Better Than Balance

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason and Liz Burns in Access Church in Lakeland and Bartow, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Man, it is good to be here with you guys.

I have been excited to come join you here for months now.

I've been looking forward to this Sunday.

And man, I'm telling you what, it is an absolute honor to be here.

But let me tell you something that you already know.

You already know this, but I'm gonna remind you of this.

Access, I believe that you have the greatest pastors in Pastor Liz and Jason Burns.

Can you guys give them honor?

Come on.

Man, we love them.

My wife, Tiffany, and I, we have been friends with them for over about 10 years now, and we have learned from them.

We have laughed with them.

You know, if you hang out with Pastor Liz, you're gonna laugh, right?

Like that is a good time.

And we have also leaned on them.

And you're gonna hear a little bit more about that in a bit.

But I am praying for your pastor.

I love him with all that I have, and I'm praying for him.

I'm asking, you know, we're we believe that God's gonna transform lives in here, and I'm hoping that maybe it's his today, because uh he's a Cowboys fan.

And they need Jesus too.

All right, relax, everybody.

Come on.

But uh listen, I'm telling you this that I have watched God do some incredible things through this couple.

Uh we we met them a long time ago, and we were we attended your your church a long time ago.

Before we ever planted our church, we wanted to see how do you do church well, and we learned from your pastors and loved them instantly.

And so uh I'm just so so honored to be here on this platform with you.

Hey, North Lakeland, Bartow, we're glad that you're here as well.

But I wanna honor you as well.

As a guest in this house, I want you to know that uh I've got a message that God has been preparing in me long before I ever prepared it for you.

And let me introduce my family.

My wife, Tiffany and I, we have been married for 22 years.

I know, it's babyface, how could that be real, right?

I know, I get it.

But we've been married 22 years.

This week, we're celebrating that.

We've got uh three kids, Noah, uh next one is Leah, and then uh Grace there on the end.

And I said, hey, listen, girl, we're gonna get in the car, we're gonna celebrate your anniversary, our anniversary, with a couple thousand of our friends in Lakeland, okay?

So today is a big party, all about us, really.

But listen, we live in Sarasota, as you heard, and you might be thinking of Siesta Key, you know, white sandy beaches, MTV show, right?

All that stuff.

Yeah, that's true.

That's where we live.

We love it.

West Coast, best coast, you know.

Uh however, there's this little known fact about Sarasota, and that is it is really a circus town.

Back in the day, Ringling Brothers, they used to winter the circus in our town, and they would put elephants on these islands, you know, by the quay, and it was crazy.

And some of that culture has stuck.

In fact, some of those uh some of those performers and and circus folks, they've you know come back and called Sarasota home.

And so it makes for incredible people watching, all right?

Like you go out and you're like, I'm not sure, is that like just a Friday night date night makeup, or are we joining the circus?

I don't know.

Uh but it's also home to Circus royalty.

Anybody heard of Nick Walinda from the Flying Walindas?

Maybe you've seen him on TV.

Uh he is, you know, one of the most incredible performers.

In fact, right here you see an image of Nick walking across an active volcano on a high wire, like suspended thousands of feet above an active volcano, and he's just balancing his way across this wire.

He is a professional, a master at balance.

He's walked between uh skyscrapers and across Times Square.

He's it's just unbelievable what he's done.

Well, in this in the winter, they actually put on a circus in my town, and so we got some tickets to that one year and showed up to the circus, and apparently they're pretty good at people watching as well, because in the intermission portion of the circus, they they picked some people out of the crowd to join the circus, and wouldn't you know it?

They picked me.

They're like, that looks like a dude that needs to join the circus.

And so this is me joining the circus.

I'm I'm right there in the middle in the in the big top, and I had a very short career, but it was a career nonetheless.

Uh, you know, I put it on my LinkedIn profile.

I'm still waiting for Nick to endorse me for working well under pressure.

Um, but hey, I never got an opportunity to walk the highwire in the circus.

And my my hunch is, I don't know you personally, but my hunch is that you've probably never walked a highwire either.

And yet, what I do know to be true about my life and yours is that we have all had to walk and figure out how to balance ourselves in life.

And I'm saying this because for me, balance has been a struggle.

It's a struggle to balance everything that you've got going on in life.

And I actually thought that life would get easier as it got older, right?

Like, I hate to break it to you, but like I thought adulthood was gonna be easy.

It turns out adulthood is really just figuring out how many different meals can you make with chicken, right?

And answering email for the rest of your life.

Welcome to adulthood.

Parenthood, I thought that would be easy too.

I got three kids, and I was like, oh, but we could write the book on parenting.

And then you find out that it's really just like bargaining with your toddler in a Chick-fil-A line to put their shoes back on.

You're like, come on, please, please, please.

Marriage.

Man, I thought marriage was gonna just be like romantic, candlelit dinners all the time, you know, like, and marriage is just one giant competition about who slept worse the night before and why you slept worse.

Listen, I I don't even make it to 22 years of marriage, take my word for it.

And I promise you, I'm so competitive in this.

I bought my wife an aura ring so that I could show her with data, scientific proof that I slept worse than her.

My sleep score is worse than her.

Balance.

It is hard.

It's hard to stay balanced in life.

In fact, I'd ask you the question: how often does life actually feel balanced for you?

How many of you know that it just takes one unforeseen bill, one car repair, one relationship that goes a little haywire.

It's that one conversation with the boss where he goes, hey, I just need to see you in my office real quick.

And all of a sudden, everything is thrown off balance in your life.

The issue is not if you lose balance, the issue is what's underneath of you when you do.

See, mental wellness isn't about perfect balance, it's about being prepared when life knocks you off balance.

When life takes the balance beam and throws it, you know, kind of haywire, life it won't stay balanced for very long.

And the Bible actually promises that life isn't gonna be easy, but it does promise that the hard parts won't be wasted.

It brings us to the book of James today, and I want to invite you to turn in your Bibles if you brought them with you to James chapter one.

It'll be on the screen here as well.

And the author of the book of James is Jesus' half-brother James.

And the interesting thing about James is that he didn't really believe in Jesus.

He didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was until he encountered the risen Savior.

And James became a leader in the early church, and he writes about trials and perseverance not from theory, but from tested faith.

So I want you to look at this wild statement that James makes in chapter one, verse two.

He says, Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds.

This doesn't make any sense, right?

Like, joy?

What do we think joy is?

Well, joy is like when you show up to church and somebody's like, hey, how you doing?

You smack a smile on your face and you're like, I'm good, highly favored, brother.

Blessed, how are you?

And they're like, really?

That's not joy.

That's that might be happiness, but joy is far greater than that.

If you're taking notes, I want you to write this down.

Joy is a posture of the heart, rooted in the presence and promise of Jesus.

Joy is a posture of your heart when it's rooted in the presence and the promise of Jesus.

And I don't know about you, but when I bump up against trials of many kinds, my joy is thrown off.

In verse 2, consider it pure joy, verse 3 picks up and says, Because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.

And perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking in anything.

James says, Listen, joy is this deep settled confidence that God is good, that God is with you, and that God is working even when life isn't.

And the Bible says that when you were born, that God formed you in your mother's womb.

And that I believe that between the womb and the tomb, that God continues to form you.

And in fact, I believe with all of my heart that that when life is trying to knock you off balance, James speaks to the moment and he says that God is not just interested in the moment of getting you through it, he's actually interested in forming you through it.

Because your formation has always been on the heart of God.

A lot of us wish that it was our comfort, that the foundation of our comfort was God's heart, but it's actually the formation of your character.

Because God doesn't waste pain.

He uses pain to form something in you that comfort and balance never could.

I would never have believed this statement if I didn't first live it.

Over the course of my life, I've had more than my fair share of pain.

I don't know what your story is.

I know that in a room this size, with this many people, that there's pain in this space.

But in my life, 2004 was the highlight of my life.

It was the year that I was married.

All you math majors already had that figured out.

22 years, you count it backwards, you're, you know, you gotta go.

And I was married in 2004, and I married my best friend.

And life has been, it's it's been amazing.

But in 2004, that was the very same year that I also experienced the worst year of my life.

Because my dad, who was also a pastor, my pastor, my role model, my mentor, my father, my daddy, was diagnosed with Louis Boddy's disease.

Louis Bodies Disease is a cross between Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

It takes the worst of both, blends them together, it takes the mind and the body and disintegrates them both.

I watched as a man who stood on a platform faithfully delivering God's word for 25 years, as he could no longer open his Bible and read it.

For four years, I attended hundreds of miniature funerals for my father, saying goodbye to abilities and memories that would no longer be.

It was in that stage of my life that I encountered depression for the first time in my life.

I wouldn't know what it was for years later, but it showed up with a vengeance.

In 2015, I had my first panic attack.

I was serving in a church and my boss was manipulating and controlling, and my physical body felt the need to escape what my mind couldn't.

I ran out of the building because I needed to get outside in order to breathe some some fresh air.

And I didn't even realize it was a panic attack until years later I was in the emergency room and a doctor came in and explained my symptoms and said, Oh, you've been having panic attacks all along.

That's what this is.

After that first panic attack, I uh realized that something needed to change.

And so my family and I, we picked up where we were living in New Jersey and moved to the great state of Florida, and we didn't come to Florida to plant a church.

In fact, we moved to Florida in order to uh to lead a church.

We were in, there was a leadership transition.

We were a part of that transition.

Three years later, we were supposed to take over this church, very successful.

And the lead pastor decided in a matter of two to three months that he was no longer going to preach from the Old Testament and maybe some of what Paul said and only a few things of what Jesus said, and we no longer fit there, and I had to resign immediately.

I went from being the most stable I had ever been in my life to struggling to put food on the table for my family.

Talk about off balance.

And I had no idea that in those seasons and in those situations that God was forming a resilience and a strength in me that would be used in future seasons.

Because listen to me, not everything that happens to you is good.

But God is good, and He's so good that He can redeem everything that pain tries to destroy in your life.

Friends, your journey is not wasted, it has a purpose.

And the thing about journeys is that journeys allow you to have perspective, it allows you to look back over some time and it allows room for that.

And the perspective reminds us that God is not wasting these seasons, even the hardest of seasons, of which you might be in today.

The ones where you feel most off balance.

The struggle isn't pointless, it's producing something powerful in you.

If you think back over the course of your life, the moments where you felt off balance.

Maybe you felt alone, maybe you were scared, maybe you were anxious, maybe you were depressed.

I don't know what that was for you.

But God has used countless situations in your life to get you where you are today.

Now, not every person or situation was a blessing in your life.

Somebody needs to say amen to that, right?

You gotta somebody's face just popped up in your mind.

But God has worked in you through it.

And look back at verse 5.

It says, if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it or wisdom will be given to him.

But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like the wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.

That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord, for he's a double-minded man, unstable or off balance in all that he does.

You know what wisdom is?

Wisdom is simply knowledge applied.

A lot of us know the right thing to do, but don't do it.

We might be smart enough to know what we should do, but we're not wise enough to follow through with it.

And when life gets hard, you don't need the whole plan.

You just need God's wisdom for the next move.

When you when you feel like you're off balance, the point is not to think, man, how do I get from here all the way to the other side of the Grand Canyon?

When you're walking that high wire, the only thing you're worried about is the next move.

The next foot, right in front of you.

Take that next one.

Can I balance just a little bit more?

Just to get that next step down.

See, for me, God's wisdom, it didn't arrive as an answer that fixed everything in my life.

In fact, several years ago, God gave me this image of a net that I needed to build a net specifically.

In 2020, uh leading a church through COVID was not fun.

Uh we were we were a portable church at the time, and we were meeting in an elementary school, and um COVID was not kind to portable churches, setting up and tearing down every single week.

Uh, we were homeless for almost two years.

But early on, we found a space that we could we could rent, we could uh lease this space and build it out in a shopping center.

It was gonna require uh a full build out, and we had$500,000 to do this, and I figured it would take four months tops.

Well, we celebrated our grand opening where my math major's at on January of 2023.

That did not work out.

Four months did not pan out.

And uh I'm telling you this along the way, we had three general contractors.

The first one uh suffered a severe stroke, that life-altering stroke, a terrible, horrible situation for him.

Hired another general contractor, had to fire that guy after he hired a subcontractor that stole$250,000 from our church in prepaid goods and services.

When I tell you that I was discouraged, defeated, that barely scratches the surface.

The day that I got the phone call letting me know that what had happened, I remember exactly where I was.

I was walking out of the front door of my house, going to my car, I picked up the phone, and they revealed to me what was going on.

I collapsed right there in my driveway and just wept.

I had my back against the tire of my car.

And just was like, God, what are you doing?

Panic attacks returned with a vengeance in my life.

Anxiety was crippling in that season.

And here's how anxious I was.

I couldn't even open my email.

Because I was afraid of what negative email I was gonna get from somebody in church.

I was afraid of seeing what bill needed to be paid that we couldn't afford anymore.

And stress wreaked havoc on my body.

I was in the hospital uh more than one time and put on the operating table twice because of it.

My mind and my emotions were unstable and I was all over the place.

But God gave me this image of a net in a season where I felt like I was falling.

I brought a net with me, not because you don't know what a net is, but because I want you to see something very specific.

God said, prepare your net.

And this picture that God gave me was a net with a bunch of different ropes woven into it.

And each one of these ropes would represent something or someone that would sustain me in the days that I could not get out of bed on my own.

There were some people in this net that were woven into my net, which included my pastor.

I speak to my pastor regularly.

Uh, I talk to him weekly.

I got friends that asked me how I'm really doing.

I've got uh professionals in my life, I've got a counselor, I've got uh a doctor, uh, my wife is one of the strands in this net.

I've got healthy physical rhythms that I have built into my life and time in God's presence.

I had overseers, a board of directors in my church, and I've got my connect group, I've got all kinds of things that I've woven in here, and I want to tell you something that your pastor is one of the fibers in my net.

Pastor Jason is an amazing pastor.

We've already talked about this, but you need to hear me say this.

He's an even more amazing friend.

He would call me out of the blue, and he would say, Hey man, how's it going?

Meanwhile, he knows exactly how it's going, and I would say, Hey, I'm great, brother.

Highly blessed and favored by the Lord.

And he would go, Come on, man, how are you really doing?

Jason, I can never thank you enough for how you have woven yourself into my life to help me make it through the moments that I didn't know I could make through.

Now I can't tell you everything that he's done for me, but I can tell you that he's prayed for me, he's preached for me, he's supported me, he's encouraged me, and quite honestly, he has just loved me.

He was one Important fiber in my net, but he is not the only one.

My wife is one important fiber in this net, but she is not the only one because it's not fair to them or safe for you to put all of your hope in one human being.

So the question I've got for you today is who have you intentionally woven into your net to support you in the moments when you cannot support yourself?

Because if you don't plan to fall, you will fall without a plan.

And the way down will be far less forgiving.

I want to give you four non-negotiables of things that you need to weave into your net.

So here's the plan for your safety net.

The number one thing is you've got to weave in God's promises and his presence.

God's word is far more than just inspiration, it's illumination.

Look quickly with me at Psalm 119.

It says, Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.

The unfolding of your words gives light, it gives understanding to the simple.

God's word lights up our path and it gives us understanding when life feels dark and confusing.

I wish I was brave enough to show you pages of my journals.

To show you highlights in my Bible.

You know when your Bible gets wet and kind of crinkles a little bit?

Show you teardrops in God's word.

I'm not that brave.

But I am I am aware of myself.

And this fiber was so significant to me that I for the last who knows how long I've been I wake up every single day earlier than I'd like to.

I go get a cup of coffee because how many of you know that you cannot speak with Jesus until you first had a cup of coffee?

I sit in the same chair in my house.

I got the same kind of journal, the same kind of pen, and I just spend time in God's presence.

Weave it in your life.

The next thing that you need to weave into your life is church and relationships.

You need to be here.

Access is an incredible church.

If you're new here, Pastor Jason's way better than me, okay?

Uh like come back next week, I promise you.

Uh if you are new-ish here or consider yourself new, give it some time.

I promise you that you can find some of the most life-giving relationships right here in this room, in this space, where you are at Access Church.

Your church, uh, it fits into Proverbs 15, 22 so nicely.

Proverbs 15, 22 says that plans fail for a lack of counsel, but with many advisors, they succeed.

Your church, your small group, your your connect groups, and your mentors, those that you serve with, those are men and women that will help carry you when you can't carry yourself.

They'll help catch you when you're falling.

Third thing I want to encourage you with is to develop some healthy habits.

At my church, I teach our church a lot about mental health, and I talk about how God created us mind, body, and soul.

We believe that we're supposed to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, and soul, right?

So with these three things, but why is it that we believe that he doesn't care about our body or our mind?

God cares about your body, your mind, just as much as he cares about your soul.

So you got to steward your body and your mind.

You got to take care of that, which means you might need to eat some food that fuels you, not just fills you.

You might need to start eating some things that you can pronounce.

You might need to start taking a walk.

During a season when I was just, I couldn't barely see my way forward.

I made myself get up and take a walk every day.

I just had to go outside.

I practiced something that one of my counselors taught me, and it was that I needed to find five things that showed me God's goodness.

You know what they look like?

On a hot summer day here in Florida.

I went outside and I felt like a nice breeze.

And I'm like, praise God, I could feel a breeze.

There was a little farmer's market by my office, and I would walk in and I would get a honey crisp apple about the size of my head.

And you know, you like you take that first bite and it crisps, and there's like so much juice and it's so sweet.

Praise God for honey crisp apple.

You're so good to me, God.

And I just practiced seeing God's goodness in my life because I needed the reminder, some healthy habits.

The fourth thing I want to encourage you with is you need to seek professional help.

There is no shame in needing professional help.

In fact, I would say that it is a sign of wisdom for you that God works through therapists and counselors and doctors who can help us process pain and recognize unhealthy habits that we have and move us towards healing.

You need to hear me say this: that prayer and professional help are not in competition with one another.

Sometimes seeking help is how we actually respond to God's wisdom.

Sometimes God's like, I already gave you some people.

You just need to go seek some help from them.

Meeting my counselor helped me identify the lies that I was believing when I was off balance.

Lies like, I'm not worthy, I'm no good, I'm not a good pastor, I'm not a good leader, I'm not a good husband, I'm struggling.

What am I worth?

Helped me identify those lies and face them head on.

Because sometimes when we're struggling mentally, we just kind of brush it off like, ah, I had a bad night's sleep.

Or I ate something weird and I kind of feel weird, you know.

No.

Sometimes we're carrying something and trying to ignore it, hoping that it just goes away.

But James gives us some good news because who wants some good news right about now?

He says this that blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.

James wraps up this entire section with a powerful reminder that blessed is the one who perseveres, who stays the course, who grows in character, who brings him glory and prepares yourself for future situations that provides an eternal reward for you when you stay the course.

Listen, endurance now leads to reward later.

What you endure now helps you sustain seasons later.

I'm telling you this that I can say without a doubt, without any sort of wavering in my heart, that I am not who I want to be today.

But I'm not who I was yesterday.

My endurance in this season has provided a quiet strength in me that I didn't know I had.

It has changed the way that I pastor my church, the way that I love my kids, the kind of husband that I am.

I have more conviction about my calling as a pastor in ministry than I have ever had before.

I am more confident in who the person that God created me to be than I knew, than I thought I ever could be.

I would never want to go through that ever again.

But I also wouldn't want to remove what God has formed in me because of it.

I am more convinced now than ever before that I am not standing on trial every single Sunday to figure out what my worth is based upon my performance for God, but that I am a son of God, a child of God that is deeply loved because of who I am in Christ.

And I don't need your applause for that.

I need you to hear that about you.

I'm willing to expose my scars because I want you to receive healing.

I'm willing to talk about my pain because I know that you walk through pain.

Pain is, it means you're human.

It doesn't mean you're weird or broken.

You're hurting because you're human.

And the beauty about our God is that he saw the brokenness of humanity and he moved towards you because he loves you.

I'm not your pastor, but I want to pastor you for a second.

For those of you in this room, for those of you online, for those of you up Bartow, all across Lakeland.

You are not failing.

God is forming you.

For something bigger than you ever could imagine.

What you're facing today will help you endure seasons in your future.

See, this is what wisdom does, it gives us perspective.

So, friends, will you strengthen your net?

Will you stretch it out wide?

Will you ask the Lord today, God, what is it that you would have for me?

And what am I gonna do about it?

God, I pray for my friends all across this room, for every person within the sound of my voice right now.

God, for those that are struggling, for those that are hurting, for those that would identify as dealing with some sort of issue that is throwing them off balance today.

God, would you reveal yourself to them in a powerful way?

God, and I pray that by the mighty name of Jesus, that the Holy Spirit would fill them and lead them to hope and healing in Jesus alone.

God, I thank you that your promises never fail.

Your mercies are new every day.

Great is your faithfulness.

We pray all those things in the powerful name of Jesus.

Amen.

And now with your eyes closed and your head still bowed, I've talked about a security in my life that I didn't know was even possible.

I've walked through things that have hurt me more than I can imagine.

And yet I am safe and secure because of my relationship with Jesus.

And if you have never placed your faith in Jesus, I want to give you that opportunity now because Scripture tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of God's standard, that we will all blow it, we will all be off balance, and we will all miss the mark.

And yet, because of Jesus, we can be brought into a relationship with God.

And if you've never chosen to follow Jesus, I want to invite you today to make that decision that you can walk away today, knowing that you will never walk alone.

And if that's you, if you want to receive Jesus today as your Lord and your Savior, would you just slip up your hand right where you are?

I see it.

See you, praise God for you.

Praise God.

This is your moment for you.

And I want to lead you in a prayer because the words themselves are not what saves you.

Jesus is what saves you.

But when you place your trust in Jesus, it changes you.

So you can pray this sincerely from your heart.

And Access Church, here at Access, everybody, we're gonna pray all this aloud together so nobody prays alone.

You can say this with me.

Jesus, thank you for loving me.

Jesus, thank you for loving me.

I know that I have sinned and I need your grace.

I know that I've sinned and need your grace.

I believe that you gave your life for me.

I believe you gave your life for me.

I believe that you rose from the dead.

I believe you rose from the dead.

Today I receive your forgiveness.

And I surrender my life to you.

Come in and make me whole.

Come in and make me whole.

From this day forward, I choose to trust you.

Amen.

Come on, Access.

Can we praise God for what he has done in this space for our friends that have placed their faith in Jesus for the first time?