23 & Me: What Shapes You with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

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.

Now, you're in week five, which is kind of like walking into the back half of a movie that you missed the first part of, okay?

Today will stand on its own.

I think that you can really gather something from it.

But this series was meant to be taken in as a whole.

And so I'd encourage you, if you've missed any weeks, get caught up at youtube.com/slash metachurch.

I have also taken the first half of this year and I have dedicated it to reminding us and encouraging us to become a movement, a congregation who are note-takers.

And here's why.

The reason we do this is not to come and check a religious box.

We say at MetaCurch, we meet together to move together, to actually get out in our community and do something, to take the truths of God that we learn on Sunday and to turn them into the power of God in our real life by applying them into our life.

And study after study has shown that you will remember and be reminded at a much higher level if you're actually engaging with the content and writing things down.

We don't understand identity.

Much of what people call their identity is just miscategorization.

We say our identity are things like our social roles.

I'm a mom or I'm a teacher or I'm a business person.

Some people think their identity is their personality or their temperament or maybe just their attractions or interest.

Some people think their identity is their career or their accomplishments, while others have a negative self-view and think that their identity is found in their worst ways or the mistakes that they have made.

The problem with all of those is those things change throughout the course of your life.

And if your identity is rooted in things that are always changing, then you will always cycle in and out of an identity crisis.

What we're trying to do in this series is root our identity, cement who we are in something that is deep and unchanging, something that is transcendent.

To do a little bit of recap, we have seen in this series so far, to know who you are, you have to know several things.

To know who you are, you have to know why you are here.

What is your purpose?

To know who you are, you have to know where you are going.

You have to know who you belong to.

And last week we saw, to know who you are, you have to know how you fit.

And we've had a big idea that's carried us all series long.

That to really understand who we are, if you believe in God, you have to know what God says about you.

And you find that most explicitly in the creation narrative, the narrative, all the way back in the Garden of Eden, where God creates the world, and then he creates humanity in a unique and special way.

He instills in us his image.

We're created as divine image bearers.

And then as soon as he makes us, he gives us a mission.

He places a purpose on all of our lives.

And that leads us to a belief that we say pretty much every week at MetaCurch, that you were created on purpose.

And listen, if you're new here yet, you might not believe that about yourself, but you need to know we believe it about you.

You were created on purpose.

It's not an accident that you're here on planet Earth, and you were created with purpose.

That God placed something inside of you that the world desperately needs.

All series long, we have gone back and seen that your identity is rooted in the garden.

When you feel lost in life, when you forget who you are, when you go astray or cycle back into the identity crisis that the rest of the culture is in, you look back at what God says about you.

And once we know that, every week we're taking the next step and the next step to really learn how to root our identity and who God says we are.

Today, here's our next step.

To know who you are, you have to know what shapes you.

What shapes you.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we're coming to you, different people in all different parts of our life, all different parts of our faith journey, seasoned believers who have followed you for a long time, all the way to people who are on the fence or skeptical or maybe from a different faith background.

But we're all here, and so I ask God that we would humble ourselves and be open to what you might have to say to us today.

We're here seeking you with our hearts.

And you've said, if we seek you with all our heart, we will find you.

And so we hold on to that today, and we ask that you would move in a powerful way.

We pray this all in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to learn what shapes you, say, Amen.

Amen.

Over the past four weeks, we've looked into many aspects of how to really cement our identity.

I'm gonna do a quick recap for us.

First, we saw that we have to know who we are and why we are here.

We are image bearers of God, and we were created to imitate Jesus, assimilate into our world, and cultivate the gospel.

In week two, we learned that you have to know where you are going.

We have to stop saying, I'm just looking for direction in life.

Direction is not something to look for, you look for a destination.

And for believers, the destination is the throne of Jesus.

Once we know our destination, then we line the directions up to that.

In week three, we learned who we belong to in an ultimate sense, that we are in Christ.

And in Christ, you are children of God, your sins are covered, and your earthly relationships are set free.

And last week, we managed the tension between our uniqueness, we all want to be unique, and conformity.

We all need to belong.

Jesus gave us the church, and as Jesus followers, that is where we fit.

It is the one place where we can maximize our uniqueness and also come together as the body of Christ to have an opportunity to impact and change the world.

Okay, so once we're clear on those, once we really have a path and we understand more about our identity, what is the one thing that could really sabotage us and throw us back into the status quo?

What is the thing that could knock us off course and drag us back into constantly living in an identity crisis?

What is that thing?

And I know we're like, you know, in church Sunday service right now, so you're probably thinking sin or evil or the devil or like the depression that comes from always thinking the cowboys can win a playoff game, you know, like what is that thing?

And maybe at first the answer seems like a little bit too light or maybe not quite believable, but I think when we look at what it says in the Christian scriptures today, it will become obvious this is true.

I think the one thing in our day and age that could really throw us off course and keep us from living out the power and purpose of our identity rooted in the garden, lived out in Christ, is information.

We are living in the information age.

And none of us realize exactly how unique this is, but there's a good percentage of us in the room who can remember a world very different from the world we live in today.

The information that all of us have all of the time, it's very recent in the scope of human history.

It was just a little over 500 years ago that Gutenberg invented the printing press.

And 500 years in the scope of human history is basically nothing.

It's like yesterday.

It's only been 500 years that books have been able to be published and mass disseminated, which means it's only in the last few centuries that most people had an opportunity to even be literate and take in knowledge.

Before that, everything was written down.

That was only a few thousand years before that.

For the rest of human history, everything was oral.

Think about how connected we are, how many people that we can feel like we know.

For almost all of human history, you wouldn't move more than 10 or 20 miles in any given direction from the place where you were born for your entire life.

You would know your family and maybe a few people in your village, and that was it.

That was your only point of comparison.

We live with a flood, a saturation of information all the time around us, constantly bombarding us.

And there's a good chance that human beings are not even built to handle the amount of information that all of us carry around with us in our pockets on our smartphones 24 hours a day.

This really matters because to know who you are, you have to know what shapes us.

And we're talking about information.

And here's what I believe: information puts us in formation.

Information puts us in formation.

What we allow to saturate our minds eventually makes its way to our hearts and our souls and our habits and our relationships and our work environments.

Your mind is the gateway to the person that you are becoming, to how you are being shaped and how you are living out your identity.

And you've probably all experienced this at some level.

Information weighing on your mind, weighing on your emotions, developing anxiety inside of you that you didn't even know you had, causing comparison where there's no chance of contentment.

I feel like one of the things that I should do in my role here is stay at some level up to date with current events, you know?

Like maybe I should know there's a giant balloon over the middle of the country or whatever.

Like I should be aware because it's on your minds.

And so I took that seriously and I started finding some sources of cultural information and news information and political information.

And I kind of enjoyed it.

I enjoyed the commentary and the back and forth, and I started listening to more and more of it.

And that information began to shape me, it began to form me.

And something you need to know about me is I'm one of the more positive people you might ever meet.

I'm like the most optimistic guide that most people know.

And after a few months of just taking in the constant fear and the constant division and all of the problems in the world, I found myself driving around town like, man, everyone here is just kind of a bunch of idiots, right?

Like the whole world's just kind of going to hell, I guess.

Like we might as well throw in the towel.

I was like falling into despair.

And I traced it back, this constant saturation of information.

And this is what that does for us.

We're in an information crisis.

And I want to be clear when I say information, I'm not saying knowledge.

I don't think our biggest cultural problem is that our 14-year-olds are reading the encyclopedia three hours a day.

Our college students are studying the New Testament all afternoon.

Here's how we're gonna define information today.

It's the simplest definition I could think of.

Information is that which informs, that which informs at any level.

What we allow in our minds that informs us.

I promise you.

If your teenage daughter is scrolling for hours and hours through filtered, airbrushed, enhanced, surgically modified influencers day after day, you better believe it informs her.

It informs her about all of the things that are wrong with her physical appearance.

It informs her about the value and worth of women.

It informs her of what you have to do to attain influence and authority in our current climate.

It lets her know very quickly that the shortest path to having followers and having likes is being more and more provocative over time.

See, the littlest bit of toxic information, what it does is it doesn't just sit in our mind and do nothing.

Our minds are like neural network machines.

And every behavior that we take and make has a reward associated with it.

And the littlest amount of information that is bad for you, bad for your health, bad for your heart, it doesn't just sit, it spreads.

I was exposed to pornography really pretty young by a much older friend.

And it created a behavior reward connection.

And those connections over time are what make your mind.

And your mind over time is what influences every single thing about you.

And when we have our kids with totally unfiltered, unrestricted phones, all the things in the world that they could ever read, listen to, or watch on their phones, and the average age of pornography is dropping by years and years, where now it's down close to eight years old.

It's informing our sons and daughters about what to expect out of future sexual relationships, about how to manage relationships they have in the future, about the value and worth and degradation of women.

Everything we do is informing us and it spreads.

It changes us, it changes our mind, and our mind changes us.

Every time you get online and you argue with strangers over politically divisive topics and you put them in your place and you belittle them and you speak to them in ways that there is a 0% chance you would speak to them in person, it informs you.

It informs you about the value of certain types of people, it informs you about the priority of how we are called to deal with the people around us.

Every time you scroll and scroll and look at all the things that you don't have and you could have and others do have, and it creates greed and jealousy and a lack of contentment every time.

There was a season where I was looking at realtor.com almost every day, you know, just checking out the houses that are a little bit out of my price point.

I have a house I can't believe I have.

It was a gift from God.

I look on realtor.com long enough and I'm like, man, this house sucks.

Because information puts us in formation.

And it's happening all of the time.

And I don't think I'm overstating this.

I do think we're in an information crisis, and the statistics bear this out.

I mean, there's a mountain of research now.

People are desperately trying to understand how.

We are richer than we've ever been, we're more connected than we've ever been, we have more convenience than we've ever had, by all measures of what you think would make you happy and whole and content and have flourishing relationships, and yet we are moving the wrong way on every statistical measure, psychologically and neurologically.

Loneliness in the most connected generation that's ever lived is higher than it ever has been before.

Depression in a world with more resource and more opportunity than ever before is higher than ever before.

Deaths of despair, that means suicide and drug overdose, is higher than it's ever been before.

And again and again, research comes back to an inflection point.

A point when the statistics moved off of a normal pattern and began to skyrocket.

And the correlation at this point is 2011 and the introduction of the smartphone.

What is a smartphone?

It is in your pocket, all of the world's information.

That which informs you informs you.

It shapes you, it molds you into the person that you are becoming.

Remember, to know who you are, you have to know what shapes you.

And to live out who you are.

We have to learn how to pick up our God-given authority and take back some control over what shapes us.

The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the church in Rome that he had started about 2,000 years ago.

And the book of Romans, it's one of the longer letters that Paul ever wrote.

It is very practical and very, very deeply spiritual.

And the first 11 chapters, he covers an immense number of topics about how to live out the Christian life, how to live your life in Christ, how to pick up your new identity.

And when we get to chapter 12, he lands the plane with an idea about how to actually do this.

He says in Romans 12, 2, do not be conformed to this age.

Information puts us information.

Do not conform, do not unnecessarily be swept along and formed and molded into everything that's going on in this current culture, in this age, the status quo that is constantly pulling you in.

And you know how our culture operates right now: angry and bitter and divisive and abusive with their words, partisan.

Do not conform.

And so, how do we do it?

How do we keep from being conformed to this age?

He says, Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by.

And it's like, here we go, Paul.

What is it gonna be?

Be transformed by deep religious practice, be transformed by chastity and charity.

Maybe you grew up in the churches I grew up in.

Be transformed by the fires of judgment.

Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

This is 2,000 years ago.

There's no neurologists.

Nobody really even understands what the mind is or what the brain is or how any of it functions.

But the inspired words of God written through the Apostle Paul landed on what we know to be true, that your mind is the door to who you are becoming.

It is the entry point to that which informs you and then forms you.

From your mind, it goes to your heart and your soul and your spirit and your habits, and it touches every single part of who you are.

If you want to break free from this age, the identity crisis that everyone is struggling through, all the statistics moving in the wrong way, a world that is living without any sense of hope, without any peace, that has more resources than we've ever had before, and yet we are less content than we've ever been before.

He says it starts by renewing your mind.

Information puts us in formation.

If you want to be transformed, it starts in your mind.

And if you're new here, what we do at Meta, whether it's in our Sunday services or in our classes or on our life teams, what we do here is we come and we get honest.

We take off all the good little Christian religious masks that we think we're supposed to wear and pretend like everything is fine.

We take an honest evaluation of our life so we can see where we really are, so we can see where God really is calling us.

And all of us need transformation at some level.

Maybe if you think about your inner life, you think about your mind, you think about your emotions, you think about your anxiety level, you think about whether you have hope for your future or are you riddled with anxiety for your future?

What about your self-image, whether you have insecurities that are cropping up?

What about your external life?

Are all of your relationships where they should be?

Your relationship with your friends and your spouse and your children and your parents and your in-laws?

What about your habits?

Are you constantly living in ways that look and feel like Jesus to the world around you?

The answer is we're all flawed, broken, finite, jacked up people.

We're all constantly in need of transformation.

And transformation, scripture says, starts with your mind.

Transformation starts with information.

That which informs us informs us.

And this has become so difficult to do in our culture, and I think it's because we see the process backwards.

And it's interesting on a cultural level, we live as if we are completely helpless victims to the information that's all around us.

It's not just social media.

Some of you are old enough to remember when there was like the news, and it was a certain time of the day on a couple of channels.

Now it's 24-7.

It's always on, and it's become really refined.

And you know what they have found through more testing and through looking at the numbers?

They found what sells on the news.

And it's not good news, and it's not hope, and it's not optimism, it's fear, and it's anxiety, and it's panic, and we don't know who we are, and we don't have a sense of identity.

So we are swept along by all of the hysteria around us.

Our emotions are completely contingent on what we read on Twitter or what we saw on Fox News or what we watched on CNN.

And all of us have to stop our lives and be in a full-fledged panic because there's a balloon over Montana, right?

And I get it.

Like we should take spying seriously, but we don't know who we are.

And when you know who you are, you can look at it for what it is.

We probably don't want folks spying on us, that's fine.

But you don't have to ruin your life or end your day or fall into panic because you are constantly aware that you are in Christ, and I promise you, Christ is far more powerful than some freaking balloon that's over the middle of our country.

I think we shot it down with a slingshot or something, you know?

It's fine.

But every day there's a new, a new topic, something else to drive fear.

It's always the end of the world, and they need to keep you on razor's edge so you will keep coming back.

And it's like we're victims to it.

Like there's no way we can stop just doom scrolling all day long.

Like there's no way we can turn off the TV.

There's no way we can walk away from a toxic relationship.

There's no way we can get accountability in our life to start breaking some of the habits that are keeping this information pouring into us and saturating our minds.

As long as we have this principle backwards, this is gonna be very, very difficult to change.

It is going to be a struggle.

And information will end up being the greatest enemy of you living out your God-given identity.

Here's the principle: information should not determine your identity.

You should not sit by helplessly as a victim and allow the culture to form you into its own image.

Information should not determine your identity.

Your identity should determine the information that you allow in.

Do you hear what that is?

That's empowerment.

That is authority.

That is you taking back your control that God has given you because God made you in his image.

He didn't make you as a victim, he didn't make you as a bystander.

He gave you dominion.

He gave you control.

He placed a purpose inside of you.

We're allowing our identity to be influenced and shaped instead of standing on our identity and our identity.

It's rooted in the garden.

Our identity isn't contingent about what those around us say about us.

Our identity is formed by what God says about us.

That we were made as royalty, made in the image of God, that we have a mission, we have a purpose inside of us, that it matters that we're here on earth.

Our identity is lived out in Christ.

And in Christ, we are children of our Heavenly Father.

It doesn't matter what we have, what we don't have.

It doesn't matter what we are lacking or where we are plentiful.

It doesn't matter what skills we have or what skills we're lacking.

It doesn't matter where people rank us on the social status scale.

What matters is that we know we are sons and daughters of the King of all kings.

In Christ, our sins have been covered.

There is nothing keeping us out of the presence of God.

In Jesus, all of our relationships are set free, where you no longer have to leverage and manipulate the people around you to try and make yourself something you're not.

Instead, you can, like Jesus, love the people around you without condition, no strings attached, knowing that your confidence isn't found in them.

It is found in something greater.

That's what our identity is rooted in.

And when you start there, when you start with your identity, then your identity becomes the determining factor of what information you're gonna allow in, of what you're gonna allow to shape you.

And you're not gonna allow anything to shape you that does anything other than mold you more into the image of the God who created you.

The Apostle Paul wrote to a church in Colossae, and I want to go through this because I want you to see how he takes identity and links it to our mind, links it to the renewal and transformation from the inside out.

In Colossians 3:1, he says, So, if you have been raised with Christ, if you are a believer, that's an identity statement.

Colossians 3:1

Seek the things above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

Verse 2, set your mind on things above, not on earthly things.

Here's more identity.

For you died.

You died.

This is what we do in baptism.

Remember, we put you in the water and we say, buried with Christ, dying to your old self, dying to your old identity, and raised up to walk a new life.

For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

And when Christ, who is your life, appears, then you will also appear with him in glory.

There's your destination.

It's like Paul is acknowledging even 2,000 years ago, how difficult it can be to transform your mind.

How difficult it can be to get intentional about what information you allow into your life.

And yet, Paul knows that a clear sense of who you are, rooted in the garden, lived out in Christ, that being clear on your identity is stronger than the pool of the world's information.

Your identity should be the filter of what forms you, knowing who you are.

And we really have to think about this because it's like we spend all day long scrolling about how the world's gonna end and the next catastrophe and everything's terrible, and then we're mad at God, like, God, why don't you ever give me any peace in life?

You know?

We're just taking it in and taking it in, and then wondering.

We're just scrolling and scrolling and watching and reading about all the things people have that we don't have, all the money people have that we don't have, the cars they drive that we don't drive, and then we're confused why we have no sense of contentment in our own life.

Information puts us in formation.

Paul goes on to describe the results of having a proper identity.

He says, Therefore, put to death that which belongs to your earthly nature sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desire, and greed, which is idolatry.

Because of these, God's wrath is coming upon the disobedient, and you once walked in these things when you were living in them.

It's like you've been there, man.

You've lived for the culture, you've let it transform your mind, you've let it seep into every area of your life.

You have allowed your habits and relationships and rhythms in life to be determined by a culture that you stood as a victim to, but now.

Put away all the following anger, wrath, malice, slander, and filthy language from your mouth.

Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old self with its practices, and you've put on the new self.

You're being renewed in knowledge according to the image of your creator.

Look at the list that we are called to step away from in our new identity.

It says sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desire, greed, idolatry, anger, wrath, malice, slander, and filthy language.

Basically, that describes the social media environment today.

It's all of those things, and it's where we're spending all of our time.

You open TikTok app, five hours, we'll see ya, you know?

We just get saturated inside of it.

Instead, in our new identity, here's what you can expect.

Therefore, as God's chosen ones, that's identity.

Holy and dearly loved, that's identity.

Put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another, forgiving one another if anyone has a grievance against another, just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you are also to forgive.

And above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity, and let the peace of Christ, to which you were also called in one body, rule your hearts and be thankful.

And that's a great list.

And it feels very aspirational, and it is the things we want.

We want contentment, we want peace with one another.

And yet, that is a list that is almost unrecognizable in our broader culture.

Being selfless, putting others before you, forgiving.

Not because they deserve it, but forgiving because Jesus has already forgiven you.

This is one of the more practical messages in a series that's been very ethereal, talking about identity and how to ground it and what that means for you.

Today's very practical, but I want to remind you something we say a lot here.

The practical is often deeply, deeply spiritual.

And it's often in the practical application of God's truths that you immerse yourself in a spiritual experience, maybe like you haven't experienced before.

One of the more recent discoveries in neurology, which is the study of the brain, is quite shocking to everyone, is an idea called neuroplasticity.

For basically all of modern science, people thought that at a young age, all of the connections in your mind were formed, and once they were formed, they would never be changed, that it was just set that way.

And now, as technology progressed and our understanding of the mind progressed, what they found is that your mind is actually moldable throughout your entire life.

New connections can be made, new habits can form that your brain can literally and even physically change over time if your mind is renewed.

And so, in the very practical applications of taking back your authority and taking back some control of what you're allowing to inform you and deciding ahead of time who you are and setting your identity and making sure you are aligning the habits, practices, and rhythms of your life up to the identity that you have in Christ, something deeply spiritual will happen as well.

And when you begin to take seriously, not just allowing the things of the world in, but having your identity as a filter for those things and allowing the things of Christ into your life, then your practical application, combined with the Spirit of God inside of you doing a work, then you can truly be transformed by the renewal of your mind.

And it might happen over time, some of it might be taken right away, but if you are diligent and if you stand in your identity, and if you understand who God has called you to be, and if you no longer allow information to determine your identity, but you set and cement your identity in something deep and transcendent and unchanging, then the information we allow in will no longer spiral us back into all of the depression and loneliness and anxiety that we want to avoid instead.

It will push us forward to a life of contentment and compassion, thankfulness and joy.

We're gonna land in a really practical place.

I want to give you three steps to practicing this in your life, and I want to end with an incredible resource that we're gonna get active in together as a movement.

If you want your life to change, transformation starts with your mind, and that's good news because you have control over what you allow into your mind.

I want to leave you with three simple strategies for doing this.

Number one is to delete what defeats, to delete what defeats.

In Romans 12, it says, do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so you may discern the will of God.

You may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

It is time to practice discernment for what we are allowing in our life, to seek the Holy Spirit inside of us and decide what things in your life are redeemable and what things in your life you should reject.

And there are some things in your life that have no redeeming qualities, they just need to be deleted, they need to be let out of your life.

Let me help you with some of these.

Um, if you are looking at anything that causes lust, if you're habitually watching pornography, there is no redeeming quality.

It is forming your mind away from the image of God.

It is time to delete that out of your life, and that might be really challenging.

And you're probably gonna need some accountability, and you're probably gonna need some help.

If you're engaged in gossip all of the time, there is no redeeming quality to gossip.

It is time to delete that out of your life.

Now, there are things like social media, which was originally built for connection.

And some of you use social media to invite people into meta church and to spread good news and to try to be a light on there.

There are redeeming qualities to it, but you have to be honest.

And when you start this process, you're gonna become a rationalizing machine.

You're gonna think of all of the ways that you still need four hours of TikTok a day.

And you're gonna need help.

You're gonna need a community around you because application happens in community.

Number two, we delete what defeats and we curate your content.

Curate your content.

Curation is the specified and specialized choosing of what you allow into your brain.

In a museum of art, there are the art creators.

Those are the painters and uh all of the artists, and then there are art curators.

The curators take all of the pieces and decide exactly where they should sit in the room.

This is what you have to begin to do with the information in your life.

What comes in and what goes out, what do you need to add into the rhythms of your life?

What information are you missing?

And man, really get honest.

If you want to really scare yourself, you can open the settings on your smartphone and all of them will show you your screen time.

It can be quite confusing, like there's 24 hours in a day, uh 17 hours.

I was on my phone.

How exactly?

Like, it can be shocking how much time we are spending, and what does that ratio look like?

What does the ratio look like of the time that you spent scrolling and the time that you spent with Jesus?

I mean, it's these things like what are we allowing in?

What are we allowing to form us?

We delete what defeats, we curate your content.

Philippians 4, the apostle Paul said, Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any moral excellence, if there is anything praiseworthy, dwell on these things.

That list is quite the filter for curation in our life.

Delete what defeats, we curate our content and limit your listening.

It's not always about what you allow in, sometimes it's about how much of it.

Even if it is redeemable, and even if it's used for good, how long are you on it?

How much time are you spending with it?

In Ephesians 5, it says, pay careful attention to how you walk, not as unwise people, but as wise, making the most of your time because the days are evil.

Your life matters.

You are created on purpose and with purpose.

And if you're giving four, five, seven hours of your day to information that is molding you and shaping you away from your true identity, it's time to limit that.

It's time to put boundaries around that.

It's time to get help with that accountability.

It's time to get in a life team where someone can love you enough to check in with you about how you're spending the time that you have been given.

Delete what defeats, curate your content, and limit your listening.

And I want to tell you about a resource.

In two weeks, we're starting a new series, but it's not just a series.

This is a movement-wide initiative that I am calling all of us to get active in.

It is a 21-day journey.

It's called learning to listen.

And the goal of these 21 days is to learn how to hear from God.

We're going to create new patterns and new habits, and we are going to put new information into the rhythms of our life.

In these 21 days, every day we're going to read one chapter of the Gospel of John together.

There's 21 chapters in the Gospel of John, which means by the end of our time, we will have read an entire book of the New Testament.

This is very exciting to me.

My guess is that there are many, many of us at Metachurch, a place where you can belong before you believe, a place where many people have come to Christ very recently.

For many of us, this will be the first entire book of the Bible that you'll have read.

And I think we should rejoice in that.

Every day for those 21 days, we are going to pray, really pray, pray for our city, pray for God to do a work in us, pray for our families.

And every week for those three weeks, we are going to fast from different things in our life.

A fast is intentionally giving something up to grow your dependence on God.

It's a spiritual discipline that can help you hear from God and show just how badly you're wanting God and his information to begin to form your life.

I want to encourage all of you to go to metachurch.tv slash listen.

You can do it right now if you want to.

You will not hurt my feelings.

That's a landing page on our website for this initiative.

If you scroll down to the bottom, the first thing I want you to do is sign up for our newsletter.

This is something all of us are going to do together every day, starting on February 19th.

That newsletter is going to send you reminders every single day and send you a link to all of that day's content.

The other thing you can find there is the blog that's going to be the organizing principle for us.

On this blog, every day you're going to have a video that's going to give you some context for what you're reading that day, make it easier to understand.

The actual text of that chapter of John will be in there.

And at the bottom, we will have some guided prayer prompts.

Whether you have been reading and praying and following Jesus for years and years, or you're brand new to this idea, we have built this experience with everyone in mind, and all of us should anticipate hearing from God during this time.

It's time to stop listening so much to what the world is telling us we should be and how culture is trying to shape our identity and really cement our identity and what God says about us.

I'm so excited for this.

We really have never done anything like this.

This is not just a Sunday sermon series.

This is something all of us are doing together.

And I believe that you are going to hear from God that He's going to show you something about who you are and how He created you, that this is going to be meaningful to you on a personal level, and it's going to be meaningful to us as a movement.

Let's pray.

Father, we love you, and we want to be made more and more into the people you created us to be.

And honestly, we know our minds have been wired in many ways by the world around us and the information we've taken in.

And so we are looking to you and we're trying to take practical steps, and we believe that our obedience combined with your spirit will do a work transforming us by renewing our minds.

I pray for that, God.

I pray that we would all be motivated to spend these 21 days with you in your word and in prayer and practicing the discipline of fasting so we can begin to hear from you in our personal lives.

So we can be shaped by you, not just Sunday to Sunday, but every day of the week.

We love you.

I thank you for this movement.

And everyone here, pray blessing on their life in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

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