What You Believe About God Changes Everything

What if the way you see God could completely transform the way you face life’s uncertainties? In this episode, we’re diving into two of God’s most incredible attributes—His holiness and sovereignty—and exploring how they shape our faith and daily lives.

Spoiler: Understanding these truths isn’t just “theological fluff.” It’s deeply practical and might just be the perspective shift you need as we step into 2025.

Here’s a sneak peek of what we’re unpacking:

• Why God’s holiness is both awe-inspiring and comforting (and how it changes how we see ourselves).
• The beautiful, life-altering truth of how Christ bridges the gap between God’s holiness and our sin.
• How to find peace knowing God is sovereign—even when life feels out of control.
• The tension between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility (and how to embrace it).
• Why reflecting on who God is can ignite real personal growth and spiritual renewal.

Join us for this short conversation that’s packed with practical insights, thought-provoking questions, and encouragement to deepen your relationship with God. Hit play now, and let’s start the year with a clearer view of the One who holds it all together!

Chapters

• 0:01 Discovering God's Holiness
• 13:33 Understanding God's Sovereignty
• 23:30 Spreading Gospel Through Podcasts

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Sojo Show with Jen and AJ, where you'll dig deep into God's Word alongside two imperfect, frequently ineloquent women, as we discover fresh ways to walk out God's truth together. Good morning, welcome to the Sojo Show, the very first one of 2025. My name is Jen.

Speaker 2: 0:22

And I'm AJ, and Happy New Year year happy new year.

Speaker 1: 0:27

We're excited to be back with you, and we may sound a little sleepy this morning yes, well, it may not be morning when they're listening, but it's morning when we're recording.

Speaker 2: 0:35

so, and early morning, very early morning, I'm stuffed away in my closet because everybody else in my house is sleeping, and so it's like jen gets like all the all the scoop on what my closet looks, and so it's like Jen gets like all the all the scoop on what my closet looks like I'm like I'm like pretty crazy. I'm looking at it. Yeah, it's messy and colorful.

Speaker 1: 0:54

But you know what I understand? It's really a good place to record in your closet with all the buffer and stuff. So yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:01

Yeah, you're just being professional. There you go, there you go. That's what we'll call it, oh my goodness. Well, we are excited to be back and together and we are doing a series this month on knowing God, all about the different attributes of God as we're starting 2025. The different attributes of God as we're starting 2025. And I think this is a great place to kind of orient ourselves as we're getting ready to hop into a new year?

Speaker 2: 1:32

Yeah, I think so too. You know. It reminds me of the quote by I think it was Tozer that said the most important thing about you is how you view God or what you believe about God. And so, and I've really thought about that quote a lot over the years and I realized that is absolutely true, because our, what we think God is affects everything. It affects how we see ourselves, it affects how we recover from failure or sin in our lives. It affects how we see just everything that happens, circumstances in life.

Speaker 2: 2:03

You know, we don't believe that God's working all things together for good and that he's present and that he's there, that he's wise, like all of those things. It affects everything. It affects the way we see everything and people. You know it affects the way we are we going to love people? Are we going to care? Do we see like a bigger purpose to all of that? And so I just think that this is a great place to start at the beginning of this new year and just saying, okay, let's go back to the basics somewhat and say let's start with refining our view of God.

Speaker 1: 2:38

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And although we're not going to be able to hit on all the attributes, I think that it is really good to remind ourselves of who he is. So we're going to start today with you know, a couple of the things that we all say, that we know and we do know, but when we stop and really let ourselves think about them in context of who we are in relationship to God, as AJ is saying, it can almost be a little overwhelming. And we invite you, as we're talking through these characteristics, to really reflect and meditate on them, and maybe even we'll give you the challenge of going through the Bible and finding different references related to these characteristics and meditate on them throughout the week. So I think that this is going to be real important. So the first one that we're talking about is God's holiness. So it's pretty. We know God is holy. That is something that we say a lot, but what does that really mean and what does that mean to us?

Speaker 2: 3:54

Yeah, yeah, I think it's a great question and obviously, when we look at the character of God, it does, like I said before, it does have implications of how we live our own lives. I think God is okay with good enough. You know, like we, it affects our decisions and on a day-to-day basis. But if we see him as holy and not cannot tolerate sin in the least, like there's no shadow of turning that, that changes the way we see ourselves and the way, maybe the way we make decisions on a day-to-day basis. You know, and so this is one that we know in our head, what holy means. Like.

Speaker 2: 4:39

It means totally blameless, but it also means he's not like anybody else. You know, he's totally set apart, he's different and to me, that has always helped me understand that. I can't understand him, you know, like. His set apartness means that I'm not going to understand why he allows certain things, why he does certain things, why he seems to be silent in certain situations. Like I'm not going to my mind, cannot comprehend His set-apartness, and I have to be okay with that. No, I have to be okay with that. I have to be okay with Him being God and no one else filling that role.

Speaker 1: 5:27

Well, and if you think about it and going on that path, thinking about all of these characteristics, I mean if we were able to understand God, if we were able to really wrap our brains around it, then would he really be worthy of our total worship. I mean, we are the created, he's the creator and we I mean if we understood him then he would not be the strong and powerful and mighty and holy God that he is. So I find comfort in that fact. You know, sometimes it can be a little discouraging to us because we don't understand His ways and we know His ways are better than our ways and we find ourselves discouraged in our circumstances. But I think we can look up from that and be so encouraged by the fact that even though we don't understand, we can trust Him in His nature, in who he is. And so there's a strange encouragement in not being able to wrap our brains around the mightiness and the holiness of God and thinking about holy and what that actually kind of means and what you said.

Speaker 1: 6:49

He's not able to tolerate sin at all. I mean this term holy means, I mean it's perfection. We are sinful creatures and this is the whole reason that we have been. If we're trusting in Christ, we've been rescued and redeemed because of His holiness, because he is so holy, he had to find a way for us to be able. He had to reconcile us to Him.

Speaker 1: 7:20

The distance between His holiness and our lives is so great. The chasm is so great we could never have in anything that we did or do. We could never go through that expanse to get to Him, and that's why we needed Christ. That's why we needed Jesus. That was the reason that he was sent, because we could not tolerate his holiness on our own. He could not tolerate our sin, and Christ did that for us. And so, thinking through who God is also, we can think about the goodness of the gospel in general and how now we can stand before a holy God. One day we will be able to stand before a holy God because of the righteousness of Christ, and he did that. It's mind-boggling, really.

Speaker 2: 8:14

Yeah, yeah, it really is. And I think too, the thing about that is the characteristics of God. For the believer, they are things that we can delight in, even though they are challenging for us to think about. And challenging for us to even like the holiness of God is something that's really I mean honestly, it kind of brings a little bit of terror to my heart, right, consider it, because it's like whoa, like I fall so short every day, like just in my desires you know they're competing, and like my affections wane, and it's like whoa, I fall so short of this one attribute of God. But, like you said, for the believer, we have a rescue from a holy God. There's a, we have a rescue from a holy God. That very God is the one who, who also is a God of love and compassion and mercy and grace and forgiveness, like he's all of those things.

Speaker 2: 9:14

And yet I do think this attribute of holy is a good place for us to start, because if we don't understand him as holy, then we don't understand God, the need, right, we don't understand the need and we don't understand the cost he paid to bridge that gap. And and I feel like in our culture today, because I, you know, I see it in my own heart where we just kind of, where I just kind of become complacent with certain things in my life and say, oh well, everybody kind of has that attitude or everybody's doing that, you know, and it's kind of like I don't take things seriously anymore. But I also, as a at at the culture at large, it's definitely, you know, we make our own rules and it's whatever is okay for me is okay for me, so don't question that. And we just have lost the understanding that God is holy and he has a set of like he has a definition of sin and he's the only one who can make that definition. Like we cannot decide what a sin is. That only belongs to a holy God.

Speaker 2: 10:23

And even I see, even Christians like I'll talk to Christians sometimes who, who, just they don't, they don't believe that you know, they have fallen to the lie that, oh well, it's okay for them because of X, y, z, situation, or maybe they were born that way, you know, forgetting that God is the creator of every human life and he is the person who decides, or he's the entity that decides what is right and what is wrong. Like we don't get to choose that, and I think that ties into his holiness as well Like the fact that he is without sin and the fact that he is God, makes him the only one able to define what sin is.

Speaker 1: 11:09

I agree with you 100% and I think that sometimes we fall into the ditch of His not ditch, that's not the right way to say it but we overemphasize His mercy and love to the detriment of understanding His holiness. I mean because, yes, he is full of mercy and love, but it's still within the bounds, as you said, of the righteousness of Christ, and that is very important to recognize that, even though he is a God of mercy and a God of love, if we are standing opposed to Him, if we are standing opposed to him, he is also holy and he will not tolerate that. He will not tolerate it. It reminds me of as we were talking.

Speaker 1: 11:59

I was thinking of the passage, just really quickly, in Exodus 33, when Moses wanted to see God. He said show me your glory, in verse 18, 33, 18. Moses said please show me your glory. And so 33, 18,. Moses said show him, please show me your glory. And so God said I will cause all my goodness to pass before you and I will proclaim my name in your presence.

Speaker 1: 12:18

And then he said but you cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live. And he, and so he put Moses in the cleft of a rock. There's a place where you can stand in the cleft of the rock and and I will cover you with my hand until I pass by, and then you can see my back, but you cannot see my face. Anyway, the whole story is really, is really fascinating to me, because it to me, it just it almost gives me goosebumps to think that we serve a God that is so holy and glorious that if we were to look upon his face, we could not withstand that. We would literally die. That's what he tells Moses. You would literally die if you see my face. And that's the God that we serve.

Speaker 2: 13:04

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it's really unbelievable when you sit and you actually think about it and you ponder what that means, like if those things are really true, for God to have done all that he's done for us. It's really amazing. There's no word to describe that.

Speaker 1: 13:26

Right, well, and it helps us with the next characteristic. So we're going to briefly move to the next characteristic and this next. Any of these we could talk on for an hour. The next one I could talk on for days, but I think it's really important that when we're thinking about His holiness, the next characteristic that we wanted to talk about is His sovereignty. Right, so we all, as Christians, know God is in control. We say that all the time. God is sovereign. We know this in our head and in our hearts too. We know it.

Speaker 1: 14:00

But again, I invite you to really think about what that means. What that means, and because for a long time I did not have I'll be honest, I did not have a right understanding of God's sovereignty. I just did not understand how all-encompassing that is to not just my life, but the world and the sin that's around us. We talked about the confusion, everything. In some mysterious way, it is all being orchestrated by our holy God. So our sovereign God is the next kind of thought that we're thinking about. Briefly, what do you think about that?

Speaker 2: 14:51

Well, this is actually funny. I wasn't sure we were going to talk about this one today, but it really ties into something that our pastor said yesterday. So we're preaching through the book of Romans. I know that your husband has preached through Romans and took a couple years to do that, maybe multiple years. Yeah three.

Speaker 1: 15:10

So our pastor, couple of years to do that Maybe, maybe multiple years.

Speaker 2: 15:12

So our pastor is not going to take that long, but yesterday he's. He just talked about how chapters nine through 11 are one theological unit, and so we were looking at chapter nine. But he said to really understand chapter nine you have to go to the end of chapter 11. And the end of chapter 11, there's a doxology, and it basically says what we were talking about earlier, where no one can understand, like the ways of God are inscrutable. Who can, who can like, understand God's ways? And so that's kind of where Paul ended.

Speaker 2: 15:48

But where he started is in chapter nine, and it was with saying you know, he's the potter and we're the clay, and the clay can't say to the potter what are you doing? And if the potter wants to make some vessels for honor and some for dishonor, like that's his prerogative, he gets to choose that. And so we see in chapter nine this whole like argument for God's sovereignty, because he is the creator. And then in chapter 10, though, it says whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, and so you see this human responsibility. And so he's like okay, right here in chapter nine, we have sovereignty. In chapter 10, we have God, we have human responsibility. And then the conclusion at the end of chapter 11 is we can't understand these things you know.

Speaker 2: 16:39

And so I think it's like, when I think of God's sovereignty, I think, yes, he is absolutely in control, but at the same time, yes, we do have a response that we are to bring to him.

Speaker 2: 16:51

You know, whether that is in worship or whether that is in obedience, or, you know, tuning our hearts to listen, or giving him space to speak every day through his word, like we do have a responsibility. So there is his sovereignty, there is our responsibility, and we're never going to quite, on this side of heaven, understand that, that tangle between the two of those things you know. So I know that's a little off from what just pure, what God's sovereignty means, but I think it. It was interesting to me because it's. It is again one of those things that we're not, we don't always understand. Why does God allow something terrible to happen to people? You know, like, was that his fault or was it just somebody's decision that God couldn't control? You know, like, all of these things ask, we ask in our heads when it comes to God's sovereignty, and I think there's a certain level that we just, we have to just trust him.

Speaker 2: 17:52

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:53

Yeah, because in some way I mean it. It, that concept is so hard to wrap our brains around because even in those things, those bad things that happen, I mean God is a holy God. He is not culpable for sin. God is not culpable for sin. God is not culpable for sin. He's not culpable for those things and yet somehow he is sovereign over that.

Speaker 1: 18:18

And Romans 8, he is working all of those things together for those of us who trust Him for our good and his glory. That's the coffee mug verse, that we all know that if we could grab that and we're not going to understand that but if we can, like you said, trust that, then it will help as we struggle, as we encourage others, as we live in community with others, as we go through our ups and downs, to recognize that all of it is somehow being worked together for our good, even if it doesn't feel good. And His glory and the ultimate kingdom. I mean you either have to believe that God is sovereign over all things, everything, or he's sovereign over nothing. We can't pick and choose.

Speaker 2: 19:29

Right, and I think, for our own selves, for our own emotional, spiritual, mental well-being, we have to land somewhere. And we have to land somewhere is where scripture tells us to land, and that is that he is sovereign, he is in control, he has the ability to move men's hearts, like the scripture tells us that, and so we have to trust him. You know, and that can be hard, it can be scary, it can be challenging, but ultimately, like that's our safest place, that's the arc. You know where we are safe is when we say God, you are God, and that means that you know, you understand and I'm trusting in your goodness. That's where I'm going to live my life, and I, for one, like I, have to choose to do that. If I don't, I will be a basket case, like, literally, I would be a basket case.

Speaker 1: 20:28

I think we all would. I think that's why sometimes we are, because we forget.

Speaker 2: 20:32

Yes, yes Right.

Speaker 1: 20:34

Just like everything else, we forget these truths and that's why we're here, that's why we're talking about it, that's why we have to study it, that's why we're here, that's why we're talking about it, that's why we have to study it, that's why we have to stay in the Word, because life bears him with need, and knowing that he's the only one that can truly fill that need, he's the only one that can get us out of our basket case state of mind.

Speaker 1: 21:19

And when we see that, it also helps us to look forward to a dying world and see their basket caseness, making up words here and be able to say I have an answer for this Right, I have an answer for this. I serve a God who is holy and sovereign and many more things and can have the boldness to bring forth that answer to them. I just I need that in this new year. I need to be reminded of who God is and I need to be reminded of the purpose that it's because of the gospel and the fact that this world needs the gospel. And if I'm just feeling good about who God is in my life, it's not enough. I have to then take that forward and put feet on it and move into this world and remind them also and tell them who God is and who he can be for them as well.

Speaker 2: 22:25

So yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great reminder and a good place, I think, for us to wrap up today. As you said, there's so much we could talk about each one of these. There's just so much we haven't even really touched anything, but just the reminder that we need to trust in God's sovereignty and, like you said, give that hope to others, because this is the hope of the world. You know, it really and truly is, so let's share it.

Speaker 1: 22:56

We're digging a little deeper into these characteristics in Sojo Academy this month. If you're interested in doing that with us there's a link somewhere at sojoacademycom We'd love to have you join us. And if you're not joining us, or if you're listening to this way late, go and look at these characteristics for yourself in the Word and reflect on them, meditate on them, and we are excited to be discussing more of them throughout the month.

Speaker 2: 23:24

Yes, we sure are, and we'd love to have you. Bye, bye, everybody.

Speaker 1: 23:30

Thank you for listening to the Sojo Show. We are so grateful that you did and we're so thankful for the opportunity to spread the good news of the gospel in such a fun and unique way. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love it if you would leave us a rating or review wherever you're listening to this podcast or subscribe to the show. Also, tell your friends. That's the number one way we get people finding out about who we are, and we really appreciate you sharing the Sojo Show to the truth of God's word, sharing, laughing, glorifying God in all that we do and, hopefully, encouraging women from all over the world in the truth of the gospel. Talk to you, then.