In episode 231 of the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, host Greg Ryan delivers a sermon‑style teaching that weaves together several biblical concepts. He introduces a personal model called the “wheel in the middle of the wheel,” where the spirit is the central hub, the soul (mind, will, emotion) forms the spokes, and the body is the outer rim. The three primary spokes are health, wealth, and love, each of which can branch into many sub‑areas. Ryan stresses that a true Christian worldview must be filtered through Scripture (citing Matthew 6:33, 6:19, and the Sermon on the Mount) and that believers must balance grace and faith, using a salt analogy to illustrate that both are needed for a healthy spiritual life. He explains the “law of incrementalism,” likening spiritual growth to seedtime and harvest, and announces a downloadable health‑tracking spreadsheet that will help listeners apply incremental progress over a year. The episode also references Jesus’ teaching that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom (Matthew 19:23), tying wealth to the need for incremental, kingdom‑focused growth. The teaching concludes with a prayer and a call to return for the next episode.
Welcome to episode 231, In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.
Welcome to episode 231. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I want to continue to talk about seedtime and harvest, the kingdom of God, the law of incrementalism, and what it has to do with you. And all of that together, I am going to start talking about this wheel in the middle of the wheel. I know, I know, I've been talking about it for a minute. But I want you— I'm gonna have this picture on my website, and I've already got it, so I know it's there. But I'm gonna post this on here because as I talk about this wheel in the middle of the wheel, and I've got Zig Ziglar's Wheel of Life, and on Zig Ziglar's Wheel of Life there is a wheel in the middle of the wheel. He just did not define it. And I don't know if he just didn't see it like I'm seeing it, or his audience was a whole lot more broad. He was businessmen, and he used his influence influence to help businessmen. And I know that Zig was a Christian. At the end of all of his seminars, he would give his testimony and he would give an invitation. Anyone who didn't have Jesus as their Lord and Savior, Zig would allow you to come into a relationship with Jesus. And this man loved Jesus. This man taught the word of God through his teachings. He would not back down from the Bible. He taught Sunday school all the time. But he knew his audience and it was just businessmen and women and he just wanted to encourage them. I've got a different audience. My audience is Christian men and women. If you're not going to use the Bible as your prism or as the way you look at life, if you don't want to learn how to acquire a biblical worldview, you're not going to keep listening to this podcast. I'm going to irritate the fire out of you. You're probably going to roll your eyes and you're going to say, "Oh, the heck with that guy. I don't want nothing to do with this stupid stuff. So I'm not talking to just regular people. I'm not even talking to businessmen and women. I'm talking to Christians. And what I want to do is I want to show you a better way. This wheel in the middle of the wheel, this is true. I have seen it happen in my life, and I know with the teaching of my pastor and what I've experienced in my life, I know that this is as close to true as I can give you. That the wheel in the middle of the wheel is your spirit man. It is the way that you handle your spirit man and how you feed your soul. Your soul— and I just want you to understand that your body, your soul, and your spirit are three separate parts. They're all connected, but your spirit is that wheel in the middle of the wheel. That is your spirit man. And that is when God looks at you, he sees your spirit. And then the little spokes that go off of your spirit, now that is your soul. That's where most of us, quote, start setting goals, and that's where most of us get involved with our world, is through our soul, our mind, will, and emotion. And there are three major areas and those major areas are health, wealth, and love. If you could only have 3 spokes come off of your spirit man, it would be health, wealth, and love. You can bust 20 different spokes out of all of those things. Like health, you've got weight, you've got exercise, you've got all kinds of different areas of your life, you got diet. You know how big the health industry is and how many different niches go off of that. So every one of those niches could be a spoke in the health area of your life. You've got wealth, and then you've got debt. You've got how you handle your finances. You got investing. You've got business. That is a huge spoke and a huge wheel. And then love is your family. It's relationships. It's your social circles. It's all of the things that make life more enjoyable. At the end of all of that, if you can picture, is your body. Now your body, and I'm holding my two hands, if you can kind of picture you holding your two hands up like you're about to clap, and you've got 'em about 6 inches or 12 inches apart, about a foot apart. So you got your spirit man on your right side, your right hand, and your body is on your left. And if you can kind of turn those with your spirit man above your body, so your right hand is above your left hand, it's underneath, if you can kind of picture that, and then kind of put your fingers down like a spider where the spider would touch your left hand. Now, if you're driving or working out, imagine your left hand is facing up, your palm is facing up, and your right hand is coming down like a crane, like a spider, coming down and touching the palm of your left hand, and the back of your right hand is going to be the wheel in the middle of the wheel, and the little spider legs are your fingers and thumb coming down touching your left hand is the soul. It's kind of a gross picture or a simplistic picture of the wheel in the middle of the wheel, but if you can picture your spirit man is the small wheel, the spokes are your, your mind, will, and emotion, but it's, it's how you handle all of this information. And then it's where you're being fed. And I just want you to think about your left hand or your right hand. One of those two hands is going to feed your soul. Your left hand or your right hand. As you, as you look at yourself before you start clapping, it's about a foot apart. You're either going to take in your soul, your mind, will, and emotions going to take in what your 5 senses tell you or what your spirit tells you? I want to go on record, we are going to start learning how to use our biblical worldview, and we're going to go to Matthew 6:33. Of course we got to go there. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. It is wonderful advice. If you go back to Matthew 6:19. I mean, you can go all the way back to Matthew 5. This is the Sermon on the Mount. If you want to start at 5 and start reading, all of this stuff is going to be added unto you. We need to concentrate on God. If you want to pull this string, you know, there's a thread that kind of weaves through the whole Bible. There's a bunch of different strings. If you think about this tapestry, if this your whole life or this whole Bible is a tapestry and there's strings you pull it But one of the strings I believe is the faith string, and I think that's why it takes such a beating that even people in the Christian community get on to people for being, quote, faith people. And, you know, and I know I've talked about this before, but I am a faith person. Now, I am a grace person as well because I think it's You can't be one without the other, I don't think. You can be too far on the right-hand side of the road and you end up in a ditch, or you can be too far on the left-hand side of the road and you end up on a ditch. It's best if you stay in your lane, and it's— you are saved by grace through faith. That you got to have both. And I've talked about before, salt, where it combines sodium and chloride. If you took either one of those by itself, it's poison. But you put the two poisons together and it becomes a life-sustaining element, and we have to have salt. A lot of us, present company included, have too much salt in their diet, and that's a whole nother topic. If you have too much faith, or if you try to go too much by faith or just by grace— I see some of these grace people that go, "Well, it's just the grace of God." They think that anything that happens is just, "Well, it's just the grace of God that I got that. Well, it's just the grace of God." It's just like it's pure luck. Or that God's up there picking winners and losers. God is not up in heaven picking winners and losers. God loves everybody equally. He loves all of his kids, and he is trying through me, through his word, through other pastors and other teachers, that you have to use faith. If you have been justified, if you have been saved, the just shall live by faith. The justified shall live by faith. And this is the key to the Christian walk. We get people that go too far on this right-hand side that everything is faith, or you get people on too far on the left that everything is grace. No, it is a combination of grace and faith. You are saved by grace. That's what God does. Grace is what God has already done. Faith is how you appropriate what God has already done into your life. You use— and I'm going to go back to my little wheel in the middle of the wheel— You use your spirit man and your spirit. The words that I speak are spirit and they are life. You got to get into the Bible to start reading what the spirit is saying to you. So you use your spirit man to read this Bible that is a spiritual book and it's spiritual food, and then you start feeding your mind, will, and emotion with spiritual truths. And so those spiritual truths start taking hold, and then your body, it has to get in line. Now, here is the law of incrementalism. We're gonna have to go to the next episode, but I wanted to lay this foundation that this law of incrementalism is what takes time. It is the law of just taking time. And the spreadsheet that I talked about at the beginning of this episode, I'm gonna attach in the next episode, I'm sure. I probably just have it on the website. Remember I talked about the 3 spokes, health, wealth, and love?
The—
I'm gonna do the health spreadsheet, and it is gonna be a physical spreadsheet. If you're into exercising, even if you're not, you'll have the ability to download this spreadsheet. I'll talk about it in the next episode, but it's gonna give you the ability to fill your own numbers in and then look at it over the course of a year. It is God's way of doing things. One of the things that is wonderful about God is he sees the end from the beginning. So if you put in on this spreadsheet, if you put in a beginning number, you will be able to look at, at the end of a year, and you can see— and I don't want to spoil the fun of this, but in the next episode I'm going to kind of take you through this spreadsheet. But it is the law of incrementalism, how it will just grow over time. And that's the thing, the seed time and harvest, it is going to grow over time. And that is the thing that's going to keep most of you away from it, is that it requires time. And that is why when Jesus said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. If you're wondering where that's found, it is in Matthew 19:23. He just talked about the rich young ruler. Then Jesus said to his disciples, Assuredly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. And I just want that to sit with you over the weekend while you wait anxiously for my explanation of the law of incrementalism. But I wanna finish with a prayer. God, I thank you so much for this listener. I thank you for everything you're doing in his or her life, and I thank you for everything you're doing in my life. God, we thank you and we love you, and we ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you on the next episode.
Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.
