 God is good and he has got a good and blessed day for you. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to Hope Today. I'm Tom, I'm here with Sydney and Amanda. I know God's got a blessing for you because we've got a great story coming up. That's right. We have Inez Franklin who wrote Uncharted. I don't know if in your life everything has been as planned. But if not, this is a great book for you and I'm excited, Sid, for her to bring this to life to us. She's very transparent with her life and just how the Bible literally set her free. I mean, I love hearing people's stories and their testimonies and I just think about when you hear that word Uncharted, you know, I think a lot of times in our lives and in our world, we think about everything as like, A to Z and it's very linearly linear, but I know that God has not called us to live linear lives. It's very like this and up and down in valleys. And you know, one time I even heard Tom and Amanda that somebody said, I think sometimes we wish the things were always on the mountaintop, but it's so important in our lives that we have the ups and downs like a heartbeat because when you go up on the mountaintop and down in the valleys, it just means that we are breathing, that we are living, that we are growing, that we are experiencing God in new ways. So we're so glad that you're joining us today that you'll be able to even examine your own heart, your own life about the Uncharted ways that God is moving. You know, I always remember, I was reading an old time guy, Charles Finney, the great revivalist and he talked about why do we need revival because it would be great if we started here and we just went straight up, no problems like this, but life isn't like that. We have this and we do this and we need to re-get ourselves back in close relationship with God. So it's gonna be an exciting time of hearing about that. I just have to hear about Mother's Day. Was Mother's Day great? I mean, it was great at my house, you know, with Jean and Susan there and my grandkids, it was a great time. How about- It was very good. So I actually shared at New Life Church in East McKeesport Friday night. And then I was at Berean Fellowship on Sunday. You know, just really, I think in both of these, one, the title was You Are Mine and I Am Yours. The other one was, you know, Mother's, Our First Daughters. In order to truly be the mother that we're called to be in the kingdom of God, we must first be the daughter of God and sit at his feet and receive from him. So it was a great weekend. I got to see all my family. My airman sent me a picture. I was like, oh, he sent me flowers. It's just, yeah, the kids are all growing and they all got me something wonderful. Just their thought. I'm like, ah, they've grown into nice people. Well, I'm so happy you had like such a wonderful mother. They're celebrating the wonderful mother that you are and all the moms that are out there and my mom and I, we had a chance. We were outside. I have a nice, like my front porch and we were repotting. Well, she was, we were like buying flowers and doing all different things. My mom was doing a lot of repotting because I was like killing some of the flowers. Like the little flower had to like pop up. I was like, oh no. I just went to home depot and like my hibiscus flower like plop, flopped off. Oh yeah, my mom, I just want to say I love you mom. And, you know, just even at church when I was at Petra was just like a beautiful thing like the kids that they gave everybody a card and a rose and just feel, it's just a really beautiful thing for everyone to be celebrate. So we say thank you to all the mothers that are out there and all that you do for the kingdom of God because it is so important in this season. We need moms. We need spiritual mothers. We need people to pour into us no matter what generation we are. You know, it's interesting on Saturday that I was riding to the store or somewhere. I can't remember where I was going. I'm, you know, I'm being spiritual and listening to a preacher on the radio and I just, I don't know. I wasn't getting into it, you know? And I changed the channel and Michael Jackson smooth criminal comes on. And I'm like, I love you. If you watch the show, you know, I like rock and pop music. So I'm like jamming to Michael Jackson here. Soon as it's over, you come on. It was a, it was a secular stage but you come on with a commercial for hope today. And I was like, Sidney's on and right after Michael Jackson. How awesome is this? So I'm glad you enjoyed, maybe you enjoyed hope today because of Sidney's commercial that you were jamming with me with Michael Jackson right before that. But anyway, all with the show. Well, I just have to say, I do love my mom and my mother-in-law and I am thankful for those moms. And Sidney said, maybe you didn't have a great relationship with your biological mom but you have a spiritual mom. Be grateful for them and be that spiritual mom to someone else. Well, it's no secret that life can be full of struggles. That along with our desire for control can all complicate the abundant life that God wants for us. Inez Franklin is our next guest and she's dealt with her own fair share of struggles. She knows hope and healing can be found for those who are still finding their way. Her debut book is called Uncharted, Navigating Your Unique Journey of Faith. She joins us now to share how we can surrender and give complete control to our perfectly loving Heavenly Father. Inez, welcome to hope today. Thank you so much. I am so thrilled to be with you today. We're so thankful and I just have to tell you I want to say thank you for just your transparency in your book and your personal testimony but I know I believe you're new to our viewing audience so if you could just give us a little bit of Inez's history. Well, first of all, I am tuning in from California so hello everyone. It is so good to be here with you today. I have such a messy story with God and it's actually a beautiful story and I want to encourage anyone listening today, watching today that we have a God that walks with us in the ups and downs on the journey of faith and no matter what happens. And so that's part of the story that I want to share with the world and I'm so grateful to be with you today to do so. Amen. So when you grew up, talk to us how that looked like and how did you meet Jesus? Well, I met God when I was seven. I will lead that my grandmother, she took me to church and she put me in a catechism class where they teach you everything about God and the first time I heard about God I was absolutely fascinated. I wanted to know more about him and I asked a question if nothing was there before God created it, where was he standing? Which I thought was a really good question but she had a hard time figuring out how to answer to that I don't think she was at her best on that day and she sent me to the back of the church to pray for forgiveness for my lack of faith. And that's how my journey of faith started at seven years old. I had this sort of crisis of, well, is it not okay to ask God questions? Is does that mean that anytime I don't have a good faith I'm out and really from that point forth for many, many years I didn't know God. I didn't want to ask questions about God and it wasn't until on my almost 40 year old birthday that I met Jesus. And the way I met Jesus is truly remarkable because I had tried to live life my way, trying to live life, being a good person. Oh, by then I knew that God existed. I knew that God was with me and yet I felt so distant from him and I felt like he was just out there somewhere and I couldn't ask anything. And so I just did my life on my own and at the time I got to close to my 40s I had made a mess. I had been a divorce twice. At the time I was in the middle of an affair that we had decided to get married but we were dealing with a lot of problems. I had already made some really poor decisions of myself, my own body, I had two abortions at a young age and I was at my rock, rock bottom. It just so happened that the man I was dating said to me, let's go to church. And so we walked into a church, actually we walked to many churches. Every Sunday we went to a different church trying to find a church that perhaps would have us. And what happened is every time we would walk out because we felt like the minute they know our story we're done, they're gonna kick us out. The minute God is aware of us being there we're gonna be kicked out. And so we kept walking out, but then on October 20th, 2002, I remember that day like it was yesterday at 10, 15 a.m. We walked into this church and the pastor was teaching on John chapter four about a woman who met Jesus at a well. He actually went out of his way to meet her at noon of the day where normally women did not come to get their water and by herself where normally she would have been with a group of women to do so. He goes out of his way and in a very gentle way begins a conversation with a question. And as they get further into their conversation she reveals or he reveals actually her story and that's that she had been married multiple times. And at the time was living with a man who was not her husband. And that was me, that was me. And I felt like, okay, all right, maybe I can stick around in this church. And I actually believe that I had spent 40 years of my life doing things my way. And now that I was at a church and that I knew I started to know Jesus, I started to eat the Bible for the first time, I thought, okay, now my other half of my life is gonna be smooth and linear and up into the right. And there'll be no struggles. And I was wrong, even though I was walking with God I experienced so many ups and downs on this journey of faith. It took me seven years to recover from the deep shame of my past to really embrace the grace of Jesus in my heart. I could have it in my head, but in my heart, that was a different story that took a lot of time. I felt that I couldn't be used by God. I felt that I was damaged goods. And as God continues to reveal himself to me as we walked day by day, what is amazing is now 20 years later through a lots of ups and downs and twists and turns, I am a Bible teacher. I get to share God's word and God's messages with people. I get to be that teacher, that receives the questions from the students. And really my heart is to let people know that the journey may not be as linear as we expect, that life is so full of uncertainties, things may be going really well. And we think, oh, God is blessing me, but then something bad happens. And we think, well, did God leave me, did I go the wrong way? And we might feel very disoriented, but God is always, always, always with us. And my anchor passage for this is through round me 31, verse 8, where it says that the Lord will never leave us for forsakas and he goes ahead of us. And so that's sort of a piece that we can have and a certainty we can have on the journey of faith. And I just wanna blast that out in the world to anyone who's listening. God is with you right now. Your journey could be messy right now and yet God is there with you, walking with you. Jesus is walking with you and he is trustworthy. I just love your story. It's like a modern day epistle. We're reading and learning and, you know, I really believe that there are a lot of people that, you know, they've made those wrong turns and recovering from that is very hard. And what, you know, I know it's not a three-step thing that people can do, but what is something that you would say begin to implement this into your life daily? What is that change that you had happen in your own life that brought such great revelation for you? Well, first I had to admit that I was a control freak. Any control freaks in the room, I wonder. And that I wanted to, even though I had left my old life or I was trying to leave my old life, I was trying to control my journey of faith as well. I wanted to control what was gonna happen and how God was gonna work. I wasn't doing that in my mind, but I was definitely doing it in my heart and in the way I was living out. So I had to put down my formulas, you know, these things that we sometimes think, well, if I do this and God's gonna do this and it's gonna happen exactly this way, I had to put those things down. And so one of my formulas was actually a negative formula which said, because of my past, I cannot be used by God and therefore I'm just gonna show up at church and just hope that I don't make any more mistakes. You know, there was a sense of defeatedness, maybe that's a word, but you know, I was defeated in my heart and I had to put down even that formula because the story of that woman at the well is that this was the most unlikely person for Jesus to reveal that he was the Messiah. Just a chapter before it was Nicodemus, a religious leader. Now that's the guy that you talk to as far as here's the Messiah coming in that people have been waiting for, but he speaks to a woman with a messy story, a lone, a Samaritan, an outsider, God's formulas are not like our formulas and we need to put ours down and it's not about a formula but about a relationship with God. And the other thing I had to do is I had to let go of a map that said, okay, my journey is gonna have this kind of experience and realizing that it's been a very windy up and down, God called me to write 18 years ago and I thought, great, I'll write a book in a year. No, it took me 18 years and it's been a really messy journey along the way and I'm finding that's what's happened in scripture. Look at the story of Joseph, you know, even Paul, he was transformed and then it was years before he actually started speaking the good news. So every story in the Bible is quite messy and interesting and we should embrace that. So part of what I had to do is embrace the present with God and look at it as an adventure instead of trying to control the future. Linus, let's explore that whole thing a little further. What do you say to someone who, they feel like their doubt is too great, their sin has been too bad or even now they're struggling, they're up and down and feeling great on Sunday and wondering if they're saved on Wednesday. I mean, what do you say to encourage someone to keep going, to keep seeking after God? Well, I totally get that and so many of us feel distant from God. We don't hear his voice. We struggle to hear his voice and what I would say to you is focus on the presence of God in your life. So in my practice of maintaining this sort of adventurous sense of my faith is I practice the presence of God. I imagine him sitting right with me like even right now and him just being willing to sit in my messiness and what you'll notice with his presence is with it comes healing and peace and grace. For me, I had to really embrace the very expensive costly grace that Jesus gave with his life, his death and his resurrection. And the more I reflected upon that incredible gift that helped me stay on the journey of faith no matter what, a little bit of faith is enough to keep you on the journey of faith. And of course, I believe the importance of being in community with other people who will speak truth to us when we don't believe it or when we're struggling, someone else can encourage us. So having a community of faithful believers who will speak into our lives is so, so important. One word that I kept coming to in the chapters when I was reading is this humble or humility. Talk to us about how important it is to walk in that manner. Yes, I, obedience is to me and humility go hand in hand. And there's actually a blessing in humility and a blessing in obedience. In my book, I use this term, active surrender. We've heard about surrender. Well, we give everything to God and we say, okay, I'll just put my hands up and I believe and trust you God. However, active surrender is saying, okay God, I'm gonna give this to you, but I'm also gonna move towards whatever it is that you calling me to. So humility to say, God, you know better than I do, I'm gonna have a heavenly mindset, not an earthly mindset and then obedience to acting into what God calls us to do. I felt so broken that I could not accept the grace of Jesus for years. But then I realized actually it was a sense of pride because it was hard for me to accept how broken I was. And I was judging others too. If I judge myself, I was judging others by the same frame. So if I felt broken, I couldn't be used, I meant other people were broken and they couldn't be used. But again, that's not how God works. And when I became more humble and understood, you know what, I am a sinner and I need God's grace. And therefore I need to trust him with what he's calling me to do instead of just doing things my way. Then in that act of obedience, I learned to be more graceful towards myself and towards others. And I found that a lot of times some of my formulas were more prideful than I realized. And yeah, humility is a gift and obedience is a blessing. And so I can't recommend that enough. Amen. Well, I know you're speaking to all of us because we've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and I loved it in your life that you literally, by reading God's word is what set you free. It's a beautiful thing. And I believe that people are identifying with you and I just wanna give you this opportunity to pray over our viewing audience, over us, because this is really important, what you have discovered through God's word and the freedom you've received. Yes. Father, we thank you so much for Jesus, for his life, his death, his resurrection, his humility to make himself nothing, a servant, God, to willingly go to the cross to pay for our sins. That was a very costly, costly gift that you've given us, God. And we wanna receive that gift, Lord, fully into our hearts that it would move us, Lord, to a deeper joy and a deeper connection with you, Lord. So would you help us, God? Today, just become even more aware of your deep presence with us through Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, God. Thank you for your word, life-giving God, sharp enough to penetrate our deepest struggle, our deepest sorrow, our deepest questions and doubts on. You welcome our hearts into your word, God, to shape us, to renew us, to make us more like you. And so today I pray that you would encourage every listener, every watcher today to seek your word and to listen and to read and to receive and to taste and see your goodness. You are kind to us and we are so, so grateful. I pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Thank you so much, Inez, for sharing with us this uncharted discovery that God has showed you and we have been blessed. Thank you. It's been a blessing to be with you as well. God bless you. We'll stay with us because when we return in 60 seconds, we're going to take a look at a scripture that talks about faith and how we can use it to grow and thrive in our walk with God. We'll be right back. Cornerstone television exists to spread the good news through Bible-based programs and a fully staffed prayer line. Through CTVN, lies are saved. Hearts, minds and bodies are healed and Jesus is lifted high. We can't do this work without you. Would you consider sending a gift this month to keep the gospel moving forward with power? When you give, we'll send you listen, love, repeat, which presents scriptural examples of those who lived alert, including Jesus, who noticed those who least expected to be seen. Gives creative ideas for showing love to friends and family, suggests practical ways to reach out to the lonely, marginalized outcast, helps you comfort the grieving and so much more. Ask for your copy of Listen, Love, Repeat when you give today. Call 888-665-4483 or go to ctvn.org slash donate. Thank you for your generosity. Hope happens here. We're so glad that you're joining us and this is a moment where we love to just take a deeper dive into our conversation and just bring out the things that we were discussing in our conversation with Inez and something that she said that really I know just stuck with our spirits and maybe your spirit as well. When she started talking about the woman at the well and we know there's no coincidence in the spirit. Actually, my church's whole month, we're talking about that very story that comes from John 4 that many of us are very familiar with. And we just wanna encourage you today because when we look at the Samaritan woman and she was outside and she was, there was shame and there was embarrassment and she shouldn't even be with a Jew because Jesus was a Jew. That we just think about when she was saying like pulling from that well, but Jesus said, there's a greater well that you can drink from that you will never go thirsty. And maybe today that you can really connect with Inez's story. Maybe you have fallen into some traps. Maybe you have had an affair. There's a bit of adultery. You've gone the wrong way. You've made stumbling blocks. You've fallen down in different places that you never thought that you would be. But you know what's so great is that I love, is that in the world that there's a lot of wells that we can drink from. Wells of addiction, wells of pride, whatever that well may be. But then here comes Jesus along and he's coming to you today. And I truly believe if you're watching from your living room, your bedroom, wherever you're watching from, Pittsburgh, Alabama, Florida, and beyond, that Jesus today is saying, I am the well that you can drink from and you will never grow thirsty again. Think about that. If you go out in the world and there's all these different things and we've all tasted and we drink of those things, it doesn't satisfy the deep need what is inside. But through Jesus and through him and him alone, because he is the way, the truth, and the life, because he is the living water. When you encounter him, when you meet him, when you stand there face to face with him, and you say, this is who I am and I've done all these things, he's like, come my son, come my daughter and drink from this well. And I will give you whatever is of living water that should flow out of your belly. So today, if that's you and you've drank from different wells that you're not proud of, give us a call at our prayer line at 888-665-4483 because we wanna connect with you, we wanna pray with you, because we know that Jesus is the only one that can truly satisfy us and truly pull us out of the depths of the world system and into the kingdom where there is life, where there is love, where there is healing, where there is deliverance and there is transformation, you are called to be redeemed. He paid the ultimate price for you. It doesn't matter how far you strayed, remember that. That Jesus paid the ultimate price for you and because when you receive him, you can drink of his living water today. You know, I love that. And I felt the same thing, Sidney, as we were talking to Ainez, the whole story of the woman at the well, it just speaks so much of Jesus met her right where she was. He didn't say you had to get cleaned up, but he didn't dodge her sin either. He didn't like gloss over the fact that she had sinned. But then he told her all that she had done and she went and told everybody else and said, he told, come and meet the man who told me everything I've ever done. I don't know if that's exactly what we would say, but then she says, this is not the Christ, is it? Well, it was the Christ and she recognized it before all the religious people did. She recognized it before the ones that should have been looking for Jesus and looking for the Christ knew. She knew because she saw his love. She saw the truth. He is the truth. She saw the truth of God and the love and he was drawing her in with that. Amanda, God's drawing people in today. He is. And you know, I can't help but get so excited over this story because in verse 39 of John 4, it says, and many of the Samaritans of that city believed in him because of the word of the woman who testified. Who? I mean, it's about us, but it's really about all the people that your life is about to impact because when you've been touched like Inez, you can't help but let other people know about who he is because it sets us free and God not only wants you free, but he wants you to be his mouthpiece. He wants you to go and share of his goodness so that you can bring your village to Jesus. That ought to be on our heart every day. You know, this is a program of hope, but the hope isn't just for us to keep. It is for us to give away. God desires to use you. And so just as she talked about, you know, you can feel disqualified. Like, well, I've got this that happened. Yes. And just like the woman at the well, Jesus blots out, what does it mean? Nothing but the blood of Jesus can make us white as snow. It's for real. It's for real. He blots out the stains that we created. Jesus is amazing and he loves you so much and he desires to use you as his mouthpiece. It's amazing. Thank you, God. So what are, what are you drinking today? What are you drinking? What are you drinking from the well that never runs dry? Because every other well does. Every other thing we think that is gonna satisfy us is gonna make us happy. They all run dry. Everyone, whether they're good or bad, they run dry, but Jesus never, ever runs dry. And he's calling to you today. Don't put him up. Release yourself. Surrender to Christ today. On tomorrow's Hope Today, discover how to break free from dry religion and immerse yourself in the saturating presence of God. Revivalist and evangelist Jesse Green offers a prophetic forecast of the coming flood of the Holy Spirit that includes a life-changing movement of God. Don't miss tomorrow's Hope Today. Cornerstone Television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers, whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.