Music.
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.
Last week we started talking about this topic of insanity. The popular definition of insanity
is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. We're finding
ourselves in a place of the way in which we are living is leading to a place or giving
us results that we ultimately don't want, but for some reason we continue to live the
way that we've been living.
I gave us a definition of insanity that sums it up this way.
Insanity is a way of being and acting that we've gotten comfortable with that leads only
to places where we don't want to go.
Sanity on the other hand is a way of being and acting that comes from a place of wholeness,
that allows us to live life on life's terms.
And we'll talk more about that as we go through the episode today.
What does it look like to turn towards sanity?
But before we go there, I want to talk one more and give us an illustration of how did we end up here?
How did we end up in a place where we're ending up with these results and this fruit and we're
going in a direction that we don't want to go? How did we end up there?
Well, a couple of things, if you, um, well first let's just talk about an illustration.
Have you ever heard about what it takes to boil a frog?
Maybe you've heard this, maybe you've not, but if you want to boil a frog, because frogs
there these amphibians and they regulate their temperature through like their skin and stuff
and so if you were to take a frog and you were to put it and try and put it in a hot,
bowl or a hot pot of boiling water it would immediately jump out it'd say this isn't safe
it jumps out it knows that if it stays there it's going to be in some serious trouble but if you,
If you take a live frog and you put it in room temperature water, the frog will be very
happy there. feel very comfortable.
Now if you have the Precision II, you turn up that burner on that water and you just
heat up that water by one degree.
The frog will sit there and the water will get a little bit warmer and the frog will
say, oh, well, that's not too much warmer. That's fine. I still feel very comfortable here.
And then if you turn up that water just another degree and then another, you keep turning
it up degree by degree.
At each moment, each point as the degree of the water gets hotter, the frog will sit there
and say, well, this is still fairly comfortable.
Why is it safe? It's fairly comfortable? Well, because it's only one degree hotter than it was before.
This has been comfortable.
I've been sitting in this water for a while. It was feeling just a little fine and it still feels fine.
Only one degree warmer is not that bad.
And the frog gets comfortable in the water after each and every single degree.
Up until the point that the water is nearly boiling.
And eventually the water does boil and the frog doesn't jump out.
Why? Because it's only one degree hotter than it was just a moment before.
We whether or not that's actually possible I've never seen anyone try and boil a frog.
I don't recommend you do it, but the illustration serves a point, right?
If someone were to say, this is the terrible situation, you know,
that you're gonna walk yourself into, right?
If you were presented with a choice of two doors, one door behind it had all the consequences,
all these, the loneliness, the isolation of addiction.
The ongoing hurt, the never experiencing healing from past wounds, broken relationships, not
getting what you want, right? If someone were to offer you that door, you would say, of course, I would never go through
that door.
But if someone asked you to walk through a door that was only slightly different than
the place you were previously at, right?
You would go, oh, no, that's fine, right?
See the thing is, is that life doesn't happen in big, dramatic moments most of the time.
Usually it changes by degrees over a long period of time.
And when we begin to make bad choices, when our way of being is not healthy, it's not
living life on life's terms, it's not following God's plan or direction, we start making these
choices that start to have small incremental consequences. And those small incremental
consequences will build up over time until we find ourselves boiling in a pot of water
we would have never wanted to be in in the first place. So how do we stop doing that?
How do we get from living in a place of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again,
And having it lead us to a place we would never ever want to go.
Because that's how we get where we're going. One wrong turn after another.
So let's talk about how do we turn towards sanity? How do we start to live and be in such a way that is on life's terms and is moving towards
where we want to go?
Well, okay. First is to wake up, right? is to pay attention to the alarm, to stop hitting snooze.
It's to say, all right, we're going in a direction we don't want to be.
That was the question I left you with last episode was to say,
Where am I going? If the way I continue to be and act stays unchanged.
Where am I going to end up? And we need to wake up to that reality that like what's going on isn't
good. I'm not going in a good direction. We need to take part. We need to start clearly defining
where the places of insanity are in our lives and stop being comfortable with them. We need to start
saying, you know what, it's not okay that things are this way. This is maybe the way things have
been, I've gotten comfortable to them being this way. But this shouldn't be okay. This,
shouldn't be the way I'm living my life. I should have better relationships than this.
I should not be constantly hiding behind lies. I should not have whole parts of myself and
my story that I can't talk about, because it hurts too much. Let's begin to find healing
break cycles and make life change.
The next thing to do is to begin to embrace strength and acceptance.
Sanity is not beginning to live, or sanity, I say, is beginning to live life on life's terms.
We need to face reality oftentimes. Reality is not comfortable and it's not easy.
And when we turn to Jesus and we begin to own up to the way things really are, we find
strength and acceptance.
One of the things that I think gets so confused in our minds is we have this idea that if
we follow Jesus, or if we follow God, if I just do the right thing, then things will go smoothly for me.
We get this idea that if I just do the right thing, there won't be obstacles, things will be easy.
Like, I'm doing the right thing, no one's supposed to stop me from doing the right thing.
There shouldn't be obstacles. You're supposed to be rewarded for doing the right thing.
But that's not how it really goes, and often following God does not mean that the storm
in our life is going to immediately stop.
There's the famous story where Jesus is walking on the water, and he's walking out on the water,
and his disciples are in a boat, and there's a storm happening on the body of water that they're
on. And the disciples are panicking because they're on a boat, and they think they're going,
to drown. They think it's going to crash. The waves are knocking and tearing the boat apart.
And the disciples see Jesus, and they say, say, oh, who is that? They think it's a ghost at first. And Jesus is like, no, no, it's
me. It's me, guys. And Jesus calls Peter out onto the water with him. And we think that's
such a powerful story of Peter's faith walking out on the water. And we sometimes forget
that Jesus didn't calm the storm and then invite Peter out on the water. No, he invited
Peter out on the water while the storm was still happening.
See Jesus offers us peace and invites us to faith in the midst of the storm, in spite
of the storms of life.
Jesus does not promise that he's going to fix everything right away, that he's going
to make all the storms go away right now.
He might, but that's not the promise. The promise is that he will be with you in the midst of the storm.
When we begin to face the hard things in life, they're still going to be hard, but we're
going to not be doing it alone.
A lot of times we get into places where we don't want to be and we get into the places
of insanity because we're trying to avoid something.
There's a storm, there's a consequence, there's a circumstance in life, there's some difficult
emotions, a difficult choice, a topic that needs healing.
We don't want to deal with it. It hurts too much. And so we run other places, to our addictions,
to our broken cycles, to old ways of being, to bad habits, in order to stop feeling or to ignore
or numb ourselves to the thing that really needs to be addressed. And so we need to come to this
place of finding serenity. Serenity is not the absence of the storm, it's peace in the middle
of the storm. So we need to wake up. We need to wake up to the insanity, to the way that we're
living and how it is taking us to a place where we don't want to go. And then we need to find
strength and acceptance to face the uncomfortable facts of life. We live this life, we often believe
this false narrative, this lie that's been sold us in our modern culture.
And that is this idea that if we just live life just right, if we do things right, we
listen to all the smartest people, we read the right books, we do things at the right
time, we will be happy.
We've been sold this lie that it's possible to live a life where you are mostly happy.
And that's simply not true.
Life includes suffering. If life were to come in a box, it would say suffering included, happiness not guaranteed.
That's the fact of life, but often we want to rail and push against that reality.
And the more and more we have a hard time swallowing that truth that I just said there,
the harder we're going to have living life as it actually is.
That's what I mean when we say living life on life's terms, accepting that things will
not always go my way, things will be hard, even when I do the right thing, I might get punished, right?
Things are not fair and suffering is included.
But when we don't live life on life's terms, when we try and hide from that reality, when
we try and numb ourselves, when we try to distance ourselves from it, all we do is multiply our suffering.
The best way to minimize suffering is to face it head on, is to not find a way around it,
but to find a way through it. We're back to the band-aid analogy.
How do you take a band-aid off?
All at once, not little bit by little bit.
And so finding strength and acceptance, accepting faith, finding Jesus, trusting that you are not
alone in the midst of the storm, and beginning to face the difficult reality that you're in.
The third thing to do when you turn towards sanity is to find integrity. With sanity comes
connection to our values. We want our values and our actions to match up. I talk to so many people
and you say, like, what are the most important things in your life? People will often say
things like family. They will say things like love, friends. Well, let's look at your life
then. Is your life lived in such a way that aligns with those values? Are you living life
where you are spending the bulk of your important time that are leading towards the things that
that you want, right?
It's funny how many people find themselves into a place of workaholism,
where they constantly are working, they can never find time to be with family.
If you were to stop them and ask them, what's the most important thing to you in your life, in your world?
They would say, my kids, my family, those who are closest to me, my loved ones, my friends.
But then why are you not spending more time with them? because the time and the way that you're living
seems that you prioritize work over them.
And so we need to find a way to match our values with our actions.
We need to begin to be looking towards Jesus, looking away from the false tree,
the tree of knowledge and good and evil that Adam and Eve ate from, and look towards the tree of
life. Look towards Jesus, look towards God, and say, how ought I be living my life? Be reading
the Bible, looking for the virtues and the values there, and say, how ought I be living my life?
And how can I match my life and my actions towards those values?
So, turning towards sanity, we need to wake up, we need to come and confront life as it is,
we need to find strength and acceptance to face the difficult things in front of us
that we've maybe been hiding from.
We need to find integrity by beginning to align our actions with our values, and then finally, we need to start trust.
We need to start finding trust. We need to trust others, we need to trust ourselves, right?
When we're moving towards sanity, the answers begin to shift, right?
We, when we're in a place of insanity, we're in a place where, if I were to ask you,
can you trust others?
Can you trust yourselves? Can others trust us?
If you're in a place of insanity, the answer is no. I can't trust myself to make smart decisions.
I can't trust others because they feel untrustworthy and nobody certainly should trust me.
But as we begin to wake up, find strength and acceptance, begin to find integrity, we
begin to shift to a place where we become more trustworthy.
We become reliable because we're no longer escaping from reality.
We begin to experience integrity.
We begin to rely on other people. We begin to reach out rather than just turning inwards.
And all of that is made possible through Jesus, right? We can't do it on our own.
This is the thing that so many people who make it through and break cycles, break addiction,
find healing, is they will tell you that they could never have done it on their own, that
it came through Jesus, right?
Here's a passage in Hebrews 12, verses 1 through 3, says, And therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw
off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.
And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus,
the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.
For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at
the right hand of the throne of God. him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.".
See, that's what we're ultimately doing. This passage describes precisely what we're striving
to do, is to fix our eyes on the goal, to run the race that's set before us. Where are we going?
And to fix our eyes, not on the circumstances, but on Jesus, to say, I'm going to have peace
and serenity in the middle of the storm. And I'm going to look to the crowd of witnesses,
those who've gone before me, those who also follow Christ, those who love me, those who
are encouraging me, and they're cheering me on.
When we live and practice in the faith, we are joining in a faith that has been filled
by millions and millions of people, billions of people, who have come before and run the
race faithfully to follow and know Christ, and we're joining in that.
And we do that by fixing our eyes on Christ, saying, He is my source of trustworthiness,
He is the source of my values and integrity, He's going to help me have the courage to
face the circumstances and to wake up and find where I'm at.
And we're going to strive to lay aside all the sin, all the things that so easily entangle
us and keep us from pursuing where we ought to be going.
And we ought to consider Christ who endured the cross. When we endure small sufferings, difficult conversations, conversations where we need
to own up, to be truthful, to deal with hurt and pain, those are hard things, but they're,
not dying on a cross.
We're being called to be encouraged. Christ has gone before us, and He has made a way, and He will be with us each and every
single step.
So, this week I would encourage you to reflect on that passage, to begin to make more and
more clear in your mind, what are those patterns of insanity that you are constantly slipping into?
And maybe answer this second question.
What are the difficult things that are keeping you from living life on life's terms?
What's the suffering that you don't want to admit's there?
That's the difficult consequence, the difficult relationship, the things that you didn't want
to be there but are there, the things that you were trying to hide from, the things that
you were trying to cope away from. What are those things?
What is keeping you from living life on life's terms?
Name those things and take them to prayer.
Say, Lord, can you meet me in the middle of this storm? Can you meet me in the middle of this circumstance, in the middle of this pain?
Lord, can you show me the wounds on your hands and your feet so that I know that I am not
alone in my own wounds and my own suffering?".
I hope that this talk is encouraging to you this week, that you find some comfort and encouragement in it.
Next week we're going to be continuing this conversation of what does it mean to turn
these things over, to begin to let go, to be able to find a place of healing and trusting Jesus more.
Remember, we didn't get here all at once. It was one day at a time, and that's how we're going to get out of here, too.
So if you've been listening and joining me in this journey, I appreciate all of your encouragement.
Let me know how this is affecting you, how you are processing these things that we're talking about.
If you have questions or other things, you can always email me or let me know in the comments.
I will talk to you all next time.
Music.