Recession Proof: Desire Deflation 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.

Welcome to the 115 service.

Man, I am so so glad you guys decided to join us.

Uh man, things were getting tight for us in only two services, and uh you guys coming to this service, you are helping us spread out, which will allow us to reach even more people.

I want you to know how we think about this at MetaCurch.

We have a lot of room in this service.

At MetaCurch, we do not believe our purpose is just to come and meet together.

Our purpose is to move together, to reach people outside of these four walls.

We do not see empty chairs as disappointment.

We see it as great opportunity.

We have room to grow, which is room to impact our city.

We're so, so excited about that.

Uh, we're starting a brand new series today called Recession Proof.

And sometimes God brings this really clear affirmation.

We plan our services three or four months in advance.

And when I started working on these messages, it was right at the end of the second quarter.

And of course, we had seen the numbers come in.

Uh, for two consecutive quarters, we'd seen negative GDP growth, the technical definition of a recession, and we see inflation through the roof.

And at that same time, this was really the affirming piece is Kim Fairchild, our prayer team leader, she let us know a trend that they were seeing.

That most weeks, the majority, some weeks, like 90% of prayer requests the team was getting were about financial struggles and financial stress.

And so, man, I think this has come at a really, really opportune time for us.

You guys know this, you're feeling it, but in August of this year, gasoline was up 26% year over year, and that's act after it had gone down quite a bit.

Electricity was up 20%, that's why your CPS bill is so high.

Food and beverages up 11%, with some grocery necessities up as much as 30% year over year.

The majority of people in America have not received a raise in the last 12 months, which means that you are now poorer than you were one year ago.

Your money does not go as far.

And so, of course, we are seeing this financial stress and this financial struggle.

Here's some expectations for this series over the next three weeks.

Here's what we cannot do.

We cannot single-handedly stop inflation.

We cannot directly change all of the decisions that local and federal governments are making.

We can't directly influence policy.

Uh, we can't vote, but we can't do that directly.

Uh, I can't like snap my fingers and make things less expensive.

All of those things are out of our hands.

But what we're gonna do in this series is focus on what God has put in our hands, the things He has given us to steward, and make sure that we are tapping in to the ancient wisdom, time-tested wisdom of Scripture, that we get new insight, new perspective, more wisdom, create new habits, new processes in our life.

And all of this we're calling recession-proofing your life.

We are in the worst economic climate probably in 40 years.

In 2008, 2009, we experienced something like this.

We will come out of this, I believe, but we will cycle back into it.

And so, how during economic downturns, can you survive and maybe even still thrive?

That is what we're focused on in this series.

And today, we're gonna go right to the heart of the issue, really like the core of the conversation.

And this is an important starting place because most financial seminars you go to, most financial books that you're going to read, they're going to skip this step.

And it is the reason why most of these programs that you go through do not last for very long.

They don't get to the very root of the problem.

Today, my message is called desire deflation.

Desire deflation.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you.

We thank you for loving us.

Uh, I thank you for a place like Metachurch, uh, for a new service, more room to reach our city.

Just so, so excited.

God, I know this can be a difficult conversation.

There are some in the room who are just gonna sharpen their skills a little bit in this series.

They're doing well and they've been living by these principles for a long time.

And there's a whole spectrum all the way to those of us who are crushed under the weight of our finances.

We have dug a hole for ourselves and cannot seem to find a way out.

And I pray, God, that we would be humble and we would seek you.

And I believe you will speak to us through this series.

And so we give it to you and we pray all these things in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to deflate your desires, say amen.

Amen.

Amen.

I hope so.

Uh, we're gonna start by talking about desires, so we need to define that.

This is not Merriam-Webster's definition, this is the Clayton Tiner definition that I'm gonna use for my message today.

Here's what we're talking about Desires are ones that are so strong they feel like needs.

Desires are non-necessities that are so strong and have so much pool in our life, we have convinced ourselves that they are vital to our very existence.

To help us understand desire, I want to talk about appetite.

We know quite a few things about our appetites, our physical appetite.

We know that there are foods that we need, and we know there are foods that we want.

We need some combination of lean protein, fruits, vegetables, and water.

We need that.

We want a double cheeseburger, bacon fries, big red, and a molten lava cake.

Can I get an amen?

We know that one of those diets will leave us feeling very awake and clear-headed, energetic.

The other one will put us in the form of like comatose on the couch in a chilies bar and grill fog, right?

We know these things.

There's some other things we know about our appetites.

You can't ever fully satisfy your appetite.

Most of us eat to the point that we're full, or maybe a little bit past full, and two or three hours later, what happens?

We're hungry again.

Our appetite is back, and sometimes with a vengeance.

There's another thing we know about appetites, and that is the more that you try to fulfill your appetites with the things you want, the foods that we want, but aren't actually actually beneficial for us, the more our appetite grows.

It's not something that stays stagnant.

The more we feed it, the more it grows.

This is how desires operate on the level of goods and services.

Our desires are out of control.

And what we do here at MetaCurch, I I know most of you are a part of this movement, some of you are checking us out.

Let me just tell you, at MetaCurch, we come here and we get real, okay?

We're not playing church, we're not checking some religious box so we feel better about ourselves for the week.

We come in and we get brutally honest with ourselves.

And by starting with a level of brutal honesty, I think most of us, with rare exceptions, can admit my desires are inflated.

The things that I want are somewhat or maybe massively out of control.

And for those of you who are thinking, not me, bro, you got me wrong.

I'm gonna spend about the next 10 minutes trying to convince you that in fact your desires are inflated.

We own so much stuff that our garages that are built to house our cars are not garages, they are storage units, and we still rent storage units.

We have so much stuff.

How many people on your patio right now have at least four different kinds of grills?

You only ever use the gas grill because it's all you have time for, but you need a pellet grill because you can make cookies on that one, and you need a charcoal grill because that's the best flavor, and you need a griddle so that you can stir-fry, and you need a green egg in case you're gonna make there are so many wives looking at their husbands right now.

And so we have treadmills, but we don't run on them.

We hang clothes on them because we don't have enough room in our walk-in closets.

I thought I'd get both gingers there for a second.

We have so much stuff, and part of the reason is because our desires are inflated, they are out of control, they're taking up so much of our financial capacity that we aren't able to move and navigate our lives in the way that we have been called to.

Here's kind of the bottom line for today's discussion.

I really believe this.

You don't have a money problem, you have a desire problem.

Your desires are influencing how you are spending, how you are viewing what you need and how desperately you need it.

It is those desires turning wants into needs and causing you to inflate your desires where there's no financial capacity left in your life.

You don't have a money problem, you have a desire problem.

And so let's kind of level because we don't come here to metachurch to point fingers at each other.

What we come here to do is to try to all collectively point our lives to God.

And when it comes to our finances, we're trying to get ourselves in line with how he's asked us to steward our resources.

A lot of why we struggle so much financially didn't really start out maybe as your fault.

At the end of the day, it's your personal responsibility to steward your resources well.

But we're not taught this in school.

We don't have these kind of financial conversations.

And statistically, financial wisdom was not modeled for you or spoken about in your home with your family of origin, whoever brought you up in this world.

Not only that, but there is a very real battle going on in our culture.

It is a battle for your mind and a battle for your money.

A war is waging for your will and for your wallet.

And most people are completely unaware that they're even in the fight.

And so this is how culture inflates our desires.

Culture inflates our desires through comparison, through fear, and through insecurity.

Comparison, fear, and insecurity.

And this is somewhat of a pathway to desire inflation.

It starts with comparison, and this is like as old as humanity itself, where you look around at who has the things you don't have, or who's living in a way you're not living, or who lives in the neighborhood that you desire, or who drives the the car out there that, you know, the poorest, the hundred grand porish that all of you walked by.

You didn't even notice my truck sitting right next to it.

I didn't see anyone taking pictures in front of my truck.

We we want what we can't have, and comparison is not a new problem, but the points of comparison that are available to us have exploded exponentially in the last 20 years.

You see, comparison is like as old as humanity itself.

Hypothetically, there was a caveman millions of years ago feeling insecure that his neighbor brought home a bigger woolly mammoth, okay?

This isn't a new problem.

The issue is for basically all of human history, everyone had a small circle of comparison.

It was you, it was your immediate family, it was extended family if they lived close.

It was your neighbors if you lived in a neighborhood, it was your social circle, people that you hung out with or went to church with or shopped at the grocery store with.

It was very, very few people, maybe like 40 people.

If you were really popular and really extroverted, maybe you had like 60 or 70 people, and that was it.

That's who you had to compare yourself to.

Eventually, we had things like television and magazines, and so we saw celebrities and professional athletes, and we started comparing ourselves to them, but they were enigmas, mysteries.

We knew nothing about them.

Twenty years ago, social media came along.

Social media was created for connection, so you could, you know, connect with your great aunt you've never met before and your college roommate that you fell out of touch with.

But because of our broken human condition, almost immediately social media went from a platform for connection and turned into a marketplace for comparison.

And think about what that means.

It means that you no longer have a tight comparison circle with 40 or 50 people to leverage yourself against.

Now that you have everyone, everywhere, all the time.

And so comparison leads to fear.

And it could be the fear that you don't have enough, or the fear that you aren't enough, or the fear that you're missing out on something.

Your vacations aren't as lavish as the people that you follow online, your house isn't as nice as the people you follow online, you don't hang around with as popular of a crowd as the influencers that you are following with your Instagram profiles.

You have these points of comparison and they're creating fear inside of us.

Maybe I don't have enough, maybe I'm not enough.

And as soon as those fears go from your head to your heart, you've moved from comparison to fear now to insecurity.

And you need to know this part of being human is we have to have security.

You will spend your entire life to your dying breath looking for security.

Uh, Maslow, uh, a psychologist from back in the day, he had a hierarchy of needs, and of course, we need air and water, but at the same level, physically, that we need oxygen and water, psychologically, we have to have security.

We will do whatever it takes to get it.

And so we're now in the influencer marketplace, and influencers are running the world.

Here's an influencer's job to make you compare yourself to someone you've never met that doesn't care about you at all.

The only thing they need you for is to move from comparison of what you don't have or who you're not or the where you're not going or where you're not living, to fear that maybe that means something about who you are as a person, to insecurity, so you will look for your security in the thing they're trying to sell you.

Influencers are not your friend.

They're not looking out for you, they don't care about you.

All you are to them is a paycheck.

And if they can get you insecure enough to buy the thing you don't need that they're selling, then you will make them the money so they can make more people feel insecure about the way that they're living.

And this is the pathway.

And how many of you have experience where you have your your iPhone, and when you get about two generations behind, it's always odd how right when they debut a new one, all of a sudden yours starts working like a Nokia brick phone, you know?

It worked perfectly fine, and then they debut a new one, and now your iPhone won't work anymore.

They kind of kept it out of the news, but Apple had to pay over a hundred million dollars in a lawsuit they called Battery Gate because some computer nerds found out that they were building in algorithms to their phones to make it stop working well once it got a couple generations behind, so your phone would no longer compare to the new phone, so you'd be afraid of what you're missing out with the new updates, so that you would feel insecure about the phone you're carrying.

And this is real.

I remember when Lane hit middle school, and I was like, Who cares, man?

All the iPhones look the same.

And he said, No, you can tell by the cameras on the back.

Everyone knows what you're carrying in security.

It's no longer about what you have, it's about who you are.

And so we look for security in the things of this world, and our desires get more and more and more inflated.

Pay attention to marketing because when advertisements first came out, it would say, Here's a product, you need it.

It'll make your life better.

And then eventually they said, Here's a product, it's better than the competitors.

And now they've gone to the level of identity.

If you have this product, you'll be a better person.

You'll be a part of something special.

If you have this product, you'll no longer be lacking.

And here's what they teach you in marketing: it does not sell to show people the benefits of a good or service.

What sells is the fear of what they might be missing out if they don't buy it.

Insecurity drives commerce.

And so we live in a world and we don't even know it.

And the people of God don't realize this.

That we're in a battle for our minds and for our money, and it's inflating our desires and leaving us with no capacity to do what God has put on our lives to do.

We have no idea.

And so I wanted to kind of demonstrate it at some level.

And I'm a visual learner, maybe you're a visual learner.

We're gonna say that this box represents your financial capacity.

So this is everything that you bring in.

And hypothetically, that means you could do anything with it.

You can invest in your purpose, you can invest in your future, you can invest in your children, you can build community around yourself, you can do things and have things, and all of it line up to who God has created you to be.

Or you can get sucked into the comparison fear, insecurity matrix, and all of a sudden have desires for things that you don't even need and really didn't even want until someone made you feel bad about yourself.

And so this represents whether you make 30,000 or 300,000, this is your financial capacity.

And this little balloon in here that represents your desires.

And what happens is the comparison and the fear and the insecurity, they literally inflate our desires.

And desires are like appetites.

And the more we fill our desires, the more our desires will grow.

And the more our desires grow, the less capacity we have for all of the other things we could be using our resources for.

And so we see this all the time in Fortune 500 companies.

You may not know this either, but these giant billion-dollar companies, they're spending tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars.

They're hiring psychologists and neurologists who study the mind to curate marketing that gets you at the conscious and the subconscious level that you're not even aware of, to make you insecure and believe in your heart of hearts that buying what they're selling will finally bring you the security that you're looking for.

You're in a battle for your mind and your money.

And it is inflating our desires.

And of course, that thing is not going to ultimately satisfy you because the more you feed your desires, the more your desires grow.

And by a show of hands, who is really worried this balloon's gonna pop right now?

Anyone have like a balloon popping phobia?

More than half of the room.

Beautiful.

You see that anxiety that you feel?

That's the anxiety that I would feel when I had just gotten married, instant family, family of four, making less than$35,000 a year, household income, and very, very quickly becoming under six figures of debt.

Over$100,000 of debt.

And I hated looking at our financial situation because it was so painful and so devastating.

And it was hard to see a way forward, and it was hard to even imagine a future where we had any sense of financial freedom.

And it was just stacking up and stacking up, and maybe that same anxiety that makes you really kind of sit back in your seat and want to just close your eyes and plug your ears.

Maybe that's how you feel when you look around and assess the financial hole that you have dug in your life, maybe through inflated desires, maybe through mostly no fault of your own.

And so, what do we do?

What do we do with all of the fears, the fear of not having enough, not being enough, the fear of missing out?

We're so easily swayed.

We will buy stuff that we don't need all of the time just because it's buy one, get one.

You know what that means?

It means you get two of something you don't want or need.

We will buy something because it was 70% off.

Well, how can I pass it up?

It's supposed to be 3,000.

I only paid 900.

You see what's happening?

The war is going on, and it's so serious that you're losing even when you think you're winning.

$900 for something you don't want or need, but you had to have it.

Too good of a deal to pass up.

Let me give you a life hack.

You can get 100% off by not buying it at all.

Our desires are so inflated, and that's a big deal because remember, this box is your financial capacity.

This is your capacity to invest in who you are today, who you're becoming, your capacity to invest in your future, your ability to fund your passion and the purposes that God has placed on your life, your ability to be generous towards others, generous towards your family, generous towards yourself, generous to the movement that you're a part of.

And some of you have all of those desires, somewhere latent, deep inside of you, and yet you do not have the capacity to follow through with them.

To recession proof your life, you first have to learn to deflate your desires, to open up some capacity.

And so today we're gonna get into scripture, a very cool letter that we have called First Timothy.

It's from the Apostle Paul to a younger church leader named Timothy.

And in 1 Timothy 6, there's some incredible wisdom about how we should look at our finances.

We're gonna look at three steps to deflate our desires.

And step number one is we must have proper perspective.

Proper perspective.

We have to know who we are, and we have to know what we have.

That's proper perspective.

A few months ago, Katie and I took Lane, our oldest, on a trip to New York City.

It's his senior year.

We took him out and celebrated.

And I'd never been to Manhattan.

It was quite overwhelming.

I mean, the skyscrapers everywhere, it's very easy to get turned around, especially if you don't have a great sense of direction anyway.

And we did this move that was accidentally genius.

We didn't plan it at all, but the first night we went to the top of Rockefeller Center.

I think it's 86 stories up, and it's a 360 degree panoramic view.

We spent over an hour up there and we were sightseeing, but I was also strategically mapping out the city because I could see all of it.

I could see every landmark, I could see everything.

Everything of note.

And so I took that hour to orient myself, and it took this broader perspective to get up and really be able to see the city appropriately.

It made the rest of the trip a lot easier because I knew where the landmarks were in association to each other, and I had at least a chance of getting where we were trying to go.

Here's the issue: in our lives, most of us have a severely truncated perspective, a severely shortened perspective.

We are normally seeing just right in front of us.

And you need to know this influencers and marketers and all of these big businesses, they have a vested interest in keeping you focused only on right now.

If you were to think a year from now, or five years from now, or 25 years from now, you might not blow a bunch of money on crap you don't need, because you would realize you are bankrupting your future self.

And so our perspective is very shortened, and we don't really know who we are, and we don't really know what we have.

Here's what Paul wrote to Timothy.

He said, instruct those who are rich in this present age, not to be arrogant or to set their hope on the uncertainty of wealth, but to set their hope on God, who richly provides us with all things to enjoy.

God, who richly provides us with all things, not to just get by, not to bare necessities, with all things to enjoy.

The proper perspective for followers of Jesus, number one, is who we are.

We are sons and daughters of God.

We are the children of the king of all kings.

And Paul says, do not put your hope on the uncertainty of wealth.

What has 2020 through present day shown us?

That our wealth is uncertain, that our jobs are uncertain, our income is uncertain.

It cannot hold the weight of our hope and the weight of our security.

We put our hope on God because we are God's children.

And if you don't know who you are, then you will look to find your security, your hope, your identity, your future, your purpose in the things of this world, all the goods and services that people are working to keep you insecure, so you will buy thinking that will finally bring contentment.

The truth is, we must start with the realization that we are sons and daughters of the King of all kings, who provides richly all the things we need and even things to enjoy.

When our identity and our security and our hope for our future is cemented in God, when our day-to-day perspective is that we are God's children, and He is a good, good Father who will provide what we need, then we will have the security to stand against all of the comparison and fear that is coming at us in this battle.

We have to know who we are and we have to know what we have.

Can we put verse 17 back up?

It says, instruct those who are rich.

And everyone in the room just checked out.

It's like, I don't know who that instruction's for, but not me.

And you know this, metachurch, we're normal.

We're average, you know, middle to lower income.

We live in normal houses and apartments, we drive basically normal cars.

We're not like a rich church.

And so we hear this and we think, man, I hope if there's any rich folks in here, they're paying attention.

And we just have too small of a perspective.

We're on the ground level and we're surrounded by all of the skyscrapers, and all we see on TV and all we read about, and all we see on social media is the millionaires and billionaires, and well, that's not us.

And we gotta get to like the 86th floor of our life, and we gotta actually look around.

And here's a proper perspective for your life.

You are rich.

Cue everyone rolling their eyes.

You are rich, and you probably don't even know it.

You are rich by every historical standard.

When you look at all of human history, we are the wealthiest people who have ever, ever walked the earth.

And it's not just our money, it's also our convenience.

If you, anyone in this room, you make 20 grand a year, there is no way if you could time machine back to kings and queens in the Middle Ages, if you could time machine back to the emperors of Rome in the second and third century and actually see how they live.

No vaccinations against any disease, 60% infant mortality rate, no air conditioning, no Instagram.

Half of y'all are like, I'm out, can't do it, no Instagram, no modern conveniences, no air conditioning, no automobiles.

Life was incredibly brutal.

Think about that.

On 20 grand a year, not a person in this room would trade places with a king or queen from 300 years ago.

We are the wealthiest people who have ever walked the earth.

And that's not even historically, right now, today on planet earth, if you will broaden your perspective outside of our little bubble here in the West and look broadly at the world, what you would find is if you as an individual make$40,000 a year, you are in the top 2.6% of wealth on planet Earth.

There are only 2.6 percentage of people who have more money than you.

If you make 60,000 a year, you are in the top 1% of wealth on earth.

You have more money than 99% of the 7 or 8 billion people on the planet.

We have what we need, and we have more than what we need.

And we drove here today in cars and we took a day off of work, and all of us are gonna eat today, even though we didn't work for our food.

That is new in the scope of human history.

We are wealthy beyond belief and we don't know it.

And here's why proper perspective matters because when you don't realize the wealth that you have, when you don't realize the blessings that you've been given, then you will stand in a battle for your mind and your money, and you will allow people who don't know you and don't care about you to convince you that you are not enough because you do not have enough, and you will not have the proper perspective to stand against that and speak against that.

Instead of carrying an mindset and emotions of gratitude into your life, you will take on a poverty mindset where you'll never have enough.

And if you've gone on this journey, you know this.

But when you make 20,000 a year and you think, well, if I could make 35 a year, I would have everything I need.

And I promise, when you get to 35, what you'll be saying is, if I could make 70 a year, I'll have what you need.

And if you make it to 70, you'll say, if I can get to six figures, I'll have what you need.

And when you make it to$250,000 a year, you'll look at people and go, sure would be nice to be a millionaire.

You'll never have enough because your perspective is off in the first place.

We must have proper perspective.

We're the richest humans who have ever walked planet Earth.

And without that perspective, we will be overwhelmed by comparison, fear, insecurity of not having enough.

We will continue to allow our desires to overtake our capacity.

And by doing so, we will be forfeiting the significant life that we were given to live.

How to deflate our desires.

Number one is proper perspective, and number two is proper priorities.

Once we have climbed to the top of wisdom and have an accurate view of what we're working with, then we will have the vantage point necessary to begin prioritizing our lives.

Here's what Paul says: instruct them to do what is good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and willing to share.

So we've admitted it.

We are rich.

But now Paul is gonna take the idea of richness and in a subtle but significant way shift it entirely.

Look what he said: instruct them to do what is good, to be rich in good works.

You see, we were created by God, and scripture says we were created in the image of God, which means the fingerprints of God are all over your life.

He's placed a purpose inside of you, and he has a design for how your life is supposed to function.

Look at what Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus, Ephesians 2.10.

He said, For we are God's workmanship.

That word in the original Greek means like his magnum opus, God's greatest act of creation.

We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.

And those good works God prepared ahead of time for us to do.

He purposed us ahead of time, they are in built inside of us.

What did Paul tell Timothy?

Be rich in good works.

We start with proper perspective, and that allows us to begin prioritizing our life properly.

And proper priorities are pointed outwards.

And we live in the most self-centered, narcissistic generation in all of human history, which means that the culture and the war that is being waged has taken our priorities and inverted them back onto ourselves.

Psychologists have proven again and again that the more you focus on yourself, the more you think about yourself, the more miserable you will become.

This is proven.

The more you think about yourself, the more miserable you will become on every measurable psychological category.

You'll become more depressed, more anxious, lonelier, you will have more worry about your future, you'll become more isolated, you will devolve into worse and worse mental health, the more you focus solely on yourself.

And of course, we are created in the image of God, the God who came down to our earth and gave his life for ours, whose priorities were always pointed out.

Paul told Timothy, it is our job to be rich in good works, comparison and fear and insecurity.

These force, the prioritization of ourself.

Our improper priorities have fed our desires that have left no room for the good works that we were created to do.

To deflate our desires, we need proper perspective, proper priorities, and last, we need proper purpose.

You guys know this.

We start with the belief at Meta that you were created on purpose, and you were created with purpose.

And the ultimate expression of life is living out your God-given purpose.

He says, Be rich in good works, teach them in verse 19, storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the coming age, so they may take a hold of what is truly life.

What is truly life?

Scripture is saying that true life, truly living, true impact, true significance, meaningful relationships, fruitful work, those come by being rich in good works.

Scripture is making it clear, and we need to understand this.

This version of life, desires inflated by a cultural war so dramatically that we have no room left for what God may want to do in our life.

This, Paul says, is not truly living.

And this is how most of the world is living.

This is how most Christians are living.

We're in a war.

We have no idea.

Paul says, store up treasures for the coming age.

If you were here last week, we talked a lot about eternity.

We always talk a lot about eternity, and I always call it the realest reality.

It is realer than the life you're living, it's realer than the air you are breathing.

Paul lived with the reality and the conviction that we are temporary bodies, but we are eternal beings.

And this life is just a glimmer in comparison to the eternal lives that we will live on the other side.

Proper purpose requires a daily focus on eternity.

What does eternity do?

It is the highest perspective.

It puts in line all of your priorities.

It focuses us on our truest purpose.

A daily focus on eternity, a moment-by-moment focus on eternity.

This is essential to getting our finances in order, to recession-proofing our life.

When you view your life and your inflated desires in light of eternity, what you'll realize is that the comparison and the fear that leads to insecurity that has inflated our desires, that has caused us to dig ourselves into incredible amounts of debt just to impress people who don't know us or care about us, all of those goods and services that we're piling our resources on, none of them make it to the other side of this life anyway.

Here's what Paul says godliness with contentment is great gain.

And I look at the Western church and I do believe there's a lot of godliness.

I do believe there are people they want to do it, they want to live it out.

A godliness with contentment.

The gain we're looking for, the impact, the difference we're looking to make, one of the biggest obstacles in our way is our inflated desires, our lack of contentment.

Godliness with contentment is great gain.

We brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out.

If we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.

But those who want to be rich, they fall into temptation, they fall into a trap, they fall into many foolish and harmful desires.

And what do our foolish and harmful desires cause?

They plunge us into ruin and destruction.

And I want to pause here for a moment.

Because I know this is a heavy message.

And we don't come here to point fingers at each other.

We come here, all of us, to acknowledge the truth of Scripture and to desperately seek to point our lives to God.

God designed us, God's plan for our life, God's ideas for how he steward what he has placed in our hands.

And so how do we deflate our desires?

Three steps.

We pursue a proper perspective.

When we have the proper vantage point, we can assemble the proper priorities, not facing in, but facing out, and we can begin truly living out our proper purpose.

Here's what I'm not saying.

I'm not saying money's bad.

Money's money.

What we do with it determines its value.

I'm not saying it's bad to have things or even to have nice things.

We're gonna look really practically next week at how to assess what is valid, what we should be seeking after.

It's okay to have things.

I don't believe when you read scripture in its context that God is calling every single person to take a vow of poverty and sell everything we have.

I do think he calls some people to it.

And what I believe at an even higher level is he calls us to live the kind of lives and structure our lives in a way that were he to call us, we would actually be able to do it.

And if our desires are in the driver's seat of our life, that will not be the case.

It's okay to have desires.

As a matter of fact, God, when we are in tune and walking with him, will often place desires on us.

It's okay to have desires, but please hear me.

It is not okay for our desires to be the drivers of our financial destinies.

It's time for the people of God to stand up and engage in the fight, and that starts at the most core level.

We don't have a money problem, we have a desire problem.

We are losing the war more than likely because we're not even aware that we're in it.

And now you have exactly what you need.

You have an awareness of what is coming against you.

And throughout this series, we're gonna get practical and tactical.

We are going to help you begin to build some habits and some skill sets to recession proof your life.

Here's something we want to offer you.

On October 15th, we're doing a one-day financial workshop.

This is not a get rich quick, come with a hundred dollars, leave with a million dollars.

This is real work.

It's gonna be four hours from 9 a.m.

to 1 p.m.

I am praying for a hundred or more people to show up to this, ready to do the hard work.

This is going to be a significant event.

It is going to get to a granular level of practicality that we simply don't have time for on Sunday mornings.

You can sign up for that at metachurch.tv slash assets.

That's two Saturdays from now, from 9 a.m.

to 1 p.m.

This is for people who are doing well financially but want to sharpen some skill sets.

This is for people crushed under the weight of debt and their finances.

This is for people who've worked for years with nothing to show for it, people living paycheck to paycheck and just tired, tired, exhausted, anxious, overwhelmed by your money.

I pray that you will sign up, you will pack a lunch, you will show up.

And together we can continue walking through this.

And when you get that proper perspective, proper priorities, proper purpose, you can begin to deflate your desires.

It's okay to have desires.

It is not okay for them to grow so large and be so out of control that they take up all of your capacity and all of your intentionality and all of your future.

When culture is no longer driving your desires, when you're no longer under the trap of comparison leading to fear, leading to insecurity, you will create room in your life, not just for your finances, you'll create room in your life to begin hearing from God.

And when your desires begin to line up with God's desires for you, that's what Paul calls truly living.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we come and more than anything, maybe, we're just seeking your help.

I pray we would have the courage to confront this in our lives.

That we would not run and hide from our financial situation.

That we would not look to the things of this world that will just leave us more and more insecure.

I pray, God, for proper perspective.

That we would get further out, higher up.

We'd set our eyes on eternity.

I pray for proper priorities.

Not focus solely on the self, but seeing day by day how you are calling us to make a difference in the lives of those around us.

And I pray that we would be a movement who embraces, that we were created on purpose.

We were created with purpose.

That we would live that out.

Find out what it means to be fully alive.

We love you, and we pray these things 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.

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