Labels Pt.3 "The Time We Spend"

So we're doing a series on labels right now and all of the different things that push at us as human beings and try and identify our lives and the different labels we attach.

And on week one, we talked about labels as related to the clothes that we wear.

And we looked at some beautiful passages from the Bible that talked about the spiritual wardrobe that's been picked out for us, and mostly how we're supposed to put on love, our basic all-per-purpose garment is how the message translation described it.

We talked about how just because something is true about your physical body or your mind, that doesn't mean that it has to define and label your life.

Just because something is true about your physical body or your mind and your will and your emotions, that doesn't mean that that has to label your life.

Matter of fact, we're a three-part human being.

We have a body, we have a soul, our mind, will, and emotions, but we also have a spirit.

And so we looked deeply at what it means to live out of a spiritual label and allow that to lead our lives in every area.

We said that to settle on just a body label or a soul label, that we could miss out on this beautiful, comprehensive, and integrated life that Jesus invites every person into.

When we attach a spiritual label to our lives, all of our body and soul labels either become obsolete or they find renewal in the new spiritual kind of sense.

And we landed on this most powerful label that any person can attach their life to or attach to their life.

We talked about this label.

What if we just lived out of a place where we label our lives, I want to follow Jesus?

What if that was it?

What if the only label we chased after, the only label that we worked towards identifying with, and our entire life package flowed out of that label.

I want to follow Jesus.

And then we looked at the person of Jesus and how he lived and how he interacted with his world as a means to encourage us to label our lives, I want to follow Jesus.

Last week we talked about the voices that we hear.

And I made the statement that just because you think something in your brain does not mean that that thought is true.

But it's in my head, but that doesn't mean it's true.

But I'm thinking it.

It could be false.

And sometimes we have to recognize when a thought is wrong and we have to learn how to take it captive and tear it down.

We talked about the destructive labels that we attach to our lives based on our past experiences and all of the voices that we've listened to, all of the things that have been spoken over us, spoken to us, spoken about us, and how we all attach ourselves to these labels that come out of past experiences.

And our behavior today is largely influenced as a response to what we've gone through in the past and what people have spoken over us.

And are you learning the art of recognizing the different voices that have influenced you, especially your own voice?

And we talked about those three unique parts again, spirit, soul, and body, and how all three parts have a unique voice that's always speaking at the same time.

I call it the three-headed monster.

The voice of my spirit is my conscience.

And when I grow in this label of following Jesus and begin a relationship with God and invite God's word to lead my life and God's spirit to guide me and speak to me and through me, the voice of my conscience begins to be shaped and formed by who Jesus is.

So my spirit has a voice, it's called conscience.

My soul has a voice, my mind will have a voice, it's called reasoning.

And the ability to reason is a gift.

Unless your reasoning is counterintuitive to what your spirit's asking you to do, then that's a wrong thought.

The voice of my body is my feelings.

So at any one time we talked through some scenarios, how at one time my conscience and my reasoning and my feelings could all be communicating different things.

And who do I listen to?

And do I listen to the voice of that school teacher that put me down, and a parent who didn't give me the attention that I desired, or the boss who won't give me the credit that's due, or my own reasoning or my own feelings that betray me, or do we lean into the voice of God's Spirit, tune into our conscience, and begin to live a life shaped out of listening to the right voice?

We learn to trust the voice of God's Spirit, leading and speaking through our conscience more than we listen to our reasoning and our feeling.

And it's beautiful when those three work together.

Today, week three of this series, I want to talk to you about the time that we spend.

So, week one, the clothes we wear, last week the voices that we hear, and today the time that we spend.

And I want to look at one of my favorite verses from the book of Colossians, chapter three, verse 17, in the Amplified Bible.

They're gonna put it up on the screen behind me.

It says, Whatever you do, no matter what it is, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus and in dependence upon his person, giving praise to God the Father through him.

And whatever you do, say whatever.

Whether in word or deed, do everything.

Say everything.

Do it all.

Say all.

There you go.

In this series of labels, here's a good label for you.

I'm busy.

I'm busy.

Say it with me on the count of three.

One, two, three.

Doesn't that feel good?

Doesn't that feel great?

I'm busy.

Is that a label that you've attached to your life?

Is it a label that other people that you know of maybe say about themselves?

I'm busy.

If there was ever a label that worked as both an arrogant badge of honor and simultaneously a lofty wall of insecurity, it's I'm busy.

Why an arrogant badge of honor?

Well, because the world that we live in, people use the statement, I'm busy, as a means of communicating their worth and their value and how important they are.

Well, I'm busy.

And at the same time, they utter those words in a way that builds a wall where they leave no room for meaningful relationships with new people or people that they even know.

And so that that wall of insecurity becomes a safe place.

I'm busy becomes a mask that we wear to not risk new relationship or real relationship or authenticity with new people.

So it's both this arrogant badge of honor, I'm busy.

And at the same time, it's a hands up.

I'm busy.

I've been hurt before.

I've risked before.

I've tried church before.

I'm busy.

In January of 2014, Nicole and I did what a lot of couples do at the start of a new year.

We sat down, we uh made some goals together, we dreamed about the upcoming year, we talked about our relationship with God and where we were at.

We we prayed together.

But one of the goals we set in in the beginning of that year was to remove the words, I'm busy, from our vocabulary.

We said, you know what, let's just stop saying it.

If people ask us how we're doing, let's not default to, oh, we're busy.

Let's come up with some new rhetoric, some new language to identify our lives with.

And the reason we made that decision is because we believe that when you commit to attaching the label, I want to follow Jesus to your life, that it involves stewardship.

And stewardship is doing the best you can with what God's trusted and put in your hands.

And if you always say, I'm busy, are you leaving any room for God to do more in your life?

What if there's more in you that He wants to pull out of you?

What if some of the gifts and abilities that are time released in you aren't coming to fruition simply because you're busy?

And so we made this decision.

I'm busy, no more.

And since then, anybody time says, John, oh, how's it going?

I'm doing great.

You must be busy.

I always say, actually, no, I'm not.

And they're like, What you're not?

No, I'm not busy.

Life feels a little full sometimes, but I'm loving every minute of it.

And we don't say, I'm busy.

Because busy is a myth.

It doesn't exist.

If all of us are busy, none of us are busy.

And here's what's true 24 hours.

That's what's true.

We all have them today, and we get to choose what's most valuable in this life by how we spend those 24 hours every day.

Has I'm busy or some form of that become a wall in your life to hold you back from experiencing deeper, meaningful relationships with other people, a deeper connection to belonging to Jesus' church, a fulfillment in the great commandment that's laid out for us to love our neighbors well.

We're so busy that at the end of the day we just pull into our garages and shut that door and never love our neighbors.

And that's what the Christian experience is about.

It's about loving God and loving neighbors.

It's not even about loving ourselves so much as it is not about loving our family or our friends, but loving our neighbors.

But we're so busy we don't even know their names.

What's true is this 24 hours, and we get to choose what's most valuable by how we spend those 24 hours every day.

Colossians 3, 17.

And whatever you do, no matter what it is, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus and in dependence upon his person, giving praise to God the Father through him.

And whatever you do, in words or in action, word or in deed, do it all in.

Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in a way that makes you look good.

No, that's not right.

Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in a manner that keeps you isolated from meaningful and authentic relationships.

That sounds safe, doesn't it?

Yeah, let's choose that one.

No, it's terrible.

Whatever you do, whether in word or in deed, do it all, all of it, all the time, so that you never ask why you're doing anything that you're doing.

You just do it.

You just fill up your life and your schedule and your calendar with activity after activity after activity, and then you have kids one day, and then you fill up their calendars with more activities and schedules and more stuff, and then eventually you're running around crazy and you're busy.

But are you fulfilled?

Does your life have value attached to meaningful purpose?

So often we attach our identity and we label our lives on how we spend our time, what we do, how often we do it, how we do it better than that other guy or that other woman?

What if this is not useful?

What if instead we attached how we valued and spent our time to our core spiritual identity, to this heart that simply says, Oh, I want to follow Jesus?

What if we began to look at how we spent our 24 hours every day and how we labeled our time and how we spend it committed to valuing time the way that Jesus did?

I propose that our core spiritual label should flow out of and into every area of our lives.

This past week on Thursday morning, we had our first uh coffee with the boys at 7 o'clock on Thursday morning.

If you're a guy here looking for a connection with other dudes, I want to invite you to our next one on October the 18th.

That's the next one.

Uh, we'll talk more about that later.

But at the table, we were talking about this idea of how when you invite Jesus to be central in your life, that it's actually meant to touch every part of your life.

And one of the things we talked about at Coffee was our money and how we how do we let uh the label of I want to follow Jesus influence how we spend our hard-earned money?

But it certainly should touch how we spend our time.

And if the 24 hours we're gifted every day is something that we all have in terms of what we value and what we prioritize, how are you honoring Jesus with how you spend your time?

Are you connecting your identity to the time that you spend?

And maybe it's less and less and less about what we do, and more and more and more about why we do the things that we do.

And why speaks to motive.

And motive is between you and God.

Motive is something that only you and God can look at together.

I'm not gonna look at your life and how you spend your time and try and guess your motive or try and gauge or judge or figure you out based on that.

This is an incredibly and uniquely personal thing, but why do you do the things that you do?

Are you so crazy and frantic that you never even stop to ask yourself that question?

Practically, what does this look like?

How do we begin to align our schedules in such a way that everything we say and do is said and done in the name of Jesus and in a way that gives gratitude to God?

I've thought long and hard about this over the years.

Has anybody here ever done any personality profiling?

Any leadership courses that cause you to look at your own personality type?

And one of the personality profiles that we've leaned into over the years is called the disc D-I-S-C, the disc personality type.

And in the disc, my disc is uh an I D.

And my eye, um, I think that the people that created the disc, they needed to invent a new chart because my eye is off the chart.

And what that means is I genuinely dig people.

And as you get to know me, um, you know what I was thinking the other day, it'd be fun to start an exercise that, you know, uh one day a week, I invite anybody from the life of Evolved to just come hang out with me in a public place somewhere.

And then you will see just how much I enjoy humanity.

Because um, there are no uh social cues that I take life from.

There are no barriers that exist in my world.

The reason I think I'm six foot six and a large man, uh, and and to some people a little bit intimidating is because I just don't let anything stop me from connecting with human beings, especially people that I've never met before.

I'm a little weird, deal with it.

Um but here's the cool thing: my love for people is also connected to what I fear the most.

The best part of my personality type is also closely tied to something that has crippled me in seasons past and still pushes at me as one of the voices that I fight against.

You see, my greatest fear as a high eye personality type is the loss of a relationship or rejection from another human being.

It's what I fear the most.

And as a younger leader, what this translated to in my life was the inability to say no to people.

Because if I say no, they might not like me.

If I say no, I could jeopardize what might be a meaningful relationship.

If I say no, they might think something wrong about me.

And so self-preservation rooted in a fear of what people would think about me crippled me.

And only as I've gotten a little older, especially since I crossed into my 40s, and as I continue to push in and continue to ask God's spirit and God's word to lead and shape my life and bring value to who I am as a human being and to the unique person that God's created me to be, I've learned that what's more important in life is what I have already said yes to and what I continue to need to say yes to.

And when you know what your yes is, attached to your purpose and attached to your identity of following Jesus, it makes it really easy to say no.

When you know what your life is about and what your life is for, and you begin to tap into your unique understanding of how God's invited you uniquely to help build his church and be a part of humanity on this planet, if you know your yes, it makes it really easy to use your no.

Galatians chapter 1, verse 10, it says there, do you think I care about the approval of men or about the approval of God?

Galatians 1:10

Do you think I'm on a mission to please people?

If I'm still spinning my wheels trying to please people, there's no way I can be a servant of the anointed one, the liberating king.

And to say with every part of my existence, I want to follow Jesus, means I have to live for his approval before and more than their approval.

And the same holds true for you in your unique capacity.

Are you living your life rooted in how you spend your time and your schedule?

Is it about living for the approval of the Father, or is it about living for the approval of people?

So, what's most valuable in this life that I should give my yes to?

What is it?

And I'm able to learn how to do those things in the Spirit of Jesus, giving gratitude to God.

Psalm 90, verse 12.

Psalms 90:12

It says there, um, and it's a prayer talking to God, God help us to remember that our days are numbered and help us to interpret our lives correctly.

God, help me today to remember that my life is fleeting.

And would you give me the grace and the wisdom to interpret life correctly?

Set your wisdom deeply in my heart, God, so that I might accept your correction.

In Colossians 3, verse 1 to 3, it says, So it comes down to this, since you've been raised with the anointed one, the liberating king, since you've attached this label, I want to follow Jesus to your life, set your mind on heaven above.

Colossians 3:1–3

The anointed is there, seated at God's right hand.

Stay focused on what's above, not on earthly things.

Because your old life is dead.

Do you remember last week how we talked about, I gave you some homework to study that passage of scripture that talks about your new nature, your new life.

Your old life is dead.

When you identify and label your life as being in Jesus, this new identity gets fashioned and formed and worked out in everything you say and do, and your old life is dead.

Stay focused on what's above, not on earthly things, because your old life is dead and gone.

Your new life is now hidden and meshed with Jesus, the anointed.

So, in how you schedule your life, in how you pursue career, in how you prioritize time with family or friends, in how you show love to your neighbors, do you maintain an urgency that your life is fleeting?

Do you invite God's Spirit to bring wisdom to help you interpret life's priorities?

Do you maintain a focus on your new life, on your new identity, that new nature, a focus on what's above rather than just temporal things?

And it's so easy to get caught up in the temporal.

It's so easy to get caught up in the pursuit of spending my time more and more at work.

And I know this is not innately a guy issue, but a lot of men begin to wrap up their identity with what they're good at in terms of job and career.

Rather than fight to continue to label their life as being in Jesus, they get their best worth and their value from what they're gifted to do with career.

And they miss out.

It becomes a The job, it becomes about the money that they make.

And a lot of men age in a way that they've succeeded at what they do, but they've had no value and purpose in meaningful relationship, either with spouse or with children or with coworkers or with neighbors.

In all of your busyness, in all of your doing, in all of your tasks, in all of your schedule and calendar appointments, are you prioritizing the hope of eternity?

It's a heavy question.

But on a day that our nation sets aside on a weekend where we prioritize being grateful, Colossians 3 says, whatever we do in word or deed, do it all in the name of Jesus, giving gratitude to God.

And somehow living grateful for who God is and what he's done in us is attached to and needs to stay attached to the whatevers that we do, the words that we speak, the deeds that we accomplished.

You see, it's an eternal perspective where we fix our eyes on heaven that gives us understanding of our why.

It's an eternal perspective that brings clarity to what we're meant to say yes to.

It's an eternal perspective that makes no really easy.

It's an eternal perspective that trades busy for purpose.

I'm busy.

C.S.

Lewis, um author and theologian, he put it this way: hope is one of the theological virtues.

This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not, as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things that a Christian is meant to do.

C.S.

Lewis claims that hope is the ability for us as Christians to look ahead, to think about heaven, to allow eternity to impact our lives.

It does not mean that we're to leave the present world as it is.

If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.

I love that.

He goes on to say that the apostles themselves who set foot on the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, they all left their mark on earth precisely because their minds were occupied with heaven.

It is since the Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they've become so ineffective in this world.

Aim at heaven, and you'll get earth thrown in.

Aim at earth, and you'll get neither.

See, we all want our lives to count for something.

From the youngest uh little girl in this room to the oldest of us, we all want our lives to make make a difference.

We all want significance attached to who we are.

Maybe we don't want to be famous, but we want to have value.

We want to be purpose-filled.

And so we fill our schedule with activity and the art of being busy, and then we attach our worth to a full calendar.

So, Jonah, what are you proposing?

Are you proposing that we just stop?

You know, that we pull our kids out of gymnastics and pull our kids out of soccer and hockey, that I that I stop working out?

Do I quit going to work?

What am I supposed to do?

Does that mean I'm just supposed to sit around and and meditate all day in the, you know, and cross-legged in my living room and just think about heaven all day long?

Yeah, no.

That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying whatever you do, in word and deed, do it all in the name of Jesus, giving praise and gratitude to God the Father.

That's the goal.

It's this the reason you have oxygen in your lungs is so that whatever you do, whether in word or in deed, that you do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him and allowing an eternal perspective to shape why you do the things that you do.

So when I coach my kids' soccer team, it's not just to look good or fill up my evenings with physical activity.

It's to bring the light and life of Jesus to families who need hope while I coach soccer, because maybe, just maybe one of those families needs a family.

And through our interaction and through our eternal perspective, maybe I'm meant to coach soccer because I love my kids and hanging out with them, but maybe it's about that family that needs something more than what they've had.

And when you go to Costco on Thanksgiving weekend, dear God, I hope you don't have to do that.

But should you have to go to Costco today, maybe it's not about rushing through to get one of those thousands of pumpkin pies that they sell and making your way to the till to get in and out as quick as you can.

Maybe that whatever you do in word or deed gives you the eternal perspective to get your eyes up off that pumpkin pie in the shortest lineup and say, man, that guy over there looks absolutely hopeless.

Perhaps I could just go over and say, hey man, is there anything I can do for you?

Maybe it just, yeah, but that's inconvenient, John.

Oh, and I'm I'm busy.

That's the point.

Do you allow the moments of life to bring a pause to your busy in a means of being eternally significant?

That's the question.

When I take a morning to just be at home and rest and play with my kids, it's not just to say that I value family, it's to prioritize rest because God did it.

It's to influence my kids with love and laughter and quality time because I always want my kids to understand the nature of their heavenly father as they learn to love and trust their earthly dad.

Is there eternal perspective attached to whatever you do in word, in deed?

As you go to work, as you climb the corporate ladder, as you fulfill the dreams and ambitions to start your own business, is it with an eternal perspective?

Does it have attached to it the ability to encourage and influence other people, to use your resource to be kingdom-minded and be a blessing to somebody who needs it?

Is there eternal perspective attached to whatever you do in word or deed?

We do it in the name of Jesus with gratitude in our hearts that God's gifted us with these things for this time, for this day, for these 24 hours.

And then we do it again tomorrow.

Amen.

Colossians 3.

Whatever you do, no matter what it is, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus and in dependence upon his person, giving praise to God the Father through him.

Let's pray.

Father, in Jesus' name.

We thank you for today.

We thank you for these 24 hours.

We thank you for this opportunity to be together in this very public way, to set our hearts on heaven, to set our hearts on you, to help shift our eternal perspective.

God, as we as we gather with family and friends throughout this day, as we celebrate a day of gratefulness, would we do so in the name of Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father, would we allow heaven's perspective to shape why we do what we do today?

And every day this week, as we go about our busy lives, would you help us be mindful of every activity, of every appointment, of every commitment that we need to keep and bring understanding.

We invite you to help shift our why, to help us remember that there's eternal significance attached to everything that we say and do.

We want to be effective in this life, God.

More than that, we want to have significant, eternal purpose in all that we are.

We want our lives to count for something greater than just how we filled our time.

We want to use our lives to make a difference in other people's lives.

And so we invite you to help us shift our focus, set our hearts on heaven as we fulfill each day every day.

We want to follow you, Jesus.

How you took time for the whosoever, how you valued humans before your own schedule, how you allowed the pause and the interruption of life to bring healing and hope to other people's lives.

We want to follow you, Jesus.

That's the label we want to wear.