Leah Sax:
Hello and welcome to episode 16 of Delight Podcast. I am Leah Sax and this is Adam Curtis.

Adam Curtis:
Hello. Delight Podcast exists to help new Christians and to encourage old ones to live for Jesus. Last week we had a great time with Jodi looking at generosity, and today we’re moving on to the important topic of sanctification and how people change. Now this topic is so important because often in the Christian life you can feel that need to change. You can feel it quite heavily upon your heart, but you’re not always just sure how to actually go about doing it.

Leah Sax:
Today, our guest is going to be talking to us about sanctification is Dr. Andrew Nicholls, who’s director of pastoral care at Oak Hill College. Before we get on to our quite tasty topic, we’re going to hear a little bit more about how he came to know Jesus.

Adam Curtis:
Hello Andrew And welcome to Delight Podcast.

Andrew Nicholls:
Hello. Very good to be here.

Adam Curtis:
Hi. It’s good to have you. Could you tell us just a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Andrew Nicholls:
Yeah. So Andrew Nicholls, I am director of Pastoral Care here at Oak Hill College, which is a college that trains people for ministry in Anglican churches and independent churches. It’s in North London, Adam used to be a student here. Lots of people have been through the college and I’ve been here for five years now. My job means that I teach pastoral ministry, which is really the bit where all the stuff we’re learning about what the Bible says connects with real life. And I oversee the pastoral care for students and their families married to Hilary, and we have two grown up boys.

Adam Curtis:
I loved my time at Oak Hill and I particularly loved my time looking at biblical counselling with you, Andrew, and I’m just so glad that we get to take some of that wisdom from the lecture hall and bring it into this podcast. It’d be good to get to know you a little bit first. Could you just tell us a little bit about how you came to know the Lord Jesus?

Andrew Nicholls:
I grew up in a Christian family and a regularly going to church family. I would have called myself a Christian for my whole life, I think. But when I got to university, I discovered there were people in the Christian Union at my uni who, when they prayed, they prayed to a God They really seemed to know. They talked to him as if he was actually their Heavenly Father. And I didn’t have that relationship with God. And that set me thinking, well, a number of things have set me thinking. I suppose the Lord wove a number of threads together. It came to a head just before my second year at university, where I was away with the Christians and the Christian Union and the speaker essentially for what seemed to me like the first time in my life explained the whole gospel simply and clearly. And the thing that I thought was missing was that I wasn’t living with Jesus Christ as Lord. So on the last night, in the last song, in the last chorus, I surrendered to Jesus Christ as Lord. I was holding a copy of the of the words out in my hand, and I didn’t move, but my hands were held out in surrender to to God as well as holding the book. The song which some people sometimes ask was Shine Jesus Shine, which is not commonly sung these days because it’s very much of its time. But that was the moment from which I am reasonably sure I had a place in the Book of Life.

Adam Curtis:
Okay, thank you for that. And when you talk about surrendering to Jesus as Lord, what does that look like? What does that feel like and how did that impact your life?

Andrew Nicholls:
That’s a great question. I think it meant recognising that he because he he made me he had a right to tell me what life was for, what life was about, what a good life would look like. I think there were particular areas of my life where I knew I was rebelling against him. There was a very specific need to to stop. And, well, the Bible word is to repent, isn’t it? You know, to to turn away from that and to turn towards Jesus. There was a whole lot caught up in it that I had absolutely no idea about at the time. And I’m still discovering what that means. You know, that Jesus as Lord is a brilliant Lord because he loves us so much and he cares for us so much and he doesn’t tell us everything at once. He tells us little bits as we grow older. He’s not impatient. He spreads it out over the course of our life. So that’s part of the adventure is, you know, discovering what is it, what does it look like for Jesus to be Lord today, and how am I going to not live with Jesus as Lord today? And how is that still going to be okay? Because he loves me so much and he still forgives me. And it’s kind.

Adam Curtis:
As you look back now over your life and how Jesus has been teaching these little things each year, what have some of those little things been which he’s been teaching you?

Andrew Nicholls:
One big thing was sorry. You asked the little things and just said a big thing.

Adam Curtis:
That’s fine. You go for a big thing first.

Andrew Nicholls:
Well, one really big thing was that my relationship with the living God affects all the little things of life that I used to think that being a Christian had big implications on a Sunday, and it had big implications when you reached a big decisive moment like, Am I going to get married? Or What job am I going to take? Those were the big moments that I would be, you know, reveal really if I was serious about what God wanted for my life or if I was going to do my own thing. But actually, there aren’t very many of those. The way that I live before God is most exposed. By the way, I say hello to somebody the way that I do the washing up or leave the washing up or do it thoroughly or badly. And it’s because in that moment I’m expressing my heart towards God and my heart towards the people that God has put around me. So my heart is always on view to the Lord in all of life. So the big thing I discovered was that it’s all about the little things, or it’s mostly about the little things. It’s about the big things too. But most of life is little things.

Leah Sax:
You talk about living for God in the little things every day and knowing his of your saviour in times of challenge and difficulty. What does that look like?

Andrew Nicholls:
It’s slightly depends, I suppose, what you mean by challenge and difficulty. I mean the example I often give when I’m talking about. These things to try and show people what it looks like in their own life is to talk about when I’m trying to carry out. I mean, it happens every week. Our recycling bin gets too full and I’m trying to carry it from the kitchen to the bin and something falls off. Something falls off because there is this thing called gravity over which I am not Lord. And something falls off because the bin is too full because I’m the only person emptying it in my head at the time anyway, and because other people have clearly had no respect for me when they when they fill it up so much, rather than making a little trip out to the bin themselves. That’s a challenge to my heart to say I’m going to surrender to the fact that I’m not Lord, I didn’t make gravity and I can’t turn it off. I’m just a weak and finite human being who is subject to the laws of nature, unlike God who gets to do whatever he wants with the laws of nature whenever he wants.

Andrew Nicholls:
There are challenges around all the time. But I think the other thing is that life from time to time brings huge challenges. When you get a massive, massive life event, when someone very, very close to you dies or when someone who you completely trusted very, very badly lets you down. It’s massively disorientating. Very few people negotiate those successfully, whatever that means. Immediately. There’s a process of understanding what has happened and understanding that the things that are precious about God are all still true. And, you know, sometimes that happens within 30 seconds. But and sometimes it happens over 30 years. But God is holding us, you know, the promises that he will not let your foot slip. It feels like you’re falling headlong down the cliff to certain death and destruction. But actually he’s holding you. What does it look like in the challenges? It looks like walking down completely unknown paths towards a light that gradually gets brighter. And even when you can’t see the light, you keep walking and trust that it will be there and it will become visible at some point soon.

Leah Sax:
Hi Delight Podcast family. We gain nearly all of our audience through social media, so every time you share the pod, a post or a blog, it invites new people into our little family. So thank you for liking and sharing and subscribing. We do go on about it all the time, but it really does help and we’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to drop us a DM let us know what you thought of the episode or what you’d like to hear in the future. You can check out our website at DelightPodcast.com. There you can find transcripts of each episode, more detailed show notes, and the latest blog by Adam on Sanctification.

So now we’re going to talk to Andrew about our topic today. And I love a good inspirational quote. You know those ones with white text on a dramatic, rugged mountain backdrop. And I scroll past those images on socials. I very briefly read them, I think. Yes, of course, this message now means that I can do anything. Of course I can climb every mountain. And in thinking about our topic today, I came across this quote. Just keep being true to yourself. If you’re passionate about something, go for it. Don’t sacrifice anything. Just have fun. Now, these quotes, which do pop up everywhere, reflects our current culture. Be true to yourself and don’t change for anyone. And yet, side by side, we sit in a world that believes anything external to self can change your job, your relationships, your location, your name, your gender. But the core of who you are, the self, your identity according to how we see culture today, is unchangeable. Is this true? Do we not need to change?

Andrew Nicholls:
That’s a great question. I can’t resist saying that. Of course, in that stuff on social media, if you stop to think about it, it’s completely ridiculous. Don’t sacrifice anything. Just have fun. Those two statements are completely incompatible. You can’t just have fun without sacrificing all kinds of things like responsibility and relationships that go through a sticky bit. Anyway, the idea that we don’t need to change is very appealing. I am who I am, you know, get over it kind of thing. But if we are in fact created by somebody else, if we’ve been made by a creator God, then we need to listen to our Creator tell us what it looks like to be human. And he tells us that he is doing some very extraordinary change in us. So he tells us that this is from 2 Corinthians 3:18. He says, We all who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord who is the spirit? Paul is saying There we already see the Lord’s glory. We know God and we’re beginning to discover how wonderful He is and how amazing he is and how powerful he is and how loving he is. And as we see those things in him, we are being changed to become a little bit more like him.

Andrew Nicholls:
We are becoming a little bit more able to love each other. We’re becoming a little bit more concerned about the things that God is concerned about and a little bit less concerned about the things that we’re concerned about. We’re becoming a little bit less selfish and a little bit more sacrificial. Most people who take Jesus seriously enough to find out what he was actually like think he’s a pretty impressive human being. He is extraordinarily sacrificial and humble and lovely, and he is kindest to the weakest people and he’s strongest in criticising the bullies and the people who mess up other people’s lives. He’s a beautiful, strong, gentle, humble, kind man. Most people who take Jesus seriously enough to find out that he is like that would quite like to be a little bit more like him themselves. That’s exactly what God is doing. He is making us a little bit more like Jesus. Do we need to change? Yes. If it’s possible to be a little bit more like Jesus. We’ve got a lot of changing to do, but do we need to do it all ourselves? No, actually, God says he’s doing it. We are being transformed by his work in us. So that’s great.

Leah Sax:
That is really great. Now we’ve named this episode Sanctification, which is a big word. Can we just flesh out what we mean by that when we’re saying sanctification? Are we saying being changed to be more like Jesus? Where do we get that word from? Why do we use it a lot?

Andrew Nicholls:
We use the word because it’s useful sometimes to have one word that stands for a big idea. So you don’t have to use lots of words to explain it. Sanctification is a way of saying becoming holy. Holy is what God is. He is totally different from us. He is completely morally pure. The perfection of his character is kind of the standard that every human being should live by. If we do, then we kind of create paradise. We get to live in relationships which aren’t going wrong and where we’re completely honouring of one another all the time. It’s a beautiful way to live, and that is how God intends everything to be in the new creation that all his people are being brought together towards. But we’re not there yet. We need to be sanctified. We need to be made holy. We need to learn how to live in ways that are more like Jesus and less like ourselves. Zach Williams song Someone played me for the first time today, a little less like me. I need to be a little more like Jesus and a little less like me. It’s a beautiful song. That song is really about sanctification. It’s about growing to become more holy.

Andrew Nicholls:
That might be worth saying. You can cut this bit out if you like that. Actually, the word sanctification has two senses and they’re both really important. So there’s something which is called positional sanctification, which is so many syllables. It’s ridiculous. But it just it just means that God already accepts me as if I was entirely holy. So I am absolutely secure and safe in his family forever because he sees me in Christ and I’m already set apart as one of God’s people. But I’ve still got a lot of growing to do, actually, to live like Jesus. And that’s called progressive sanctification. I will become more and more holy. That verse that I read from 2 Corinthians 3:18 is one of those places in the Bible that makes that really, really clear that God has begun a good work in us. He’ll bring it to completion on the Day of Christ Jesus. That’s Philippians 1:6, when we will all be exactly like Christ. Sanctification is a big word for a very, very precious idea. The more you look at Jesus and how wonderful he was with people, the more you want to be sanctified, the more you want to be made like him yourself.

Leah Sax:
How do we go about being more like Jesus? Well, the.

Andrew Nicholls:
First thing to say is that this is something that God has promised to do. It’s not about learning a formula and then doing it. It’s something that as you live in relationship with Jesus, he does it. There are lots of ways in which his word guides us. The Psalms keep talking about his word as a light. He shines a light on us for us to see. And that means that his word is always guiding me into what it looks like to be sanctified and to be holy. So his his word is a huge help. Whether you’re thinking about the law, the instructions that are there in the Old Testament or the instructions that Jesus and the apostles gave about, about how to live and how to love and how to how to do relationship. That’s one way in which we grow in holiness. We pay attention to the commands and instructions of Scripture. Another way in which we grow is it’s not quite obedience to commands. It’s about it’s about growing in wisdom. So learning more about how life works in God’s world, so that you understand more and more about how people tick and how you tick and how things go wrong. And there’s lots about that kind of thing in in the Book of Proverbs just being wise in the way we live with people. That’s another way we grow. One of the big ways that we grow, which is kind of horrible but also wonderful, is that we often grow.

Andrew Nicholls:
And the Bible is very clear about this. We often grow through suffering when life goes really, really wrong and really, really painful and really, really hard. We are tempted to think it’s in. Exactly those moments that now real disaster has struck. And I have I have now definitely fallen out of God’s blessing and I have no future and my life is tumbling out of control. We haven’t really tumbled out of God’s control and those kinds of moments, you know, the Bible says some extraordinary things about them, which are kind of hard to process at the time. But essentially God is is assuring us that in all of those moments, he’s doing some very important work. He uses words like refining. You know, metal has to get made very, very hot for its impurities to be to be burnt out of it. It’s a little bit like that for us sometimes, that God, God loves us so much and he’s he’s so committed to fulfilling his plan in us that if it means that some really unpleasant bits need to be burnt out of me, he’s willing even to have that happen. And it’s never more than I can bear and it’s never more than he will carry me and care for me in. But it does hurt sometimes.

Leah Sax:
How can we see in a practical outworking of life that we are being sanctified, that we are being made holy? What would that look like as a practical example?

Andrew Nicholls:
A lot of the time we can’t see it at all. And that’s one of the reasons why God’s Word bothers to tell us that God is definitely doing it, especially when life feels like it’s falling apart. I think when Paul wrote to the Philippians, they were pretty upset because Paul, their great hero, had been banged up in jail for quite a long time and they thought the whole future of the church was now guaranteed to be a failure because their great apostle was in prison. And Paul said, You do know, don’t you, that God has begun a good work and he will bring it to completion, that God’s plan is unstoppable. And in fact, the fact that I’m in prison means that some jailers are getting to hear about Jesus. He kept wanting people to be encouraged that what they couldn’t see, they could only see disaster and problems, things going wrong. But Paul said God is keeping his promise in all of this. So I think the first thing is we often can’t see it. But another way would be that we can see other people changing more easily than we can see ourselves changing. You might have a friend, you’ve watched them go through a really hard time in life and you’ve you never really noticed that they’re praying a little bit more than they used to, or that they’re a little bit humbler than they used to be or they don’t any more Talk to you as if as if life was easy.

Andrew Nicholls:
If you could just do the right thing. You know, people who haven’t experienced their own kinds of suffering often treat other people as if, Oh, you should just do this. It’s easy. But when someone’s been through their own hardship, they stop talking like that quite so much. They become much better friends for people who are going through hard times. And I think that’s one of the ways that we’re sanctified. Jesus is amazingly able to walk closely with people who are suffering. He doesn’t judge them. He doesn’t squash them. He’s very, very gentle. We can see each other become a little bit more gentle. We get the corners knocked off, we become a little bit more prayerful. We take reading the Bible a little bit more seriously. We find we really miss church because church is so important to keep us going. We love our small group and it’s not that it’s a massive revolution happens every time we get together as a group of Christians and we read the Bible and we think, Oh, my word, my mind has been blown, but we just we just like meeting together and encouraging each other and praying for each other. And I think those those little changes that happen over a lifetime are all signs that God is growing us to become a little bit more like more like him.

Leah Sax:
This is so beautiful. I just want to sit here and meditate in all these words. This idea of being made holy and pure like Jesus seems like an impossible goal to reach and kind of makes us feel like, should we even be trying to be like Jesus? Is that even is it even attainable?

Andrew Nicholls:
Well, I think we often do feel like, you know, if you’ve really tried hard to break a habit and you’ve failed and you’ve gone back to it again and again and again, it can feel totally out of reach and totally impossible. I think it’s a great question to ask. Is it even possible to stop being selfish? Is it even possible to turn to the Lord for help instead of turning to YouTube or the fact that this is a promise that God has made to every single one of his children is our lifeline? In moments like that, we can’t do it. There’s a phrase, isn’t there? You know, I keep feeling like I’m back at square one. I don’t know whether it’s a game of snakes and ladders. You know, you start at square one at the bottom and you you go along, you roll the dice, and sometimes you go up a ladder and it’s great. And then sometimes you hit a snake and you fall. You fall back down. When life feels a little bit like that, we can feel like we’re back at square one, that we’ve got absolutely nowhere. The journey that we went on has been a journey where God has been with us and He’s been teaching us so that although we might feel that we’re back at square one, actually we’ve learned, we’ve learned more about him, we’ve learned more about ourselves, we’ve learned more about our weakness. And as we set out again to try again, we’re not the same as we were because we’ve had another experience of failing and needing God’s love and grace. And that experience is one way in which, you know, God uses failure to draw us close.

Leah Sax:
Yes, because I was going to ask, is it possible to regress, become less sanctified if that if that’s a concept, if we don’t see change, if life is really difficult. But I guess that question has been answered and it is wild to me that God, God is the one changing us because as human. Leah I kind of feel like, well, I feel this way. How can my emotions change or the way that I process change? But the idea that God has given us this promise that he will, that he can, it’s a supernatural work of God, which is beautiful, and I can’t get my head around it really.n.

Andrew Nicholls:
No, Exactly! He’s such a genius, you know, that people use the he is a master craftsman with us. You know, we are like a block of wood on his workbench and he has a beautiful set of chisels and a very beautiful hammer in his hands. And every one is used with such exquisite skill that we’re being turned from a lump of wood into just an awesome, awesome creation. C.s Lewis said once that if I could see you now Leah, as you will be when God has finished, I would be sorely tempted to worship you because you’ll reflect so much of God. I mean, the lovely thing is of course at the moment when I do see you like that, I’ll at the same moment know that the God who’s done that is the one who actually needs the worship and and we will worship him together. But C.S. Lewis is Right. The beauty that God is making in us. Goodness me it. Hurts when the chisel goes in. And we love that bit of wood, but God knows we’re better off without it.

Adam Curtis:
Just reflecting on what you’re saying there, Andrew, that sometimes you feel like you’re thrown back to square one. Sometimes you just get that sense of your own failure. And like, I can definitely relate to that, that nagging sense of guilt and shame and how it just pushes you, pushes you down. To make it very practical for that person who’s maybe read the Bible by themselves or sitting in church and heard a convicting sermon, or maybe they’re just going for a walk in the countryside and they feel the weight of God’s word upon them and they’re feeling that twinge of something’s got to give, something’s got to change. How should that person start?

Andrew Nicholls:
We start by talking to our Heavenly Father about what we’re feeling, about what we’re thinking. Lord, I’m walking through this forest and I can see the greatness of the trees you’ve made. And I feel very small and I feel a failure. Please remind me of your love and please help me to grow. Just begin a conversation with the Lord. He’s always there to listen. He loves us to ask for his help. He is our helper. He is our redeemer. He is our rescuer. He is our saviour. And he loves it when we ask him to be all those things for us. That’s what it means to know God is to approach the throne of grace with confidence. As it says in Hebrews, He rules in order to love and care for us. So just begin talking to him. That would be the first thing. Another thing to do would be that growth is not a solo thing. There are people to talk to friends, Christian friends, a small group at church, a Pastor. There are all kinds of people that can pray with us, can talk to God for us and put the things we are trying to find words to pray about. We can put it in their words and that’s really, really helpful. See, one of the great problems is that it’s very easy to want to persuade each other that we’re all basically okay and didn’t actually need Jesus to die for us because we’re basically,

Andrew Nicholls:
You know, we’re we’re fundamentally good people and we can spend so much time doing that in the church that it comes as a big surprise when I say I’m actually struggling with something at the moment. I can’t stop watching this particular website or I can’t stop feeling jealous about this thing that my sisters got that I haven’t got. And that is so normal. We are all experiencing those kinds of things all the time and we could just say that to each other and pray for each other in that. Have you ever been in a group of friends where one person says, Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I actually find this quite hard? And then everybody else says, Oh yeah, no, I’m the same. I find it hard too. And I think sometimes, you know, that God’s spirit moves us or someone else in our group of friends to start talking about how we’re struggling at the moment. And then we find that actually he’s brought us together because we’re all struggling in different ways and we can all help each other draw close to him and feel forgiven by him and discover how he’s caring for us in these hard moments of life.

Leah Sax:
So how do we help one another? How do we help our brothers and sisters become more holy to love Jesus more because we are family. We want to encourage each other. With that, we talk about how we as individuals or in fellowship become sanctified, become holy. How do we love each other in that?

Andrew Nicholls:
One of the key things is to try to help each other discover not just what’s going on in the surface of our lives, but what’s going on in our hearts. So there are all kinds of things I do every day. You know, if I’m carrying out the recycling and I get cross because a bottle has fallen off the top of the crate, I might express my frustration. So the question is not so much, Oh, don’t get cross. It is, why are you getting cross? What’s going on in your heart? The answer is that often that there is something going on there. In my relationship with God, it might be that I would actually quite like other members of my family to serve me rather than to be a servant. Well, that’s an issue between me and God because God asked me to serve the members of my family. And I suppose I’m just trying to give that as an example of we help each other by being willing to have a little bit of a grub around under the surface of our lives, what’s really going on in our hearts? What are we loving? What are we desiring? What are we afraid of? And often our emotions are a good clue to that. What are the things that I get most excited about or most worried about? Most frightened about? What do I feel proudest about? What are the things that feel like the biggest threat to me? That those kinds of questions, they’re not light and easy, but they are incredibly helpful in terms of thinking about what are the things that my heart has become attached to, what are the things that my heart longs for? And to be able to talk about those things with each other gives us a chance to, I suppose, review the state of our hearts and to think together about whether those things that we’ve become attached to, the things that we long for, the hopes, the dreams, whether they’re being shaped by the things of God or whether they’re being shaped by the things of the world.

Andrew Nicholls:
And the answer is there will always be a mixture. But as we talk about it and think about it and pray about it together, it becomes possible to see them change and and become a little bit more shaped by the things of God and a little bit less shaped by the things of the world. Being willing to talk about our own hearts is a great help to other people because that helps them talk about their own and being willing to ask another question of somebody else about what’s going on under the surface is a great help too. One of my favourite book titles is Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands. We Aren’t the Redeemer. God is the Redeemer, but he uses people like us as instruments to do his work of redeeming, his work, of sanctifying. And the questions, the words, the ideas, the responses, the smiles, the hugs that we give each other can be really important ways in which we’re instruments in God’s hands.

Leah Sax:
I wonder if somebody’s listening to this thinking, this is a wonderful, a beautiful thing that God is doing. And it sounds it is a beautiful thing. If we are listening to this at home and we’re just feeling really low and just thinking. I don’t see changes happening. I feel really lonely. I don’t feel in fellowship. What advice would you give to that? Someone to maybe how to pray through that? With a heart longing for that, but just really struggling in that openness, in that fellowship.

Andrew Nicholls:
I think to notice that’s how you’re feeling and to start talking about that to the Lord. So just instead of just saying to yourself, I feel so hopeless to say, Lord, I feel so hopeless. Those are two such different things, you know, One is is genuinely hopeless and the other one is saying, Lord, can you help? Lord, I believe you’re there. I’m calling out to you. I need you. If you find it hard to put into words, or even as you’ve tried to put it in words, one of God’s great kindnesses to us is to give us words that we can use to pray to him. And there’s a whole bunch of Psalms, for example, that put words to the hard things in life. Start reading some Psalms. I mean, there are some particularly good ones. Well, they’re all good. Most people know Psalm 23, which begins The Lord is my shepherd. Just even to take that one sentence, the Lord is my shepherd. Lord, I feel so hopeless. But you are my shepherd. Please, would you take me to green pastures? Please. Would you lead me beside still waters? Because I feel hungry and I feel churned up. And I need your care. So that would be a little example of how to take a little line from a psalm. You know, there’s a very, very bleak psalm, Psalm 88, which starts with, Oh Lord, you are the God who saves me. And then it goes through everything that is going wrong in this person’s life. And it is terrible. He talks about drowning. He talks about being in a pit.

Andrew Nicholls:
He talks about being incredibly lonely. And at the end of the sun, the sun finishes with darkness is my closest friend. When we’re living through times of life that are as dark and as hard as that, it can be very, very hard to find words to express that to God. And Psalm 88 gives us words to express it to God. So good way to start would be just to begin trying to express your thoughts to the Lord and to look in the Psalms for Psalms, which give us words that we agree with. Why are you cast down o my soul? That’s in Psalm 42 and Psalm 43. The idea that I’m sad and I don’t know why and I hate it and please, would you change it? But you’ll find as you find those words in the Psalms which express what you’re feeling, you’ll also find right next to them, words that take you on to the next step. So why are you cast down o my soul? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him. I trust that I will one day praise you again. I don’t feel like it now. I’m so depressed. But I will look to the Lord one day. I will praise him again one day. God, you will seem wonderful to me again. I wish you did now. But at the moment, all I can do is cry out that that would be true one day. The Psalms are phenomenally real about life, much more real than we are when we want to just keep smiling at each other.

Leah Sax:
When we first started talking about this topic, I wasn’t quite sure where our interview and podcast would go, but I love that it settled on all of your life. God is making you holy. And that is question is, it’s not so kind of like sanctification. This is what happens on a Tuesday at 4:00 pm. It is a picture of your life and it’s a promise that God has made to us.

Adam Curtis:
O Amen And actually that process of sanctification is happening in the small things of life, isn’t it? We kept on going back to that illustration of the recycling. I just found that so helpful, actually. What is my attitude when I’m doing the recycling? Is it grumbling that other people should serve me? Is it pride that I’m serving other people? What’s going on in my heart in that moment? That is where sanctification happens. I love the fact that Andrew helped to see how it is in the small things of everyday life.

Leah Sax:
Yeah, and it’s not something that we can do. Yes, we live for Jesus. It’s God who’s at work changing our hearts, which is beautiful.

Leah Sax:
Right. We’ve reached the time in our episode where we’re going to ask you our surprise bonus question. Andrew. So our question this season is if you could give a new believer one piece of advice, what would it be?

Andrew Nicholls:
That’s a hard question, isn’t it? When when there’s no context except for the fact that someone is a new believer? I think it would be. Never forget that God has made you for relationships. First of all, with him. And secondly, for other people. So when Jesus summarised the whole law of God, he said Love God, love your neighbour, because we’ve been made to thrive in relationship with God and relationship with other people. Now, at the moment, those relationships are not what they will be one day and it can leave us wondering if we’ve so messed up that the whole of life is falling apart. But if God made us for relationships, it’s because he knows how to lead us to thrive in that way. So he is going to grow our relationship with him. He’s going to help us in our relationship with other people, and we can absolutely rely on him to be there to grow those things over the course of our lives.

Adam Curtis:
Thanks so much, Andrew. You’re very welcome. It’s been a delight. It’s been a delight.

Leah Sax:
Hey, hence the name of the podcast.

Leah Sax:
Thank you so much to Andrew Nichols for being our guest on episode 16 of Delight Podcast. Please do tune in next week for episode 17, where we’ll be looking at the topic of Joy with Kirsten Birkett. This is Adam and Leah, delightfully signing off.

Adam Curtis:
Goodbye.