Change of Place

I'm gonna read here in Hebrews 11.

If you have your Bible, you can turn there.

If you're not super familiar with your Bible, just start in the middle, start going right.

Eventually you'll get into the New Testament.

Hebrews is like kind of in the second half of the New Testament.

I'll give you a minute to get there, but let me give you just a little bit of context.

Hebrews 11 is known as the faith chapter in the Bible.

It mentions 16 different Bible characters, both male and female.

And it talks about that the common thread throughout their lives was faith.

They had different personalities, they lived in different eras, they had much different assignments, and yet each of them followed through in their assignment, as difficult as it was, and for some of them things went really good, some of them things went really bad.

They had high highs and low lows, but the thing that they all had in common was their willingness to walk by faith.

And so we're gonna look at this today.

Hebrews 11, verse 8.

Hebrews 11:8

It says it was by faith that Abraham obeyed God when he called him to leave home and go to another land that God would give him as his inheritance.

He went without knowing where he was going.

And even when he reached the land, God promised him he lived there by faith.

I want you to notice this last part here.

It says, for he was like a foreigner.

He was like a foreigner.

Um I started talking about this last week, created a framework that is gonna kind of build out uh this series of messages.

And we we talk we talked about last week um pace plus place plus people equals perspective.

Perspective.

Think of it like this: if you um if you grew up in the same place, you lived in the same place all your life, you were around the same people all your life, and you went at the same pace all your life, you would have a pretty narrow perspective.

It would be pretty predictable, pretty consistent.

Anytime you mess with one of these, if you speed up or slow down, or stop, go, fast, slow, um, if you get around different people, different ways of thinking, uh you diversify your circle, so to speak, or you're exposed, have deeper experiences or different experiences, it changes your perspective.

Uh today, what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about place.

Last week was about pace, this week is about place.

Um there is something about changing your location.

It does something.

Like if you have a meeting that you have as a routine meeting and you have it in the same place every week, often it'll start to get stale.

So if you're like in charge of leading the meeting, you find that it's starting to get a little stale, often you just change place.

Like, hey, let's go meet outside, or let's go meet up at a coffee shop, or go to a different room.

A different environment often causes people uh to think different, it causes them to respond and react different.

Um sometimes people want to move to a new city and often is just part of their reset.

Hey, a lot happened in Columbus, and so I was there, and uh there's there's baggage there, there's stories there, there's skeletons there, and so I'm moving to Houston.

I'm gonna go to Houston and I'm gonna start over.

I'm gonna hit the reset.

And I think there's something to that.

I think sometimes uh going to a new place, a fit new physical place, uh can help you with that.

But I've also seen people uh try to hit the reset button simply by going to a new location, but going to a new location uh doesn't mean that you've gone to a new place.

Uh in fact, I've seen many times people go from this location to that, to that, to that, they go from Columbus to Houston to Atlanta to LA, okay, to Denver, and and and guess what?

Uh somebody said one time, real good, they said, uh wherever you go, there you are.

And so if I don't dig into what happened in Columbus and uh get a new mindset and have my mind renewed and dig into all that, it's pretty soon I'll just turn Houston into Columbus.

Okay, I've gone to a new location, but I've not gone to a new place.

We read the story in Genesis 12, and of course it's um it's accentuated in Hebrews 11, but it's the story of Abraham, and if the story of Abraham, if you were gonna sum it up into one sentence, it would be God called a man to go to a new place.

A new place.

He calls him to go from Haran, his hometown, to Canaan, which is the promised land.

But it's about so much more than real estate, it's about much more than geography.

He's calling him out of the patterns of his life, he's calling him away from everything that's familiar, he's calling him to a new place.

And the reason that the story is so impactful is because it still matters to us today.

God is still calling men and women to a new place.

And so when you look at the story of Abraham, it's meant to inspire you.

It's it's written down to encourage you that you don't have to stay in the place that you're in right now.

You don't have to stay there.

I know you feel trapped in it, but you don't have to stay there.

You can break the cycles, you can come out of what's familiar, you you can navigate all the emotions that come with unfamiliarity and going to something you've never been before, to not stay stuck.

God is still calling people, just like he did, Abraham, to go to a new place.

So I don't want to just think of place as like a location.

I want you to think about it like, I want you to say, Yeah, I'm in a new place.

Like, if you ever talk to somebody, you're like, you know, I'm not in the same place I was.

I'm in a different place.

And often when you go to a new place, it causes you actually to see locations differently.

I was um uh a few years ago, my wife had LASIK eye surgery, and she had LASIK eye surgery a few minutes from where I grew up.

And I hadn't been back to my hometown in a very long time.

So we went back and she was going in for surgery, so I had to kill some time.

So I went back and I drove to the house that I grew up in, and I drove around the streets I used to ride my bike in, and I went to the elementary school where I where I went, and then I went to my high school, and I don't think I had been back to my high school, I don't think I'd been back since I graduated.

So it had been like 20 plus years since I had been there, and so I went back and it was interesting because if you've ever done this, if you've ever been at a place and then you left and you had a variety of different paces, places, and people and perspective, and you've lived a bunch of life, and then you go back to the place.

It looked the same, but I saw it differently.

Same place, different perspective.

And this is no disrespect to the place I grew up in or the people I grew up around, but you know this.

You might have had some childhood friends that never left the place and stayed around the same people and never changed pace.

And when you get around them, it's a little awkward because you don't know what to talk about except for just nostalgic memories.

Because where you're at and where they're at, it may be a different place.

I love them, you love them, they love you, but we're not in the same place.

And so when we think about going to a different place, it means that we're going to have to venture into something unfamiliar.

Okay?

And so this is what I want to talk about.

I I want to start with how things become familiar.

All right.

So here's the process a summary of the process.

So they start out, everything starts out unfamiliar.

Okay?

Starts out unfamiliar.

When you're born into the world, you are born as an infant with the psychological, biological uh wiring to fight for survival.

And that's why, even as an infant, before you have any idea about the world, you don't know any facts, and you can't speak, when you feel hungry, you cry.

You cry because you your body and your mind is saying, We're gonna run out of calories.

And so you cry, and then someone feeds you, and so what causes you to cry is actually your amygdala is afraid.

Okay, so your amygdala is unfamiliar, you experience fear, okay?

And when you experience fear, your amygdala causes you to be afraid.

And then if you cry and they come feed you, you start to develop a pattern recognition.

When I cry, they feed me.

And so when babies cry, often it's because they're hungry.

Which, by the way, is why if your baby's waking up in the night, babies wake up in the night, they're hungry and tired, and they don't know which one they're more of.

Am I more hungry or am I more tired?

But they're hungry, and their their instincts, their survival instincts are saying, we're gonna run out of calories, so they cry.

Shayla and I got a book called Baby Wise when Ella was a baby, right?

And they basically said, Look, your baby is waking up in the night, it's tired and hungry, it thinks it's gonna starve to death, so it's crying.

So you need to let them cry it out.

And if they'll cry it out, eventually they'll go, you know, I'm just tired.

And then they'll fall asleep, right?

And then you wake up the next morning, you feed them, they're like, Oh, I didn't die.

And so then if you keep going and feeding them every time they cry, every time, they'll just cry till they're 50 years old, right?

And they recognize the pattern.

I cry in the middle of the night, they get up, and I'm we're here.

Okay, so anyway, the whole point is you get them, you you let them decide that they're tired, fall asleep, and you're giving them the gift of sleep, plus you're giving yourself the gift of sleep, praise God.

And then in the morning you feed them and they recognize, and their neocortex picks up on the pattern, and everyone gets to sleep.

You're welcome.

Alright?

Um, so fear, amygdala, unfamiliar.

I don't recognize the pattern of this place.

What then what triggers?

Emotion.

And the emotion is fight, flight, or freeze.

Okay?

Your amygdala processes emotion.

This is what I feel in the unfamiliar.

If you'll stay in the unfamiliar long enough, your neocortex will develop patterns that you not recognize.

And once I develop a pattern, now the unfamiliar has become familiar.

God calls Abraham to leave familiar.

Haran, hometown, generations of Abraham's family were there.

Um he said, I'm calling you, and it says in Hebrews 11, to go to a place that he wasn't familiar with.

And so you're gonna feel fear and you're gonna feel fight, flight, you're gonna feel fear for survival.

And it says in Hebrews 11, and it says this of Abraham and the other 16 people, that although they had all different personalities and they had different assignments, each one of them, what they had going for them was they had the same amygdala, it's actually here, amygdala that you have and I have.

And they felt the same fear and the same fight, flight, or freeze, but they faith kept them there.

Faith overwhelmed their amygdala.

Instead of the amygdala overwhelming their faith, they trusted God enough to stay there long enough for their neocortex to develop a pattern and for them to become familiar.

So, so this is what we see of Abraham.

In fact, look what it says in verse 9.

It says, even when he reached the land God had promised him, he lived there by faith, he stayed by faith.

Why?

For he was like a foreigner.

In other words, he felt unfamiliar.

You would think if you went to the promised land in verse 6 of chapter 12, he goes, crosses into Shechem, which is the beginning of the promised land.

You would think when you got to the land God promised you, the new place, you would feel at home.

But it said he felt like a foreigner.

So it took faith for him to leave to go to the unfamiliar, and it took faith, it says, for him to stay in the unfamiliar long enough for the pattern to develop and for it to feel familiar again.

Um, we see this of him, uh, of Abraham when he goes into the promised land, and he no sooner gets there that his brain starts to develop patterns and he starts to feel somewhat comfortable when a famine hits the land and he goes into Egypt.

We've referenced this a few times, but in chapter 12, he goes into Egypt, which is what it's unfamiliar.

I don't know Egypt, I don't know their customs, I don't know their language, I don't know how they roll.

And so he goes in there, and what happens?

He gets he becomes afraid, and so he goes into survival mode, and this is where he does the weird thing where he takes his wife, who should be his you know cherished partner, and he uses her as a survival tool.

Why would you do that?

You would do that because your amygdala is going crazy.

I don't recognize the pattern of this place, it's unfamiliar.

And so he goes into this this panic and this fear that I'm going to die.

And so he he uses people, uses his wife to do that.

And so what we see in in Hebrews 11 is a roster of people who throughout their life had something in common, and it was their ability to stay in the unfamiliar.

It was their faith in God that kept them from flight or freezing or you know, getting stuck where they were or retreating, it was their faith that kept them in the mix while their neocortex caught up.

By the way, let me show you this if we read ahead, right?

If you take and you go past Genesis 12 and the Abraham story, all the way into Exodus, I'll give you the cliff notes, but it's a really great point here.

It's a really great illustration of this.

So ultimately, uh Abraham's descendants, they they end up in Egypt in bondage for 430 years.

430 years they're in slavery in Egypt.

And so they have this promise from Genesis 12.

This promise, someday you're gonna inhabit this land, someday you're gonna live here.

But they have 430 years of bondage in Egypt, which means nobody that's alive at that time has ever been anywhere but in bondage in Egypt.

Which means what?

Bondage in Egypt has become familiar.

At one point it was unfamiliar, and we were afraid, but even within this Egyptian bondage, we've been here so long, we've developed patterns of how to survive in bondage until now the bondage has become familiar.

And so what happens?

God says, You know what?

Bondage is not my plan for your life.

And I'm ready to fulfill my promise.

And so he raises up Moses as a deliverer.

And Moses goes and he says, Let my people go.

And they cross the Red Sea with a miracle of God.

God parts the Red Sea and they go through.

And now they're on the other side of the Red Sea, and God keeps the miracles going.

They're hungry, and God sends manna, food from heaven, essentially dew that goes on the ground and becomes food.

But the food uh they can't store it, it it'll rot within a day, so you have to eat.

So they're dependent daily on God to provide for them.

Which only sounds cool when you're reading it in the Bible.

You know, Jesus is like, pray like this, give us this day, our daily bread.

It's like, how about year?

Give us this year, our yearly bread.

Give us this day to depend on God.

I know I'm talking to somebody today that's like, you have to depend on God daily.

God, get me through today.

I don't know what's gonna happen a week from now.

I don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow.

And so the children of Israel are now out of Egypt, they've crossed the Red Sea, they are on their way to the promised land, and they find themselves being provided for by God, but they find themselves longing for Egypt.

It says in it says in the book of Exodus, uh, Exodus chapter 16, verse 2, it says that the whole community of Israel complained about Moses and Aaron.

Exodus 16:2

If only the Lord had killed us back in Egypt, they moaned.

There we sat around pots filled with meat and ate all the bread we wanted, but now you've brought us into the wilderness to starve us all to death.

Look at this.

They are now free.

They used to be in bondage, now they're free.

They're on their way to the land that God promised them hundreds of years before, and here they are preferring the patterns of Egypt over the promises of God.

Why?

That's how powerful familiarity is.

That's how powerful brain patterns are, that's how uncomfortable the fear of our amygdala.

I don't have this pattern.

I don't have it.

I don't have it.

All throughout your life you've been dealing with this.

It wasn't just when you were a baby, when you went to school at first, and then when you went to high school, and now I gotta map this pattern.

Then you went to college and I had to move to a new place and map this pattern, and then I got into uh I got into my first job and I got to map this pattern.

Then I left that and went to a different one.

And so your amygdala the whole time has been going off while your neocortex created patterns for you to finally become familiar.

And so what we have is Abraham, we have a vivid picture of Abraham learning how to walk by faith.

What is walk by faith?

Walk by faith is I step into the unfamiliar, I feel everything the amygdala has to offer, but my faith keeps me there while my neocortex patterns it and it becomes familiar again.

Let me show you.

Let's look back at Genesis 12 and look at something through the lens of what we just talked about.

Genesis 12, verse 7.

Genesis 12:7

This is right when uh Abraham first enters into the promised land for the first time.

It says in verse 7, the Lord appeared to Abraham and he said, I'll give this land to your descendants.

Okay, so he chapter or verse 6, he enters Shechem, enters the promised land, the northernmost part of the promised land.

He enters in, but he doesn't know he's there.

So the Lord speaks to him and says, This is it.

Look around.

I'm gonna give this land to your descendants.

So look what Abraham does.

Abraham built an altar there and dedicated it to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

Verse 8, after that, after that, Abraham traveled south, so he kept going, and set up camp in the hill country with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east.

And there, look at this.

He built another altar and dedicated it to the Lord, and he worshiped the Lord, and then Abraham continued traveling south by stages toward Negev.

Now, look what happens.

He's going, he enters the promised land, it's new, it's unfamiliar.

When he gets there, and the Lord shows him this is the promised land, he builds an altar and he starts to create a pattern of altars.

He keeps working his way south because as he builds an altar, the altar is a physical picture, it's a physical picture of the faithfulness of God.

And because I'm going into unfamiliar places, I want to look back at something familiar to remind me.

I'm gonna give you two sentences.

I wrote them down because I want to make sure we get them right.

Okay?

Here it is.

The first one's this faith keeps you steadfast in the unfamiliar place while your neocortex creates a new pattern.

Faith, faith keeps you steadfast, keeps you from freezing or running when you're in the unfamiliar place while your neocortex creates a new pattern.

Here's what altars do.

Look at this.

Altars populate your memory with patterns of God's faithfulness.

So notice he didn't just build one altar, he built them as he traveled south.

He kept building them.

Why?

Because my brain needs patterns.

And when I go into Egypt or when I go into a new place, doggone it if that amygdala doesn't go nuts again.

And that amygdala is making me feel like I want to freeze.

And that it's making me feel like I want to run home or want to quit or want to shut down.

And so, what do I do?

I look back at my altars and I see the faithfulness of God, and that keeps me going the direction of faithfulness and walking by faith.

Um I was thinking about this recently, you know, because I you come to places like this, and people like me get up here and talk about faith.

And if you're the type of person, by the way, I I want to talk directly to some people who really, really hate change and really don't like unfamiliar things.

Like if you was say, I'm not, don't raise your hand, but like if you are kind of neurotic, uh kind of highly inflexible, um, you really like I was talking last week about change of pace, and I'm like, you know, some of you feel like you're spinning your wheels and you just keep pushing the gas harder and you're trying to make it go, and then some of you are like grinding the brakes because you're like life is going way too fast, and I feel like people are forcing me out of my comfort zone, and and so you're trying to make things stop or you're trying to shut it down.

I that's who I want to talk to right now.

Because if that's you, if you say I'm not flexible, I I have tremendous anxiety, I have an overactive amygdala, and when I go into unfamiliar, my fight, flight, freeze, all that stuff kicks in, and I get stuck, and which makes me not want to keep going in there.

You come to a place like this, and it's like somebody like me is talking, and it's like, what is what is a proper expectation for you of what will happen in your mind and heart as you walk by faith?

Because I think sometimes we overpromise something that I don't think will happen.

For example, if you're neurotic and inflexible and you hate change, maybe God will do a miracle and make you happy, go lucky.

Probably not.

Probably not.

Like I don't know how many times I've seen that happen.

I'm not saying it can't happen.

Hear me.

With God, all things are possible.

If He wants to take you from neurotic to Kesara Sarah, okay, I'm just sort of go with the flow.

You know, I used to really be, and now I'm just go with the flow.

And internally, I don't feel any anxiety anymore.

Maybe, maybe that'll happen.

I don't think so, though.

Because I think we're born with some sort of personality, and it's a combination of nature and nurture, and so you're kind of wired a certain way, and then your environment, and as your brain swarms, you kind of are who you are.

And so I think a lot of times people within that say, well, because I'm that type of person, I just won't go into the unfamiliar, or they expect that when they do, if they have enough faith, and the spirit that raised Christ from the dead is in me, so now I don't worry at all, and my amygdala, somehow the Holy Spirit makes my amygdala just not function.

I don't think so.

I I think what happens is like the people in Hebrews 11 who had the same amygdala you and I have, were willing to trust God throughout their lifetime to walk into the assignment of the unfamiliar, to feel what they feel, to stay steadfast in the middle of the uncertainty and the the lack of familiarity, let their neocortex catch up, it becomes familiar, and then God calls you to another unfamiliar thing.

And then you just start stacking altars.

You stack altars and you start going back, but that altar, remember what happened there?

That altar, remember what happened there, what happened there?

And yeah, maybe over time the amygdala chills out a little bit and you start to gain more confidence and your faith becomes built up and stronger.

Um, but but you might you might always fight the amygdala.

You might always battle those feelings of fight, flight, but you're making choices and decisions to trust the faithfulness of God.

I'll say this last thing and then I'll be I'll pray for you and we'll go watch some football.

This is the Browns year, by the way.

I I declare it in Jesus' name.

I declare it.

I declare it.

Name it and claim it.

Come on, somebody.

It's not good theology, but I'll I'll try it.

I'll try anything.

Okay.

Um the thing I love about Hebrews 11 is Hebrews 11 keeps it really, really, really real.

The writer of Hebrews 11 refuses to let this thing become some fairy tale.

Hey, all you gotta do is trust God and let go and let God, and it's all gonna be fine, and it's all gonna live happily ever after.

That's not what he writes.

Look at what it says in Hebrews 11 32.

He says, How much more do I need to say?

It would take too long.

He says, It would take too long to recount the stories of the faith of Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah and David and Samuel and all the prophets.

He said, By faith, by faith, these people went into the unfamiliar, they faced their fear, they refused to let fight, flight, or freeze take over, they stayed steadfast.

Faith caused them to stay in the mix long enough for their uh neocortex to pattern the thing and for it to become familiar, and through that faith, they overthrew kingdoms and ruled with justice and received what God had promised them, and they shut the mouths of lions and they quenched the flames of fire, and they escaped death by the edge of the sword, and their weaknesses were turned into strength, and they became strong in battle and put whole armies to flight, and they leaped tall buildings in a single bound, and it was they had great stories of victory and heroism, and and they had wonderful testimonies, and and and every and it went up and to the right and they fell down, but they got back up and they ended up in victory.

But others were tortured, refusing to turn from God in order to be set free.

They placed their hope in a better life after the resurrection.

Some were jeered at and their backs were cut open with whips, others were chained in prison, some died by stoning, some were sawed in half, others were killed with the sword, some went about wearing skins of sheep and goats, and they were destitute, they were oppressed, they were mistreated, and they were too good for this world.

Wandering over deserts and mountains, hiding in caves, holes in the ground.

Verse 39.

All these people earned a good reputation, all these people lived powerful lives, all these people lived victorious lives, all these people had noteworthy lives because of their of their faith.

Yet none of them received all that God had promised.

That their life was a even the promises of God weren't just about the promises that are all gonna happen in our lifetime, but the things we set into motion that will happen after we're gone.

But all of the 16 people named and the many other represented in Hebrews 11 represent people that said, Look, someday I'm going to die.

Someday this body is gonna give in.

But as long as I have breath in my lungs and I have opportunity in front of me, I'm going to walk by faith.

I'm going to step into the unfamiliar.

I'm not going to have my life determined and ruled and directed by my fight, flight, fear, amygdala.

I'm not going to live that way.

I'm going to stay steadfast, and when that means I've got to stand still, I will.

When it means I've got to keep going south, I will.

And I'm going to build altars along the way of God's faithfulness throughout.

And as long as I have life, as long as I have life, I will not be stuck in the familiar.

And I want to take a moment and I want to pray for those of you that are walking through a faith-trying time.

This is not fairy tale land.

This isn't, well, hey, it's just all gonna work out like the first part of Hebrews.

I don't know.

The thing might work, it might not.

The thing might take off or it might die.

Uh it might heal or it may not.

I don't know exactly what's gonna happen.

But here's here's what I can tell you.

Throughout life, God will use new paces, new places, and new people.

And throughout life, our perspective is faith.

Our perspective is that God will be with me, he will not leave me or forsake me.

Our perspective is even if I don't get to see the dream come to fruition, even if I don't live to see the promise fulfilled, God is using me as part of his promise.

I'll play my part of it and I'll do it operating in faith, trusting God to be with me.

And so today I have a sense that some of you maybe are in this process.

Maybe you're about to step into something unfamiliar.

And you find yourself in that stress, anxiety, you're afraid, I've not been here before.

You're like Abraham leaving Haran and going toward the promised land.

You might even be like the children of Israel coming out of bondage on your way to a better place, but something about how bad our brain wants patterns.

There's something about the patterns of Egypt that somehow seem more appealing than the promises of God.

And for you today, find yourself in this process and double down on your faith.

Lord, give me faith today to be steadfast.

Keep me, give me faith today, Lord, to remind me of the altars of your faithfulness.

Lord, help me to keep moving in the right direction.

And Lord, today I'll stay here as my neocortex catches up.

I don't recognize these patterns, but Lord, I know if I stay here long enough, if I keep moving in the right direction, Lord, it's all gonna slow down.

It's all gonna begin to make sense.

And so I will rely on you.

I'll draw on you right now.