Ep 48: Licking the Bowl (w/ Keaton Pearce)

Speaker1: Well good morning I'm Daniel Dalp and this is for your Sunday morning drive. The short podcast with the goal of providing your motivation, your drive on your way to worship and recentering your mind on the spiritual things on those hectic Sunday mornings. I appreciate you riding along with us this morning. We do have a special guest and today we have Keaton Pierce on the show. Keaton serves as the pulpit minister at the Gold Hill Road congregation in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Keaton is an author, a fellow dabbler in tabletop games, and a good friend. He's also the co-host of the Fully Equipped podcast. It's a fantastic show and I highly encourage you to check it out, and you can find the links to that show and more information in the show notes of today's episode, and on the page for this episode on our website for your Sunday morning drive.com. You know, I've always admired Keaton for his commitment to quality, and he was one of the first people I turned to for advice and for questions on how to start a podcast. When I was first kicking around the idea for for your Sunday morning drive. So I guess you can either thank him or blame him for the show's existence. Either way, I'm thankful for his advice, his friendship, and his willingness to come and share some great thoughts with us today. Let's get this show on the road. This is episode 48, Licking the Bowl. Keaton, take us to church.

Speaker2: Are we there yet?

Speaker3: At some point in life, you have heard the phrase you don't know what you don't know. And that applies to so many seasons of our life. But I think it particularly applies to raising our children, especially if you can think back with me to especially your first child when you're when you're just new at this. Right, and you don't have any data points to pull from. And, and you look back on this and it only gets amplified. It only is extra when your first children, you get two at a time. My wife and I, we have twins, a boy and girl twins, and these were our first kids. And so we get two of these and we're trying to to make this all work. And, you know, you recognize and you look back on certain things. And perhaps there are stories that you tell that you can laugh at now. But in the moment, right, they felt life altering. They felt like such a huge deal. I think back to when when my daughter was was little, she had to be pretty young because she she was just learning to crawl. And I remember she was crawling around and we had a bathroom on the ground floor. And, you know, she was kind of crawling around and we were trying to give her kind of, you know, controlled free reign, but free reign. And and before too long, we realized that she's heading over to the bathroom and, you know, they're they're little, they're, you know, squishy still. And you're like, well, they can't get into tons of, of danger that, you know, that low on the ground, they can't turn faucets on things like that.

Speaker3: But we get over there and my wife and I start looking, and we recognize that our daughter is licking the side of the toilet bowl and our hearts just sink because, you know, we've put all this time, all this effort at that point. You know, our kids were five weeks premature. So we were at the doctor all the time making sure they were healthy. We were trying our best to to give them all the, you know, nutrients and things they need to kind of build their bodies immunity. And we think, well, this is done right. I mean, she's clearly a goner, right? How can you recover from from such a thing? I fully expected her to sprout like a third arm, you know, really close soon after that, because that was just such a detrimental thing. But we look on that story now and, you know, having years of hindsight and and experience and things. And we look at that and we laugh. And I like to tell that story because it's it's funny. But we look at that and we recognize back then in the moment we had very real anxiety. We had very real dread and fear thinking, you know, again, you don't know what you don't know. We had never went through this before. What what what's going to happen? And now we have the ability to look back and we laugh at that. And you think, well, what happened in the interim, right.

Speaker3: The delta between genuine fear and now being able to just really laugh at that story. What's what happens in that middle? And I think what happens there is maturity. What happens there is experience, right? We have data points to pull from even that instance in and of itself. We look at that and we recognize she didn't get sick. Right. She didn't sprout that third arm. She's fine. And we recognize she's going to be okay. And they've gotten sick since then and they've recovered. And so we just have more to pull from. And there's a spiritual parallel to this. I look over in Philippians chapter three and verse 12, and Paul says, not that I have already obtained all of this or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. I heard it said one time, and this has stuck with me. Spiritual maturity is not about perfection, but about progress, right? Paul is one of the greatest examples of faith, and he reminds the the Philippians there. He reminds the Philippian Christians that spiritual maturity is this continual process that even he, you know, as much time as he's spent thinking about, you know, spiritual things, he's not arrived yet, right? He compares it to a marathon. Not not a sprint. And we look at our journey of spiritual maturity and how we grow. And we recognize that it's an intentional effort. Right? It's not something that we're going to drift into. It's not something that we're going to fall backwards into.

Speaker3: It's not that you and I are going to just be around church things, right? That we're going to be church adjacent for our entire life, and we're just going to wake up one day with spiritual maturity. It's something that you and I have to continually seek. How do we do that? It means that we press on from the things that we struggle with. We recognize that we learn from our experience, that we keep our eyes fixated on Christ, that that maturity process, that sanctification process that happens within each of us, that it is a lifelong pursuit that we trust God in all of our seasons to help shape us. Right. We do that through His Word. We do that through prayer. We do that through fellowship. We do that through teaching. We do that recognizing that we're constantly in a state of flux, though, and I mean that in a good way, that we constantly are being molded to be more like the image of Christ. Spiritual growth isn't a sprint. It's a lifelong pursuit. Each day is an opportunity to take one step closer to Christ. And so that's my challenge for you as we engage in worship today. I challenge you, fix your eyes on Jesus and think of that one area where your you and I are able to recognize. How can I take that step closer? How can I take that step in spiritual maturity to look at Jesus, to look at His Word, and to grow one step closer to him today?

Speaker1: Keaton shared some great thoughts for our Sunday morning drive, and now it's time to hear yours. Our discussion questions for this week are. What are some experiences that you have been through that have helped to mold you into the image of Christ? What are our spiritual strengths and weaknesses, and what steps can we make to seek out areas for spiritual maturity?