26 The Courage to Be Guided: Learning to Trust Yourself Again

The Courage to Be Guided: Learning to Trust Yourself Again

Many of us were taught to build our faith around guardrails — rules, boundaries, and constant self‑monitoring. They kept us safe for a season, but they were never meant to be the destination. In this episode, we explore what happens when the Spirit begins inviting us into something deeper: inner guidance, spiritual maturity, and the courage to trust the work God is doing within us.

We’ll talk about:

• why guardrails were helpful
• why they eventually become limiting
• why freedom feels scary
• how to discern what’s happening inside you
• and how the Spirit forms wisdom from the inside out

If you’ve ever wondered whether you can trust yourself… or whether freedom is safe… this episode will meet you gently and honestly.

Settle in. Take a breath. Let’s walk this together.

Transcript

Lisa Meador 0:42

Welcome back to Outside the Pulp Pit. As always, I'm glad you chose to click on this episode today. We are going to delve into a topic that I know some people are going to squirm and click out of, but that's okay because it's going to really click with some of you, and you are the ones that I'm talking to. This is a topic that I have held off going into, but you know, it's just been in my spirit so much lately. I'm going to go ahead and bring it out. We're going to sit with something that lives right at the intersection of our humanity, our faith, and our spiritual formation. It's the idea of living with guardrails, if you will, and eventually learning to live beyond them. Stay with me now, not recklessly, not throwing caution to the wind, but learning what it means to be guided from the inside instead of from the outside in. Now that shift, learning to trust the Spirit's work within you, can feel incredibly freeing and incredibly terrifying. So today we're going to talk about why guardrails were helpful and even necessary at some points, why they eventually become limiting, and why freedom can sometimes feel so scary and what scripture actually shows us about the human heart. I know, boy, you guys just started throwing scripture at me right away. That's all right. Y'all just put a pin in it. Because let's hear the whole topic before you're ready to cast a judgment here. So this might be a little bit longer episode. So settle in, take a breath, let your shoulders drop. We're gonna take this gently and slowly, I hope, but you guys know I get rushed. Sometimes I get excited about what we're talking about, and I start zipping right through things, but I'm gonna try to slow that down a little bit today. Now, many of us grew up in church cultures, very good, sincere cultures, where the emphasis was on monitoring ourselves, right? Monitoring our behavior, not understanding ourselves, but monitoring. So don't do this. Avoid that. Be careful of this. Make sure you stay inside these lines. You know, it wasn't malicious. Nobody was trying to, you know, be hurtful in that. It was the only framework that many leaders had. And it created what I call a guardrail faith, a faith that's built on external boundaries instead of internal formation. And guardrails do help you when you don't know yourself yet or you don't know how to discern desire. Maybe you don't know the difference between fear and conviction. That one took me a really long time. Maybe you don't feel safe inside your own body. I know some of y'all out there deal with this on a regular basis. Maybe you don't know how to recognize the spirit's guidance just yet. Guardrails really do help early on. They're kind of like training wheels. I think I like that imagery a little bit. They're like training wheels, but training reels were never meant to stay on the bike forever. So I'm gonna try to slow it down one more time because this part is is important. I want to say something because I believe it with all my heart. Being human is not the same as being sinful. Before the fall, God looked at humanity and said, Very good. This is in Genesis 1:31. So he said it was very good. This is his creation. So we have to think about this. So hum humanity being human in itself, this is God's creation and it's very good. And that did not get erased by sin. It got distorted, but not deleted. We see this throughout the Old Testament. David, he genuinely loved God, right? He was a man after God's own heart. And yet he committed some pretty terrible sins. Then we got Abraham, the father of our faith, right? Father Abraham, man, he believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness, yet he lied about Sarah twice. And let's, you know, not forget the whole Hagar situation. How about Moses, who talked with God face to face? That's in Exodus 33. But later down the road, he still acted in anger, and that's in Numbers 20. So they weren't split in half, they were human, bearing God's image and carrying fallen tendencies. And this matters because it means this: your humanity is not your enemy. Your fallenness is. I know some of y'all are checking out right now. If you've made it even with me this far, I know, but stay with me, y'all. I just keep trying to bring it home. We're gonna live in this human body until the day we die. Somewhere we've got to come to terms with that. How to live this spiritual life inside this human body. You know that humanity is not your enemy. I said that a moment ago, but your fallness is. And those are not the same thing. So slow down and listen. Get your notebook, hit pause, rewind. This is really important. When you begin to understand yourself, you realize not everything inside you is coming from the same place. Here's maybe a beautiful, a simple way to see it. Look, I'm not trying to get some doctrine out there. I'm just trying to come up with some terminology, some ways to help you understand yourself better, to help you understand your walk with the Lord. Okay, so I'm gonna throw in some terms here and bring it in. So y'all just open up your spirit and mind and let's let's listen. All right, human desire. And this is the part of you that God created as good. So the desire for connection, right? To be part of the body of Christ, to have a connection with another human being. How about beauty? That's a human desire, nature beauty, all kinds of beauty that we find in this world. Rest. Rest. That's a human desire. God created that. That's a scripture he promises us is rest, joy. There's another one. You know, I could think of so many scriptures for each of these terms, but I'm gonna try not to belabor the point. But these are human desires, these this joy. How about meaning and purpose? That's a human desire. That's part of how he created us so that we're not isolationists and living alone. And that ties right on into connection and then maybe the word belonging, right? We all have that desire. And these longings, these desires, these few little things I listed out there, these existed before sin. Why did you why do you think the Lord said it wasn't good for man to be alone? Right? So these things he created within man, these types of desires are just part of being human. I'm gonna bring in another one for you. How about patterned desire? You know, I did a couple of episodes about patterns and how patterns can be changed. You're not broken, you're just patterned, right? And patterns can be changed, can be repatterned. And these are the desires and reactions. Hear my words now, shaped by maybe your childhood, by trauma. Hey, let me just throw a little quick example. You've been in a car wreck. Boy, I bet you're nervous when you get in a car. Okay, you got some desires that are shaped, some patterns that have come up from that, right? I'm not going to get into explanations of each one. That was just a super simple one. But these are desires and reactions that were shaped by external experiences. Um, maybe neglect, fear, hypervigilance, staying on alert all the time, all kinds of survival strategies. Man, oh man, I could create a whole list of those. They're not sinful, they're not holy, they're simply unhealed. Are you starting to maybe pick up a little on what I'm talking about here? How about fallen desire? That's that old carnal mind of ours, the flesh, the part of us that resists God, that chooses self-exaltation, pursues unhealthy appetites, acts from pride or rebellion. So Paul talks about this in Romans 7. That's the part of us that does what we do not want to do. So here we go. Let's talk about another one. This is one y'all been waiting on, right? Spirit renewed desire. This is that inner transformation that only comes through Christ. This is what Jeremiah meant when he said God would write his law on our hearts. That's Jeremiah 31, 33. And this is the fruit of the spirit forming in you. When you begin to ask, which part of me is speaking right now? Everything changes. This is where the guardrails begin to lose their necessity because the spirit begins forming wisdom inside you. You know, I did go a long time, and I only looked at it as carnal versus spirit, carnal versus spirit. I mean, I true, look, so many y'all have heard me say it, but you know what? God can teach you more things. You can only walk in the knowledge you have, and then he can expand your knowledge if you let him. And he began to show me that some of these things I thought I was, well, I was struggling with fears and anxieties and things, but it wasn't a sin. I just needed healing. And it just came from a wounded place within me. So he didn't look at it as sin, like something I needed to repent of. It was, I just needed to recognize that I needed healing in that area and come to him and let his spirit heal me and make me whole there. So I don't spend my whole life acting from anxiety or urgency or fear. Maybe that'll help maybe bring it home a bit for you. And freedom, freedom can feel mighty scary, y'all. I'm telling you, it can. Let's let's name some of this part gently because y'all, I could be the poster child for this for real. If you've lived with guardrails your whole life, y'all, I I have built buffer zones around me. I got rubber baby buggy bumpers all around my life. I've got financial ones, I've got relationship ones, I've got time ones, I've got spiritual expectation ones. I have got so many buffers. Y'all can ask any member of my family for sure. We make a plan. I'm gonna plan. Oh my goodness, talk about when we went to Kenya. You talk about a buffer. Oh my word. Y'all, so many layers of my life. But you know what? I don't feel the need to overprepare anymore. Study for hours if I'm gonna minister. I mean, just so many things where I, but it wasn't from a right place. It was from a fear, an anxiety, a protection, a fear of the unknown, all of these things. And boy, when God started showing me this, that I just needed healing from some things early in my life that shaped the way I reacted, the way I built relationships, all of these things. Oh my goodness, it was beautiful and scary at the same time because then I began realizing I can take all that buffer down, right? I don't have to have a time buffer. I can just be reasonable and say, hey, this is a reasonable amount of time to get somewhere and that'll get me there in time to, you know, do what I need to do, but I don't have to build a you know six-month buffer in there. So, anyway, let me get back to how I wanted to break this down to you about freedom that can feel scary sometimes. If you've lived with guard's rails your whole life, you were taught don't trust yourself, right? Don't trust your desires and sure don't trust other people. Don't trust your emotions, don't trust your instincts. Man, we just live on guard. Hyper-vigilant is a word I use. But then the spirit begins to lead you toward freedom, toward inner guidance. And that feels unsafe because, like, what am I gonna do if I don't have those guardrails out there? Fear has been your safety zone for a long time. Monitoring has been comfort. Hypervigilance has felt like wisdom. Rules have felt like security. So when someone says God is forming maturity in you, it doesn't necessarily feel like good news. It feels like, oh man, I'm gonna mess this up. I'm going to slip. What if I can't trust myself? What if this freedom leads me away from God? But here is a truth I want you to hear me today. Freedom is not the absence of guidance. Freedom is the presence of the Spirit guiding you from within. I know that was big. So freedom is not the absence of guidance. Freedom is the presence of the Spirit of God guiding you from within. The problem with guardrails is not that they're bad, it's that they're external, right? They're on the outside of you. And they can restrain behavior, but they cannot heal your patterns, renew your desires, calm your nervous system, teach discernment. They can't produce love and they can't change your motives. Only the Spirit can do these things. And that's why Paul says, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. That's 2 Corinthians 3 17. So freedom isn't the removal of boundaries, freedom is inner transformation where the boundaries move inside you. Here's the heart of the matter. When you understand those parts of your inner experience that I just explained, when you understand that, you begin to recognize your patterns. When you begin to hear the difference between fear and discernment, when your humanity begins to feel safe instead of shameful, when the spirit begins forming wisdom within you, then guardrails begin to fall away. Not because you're rebellious, but because you're becoming mature. And that is the work of the spirit. Look, he wants to speak to us as mature. He wants to speak to us face to face. So it's not freedom without guidance, it's freedom with guidance just from the inside out. You know, today I just wanted to bring this out because it's been so pivotal in my walk with the Lord. And I want to ask you a couple of things. Where in your life are you still relying on guardrails? Because you don't yet trust the work God is doing within you? Are you living by a rule book? Are you worried about what other people are going to say or oh my gosh, I'm going to have to repent of this? And, you know, just the whole list of things. Is that what's governing your daily life? Where do you fear and discernment get tangled up, right? Boy, that one was a big one for me. Learning to discern between what God is having me be careful of, right? And what is fear driving my every move, scared to do anything in my life? And how about this one? You know, where does just being human, just having human natural desires, where does that feel unsafe for you? Where might God be inviting you into a deeper and more spacious freedom? So you're not bad for needing guardrails, and you're not weak for feeling afraid. You're just human and you're being transformed. So I wanted to put these things out there for you today. Maybe I'll do another episode and we'll explore it maybe a little bit more, what it might look like to live guided by the spirit within you and not by fear, not by hypervigilance, not by being on alert all the time, not by rigid rules, but by the one who is writing his life on your heart. I thank you for sitting with me today and listening and taking this in. Until next time.