally. We’re here by accident. We just happen to end up on this planet that cooled down, the chemicals got to just the right configuration. That inanimate chemical material became biological and alive. They can’t account for it. They don’t know how it happened. They never will because, of course, that’s not what happened. God created life.

So they’ll never find that answer, but they believe it and have to believe that inanimate objects became animals. That’s a miraculous thing. That’s a magical thing. It’s a fantasy world that they’ve accepted with Darwin of the Gaps. They don’t know the answer, but somehow the science will figure this out someday. Same thing that they subscribe to the Christian. If you say, well, maybe there’s something here that God hasn’t let us in on. But, they will say this. There is no big meaning, but you make your own. You make your own meaning. So yeah, I’m going to die and nothing’s going to matter, but in the meantime, why don’t I just be nice to people? Why don’t I just be kind to people? I don’t need God to teach me about that. They’ll say those things.

Then you have to deconstruct that. It’s like, okay, you do need God to even know what nice is because the only way you can come up with what nice is or bad is, is what we would have to call a cultural convention. A construct that a bunch of humans got together and said, let’s choose to make this bad and this good. It isn’t actually bad. We’re just going to decide that from now on, you don’t kill me. And if you don’t kill me, I won’t kill you. You don’t take my wife, I don’t take your wife. And ultimately I’ll live a lot longer, a lot safer. You live a lot longer, a lot safer. We’re allowing ourselves to survive. Thus, it has some value and I can pass on my genes to somebody else. And then that continues to run the cycle until we all die out again. No meaning.

And what I try to tell the people is, if there is no ultimate meaning, I even gave you this example before, if you have a novel and there’s stories inside of the novel, the novel is the complete story. Once you finish the story, every little story in between that is irrelevant. It’s gone. It doesn’t matter. It has to fit the entire story to have any value, any purpose because it all fit only because there was a big story. Well, life, the world, earth, humans, there’s a big story. God made us. He gave us purpose. He said, I’m here. Come know me. Let’s have a relationship. I’m even going to let you live forever. We’re going to be together. And so I’m going to ask you to listen to my nature. I’m going to tell you what I am. I want you to worship only me because I’m the only one that created you. I want you not to have other gods before me.

Now we always think, oh, that’s idols. That’ll be obvious. I’m never going to worship an idol, but you do. You worship an idle if you worship money. You worship an idol if you worship texting. You worship an idol if you have constant anxiety because you’re worshiping anxiety, you’re giving it more power than anything else. So we’re always putting idols up there, but God says, don’t do that. He says, honor your father and mother. He said, don’t steal. He said, do not bear false witness against your neighbor. So basically God made the rules, don’t lie. God invented that. We can say we shouldn’t lie, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t. I mean, you could say, well, if you be nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. I don’t care about you. If I can beat you up and take your wife, I’m doing it. And if I’m stronger than you, try to stop me. You can’t. I win. I got what I wanted.

That’s the problem. There is no value or no meaning. And if you try to pretend that there’s meaning in something that you’ve manufactured in your mind, and the only reason you would do that is because life without meaning has no purpose and there’s nothing by which it gives you a sense of joy, of happiness, of even desiring to stay alive if there’s nothing to shoot for, nothing to accomplish. There’s this inner drive given to us to say, there is something out there to go get. Go achieve that thing. There’s something that is better than where you are. Let’s see if we can raise the bar. Well, that is innate in all of us. Why would you have that if there is no ultimate meaning? Because God gave it to you. They are given this clue. God says, go find meaning. Meaning has meaning. And they say, I don’t want God. So consequently, there is no meaning. We’re here by accident. But we make our own, we become God original sin.

So it always goes back to the Bible. That’s why you need to study the Bible. It’s an amazing book because it literally is the rules of life. It’s literally a book that tells you every stinking thing that ever happened from the beginning to the end and how it’s going to end. It’s an amazing book. It even tells us how it’s going to end. And guys, we might be in the middle of it right now. Right now. I was thinking about my faith a while ago because if you’re a true Christian, if you are a Christ follower and you give your life to him, you think to yourself, well, I have to behave a certain way. There’s certain things that are expected of me, right? Certain ways that I have to act, certain ways that I have to do. And I honor God by doing what he’s asked me to do. He says that, if you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.

But what I’ve learned more and more as time goes on, as I watch our country change, and as I watch bad be called good and good be called bad, when I watch honor be called something to be besmirched, and when I find selfishness and nihilism to be considered attributes, to be achieved and to be inculcated into law. We’ll call it socialism. And we’ll steal from those who have accomplished something so we can have one feel good about ourselves, but we’re going to put you down for even carrying that, I stole from you. How dare you not give to me? It’s always about me, but I’m always good. When I receive it, I do it with great honor, because I deserve it. And I’m also going to make sure that the rest of you have to do what I say too. Remember, I always exclude myself from the same scrutiny. It is institutionalized narcissism.

So I was trying to think about what does faith mean? What’s Christianity mean? What’s expected? And I grew up in a church and you’re told certain things and behave in a certain way, and be honorable, and don’t lie and don’t cheat, and be good and be kind. And I realized, the more I look into this Bible, that God expects your whole life to be his. Everything, every thought is supposed to be captive. Every thought is supposed to be captive. Everything you do is supposed to be God’s sacred space that he utilizes and is trying to shape it into what he demands. He’s trying to literally turn you into Christ. He’s trying to turn you into Jesus Christ. You’re not going to get there, not on this earth because we are sinful, but he’s trying to mold you into that thing.

So I realized that there was this idea. And again, keep this in mind. If you ever get some deep revelation from God, that is mind-boggling you, you never thought of it before, you speak it to others, and they’re blown away by it, and if you have this idea and nobody else has ever heard or gotten this idea, but you, be assured it’s a cult. Because if it’s from God, there will be others that will say, oh, God gave that to me too. He gave that to me too. Whether there are two or more witnesses, let everything be established. God will always let others know. So you’ll know it’s not just you making this up. He’s giving you this insight.

This is God’s Comic Brad Stine saying, thank you so much for coming out. I’m going to be here next week. If you want to give to my ministry, if you believe in what I’m doing and you want to see it grow before I pass away from this mortal coil, you can give and we’ll show you how you can link it up. God bless you guys. Thank you for being here. And next week, we’ll see if we’ve gotten any closer to building this into something that can start getting some guests on as well. God bless you folks. I will see you next week. Thank you for being my friends and remember Jesus-Live A Life With Meaning – Brad Stine Mini-Cast

Brad Stine Has Issues

Previous Post

July 20, 2021

Brad Stine Has Issues: I Don't Worship AMERICA

Next Post

July 28, 2021 Parent Like You Mean It: Fearless Parenting

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Brad Stine Has Issues Christian Podcast Central Classic Podcast Experience God Life Grounded Ouxano Parent Like You Mean It The Protest Show with Thor Ramsey The Summit Lecture Series Uncategorized What You’ve Been Searching For

Select a Month July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 June 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz