Music.
Welcome to the Rooted Life Change Podcast. I'm Pastor Luke, and I believe that you can experience lasting life change for your good,
and for God's glory.
We've been going over and we've been talking a lot about denial, and last week we talked
about pride, and all kind of getting into our heads this idea of where we're at.
How do we begin to take those first steps in growing into a place where we can begin
to experience some change?
And that first step is beginning to identify that place of denial, where we've maybe been
denying, closing our eyes, plugging our ears, and pretending we don't have a problem.
But we've come to a place where we need to admit that we have a problem.
But how did we get there? How did we end up with this problem?
We didn't get there on purpose. Nobody ever sets out and says, you know what, today I'm going to go out and make bad decisions.
No one does that.
All of us have our best intentions. We all want to end up in the best position possible at the end of the day.
So how then do we end up in these places where we're stuck, where we have these problems, We have these hurts.
We have these addictions. We have these cycles that we can't seem to break.
How did we get here?
Today we're going to talk about this idea of sanity. Are we living a life that is kind of sane?
Or are we living in a condition of insanity? And I'm going to talk about what I mean by that.
When I say insanity, I mean that are we living in a way of being and acting that we have
gotten comfortable with, but it only leads to places where we don't want to go.
Insanity, on the other hand, means a way of being and acting that comes from a place of
wholeness that allows us to live life on life's terms.
I think it merits a little bit of time to spend and talk about what do I mean by those
two things. Let's talk about insanity.
A way of being and acting that we've gotten comfortable with that leads only to places
where we don't want to go.
Well, let's break that down a little bit. We all have ways of being and ways of acting.
We all have our routines.
Those are creatures of habit. We love to get, I'm one of those people who goes to a restaurant and loves to get the
same thing every time because I know I'm going to like it.
We're creatures of habit. We love to have the same thing for breakfast, know what we're going to do each week and
each day.
We have our routines. When we get home from a long work week, we know exactly what we're going
to do to unwind. And the same thing comes to how we respond to different stress and the way we
respond to situations. Even the way we respond to certain individuals. We get into habits of
responding to some people nicely and some people not so nicely or kindly. And so we get into these
ways of comfortable routine habits. But what happens if those habits are unhealthy? Or
if those habits are leading us to a place that we long term don't want to be? Nobody
wants to end up with a medical problem. No one wants to develop a medical problem. But
one of the biggest ways that you can develop a medical problem is by not taking care of of your diet, right?
If you say, if you sit someone down and you say, do you want to have heart problems later in life?
Well, no, I don't want heart problems later in life. No one wants that, right?
Okay, well then why are you not exercising and eating very unhealthy food in large quantities?
Because I like those things. But you said you, but those things lead to heart problems
later in life. You said you don't want heart problems.
See, there's this incongruity between the thing that you're doing now and where that thing
is ultimately going to lead. now.
Health is an easy one to kind of pick on it's one that we all deal with of trying to wrap our minds around,
the long-term consequences of my current daily habits, right that's difficult to.
To predict but the same thing comes when it comes into our relationships if you want a healthy relationship,
Well, then you need to be
Conducting yourself in healthy ways from the very beginning of your relationship if a relationship is founded on
maybe some Deception or some lies even white lies, right?
Is that going to lead to a healthy relationship down the road?
And so what we find ourselves in is if we're in a place if you're listening to this podcast and you're struggling to make life change,
chances are as you have some form of of insanity going on in your life.
The really popular way of defining insanity is doing the same thing over and over again,
but expecting different results, right?
We come to and say, well, I wanna get better grades.
Okay, did you study?
No, I just thought I would just show up and take the test.
And okay, well, you don't do very well. And then do you study again?
No, I'm just gonna come up and take the test again, and maybe next time, I'll try harder
while taking the test, right?
But you're not studying, you're not learning from your mistakes,
you're not doing anything different that's gonna lead to a different result.
That's insanity. And it's the same place that we get ourselves into.
If we don't want to go where our habits, where our routines,
where the way that we're living and being is leading us, but we continue to stay in that place.
Well, that's some sort of insanity right there If you are experiencing addiction addiction is an absolutely.
Isolating experience not only because it Keeps us in a place where we feel like we can't be truthful and honest with people and we hold people at bay
But oftentimes the addiction itself can push people away when we choose the addiction over people
over connection, when the addiction begins to have,
compounding effects, it takes more of our time, more of our money, we begin to lie.
It makes us behave in ways that we would never behave before we begin to use people.
That pushes people away and it results into a place where we're ultimately left alone,
just ourselves and our addiction.
That's the end game of addiction, is ultimately isolation and loneliness,
where the only thing we have left is the addiction.
That's a terrible future. And if that's where we're headed to,
but we refuse to let go of the addiction or to address that we have a problem,
then we're going to get there whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
Well, why why do we kind of buy into these? Why do we say well, there's this,
Addiction that's going on in my life and maybe there's this problem and why don't I change?
Why did we end up with this way of being in the first place? And that's because we ultimately we believe these short-term lies.
Right when we eat from We've talked about this idea this concept of going back to the garden in the Bible Genesis
Adam and Eve the true trees,
Representing two ways of being like sometimes we listen to that story and we hear the cartoon and all we think of is one tree
There's the tree of knowledge of good and evil and Adam and Eve weren't supposed to eat fruit from it and ate fruit from it
but we forget that there's actually two trees and
And that one of the trees was permissible for them to eat from until they had eaten
from the other one that they were not supposed to eat from.
And these two trees, they're not just, the one tree is not just a thing that you're not supposed to do.
The other is a thing that you ought to have been doing. See the two trees represent a choice.
The Tree of Life, the tree that God encouraged Adam and Eve to eat from, that was theirs
for the taking, was a symbol, was a understanding of saying, we're going to take life and how
we ought to live and knowledge and wisdom from God.
We're going to live life on God's terms. He's going to rule and reign in our hearts, and we're going to follow after Him.
And so, why would we ever need to eat from the tree of knowledge in good and evil if
it brings about sin, hurt, and separation, and pain?
Well, it's because Adam and Eve bought a lie. If we look at that story in Genesis...
Genesis chapter 3, it says this, says that the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild
animals the Lord had made. And he said to the woman, did God really say you must not eat from
any tree in the garden? Which is not what God said. The woman said, we may eat from the trees
in the garden, but God did say you do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
the tree in the middle. You must not touch it or you will die.".
"'You will certainly not die,' the serpent said to the woman,
for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God,
knowing good and evil." Notice that there is this truth and a lie in the twisting.
Sure, they will not die. They will not die immediately.
They will eventually die. They will die spiritually.
They will die internally. There is death that is coming, and the serpent lies.
He's like, well, no, you won't die.
You won't die right away. You will physically die now. You will spiritually die.
You will suffer consequences. And the serpent holds up this false promise, saying, if you eat from this tree of the knowledge
of good and evil, you will be like God, your eyes will be opened, and you will know good from evil.
Well, that's also partly true. But the part of that lie, the lie that comes in, is that with that comes sin, comes the
fact that we don't have the wisdom to make good decisions between what is good and what
is evil, that all too often we choose evil, right?
That's the lie, is that, yeah, we might suddenly begin to understand what good and evil is.
We aren't powerful enough and wise enough and holy enough to make those choices, to
be really discerning.
See, the serpent is offering something, but it's something that comes with a bit of a
consequence on the other side that Adam and Eve aren't noticing or aren't seeing right now.
And that's the same way all of these decisions come.
We often eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We say, you know what, I'm going to follow my own wisdom.
I'm going to do what feels good, what I want to do right now.
And we decide to do that. When we decide to do that, we're saying no to the way that God has called us to live,
and we're choosing to follow after and eat our own wisdom.
And that's when our insanity starts to kick in. We start to believe lies.
We might believe a lie like, this will make us feel good.
That's very true. And addiction often makes people feel really good.
The problem is that you don't always feel that good, or how are you going to feel afterwards,
or the long-term consequences of how that's making you feel.
This will finally be the thing that I need.
We make a decision, we say, you know what, I don't care that I'm going to have to cut
off all of my relationships to make this decision, this will be the thing that I finally need.
Not always true, often comes with significant cost. Just one more time won't hurt. Yeah.
But just one more time always leads to one more time. And if I could have control, we
would be happy. That's another, that's a lie we love to tell ourselves. If I had control
over everything, if only people would listen to me, do what I say, if things only went
my way, I would be happy. I'll tell you, there's plenty of people who get things just the way
they want them and they're still very, very unhappy. I know best. I'm making this decision
even though no one else and everyone else is telling me that this is not a good idea.
I'm not going to listen to them. I know best. No one understands. No one understands who
I am. That's a lie that we often hear and tell ourselves. No one truly understands me,
except for me. And it'll be easier to stay like this. That's the lie that we've talked
about quite a bit on this podcast, that we believe this idea that it's just easier to
stay this way. I shouldn't change. I should just be exactly the way I am. But staying
the way you are is uncomfortable and hard and has its own consequences too.
Every promise is ultimately a lie because behind it sits a cost that maybe isn't immediate,
maybe isn't right away, but in the long term, it's going to be there.
And so, we begin to buy that lie, begin to become comfortable living a certain way, being
a certain way, and when we do that, we begin to get into this place of insanity where we're
continuing to believe a lie, act and behave in a way that's leading us to a place that
we would never, ever want to go to begin with.
If we knew that that was where I was going to end up, if I made this one decision, we'd,
We'd never have made that decision.
But now we're down this road and there's that snowball effect and we're feeling that anticipation of,
where is this leading me?
This is not leading me where I wanna go. And that's, when we're in a place of,
in a life cycle or we're in a place of hurt or we're a place of addiction,
we don't wanna think long-term
because what we see long-term at our gut, what we know is coming,
we don't want to pay attention to.
And we need to start paying attention to it. And that's really my challenge for you this week,
is to sit and to think about the way in which you are living.
Say, is the way that I'm being, acting, the way my relationships are trending,
if I continue to live my life exactly how I've been living my life now,
and it stays this way for five, 10 more, 15 more years,
Where am I going to end up and is that where I want to go?
I encourage you to wrestle with that question.
As always, you can comment, like, send me emails and let me know how this is playing
out in your life, and I will talk to you.
Music.