The Natural with Paul McDonald and Ricky Furr

Join Paul McDonald and Ricky Furr as they discover God’s truth in the 1984 film, The Natural starring Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, and Glenn Close. This movie reveals important truth about how your enemy, the devil, operates. Paul and Ricky discuss the importance of living from your identity and how that provides an impact and presence to those around us, as well as looking at the power of questions.

Join us as we discover God’s truth in The Natural!

Quotes

• You have a gift. But if you rely too much on it, you’ll fail.

• All that is gold does not glitter, and not all those that wander are lost. (JRR Tolkein, Fellowship of the Ring) The enemy looks fair but feels foul.

• The story of your life is the story of the long and brutal assault on your heart by the one who knows what you could be and fears it (John Eldredge, Waking the Dead: The Glory of a Heart Fully Alive).

• Mom advice: Are you doing your best? Well, you can’t do better than your best.

• I don’t have enough, but you can have what I do have.

• It’s about who we are, not in spite of the wounds, but because of them.

• Every choice we make comes from fear or love (Allen Arnold).

• Our presence is more important than our production.

• When you walk in who you’re supposed to be, the people around you start to feed off that.

• We give God our sin, but not our story.

• Once we go through the first death, we do not fear the second.

• We continue to beat ourselves up non stop instead of accepting God’s grace and forgiveness and moving forward and asking what He wants us to do that day.

• You have to face what you could have been.

Themes

• Gifting and character

• The impact and power of a father’s voice

• Following God and the attacks of the enemy

• The assault on Roy’s heart and identity

• Navigating relationships

• Offering what we have

• The way the enemy operates: offers money, fame, security. If that doesn’t work, threatens with shame and condemnation

• The danger of losing our focus

• The power of questions

• The life we learn with and the life we live with after that

• Presence over production, making an impact on the world around us

• Time is the irreplaceable resource

• Living from our identity and becoming a ripple maker

• The necessity of our wounds

Questions to Ponder

• Are you doing your best? Remember, you can’t do better than your best.

• What voice are you listening to? Memo or Iris? Fear or love?

• What happened to you? Is life how you expected? What happened?

• Who are you invited to initiate alongside you?

• What is your identity?