 Hey guys, it's Isaac. Welcome back to the Daily Disciple channel. Today I want to talk a little bit about being real, and part of what I want to do here on this channel is be real with you guys. It's not always easy. It's not always comfortable, but it's important. We can get in this space as Christians, especially of just wanting to be positive all the time and only show the positive aspects of our lives or only talk about them or think about them and show other people, oh hey, it's great being a Christian, it's all happy. And somehow in our minds we think that that actually is helping, you know, draw people to Christ by just being positive all the time. But I think we miss out on a big part of what the Christian life is when we only think about the positive and the happy. We got to think about the hard and the tough. What does Christianity, what does God have to say about those times in our lives? And part of being real, I think, is being real with ourselves about when we're going through those tough times or when we're having those hardships in our lives and identifying those and saying, you know what, this is happening. And it's not something where I can just be like, oh, it's fine, you know, it's okay, it's still happy, it's still positive. Because that's just changing the outward, right? It's just changing, oh, we're putting on a face, that's just acting. And God doesn't want us to act. He wants us to be who we are and to be real with him about what we're going through. You know, when we're faced with the tough things in our lives, when we're faced with those things, we really have three options. We can pretend. And pretending, a lot of us are really good at pretending, we're really good at putting on a face like I was talking about earlier, putting on, you know, a performance like everything's all right, like our lives really aren't as tough as they may be. But just saying, oh, you know, it's good and putting on a face and showing everyone that everything's okay, we could do that. We could pretend, we could honestly be the same way with God, not only with other people, but put on a face for God and say, oh, God, thank you so much for creating me, I'm just so happy right now and just wonderful and not being real with God in that way. We could pretend, or like a lot of people do, you could run, you could see, hey, wait a minute, life is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. And you run from God and you try to look for rest and satisfaction in other places. You try to look in entertainment or in distractions or in sinful pleasure that we may partake in. We like to look different places and we run from God when life gets tough. We don't face up to what we're experiencing, but instead we try to distract ourselves or experience, you know, pleasure or that kind of thing. We run. The third thing that we could do is believe God. Now, that's the toughest to do, but it really shouldn't be. When we think about it, believing God is actually, should be the easiest thing to do. Because when we think about who the most trustworthy person is, it is God. And when we think about who has control of everything of our lives, it's God. So believing him, believing that he has purposes in everything he does, believing that there is hope despite the way that we're feeling the tough things that we're going through, believing God, that should be the easiest thing, but it's not. It really isn't. But when we can be real with ourselves and with God and other people about what we're going through, about what we're experiencing, about the tough things that we have to struggle with, when we can be real about those things, I think God's going to begin to minister his truth to us, the fact that he is trustworthy, the truth that he is faithful. He is steadfast. He won't leave us or forsake us. He is there for us, even in our time of trouble. So that's my message to you guys this week. For me, yeah, life's not always easy. In fact, life seems to be more tough than it is easy. I don't know. Some people have a tendency to, I don't know, with different issues in their lives, and they let them overtake them. And I sometimes feel a pull towards that, a pull towards being overwhelmed, a pull towards being anxious, a pull towards being depressed, a pull towards letting the tough things in life get to me. And when I need to be believing God and believing that he has everything under control, and that doesn't mean that I'll feel better necessarily, that doesn't mean that all the tough stuff's going to go away, because most likely it won't. But it can re-center our focus onto where our ultimate pursuit should be and that is Christ. And if you get anything from anything I said today, take that last sentence. We need to be pursuing Christ about everything, not necessarily feeling, not just trying to feel better, but we want to pursue Christ. And be real with him about what we're going through. I hope you guys can be real and authentic with God. Thanks for watching, guys. If you enjoy or find these what I consider a hard-to-hard talk, talks with you guys online, if you find these helpful, let me know. I'd love to do more of them, but yeah, be sure to subscribe if you would like more videos like this and check out dailydisciple.ca for mid-week content, blog posts, videos, that sort of thing. I look forward to seeing you guys there and I hope you have a great day. Bye, guys.