THE JOURNEY TO YOUR GENIUS | Erwin McManus - MOSAIC

[Music] it was my last day of high school i had broken my hand playing football and they had to put a cast on my arm i wasn't able to write throughout the semester sort of a dream come true for a senior in high school and on that last day i went to my english teacher and i handed all of these short stories that were required for the year i think of somewhere between 20 to 25 different stories i'd written that week turned them in on the last day so that i could graduate from high school my teacher was so frustrated she told me she would not accept the papers and i said well you know i had a deferment all year and believe me i milked a broken hand as far as i could and she told me she would not pass me because of that i would fail my senior year of high school so she sent me to the principal and i went to the principal and i explained to him my dilemma and at first he was basically hands off and said you know it's up to the english teacher to decide whether you pass or fail and i reminded him of one small thing i said look if i fail english i'll come back next year you do not want me to come back i do not want to come back it really helps us all if you find a way to help me graduate from high school so he sent me back to the english teacher with basically a um a recommendation that she find a way to pass me and and so she said these last words to me i'll never forget them it's the last thing i ever heard from a teacher in high school in 1976 she looked at me she said irwin have you ever thought about going to college and i said uh yeah maybe and she said you will never make it those words have resonated in my mind for the last decades it wasn't just that she said it was that she reinforced what i had heard all of my life you will never make it now i i understand that she was frustrated with me i understand that i earned that um reflection from her but i i wanted to begin here because as we dive into the genius of jesus and as we unwrap this material that would not only give us insight to who jesus is and the genius that he expresses but more than that we will begin to discover our own personal genius and and i want you to realize that i'm leading you on this journey not because someone declared me a genius as a kid not because someone saw in me extraordinary capacity brilliance intelligence genius i'm leading you on this journey because this is a journey of the blind leading the blind this is a journey of someone who grew up believing there was nothing unique in him nothing special nothing extraordinary certainly no spark of genius that has in this lifetime begin to discover how the person of jesus can radically change not only your life that can change it seems the essence of your own being i i want to stand before you today as a living example that when you open up your life and begin to allow jesus to shape who you are his genius begins to change you and when i first wrote the book i had a more practical subtitle the genius of jesus now has as its subtitle the man who changed everything which jesus does but my subtitle originally was simply this how to think create and lead like the greatest mind who ever lived and so i'm throwing out this possibility to every one of you who's going to go with me on this journey that if you will dig in if you will dive deep if you will lean in closely and allow jesus to be in the shape who you are to shape know not just your your your moral compass but to shape your thinking you will begin to elevate to a level of thinking creating and living that you did not know was possible for you i have to tell you i i actually think my english teacher did the best thing in the world for me when she said you will never make it because what she was saying to me was exactly right if there wasn't a change in my life if i did not make some kind of radical adjustment to the direction and the course of my life if i didn't change the way i was thinking and acting and choosing i would never make it it wouldn't even matter what it was she didn't even know what my it was you will never make it well make what it didn't matter because the choices i was making the life i was living the person i was becoming would guarantee that i would not succeed whatever my life course would become i still remember the day when i saw buster douglas defeat mike tyson it was a shock but that's not really the fight that remains in my memory it was the second fight when buster douglas had a rematch with mike tyson and and he came in overweight and out of shape and and clearly had already lost the fight before he entered the ring and and later i'm listening to sports talk and and they're talking about buster douglas and they're not talking about why he lost the fight in the ring they're talking about why he lost the fight before he ever entered the ring and one of them began to say you know buster douglas is a great human being he's just a really nice guy and they even said he's even a person of deep faith but then the statement was made and it struck me and it's stuck so deep to the core of who i am he said some people are simply structured for failure and when he said that it set my mind reeling some people are simply structured for failure am i structured for failure do i have internal structures that i've created or maybe somehow were imposed on me that have destined me for personal failure in whatever endeavor maybe in just life itself not not not just in a career or or in relationships or in achieving some dream or aspiration or goal maybe i'm structured for failure when it comes to life itself i wonder how many of us keep blaming our environment keep blaming our circumstances keep blaming other people but it's actually the internal structures that we've allowed to be created constructed within us that keep us from living the life that we're created to live which leads us back to the genius of jesus see what jesus begins to do in this language that we've come to know as transformation he begins to restructure the universe within you he begins to restructure you from failure to success and i don't want to use success in a superficial way i want to use success in in the richest deepest most comprehensive way possible success in the way that you build relationships success in your marriage success as a parent success as a human being going beyond success as a as as a business person or success with with wealth or or power or or influence or even fame those things are so secondary to the success that is so inherently necessary to live a life that actually matters see i i want to be successful i want to have a successful marriage i want to be the best husband humanly possible i want to be a successful father i want to be the best father humanly possible i i want to be successful in human relationships i want my friends to know i'm trustworthy i want them to know that they can depend on me i want to be successful as a person that reshapes every environment he's in i want to make sure that everywhere i go that place gets better because i'm there i want to make sure that that i live the kind of life where everything i touch gets better because i help make it better and so i don't want to use success in some kind of superficial or or or surface definition i i want us to look at the depth of what it means to live a life that actually matters and i want us to unwrap the genius of jesus and begin to discover how we too might think create and lead like the greatest mind who ever lived chapters one and two of the genius of jesus are simply called genius and prodigy chapter one gives us a foundation for the whole concept of geniuses this phenomenon that we've seen throughout history where men and women express a level of human capacity that before them was completely impossible they changed the entire construct of how we understand human creativity human intellect human capacity and and after they walk with us in human history we redefine everything based on how they changed the game how they changed our our experience they changed our understanding of what was even possible we never hear music the same again we never see art the same again we never think of of math or physics the same again we we never see that particular sport or or endeavor the same again because once that expression of genius is realized it changes everything for us but one of the interesting phenomenons as we dive into the book is really this aspect of of the prodigious nature of humans that somehow human beings become extraordinary things that such a young age and if you have anyone in your life that you've ever compared yourself to that that was just amazing at something so early it can be incredibly frustrating and and i i can tell you i understand why the contemporaries of mozart must have hated him and and why the contemporaries of picasso must have been so frustrated by him and why the contemporaries of bobby fischer must have just absolutely felt so much disdain for him because all of a sudden your intellect your brilliance your your extraordinary capacity looks mundane and ordinary against the backdrop of their genius and for whatever reason when uh when we came from el salvador to united states mostly out of convenience and my mom says also because i was so uh insistent my brother and i started school at the same time and so i started in first grade when i was five years old he uh was seven years old and and in my mind my my experience said to me that we were twins because we were in the same grade it never really was factored in my understanding of who we were that he was a year and a half older than me you just don't think like that you're both in the same grade so you should both have the same capacity and so i always grew up with with a brother who was in the same grade as i was who was bigger and stronger and faster and smarter and more popular and more talented and more gifted and there wasn't any arena in which i ever compared favorably so i spent my entire life trying to play music or composing with mozart as my brother right my entire life trying to paint with my brother as picasso and just even our names i mean my name is erwin and his name was alexander because he was named after alexander the great and i lived in that contrast in comparison all of my life and one of those things that that begins to shape within you is that you begin to have a diminished view of yourself you begin to to wonder if there's anything unique anything special anything extraordinary within you simply by contrast and comparison i think a lot of us have been like that not necessarily because we have a brother or sister or a sibling who who causes us to feel the sense of being diminished but but simply because we live in a world of comparison and the moment you get into school and the moment you get around to other kids and the moment you've been realizing that that there are other people more more gifted more talented than you are in even the arena of your passion it can begin to make you feel like you don't have anything unique to give to the world but one of the things i i i'm constantly reminded of is that when you were a child whether you realize it or not you had the extraordinary capacity that there was genius inside of you and yes i'm trying to change your mind about you i'm trying to change your mind about really all of humanity i i am trying to convince you that that when you were born there was in side of you this capacity for genius that you may be completely unaware of that that even though you may seem incredibly average and ordinary now and even though you you may look at your life and yourself and think well there's nothing unique or brilliant about who i am there's no unique talent or gifting that that i can point to i want you to know that when you were born you were born not only with the image of god within you which is more than enough by the way but that image of god reflects the genius of god and that there's uniqueness within you that maybe has been long forgotten and long lost there's this beautiful passage in luke chapter 2 beginning in verse 42 that gives us a small window into the life of jesus before he is reintroduced to us as as a an adult at the age of 30. and i i so wish that that we knew so much more about jesus from birth to 30. and there there are all these apocryphal stories about jesus even in the gospel of thomas and other writings and i think some of it is that there's this incredible curiosity about what would god look like at the age of six what would god look like if he became a human being at the age of 18 what would god look like when when he was going through the entire developmental process from from adolescence to adulthood and we get this one window in luke chapter 2 verse 42 on down and it says this when jesus was 12 years old he went to the festival according to the custom after the festival was over while his parents were returning home the boy jesus stayed behind in jerusalem but they were unaware of it thinking he was in their company they traveled on for a day and they began looking for him among their friends and relatives when they did not find him they went back to jerusalem to look for him after three days they found him in the temple court sitting among the teachers listening to them and asking them questions everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers when his parents saw him they were astonished his mother said to him son why have you treated us like this your father and i have been anxiously searching for you why were you searching for me he asked didn't you know i had to be in my father's house now there's so much nuance in this particular encounter that i don't know why but it makes me feel hopeful first of all jesus was perfect and he still made his mom mad and i don't know why but i just feel better about that and having looked back on my childhood and all the times i i really upset my parents even when i didn't mean to but i also think this is a an incredible insight on the parenting side because god had to choose jesus's parents while he was an infant and an adolescent in this world so he chooses mary and mary becomes iconic across the world but but mary who should be the greatest mom who ever lived lost her kid i mean can you imagine this here you have mary and joseph they're traveling and they don't even notice for a day that jesus is missing i just cannot imagine that i mean i've had moments like that i i i've always been really absent-minded and i've i i've lost my wallet and i've lost my watch and i i i even lost my car in a parking lot once i couldn't remember where i put it but i remember one time i was driving home and my phone rang and i heard this little voice and it was mariah and she says daddy and i said yes honey she goes did you forget something and all sudden i realized that mariah was still at the event that i had just left and i forgot that she was with me and i was supposed to bring her home and i left my little girl there fortunately she had a phone but jesus didn't have a cell phone he goes off to the temple he's in jerusalem can you imagine this 12 year old boy is missing for a day and his parents they're not even aware of it and finally when they're aware of it they're frantic they're they're anxiously looking for him and they can't find him anywhere and they finally discover he's at the temple and then they're upset with him and instead of jesus owning this moment saying you know i forgot i didn't ask for permission i should have let you know that i was going he said did you know where i was man if i had said that it would have been old school for me and and yet jesus in this moment gives us so much insight to who he is 12 years old at the temple and just for context i mean the the greeks had their uh their ereadopolis and and that was where they came together and all the great philosophers and great minds and and great intellects of the greeks would come together and talk about about philosophy and theology and and and about the great issues of life but for the for the hebrews it was the temple the temple is where the great thinkers and the great minds came together those who had spent their life studying the law and the prophets understanding the torah and but it went beyond that they were asking the deep theological and philosophical questions of life and they were asking the same kinds of questions that the greeks were asking and going to the depth of what it means to to be human what is the meaning of life who is god and how do we understand him and and what are the things that are transcendent and that exists beyond time and space and and here jesus is at the temple with the greatest minds of his time and he's confounding them and astonishing them with his questions and you see this this glimpse into the genius of jesus to this prodigy that by the age of 12 already was asking more profound questions than the pharisees and the sadducees and the teachers of the law and it wasn't necessarily that he had a more comprehensive knowledge of the data of the scriptures all the religious leaders have spent their lives studying the bible it's that jesus was able to go beyond the surface of the text to the nuances of intention and meaning and ask the deep questions that the only god would ask in that kind of environment and i think it's fascinating that they were not so much astonished by his answers because that's what we want from god right if you're a genius give us the answers but actually the genius of jesus was not that he laid out all the answers which should make life so much easier for us is that he began to drive us to guide us to the questions that really matter in life i know this is true in my own life and it's even been true as a parent one of the things that mariah and aaron would always be so frustrated with me about was that i i wouldn't give them answers for all the questions they would ask me and and and so often times it would ask me questions like well you know what's our political position or or are we conservative or liberal are we republicans or democrats or are we socialists or libertarians they would just ask me all these questions and and they always wanted me just to give them an answer and in fact i can tell you so many times that they would just get angry and say look we don't want your your philosophical answers dad or questions we we don't want you to be yoda we just want you to tell us the answer and i just knew that if i spent my life giving my children answers i would actually make them weaker because giving them the answers doesn't actually help them grow it's guiding them to the questions so they can grapple with the deep issues of life they will make them deeper richer more profound and interesting human banks and here jesus is at the temple the age of 12 and he's already asking the deepest questions of life and even his response to mary and joseph did you not know that i must be at my father's house at the age of 12 jesus already found his intention and that's one of the unique characteristics that you find one of the unique qualities you find in geniuses that you begin to actually unwrap your genius when you find your intention because it begins to push out everything else in your life and jesus knew exactly what his life was to be about even at the age of 12. he knew exactly where he should be he said you know if you understood me if you understood my intention if you understood my purpose you would have found me right away because you would have known i would be at my father's house i wonder how many of us have have in a sense lost our genius because we've never found our intention we've never found our purpose and we spent our lives wandering and searching and and and we're trying to make sense of who we are and and instead of finding out really what is the unique gifting that god has placed within us to give the world but this isn't the only place where the uniqueness of genius is expressed in a child and and of course on this particular journey i'm not trying to make you a better mathematician i'm not trying to make you better at art i'm not trying to somehow awaken your ability for composition or or for or for physics i'm actually trying to awaken in you the deepest essence of your humanity which is absolutely the most essential expression of genius that you need to step into because the genius of jesus makes us more fully human the genius of jesus is that he makes us once again who god created us to be the genius of jesus is that he once again aligns the image of god in us so that we can reflect that image fully and beautifully and wonderfully but there was a moment all the way back in the life of um of samuel and i want us to go to first samuel chapter three i just wanted to listen to this narrative beginning in verse 1. samuel was the son of hannah and hannah was not able to have children and she cried out to god and begged god for a baby and and she said to god god if he'll give me a child i will dedicate that child to you and and hannah has a son and his name is samuel and so she she takes samuel to eli and and commits him to the the course and intention of god and now samuel is a boy and this is what happens so let's look together first samuel chapter 3 let's begin in verse 1. it says the boy samuel ministered before the lord under eli in those days the word of the lord was rare there were not many visions one night eli whose eyes were becoming so weak that he could barely see was lying down in his usual place the lamp of god had not yet gone out and samuel was lying down in the house of the lord where the ark of god was then the lord called samuel samuel answered here i am and he ran to eli and said here i am you called me but eli said i did not call you back and lie down so he went back and laid down again the lord called samuel and samuel got up and went to eli and said here i am you called me my son eli said i did not call you go back and lie down now samuel did not yet know the lord the word of the lord had not yet been revealed to him a third time the lord called samuel and samuel got up and went to eli and said here i am you called me then eli realized the lord was calling the boy so eli told samuel go and lie down and if he calls you say speak lord your servant is listening so samuel went and laid down in his place then the lord came and stood there calling as the other times samuel samuel then samuel said speak for your servant is listening i think this is such a fascinating moment the life of samuel because it gives us a backdrop of that time it says that during that era that the visions that god would bring into people's lives were rare and in fact they are unexpected and no longer happening there are not many visions in that time that god was not speaking in that time and it makes me wonder if it was that god was not speaking or there was no one who was listening but it does tell us that in those days the word of the lord was rare and that there were not many visions and then samuel's laying in bed he's just a small boy he doesn't even know god yet but his heart is postured in such a way that when god speaks he hears god's voice but he doesn't know it's god and so he goes to eli the priest and and he thinks that he's being called and and eli says i'm not calling you go back to bed and it's so interesting that you have this this moment of confusion because actually what's happening is this this small child is hearing the voice of god but he doesn't know that he's hearing god and and eli the priest of god is completely unaware that samuel is hearing the voice of god and i'll tell you why it's because eli has not heard the voice of god and all of a sudden when it happens three times eli realizes there's something happening here that's transcendent that god is speaking to the small child and i think the contrast is so interesting you have this adult priest eli to whom the voice of god is silent and you have this young boy named samuel who does not even yet know the lord and yet god calls him out and it's in that posture that the relationship between samuel and god begins and i love what what eli says to samuel he says here is your posture the next time you hear the voice simply say here i am you called me and in that moment family begins this relationship with god speak lord your servant is listening and i wonder how often times what god wants to do in our lives is lost because quote we've grown up and we've lost the essence of what is necessary in us that we had when we were small children i do think it's fascinating that that for jesus the posture that he kept calling us to reclaim was not some level of of achievement it wasn't that we needed to become more educated or we need to become more knowledgeable or we need to become more of something he actually said no what you need to do is become like a little child in fact that's what jesus said to his disciples when they came to him with that ever prevalent question who's the greatest in matthew 18 verses 1-3 we're told that at that time the disciples came to jesus and asked who then is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven he called a little child to him and placed the child among them and he said truly i tell you unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven now you might think that sometimes what god asks you to do is unreasonable right i i mean i've heard people tell me they just can't live up to the expectations of of the scriptures i mean the ten commandments seem to be so uh overwhelming because we're told do not murder and do not commit adultery and do not steal and and and do do not lie and and you have all of these commandments and they go well we just can't live up to this well well here's here's a command that is more difficult than any of the ten commandments unless you change and become like a little child i mean how do you become a little child now that you are an adult and in fact it can seem kind of frustrating because you spend your whole life trying to grow out of childhood to move into adulthood to become mature and now jesus saying is that you need to become a child again it reminds me what jesus says to nicodemus he says to him nicodemus unless you're born again you will not even see the kingdom of god well you're going wait a minute there's a lot of things i can do a lot of things are within my control but i cannot go back inside my mother's womb and be born a second time in fact that's what nicodemus says to jesus and and here his disciples are asking the question who among us will be the greatest in your kingdom and jesus brings a little child who says this is your outcome goal you need to become like a little child you need to change and become like one of these and it can be so frustrating when you're looking at just going my actually my entire life becoming an adult and now you want me to become a child and yet i wonder if jesus understood more about the essence of what was lost in our humanity than we could ever imagine that there was something absolutely beautiful in us extraordinary within us that reflected the image of god and and if we could just step back and step back and in our posture toward god as little children it would begin to reawaken the extraordinary within us because we finally have the right posture in relationship to god i always thought it was so fascinating when i would see these studies on on children and the relationship between divergent and convergent thinking and how how all these studies seem to indicate that about 95 percent minimally of children are actually naturally divergent thinkers and and and yet by the age of 12 only five percent of adults are still divergent thinkers and we all move to convergent thinkers and even if you just take this one arena that children naturally are creative the children are naturally imaginative that that children are naturally engaging that aspect of human uniqueness and genius what would happen if we could reclaim that that there's this beautiful posture of innocence in in children where they they trust and they're open and and they're curious and they're willing to learn and and they're they're not trying to prove something they're trying to discover something and it struck me how in the scriptures when when adam and eve when the man and the woman suffered their relationship with god and they realized that they were naked and ashamed and it tells us that god came walking to the garden in the cool of the day that they hid from god and god says adam where are you and and adam responds well we heard you and we were we were hiding because we were naked and ashamed i thought how odd because their posture has just changed because they had they had a relationship with the creator of the universe there was an open relationship an open channel of communication with god and now the worst thing in the world has happened to them now they there's something that has been broken within them now they are filled with shame and they have this awareness of themselves that they describe as their nakedness and it seems to me what you'd want to do is run to god and say we don't know what's happened to us we don't understand what we've lost we we we've made a choice and it was a horrific mistake but god we don't understand what what what this consequence has cost us it seems like you would go to god and ask god to help you understand what's happened and to find a way to fix what you've broken but instead they run from truth they run from the light they run from god i was just talking to someone today and and they they have to get some more information from a doctor because of different things that are happening in their lives and and they're really hesitant to call the doctor back and i said hey you need to call the doctor because ignorance is never the best posture and i know it's terrifying to know but believe me the best outcome comes in knowing not in hiding and i had to learn that lesson over and over in my life because so many times it's my own shame it's my my own sense of guilt my own sense of inadequacy my own fear and my own doubt that keeps me from moving toward the truth but one of the beautiful things about being like a little child is that you're not ashamed you're just open you're driven by curiosity you're you're driven to know you're driven to explore you don't have an agenda you're you're you don't have a hidden agenda you're you're just moving toward the god and i i think it's so interesting that little children it seems were so easily able to trust jesus while the most intellectual and educated of jesus's people were the ones that were more resistant to coming close to him i mean think about this as a human being every developmental aspect of being human is connected to our curiosity the reason you can stand the reason you can walk the reason you can hold your head up is because you were curious you might think no no it's because i developed physically actually it's not your physical development is secondary to the motivation of curiosity see when that little child is born and they're almost all head because humans are basically like 90 head and 10 the rest of us and that head it weighs heavily on us and in fact one of these you know when you have a little baby an infant you have to hold the head because that neck is incapable of holding up that head it's it's just physiologically impossible to hold your head up when you're born and that child will just lay there in fact now they have these suits you just strap your kid in you zip them up and they just lay there like this and i guess they're happy because they can't move but one of the ways you know that they're developing is because they start trying to move and they become more and more curious and and what happens is that they want to see in a direction that that their head is not able to go so they start developing neck muscles so they can actually lift their heads see your neck muscles are developed because of your curiosity and then as you're looking around you realize oh there are other places to explore there are other things i can experience other places i can i can actually travel to and so then you begin to push up because you want to be able to see further and know more and then you begin to learn how to just crawl and crawling is the outcome of human curiosity and then as you begin to crawl you ever notice that your children never crawl to the right place they always crawl to where they shouldn't go they always seem to crawl to the wrong place they're always crawling in some place or you're going no and you're catching them and then one day the curiosity just gets the best of them and they have to stand up and they begin to walk now every child that has ever lived on this planet has failed at walking they fall they may even get hurt but it doesn't keep them down because their curiosity is so powerful that even the price of failure and the price of pain is not enough to keep them from exploring this is who you were when you were born you were fearless maybe even reckless you were determined to see further than you've ever seen to experience what you've never experienced to go where you've never gone you were born for adventure you were born for wonder and you were fueled by your curiosity and fear was never more powerful than your desire to learn to discover to explore if you're going to reclaim the genius within you you're going to have to reclaim that childlike posture in your life that longing to discover that that drive of curiosity that that that need to go beyond whatever boundaries exist in your life and if you want to posture your life to begin to think and create and lead like the greatest mind who ever lived if you want to begin to experience the genius of jesus in your life you're going to have to go back and take the posture of a child where you have innocent trust in the god who loves you and that trust allows you to follow him wherever he leads where you've never gone before regardless of outcome or risk or failure and no matter how many times you get up on widely wobbly legs and fall down you get back up and you get back up and you get back up because the way god wants to grow you it doesn't want you to outgrow your childlike curiosity he does not want you to outgrow your childlike wonder he wants that curiosity and wonder to grow within you so that it stays with you throughout all your life this past week i was driving and and i had this memory that i'd forgotten and and i thought it was just for me such a perfect metaphor of my own personal journey and i think it's the journey of so many of us i always told myself i was bad at math which is kind of odd and because when kim and i were first married we would travel across the country in a car and and while she would sleep during those long trips i would do math in my head just for fun for hour upon hour upon hour i would just create these math problems and i would work them for hours and and which is kind of odd for a person who's bad at math and and i started thinking to myself where did i start believing that i was bad at math and i realized i had a couple experiences but one was in particular now i i wasn't necessarily bad at math i was just bad at being a good student i i was just bad at elementary school and junior high and high school but i remember when i had to take geometry now i didn't want to take geometry because i avoided math with every fiber of my being they would throw me into math classes even when i wouldn't want to be in a math class and i and i remember being in geometry and i missed a lot of classes and i almost never turned in the homework assignments and i was every teacher's nightmare but there was one particular exam and it was on proofs i just remember this for some peculiar reason and and i didn't spend the time studying proofs or understanding how proofs worked but the way the teacher organized the test is that she put proofs in a category then there was a line and then she put other proofs in a category then there was a line and she put the same kinds of math problems in the same categories and so even though i had not studied the concept of proofs or how they work i looked at the problems and realized that all the problems in each section had a commonality so i was able to answer each problem based on the construct of the cluster now i had no idea if this was right or wrong i just knew that i had an hour to take an exam and i needed to do the best i could so i did and for some unexpected reason i had all the answers right and i got called in to that teacher's office and accused of cheating now i can tell you that i didn't cheat because i could fail effectively all by myself i i would say look look at my grades i there's enough proof there that i don't cheat because who cheats for a d and and my tears say well you got an a on this test and you had to have cheated because you did not go to class you did not turn into work and i tried to explain to her what i did but she wouldn't listen to me and i remember getting put into a portable by myself to take the test again and i do remember the second test was purposely harder and the result was pretty much the same and i look back and i realized that i didn't even know how i could know i didn't even know that i was good at something but the moment that i actually expressed my capacity to do something i was immediately told this wasn't possible for you to be good at this and so instead of walking away and thinking to myself the institution is broken i walked away going i'm bad at math i can't do this i don't understand what's going on here and i wonder how many of us because we didn't do things the way we were told to do them because we didn't do things the way we were expected to do them because we didn't do things the way everyone had done them in the past we grew up believing that this is not my genius this is my liability see i want to submit to you that there is stuff inside of you that you don't even understand or your genius but they didn't fit in they didn't match the sight of the world in which you live they didn't make it easier for you to be conformed or to be standardized or to fit into the status quo and the reality is that there's genius inside of you that is waiting to be awakened but you may not even know it because you've believed all your life there was nothing unique nothing special nothing extraordinary in you so i want you to begin where it matters most what jesus wants to do is he wants to change us so that we begin to reflect his beautiful humanity he wants to make you fully and beautifully human again and it begins by opening up your life to him and entering into a relationship with the god who created the universe there is no genius that will ever exist that will match the genius of god god who imagined all the universe who imagined this beautiful ecosystem who imagined every cell in your body who imagined you and created you created you in his image and likeness and for you to think for one minute that there isn't a spark of genius in you is to not understand what it means to be created in the image of god but it begins by opening yourself up to a relationship to the god who created you see if you spend your whole life getting good at math and never learn how to get good at forgiveness you'll never live the life you long for if you spend your whole life getting good at science and never learn how to get good at compassion you're never going to be the person god created you to be if you spend your entire life getting good at making money and miss out on what it means to be good at loving people you're never going to become the person god created you to become because the genius that jesus wants to awaken within you is not about the expression of your talent but about the transformation of your essence jesus looked at mary and said didn't you know i need to be at my father's house see what jesus is saying is it all begins here it all begins here the genius that you're searching for the genius that you need it begins when you realize that a relationship with god is that place called home it's that place where you belong it's what your soul has been searching for and you may be listening right now and before we go any further on this journey of the genius of jesus before we go any further to awaken within you the genius within you i want to invite you to open up your life to the god who created you to the god who loves you to the god who stepped into human history in the person of jesus to the god who died on a cross so that you could be forgiven to the god who rose from the dead so you could be free see that stroke of genius is waiting to change your life but you have to invite the god who loves you to come into your life to forgive you of your son and to set you free so if you're listening right now and you've never trusted jesus with your life you've never opened yourself to a relationship to the god who loves you i want to invite you right now just to cross the line of faith with a simple prayer it's just one sentence it's not everything you and god need to talk about you and god are going to have a conversation that lasts forever but here's where it begins it begins with this simple prayer jesus i give you my life right now we just just take a moment right now just tell him jesus i give you my life jesus i give you my life if this is your prayer i want you to understand something the god who created you the god who loves you the god who died for you and rose from the dead has come to dwell within you and not only does god dwell within you but all of his genius lives within you now and that is worth a lifetime of exploration because the genius of jesus will awaken in you the best version of you beyond your wildest imagination so if you just gave your life to jesus right now i want to welcome you i want to walk him to this beautiful family where we've all experienced the forgiveness and the freedom that only jesus gives and let's pick up next week as we dive into discovering not only the genius of jesus but the genius within you

Channel: Mosaic

Views: 4,853

Rating: 4.8911567 out of 5

Keywords: MOSAIC, MOSAIC Los Angeles, Erwin McManus, Erwin Raphael McManus, Los Angeles Church, YouTube Church, Church, Jesus, Worship, Mosaic MSC, Mosaic, MSC

Id: DOzuJc8Hyq4

Length: 49min 22sec (2962 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021