No Regrets: Spend Less, Enjoy More | Nathan Lawson

Music.

Your next step.

Well, hopefully as you head into fall, things are off to a good start.

Students in new classes. If you're a teacher, classes with new students and

those students have parents whose emotional maturity is still yet unknown.

You've got a whole semester to find that out. It is going to be a great semester.

I hope it's already off to some fun things

because whenever it comes to going back to school of your house because

like ours there are backpacks and clothes and new

things and supplies that you get fresh pencils and

crowns and all kinds of those details and

we're going to be talking about today about stuff we're going to be talking

about like like not emotional stuff but like this kind of regular ordinary fill

your house stuff and i know there's a part of us when you come into church you

might be expecting you know there's a messages on forgiveness and courage.

There's messages on determination. There's messages on, you know,

God's unconditional love. And those are all true.

But at the same time, it's also true that God has a lot to say about what we do with our stuff.

That even though in the Bible, you've got the book of Psalms with those lofty

prayers, one that inspired one of the worship songs we did this morning,

right? The Lord is my shepherd.

I shall never be in need. We read out those prayers that say,

Lord, created me a clean heart renew a right spirit in

me but right next to it is that book of proverbs where

it's going to tell us to be careful with our words be careful with how we the

kind of friends that we hang out with and even be careful with our stuff now

i don't know if you noticed but i have upgraded this morning no longer drinking

water out of this old and dated reciprocal receptacle I mean,

now we have gone to a new insulated beverage container containing a full 40

ounces of hydration glory, able to keep it fully insulated until Jesus himself

returns right here and now.

But I wanted you to know, though, when I was picking out the one for this morning, I had options.

That one's going down. Whoa!

See, this was done on purpose. Some of you are on the edge right now,

and no, I don't know about that.

I had options. This is just from one corner of a closet in my house.

And I don't know about what your house is like, but we have a lot of stuff.

We go and buy plastic drawers to put inside of closets to increase the closet's

efficiency to hold more stuff. A garage is no longer enough.

Now my garage and perhaps yours also needs industrial shelving installed so

that we can maximize the amount of stuff that can be put there. We have lots of it.

And we're in a culture that seems to always have more, whether it's back to

school, more backpacks, more clothes, more options, more water bottles.

There's just an endless list from birthdays and gifts and friends gets together.

It seems to always creep in and you're trying to hold it at bay.

There's just so much of it.

And some of us, at least maybe in the back of your head, know that verse from

1 Timothy that says, but godliness with contentment is great gain, 1 Timothy 6.6.

But whether consciously or unconsciously, a lot of us kind of operate under

that principle that says, right, godliness with great gain will lead to contentment, right?

Once we just get things a little more settled, a little more sorted,

once we're finally able to grow grass in my yard, which is the apocalypse,

then we're going to feel more settled in this household. Good days are ahead.

But the danger is, as we're going to look today, that there's a lot of lies

surrounding our stuff and the culture that we find ourselves that is so pervasive.

It's so part of the atmosphere that we live in that if you're not careful,

you are going to just be pursuing an end that never actually comes.

There's this upgrade, this thing that we do where you scroll.

You add to cart, you're excited, you check out, and then you wait two days and

it's like Christmas in the middle of the week.

You get a box and it's great until it's pretty much like I thought it would be.

And it goes aside and then we scroll again and we're excited because there's

a new option to upgrade and we find it happening over and over again.

And so we have so much stuff and we're almost happy.

There's a proverb that we'll use as our kickoff for today. Proverbs 21, 17.

Here's what it says. Whoever loves pleasure will become poor.

Whoever loves wine and oil will never be rich.

Now, this is an important one to write down because it's not like the Bible

is anti, right? Enjoying olive oil.

And if Jesus's first miracle at Cana is any indication, wine doesn't seem to be off limits either.

But yet in this verse, it talks about pursuing those things as the pursuit of

pleasure ultimately leaves us poor. I mean, financially, if we were to take

consumer debt seriously, we know that there's a part of that that's true.

Spending on money on to get nicer couches and nicer vacations and bigger TVs

than we need can lead to all kinds of financial pressure.

Now throughout this message, I just want to give the footnote here.

There are many things that can lead to financial pressure, right?

People can lose jobs, not because of anything they did wrong,

but because of the economy.

People can be diagnosed with medical conditions that are both expensive and

make it difficult to work.

People can graduate with degrees they can't find jobs in. And so they're struggling to get by.

So this isn't the only route to financial trouble, but this is definitely one

that you have a lot of control over that the things we choose to purchase.

And what this is saying is that the pursuit of pleasure through stuff will leave you poor.

I mean, certainly your bank account will be poor, but ultimately that has a

way of spilling over into everything else relationships and the way we parent

and the stress that we feel in our lives wrapped up in our finances,

the number one stated cause of divorce in the United States is money.

And it would be a shame if we allowed this one area to go unchecked and unchallenged,

to allow it to lead us to more and more financial trouble that began to spill

out into relationships that we really love and care about.

But it was all because of the pursuit of more and more and more stuff.

So we're going to talk about that a little bit today that we want to be,

we want to talk about the challenges of culture and some of the myths we find ourselves up against.

That we're in a culture that just has made it so much easier to acquire so much more.

Do you remember back in the day when you had to like drive to

Blockbuster like as a part of your weekend routine and

physically find a movie like holy cow the stone age can you just imagine the

time involved in doing that you had to walk amongst the aisle and pick it up

do you remember back when tvs that were 30 inches were huge in a household and

now it feels like you're staring at a cell phone somebody's mounted at the front of the room.

There's just all these options to get knives that are sharper than ever and

cars that run smoother than ever and coolers that are more equipped than ever before.

And yet there's a part of us that still feels a bit bored with it.

There's only so many restaurants you can go to where it starts to feel like

a little bit like you're just spinning a wheel.

And that promise and that excitement for new things always is a little bit further off.

Advertisers showing you that for just an admission price of $30,

your family can have a memory like never before. order now.

I think one of the dangers we have to go against is that the culture that some

of us imagine that we live in, we know that that is not a problem.

That unlike what Madonna said, we are not all materialists living in a material world.

That we can pride ourselves that we are not Scrooge McDuck or Ebenezer Scrooge,

clutching our possessions in tight, cold-fisted piles where our money goes up

and we try to swim in it, which sounds more painful than it looked like on the DuckTales show.

But because we're not the Scrooge, we can imagine that we're immune from it.

I don't hang on to my stuff. I don't feel anything for it in particular.

The twist is that we don't live in a materialistic culture. We live in a consumer culture.

And although a materialist may want more stuff, we don't want more stuff.

We just want something else.

A consumer culture is defined by a restlessness, a desire to throw away the

phone, the shoes, the whatever, because there is an upgrade just around the

corner that promises better, more, faster, and more efficient.

And unfortunately, as it goes even faster in our culture and the orders seem

to be piling up as the delivery trucks circle our block multiple companies multiple times a day,

we know the truth that we are probably going to be disappointed with what we

haven't even ordered yet.

I just think it's so apt that that mantra of Amazon, satisfaction guaranteed

with a footnote for 30 days, then you're stuck with it.

That there's just a truth that after about 30 days and you're bored with it

and it's worn out and it's not working anymore, you're like,

I tell you what, what we need to do is order something else.

And if you're not careful, you're going to allow a culture around you to sell

you on what it is that drives this in the first place.

It's not just the pursuit of these individual products and their promise of

upgrade ultimately is the promise that you could be happier,

that you would find more joy.

That the teens who sit at home because they feel bored because their parents

won't buy them this phone or that system or that game and if I only had it have

not yet lived long enough to realize that all of it is a bankrupt pursuit offering

brief moments of isolated happiness that simply is more disappointing as you get older.

We realize that it's not just clutter that even though most of us could probably

benefit from con marion our house and decluttering and only keeping the things which spark joy,

it wouldn't change the fact that we will fill it up quickly with a restless

pursuit of something else, because it's not just clutter. It's a type of captivity.

It is what advertisers have sold us over and over again, that I know with confidence that I could say,

liberty, liberty, and you are already thinking of the jingle,

because we are pervaded by a nonstop onslaught of advertisements for experiences

and equipment and hobbies.

And that comes with a high price tag. So if only you give a little more, it'll arrive.

And so I think in the midst of all of us, as we start to listen to Proverbs,

knowing that our world is so different from theirs, they couldn't even imagine

the wealth that we find ourselves in.

And yet we seem to be one of the most bored and dissatisfied of all generations.

We have to ask what happened and what's going on.

Why are we not more satisfied than we should be?

I mean, look at this upgrade. Just a week ago, I was drinking water out of a

ceramic container, like the Roman Empire drank out of ceramic containers.

This is so primitive and backwards, and now I've been brought into the 21st

century, and look at the glory that you can now behold.

I wonder, though, as we consider for just a moment, the first challenge that

we want to make is not only that we find ourselves not surrounded just by clutter,

but by a captivity defined by restlessness and the pursuit of something more,

but also that a part of us realizes our definition of better perhaps needs some examining.

The second movement in our message today, we want to look at this new definition

of better that Proverbs wants us to consider, because culture constantly sells

us that upgrade on the knowledge that it will be better,

that technology promises just around the bend things will get so much better than ever before.

Few things to me capture it more than the razor when it, the humble razor,

when it came out, who remembers when the Mach three razor came out 1998 before

that you, those pathetic people use two bladed razors.

Like they just didn't know how good it was going to be in the days ahead.

And so 1998, me and my young high school self shaving off peach fuzz,

like never before the experience promised a better shave than man has known

up to this time, but not to be outdone another company whose name I'm not going

to say, because I'm worried how it'll come up on closed captioning,

invented the Quattro razor.

Yeah, that's right. They pulled out Latin. That's how fancy we're going now.

Four blades. 25% better shaving experience for you in your household,

available in an aisle near you. Four blades on a single razor.

Well, Gillette, now looking down at their silly Mach 3 from the 90s,

now in the 2000s, invented the Gillette Fusion.

Five blades for your face. We are not just shaving anymore. We are exfoliating. We are sanding.

We are buffing and polishing your face into that chiseled chin.

It promises so much. My chin never looks any like it does in those commercials.

I got to be honest with you.

And in case you're wondering, oh yeah, Barbasol said five blades.

If you want to live in the stone age, consider instead the Barbasol six blade

experience. Mail ordered from Walmart can be in your house in but one day of shipping.

It's an upgrade. Sort of.

What do we mean by better, exactly? You stop to ask that sometimes.

I mean, on paper, that is more technology. It's laser-cut titanium,

whatever. I mean, it is fancier. But, like, is it better?

Look at this. Look at this glorious beverage container.

Mm. It's so good.

It promises, as I've been told by people when they upgrade, explaining to me

the features that justify its purchase.

It keeps water cold for 24 hours, 40 ounces.

Never mind that most of us grew up with an eight ounce milk and that was our

lunch beverage and we seemed to survive. Let's just leave that alone for a second.

24 hours of cold promised. And it makes me now, the cynical part of me wants

to ask, do they have water where you work?

Are you walking through a lot of deserts where you need to clutch a single container?

So that the next morning you can have the assurance that you're not without?

Because, I mean, I have water at both my house and my work, and I'll tell you what I'm going to do.

I'm going to drink this probably before lunch. I mean, I can't think of a time

when I didn't, and guess what I'm going to do at lunch?

I'm going to fill it up and probably drink it before I get home.

I don't know if I need 24 hours.

Is it better? I mean, it's fancier technology, but is it doing anything that

I actually need in my life?

Once you're saying that you're not going to keep that water there for more than

six hours, you know that. So I don't care if it's 24, 36, or lo and behold, you know it's coming.

That hundred hour promise on a water bottle, what would make that better?

I think you need to be careful. Because we live in the culture that constantly

says that because of this feature and that option, it's simply better.

And what Proverbs is going to challenge us on is this verse we want to look

at right here. It's going to say, better a dry crust with peace and quiet than

a house full of feasting with strife.

Hold on to that verse for just a moment, what it's saying in its cultural context.

It says, you need to change the way that you use the word better.

Otherwise, you'll set yourself up for a terrible trade. Because better,

he's going to say, is a crust of bread.

Now, what he's saying is, according to my cultural definition,

where people who don't challenge it, They're going to say, well,

this is obviously the worst option is the crust of bread.

And the better option clearly is the large house that is feasting and there's an abundance.

And what Proverbs is saying is you need to be more discerning about what exactly

you mean by the word better.

Because you've got to be careful for trading joy for junk, right?

For trading contentment for chaos.

And this is saying, if you got this, a lice house that according to the outside

is exactly what you should be aiming

for. but behind you were wrecked relationships and debt and problems.

You have not made a better choice, but a worse one.

That what the proverb is going to say in its own cultural package,

and again, we have to kind of communicate the distance, but underlying it is

that we need a new definition of what exactly we mean by better.

It says this as well, better is a little fear of the Lord than great wealth with turmoil.

Again, it says, I know left unchallenged, we have a definition of what better

is, how we know if we're doing well and how successful that we are.

But if you are not careful, you will accept a definition that has been crafted

for you by advertisers who are more than happy to take your money with the promise.

And so God, this is not going to say that money is bad. This is not going to

say it's wrong to enjoy yourself.

In fact, I grew up in a church that tended to answer this problem with a very

simplistic answer that material things are bad and spiritual things are good, right?

Material things are for those carnal Christians that don't understand the weight of spiritual things.

You need to give in spiritual things and that will keep you from,

you know, getting distracted by stuff.

The problem with that argument, not first of which is that we would go to a

steakhouse right after church that always seem to undercut the message just a smidgen.

But even more to the point, have you ever tried to cut that razor blade on your

life exactly on where that's going to work out?

Like, I'm pretty sure that the ways that you connect with your friends and family

are when you're having those joy-filled moments and you are eating a nice meal together.

You are having time to create and relax together. I don't think you can draw

a line in your life and say, this is the time when we stopped doing physical

things and only did spiritual things.

That's the kind of attitude where if you want to do it, your life will become

more boring and more hollow and very irritating to everyone else around you.

That God looked down at the garden and the world that he made and he said it

was good. And I've put the plants here for you to enjoy.

And I want you to cultivate them so they're thriving.

When he said to Adam, I want you to help this garden grow. I want you to make

so many mangoes grow in here that you don't even know what to do with them.

Like, that's what I want to see in your life.

Joy filled. I'm not saying that, that these things that we have to get sometimes

are all bad. I'm just asking that we don't fall for the illusion because sometimes

the cheaper thing is far richer.

Sometimes older things that are a bit worn out are still plenty good enough

and have life left in them. They're a bit deeper.

Sometimes a simpler option is simply the one that is better for the life that God has given you.

And if you stopped and thought for just a moment about, well,

what would it look like if I were to listen to a different voice for better.

What is that I'm hoping to get from my family? I can tell you that the debt

that people get themselves in is rarely because they wanted to get into debt.

It's because they wanted to be happy.

They were trying to be joy-filled. I just wanted to give my kids what I didn't

have. We were just trying to give an experience.

We were just thought if we bought, you know, if we did this play,

went to this place and got this entertainment system, that it would make all the difference.

And if you take a moment to step back, what the scripture is calling us to is not a more austere life.

They're not suggesting that if you just suck it up and stop wanting good things,

that life will go better for you. That's not what it's saying. Don't miss my point.

It's saying that better is defined differently for those who follow in Jesus's footsteps.

And that if we thought about what's driving the constant upgrade,

the dissatisfaction, it's that it's our hearts are more restless than we want to admit.

The promise that we want, that oftentimes I feel like my life is a reflection of that book from Dr.

Seuss, Cat in the Hat, I sent out in an email this last week.

And if you don't remember that story, that classic tale that rhymed,

so even if you were as bad at reading as I was, you could still read smoothly

and basically predict the next word.

But in that book, Sally and we later find out in the TV show,

Conrad are sitting there staring out the window of a house, bored.

I'm bored. There's nothing to play and there's nothing to do.

And then in pops the cat in the hat, kabam, and he goes everywhere and he starts

playing with stuff that was already present.

And he has that line in it that says, look at me, look at me,

look at me now. It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how.

But I think part of what we have to recognize is that our culture is surrounded

because we feel bored and restless and they stand in the gap offering an upgrade

or an expense or a thing we could do.

And yet the return on the investment is so small that instead we have to say,

what if we purchase things for a different reason and with a different rubric?

I'm not saying that you should buy the cheapest things available.

A bicycle that you buy that falls apart before the month is out is terrible

for all persons involved, not least of which the kid who has to wreck on it. Like, that's not good.

But if you were to write a bell curve of joy, how much dollar for dollar am

I going to improve the biking experience?

I can promise you it is exponentially diminishing quickly that a belt that falls

apart because it's just cheap plastic spray painted with glue and fake leather

is a terrible thing that will barely make it out the weekend.

But a $30 belt holds your pants up just as well as a $300 belt.

Why did I purchase this other one?

Because our hearts are restless and we were easy targets.

Augustine has this famous line in his book, Confession, our hearts are restless

till they find their rest in you.

It would be hard to sell those kinds of products to somebody at peace.

It's just hard to do it. For someone who's content and happy and joy filled,

they're just hard to convince that this brand will make all the difference on

them. But it's easy to feel that way.

To believe that if I was walking down the hall of my high school and it had

that brand on the jacket when I was in high school, it was amber crumb and Fitch.

I don't know what it is now. I'm sure there's new brands, but if I could just

have that on the jacket, oh, it would feel so cool and amazing.

And we believe a line about what would make us happy that never seems to deliver.

So what I'm asking you for is not that you settle for less. I'm not suggesting you settle for less.

I'm just asking that you redefine what more really looks like in your life.

And part of it is this recognition that we can stop chasing an illusion and

start choosing a better version of what better is toward happiness and joy and life.

Look at this next thing that I think God wants us to call us toward,

and that is the reality that fun is a skill.

And it's not a side skill. It's a core skill because you are put on this earth

to experience life with other people and express your creativity alongside of them.

And while it is true that your faith will grow in moments of crisis,

it will often do so because of relationships you formed with other people while having fun.

The conversations that you get

to communicate life to your kids will not always be moments of disaster.

Very often, they will be moments where there was joy and you had a chance to

connect when there was no agenda.

Fun is a skill. This proverb comes to mind, Proverbs 15 at 15.

I want you to just look at the first part of it. It says, all the days of the

oppressed are wretched, but I haven't written the ending up here yet.

How do you think this proverb is going to end?

What's the opposite? Well, the days of the oppressed are wicked.

So it's probably going to say something like the days of people who are not

oppressed are way more enjoyable, which sounds true.

Like, why would you want to be oppressed? That sounds very uncomfortable.

But what it says is unexpected and life-giving because here's what it actually says.

All the days of the oppressed are wretched, but the cheerful heart has a continual feast.

That's an unexpected answer, isn't it? I mean, oppressed doesn't even sound like it's your fault.

Bad things are happening to me. And what it seems to suggest is that's true.

It is terrible when bad things happen to you. But the heart that you had while

you were there can make it far worse.

And that a cheerful heart finds a way to have a feast wherever it happens to be.

The answer is unexpected and shocking. It confronts us a little bit.

Because it does mean that part of the boredom that we have, the restlessness,

the dissatisfaction, is at

least in part because we don't have a good skill set on how to make fun.

That the problem you're having in life to feel bored isn't just your budget,

and it's not your parents or the classes you happen to be in.

Part of it is a skill set that some of us are a bit rusty in developing.

But the secret is that because this is true, there is something life-changing

and potentially very, very helpful for you as you go forward to not say,

because I'm feeling bored, I have to pay for this or pay for this.

What if fun was a skill that you developed to be able to create joy wherever you happen to be?

Think about a moment when somebody came into your house who has a high skill level of fun.

You know who they are. You're thinking of them right now. When they show up, fun happens, right?

They take the same deck of cards that you had. They take the same game that

was there before they showed up. And suddenly you are playing a game. You are laughing.

You're sharing life. And what changed? It was the same stuff.

It was the same environment. But what changed is somebody showed up that recognized

that fun is a mindset that I bring to the room, not just something you consume.

Fun is a skill set. My wife says often that fun is where formation happens.

And it is of life giving importance that you recognize that you are not subject

to your bank account balance on how much joy and fun you can have in life.

I am prone to be a more serious person. So if I tell my kids they need to do

the dishes, they're not doing it. Solution.

Children, obey your parents in the Lord for it is right. We're going to pull out that heavy verse.

We got lightning in one hand, thunder in the other.

Like we got some punishments. We can ratchet this up thing. You guys got to

be respond, fill this house with stuff. And here you are being bored.

You guys act bored all the time.

But if I were being honest, it would be embarrassing if it wasn't also me.

That I just zone out evenings and watch shows or believe that one more restaurant

will make all the difference. I am just as listless. It's just by a different name.

What would it look like if before dishes you said to that group of teens,

one or more, Hey, I'll tell you what, let's play a game of Slapjack.

Me and you, a deck of cards, we grab it, put it right here, we're going to play Slapjack.

Loser does the dishes. but because you're making me do Slapjack you must now

say hail to the chief which would be me while you do the dishes.

Let's see how this game goes.

Now you know what would happen. You know what would happen.

It would turn the room from no fun to what?

To fun. Now think about what that means then is that fun is a skill that you bring with you.

It's something that you can take with you into situations where people have

bought in a narrative that they don't have that I can't have fun because I don't

have the PlayStation 4 or 5.

I've only got the 2 and they've just convinced themselves that somehow the fact

that God put infinity of his own presence into your life and creativity and

all this that you could do and instead you've...

You've outsourced it to gadgets. Fun is possible because you can choose joy

wherever you happen to be at.

Just if you got nothing else from this message, but you believed it earlier,

you will not only save tens of thousands of dollars, you will connect with people

deeper and you will find it in places where everyone else says,

I don't know how you made waiting in line fun.

I find myself always taking notes on my wife. It was a way of making fun.

We need to recognize that fun is a mindset before it's the moment.

It's the posture of the heart you have as you show up. Remember this verse,

a slugger's appetite, Proverbs 13, 4, is never filled.

But the desires of the diligent are satisfied.

Now, of course, this proverb is about work and how we get moved forward in our

careers because we're willing to do the hard work. But there's something underneath it as well.

A slugger, a lazy person, has all these, have the same desires as a diligent person.

They just don't want to move at all and change anything about how they're doing

life. They just keep thinking it's just going to show up in this living room.

And so their desires are never satisfied.

What has to change is how we show up.

One of the things I think the last that we want to look at is that not only

is fun is a skill, but as you take a step back and reflect in your life on a

narrative that I promise you is as countercultural as exists right now,

is that creating brings more joy than consuming.

That creating brings more joy than consuming. and realizing that this is true,

not only is fun a skill, but the more that you can channel your own creativity

into what you're doing, the more

happiness and joy and connection you'll experience in your activities.

We were in Africa not too long ago.

And we were over there and we had one of those rainy afternoons.

Everyone's inside and we have an iPad, which by local standards was amazing.

And so here my kids are with some of their friends and they have this iPad and

let's do a little thought experiment.

They could, because we had Wi-Fi, which was new after the World Cup in 2010,

the good internet in Africa.

They could watch Netflix for an hour with their friends and laugh and watch a fun show.

Or what they did is they put the iPad on a stand and they set out some Legos

and they do stop motion, take pictures, move the Lego, take a picture,

move the Lego, take a picture.

They were going to create their own show complete with soundtrack.

And yes, I have the recording. I'm not going to play it because they're in here.

But like, they spent one hour making a show. Now, I'm just going to ask you a second.

Which, not just more spiritually right, which one is more fun?

Watching or making something?

You know in your heart that it's when you make something. And it doesn't,

on the surface, it goes against everything our culture is selling right now

because the show is designed to be funny.

Thousands of dollars have made the jokes perfectly timed for your level and demographic.

They're humorous. It requires no effort from you. It's just a press of a button

and look at it. You can be happy.

But the happiness it offers is the lowest level of enjoyment possible.

And it doesn't mean that there aren't times when consuming something is good.

I mean, it's fun to watch shows with other people, But what we have to recognize

is that when we create something and we express more of who we are,

we will always be more happy because of the experience.

And even though we all know that the kid plays with the box more than the educational

toy we got because it was the highest recommended on Wirecutter,

we still often don't buy the boxes to make the fort.

We buy the gadget because that is what the blog I followed said to do.

We have to remember that creating just brings more joy than consuming.

And that fun with is always better than fun what?

That if you think about what is it that I'm trying to get out of these experiences,

it's that fun with is simply a far better than fun what?

That if you had the option to have a $12 cup of coffee where the beans were

flown straight from Ethiopia and blessed on the way in and ground individually,

but you consumed it by yourself, you will have less enjoyment than if you consume

a dollar cup of coffee from 7-Eleven with an old friend that you're catching up with.

And when you start recognizing that it's really more about the with than it

is the what, that this is where happiness is, this is where memories are made,

this is what matters to me.

It is nothing wrong with having certain things that your family likes and your does.

Nothing wrong with that, but you have to make sure that the narrative you're

playing in your head about what it is that we're chasing after is rooted in

reality, that God made you with far more capacity than any gadget could substitute.

And there's far more joy and happiness possible when you're willing to show up.

The party starts when you stop trying to buy fun and start building it.

That as fun as it is to eat a fine meal, and I like a fine meal as the next

person, especially at a restaurant where someone else is doing the dishes,

praise Jesus on those nights, that's great.

But if I'm wanting to be truly happy, I've never had a time where I met with

other people and made a meal together, where we don't remember it more later.

Because to create always brings more joy than to consume by itself.

I love listening to music. We're in a generation of headphones.

You could basically murder somebody at Planet Fitness, and I don't think anyone

would notice at this point.

We have perfected noise cancellation to the oomph degree at this point.

Everyone is in their own little bubble of music, and I like music as much as the next person.

But I don't care how expensive the music is that you're listening to,

and the service that you're using, and the speakers, a $500 properly tuned by engineers, who knows?

I can tell you it will always be lower than when you learn to play a little bit of music on your own.

It is a lot of work to put that work into learning to play a guitar,

learning to sing when your voice doesn't feel right.

But I can promise you that if you left culture for a second and said,

consuming it at higher and higher levels of fidelity is never going to pay off

as well as when you put in the work to say, I want to create and be a part of this.

I need for myself to be in it because God put in your spirit, his own image.

And when you find ways to express that creativity, your father delights in what

he sees. and it's a one-of-a-kind experience.

I don't know what this is going to look like as you walk into this fall.

I hope it sparks some great conversations as you go out of here.

What have I been trying to upgrade, and what hobby have I been kind of overly

obsessing about, which honestly is probably not going to get any better.

My golf swing will probably not improve that much at this point.

I think I'm pretty much peaked out at terrible. Like, that's probably where I'm going to be.

And what I instead need to do is say, how am I going to do more things with other people this fall?

How am I instead, instead of just consuming everything that we do,

just find one or two moments as a family over the next couple of weeks to say,

there's nothing wrong with watching a movie as a family.

But how about one night this week, we try to create something.

Let's get together with our small group and create a meal together.

Let me see what it looks like if I go with my kids to Walmart with a credit

card and I say, you grab some food and we're going to make this together and

we're going to eat it no matter what it takes like. That's my promise to you.

And I promise that there is going to be a gift of what Proverbs is offering. Better is.

And you're going to realize that promise of better is not spiritual trick to

get you to accept something painful.

It's an invitation to experience joy like you've been missing out on.

Just a moment, Daniel's going to come out and he's going to play as we gather toward this table.

We're going to remember that when Jesus showed up, his first miracle was at

Canaan bringing wine to the party.

Jesus was a person who lived a joy-filled life to the extent that it was a stumbling

block for Pharisees who met him.

And he told his disciples, I came to give life and give it abundantly.

But he knew that in order to do that, his own life had to be poured out on the

cross because of our brokenness.

That our own susceptibility to accepting a narrative of culture that is self-centered

and focused and takes us in all kinds of the wrong direction, breaks God's heart.

And so his own son died on a cross that your sin may no longer stand as a barrier

between you and your heavenly father.

And he invites you to gather around this table.

It is not our table, but Christ's table. And when you take this cup,

you remember that God not only wanted to offer you forgiveness,

but as Paul says in Corinthians, that we are to regard each person here is new creation.

That all those who've accepted the gift of Jesus in baptism are new creation.

You know what that means?

That the same voice that spoke and made light is doing something new in you.

That it can express itself in an infinite possible ways and there'll be no one else just like it.

That God wants you to take the gifts that he's given you and say,

find a way to create this week and feel your father's delight.

So as you gather around this table today, some of us, I know,

have perhaps been caught up

in some traps and some restlessness that we're going to need to challenge.

Some of us need to have been bored and restless and taking it out on everyone

else in the house that's been with us.

And we need a little bit of an attitude check on how our own attitude perhaps is making that worse.

And maybe we're going to choose that hard work of saying, God,

I've not made anything in a while.

I'm a consumer. I was raised in it. I've leaned into it because it was easier and it had no risk to it.

God, I need to not just consume everything in my life that's entertainment.

God, help me to use these hands, this voice, to make a card,

to create something so that I can connect with others and with you.

Thanks for listening. If you're near Yorktown, we'd love to see you in person.

Services are Sundays at 9 and 1045 a.m.

Music.