God Made Podcast

I launched this podcast this week. The whole plan was to record it with my wife Kristi as co-host. Then she got sick. Episode one, solo, on a podcast about faith meeting real life — and real life showed up before I hit record.

This week's sermon was about choosing joy in the middle of trials from James 1:1-8. This episode takes that one step further — what does that actually look like when Monday hits? Not a re-preach. Just an honest conversation about the difference between joy and happiness, what we actually do instead of choosing joy, and the two things that work in a hard season that nobody wants to do.

Because Sunday doesn't fix everything.

📍 Northview Church — Kodak, Tennessee New episodes every week.

What is God Made Podcast?

Real conversations about following Jesus when life doesn't slow down — from a pastor who's still figuring it out too.

Pastor Greg Rains:

I preached about joy in trials this past Sunday, and then Sunday night, my wife got sick. Let me tell you why that matters. This podcast is supposed to be a a two person podcast, me and her doing this together, and the whole plan fell apart. So here I am. Rather than sitting here with my wife talking about this stuff with you, you get a solo episode, and this is episode one of a brand new podcast.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Real life showed up before I ever hit record.

Pastor Greg Rains:

But you know what? It's not an accident. That that's James one two.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Well, hey there. I am Greg Rains. I am the pastor of Northview Church in Kodak, Tennessee, and you are listening or watching the God Made Podcast. And here's what we wanna do on this podcast. We wanna take what happens on Sunday in the message that I preach on Sunday and talk about how do we live this out?

Pastor Greg Rains:

What does it look like every day during life? Here's what we're not

Pastor Greg Rains:

gonna do. I'm not gonna preach it again. We're just gonna have

Pastor Greg Rains:

a conversation. We're gonna talk. So what's that mean for you? That means if you weren't in the room with us Sunday, if you missed for some reason, or if you weren't able to watch it online, or or maybe this is the first time you've ever even heard of Northview Church, so you haven't heard any of our messages, that's okay. You're gonna be able to follow along and still engage with this because it's just a conversation about scripture and what God is doing in our life right now.

Pastor Greg Rains:

That's what the God Made Podcast is. The whole point is taking a sermon and talk about what it looks like when you're actually in the struggle of everyday life. So let me tell you kind of where I'm at in life right now. I'm not in a dramatic crisis. I know some of you joining me, you may be going through a very difficult time right now, maybe your life is upside down and you just need some encouragement, and I hope that you'll find that here.

Pastor Greg Rains:

And as a matter of fact, I would love to pray for you. You can drop a comment. You can send us an email. We actually have a prayer team who prays, goes to battle for you every single week if you have a prayer request. Send us one.

Pastor Greg Rains:

You don't have to be a part of our church. We would love to pray with you in the middle of that. I know some of you right now are in the middle of a trial.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Thankfully right now I'm not. There's not a dramatic crisis going on. I've been through them and I know that I'm gonna go through another one, but right now I'm just in the grind. What's that look like for me? I've got two kids.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Maybe you're a parent, so

Pastor Greg Rains:

you kinda you know what this looks like. You can identify. My kids are not real close in age. I have an eight year old daughter and I have a 14 year old son. Now both of them, they play sports.

Pastor Greg Rains:

My daughter plays basketball, so guess what I got to do this year? I got to learn how to be a basketball coach. I'm not a basketball coach, and we won two games. That's beside the point. Maybe next year we'll win three games.

Pastor Greg Rains:

We're gonna get better. Who knows? The point is it takes a lot of time. Practice is here. Gotta get my son back and forth to football practice.

Pastor Greg Rains:

All these things going on. And then when sports seasons aren't going on, even though they almost seem to be year round now, you've just got school every single day. There's all these things with school that that are just pulling at you and tugging at you all these different ways. We're right now in the final few weeks of school here in East Tennessee and all these things start lining up that you've gotta go take care of, performances, awards days, all these kind

Pastor Greg Rains:

of things going You're just worn out. But then on

Pastor Greg Rains:

top of that, I'm a pastor and I'm a pastor at a small church and I'm the only full time staff member. Now hear me when I say this, I've got some great staff members with me and we've got some great volunteers in our church, but nobody else is full time. They all have jobs. So I end up being the one who's picking up the slack, doing the admin work, mowing the yard, doing all those things on top of the regular duties of a pastor. And you know what happens in the middle of that?

Pastor Greg Rains:

And I want to be clear, I'm not complaining about that at all. I love what I get to do and the people I get to serve. But something happens in the middle of that, in the middle of kids, practices, school, just the church stuff. Margin begins to run out. So what in the middle of margin running out when you've got all

Pastor Greg Rains:

these things going on, family time starts to suffer.

Pastor Greg Rains:

A lot of times here's what family time looks like for us. It's, hey, let's jump in the car. We gotta run over to the church and take care of this. Or, hey, we need to ride down to Sam's Club because I gotta pick up all this stuff for the church. The church time, a lot of times, becomes family time.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Sometimes I worry about that. I don't want my kids to resent the church. Now, do. We are blessed almost every night. Well, no, it's not every night.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Probably four nights a week. We are able to have dinner together as a family. I treasure those times. But then after dinner, we're all tired, so we all kind of scatter,

Pastor Greg Rains:

and we all kind of veg out and do our own thing until bedtime. Family time suffers when busyness and the grind, it's all happening, but something else suffers in the middle of it. And it's something you probably wouldn't expect because I'm a pastor, but God time suffers. It's hard to find that time to sit down and spend with the Lord, to make sure you're digging into that relationship with the Lord and digging in through Scripture and learning more about him. Some weeks my time with God is simply preparing a sermon.

Pastor Greg Rains:

And I'll be honest, that's not okay. That's not how you grow in your walk with Jesus is just preparing to teach and preach. Family time, God time, they're both suffering because it's just a busy season. It's not a crisis, it's just a busy season.

Pastor Greg Rains:

So how do you find joy, as

Pastor Greg Rains:

James says in the trial? And the trial can be a major crisis, or it can just be that time where you don't have any more margin left. How do you find joy in that? What does it actually look like? Now now here's the reality.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Most of us, and probably most of you on the other side of this screen or listening to to this podcast, most of us were not in some sort of huge crisis right now. Some of you are, but most of us were

Pastor Greg Rains:

not. You've been through them. You will go through them again, but right now, things are kinda coasting okay, but you're exhausted. You're worn out. You walk through the door on Sunday mornings and you're running on fumes.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Or you don't walk through the door on Sunday mornings because you just need to sleep so you can do this again starting Monday. You're exhausted, you're running on fumes, you're tired, and you're just busy. But in the middle of that, we kinda gloss it over, and we don't really look at it as being a problem, really.

Pastor Greg Rains:

I know when you see a trial in your life, a big issue going on in your life, you can see that and know that it's a difficult time, but sometimes we just look at the everyday thing and say, well, it's life. We just gotta power through. And what do we do? James says in the middle of a trial, choose joy. Consider it joy, he says.

Pastor Greg Rains:

What do we do instead of that? What do we do instead of choosing joy? And the reality is it's not always obvious that we're doing that.

Pastor Greg Rains:

What what it looks like for some of us, and I see myself in this,

Pastor Greg Rains:

tonight you're gonna go home and you're gonna be tired, you're gonna sit down on your couch or in your recliner, and you're just gonna watch a movie because you need to laugh or you need to get lost in a story. Or maybe for you, it's just sitting down and you just pull out the phone and you start scrolling because you just wanna do something where your mind doesn't really have to work. But then you come across world news and you're like, everything's falling apart. So that doesn't really help. And it drives you deeper into a hole and you just need to to relax, take the edge off.

Pastor Greg Rains:

You have a drink, but then you have the extra drink. You feel numb.

Pastor Greg Rains:

But other times,

Pastor Greg Rains:

it's family. You use that family time, to just get busy, to

Pastor Greg Rains:

kind of mask everything else that's going on. And you look at it like, well, I'm at my kid's ball games or I'm at my kid's activities and that's good enough. Or or maybe it's work. You a lot of us, we're workaholics, and you spend a lot of time just trying to to pound away, making sure that all of the things at your job are taken care of, especially if you're a business owner. You just work all the time.

Pastor Greg Rains:

It's just busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. And here's the truth. Sometimes it's not all these other things. It's the grind that is the mask. You use it to cover up what's really going on in the background.

Pastor Greg Rains:

But it's masking. Powering through

Pastor Greg Rains:

isn't the same thing as trusting God. Just white knuckling your way through life trying to make sure everything's taken care of, that all the needs of your family are met, that all of your needs are met, that your job's taken care of, and that you just get to have a little entertainment time on the side. That's powering through white knuckling through life, it's not the same thing as trusting God. And if you claim you're a Christian, then right now you're missing out on that joy and that satisfaction that He has for you. So let me ask you this question,

Pastor Greg Rains:

what are you medicating right now? Or how are you medicating right now?

Pastor Greg Rains:

Life can be hard. And sometimes it's just the busyness that wears us down. So in the middle of that, what are we supposed to do? James says consider it joy. But life is difficult.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Life is a struggle. Sometimes they are really big things that happen, relationship issues. Some of you may be in a financial train wreck right now. Maybe it's your job that's just really difficult. Maybe it's health.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Maybe you've got some sort of diagnosis or a family member's really struggling with it, or maybe you are just overwhelmed with life and you're just busy. How do you, in the middle of that, how do you consider that joy like James says to do? Well, I have found two things that actually work in that area, in

Pastor Greg Rains:

that scenario, but it's two things that most people resist

Pastor Greg Rains:

or kind of blow over. Especially the first one that I'm gonna mention because it's this, whatever you're going through, matter how hard it is, don't do it alone. Now let me be clear, this is not a small group pitch. As a pastor and especially at our church, we really believe in the power of doing life together in a small group, we call them life groups, I mean, going through that together, that's a discipleship kind of thing. This is not a small group pitch.

Pastor Greg Rains:

This is for those of us when we're in a struggle, and maybe you're even in a small group but you just don't talk about it. This is when you're in those things and isolation in the middle of it just feels safer.

Pastor Greg Rains:

That's when the person who needs other people most never reaches out. It's hard. So here's what what I wanna encourage you to do. Find

Pastor Greg Rains:

somebody. Find somebody who's been through what you're going through. Find someone who you're just close to. Find someone who's just been through other trials so you know they've got experience dealing with all kinds of things. Just find somebody.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Anybody who you trust, and that's key, it's gotta be somebody you trust.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Find them and just talk. Just be raw, just

Pastor Greg Rains:

be honest. I haven't always had that and maybe you don't have that right now. Find somebody. I'm blessed right now. I I found somebody who we started kinda doing an accountability thing with, and now that group has actually grown.

Pastor Greg Rains:

It went from me and him to now there's six of us in this group, and we meet every single week. And that's all we do. Yeah, I mean, it's not all we do. We dig into Scripture and we talk about God and what God's doing in our life, but the majority of our time together each week when

Pastor Greg Rains:

we meet is just talking about how hard life is. This is

Pastor Greg Rains:

what I'm dealing with with my family. This is what I'm going through at work. This is my health struggle. This is even the sin that I'm struggling with.

Pastor Greg Rains:

We just talk. We're open. We're raw. We're honest.

Pastor Greg Rains:

And having something like that has helped me so much even in the

Pastor Greg Rains:

middle of this busy season of life. So that's number one. Don't do it alone. Find someone to do it with. And then number two is this.

Pastor Greg Rains:

It's gonna sound weird that

Pastor Greg Rains:

I say this is number two because I'm a pastor. This really should have been number one.

Pastor Greg Rains:

So just pretend I said this is number one, but here it is. Pray. I know it sounds really churchy, kinda almost Sunday schoolish, maybe even childish, just pray. Maybe that's why prayers always last. We exhaust everything else first.

Pastor Greg Rains:

We mask our problems. We do all these things. And then when it's all done and we're finally to the end of our rope, then

Pastor Greg Rains:

we pray. But prayer can't be last.

Pastor Greg Rains:

In reality, prayer needs to be first. But let

Pastor Greg Rains:

me be honest with you, I'm in a busy season, and there is sometimes a gap between what I preach on Sunday and what I practice through the week. Now don't take me wrong, there's not a moral gap. I'm not struggling in any of those areas right now. I'm not gonna lie and say I never have, but right now there's not a moral gap. It's a spiritual gap where I'll preach something on Sunday, and then the rest of the week I'm not following through with what I preached.

Pastor Greg Rains:

That whole practice what you preach kind of

Pastor Greg Rains:

thing, sometimes I fall short of that because I'm busy and this is what it looks like. That prayer time, my God time, it's when I'm gripping the steering wheel driving from one appointment to the other. It's quick, maybe a few minutes here and there while I'm also yelling at the driver who cut me off in traffic. As you can tell, not great prayer time. But it's what I got, so I do it, but it's not enough.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Prayer is so important. And maybe you're in

Pastor Greg Rains:

that season right now where prayer's on the back burner. Trust me when I tell you this, I go through it on a regular basis and those days when prayer is on

Pastor Greg Rains:

the back burner, my wife can tell, my kids can tell. My wife will call me out on it. You didn't pray today, did you? Do you have someone who can do

Pastor Greg Rains:

that for you where you're not going through it alone? Well, they'll say, hey, did you spend time with God today because you're acting like a jerk right now or you just seem overwhelmed right now.

Pastor Greg Rains:

You know, I know I'm a pastor, but I'm still figuring it out just like you are. I'm not some

Pastor Greg Rains:

some guy who has all this taken care

Pastor Greg Rains:

of and has everything figured out.

Pastor Greg Rains:

But I know this, life's not easy. Life is really hard. I preached this Sunday that joy isn't found after the fire, it's forged in the middle of it. You know what? I'm finding this week, even though it's early in the week, it's already proving it because this isn't going the way I planned.

Pastor Greg Rains:

This podcast was not supposed to be a solo episode. My wife is supposed to be sitting here next to me talking about what she got out of the message on Sunday and helping me see the gaps in it and helping me see how it's applying even to my life. It's not supposed to be me by myself,

Pastor Greg Rains:

but I trust Him. He's still forging something in the middle of that.

Pastor Greg Rains:

It's true for me this week,

Pastor Greg Rains:

and it's true for you right now. Joy isn't found after the fire. Joy is forged right in the middle of it. If this helps you at all, share this podcast with somebody. Send

Pastor Greg Rains:

a link to somebody who needs it. Subscribe to it on whatever podcast platform or YouTube. If you're listening, wherever you're at, if you're listening or watching, subscribe to the channel. That helps us out, and it'll help you out knowing when the next episode drops. And next week, jump back with us.

Pastor Greg Rains:

We'd love to spend each week with you as we're walking through the book of James together and just looking at how this really applies to life. We'd love for you to watch our sermons and hear what we're looking at from the theology side of it and the scriptural side of it, but this podcast is the life side of it. How does that sermon meet that everyday life struggle? So join us. Subscribe to this podcast and join us each week and hopefully it's gonna help you out.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Hopefully we can all walk through this together and we would love to hear some feedback from you, some comments from you. How is this helping you in your walk with Jesus? Does it encourage you? Let us know. I'm Greg Rains, and this is the pod made the pod made.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Yeah, I can't even get that right. That's how this week's going. This is the God Made Podcast.

Pastor Greg Rains:

Because Sunday doesn't fix everything. I'll see you next week.