Prioritize: Prune Your Problems 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.

So good to see you guys.

I want to welcome you wherever you're at today.

If you're here in Helotus 151 Saloon Online, so glad that you joined us.

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

I'm the lead pastor here.

I'm not normally tied to desks on Sunday mornings, but we are in a new series called Prioritize.

And last week we learned an essential truth that as humans, we have this inherent tendency to prioritize our prior ties.

That there are key moments around people, places, and things in our past that leave such a significant impression on us that if we do not get intentional about our priorities, then painful moments from our past will prioritize our lives for us.

That means your future that is so filled with potential and your destiny with the purpose that God has placed inside of you, that your future could have its agenda set for you by painful prior ties in your past.

We're talking about properly prioritizing your life because we start with a core assumption in Metachurch.

Number one, that you were created on purpose, which means there's no accidents.

You're on earth for a reason.

You were created on purpose, and you were created with purpose.

There is a purpose inside of you.

It is the deepest longing of your soul, and it can only be met when you begin to live what scripture calls a fruitful life.

That is a life that brings or generates more life around you.

It is a life where you produce what you were purposed to produce.

When we properly prioritize our life, we see three things happen.

We maximize that purpose, we minimize the distractions that hold us back in life, and we multiply our impact during our time on earth.

Priorities, when they are done right, are how we unleash our passion and our power.

It's how you live not just a successful life, but an incredibly significant life as well.

The truth is, most people are not intentional about prioritizing for their future goals, and they aren't intentional about discovering the purpose that God has placed inside of them.

And so what we try to do over the last two weeks is to make the invisible reality of how these prior experiences, people, place, and things are controlling your life.

Take the invisible and make it overwhelmingly visible.

You have a future and a potential out in front of you.

And if you are not looking back at the past that controls you, then your past will become an anchor that is keeping you in the constant struggle to live a life that matters.

You may not be able to see these prior ties, but you can certainly feel them.

You feel it when you have a tie to a place in your past.

Maybe you're convinced that your life will never be the same after the significant move that you made, or maybe you are tied to a childhood home that nothing else can ever live up to.

We talked last week a lot about how people get tied to their experiences in school, and some people had such an incredible experience.

It was like the height of their popularity, the height of their influence, the height of achievement happened in middle school, high school, even back in elementary school, you think you peaked at 15 years old, and nothing will ever compare to it.

Other people had such devastating experiences of school, and no matter how much the people around you can see your value, can see your skill sets, can see your worth, you only see yourself as that middle schooler who was behind and didn't hit puberty when everyone else did, or the high schooler, who didn't know how to socialize with everybody else.

Maybe you are tied to your very first job and a supervisor who told you that you would never amount to anything.

And now it's like the smallest bump in the road of your career, and you just know that you are finally proving that boss right.

We prioritize prior ties.

Some of us come week after week, and we always talk about how God has given us a purpose, and we have the ultimate opportunity to join with the creator in the redemption of his creation.

And you love that idea, but you feel like you are slowly crawling your way towards it, like you take one step forward and three or four steps backwards again and again and again.

Could it be that you are anchored to places in your past?

We can't always see these prior ties, but we feel them.

We feel it when we are tied to world views and ideas about how to manage the things and the resources in our life.

And so, what is your money to you?

Is your money a way to accelerate the path to your potential, or is your money a way to avoid or alleviate the pain from your past?

We are forfeiting our financial futures to try and mitigate pain right here and right now.

And why is that?

Why are we living with absolutely no financial flexibility?

Why are we building absolutely no wealth?

Wealth creation is not magic.

Don't let them sell you that lie.

It is spending less money than you make continuously over time.

That is as simple as it gets, and yet it's like we just can't do it.

We are overspending and undersaving, drowning in debt.

We're convinced that we must drive a new car every two years, and why?

We are convinced that we have to wear name brands even if we can't afford it.

Why?

Why do we have our eight-month-old in$80 Jordans?

They can't walk yet.

And could it be that the way you prioritize your money isn't as fuel for the future and potential that you could have, but it's actually tied to pain in your past.

We feel our prior ties.

It's the feeling of being stuck.

It's the feeling of pain that we can't quite pinpoint.

We struggle with places, with things, and we are also tied to people from our past.

And many of us every day are dragging behind us broken relationships.

We're dragging behind us the pain of harsh breakups or people who cheated.

We're dragging behind us the people who spoke our false narratives into existence, the people who we could never impress, the people who we wanted to be accepted by so badly, and yet they continued and continued to reject us.

Some of you are dragging behind you mother and father wounds that you are too scared to intentionally look back and confront.

We leave pieces of ourselves behind.

Some of you are tied to a long string of sexual encounters where you've given away pieces of yourself that are affecting you today and destroying your future.

God has an incredible future out in front of you, and yet so many of us are allowing a past that we've already lived, that we can no longer control.

We're allowing it to take control of our lives in the present and set the agenda of our lives in the future.

And your life is too important to live like that any longer.

Last week we began to look at our prior ties.

If we're gonna meet our potential, we have to break free from them.

And today we're gonna take the next step in doing just that.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you and we thank you.

We thank you for loving us.

First of all, we thank you for this time to come together as people from all walks of life, all different places in our faith journey, but all different worldviews and backgrounds to come together for the purpose of seeking the life that we were created to live.

And so, God, we're asking that you would speak to us, and because we want you to speak to us, I pray that we would have the humility to lay down all of our own ideas and any agendas we've brought in today, to simply be willing for you to say what you need to say and do what you need to do.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, and everybody said, Amen.

We're talking about how to live a fruitful life.

We are convinced that to do that, you must prioritize properly.

Doing so will help you maximize purpose, minimize distractions, multiply your impact.

We're gonna look at the most famous passage on how to live a fruitful life.

It's a passage that we went into great detail on back in April in our I Am series.

It's the words of Jesus himself in John's Gospel, chapter 15.

Jesus said this: I am the true vine, and my father is the gardener.

And every branch in me that does not produce fruit, he lifts up.

And he prunes every branch that produces fruit so that it will produce even more.

In this moment, to give you kind of the setting, Jesus had taken his disciples there in Jerusalem to what's called the Mount of Olives, and it overlooks most of the agriculture there in Jerusalem.

It's an agrarian society, and as Jesus and the disciples are looking over vineyards almost as far as the eye can see, these disciples back in the first century would have completely understood this metaphor.

Now, most of us don't grow grapes for a living, and if we do garden, it's like a little urban raised bed garden, you know, in the backyard or whatever.

And so we might need a little extra layer of understanding to fully grasp what Jesus is saying.

The first point that Jesus makes is like blatantly obvious.

It's so obvious that it can't be argued against at all.

You see, the metaphor is that Jesus is the vine, he is rooted, and and we are the branches attached to that vine.

The first point is that the branch can only survive if it is connected to, the branch can only survive if it is connected to the vine.

That is obvious.

The moment that you cut a branch off of a tree is the moment it starts dying.

It will not produce fruit, it cannot produce flowers, it will not grow any more leaves.

We know this, that the moment a branch detaches from the plant, it can no longer get the nutrients it needs.

It is detached from its very source of life.

This is the picture that Jesus paints of the very first step of how we can also live a fruitful life.

We must be connected to the source of life.

This is important because that's what that's what makes what we do right here different from just going to a self-help seminar or reading a book about proper priorities.

And please, don't get me wrong.

You can be disconnected from Christ, not even believe in God, learn how to prioritize your life better, and your life will get better.

You'll manage your time better, you'll probably make more money, you'll be more available for your relationships, you can be successful.

The problem is we're not just on a journey to success.

And everyone can point at some incredibly successful people who are incredibly unfulfilled and incredibly depressed.

We are looking to live a successful life, but more importantly, we are looking to live a significant life.

And to live a significant life, we must be attached to the source of true life.

Not just living, because you can be living, you can have brain function, heart beating, breath in your lungs, you can be living and not really be alive.

And if you've ever truly been stuck in life, if you've ever truly been in that moment where you can barely get yourself out of bed, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

You are living, but you're far, far from being alive.

To truly discover your purpose and live a life that fulfills you at the deepest level of your being requires that you find that purpose in the one who created that purpose inside of you.

This is called an abiding relationship.

A relationship where we are seeking intimacy with Jesus every moment of every day, in every action and reaction, in every decision, in every relationship, we are seeking out what Christ has for us.

This is step number one.

He is the vine.

We are the branches.

If we are to bear fruit, we must abide in the vine.

Jesus begins to extend his metaphor.

Once you are connected to him and you will start seeing some fruit in your life, but we all still have problems.

We all still suffer.

We all get stuck.

Branches that are producing fruit still need some help from time to time.

And he says that that help comes in the form of pruning.

Every branch, he says, God prunes so that it may produce even more fruit, living out our purpose and pursuing our potential.

On grape vines, where Jesus is giving this analogy, there's a very specific type of branch that gets pruned.

We talked about this a little bit last time.

Those branches are called laterals.

That's a technical term for them.

And what these laterals do is they grow right at the base of the branch, where the branch meets the vine.

And there's a reason that they grow there, and it's the same reason that they have to be pruned.

They grow there because they want to get as close as they can to the source of water.

You know how a plant works, you learned this in third grade science.

The roots go into the ground, when the water goes into the ground, the roots draw the water out of the ground and up into the plant.

Now, the water must make it up and out, because that is where the fruit is grown.

It must go up and it must go out.

Laterals are not up and out, they are down and right at the base.

They put themselves as the first in line to get access to the water.

And by doing that, they are diverting the water away from where it needs to be prioritized in order to actually grow fruit.

Now we talked about that last time, and the technical term for these little branches are laterals.

However, what I didn't know how to work in my sermon last time is what these are actually called by all of the gardeners out there.

They're not called laterals, they're known as suckers.

And they are called suckers because they suck the life out of the plant.

And so people who own vineyards, they don't talk about pruning, they talk about de succoring their vineyard.

That is the purpose of getting rid of these little plants that are keeping their vines from proper prioritization.

And our lives are in desperate need of some de-succoring.

We all have some aspects of our life.

We have some things that we have allowed in that are taking our precious resources.

These are the distractions that we are seeking to minimize in our life.

These are the toxic relationships that are draining us day after day, week after week, year after year.

These are the habits that are keeping us from actually pursuing the time and the work that goes in to living a significant life.

We all have things we've allowed in our life.

And they are sucking the life out of us.

We need desperately some pruning.

And maybe you have felt stuck.

Maybe you are stuck right now.

And here's what we learn from the plant.

Here's what we learn from the laterals.

Here's what we learn from the lack of pruning.

It sucks to be stuck.

You know this.

If you are stuck in your marriage, and every day you're like, what are we doing here?

Forget love.

We don't like each other anymore.

It's like every drive home from work, I just want to keep driving.

There are a few things worse than that.

Feeling stuck in your career every day, driving to work.

Like, what in the world am I doing?

Why am I wasting 10 hours a day at this job I hate, surrounded by people I don't like, producing a product I don't care about?

If you've ever really felt stuck in life, where every morning you wake up like there is a weight on your chest, it takes everything in you just to get out of that bed.

You know?

It sucks to be stuck.

And it doesn't happen magically.

And it doesn't happen on accident.

It happens when we are tied to things in our past that are setting the priorities for our present and our future, that are allowing things into our lives that are sucking the lives right out of us.

And so, how much would it be worth to get back the marriage that you dreamed it would be when you stood at the altar and said, I do?

What would it be worth to you to be parenting kids, not just praying for the day that they turn 18, but praying for the day that they transition into adults who you can cherish as friends?

What would it mean to be a part of a career?

How much is it worth to you to drive into a job every day that even if you didn't care about the job, you know that you have a purpose within it?

You can live that life.

But it requires the painful process of pruning.

What would it look like to actually cut yourself free from the things that are in your past that are holding you back from the life that you could be living?

What would it be like to actually wake up every day convinced that you have purpose, passion, and a sense of worth about how you're living and who you are living for?

It looks like it's easy as a snip and a snap.

It's not.

It's turning back and intentionally facing some of the most painful moments from your past.

But what would it mean to unshackle yourself?

What would it mean to feel like every day that you wake up you have an actual runway to your future?

What would it mean for you to believe in yourself at the same level as the person in your life or in your past who believed in you the most?

And we can live this life.

And most of us will not.

We fail to do so, we continue to let prior ties from our past set the agendas for our future.

And we do it because pruning can be incredibly painful.

Jesus said that he is the vine and that his father, God the Father, is the gardener.

It is God that gives us the opportunity for pruning, but pruning can be painful.

And why would God allow us to go through pain in our life?

Isn't He a good God?

Isn't He all-loving?

The author of Hebrews had to answer that question.

In the New Testament, there's a letter that we call Hebrews, and it's written to some brand new Christians, and they're getting a lot of things pruned out of their life.

And they are suffering.

Like they are incredibly suffering.

Not like our suffering, like I almost got a front row parking spot, and then you know, that jerk like pulled in there really fast, and now I've got to walk, you know?

It's like, never mind, I'll just drive home and order my H E B online, you know, like not that kind of suffering.

Not like I wanted a soy latte and they gave me whole milk, you know?

These people have lost their jobs, they've been kicked out of their homes, their wealth has been confiscated, they've been disowned by their families, many are being imprisoned, and some are losing their life just for doing exactly what we are all doing here today.

Coming together to claim the name of Jesus.

They are suffering.

And the pruning is so painful in their lives that they're thinking about abandoning their faith altogether.

And so the book of Hebrews, the letter to the Hebrews, is addressing this issue.

And in Hebrews chapter 12, he starts by saying, and you have forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons.

Hebrews 12 · chapter mention

What that means is you guys are forgetting how God actually sees you.

Not just as believers, not just as followers, not even just as his church, God sees you as his children.

And so, my son, do not take the Lord's discipline lightly.

Do not lose heart when you are reproved by him.

For the Lord disciplines the one he loves and punishes every son he receives.

And here's the key endure suffering as discipline.

We often don't see our suffering as discipline.

We often see suffering as further proof that we are, in fact, victims in our own story.

Take your suffering as discipline.

God is dealing with you as children for what son is there?

That a father.

That's not discipline.

And we live in a culture today, uh Where there are a lot of sons and daughters who are not being disciplined.

What did Jesus say to his disciples?

He said that God is the gardener and that God prunes those who are attached to the vine so that we can live our ultimate fruitful life and meet our potential.

He does this to prune, he does this to get out of our life the things that are diverting proper prioritization in our life, and it's a painful process.

And God knows this.

But God knows all.

God is wisdom itself.

And one thing he knows for sure is that pruning is far less painful than a life that is wasted.

And whatever you have to go through, and I understand what I'm saying when I say that, whatever you have to go through to break free of your prior ties and to be able to get intentional about the future God has for you, whatever it is, however painful it is, wherever it takes you and whatever it causes is less painful than someday being on your deathbed and looking back at a life full of wasted opportunity, ruined relationships, and a potential that you never even bothered to pursue.

God knows this.

For the parents in the room, if your kids are never mad at you, if your kids never hate you a little bit, if your kids never think that you are idiots, there is like almost a 100% chance that you are trading some temporary convenience and peace for future devastation.

There's a good chance that you are raising kids to become adults, the kind of adults that you can't stand.

Kids require boundaries and they require discipline and they require parents who get on the same page in the same team to make sure that their kids feel the natural consequences of their actions.

We discipline kids, not arbitrarily, we discipline kids because we love them.

It is our job to help our kids prune their lives, to get the wrong relationships out, the wrong friends out, the wrong habits out, the wrong worldviews out, the wrong media out.

That is our job, and these things are desperate to take priority in our children's lives.

And so we discipline, and sometimes we punish, and we allow our kids to endure the right kind of suffering so they will grow up and avoid the wrong kind of unnecessary suffering.

Verse 11 sums it up like this: no discipline seems enjoyable at the time.

Obviously, it's painful.

However, later on, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

You should want your kids to live a fruitful life.

A life that brings more life.

A life where their passion and potential is unleashed, where they are not only successful, but where they are ultimately significant.

And you know it's interesting because we endure suffering in our own lives.

And we know that God is our father, and we're very comfortable with that idea because we've got 2,000 years of talking about it and preaching about it and singing about it.

But to these believers in the first century, almost 2,000 years ago, gods back then, they were not fathers to you.

They were not relational with you, they were not involved in your life, they did not care about your suffering.

This is a reminder that this is the one true God, the God who got small, the God who came to our earth and proved his love by trading his life for yours.

The bottom line is if there is no discipline, there will be no destiny.

The future that God has for you, that if you were to follow him and pursue that purpose, you cannot even imagine the potential he has placed inside of you that he's desperate to set loose on the world.

To get there requires enduring your suffering as discipline.

We must prune if we want to see proper prioritization, if we want to maximize purpose, minimize distractions, multiply our impact.

We must break ourselves free from the things in our life that are sabotaging our significant by overtaking our priorities.

There are two things that we learned today, I want to summarize them for you.

The first is in John 15, and that's that we must abide in Jesus.

You see, a couple things happen when we put ourselves in proximity to perfection.

The first thing is we realize that we are far worse off than we could have ever imagined.

You see, it's easy to think that we're doing pretty good, you know?

It's like, I'm a good dad, you know, I'm a good husband, good employee, good boss, you know.

I'm doing pretty good, man.

And all of us can make ourselves feel that way.

All it takes is comparing ourselves to someone who's doing a little bit worse than us in all those areas.

All of a sudden, it's like, man, I've got this figured out.

I'm doing all right in life.

I might even have some of the answers.

When you put yourself in proximity to Jesus, when you seek him in every moment, what you realize is just how desperately you need him.

Just how far you are from God.

You realize the weight of your sin and the depth of your depravity.

When we get close to Jesus, we realize just how bad off we actually are.

And at the same time, we begin to realize just how incredible our potential is.

And maybe that seems like a paradox.

Maybe those seem like contrast, like they're moving in the opposite direction, but they're not.

They are one in the same.

When you spend time with the one who gave his life for you, you realize that it was your sin that cost him his life.

You realize just how bad off you are, and at the same time, you realize that if you had been the only person on planet earth, he would have still come.

He would have still given his life because you are that valuable to him.

It starts with abiding in Christ.

This isn't a feel-good message, this isn't a self-help sermon.

This is the reality that our sin holds us back, and Jesus holds the power to defeat our sin.

Once you begin seeking to follow Jesus and have this abiding, intimate relationship with him, it may take some time, but you will see relationships improving and anxiety abating and confidence increasing and perspectives shifting.

However, you will still require pruning.

All of us do.

We have all lived through different levels of suffering in our past.

And maybe you went through incredible trauma, and maybe you had a great life, but we've all suffered, and if we're not willing to take an intentional look back, then what is behind us will anchor us and hold us back from what lies ahead.

The first step is staying close to Jesus, and that's gonna be so important.

Because the second step we learn in Hebrews is to assess our suffering.

And we all suffer.

And maybe you have a great life, good marriage, you like your job, you enjoy your kids, you have good hobbies, a great friend group, you're not in crazy amounts of debt, you have some money in the bank, maybe you have a good life.

We all suffer.

We are in the midst of a broken, jacked-up world.

And for most people, they view suffering as an incredible inconvenience and a hindrance to their future.

And yet, Hebrew says to endure our suffering as discipline.

And all throughout scripture, we see the idea that suffering is actually what takes us, molds us, refines us, grows us, and matures us, and it actually requires suffering to get to our potential.

So many people waste their suffering.

When suffering with the correct perspective and staying close to Jesus can be the greatest gift you get.

And here's why.

The hardest point about priorities is to know what needs pruning.

Your suffering is a gift because your suffering is pointing at exactly what needs pruning.

Your suffering is pointing at what needs pruning.

The pain that we go through in life is like a giant neon sign pointing us to the fact that there is some misplaced priority in the midst.

There is suffering that has nothing to do with you, it happens to you outside of you, you are a victim of it.

There is suffering that is a natural consequence of the actions you take.

Those are two very different things.

But God is so big and he is so great that while he doesn't cause suffering, he can redeem all of it.

If we will assess our suffering, if we will take an intentional look, what we will find is it is pointing to something that needs to be pruned out of our life.

And you see people who keep missing the promotion and missing the promotion and missing the promotion, and manager after manager after manager has told them the same things about their performance and their personality, and what do they think?

What an idiot! If I could just get a better boss, if people would just listen to me, if they could just get on my agenda.

And it's like relationship after relationship after relationship ends, and you think, why does everyone suck so bad at friendship?

You're the only common denominator in this problem.

It's pointing at something in you.

It's like, how do I never have any money in the bank?

If I just made more money, maybe, but if there is something that needs pruned out of your life, you're gonna get more money and have more problems.

Sometimes our kids, like all kids, they repeat the same problems, you know, over and over.

It's like they keep running into the same obstacles.

And because of that, they keep getting the same talks from me.

And I feel bad for my kids because y'all have heard me preach, you're hearing me right now.

Um, I am long-winded, you know?

It's like my kids don't need whoopings because by the end of my sermon to them, they are ready to spank themselves, all right?

And so when it's like the third time or the fourth time or the fifth time, I'll finally say something like this.

All right, here we go.

Same speech.

Same speech.

I'm gonna tell you the same things because nothing has changed.

And so it's not about the speech, it's about what you think about it.

And chances are you're going to sit there and think, oh my gosh, mom and dad are such idiots, and I wish they'd leave me alone, and I wish I just got to do my own thing, and I wish that they would see it from my point of view, and I wish they would just get on with my agenda.

And it's easy when we talk about kids.

Because it's like, why won't they listen?

It's so obvious.

It's like you're five or whatever, you're nine, you're eleven, you haven't lived yet, you know nothing.

Like you haven't seen the world, you haven't experienced the consequences of it.

Why won't you just listen?

Everyone can look at a good parent disciplining their child and know, know that that child is wrong.

And the difference between us and our children is nothing compared to the difference between us and our Heavenly Father.

And He is giving us opportunities to pinpoint the problems that are sucking the life out of living and to prune them away.

And we continue to fall into the same cycles, we continue to make the same mistakes, we stay in the same habits, we stay tied, allowing our past to set the agenda for our future.

And the whole time we just wish that God would get on our agenda.

The whole time we wonder why we are so victimized in this life.

We look for others to blame.

Your pain is pointing at exactly what needs to be pruned out of your life.

And if you could get there, if you could walk away, if you could change your mind, if you could break free, you could move forward to an incredible future that God has in store for you.

This is how discipline happens.

Don't waste the struggle.

Assess your suffering, process your pain.

And remember, step one, we don't process it alone.

We take our suffering to our Savior.

We ask him to speak to us, and he will.

And sometimes he speaks through his word, and sometimes he speaks through a smill, still small voice, and sometimes he speaks through the wisdom of other people, and sometimes he speaks through people you can't stand.

But your suffering is pointing at something, something that is holding you back.

And if you can get intentional about finding it, if you can be humble enough to prune it, then you can properly prioritize your life and begin truly living.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you and we thank you, God.

We we're just humbled.

I mean, every time I think about it, that you chose us.

Broken, jacked up human beings, selfish, prideful, arrogant.

God, I don't know how many times you've tried to point me towards the obvious conclusion, and I just went so badly for you to get on my agenda and line up with my calendar and do all of my wishes, and you're so patient with us.

And you see us as your children, and God, you don't cause our suffering, but you redeem it.

If we will see it as discipline, God, it will be the key that unlocks the door to the life that you want us to live.

And so I pray that we would continue pursuing properly, prioritizing our life.

That we would stick close to Jesus, and we trust that He will help us every step of the way.

We ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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