Heroic: Watch The Throne with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaChurch.

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.

It's so good to see you here.

If you're new with us, my name's Clayton.

I'm so, so glad that you guys joined us.

Man, what an incredible time of worshiping through music.

And I think it's worth saying from time to time just what we believe about these Sunday services.

Sometimes we can label things incorrectly, and words create worlds, right?

They really inform our beliefs, and our beliefs inform how we actually live out our everyday lives.

And one of the things that gets commonly misunderstood in the church world is we call what just happened, this whole musical piece, we call it the worship, right?

As if worship can be segmented off into this thing that we do with instruments and our voices.

And what we like to say at Metachurch is that we just worshiped through music.

It was one way of worshiping.

And this is really impactful in how we perceive who God is and what we do as his followers, because worship is where we give our time, attention, and energy on the practical level.

On the spiritual level, worship is where we place the weight of our hope and our expectation.

It's where we give our time, energy, and attention.

It's where we place the weight of our hope and our expectation.

And so what music does, we worship through music because it acts as a conduit or a vehicle that points us to the actual source of our worship.

We are not worshiping the music because as good as these songs are, the song itself cannot hold the weight of your life's expectation.

The band does the best job they can to prepare and then to perform, and they are facilitating the music.

And I think we have the best band you're going to find anywhere on a Sunday morning in San Antonio.

So we're incredibly fortunate and incredibly blessed, but we don't worship a band.

And we don't worship the songs that they sing.

All of it is pointing us to the God who we are actually giving our time, energy, and attention.

And the only thing in the universe that can hold the weight of our hope and the expectation of our life, we worship through music because the music is pointing us to the source of our worship.

And here's where it gets interesting.

Because you can't just easily define worship as the music and throw it into this category called worship, we're continuing to worship even once the band leaves the stage.

We worship through music and then we worship together through the word.

In the same way that the band prepares and then leaves, I try my best to prepare, to give a message that makes sense.

But this message cannot hold the weight of your hope.

But it is pointing you to the one who can.

Amen?

We worship through music, we worship through the word.

And if we can come to this moment in this service together and truly have open minds and open hearts, then God can do in our lives exactly what he wants to do.

And at MetaCurch, we are a place for all people and all different places in their life and all different points in their spiritual journey.

And so whether you have been a Christian for a long time, a follower of Jesus, or whether you don't even really know if you believe what we believe here, this is a place where you belong.

This is a place where you can come.

And if you can be open to giving some of your time, energy, and attention to God today, he might just show you exactly why he should be the place where you put the weight of your hope and your expectation.

Let's pray.

Father, we love you and we thank you for loving us.

We thank you that you don't just talk about loving us, you prove it.

You prove it again and again, and you proved it ultimately by sending Jesus to pay the price for the sins that we owed.

God, we thank you for MetaCurch, a place for all people, people that you love and that you have instilled with a great purpose and a significant reason for being on this earth.

And we pray that we would continue to discover that purpose and to live it out, that we would continue to learn how to live heroic lives.

We love you.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

We are in our heroic series, and uh we were joking before services, this feels like the 417th week of this series.

We have been in it for a while, but we are just continuing and continuing to dive deeper and deeper into what it means to live a heroic life because that describes really the mission of Metachurch, which is for people to find Jesus and then to unleash and unlock their purpose.

Living out your God-given purpose will ensure that you are living heroically.

The way that we're navigating this series is we're looking in Hebrews chapter 11 at what we've been calling the Bible's Hall of Fame.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

It's this list of all the great heroes of scripture, and we've done a deep dive into some of their lives.

And upon examining them, we found number one, that these great heroes of scripture that maybe you grew up learning about in church or Sunday school, that they were incredibly ordinary and really jacked-up people.

Like God used them in spite of themselves, and that's an important thing to learn in and of itself, because we can actually move into dangerous religious territory where we start worshiping the heroes of Scripture instead of using their lives to point us to the one true source of our worship.

It's also encouraging because just like them, we are ordinary, jacked-up people, and if they can live heroic lives, then so can we.

And so we're digging in and we're finding these various character traits that if we could add to our own life, we could see our own heroism really expanded while we're here on earth.

Today we are looking at David.

We read about him in Hebrews 11:32.

Hebrews 11:32

It says, And what more can I say?

Time is too short for me to tell all about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets.

If you grew up in church, we are talking about that David, like the poster boy David, the guy who was anointed king when he was like barely out of kindergarten, who defeated a giant and saved the entire nation before he had hit puberty, the very David who married an actual princess and became the most popular person in all of Israel.

David lived kind of a dream life for most of his time on earth.

And if that wasn't enough, it soon became apparent that he would in fact become the next king of his nation, the nation of Israel.

Everything was going right for David until everything fell apart.

My message today is called Watch the Throne.

Watch the throne.

I did not make this title up.

Back in 2011, two of the biggest rap stars of all time, like if there is a rap, Mount Rushmore, both of these guys are definitely on there.

They dropped a surprise album.

They blew everyone away.

Jay-Z and Kanye West came together, collaborated, put out a full-length album, and that album was called Watch the Throne.

It was a crazy album.

And when they were interviewed about it, and they asked, you know, why Watch the Throne?

Why call it that?

And what are you guys really getting at by taking these two giant superstars and combining your power?

What they said is that they were protecting what they had built.

They were the number one rappers, number one in hip-hop.

And as they looked, they not only saw a new wave of hip-hop coming, a new wave of more dance-infused rap, they also saw other genres of music that were growing in popularity.

And they saw some young rappers who were climbing the charts.

They saw a young Drake and thought, man, this guy is coming for our spot.

A young Kendrick and said, this guy could be the real deal.

They put out Watch the Throne to say, you guys might be good, but you need to understand that we are still king.

And so throughout the album, man, they're just going off talking about all the things they've accomplished and all of the things that they have and the hundreds of millions of dollars that they've made.

And honestly, that's kind of typical for a rap album, this great boasting and big, arrogant, prideful song tracks.

And you know, to some this seems like a real power move for them to mark their territory and take a shot to cement their place at the top of the game.

But as well as that works in hip hop, and as well as the big arrogance seems to work in Hollywood, when you try to live that way in your everyday life, it is going to get really old really, really quickly.

This is a watch the throne mentality.

When we live filled with so much insecurity that everything we do in life is in order to try and self-protect our own power, our own status, and our own influence.

We all are susceptible to falling prey to a watch the throne self-protective mentality, and yet we can't stand it when we see it in other people.

What do we think of people who have to constantly remind us just how talented they are?

What do we think of a boss or even a coworker who always has to highlight all the ways that they're valuable to the organization?

How long does a friendship last when they constantly tear you down and constantly build themselves up?

As great of an album as Watch the Throne was, if you listen to it through the lens of self-protection, what you see is not confidence and security, what you actually see is deep abiding insecurity.

A Watch the Throne lifestyle always, always is seated in insecurity.

You can see this sometimes when you hang out with spouses, and one of them always, they take every opportunity to cut their other half down.

When a coworker constantly points out everyone else's flaws but can't stand it when anyone brings up any of their own shortcomings.

We see this all over social media.

Everyone watching the throne, everyone trying to self-protect, to hoard power and influence and status, putting filters not just on their photos, but trying to put filters on their actual life, signaling out how virtuous and put together they are, even if everything's actually falling apart behind the scenes.

We see a watch the throne mentality many times when people are given authority and they use their power and they use their position for their own gain, even at expense to the people they are supposed to be supporting.

This kind of self-protection is rampant because our culture pushes it.

Every form of media that we are exposed to are people who are highlighting their own ability to become king, their own ability to raise their influence and stature among others.

It's a problem too because we're actually biologically wired to self-protect.

You may not know this, but there are like layers to your brain.

And the highest layer is where we can do unique problem solving, where we can forecast for our futures, where we make rational decisions all the way at the lowest level of our brain, the part that sits right on the top of our spinal cord.

It has one function.

It's the part of our brain we share not only with all the mammals, but all the way down to reptiles like lizards and snakes.

This part of our brain has one role and one role only, and that role is to keep you alive.

It is the role of self-protection, of making sure that you look out for number one.

When we live a watch the throne kind of lifestyle, we are actually operating at the lowest level of our intelligence.

And it's easy to point at culture and it's easy to point at celebrities, but the church is just as guilty.

And one of the greatest philosophical mistakes of the past hundred years in the church is somewhere along the way we got the idea that it was our job as the church, and it was our job as church leaders to actually begin to protect the glory of God Himself.

And the way we protect God is by protecting our little local churches.

And so what we have to do is make sure that everyone who comes in looks like us and thinks like us and talks like us and votes like us and lives like us.

And if we can just make sure that all the right people get in and all the wrong people get out, then we'll be doing our job to protect the glory of God by protecting the glory of the church.

And we're so busy protecting ourselves and protecting what has been put in our hands that we fail to do the number one thing that God actually asked us to do, which is to radically and unconditionally love all people at all times.

And so maybe you've never been to those churches.

But most of us grew up in them.

And what happens is we get so fixated on our own throne, we get so fixated on the problems that are outside of our control anyway, that we fail to do the very things that God has tasked us with doing.

We are taught and we are raised to think that if we don't protect our own power, if we don't watch our own throne, that someone will come and they will take it from us.

That whatever it costs, we must make sure that we are king and that everybody knows it.

And the truth is, you cannot live a heroic life and watch the throne at the same time.

You see, for me and you, watching the throne is metaphorical.

We're talking about our careers, our marriages, our parenting, our relationships, our social circle, our spending.

We're talking about this as a nice useful analogy to the way that we navigate our life.

For David, the throne was literal.

There was an actual throne in an actual palace where he was anointed to actually become the king.

God had picked David as a young man and affirmed that through an anointing by one of his prophets.

He was actually, by God, entitled to become king.

And entitlement is a huge part of the problem.

Because we all feel entitled as a culture, not because we've earned it, not because we have like proved our worth by fighting a giant, not because we have shown our moral steadfastness in the face of temptation.

We think we have earned it just by the fact that we're here on earth.

We showed up, and so we probably deserve to be king.

Entitlement is a big part of the problem.

And so we're not like David.

We often act like another famous young prince who had his eyes on the throne.

I think you know who I'm talking about.

He just couldn't wait to be king.

Now it's silly, but let me make a point that will ruin Disney for you forever.

You remember the cute song?

Oh, I just can't wait.

You realize to be king, his dad has to die.

We get so focused on the throne, so focused on being king, we get such tunnel vision that we fail to realize how our desires and selfishness will actually impact the people around us.

And that's how we live.

We are told we should be king, we are told we should be on top, and if anyone is coming for our spot, we better watch the throne.

We want power.

And yet we don't think power is something that is earned through hard work, we think it is something that is given to us just by the mere fact of our existence.

We want influence.

We're watching the throne, trying to protect what little influence we have and trying to take influence from others.

And we don't even understand what influence is.

We're changing the very definition of the word.

Influence, I would argue, and I tell my staff, influence is the most valuable currency you will ever have in life.

It is more valuable than time, it is more valuable than money.

If you have influence with your peers that you have earned through respect, hard work, investment, you can do anything.

Like the future is wide open for you.

We don't know what influence is.

We think influence is something you get by doing a dance on TikTok.

We think influence is selling fake eyelashes on Instagram.

We think the way we get influence is breaking our arm on milk crates.

We don't know what influence is.

We've changed the very definition of it.

We're desperate to be king.

We'll do whatever we have to do to get there.

And you give us the slightest bit of power or the slightest bit of pain, and we will begin to turn our back on our purpose in order to protect our power.

We will watch the throne.

We're looking at David today, a heroic life, who, if you know anything about him, once he becomes king, he falls into some really public, really serious sins.

But at this point in his life, he's a godly young man.

He is pursuing his purpose.

He is living for the benefit of the nation that one day God has said he will be king over, and his life has gone really well.

It's like success after success after victory after victory after when after when after when.

Until it all began to fall apart.

Now, David was going to be king, but he wasn't king yet.

That belonged to Saul.

And if you think dropping an album to take care of some of your insecurities is extreme, wait until you hear about King Saul.

He is the guy who, when he should have gone and fought Goliath the giant, instead sent a 13-year-old in his place.

Put the whole fate of the nation in David's hands.

Literally sent him out as a scapegoat, assuming he would lose, but he didn't.

Now David is popular and he can leverage the popularity, so he brings him in.

He gives him his daughter's hand in marriage.

He moves him into the palace.

He's using and leveraging that relationship, and honestly, it's not a bad move.

Everyone loves David.

And it's all good until Saul gets insecure.

See, the Bible tells us that the women in town started singing a new song.

And the song went like this Saul has killed his thousands.

And Saul's like, heck yeah, I have, bro.

I like this song, I like where this is going, but that was more to the song.

And when Saul has killed his thousands, and David, his ten thousands.

You may not realize this, and I don't know how much you know about the rap game, but this is ancient history's first diss track right here.

Saul's got his thousands, but David, and Saul is infuriated.

That's all it took.

All of a sudden, he saw a young gun coming for the number one spot.

And instead of valuing and leveraging the relationship he had with David, he turned his back on him and he began, out of insecurity, to literally watch the throne.

He was hellbent on making sure that no one but him had power.

And so he began to manipulate David and withhold from David, and eventually he even tried a few times to kill David.

David had to run for his life, and that's where we pick up the story.

We're gonna take a little bit of time to break down these first two verses.

1 Samuel 22, verse 1 says, So David left Gath and he took refuge in a cave called Adulam.

1 Samuel 22:1

You see, his journey was incredibly frustrating.

He ran from Israel and left behind all that he had known.

Now, for years now, he has lived inside the palace, he's eaten 12 course meals, he has had servants wait on him hand and foot, he has been the darling of a nation.

Everyone loves him, looks up to him, wants to be close to him.

He has everything he could ever need and everything he could ever want.

And now he is on the run.

First, he goes to a place called Nob, and they won't even get close to him because they know that it is not worth the risk.

If they bring him in, the full wrath of King Saul and all of Israel will rain down on them.

So they send him packing.

Next, he goes to a place called Gath, and he is just hoping that the king of Gath will let him in and give him refuge.

And in fact, the situation becomes so dangerous that this guy who is about to be king has to completely ridicule and embarrass himself by pretending to be insane, even foaming at the mouth, just so they will let him go and get him out of there.

He is left without options.

He has gone his entire life with almost nothing but victory after victory after victory.

And now he is putting together a significant string of defeats.

We go back to verse one and it says, So David left Gath and he took refuge in the cave of Adulum.

And when David's brothers and his father's whole family heard, they went down and they joined him there.

The cave of Adulum is not like a creative name for an Airbnb in the area.

It is a cave.

It's in the side of a mountain.

It is nothing.

It is the definition from palace to cave of rock bottom.

The cave of Adulam was in Philistine territory, sworn enemies of David and all the Israelites.

So not only was it really rough lodgings, but it was also quite dangerous.

And so at this point, David has been faithful.

He's deeply in love with God.

He has an abiding relationship.

We know that because David wrote the majority of the Psalms that we have collected in our Bible, and we just see this intimacy and this relationship.

He wants to do right.

He's pursuing God with his life.

Honestly, David could have killed Saul.

He had plenty of opportunities to.

He was the best warrior in all of Israel.

He wouldn't lift a finger against Saul.

He thought that'd be disrespectful to God.

Like he's trying, right?

And now he's in a cave.

That's what he gets for it.

So at this point, he's like, gotta be thinking, if I could just get a crew together, man, if I could get some guys in here who are like as strong as Samson, if I could get some guys in here with just some wealth, like money helps, you know.

Supplies, food, weapons.

Like, if I could just get maybe some guys who are like just smart, like the smartest guys in the land.

Like, God, if I could just get the Avengers together, you know?

Like, just a Avengers a symbol, and we'll get in this cave and we'll be fine.

And God sends some people his way.

It says in verse 2: in addition, every man who was desperate, who was in debt, or who was discontent rallied around David and he became their leader.

About 400 men were with him.

Oh, great.

He wanted the Avengers and he got the freaking bad news bears.

Like, God skipped the A, B, and C team.

This is the W team.

Like, these guys are the losers of the losers.

These are the people in Israel that Israel was like, nah, you can have them.

Like, they are the lowest of the low class.

And this is who God sends.

This is now rock bottom.

It does not get worse than this right here.

David is now separated from everything he knows and loves.

He's on the run.

His life is in danger.

And to help him, God sends the misfits of all misfits.

This is literally rock bottom.

And so when you hit rock bottom, you kind of have two options.

And there's a few ways to get to rock bottom.

Sometimes we we get there by placing ourselves there.

Through our own decisions, our own worst ways, our own toxic habits.

We let an addiction rule our lives and get us out of control.

We allow our spending to just bury us under a bunch of debt.

Sometimes we get to rock bottom because someone else pushed us there.

We're never all the way innocent, you know?

But it's like when you've been a really good spouse, as good as you know how to be, and they cheat anyway.

You're at rock bottom and you didn't ask to be there when you're like a good employee and you're the first to get fired anyway, didn't play the politics well enough.

When you're a great friend and you find out that they're gossiping about you anyway.

Like rock bottom is hard enough, but when you didn't do anything to deserve it, when we hit rock bottom, we have a decision to make.

And when we're at rock bottom, the way that we got there is someone, us or someone outside of us, has been watching the throne.

Someone is hoarding power, influence, and status for themselves, and you have now been a victim of it.

Especially when you get to rock bottom and you didn't deserve it.

The first temptation that will come is to say, Well, you know, two can play that game.

And if everyone else is watching the throne, if everyone else is gonna live in this self-protective mindset, I might as well myself.

If everyone else feels entitled to be king, then why shouldn't I try to live as my own king as well?

As a matter of fact, I am now determined to get myself out of the rock bottom and to show them exactly the mistake that they made.

They want to cheat on me, just wait until they see the next person that I pull.

So much finer than they are, I gotta have more money than them.

They want to fire me, wait till I get a better job and tag my old boss on Facebook, you know?

It's like I will show them they want to come for the number one spot, they better watch their own throne too, can play at that game.

You have an option to choose when you hit rock bottom, either to begin to live self-protectively or to live heroically.

And I will not lie to you.

The heroic path is the harder option.

The heroic path is the one where you have to shift your perspective and swallow your pride.

The heroic path is where instead of killing those who have come after you, you have to pray for them and support them.

The heroic path is not for the faint of heart.

It requires a lot of faith and a big perspective.

But here's the power of the heroic path.

When you watch the throne and you're concerned about power and status and influence, you are focusing your attention on things that are outside of you, and because they are outside of you, they are outside of your control.

Watching the throne is a lifestyle that is contingent on the world around you cooperating with you in that pursuit, and the world around you doesn't care about you because they're watching their own throne.

Watching the throne is an exercise in external control.

A heroic life is not about what you do.

A heroic life is not something external to you.

A heroic life is who you are, it's about your identity.

It is not rooting the hope and expectation of your life in a world that is outside of your control.

It is rooting your life in the one God who never changes and is, in fact, always in control.

The heroic life is a life where we have faith, where we escape temptation, where we rely on God, where we're open to change even when change is hard, where we invest in eternity.

That means living for something bigger than yourself.

It's where we change the world around us, not by controlling the world, but by taking all you are and all you have and giving it away to that world.

David is at rock bottom, and if the cave wasn't bad enough, now he has a cave full of men who no one else ever wanted.

And fortunately, we have a great example in David choosing the heroic path.

We see in verse 2 it says, in addition, every man who is desperate in debt or discontent rallied around David, and he became their leader.

You see, the pain of rock bottom is that you don't have enough, and you feel like you aren't enough.

David is supposed to be on his way to be king.

Now he is nowhere close.

He's not king, he doesn't have a throne, he doesn't have a palace, but he didn't need a throne to be a leader, and he didn't need a palace to exercise his purpose.

He became their leader.

And what you have to understand contextually is that in the ancient world there was no democracy, it didn't exist.

There were different forms of monarchy, which means kingdoms, and in those kingdoms, everything was broken down systemically by race, by gender, and most importantly, by class.

And how that worked is if you were born lower class, that means you lived lower class, and then you died lower class.

There was no upward mobility, there was no climbing the ladder, there was no idea of bettering your life.

That was who you are: lower class, middle class, upper class.

And if you're lower class, you don't make eye contact with anyone above you.

You don't go shopping at the same time as the people above you, you don't walk the same trails as the people above you.

That's how the world worked, but in the cave, David led differently.

Everyone had a voice, everyone got respect.

And because David lived heroically, he took who he was, where he was, and what he had, and he gave it to God.

The only one who can hold the weight of our hope and our expectation.

And because he gave it to God, the pain that drove 400 men into the cave was unleashed as purpose that was unimaginable.

Saul had everything he could ever want.

He was still in the palace, he still had all his servants, he still ate like a king, he was literally living in luxury.

And yet, he was immeasurably miserable, drowning in insecurity, spending every day, every waking moment, watching the throne, self-protecting his power, his status, and his influence.

The truth is, you cannot watch the throne and see your purpose at the same time.

By turning to watch the throne and self-protect, you are turning your back on your God-given purpose.

When you are living for your power, status, and influence, you are spending your time, your energy, and your attention to build up yourself.

When you watch the throne, you are placing the weight of your hope and the expectation for your life on yourself.

And you're good at very, very many things.

But I promise, you make a terrible God.

It is only when we are able to stop the process and the pattern of self-protection that we can turn.

And instead of trying to hoard power to raise ourselves above others, we begin to see true purpose.

Instead of living for our own status amongst our peers, we begin to see what actual significance would look like, giving our life away to others.

Instead of trying to hoard our own influence, we began to see what an inspiration we were put on earth to be to all of the other people desperately seeking for the hope that we have access to in our God.

You cannot live a self-protection life and a life of purpose at the same time.

You cannot watch the throne and pursue the heroic journey at the same time.

And we live in a culture and we are at some level even biologically wired to self-protect.

It takes a lot of work to live a heroic life, a life where instead of trying to always protect who we are and what we have, we live to continue giving it away.

And yet, in God's economy, the more of our self that we give away, the more that He gives to us.

Saul had the throne, and yet he spent every day in insecurity trying to maintain it.

David said, I don't need a throne, I don't need a palace, I can lead without it.

And precisely because David did not need a throne, God gave one to him anyway.

He was surrounded by 400 men, men that nobody else wanted, no one in all of Israel would touch.

And yet, through one man's decision to live heroically all the way at rock bottom, we get to see not only the purpose of these men, but their full potential unleashed.

I want to read in 1 Chronicles, another book in the Old Testament.

I want to read to you about who these men became.

Here are some of the highlights.

It says the following were the men who came to David at Ziklag, which is where the cave of Adulam was.

While he was still banned from the presence of Saul, they were among the warriors who helped him in battle.

They were archers who could use either the right or the left hand, both to sling stones and shoot arrows from a bow.

Some were Gadites, defected to David at his stronghold in the desert.

They were valiant warriors, trained for battle, expert with shield and spear.

Their faces were like the faces of lions, and they were as swift as gazelles on the mountains.

These Gadites were army commanders.

The least of them was a match for a hundred men, and the greatest of them were a match for a thousand.

All these warriors, lined up in battle formation, came to Hebron wholeheartedly determined to make David king over all of Israel, and all the rest of Israel also was of one mind to make David the king.

The one who was not concerned about whether or not he would become king, had the support not only of his men, but his entire nation, and the king who spent all of his time protecting his throne, ended up losing his very life.

Everyone loves you when you're king, or at least when you can convince them you are.

But David had found 400 mighty men, some of the greatest warriors in all of Scripture, when he was all the way at rock bottom.

And so, how do we overcome our insecurity so that we can begin to pursue our purpose?

Because as long as insecurity is at the wheel, you will turn and self-protect.

You will live a life where you watch the throne.

Insecurity is a short-sightedness in your perspective.

And like most things, it tends to work in cycles.

Because the more you watch the throne and the more you self-protect, the more you convince yourself that your security comes from you.

When you watch the throne, it means that you are king, you are getting your own worship, you are holding the weight of your own hope and your own expectation.

You are living as your own God, which means your security must come from yourself.

And I'm here to tell you if you haven't lived long enough, you will find out along the way that you are not enough to provide yourself security.

I'm gonna say it again.

You are not enough to provide yourself security.

Only God can hold the weight of that.

And in the areas where you are insecure, you must ask, am I watching the throne or am I giving this to God?

The areas where you don't feel like you have enough, you don't feel like you are enough, where you feel like you're at the wrong place at the wrong time, can you trust God with it?

Because you might not have enough.

And you might not have the skills, you might not have the resources, but you know the one who does.

And if we look to God for our purpose and God for our identity, our security doesn't have to come from who we are or what we're capable of.

Our security comes from Him, and there's more because we are biologically at the lowest levels of our brain, we are wired for self-protection, but your body is actually fighting for you to be heroic.

Neurologists have now proven that when we self-protect, when we live these selfish, watch the throne lives, that our body actually releases chemicals, the very chemicals that lead to anxiety, to stress, to high blood pressure, even to addiction.

And the reverse is also true.

Studies have actually proven what scripture says that when we live heroically, when we give our lives away, when we live for the purpose of bringing hope and life to others, our body actually releases chemicals that produce joy, well-being, that alleviate anxiety.

Chemicals that actually produce a sense of security and optimism for your life.

God even created your physical body to fight to push you in the direction of the heroic life that He has created you to live.

The question for today is what are you protecting?

What are the areas in your life where you assume that you are in competition with somebody else, not because it's real, but because your insecurity says so.

Maybe it is with your spouse or your children, it could be with your parents or your siblings, it could be your coworkers or the people working out next to you in the gym.

It doesn't take much.

It can be the other room parent who, in your mind, they are always trying to show you up and always trying to outdo you.

And maybe you're just watching the throne.

And if you would just turn it around, if you would walk into the situation trying your best to bless their life, everything would change.

If you're at rock bottom today, I have good news.

You can't control almost anything in your life, but you can give your life to the one who controls it all.

And instead of trying to watch the throne and leave your life up to all of the things outside of your control, you can live heroically.

It's not about what you do, it's about who you are.

And heroic lives give their lives away for others.

Heroic lives don't need a throne because we know the one who actually sits on it.

Pray with me.

Father, we love you, and it is just like the most unbelievable burden relief to know that I do not have to be king because I know the actual king.

And God, so many times I find myself living like Saul.

So many times I get insecure and I try to self-protect.

And God, I pray you would continue to show us, Holy Spirit, that you would just make it blatantly obvious the areas where we are trying to self-protect and that we could have the perspective to give that to you.

I know, God, you are wanting to release heroic lives out of this movement we call MetaCurch.

I pray we would continue on that path.

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.

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