What is The Undivided? | Episode 20

Thanks for listening to this week's episode! Today Pastor Johnny shares what The Undivided is and what counseling and discipleship work looks like in the ministry outside of the podcast. He digs into why so many addictive patterns are really attempts to medicate deep hurt. We talk about naming sin clearly while also walking back into our stories with God so our experiences stop defining our identity. 
• Naming pornography and other behaviors as sin while also seeing them as symptoms 
• Dopamine as a “cheat code” we use to avoid pain and grief 
• Sitting with people in their stories through tears, trauma, and regret 
• The broken arm analogy for counseling: we help set, God heals 
• Comparing what felt normal growing up to what Scripture calls healthy 
• Grieving the gap between what we needed and what we got 
• Submitting little t truth to Big T Truth and watching identity shift 
• Practical invitation for one-on-one or Zoom counseling and referrals when needed

Transcript

Welcome And Why This One’s Different

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey, Johnny Underwood here with the Undivided Podcast. Thank you for tuning in today, and I really hope you're blessed by this episode. Well, good afternoon, Undivided Podcast listeners. Johnny Underwood here, and I am so excited to do this 20th episode with you. Today we're going to do something a little different. We're going to jump into a little bit of what we do actually when we're not on a podcast here at the Undivided, as we get to just partner with individuals and couples and small groups at times around their stories.

Naming Sin And Reading Symptoms

SPEAKER_00 0:41

So Undivided is as a ministry is a ministry that engages men and women in the places that they hurt in their stories. So we look at places in individuals' lives, whether it's porn or it's other aspects of brokenness, and we look at it, one, we name it as sin. If you're looking at porn, you are sinning against God. But more than or equal to that, I should say, is we also see that these behaviors are also symptomatic to something. So what you experience with the undivided is a listening ear and a tuned heart that by God's guidance through his Holy Spirit will set with you in your story and by God's leading help you unpack your story, see where that hurt is, and we ask the questions of why are we going to dopamine? Why are we going to these uh addictions to medicate hurt? Uh hurt that we're really not built to carry. Heather and I say we get the opportunity to set in people's stories with them. It's really is an honor to do that. It's a joy to to set in someone's tears with them, literally to weep with them as they weep over the the hard places of their lives, whether that is childhood trauma, whether that is sin, dopamine addiction that they've gotten into out of curiosity. Uh, if it's well, we could just unpack a myriad

God Heals And We Help Set

SPEAKER_00 2:30

of ways that we get there. But the bottom line is that we get addicted to dopamine. And then that dopamine has a controlling impact on our lives. And then instead of setting in those hard places, when we get bumped, where that wound gets bumped, we go back to that addictive um dopamine that we have found a cheat code, again, whether that is and not the where we minister primarily is through pornography or fornication, or if you're married, into uh extramarital affairs or extramarital relationships, which are affairs, adultery. Uh, but there can also be other places that we can go to. That can be becoming a shopaholic, that can be being just a generous giver of your time or your other resources so that we look like good people or we're pleasers, right? We turn into these people pleasers. We can go to food, right? One of my favorite things uh is food. I really enjoy certain foods, Mexican food as I had today, delicious. Uh, but we can go to these places and we we medicate with them. So the gift that we give is the gift of setting with you in your story. And it's the opportunity we have to be a witness to what God's doing as He unpacks that hurt, as He ministers to it, and we get to walk beside you as healing happens, right? Um, my wife has this great analogy that I heard her say again today, that you know, like a doctor, if you were to break your arm, or your arm was to be broken, not that you would necessarily break your own arm, but if your arm were broken and you go to a doctor, that doctor doesn't heal your arm. Right? We I mean we would agree with that. The doctor doesn't heal your arm. What the doctor does is he sets that arm right, he sets it back in place, those bones back in place, and then he will build a cast or some sort of support mechanism to keep that arm in that uh reset proper place. That cast is then on your arm for an extended amount of time while that bone heals, right? Who heals that bone? God heals that bone. That's what goes on. We're not the healers. God is the healer by his spirit, but what is needful in that situation is a doctor to set that bone right so that the healing process can go forth. Right? If we have a broken bone and it doesn't get set right, it'll still fuse together many times, but it won't grow back properly, and we lose functionality and mobility and a myriad of other troubles that we could have based on that bone not being set correctly, then it's it fusing together in a way that is not what was needed or not proper for God's original design for that that bone. So, well, in the same way, this is what we're doing in with with uh this ministry here is we get to set in your story with you, we get to pray with you, we get to read your story as you do the story work and see what what we grew up with or what you

Normal Versus Healthy Family Patterns

SPEAKER_00 6:04

grew up in, right? As we have these questions, these prompts that we ask you to answer, and then we set in those and we take that story and we compare that story to to your normal, what you grew up in, your normal story to what we see in scripture as healthy. And we compare those two, we lay one over the other and we cess out what is different, and then we one acknowledge that one may have been normal but not healthy, and then we grieve in that gap between the two. It might have been normal to grow up in a single-parent home, but it may not have been healthy. It wasn't healthy. That's not what God designed as a family. He designed two parents, a mom and a dad, that are attuned to each other and attuned to God, to model a godly family and to rear you in the fear and the admonition of God and to model a holy relationship with each other and with God so that we would grow up and see that, and then that would become the normal, the standard, the holy standard that would be what we observed growing up, and then we would duplicate that as we grow, right? As we see this over and over again, day in, day out. We we experience this and go, that is healthy. And the principle that it would be at play there is that more is caught than taught, right? It's not just that your parents would be teaching you holy things, but they're modeling holy things, they're modeling this holy relationship, and so that becomes your holy normal and you're healthy. And so then when we get out in the world, the secular world, and we see other things, we compare it by nature, our nature, we would compare it to what we grew up in and go, wow, that's nothing like the home that I grew up in. I grew up in a godly home that doesn't seem holy. Our perspective would be based on this biblical model of godly living in the home that we grew up in. And for many of us, that's not our story. It doesn't mean that we didn't have well-intentioned parents. It didn't mean that we had evil parents. We may have had well-intentioned parents that didn't have that themselves and haven't healed to the point that they could offer that at that time that we were living in their homes, in those formative years from zero to 12, 13, right? Before puberty kicks in and we begin to look outward. You know, we we face away from our families more and more as we look into the world, we look into coaches and teachers and pastors and others that are then going to begin to speak into our life as we begin this process of developing and maturing in such a way that we're we're looking to do life outside the home, or we're we're preparing to look for life outside the home, right? Because on the other side of puberty, we have these desires that come on, come online to look for a spouse. Maybe not at 13, but we become aware of the opposite sex, and there's this interest that we have in the opposite sex, and this desire and these um this awareness that we have begins begins to develop and uh stimulate a motivation to get an education, to further education, to learn a trade, to engage uh with the more difficult things in life because we want to one day marry, we want one day to have our own family by God's design that is awakened in us at puberty, and then it's further developed as we walk down life and we go through our teenage years and then into our uh late teens and twenties, and we want to start a family, we want to date, we want to engage the opposite sex, and we start looking for that life mate, that life partner, right? As a man, I'm looking for that helpmate. As a wife, my wife was looking for that person that she could give herself to and come be a life partner with. And between the two of us, there's we form this holy, complete union of oneness that then God blesses, right, as we do that God's way, and he then gives us out of that holy union godly offspring. And this God-ordained cycle goes on and on and on. But that's not always our story. We grow up in some element of dysfunction that is can be normalized because that's what was normal to us. And so what we do with in the undivided is we we walk down your story with you, and we unpack where the normal may not have been healthy. And we, again, as I mentioned before, we grieve that gap with you, and we'll grieve with you the harm that you may have experienced in that. And we help, as God leads us, help make sense of where God has been and where God may be in your story in the in that moment. To then look at that and be able to look at it in truth and say, hey, I needed these things in my childhood, or I needed these things in this stage of my life, and they weren't there. How do I, how do I have that now? How do I heal to be able to move forward in a healthy way, in a God-honoring way, and walk towards completion, walk towards health and healing, so that I can have the relationship with God that He desires me to have, so that I can be that godly man or that godly woman that God desires me to be, so that I can be that godly husband, that godly wife. I can be that godly teenager, I can be that godly young man, young woman, that that God says that He that He not just says, but He calls me

Identity Shift Through God’s Truth

SPEAKER_00 12:08

to be. So many times as things go in our ministry, is it's coming back to engaging our story and bringing our story and submitting our story to God's truth. So God's truth being big T truth, our story being little T truth, right? I really did experience these things. They were evil, they were sinful, they were traumatic. But I take those little t truths and I submit them to God's truth, right? And as I'm holding these two things, one of the they're, if you will, they're on a scale and I have to choose. And I go, but these things are so real. I really did have these experiences. And nothing's gonna change that. You did have these experiences, but as we bring God's truth into this into light here, there's a paradigm shift that happens. And I start seeing this truth differently. This no longer begins that as I look into this truth and who God says I am and where he is in my story, there's this paradigm shift that happens, and I begin to see my identity as different. I don't longer see myself as an unwanted child or just as a stepson. I don't see myself as a molested little boy. Those things are true. I experienced these things. I was a stepson, I was molested as a child. I have had a porn addiction, I have had some traumatic things. I've had a first marriage in my life. These are all true, but in light of God's truth, these things pale. But they're not my identity. My identity is that I was intentionally and divinely created by my Heavenly Father. That with great intentionality, he ordered my conception. With great intentionality, there's a call of God on my life to do what I'm doing. And that uh the childhood experience that I have were all evil, sinful uh acts to snuff out God's call on my life. Right? The porn addiction that I had is my trying to medicate my childhood experiences and taking something that God designed to be holy and beautiful in the in the and he designed in me the attraction to the feminine, my wife specifically, and all the various times and places that I've gone and looked elsewhere to look at God's beauty or to medicate the the hurt that I have with dopamine through pornography. To be able to go, I did do those things, but that's no longer my identity. I'm not a pornographer 20 years clean from pornography addiction. I'm no longer a pornographer, if that's even a word. I'm now, I see myself in truth of who God says I am. I can acknowledge that I had these experiences, but this isn't, these are true of my actions or my experiences, but this is also true of my identity. And I carry this as who I am despite my experiences. My experiences are just after my experiences, they are not my identity. And that's the work that we get to do with people is walk down their experiences and say, this is true, you had that experience. We can grieve this with you, but this is also true. This is who God says you are, because he made you, he knows. And he didn't say, because you had these experiences, this is who you are. He says, Because I made you, this is who I ordained you to be. And then we walk that out, we wrestle with God there, and in that wrestling, we begin to walk out the truth of who he says we are, and we get to have adventure with him as the sons and daughters of God as we embrace the truth of our sonship or our daughtership. So our aim is to again walk beside you in that story. And we've been so blessed over these 10 years to get to do that with so many individuals and so many couples. And so it's one thing to look at what we do here on the podcast. Many times you're getting the the pastor version of me that that likes to unpack scripture and break it down and you know, through the the videos, um, make an effort at guiding us through discipleship. And again, as you think about that, as I even as I verbalize that, that's a lot of what we do here in our counseling office. It's not this uh clinical environment, it's this living room environment that we literally get to do some one-on-one discipleship in. Many times we the relationship is one like a pseudo-parent or a an intimate relationship as a pastor and a client as we're doing that one-on-one, grieving and getting into the word and unpacking God's word to see maybe I didn't have what it was I needed then, but how do I go ahead and get that now? And we watch God do just holy work in that space. We watch marriages get restored, we watch men and women get free of the traumatic experiences that they've had, not just the ones that they experienced in their child, but many times it's traumatic experiences that and traumas that we've brought upon ourselves, right? Whether that be a young woman who's walked through an abortion or abortions, walking through a rape experience that she never said anything about, or a man walking through uh a childhood molestation experience, that's my own story, right? I've had I've been very fortunate to have godly men walk down that story with me and unpack that with God. So walking through the uh the breaking loose of these the dopamine addiction that is found, and we can get to that cheat code through pornography. Again, part of my story and be able to walk men down that road and say, here's what it looks like to be free.

Invitation To Counseling And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 18:18

As I think about that, and as I just present that today, of what we do on the other side of this camera in the daily of our lives, I would just offer to you if that's something that you need, if that's something that you go, hey, that what you're describing is something that that speaks to me, or um as a man or as a woman, we don't cross gender minister, but my wife uh would love to, if you're a female, my wife would love to minister to you, hear your story, engage you in that place. If you're a man, I would love to engage you there. It is it is literally it's a joy, it's an honor to get to hear your story and then walk down your story with you as God gives us direction. So uh if that's you, again, I just invite you to go to theundivided.org. And there is just a simple form at the bottom of each of the pages, and you can put your name, your phone number, your email, and there's a little section for a message, just say, Hey, this is me. How do I set an appointment with you? Your your uh message today resonates with me, and this is me reaching out. Could someone give me a call back? Could someone email me back and talk about uh setting an appointment? We do one-on-ones here in our office. We also do Zoom uh counseling. And yes, we would we would love to talk to you, we would love to uh engage you there and see if we're a good fit for you, if you're a good fit for us. If we're not a good fit for you, we have other resources. Sometimes the best gift that we can give someone is a referral. So if undivided is not the ministry for you, the gift that we could give you is walking beside you as we help you find the right counselor, the right pastor, the right ministry that you might need to uh walk through the healing that you that you need to walk this life as a holy man or woman of God. So I know this is different than our usual podcast, uh, but please uh take this for what it's worth, reach out to us and uh thank you for dialing in today.

Prayer And Podcast Update

SPEAKER_00 20:28

So, with that, I'm gonna pray. Heavenly Father, I just thank you for this opportunity to share a little bit about what we do here at the Undivided. And Lord, I ask that you would move up on hearts, Father. Uh, if there is a need, if there is an opportunity that Heather and I can walk beside someone in their story, as brothers and sisters in Christ, that we could walk beside them and engage them, Father, and be instruments of uh guidance, direction as you do great work in their lives, Father. We welcome those opportunities, Father. Yes, it's hard work, God, we know that, but it is good work. There is something wonderful and glorious about men and women getting free uh and healing from the past. So, Father, we just ask that you would move upon them, Father, if we're if this is if this has resonated with them at all, and that Father, you would have them reach out to us so that we could serve them and serve you, Father, which is our aim. So, Lord, we love you and we thank you, and we just pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Hey guys, before we close, I just want to also mention that over the next month we're gonna take a break from our podcast and we're going to Be adding a second microphone to what we're doing. And so that as we come back in May, there will be sometimes, not every time, a second person on the uh on the set here with us, uh, with me. And we're gonna be doing some fun interviews of other ministries in town. Um, we're gonna have interviews of people that are willing to come in and just share parts of their story, uh, all for the sake and for all for the purpose of glorifying God and helping us as the body of Christ heal or know that there is healing, that our that our God is alive and well, and he is still doing great things here in the 21st century. So, God bless, and we look forward to seeing you in May.