Perfecting Me

Character and Relationships

Three Angels Broadcasting Network

Program transcript

Participants: Wintley Phipps (Host), Adly Campos, Dr E T Stoddart, Ruthie Jacobson

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Series Code: PFM

Program Code: PFM000006A


00:27 Hi, I'm Wintley Phipps, and welcome to our program
00:30 Perfecting Me, Becoming More Like Jesus.
00:34 I'm so glad you've joined us.
00:37 My guests today on our program are Ruthie Jacobsen,
00:40 Head of Prayer Ministry of the North American division
00:42 of Seventh-day Adventist, Pastor Errol Stoddart,
00:45 Senior Pastor of the Church of the Oranges
00:47 of Seventh-day Adventist in Orange, New Jersey,
00:50 and Mrs. Adly Campos, Speaker and President
00:53 of Family Well-Being International.
00:56 You'll hear from them a little later.
00:59 When God gave Adam the woman Eve,
01:04 God gave to Adam much more than a wife.
01:10 In Eve, God gave to Adam one of the keys and blessings
01:14 that holds His entire universe together.
01:18 He gave to Adam a gift
01:20 that is a prerequisite for living in heavenly society,
01:24 a precondition of citizenship in the kingdom of God.
01:28 In Eve, God gave to Adam something
01:32 that is at the very fabric and foundation
01:35 of perfecting our character.
01:38 In Eve, God gave to Adam in the Garden of Eden
01:41 the gift of a reciprocal, loving,
01:45 spiritual relationship.
01:48 In God's kingdom, relationships are essential
01:53 to our growth and development of character.
01:57 Even today, God looks at our relationships
02:02 to determine the fitness of our character
02:06 for heavenly society.
02:08 Remember the young man that said,
02:09 "Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"
02:11 The Lord, God said, He said, Jesus said to him,
02:15 "Love the Lord God with all your heart,
02:17 with all your soul, with all your strength,
02:19 with all your mind," that's the relationship to God,
02:23 "and your neighbor as you love yourself,"
02:26 our relationship with others.
02:28 This world we live in
02:30 is a character training ground for heaven,
02:33 and our relationships with our families
02:36 and those around us are a key indicator
02:40 of our readiness for heaven.
02:43 Yes, God looks at our relationships
02:45 to determine our fitness for heaven.
02:49 That's why I try to always remind myself,
02:51 always love God with all my heart
02:54 and my neighbor as myself.
03:03 In the Garden of Eden, God made it abundantly clear
03:07 that He created us for reciprocal, loving,
03:11 spiritual relationships.
03:14 A relationship is the joining of two hearts
03:17 in sympathy and compassion with one another.
03:21 It is a quiet trust between two individuals,
03:25 a precious trust between two souls.
03:29 Relationships are invisible, unexplainable,
03:33 imperceptible, and yes, often indescribable.
03:38 How we feel about children and grandchildren
03:41 is often very difficult to describe to others.
03:44 I have a friend who once said to me,
03:46 "I've always heard people say something happens
03:49 when you have grandchildren,
03:51 but I didn't understand it until I got my own."
03:54 He said, "Let me explain.
03:56 My baby granddaughter was by the house the other day,
03:59 and she was fishing behind a credenza for a toy
04:01 she couldn't reach.
04:03 So she picked up the credenza,
04:05 and on it was my wife's most expensive lamp,
04:08 and that lamp came crashing to the floor."
04:12 He said, "If that was one of my children,"
04:15 and then he said, "But you know what I heard myself say,
04:18 "Oh, look how strong my grand baby is."
04:22 Through relationships, one heart bonds with another.
04:26 And we find, in healthy relationships,
04:30 comfort, confidence, rest, and repose.
04:35 Godly relationships are conceived in sympathy,
04:39 and nurtured in love and compassion.
04:42 And those relationships
04:44 shape our character and our destiny.
04:50 The best relationships are authentic, positive,
04:54 and constructive relationships.
04:56 The best relationships provide support
04:59 in times of trial and adversity.
05:03 Often our careers and our noblest aspirations
05:06 are fulfilled by the relationships
05:09 we developed with people we respect
05:12 and people who took us into a mentoring relationship.
05:18 Now not all relationships are healthy.
05:20 When motives are impure
05:23 and misguided in a relationship,
05:25 that relationship can become our greatest curse.
05:29 Because of how it destroys the beauty of character,
05:34 many negative relationships in this world
05:37 are built on injustice, greed, and power.
05:41 When motives are misguided and impure,
05:44 those relationships become toxic and poisonous,
05:48 erratic and unstable.
05:51 Someone once said, "We learnt to fly the air like the birds
05:54 and swim the sea like the fishes,
05:56 when will we learn to walk the earth like brothers?"
06:00 Many think that their relationships to God
06:03 is all that matters and that they can then live
06:05 in any kind of way they want to
06:07 and treat people any kind of way they want to.
06:10 I want you to know God's church can never grow
06:14 with that kind of thinking.
06:16 We live in a world
06:18 where the only thing that keeps us from chaos
06:22 are healthy relationships.
06:25 Father, mother, children, and yes, even leaders,
06:29 the character of a leader can profoundly influence
06:34 the character of a nation.
06:36 As Dr. King once said, "We are bound together
06:41 by an inescapable network of mutuality."
06:46 In our world today,
06:48 there are relationships of blood and nationality,
06:50 there are casual relationships, professional relationships,
06:54 there are short term and long term relationships,
06:57 but all of those relationships were given to us by God
07:02 to strengthen and build our character.
07:06 I want you to see this video about strengthening
07:09 and building healthy relationships,
07:12 brought to us by our friends at the 700 Club.
07:17 It is a video that will inspire you,
07:20 and motivate you, and strengthen you,
07:22 and show you how you build relationships.
07:30 We were very much in love.
07:32 He asked me three weeks after we met,
07:34 if I would marry him, and I said yes.
07:36 We dreamed of serving God together,
07:39 we had a dream of having some sort of
07:41 world wide music ministry.
07:44 Pat and Gayle Hadley had high hopes
07:46 when they married.
07:47 But the daily responsibilities of work and family
07:50 soon took a toll.
07:52 The dreams that I had of traveling the world together
07:55 and, you know, singing for the Lord,
07:57 none of those had happened.
07:59 I think I took all that disappointment,
08:02 all that hurt, and I turned it towards Pat in a way
08:05 because I connected him with those lost dreams.
08:10 I wasn't really aware of how bad things really were.
08:14 So I just got to a point were I thought,
08:16 "Well, this is as good as it gets,
08:17 this is just the way it is.
08:18 This is the way it's going to be,
08:20 this is normal marriage."
08:21 I started focusing on the children,
08:23 and my relationship with my husband
08:26 became more of a business partnership.
08:30 Pat pastored a church in Alaska,
08:32 and Gayle served as the worship leader.
08:34 But as their ministry responsibilities increased,
08:37 so did the tension at home.
08:39 I always felt pressure to have a perfect marriage
08:43 as a pastor.
08:44 You're an example.
08:45 When marriages failed for pastors, it's, you know,
08:50 you got to find a new career.
08:52 Pat and I couldn't even be in the same room together.
08:55 I mean, without argument,
08:57 without there was constant arguing,
08:59 fighting over things.
09:00 I was living downstairs, she was living upstairs.
09:03 We meet together in the kitchen,
09:05 talk about things that we needed to talk about,
09:07 and then go about our lives.
09:09 For 23 years, Pat and Gayle went through the motions.
09:13 But after a blow up on the day
09:14 their daughter left for college,
09:16 Gayle told Pat she'd had enough.
09:19 Everything I did was either for my children,
09:21 or for my husband, or for the church,
09:23 you know, it was...
09:25 I felt like I was gone like, there was no me anymore.
09:30 I didn't want to do this anymore.
09:32 I didn't want to be married.
09:34 I didn't want to be a pastor's wife anymore,
09:37 that I was just done.
09:40 That was the lowest moment because I never,
09:43 I never stopped loving my wife.
09:46 I didn't want my marriage to end.
09:48 I didn't want my family to suffer divorce.
09:52 And then I heard God's voice.
09:53 And He said to me, "Come to me,
09:55 and I will heal you."
09:57 And at one point I said, "Heal me?
10:00 I don't need to be healed. I need you to heal her."
10:03 Pat heeded God's voice
10:05 and in an attempt to find his own healing,
10:07 met with a local Christian counselor and author,
10:09 Art Mathias and began reading his book,
10:12 Biblical Foundations of Freedom.
10:14 In that book, I learned that I needed to forgive
10:21 that if I was going to be obedient to Jesus
10:24 and obedient to God, I had to learn
10:26 how to really forgive people from my heart.
10:31 Not only my wife,
10:33 but everyone in my life that had hurt me.
10:35 I began to pray for her.
10:38 And I'd never really done that in my marriage
10:41 because as long as I was bitter,
10:43 I wasn't going to pray for her,
10:45 because the bitterness was blocking it,
10:47 so I started praying prayers.
10:48 I had a little bit more authority
10:50 of having behind them.
10:52 You know, in the name of Jesus,
10:54 Satan, you cannot have my family,
10:55 you cannot have my wife.
10:57 You need to get out of here and leave her alone.
11:00 Some nights, I went into our bedroom,
11:03 I laid down on the floor by the bed and I prayed,
11:07 I prayed silently so she couldn't hear me
11:09 but God could hear me.
11:10 It didn't take long for Gayle to notice,
11:12 there was something different about Pat.
11:14 He wasn't even fun to argue with anymore
11:17 because I couldn't get him to argue with me.
11:19 So I asked him, I'm like,
11:22 "What have you been doing because you're different.
11:26 You're giving me lots of space which is good,
11:28 I needed that but you're different.
11:31 What's going on?"
11:32 And I talked to her about forgiveness.
11:34 And I said, you know,
11:35 I have a lot of things to fix in me.
11:38 And it's not about you, it's me,
11:41 and God needs to fix some things in me,
11:43 and so I'm going to do that.
11:44 I have been trying to fix things
11:47 by my might and my power,
11:49 and I was learning how to fix things by His spirit
11:52 so that and that's the only thing that worked.
11:54 Gayle began to see God on her own
11:57 and to try to understand forgiveness in a new light.
12:00 These things that I had been holding on to for years,
12:03 all these things that have happened to me,
12:04 I had the wrong focus of what was wrong,
12:07 and I though Pat was the enemy,
12:09 and that people in the church were the enemy,
12:12 and even my family, you know,
12:15 I had seen them in the wrong way.
12:19 And that they were not the enemy,
12:21 and that I could forgive.
12:27 And I just started feeling joy again.
12:31 And it was such an amazing thing
12:34 to feel this warmth, and this love, and this joy
12:37 that I hadn't felt for years.
12:40 Hope was springing up in me
12:43 that my marriage could be saved.
12:45 She was becoming a new person. And I watched it.
12:49 And I was like, "This is what I've been praying for."
12:52 Now God was showing up, and reworking her and me,
12:58 and it was beautiful.
13:00 These were things that were new to us.
13:02 So what we were really learning is we're learning
13:04 how to take the teachings in the Bible
13:06 and make them real in our lives.
13:08 Today, Pat and Gayle say
13:10 their marriage has never been stronger.
13:13 I never knew that it could be this good.
13:16 I never knew that this is what life could be
13:20 like being married.
13:22 She is my best friend, and she is my partner,
13:26 and we face life together.
13:29 And it's awesome.
13:31 He's the first one that when something happens to me,
13:34 I want to share it with him.
13:35 And I have hope for our future together.
13:37 Well, I'm so thankful that God showed me the way,
13:41 showed us the way of life,
13:44 and showed us how to live life together.
13:51 Joining us again are my guests
13:54 Ruthie Jacobsen, Adly Campos, and Errol Stoddart.
13:59 I wanted to start of by asking each of you,
14:04 do you have a memory of probably
14:06 the most influential relationship
14:10 that you've had with another human being
14:13 in your life?
14:14 I know, most of us would say our spouses,
14:17 but I wanted you to go beyond your spouse,
14:20 maybe when you were growing up, in terms of understanding
14:26 the importance of surrendering to Christ.
14:29 Can you think of the person, or a person
14:33 that has influenced your life profoundly,
14:36 the relationship you had with them,
14:38 influential life profoundly?
14:40 Sister Campos?
14:42 Yes, I'm thinking on Dr. Charles Taylor,
14:45 he was the president of the Montemorelos University
14:49 at the time I was a student.
14:51 He inspired my life,
14:55 he tried each and every day in everything he did
14:59 to resemble the character of Christ.
15:03 And how about you, Pastor Stoddart?
15:06 Probably, two people.
15:08 Dr. Benjamin Reeves,
15:09 my homiletic's professor at Oakwood.
15:11 Yes, he was mine teacher too.
15:13 Just a steady man, levelheaded, calm spirit,
15:17 and probably the opposite of him
15:20 was Dr. Cleveland, EE Cleveland.
15:24 He was the firebrand but Dr. Cleveland,
15:28 sitting in his class was really the thing
15:31 that drove home to my heart
15:34 how special I was in the eyes of God,
15:38 and how God saw me, and how God sees us,
15:41 His deep love for us.
15:43 Dr. Cleveland's class was where
15:46 that transformative moment took place.
15:48 How about you, Ruthie?
15:52 Well, I'd have to say that one of the people
15:55 who influenced me was Elder CD Brooks.
15:59 Many, many years ago, I was living in Dayton, Ohio,
16:03 working in Nursing Service Administration
16:05 at the Kettering Medical Center.
16:08 And this is before we were married.
16:10 I used to go out
16:12 to Germantown Church near Dayton,
16:15 and CD Brooks would come out there every Thanksgiving,
16:18 and he'd come out at other times too.
16:20 And he sometimes had evangelistic crusades
16:22 in Cincinnati or other places.
16:25 And I would be so thrilled to sit at his feet
16:28 because he taught Jesus.
16:32 He taught amazing grace. Yes.
16:35 And I think it was, although I've grown up
16:38 in an Adventist home and my parents were praying,
16:42 godly people, I was first influenced by them.
16:46 But CD just was somebody that waters your soul.
16:52 Yeah, yeah.
16:53 You know, when we all think back,
16:57 different names come to our minds.
16:59 And for me, Elder EE Cleveland,
17:03 I was a teenager, I was a teenager.
17:07 And I remember, they said this,
17:11 "Preacher from the general conference
17:12 was coming to speak at Oakwood College then,
17:15 now Oakwood University.
17:17 And I remember so clearly sitting there,
17:20 and as they were reading his vitae
17:22 and his long list of accomplishments,
17:25 I was focused on him.
17:26 And he had his eyes closed, he had his hand on his chin,
17:29 he was patting his feet,
17:30 and he was rocking back and forth.
17:32 And when he got up to speak, he soared,
17:36 and I deduced that his soaring probably had something to do
17:39 with his preflight checklist, you know.
17:43 Whatever he was going through,
17:45 that was going to help him fly, you know.
17:48 And so when they would introduced me as a teenager
17:51 at Oakwood, I closed my eyes and I put my hand on my chin,
17:55 and I pat my feet, and I had rocked too
17:58 when they were introducing me.
18:00 But little did I know that I was entering into
18:03 what would become the secret of all of my blessings
18:07 and success in life and ministry.
18:09 And that is, I was learning to go to the mountain
18:12 before I went to the multitude.
18:15 So when I came down off the mountain,
18:18 my voice was shining, my face was shining,
18:21 my relationship with Christ was being reflected.
18:24 We all know that relationships profoundly
18:29 impact our character.
18:31 The Bible talks about bad associations
18:35 corrupting good morals, for example.
18:38 But, Pastor Stoddart, in what way do you see
18:42 the power of relationships
18:44 impacting profoundly our character?
18:49 It has a tremendous impact, you know,
18:52 the old folks would say, when I was growing up,
18:54 if you hang around dogs, your cats flee.
18:56 Yeah.
18:59 There is this sling of assimilation
19:02 that takes place up based on association.
19:06 And there's no doubt, Moses on the mountain,
19:09 his being in the presence of God,
19:12 when he came down, the Bible says,
19:14 his face was shining so much
19:16 so that they had to cover his face,
19:18 they could not look at his face at all.
19:21 And that's the reflection of association
19:25 in being in the presence of God.
19:27 Elijah with Elisha, and so on, and so on, and so forth.
19:32 If you see the biblical examples
19:33 over and over again of people hanging around somebody
19:39 who had a connection with God, and by their association,
19:43 they experienced in their own walk
19:46 a connection with God.
19:47 How about you, Sister Campos?
19:49 How important do you think relationships are
19:52 in the development of Christian character?
19:56 So important that specially in the family,
20:02 parents are to be very careful on how they reflect God
20:07 in their own lives at home, because children learn more so
20:13 from observing the conduct, the behavior of the parents
20:18 than words or punishment.
20:21 So therefore, it has a lot of influence on us,
20:26 what we learn at home.
20:28 Even though our parents might not be perfect, no, no,
20:33 according to their world standard,
20:35 they still are reflecting Jesus' character.
20:40 Especially, I teach in my seminars,
20:44 fathers, the figure, the male figure
20:47 has to be so careful in the way he behaves, he conducts himself
20:52 because children tend to think of God as a male.
20:57 Yes.
20:58 Father, we say our father which art in heaven.
21:02 And they will compare their father on earth
21:06 with the father on heaven.
21:09 So we have to be so careful in how we represent
21:13 God's character before our children,
21:16 before our little ones, before our own family,
21:18 and then to others.
21:21 Ruthie, what do you think about that?
21:24 What do you think, and why do you think
21:26 that relationships are so important
21:30 in developing character?
21:31 And as you think about that,
21:32 I want to ask you two questions.
21:34 And the second one really is, have you seen miracles
21:39 in prayer to transform relationships,
21:43 and how they've impacted other people's lives?
21:48 Absolutely.
21:49 I'm convinced there's nothing else,
21:52 there is nothing else.
21:54 I have seen people who have been sure
21:57 that they were at the very bottom,
21:59 and suicidal, you know, and just had no place to go.
22:05 And when they came to prayer meeting,
22:07 and they were surrounded by loving people
22:10 who placed hands on them and prayed over them,
22:13 believing and praying in the name of Jesus.
22:17 You know, heaven, it's just like
22:19 the Peterson song.
22:21 Heaven came down and glory fills your soul.
22:24 But it comes through people, it comes through people.
22:29 God works through His people.
22:31 Wintley, I have to tell you, one of the things
22:34 that I still remember about the prayer meetings
22:36 at Capitol Hill
22:37 was how those young professional people
22:40 would line up to give their testimonies.
22:43 Yes, you remember that. Everybody has a story.
22:46 Every body has a story. Yeah.
22:48 And God uses those stories to encourage.
22:51 And when you share your story,
22:54 it not only blesses people who hear this story,
22:58 but it encourages your own heart.
23:00 So relationships are just...
23:02 I think this is a paramount subject
23:05 to the heart of God.
23:06 Pastor Stoddart. Let me say this, Wintley.
23:09 I took a class recently called theories of personality.
23:13 It was a very interesting class.
23:14 I just wanted to sharpen my soul as they say.
23:18 And one of the things they talked about in the class
23:20 was, they talked about a religious personality.
23:24 And they said that the way
23:26 a religious personality gets developed is that
23:29 it's passed on through heredity.
23:32 It's comes from grandparents to parents
23:35 down to grandchildren.
23:37 I thought to myself, "That is unbelievable."
23:40 There is a thing in psychology called a religious personality
23:44 that seemingly has the capacity to be transferred generational.
23:50 And the teacher says,
23:51 "Sometimes it may skip a generation
23:54 but catches up with the following generation."
23:56 Right, right.
23:57 And I thought to myself, "That is so powerful
24:00 to know that what a parent is doing today
24:04 or what your grandparents did 50, 60 years ago
24:08 were seeds that were sown in preparation
24:12 for who we are today spiritually."
24:15 It was so profound to me.
24:16 Yeah, yes. Amen.
24:18 I made a statement at the beginning
24:20 that God looks at our relationships
24:24 to determine our fitness for heaven.
24:28 He looks at our relationship with Him, you know,
24:32 He wants to be sure we are happy with Him,
24:37 and happy in Him, because He does not want us
24:41 to come to eternity unhappy.
24:45 And then He looks at our relationships
24:48 with those, as Sister Campos was saying,
24:51 those who are closest to us, you know.
24:55 I often tell my wife,
24:57 we just have a few more seconds.
24:58 I tell my wife that I have to speak to her
25:04 the way I planned to speak to her
25:07 in the kingdom of heaven.
25:09 Amen.
25:10 I love that.
25:11 Yes.
25:13 So I envisioned myself sitting in heaven
25:16 across the table, you know, for my wife.
25:19 And the way I planned to speak to her there
25:23 is the way I want to speak to her right here now,
25:27 because the Lord looks at our relationships
25:31 to determine our fitness for heaven.
25:35 Thank you so much, you guys.
25:36 If we had all think that way, Pastor,
25:39 then there will be no divorce.
25:41 That's right, there'll be no divorce
25:42 if we all thought that way.
25:44 God bless you.
25:45 Thank so much for being with us today.
25:52 Sin entered the world
25:53 because Eve's relationship with God was compromised,
25:57 shattered, ruptured, and broken.
26:00 And with the broken relationship
26:02 came a deformed character.
26:05 Jesus came to this world to live and die,
26:10 to repair the relationship between God and man,
26:15 and to restore the character and image of God in man.
26:21 And now everything in eternity hangs on a relationship.
26:28 For us, it is a relationship with Jesus
26:31 and our relationship with others.
26:34 And Satan knows that, and that's
26:37 why when the enemy wants to discourage
26:39 and dishearten us,
26:41 when he wants to disappoint and depress us,
26:44 the first place he attacks is our relationships.
26:50 Satan knows that before he can destroy us,
26:53 he has to first damage, devastate,
26:57 and destroy our relationships.
27:00 Servant of God said,
27:02 "I saw that it is in the providence of God
27:04 that widows and orphans, the blind, the deaf,
27:07 the lame, and persons afflicted in a variety of ways
27:10 have been placed in close Christian relationship
27:14 to His church to prove His people
27:17 and develop their true character."
27:21 I want you to know, God's blessings
27:24 will rest upon our relationships.
27:27 He uses relationships to determine our fitness
27:32 for heaven.
27:34 And so thank God for the relationships
27:37 that you have.
27:38 Thank God for the relationships He's placed in your life.
27:43 I'm Wintley Phipps, and remember,
27:47 to be a Christian means to be Christ-like.


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Revised 2018-01-25