Quiet Life, Loud Impact with Pastor Noel Laws

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at Medichurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

Good man, it's so good to see all of you here.

I hope you've been enjoying this three-day Labor Day weekend, and I'm glad you made some time to join us for today's service.

Now, I know I'm not a new face to MetaCurch.

You see me lead worship up here most Sundays, but it's been a little while since I've gotten to share a word with you guys, and so I'm very excited.

I have a great message for us today.

Now, I don't know if I'm the only one.

Maybe I am.

But did it did it seem like summer went by like super fast?

Was that just me?

It might have been just me because I had a lot of things going on.

I told you guys earlier in the year that I got engaged to a wonderful woman.

Well, I'll have an update on that.

It stuck.

I tricked her, she married me.

We got married in early July.

Thank you so much.

Her name is Elizabeth, and I really do hope you all get to meet her at some point.

And I know I'm biased, I do understand this, but she is the most incredible, the most beautiful woman I've ever known in my life.

And I'm so proud that I get to be her husband.

Now, today I have a message for us that has been stirring inside of me for the better part of six months.

And I've told you guys when I get the opportunity to come up here and preach, I'm usually preaching from a place of what something God has just brought me through.

This is something that God has been working on me in, and He I want to share it with you guys.

And the initial inspiration for this message initially came from watching how Elizabeth lives her life.

There's an aspect of how she lives that I find very inspirational.

And so I began to seek to model it in my own life, and that's what we're going to hear about today.

My message is called Quiet Life, Loud Impact.

Would you guys pray with me?

Heavenly Father, I am so grateful for this opportunity.

Um God, I pray that you would uh uh just organize my thoughts.

Give me clarity and speech, God.

Prepare people's hearts and minds to receive the message that you have for them today, God.

I am so grateful for everyone who's here.

God, we love you.

Jesus, we worship you, and we pray all these things in your name.

And everyone said together, Amen.

Okay, now believe it or not, last December I turned 40.

I guess I've officially reached middle age, and I gotta tell you that for the most part, I'm feeling kind of great.

Like I don't feel like I thought I would feel at 40.

Well, mostly I feel great.

Being 40 also means that I've been playing music now for 25 years.

That's kind of crazy to me.

I didn't think I'd ever be like earning money by playing music for this long, but I'm very grateful that I am doing just that.

And while my body doesn't necessarily feel 40 and my brain doesn't necessarily feel 40, my hearing, it feels like it's about 70 years old.

In my early career, I was in very loud environments for very long periods of time.

And I know you guys can uh probably figure this out, but that's not good for your hearing.

That doesn't help you.

It makes your hearing go bad, and as a result, I have had a ringing in my right ear for 20 years.

It has never stopped ringing.

Once it started, it never stopped.

And about five years ago, I started getting ringing in my left ear.

And so now I have two ears that ring all of the time.

They ring all day, they ring all night, and here's the worst part, MetaCurch.

They don't even ring at the same pitch.

It's maddening for a musician to have two different pitches going on all the time.

But I've learned to live with it.

In fact, I don't even really notice it's there for the most part now, unless you know I'm talking about it like I am with you guys, and then it starts to get a little bit louder inside of my head.

The worst part about having hearing loss at some level is that I have a hard time understanding what people are saying when we're in a room that has a lot of ambient noise in it, right?

The worst place for me is a restaurant.

You know, there's so much sound that's happening in a restaurant.

You have waiters asking if you need anything, you have dishes clanging, you have music playing.

When I'm in those environments, it gets very difficult for me to be a part of the conversation that's happening because I can only ask so many times for somebody to repeat what they literally just said, right?

After so many times of doing that, I start to feel bad.

I start to feel like I'm a burden to the conversation.

And once I feel like a burden, I sit back in my chair, I smile, I nod, I hope desperately that whatever I'm nodding at is the appropriate response, but I don't know what's being said, and instead, I start having a conversation in my head.

And I always think the same thing.

If only I had a volume knob where I could just turn down the sound all around me, then I'd actually be able to understand what the people I'm eating dinner with are actually saying.

But the problem remains.

When everything is loud, nothing is clear.

You know, our lives can be just like that.

Our lives can get pretty loud, and I'd be willing to bet that you have experienced the effects of a loud life.

Loud lives look like everything and everyone wanting something from you all of the time.

And the noise that that is creating in your life is hitting you from all different angles.

We have noise that's created in our work lives, right?

What we do for a living.

It's hard to work all day and then leave the conversations behind, and then leave the meetings that we never wanted to be in in the first place, right?

And leave the deadlines that we know are due the next day.

It's creating noise in your life.

You have noise in your personal lives, your relationships have gotten overwhelming.

It's like everybody wants something from you, everybody wants some advice, everybody wants to hang out with you, everybody needs a shoulder to cry in, and everybody can get pretty loud.

We're just at the beginning of all this.

We haven't even gotten into your home life and all the noise that comes from being a parent, from being a spouse, from being a homeowner, and all the responsibilities that you hold within each of those roles.

We have the noise that happens inside of our head.

It's probably the loudest noise that we experience, and it's a noise that nobody else gets to see, and nobody else gets to hear.

It's all the things that we're saying about ourselves to ourselves, it's all the ways that we wish we could be, all the things that we wish we could do, all the time that we wish we had but didn't.

And so the volume of your life is getting louder.

And then it gets louder, and then it gets louder, and pretty soon nothing in your life is clear anymore.

It's possible that the volume in your life has gotten so loud that you feel like you have nothing left to offer.

Maybe you've lost your sense of self, or maybe you've lost your sense of purpose altogether.

Now, here's what I believe about us today, Metachurch.

If we're going to be the person that God has uniquely created us to be, then we have to get clear on the purpose that God has created us for.

And that's gonna take some work.

It means that we're going to have to learn to turn down the volume of our lives because when everything is loud, nothing is clear.

Now, I told you earlier that the inspiration for this talk started with Elizabeth.

You know, when you're growing in relationship with someone, when you're getting to know them, oftentimes you notice things about them that make them different, things that make them unique.

And I definitely noticed those things about Elizabeth, but it was hard for me to pinpoint what those things were.

Well, one day I was reading through the book of 1 Thessalonians, and all of a sudden I understood what it was that made her so different.

Thessalonians is a letter from the Apostle Paul to the church in Thessalonica, and just like most of his letters, he's instructing them on best practices, best ways for them to live.

Here's what he says in chapter four, verse 10.

He says, But we encourage you, brothers, to do so even more, to seek to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands.

To seek to lead a quiet life.

This is the part that really jumped off the page at me.

It's like a ton of bricks hit me over the head all at once.

This is what made Elizabeth different.

She truly leads a quiet life.

And then the next thought hit me.

No, you do not lead a quiet life.

Your life can actually be pretty loud.

And it's important that we lead quiet lives.

In fact, Paul's gonna tell us why.

He says it affects the person, the people around us, and it affects us.

He says, to seek to lead a quiet life, mind your own business, work with your own hands, and in verse 12, he says, so that this is why you need to do those things, so that you may walk properly in the presence of outsiders.

That's how it affects everyone around you.

And so you won't be dependent on anyone.

That's how it affects you.

In other words, quiet life, loud impact.

But how do we do this?

How do we turn the volume of our lives down when the volume of the world is getting increasingly louder and louder?

Now, I hope at this point I've convinced you that your life is loud, or maybe it's just getting loud.

You have a lot of noise in your life, but if I just left you there, that wouldn't be a very good message.

I want to give you some application that you can actually uh start applying in your life today, as soon as service is over, and you can start to lower the volume of your life.

Now I'm gonna call this uh application steps.

There's three of them.

I'm gonna call them volume knobs.

Everybody knows what a volume knob does, right?

1130, y'all gotta be more responsive.

Everybody knows what a volume knob does, right?

Okay, well then I'm gonna test you.

I'm gonna play teacher really quick.

I'm gonna do a fill-in-the-blank little thing here, right?

If I walk into a room and I see a radio and I can't hear the music, then I'm gonna go to the volume knob, turn it up, and the music will get it'll get louder.

And if it's too loud already and I don't want it that loud, I'll turn it the other way and it's gonna get quieter or lower.

Yeah, quieter was the right answer.

I'm not grading, but you know.

It's gonna get quieter, and that's what I hope these volume knobs are gonna do in your life.

I'm hoping that you can decrease the volume of your life so that you can have a louder impact on the world that's around you.

So, Medit Church, are you all ready for the first volume knob?

Yes, okay.

It doesn't really matter if you're ready for it, you're gonna get it anyway.

That's why you came.

So, volume knob number one.

We are going to curate our content.

You're gonna curate your content.

Now, if you've ever gone to a museum, then you have definitely seen the effects that a curator has on the experience.

And our curator intentionally selects what belongs in a museum.

And so, for you to curate your content, you must take an intentional look at all of the things that are fighting for your attention.

And there's a lot of things fighting for your attention.

You need to take an intentional look at all those things and decide what are you gonna let in and what do you need to cut out.

We're gonna be looking at these volume knobs through the lens of scripture.

Of course, we're gonna be in the book of Proverbs, and Proverbs is a collection of very wise things.

They were all said by what who the Bible calls the wisest man to have ever lived.

His name was Solomon.

We're gonna start in chapter 4, verse 20.

Here's what he says: My son, pay attention to my words, listen closely to my sayings, don't lose sight of them, keep them within your heart, for they are life to those who find them, and health to one's whole body.

Now, I said that Solomon was the wisest man to have ever lived, and scripture actually lets us know that when he succeeded his father, King David, on the throne of Israel, God asked him uh or told him that he would give them anything he asked for, and Solomon asks for wisdom.

And this wasn't for selfish game, this was so that he could lead God's people well, and so God granted him all the wisdom he needed to do just that.

If you're a believer, then you're a part of those people.

This wisdom is actually for you.

And so when we read verses that say, My son, pay attention to my words, we can say, Metachurch, pay attention to these words, they're for you.

Or you can even put your own name in there.

These uh words are for you, they're important to your life, and they are life to you if you're able to find them and their health to one's whole body.

And here's the wisdom he gives us right after saying how important it is to listen to what he's going to say.

In verse 23, he says, Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life.

Guard your heart.

I think inherently we know what types of things need to be guarded.

Precious things need to be guarded.

Like you don't walk into a bank and see cash all over the floor, right?

Cash is a precious commodity.

You see cash behind the vault door.

Only the people who need to have access to it should have access to it.

When you go into a jewelry store, all of the precious jewels are behind a glass case, and usually there's an armed guard there protecting that precious thing.

Fragile things also need to be guarded, and all of you have experienced this in your life.

Here's how I know everybody goes grocery shopping, right?

And usually we just want to get in and out of there as fast as we can.

So we're zooming through the aisles, we're throwing stuff into our basket until we get to the eggs, right?

Once we get to the eggs, we slow down, we open the box, we make sure there's no cracked eggs in there, then we put them in the special seat that's made for babies, and if there's a baby in there, you kind of throw it in with the rest of the groceries, because you need to protect these fragile eggs, right?

Precious and fragile things should be guarded, and your heart is precious, and your heart is fragile.

When I think of guarding something, I immediately conjure up an image of a kingdom.

You know, the castle that's surrounded by a big fence and surrounded by a big moat.

The fence and the moat, they're defensive mechanisms that's meant to keep the wrong people out and the right people in.

Now just imagine for a second a kingdom that had a moat and a fence that never lifted the drawbridge and never closed the gate.

Anybody at any time could come in and attack that kingdom.

And the same is true for your heart.

It's why you need to guard it.

It's precious and it's fragile.

And if you leave it unprotected, let me tell you that the enemy, and I'm being very clear, not an enemy, I am actually talking about the enemy, the devil, will come and he will attack your heart.

He wants nothing more than to make you useless for the kingdom of Jesus.

He wants nothing more than to make you impotent and void of purpose in this life, and his attacks are cunning.

That's why we need to have a volume knob that'll help us curate our content.

Because if you're honest with yourself, you know that a lot of what the world has to offer by way of content is not good for your heart.

I wish I had time to cover all the types of content that we consume, but I'd never make it through the other two volume knobs that we need to talk about.

But generally, let me just say you should be very cautious, very intentional about what you watch, about what you listen to, about what you read, and maybe most importantly, about what you are Googling.

And here's why it's so important.

The things that you are taking in with your eyes are displaying themselves in your life.

We have to curate our content.

If you're allowing a constant stream of profanity, the vice of rhetoric, nudity, pornography, gossip, conspiracy, if those are the things that are always coming into your life, your life is going to be incredibly loud, and it will end up drowning out that still small voice of God who's trying desperately to give you guidance and clarity in your life.

This first volume knob allows us to guard our hearts by curating our content.

Now I said I'd give you some application steps, and with this particular one, we can go in so many directions.

And so I just I just went for one.

I just picked one that I think applies to most people in the room.

This application step has to do with what you are watching.

There are no shortage, there is no shortage of streaming services that you can watch any show and see anything that you would like to see.

And a lot of the stuff that they have to offer is not good for your heart.

And so here's my suggestion for you, Metachurch.

I wonder if you would just try it for one month.

Put a guardrail in your life that helps you guard your heart.

Anything that's rated TVMA, TV mature, just don't watch it.

Just cut it out.

And I know that's gonna take out a lot of things.

I'm doing it in my own life.

I almost don't even watch TV anymore.

There's nothing there, but the things are not good for your heart.

And here's the second thing.

And this one, everybody started looking at each other and laughing at each other a little bit, but I do think it's very important.

I think you need to cut out the horror film genre altogether.

Like you do not need this stuff in your life.

Listen, the amount of overt, demonic, and satanic activity that's actually being portrayed in these movies should really wake us up to the fact that there is actual spiritual warfare, and the warfare is over your heart, and the warfare is over your soul, and you, by watching these things, are opening yourself up to things that you, I guarantee, don't want any part of.

We need to guard our hearts.

Now, this is just a first step, and the challenge in curating your content is not just about what you keep out, it's about what you add to your life.

And the best thing that you can add to your life, and we tell you this all the time, is to read your Bible.

I bet if you could find someone in here that is an everyday Bible reader, that they would tell you, they would testify to all the good it does for their life.

And listen, I'm one of the pastors here at MetaCurch.

I'm not perfect at this.

I'll just be transparent.

There's some days that I don't get to it.

I'm not proud of it, it's just true.

It's a discipline that you create over time.

Let me tell you what reading your Bible is gonna do for you.

It's gonna help you understand the nature and the character of God.

And when you can understand that, you can actually start hearing from Him more clearly.

It's gonna serve as a filter in every interaction that you encounter during your day.

It's gonna give you some instructions, very practical instructions, on how to live a life that leads you straight into your purpose.

Don't be worried about where to start.

I get that question a lot.

I want to read my Bible, I don't know where to start.

This is the thing I always say.

If you want to know where to start, grab a Bible, open it to wherever you want, and that's the place you need to start.

I'm not saying this is like a God thing, sometimes He does this right.

Oh, it's a perfect passage.

I'm just saying where you start is not as important as when you start.

And you need to start now.

You need to start curating the content of your life, or the volume of the content in your life is going to overwhelm you.

That's volume knob number one.

Curate your content.

Our second volume knob is going to be to cultivate your community.

I love this word cultivate, it immediately makes me think of farmers.

Now, I grew up in an agricultural community, so I happen to know some farmers.

I've never done farming myself, but I know a couple.

And here's one thing that I know about farmers they are incredibly meticulous about the crop they are cultivating.

You know, they don't wake up one morning, walk outside to some random patch of dirt, and throw out some seeds and hope for the best.

That's not what they do.

Instead, they carefully plan out every inch of soil that they have to farm.

They carefully plan out every step it's going to take them to get that seed to turn into a crop.

When it comes to the community that we surround ourselves with, I believe that we should be just as meticulous as those farmers are.

The community that we are invested in should have a positive effect on our lives, and we should have a positive effect on their lives.

Now, I'm not saying perfection, you are going to have conflict in your community, and at MetaCurch, we are not conflict averse.

We actually believe that healthy conflict is a good thing.

It will enrich and give you more intimate relationships with people.

But overall, the community that you invest in should have a positive effect on your life, and you should have a positive effect on theirs.

Solomon actually has a lot to say about community.

I just picked two verses to help us uh apply to our volume knob.

We're gonna start in Proverbs 13 on this one, verse 20.

Solomon says, The one who walks with the wise will become wise, but a companion of fools will suffer harm.

One of the things I love about the Proverbs is that they are so incredibly straightforward.

They're not very hard to understand.

Solomon's like, hey, I got an idea.

If you want to be wise, maybe you should hang out with wise people.

Hey, if you want to be a runner, maybe you should hang out with yeah, and if you want to be a reader, maybe you should hang out with it's a pretty basic concept.

It's easy to understand, and unfortunately, there's another truth to it.

If you hang out with foolish people, you will start doing foolish things.

We've all experienced this.

Maybe you've experienced it personally.

I have, or maybe you've seen somebody who's experiencing it, they're just running with a wrong crew that's leading them down wrong paths.

People who are not having that positive effect on their lives.

Part of cultivating your community is having good boundaries with people who are not having that positive effect on your life.

And this can feel bad.

Boundaries are not always the easiest thing to put up, but they are so necessary in living a quiet life.

Listen, what I am not telling you guys is to avoid and blacklist and throw everyone else to the wayside.

That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying you need to carefully consider how much access you give to your heart to the people who are not having a positive effect on your life.

Solomon goes on to say in chapter 18, he says, A man with of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Here's another thing that I know about farmers.

Farmers plant seeds, but farmers also plant weeds.

Like when they plant those seeds and their crop starts to come up, and then a weed comes up right next to it, they yank that sucker right out of the ground because the weed is gonna take water away from the crop that they're cultivating.

And some of us have some weeds that we need to be pulling in our life.

Not every single person that you just enjoy being around that seems like fun and always a good time needs to have a significant role in your life.

Here's a harder one.

Not every single person that has held a significant role in your life at some point in the past needs to hold one in the future.

The more people that you let close to your heart, the louder the volume is gonna get.

And again, it's not about ignoring everyone except for a select few.

This is about being intentional with your relationships because when you can find the right people in your life to be in community with, you will find people who will always be in your corner and always build you up.

So here's how we're going to adjust the volume of our community.

I think the first step is that you actually need to decide who you want to be.

Who do you want to become?

What is your goal as a person as you move down the path of life?

Once you can figure that out, you can find a community that's already on that path.

And just by being in proximity with them, you will start living the life that you actually want to live.

If you want to start reading your Bible, find a community that has a Bible study, right?

You're gonna start doing the things that they do.

The second thing we can do today is begin to take an intentional look at who we're surrounding ourselves with, who we're giving access to our heart.

And maybe consider what it looks like to create some boundaries.

Your heart is fragile, your heart is precious, and you should be guarding it.

And not everyone needs to have access to it.

You are allowed to say no to people.

People who are stealing your joy, people who are stealing your peace, you are allowed to say no to.

It's gonna be necessary because when you can't do those things, your life is gonna get loud.

Volume number uh, volume knob number one is to curate your content, take a careful look at what you're putting into your life and into your heart.

Volume knob number two is to cultivate your community, take an intentional look at who you wanna be and surround yourself with those people.

Volume knob number three, and possibly the most important one, is to learn how to clear your conscience.

And let me tell you what I mean by this.

I mean you need to learn how to forgive people that have hurt you, and you need to learn how to ask for forgiveness from people that you have hurt.

If you curate your content, like if you really take control of the information that you're allowing in your life, and you cultivate your community by saying no to people who bring you down wrong paths and yes to people who build you up, but you are still unable to forgive, your heart and your soul are gonna remain on volume 10.

Everyone, every single person in this room has been hurt by someone.

It's a product of living in a broken world.

What we so often do is we withhold forgiveness from that person.

There's a lot of reasons why we probably do this.

Maybe you don't want them to feel like what they did was okay.

Maybe you're withholding forgiveness because you don't want them to like get away with it.

Maybe it's because you're just trying to retain some amount of control in the situation.

We've also hurt people in our lives.

We're capable of doing this as well.

And because of our pride, what we so often do is we don't go and say we're sorry, we don't seek forgiveness.

In fact, what we do a lot of times is we rationalize our behavior.

And if you're really good at rationalizing your behavior, you can actually make what you did their fault.

When we live with unforgiveness, whether we need it or need to give, uh whether we need to give it or whether we need to ask for it, our lives get loud.

And so let's see what Solomon has to say about forgiveness.

He says in chapter 17, love prospers when a fault is forgiven, but dwelling on it separates close friends.

Love prospers when a fault is forgiven.

When you see that word love, your ears should immediately perk up.

We live by something called the law of love.

It's a command that Jesus gave to his disciples directly after the Last Supper.

You can see it in the Gospel of John.

He says, Jesus says, I give you a new command, love one another.

Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another.

And I can hear my brother responding to this right now.

He says, reads easy, does hard, and he's right.

It does read easy.

Yeah, just love everybody.

That's not hard, but it is.

And yet it's the command that Jesus gave to his disciples just before he was arrested for no good reason, just before he was beaten, almost beyond recognition, just before they killed him on a cross.

And he didn't have to do any of that.

He did it because of his great love for us, because of the sacrifice we can actually have relationship and fellowship with our Father.

But Jesus didn't stop there.

Even as he was hanging on a cross, lungs filling with fluid, literally dying, people were standing in front of him, mocking him, ridiculing him, spitting on him.

And Jesus still, even in that moment, offers up a prayer.

He says, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

You know, Jesus understood that love prospers when a fault is forgiven, even as he is being hurt.

It's that kind of love that gives us hope.

It's that kind of love that gives us inspiration, it's that kind of love that has taken the movement of Jesus and made it last for over 2,000 years.

That's why we should seek to live like Jesus lived.

And if we're gonna do that, it means we have to forgive like Jesus forgave.

For the believer, like if you've placed your faith in Jesus, then forgiveness should be standard operating procedure.

There should never be a question in your mind on whether or not you should forgive.

Yes, you should forgive.

Yes, everything.

You've been forgiven a great debt, and so we forgive great debts.

That guilt you feel for hurting someone, the pain you feel from being hurt, it's adding noise to your life.

And it's just not necessary.

Here's how we can apply clearing our conscience, this volume knob to our lives today.

First off, we can ask for forgiveness.

We can apologize.

This seems like something every adult should know, but I learned firsthand that most adults don't.

About five years ago, and probably the biggest hurt of my life, I went through a course with a friend where I had to take a step of making amends, right?

I had to go and I had to make a lot of apologies.

And believe it or not, I didn't know how to apologize.

Apparently, I learned over time.

And let me tell you what, an apology is not.

An apology is not going to the person and saying, I'm sorry, I hurt you.

I know what I did hurt you, I'm sorry for that, but I wouldn't have done it if, like, as soon as you start to qualify an apology, you're officially not apologizing any longer.

I had to learn this the hard way.

What I begin to implement into my life is to carefully consider like what happened, what the conflict was, and then I had to be able to own my role in it, not theirs.

I had to own my role in it.

Nobody makes me do anything.

I choose what comes out of my mouth.

You cannot blame someone else for what you did.

Let me give you a hint on why you do what you do.

It's because it's inside of you to do that thing.

No matter how it comes out, no matter who's around you, you let it come out because it was in you.

They didn't do that to you.

The most amazing thing happened as I began to learn how to apologize like correctly.

Once I figured out how to make it a proper apology, every single time, I wouldn't even mention the things, the roles they played and whatever had happened, every single time I made a proper apology, the person came back and immediately apologized for everything they did.

Asking for forgiveness takes great humility, but it will cause your life to get quieter.

The second thing is admittedly going to be harder to do.

The second thing we need to do to decrease the volume of our life is to give forgiveness.

Now, I know a lot of you, I've known a lot of you for a long time, and I know that the pain runs deep in this room.

And some of mine does too.

Forgiveness is a discipline, which means you need to develop it over time.

My greatest hurt took years, I mean, literally years of me praying and telling God, I forgive this person before it ever actually took root.

But had I not done that, I can tell you, I do not believe I would have been in a position to be married today.

It was a discipline that I had to develop over time.

Listen, I don't want this to be confusing, but forgiveness is not saying that what the person did to you is okay.

It's not.

I don't want you to think that forgiving someone means they're getting away with it.

They're not.

They will answer for it at some point.

Forgiveness is saying that I refuse to live my life in light of what you've done to me, and instead I'm going to live my life in the light of what Christ has done for me.

Medit, God has great things for you, great things in store for you.

And I don't want you to miss them because you're living with unforgiveness in your life.

It's adding volume to your life, and it's not necessary, and it's not good because when everything is loud, nothing is clear.

That includes our God-given purpose.

Loud lives don't leave space to hear from God.

Loud lives have very quiet impacts on the world around them.

But you can learn how to turn down the volume of your life if you can curate your content, cultivate your community, and clear your conscience.

If you can really apply these volume knobs to your life, then the impact you're capable of having on the world around you is going to be extremely loud.

Here's what curating your content does.

When you can curate your content, all the things that are affecting you negatively, the things that you're taking in, are going to be gone and it's gonna leave you some room to add the right content, the good things that make your heart healthy and strong.

And it's not just gonna free up space in your mind and in your heart.

You're gonna get some more space in your schedule.

When you cultivate your community, when you don't give yourself away to every single person that wants a piece of you.

Instead, you can have focused, intimate relationships with the people you do life with.

You're gonna have more to offer your cultivated community than you were ever able to offer anyone before.

And when you can clear your conscience, when you can forgive the people who hurt you, when you can ask for forgiveness from the people that you've hurt, you are aligning yourself with Christ.

And that's gonna free up space in your heart for God to move even more strongly in your life.

This world has everything to offer, and most of it is not good for your heart.

Most of it is adding noise to your life.

A good, healthy, happy life is not defined by the quantity, how many things you have in your life, but it's defined by the quality of the things that are in your life, and you get to have a say in that.

You get to choose what is in your life and what is not in your life, and the very few things that you don't have a choice in, you get to choose how you respond to those things.

You have an effect on the quality of the things in your life, and the things in your life have an effect on the quality of your life.

We need to guard our hearts, and my hope is that with these simple volume knobs, and there's way more we could talk about with all this stuff, with these simple three volume knobs, you can begin to take a loud life that has a quiet impact and turn it around and have a quiet life that makes a loud impact.

Would you guys pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for your word.

We're so grateful for your truth.

Holy Spirit, we are grateful for your guidance.

And God, it is my prayer that this isn't just another Sunday.

It's not just another sermon, God, that it will actually be something that we can begin to apply to our lives.

Father, that we can become more focused on what it is you want us to do in this world, that we can begin quieting the noise that isn't having any good effect on our life, and instead focusing in on what you have for us.

God, I pray that people will truly start considering what curating their content looks like.

That they'll cut out the things that are hurting them, that are bad for their heart, God, that you would show them the difference a quiet life makes in that way, that they'll cultivate their community, God, surround themselves with good people.

God, that they can ask for forgiveness.

Jesus, you have you lived a life you died on a cross and you did it so we could experience that same kind of forgiveness we need to give.

And so, I hope my prayers that we can continue down that path with you.

Jesus, we love you.

You're the only reason we have hope, the only reason we have a future, and we pray everything in your name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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Man, I love you guys and I hope you have a great rest of your day.