Change Your World

Hello and welcome to this episode of Become a Competent Biblical Counselor. My name is Dr. Dave Jones, and today's episode is entitled Your World. And the scriptural reference that I want to use today is 2 Timothy 2, verses 3 through 5, where he says, For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, truth makers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heedy, high minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof from such turn away. I want you to know those those last four words from such turn away. Not a conditional statement, not a suggestion. Look at it as a command. So let's look at your world. And what I mean by that is we're looking at the world of the people who call you who are just frustrated, discouraged, disappointment. They really don't know what's going on, what's wrong. Their life is just a mess. They're not happy. They're just guided by everybody else and really, really confused. And the more you talk to these people and ask them questions about what their life is like, the more uncertain and unguided that they are. So after you've spent a considerable amount of time, I'm talking about ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, and you've just gotten nowhere with this person, then it's time for you to take control and be more direct than you have up until this point. And it starts by simply asking, tell me about your world. And they'll say, What? Tell me about your world. Do you have a best friend? And tell me about your best friend. How long have you had this person as a best friend? And why is this person a best friend? And then ask them, tell me about your favorite music. What kind of music do you like? What kind don't you like? Do you go to concerts? Do you listen to the radio? Where do you listen to your music? How do you get your music? Ask questions like this on and on and on until you get a real good idea of who this person is and what their world is like. What is their life like? Oh and don't forget to ask them about social media. How much time do you take and spend on social media? How often are you on social media? Are you on so many times a week, so many times a day? How often? And that's just a simple example what you do with talking with one person who's having their own individual problem. So now let's talk about the marriage situation. There are three worlds involved in a marriage. The husband has his world. There are things he likes to do, places he likes to go, things he doesn't like to do, places he doesn't like to go. There are certain friends that he has, certain friends that he doesn't. That goes without confusion to understand that. But the important thing to realize is that your husband or a husband has his own world. The wife. She has her own world. She has her own friends that maybe the husband just doesn't identify with. But she likes this person. This is her world. She has her way of going shopping. She likes to know that she can go shopping whenever she wants to without any interference from a husband. But she has her world. And then the two of them have their world. They might go to see movies together. They know which movies that each one likes to go see. They might listen to music together. They might do things together that they would not do individually and separately. So there are three worlds there. Then let's talk about the family, the children. You can go ahead and identify the age of the children any way you like here, from the ages of five all the way up to high school. You talk about different worlds. They have a totally different world than anybody else, other than the people in their world. They even have a different language, a different code that they speak. They have different unusual places they like to go to and things that they like to do that totally is out of understanding from the point of the parents, but that is their world. You want to see a real quick change in somebody's world? Wait till your children get old enough to go to college. You talk a rapid, very quick, influenced world change. Just wait until that college student comes home on the first break from college to see you. You've got a different child. And one of the best things to identify with someone that's having problems or couples that have are having problems, families that are having problems, is to identify their worlds. What is going on in their individual and respective worlds? Who are the influencers, who are the motivators in their life that are helping them to make decisions, not on their own, but on somebody else's opinion? And you'll find very quickly people will say, Well, yeah, they're my friend, and I've been with them for years and years and years, and and sometimes we have our ups and our downs. And okay, that's that's that's normal. That happens, but what other influencers are in their life with respect to how they are living their world? Who is defining their world? And the important thing we had another episode earlier where I spoke about the vertical and the horizontal influences, and the point I'm trying to make with respect to identifying a world is how are you identifying the world? How is your counseling identifying their world? Is it horizontally or is it vertically? Are they defining the world based upon what their friends and social media and music and entertainment influences are, or are they looking at life from God's point of view? Now I think what we want to get to is to the point to where we're asking your counselee who and what influences in your life are helping you to grow, who are helping you to be happier. Whenever you're with this person, you're so much happier. Well, who is that person? Who is that person that's encouraging you to be better and to do better? That you are a better person than what you think you are. And if they have people or influences in their life that are not helping them to grow and be happy and excited when they're around and to encourage and to motivate them to be better than what they are, why are they in your world? Why don't you identify people that's going to help you to be a better person than you are? One of the best forms of advice that I've learned from a lot of people in a long time is if you want to be something, find somebody who has already excelled in that field that you want to identify with. Understand how they think, understand how they talk, understand how they identify with going on in the field you want to identify with. Now, that all sounds kind of nice, kind of encouraging, kind of exciting to look around and look at your life and say, well, you know what, there are some things that I'd like to change, um, but I just don't know how to do that. Well, counselor, that's where you come in. That's where you identify those things that are not motivating and encouraging to the person's life, and then the world that they've decided to create. Now it's your opportunity to show them what God would expect them to have a world like. How you can help them to construct the world from God's point of view instead of the horizontal influences of people around them. But there is a caveat here. Sometimes it is super, super difficult and heart-wrenching to look and identify people in your world that are just not helping you at all. They are people that walk into a room and everybody just kind of shuts up because they've taken over the room and they just they're a downer. They just cause everybody to be wishing that they could be somewhere else. There are times when we have those people in our lives that you have to determine a way in which to minimize continual involvement with those kind of people. That's what the scripture referred to at the head of this episode. From such turn away. And it's at this point as well that the counselor can say, well, let's rehearse what we're going to do to minimize the involvement of that person in our life while we include and encourage the involvement of other people in our lives that it's going to help us to grow and to be motivated in what God wants us to do. And the kind of world that God wants us to have. He's given us that right. This is our world. What are we going to do with it? Well, that's where you come in, counselor. There are very few times where people have been encouraged to change their world. A lot of times they've never thought that they had the opportunity to do that. They never heard about changing your world. Things just happen, and that's the world that you have. No. You can help them to change their world to be the kind of world that God wants them to have and to live in. I remember a 50-year-old man called me one day saying that he was just very down and unmotivated, and we got to talking about his world. He had two children, and his mother was still alive, and um it seemed that whenever his mother would come into his presence, she took over, to the point where she treated him as if he was not fifty, but he was fifteen. And so she always said to I will do whatever I want with you because I'm your mother. And he never said anything to his mother about changing her attitude or responding differently to her when she would say things like that. But every time she came over or was involved with the family on the phone or in in presence or whatever, she was just a real downer for everybody in the room. So we created a plan. We rehearsed a script with respect to how he is going to do what God had encouraged him to do as far as creating a different world, changing his world. And it came down to very simply, say he told his mom, he says, Mom, I love you very much. Um I want you to know that I've learned a lot from you, but there are some things that we have to change now. And she says, Well, like what? And he says, Well, for one thing, I'm 50 years old. I'm no longer 15. I have my own family, I have my own life, and I want you to continue to help me to grow, but we've got to change our language. And mom, from now on, I appreciate it if you would be more gentle when you spoke to me and more concerned about the fact of what you are saying and listening to what you're saying instead of just blurting it out. And so he went on and on and continued giving her more suggestions, and she went from one foot to the next foot, just jockeying back and forth. He could tell she was not liking this conversation at all. And he got to the hardest part of the conversation. He says, Now, mom, if you can't do that in the future, then you just don't come around. You just have to go somewhere else until you can. But I will welcome you back whenever you want to. But this is my world that God wants me to create and live in, and I want you to fit in with it as well. Well, it took a long time, three months to be exact. When mom finally came to him and she brought him a plate of cookies, and she says, I'm so sorry. She says, I want you to realize that I understand now what you meant, and I will try to be the person that God wants me to be, so that you can be the person that God wants you to be. It takes practice, but it takes a conviction as well that this is something that the counselee might want to do. The counselee should be encouraged to do that. And if the children, for example, also are not behaving according to the way they should, then the parents have to understand that raising a child is not a democracy. They do not have a voice. There are times when you could say, you could have the counselee say to the child, you know that little girl Patty down the street, I'm really not comfortable with her. And I think that we should not spend so much time with her. And if there's an argument, well, it's got to be an understanding. That's the parent's right, is to create the world for the child while they can, instead of letting the child create their own world of which they have no idea how to do. So that's it. Change your world, live a different world, live the world that God wants you to live in. But you might have you have to practice and rehearse and encourage the counselee, they have an opportunity to grow and to be motivated to make sure that they put events and circumstances and people in their lives to do that. I hope this helps and uh look forward to talking to you later. And in the meantime, make it a great day.

Bye.