Liberate Your Story Podcast

In this episode, I’m going to unravel a word and belief that will likely create conflict for you. I am going to share a few stories that are highly sensitive in nature. One of these stories references a sexual assault without details of the crime committed. You are always free to skip this episode.

I also want to say this before I go any further. My podcast, and this episode, are not about dismantling Christianity. It may feel like it at times, but that would be a very futile goal to have. It would actually make me the same person on this side of Christianity as I was on the other side…interested in saving you.

I’m not interested in saving you.
I am interested in challenging your current context and model of the world.

You see, the reality we live in is relative to our internal navigation system. That system is formed by our beliefs, values, experiences, learned strategies, and culture.

We have programming that directs us to outcomes based on its primary need to stay alive. At a very young age, we learn to stay alive by learning all of these things. We learn how to stay safe and how to belong (which is part of staying safe).

What was important for that survival at one time, may not be what we need now. We’ve grown, we’ve changed, our circumstances have changed, our world has changed.
Revisiting our programming is incredibly important so that we can continue to expand and thrive.

If you were like me, you were raised in a certain understanding of God, faith, and community.
The beauty of America is that we have a large variety of these types of religious systems. Although your religious upbringing may have been different than mine, it still came with a set of understandings.
In the Evangelical Christian church, we called these…. Doctrines.

These doctrines gave us the plumbline for how we understood ourselves in light of a holy god.
These doctrines were our programming.
Everything we did and felt needed to line up with this programming or we would be wrong, in trouble, or…unsafe (as our subconscious would understand it).
Being on the outs of these doctrines put us at risk of losing our community and even our eternal destiny. So…the laws and doctrines kept us safe…or at least that was how our reality was perceived.

It’s essential that we keep challenging ourselves to look at how our beliefs direct our lives.
If we want a different outcome than we are getting, then it's our beliefs that need to be changed.

BUT if our beliefs hold a higher value than our outcomes (our happiness, our success, our joy, our ability to stay safe), then we will jump through hoops in our minds to make it make sense.

We work hard at this all the time.
Any event in our life, positive or negative, creates an opportunity to navigate our safety. The path we take to safety is our strategy. We have strategies about literally everything we do…all those repeating things we do on a daily basis…those are strategies to get outcomes we need or desire.

I’m going to challenge you in this episode to unravel a very powerful word in the religious world that most likely will have created strategies for how you live or lived your life.

This word is Sovereign.

I wanted to do a quick search of something current in regard to this word. I realize that my past context may not be a present context. So to Google, I went.
Consider for a moment, this explanation of sovereignty found on christianity.com. It's part of an article written by Chip Ingram on August 11, 2022. I actually don’t know very much about this author of the article so I’m not here to figure out who Chip is or whether you should listen to or read his content. This particular article though was a great example of my whole point in today’s episode.
As I quote this article, I want you to pay special attention to the hard work done to make something mean what his belief system needs it to mean.
“If you were to look up the word “sovereign” in the dictionary, you would find words and phrases like “superior,” “greatest,” “supreme in power and authority,” “ruler,” and “independent of all others” in its definition. But the way I like to explain God’s sovereignty best is simply to say, “God is in control.”
Biblical Definition and Context of 'Sovereign'
There is absolutely nothing that happens in the universe that is outside of God’s influence and authority. As King of kings and Lord of lords, God has no limitations. Consider just a few of the claims the Bible makes about God:
God is above all things and before all things. He is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. He is immortal, and He is present everywhere so that everyone can know Him (Revelation 21:6).

God created all things and holds all things together, both in heaven and on earth, both visible and invisible (Colossians 1:16).

God knows all things past, present, and future. There is no limit to His knowledge, for God knows everything completely before it even happens (Romans 11:33).”

Now, there were more verses sighted in this article and He also goes on to tell us that God’s sovereignty will bring us comfort, require our submission, and inspires us to worship God.
The writer goes on to sight a few modern-day Christian theologians like John Piper and Kay Arthur. It is a strong effort to help us be ok with giving up our own knowledge of ourselves and let God have control of knowing us.
Now, this is just an article found with an easy google search for “what does the sovereignty of God mean”. Christians will vary on the details, but I think he summed up the general idea this belief system has which is “ God is in control”...and I am not.
I used to debate the intensity of this sovereignty while I was part of the Christian belief system. It was an epic dance of how much I wanted to be ok with in releasing my control and responsibility in life.
If God was in control, then what happens was up to him. Do you hear the safety in God being in control?
Based on my belief system, God being in control did, in fact, create safety for me.
Now…I just throw the whole concept out because it is NOTHING but destructive in its outcomes.
Submission and release of responsibility are not the answers to the human condition.
In fact, it actually creates a whole chain reaction of problems that hurt ourselves and others around us.
For example…
I recently saw a news article about a child who had been in the foster care system for 14 years, his whole life. The article was sighting how this boy just wanted a final home, a final family. My heart broke. This should have never been an article written because this 14-year-old boy should have never been longing for a family for so long, right? The question that rises up for me in a story like this is, “Where was God if he’s sovereign and in control of everything?”
We have a belief problem. We have a God problem. No matter who God is, how he/she actually exists and acts is actually irrelevant because the belief we have chosen in regards to Sovereignty says that God is not filling His end of the bargain…the defining quality of that God.
Christianity says that God is sovereign and that nothing happens without Him knowing or allowing it. And this sovereignty is something that should bring me comfort and cause me to want to worship him more.
Do you hear this?
You do realize that horrific things happen to children every day that are vile, disgusting, and a living hell.
But…god is in control. And god will offer you heaven if you believe in him and offer your submission for this comfort of sovereignty.

Beliefs are a powerful thing. Unchecked, unchallenged, they require us to jump through hoops to make it make sense just enough that we can keep believing.
In this case, we actually have to stop looking at the child abuse epidemic, we have to assure ourselves that foster care is a good experience for children in pain and we have to gaslight ourselves that it's Satan’s fault these things exist creating an even greater need for a god that is sovereign.
AHHH. It’s a circle of avoidance…because we aren’t willing to challenge the belief itself.
I worked with a teen during my teen mentoring years, whose father was videoing his sexual abuse with her and selling it online. I was involved in this young girl’s life in real-time during this tragedy. It shook my world in a way I cannot describe.
It changed me and it changed my beliefs about a sovereign god. I was angry that the sovereign god I believed in, didn’t take action BEFORE this ever happened to her.
I had this horrible visual in my mind of God sitting up high watching and shaking his head…” if only that father had given his life to me, this wouldn’t be happening.” Sick right?
Well, I think I could actually hear that last thread unraveling…the thread that still had me tethered to this belief of God’s sovereignty.
I could no longer convince myself that this belief system I was a part of was Love. I could no longer find the path of reason back to a god that loves the world.
Was this the fault of a small god?
Is God responsible for what happened to her?
I actually think those questions distract us from where the responsibility actually lies.
This was the fault of a small but very powerful belief that resided in me. I had learned to manipulate my reasoning and logic to conform to something I wasn’t willing to let go of. The final question I asked myself was “how does this belief do good for me? How is it good for her?”
It wasn’t. Just because it’s what I was told was right and true doesn’t mean it was. Or that it's good… and it doesn’t mean I have to accept it.
Webster’s definition of Sovereignty is:
supreme power especially over a body politic (a people considered as a collective unit)
freedom from external control: AUTONOMY
controlling influence

So what if (my favorite question) would it look and feel like to hold responsibility for the human condition, my human condition, in a way that created autonomy that could take action? Rather than a release of control to a belief that said someone else will take care of it?
Whoa. Does that make me responsible for what happens to the people in the world, everywhere? No, that’s not what I’m saying.
What I’m saying is that when we stop saying and believing that we have no control or no autonomy for what happens in our life, then we actually have the opportunity to rise up to change what’s happening in our world, in our lives.
It’s a powerful shift. We would live very differently.
If we had control of the things that happened in a day of our life, instead of relinquishing that control to a deity, what could change for us?
Might we stop talking about fairness and justice…and actually DO things in workplace or families that equal the scales for someone else?
Might we stop waiting for someone to find a child a new family and be family to anyone who needs one?
Might we stop feeling sick about another teen girl who was sexually assaulted by someone and DO WHATEVER THE HELL IT TAKES TO MAKE IT NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN?
When problems feel insurmountable, we, under this doctrine of sovereignty, have a way out of carrying the weight of the really hard stuff.
What if being human was about moving through the hard things instead of passing the buck to a sovereign?
Are my expectations too high? Likely. But let me say this…
The Evangelical Christian church has hidden from further responsibility of caring for its communities for far too long. If God was actually in control AND was the definition of Love, then these things in the world would never and could never happen. It would be impossible for a god of that character to allow it to happen.
Consider the mental gymnastics we have done to uphold a belief that would actually produce a different outcome than it does. In order to be ok with that, we have to manipulate our experience with it. We have to create the seemingly logical loopholes that make it possible for this definition of god to exist.
Our focus to uphold a doctrine has been disabling humans from doing acts of love on our planet. We have been in a love deficit because the belief in doctrines has held more value in our subconscious than the actual belief in love. If Christianity worked as hard to support the belief of love as it did the laws and concepts of God that it created, wow…humanity would host a very different experience.

Liberate your beliefs and you liberate your story…and possibly someone else’s too.