Hi, I'm Susie Larson. Thanks for listening to this podcast from Susie Larson Live.

Welcome to Welcome to Sissy Larson live.

Welcome to Sissy L ever since, ever since we've got you left.

Welcome to Susie Larson Live, always honored to get to spend this time with you.

In fact, I look forward to bringing you conversations every single day that hopefully inspire you in your faith walk,

the deep in your understanding of God's Word and that heightens your awareness of his very real presence in your life.

Well, my guest today writes this. He says, do you ever feel like you're not growing in your faith the way you're supposed to? It turns out there are forces working against you, threats to your faith, trying to keep you from flourishing in your relationship with God. So today, we're going to talk about six threats that Jesus addresses in the parable of the sower and how we can overcome them. You want to know what they are? I'll give you a sneak peek. Pride, pain, worries, wealth, wants, and not waiting. So if you wonder why your faith doesn't seem to be working, you've come to the right place today. Author and Pastor Mike Novotny joins me today to talk about his new book, What's Big, Starts Small, Six Ways to Grow Great Faith. What's Big, starts small, six ways to grow great faith. Got five copies to give away today. You know the drill, if you've been listening long enough, but I know we get new listeners all the time, so here's the drill. You text the word book, just the word book, not in quotes, not with an exclamation point, just the word book to 877-933-24-84. And the reason we're so particular is because that word book will kick you back a link so you can enter the drawing. A quick announcement before we hear from Pastor Nebotany. We love to pray. And in our staff meeting, we pray for many of you by name but we know we've got many many

many listeners and on our website there is a link that says let us pray for you and what's so powerful

here is there prayer missionaries that just position themselves on that page and look for new prayer

requests you remain anonymous you click on that link put your prayer down but then you're notified

if someone prays for you you can find that on my faith radio.com. All right, let me tell you about my guest. We'll get him on the show. Mike Novotny's a pastor at the core. It's a church in downtown, Appleton, Wisconsin. He's a spiritual leader, and he leads, elite speaker for Time of grace. It's a media ministry that reaches a national TV audience of 400,000 a week and engages with

people more than 5 million times a month. Wow. He enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters,

continuing his streak of 37 years of playing organized soccer, running long distances, and reading

any nonfiction he can get his hands on. Pastor Mike, welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks so much

for having me, Susie.

Always great to chat with you. So you know this you've been on before. We start making it

personal, just wondering what has the Lord been talking to about these days? Oh, yes. Many things.

We have like four hours to answer that question. Yeah, right. Exactly. Just go. You got it.

I have so many things to fix. I feel like he's working on 10 different angles of me. Oh, man, no, there's a passage that jumped out at me. So I've been writing sermons in a month or so here at our church. We're going to spend three to four weeks talking about marriage and especially about adultery and, you know, squeeze enough Bible you know into that slot that you have to speak to the people of God and I'm sure you know

like it's complex and it's emotional and it's difficult and I'm trying to think of you know

people who've been cheated on people who cheated the, the shame, the pain, the hurt.

And I just came across a random, almost unrelated passage in the book of Hebrews.

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