Live the More
Live the More
#001: What does it mean to "live the more"?
Be sure to check out this episode's blog post for the freebie / worksheet on how to live free from a "scarcity mindset" and in the truth of God.
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I'm John, and today we're going to explore. What does it mean to live? The more how do we live, the more of God explore all of who he is in a busy, stressful world. I'll share how live the more we'll help you find meaning in an often unstable world, so you can not just survive but thrive. About seven or eight years ago, my wife and I were desire ing Maur of God, and so we signed up for a spiritual retreat in the mountains of Austria. And we thought this, if anything, will be a great place to reconnect with who goddess. And when we got there, a man by the name of Brian Rice was leading us through some spiritual exercises. But before he began that process, he compared life with God to cheesecake. I don't know if you like cheesecake, but the analogy is magnificent, he said. You know, when you think about cheesecake, you can study everything there is to know about cheesecake. You can study. It's New York and Greek generations. You can study the ingredients. You could know how the cheesecake is made, but until you put that thing in the oven, and you pull it out and you let your senses take it in. You smell it, and then you take the first bite and you let your taste buds just absorb everything that there is to offer in that cheesecake. You're missing so much of the experience, you have to taste the cheesecake. And he related this to our lives with God. A lot of times in our life with God, we study God. We learn a lot about God, but we can miss the experience. Or maybe even sometimes we have the experience. But then, over time, we stop experiencing life with God. We stop tasting the cheesecake and what we have learned through the years, not just during that time of the tree in Austria, but even now is that we long for deeply satisfying holistic fulfillment in life with God. In many ways, it's it's like returning to the Garden of Eden. If you're familiar with the story in Genesis one through three, Adam and Eve have this deeply satisfying relationship with God. Clearly, they have been walking with God in the garden, there, connected to nature. There's no fear in the face of the animals that are there. There's complete security and joy in the presence of God, and it seems that there's deep enjoyment and who they are and who God is. And there's great freedom. I mean, they were naked after all, but it seems holistic as well. It's a convergence of worlds. Heaven meets earth, sacred meets secular, physical and spiritual are so intertwined. And there's so much life. Clearly, even prior to the the advent of cheesecake, Adam and Eve are tasting the cheesecake there, tasting experience, experiencing what it means to have life with God, one of the most important, one of the highest priorities and desires of our generation, generation Y and Z and millennials and afterwards is to live a life of meaning to have satisfaction. Even Forbes magazine says one of the highest values towards work from millennials is to have meaning in their work to know that their work is meaningful. And so with that, there's this desire for security, sustainability, obviously meaning and also collaboration. And we were made for these things. You look at the Garden of Eden once again, God says to the man, it is not good for man to be alone and so he creates woman, and all of a sudden there's elaboration. There's there's collaboration. There's working together in a connection. And when we look at our world, we often see something quite different, don't we? We often see instability in disconnection. We may feel it financially. We may be stressed out about what the stock market is doing, or whether or not our company is going to be bought out next week. We may feel it politically, with political infighting and divisiveness amongst our neighbors, or even what we hear on the news and TV. A lot seems to be shifting and changing. Deloitte's the famous accounting and consultancy said this. It's survey millennials, and they found that millennials are incredibly distrustful of, particularly political and religious leaders, the government and the economy. Now that's that's a lot of things to be distrustful of. So talk about a a morose worldview. But this is this is who we are. If you're a millennial, this is who you are. There's there's something about your DNA that for whatever reason, the majority of us are distrustful of political and religious leaders, the government and the economy. And so oftentimes, the response to this to shore up safety and to give meaning to our days is to become busy. That nasty four letter word that we also love toe wears a badge of honor. Sometimes we have equated business to meaning, yet we desire stability, security and meeting. But it's business the way to go in a world shifting and changing. Often our responses. I'll just doom or and by doing Maur, there's this sense of control. And so feeling out of control isn't isn't something that that's even on the table. It's not something that we're willing to accept, and so we will pursue Maur control by becoming more busy. Um, let me give you an example financially. If you're feeling stressed financially, maybe you'll become more busy and you'll rush and your hustle to feel meaningful. But have you ever asked yourself slowed down and ask yourself, What is it about money or finances that makes me feel stressed? What's the deeper thing below the water line that's stressing me out? Why is it that when I see my bank account a little lower than I think, I think it should be that all of a sudden I feel lack of meaning or instability. I submit to you that it's a feeling of scarcity. A scarcity is lack. It's a sense of, um, I'm lacking something I don't have what I need on. I may not ever have what I need, and it could be a mindset, and it often leads to fear. And so this fear of lack fuels and is the engine for our need to keep up to be busy, and on top of it, we're still desire, meaning and so below the water line. There's this this thing stirring that desires meaning, but you could be incredibly busy and still not have that deep sense of meaning. I remember listening Thio NF, the rapper who of late has had a lot of success, and he talks about on his album The Search. How one of his most challenging moments in life was when he had a number one on the billboards and he'd sold out all these concerts and he still felt incredibly empty. And so here's an example of someone who had so much success and was incredibly busy and yet below the water line there is this this sense of I'm lacking something something's not something's not right. The target is not being hit. I don't feel fulfilled. But we're told if we hustle right, if we embrace the hustle and if we go on all the vacations and we have that instagram a ble life, um, we'll achieve meaning. And I love Instagram. I love. I love posting beautiful pictures of the places I go to. I think it's a great thing, but I too feel this this this pool that unless I have the most Instagram mobile, shared liked picture than maybe I'm not doing it right. Have you ever felt that way For me? It's It's a feeling of scarcity that I'm lacking something. This is hard. This is a really struggle. Not only do I feel this in silly places like Instagram, but I feel listen, work at times. Uh, am I doing enough? Um, is my work going to leave a lasting legacy? Am I taking care of the people around me or in my stress of of wanting to achieve more? Am I lashing out at the people who should be on my team? Am I throwing people inadvertently under the bus because I'm afraid of getting trouble with my supervisor. Um, there's all kinds of examples I could give to wear this feeling of scarcity that I'm lacking. Something creates anxiety, which then creates a sense of business. And that business sometimes leads us to marginalizing the people who mean the most around us. And that could be our co workers. That could be our family. So this is a very real struggle. And I've felt this before. Um, I, John live in Budapest, Hungary, when I look around Budapest and if you've never been to Budapest, it's a major international city. It's an incredibly busy city. You have foreign diplomats from all over. Just a few weeks ago, we had the Turkish prime minister in town to shut down the entire city. It is a busy city, and when I look around my city, I see in myself something as well. This constant temptation to stay busy. Even travel must be optimized. If I'm at a red light, I need to check my e mail on my phone or, ah, if I'm on the subway on the Metro, I need to scroll through Instagram and make sure that I'm hash, tagging and liking the right people and connecting with the right influencers. Every little moment has to be optimized, and I see this all the time. I can't tell you how many times I'm sure you've experienced this. Wherever you are in the world, I've had to gently honk it people to get them to look up from their phone because they realized that I realized it's a green light. So this business just consumes our world, that we have to stay busy. There's always something to d'oh. There's this nagging need to be constantly connected, at least seemingly connected to doing and producing. And ironically, it's the result of this constant connection productivity that I sometimes feel disconnected from everything else. In all of my business, I can get so busy and so chaotic that I realized I'm not hearing from the Holy Spirit anymore. Or, Ha gosh, I don't really feel connected to God or to even myself. I'm not even sure what I want. I'm Aiken work super hard for six months and look up and go. Is that really what I wanted to be doing? Is this really making an impact? But I'm not slowing down the process. It or it could even lead to disconnection toe others. Where, um recently I was working so hard and so much that, um at night, as as I put my kids to bed, I'm like, jumping right back on my computer. And my wife essentially had to close my laptop at Lee, Had to close my laptop and say, Hey, can we just connect? Or maybe even its disconnection from nature? You know, we spend so much time running around in cities, um, that we forget what it means to put grass beneath our feet or or fill dirt beneath our fingers. And so this business could be felt in this way. And so externally, it's this pursuit of meaning, right? We pursue this meaning from a sense of scarcity and from a fear of scarcity And the mindset kind of looks like this if I can connect it for us, no one is looking out for me. I'm on my own. I've got to make it happen. I gotta hustle because there may not be enough for me. I've got to make this work. It is on me. I've got to hustle. Otherwise it's gonna fail, or I'm gonna fail. Um, I have to fight to get mine and there's some good things in this. It's not bad to hustle from time to time. It's not bad toe work hard, but the question is, why are we doing it? Are we doing it because we think by doing so much by being busy, we will achieve meaning or we doing it because we're flowing from our identity were flowing into What we see is our destiny, and I think there's a big difference between those two things. But what does this do? What does this do if we're doing this from a mindset of scarcity of lack? Well, emotionally, spiritually can lead to stress and feeling overwhelmed or even feeling powerless. And so we have to fight, claw and scratch in order to get that power back and feel like we're we have control and we could be defined by what we have in our two hands and what we've produced physically, this can lead to fatigue the way you can see this. Best of probably on our phones, right? Um, USA Today had a really funny story in 2018 where a teacher from Louisiana had students do a writing assignment and um four out of 21 students in the writing assignment wrote that they wish that their parents would just get off their phones. And there's this really cute and at the same time, sad. Um uh, picture of this one riding Simon thought a second grader did, or she said, I just wish my mom would get off her phone. I wish you didn't even have a phone. I wish phones didn't even exist. And this poor second grader is just crying out and saying, My mom is so busy. She's always on her phone and I feel for the second grader and I also feel for the mom, man, I'm all my phones so much because I feel like there's this expectation to be in constant motion to be constantly active and that by that I'll be seen as meaningful and so so often. I don't know if this is your experience as well, if you can relate to this, but so often people will ask us how we're doing. And what do we say? Oh, man, I'm busy, you know. And for a long time, it's kind of a badge of honor for me on busy. You know, I want people to see that I'm busy that I'm active. Right? Um, the other day, at the end of a very exhausting month, someone asked how I was doing and I said the same thing. But I said it in a different way. I said, I'm busy as said in this kind of despondent, defeated way. And I realize, Gosh, it's the same answer. But there's a different meaning to it now. I'm not so satisfied with just being busy. Can you relate to this? So that's kind of the external peace to this. But what's the internal thing? What's going on beneath the water line? In the heart level, in the soul level, that deeper. Blair, I submit to you that the core problem is this disconnection disconnection with God, disconnection with self, with others with nature and even our work. And so this disconnection, this disconnection with who we are and who we want to be, for example, can lead to a lack of understanding about what is our identity. Because if we believe that our identity is found in what we can D'oh, we're disconnected from our identity being what God says about us and that were created. Beings who are loved than that disconnection can put us into a flurry of activity. So do you see what I'm saying? And this disconnection can lead us feeling dissatisfied, disappointed on. We want more enjoyment and God, and we want more enjoyment in life. But maybe we're at a stage where that's waiting because we've just been so busy and we could be left asking, Is there more than this? Is there more than just being busy and just kind of running along? And the truth is, this. God is so good, Father. God is, he's revealed in the Bible is so good and church can be incredibly transformational. And life giving and work can be deeply satisfying. Nature can be incredibly enjoyable in life giving and reconnect us with the root of our humanity. We can have healthy relationships to ourselves and with our needs. However, if we approach these things from a place of security and rest that comes only from God, that's what gives us life. Otherwise, we push and hustle and strive for meaning in all these In all these places slimming give an example. If we approach God from a mindset of scarcity and from a sense of disconnection with who he really is, we might see him as demanding. Is expecting more of us. Let me give you a great example of this. A few years ago, I had a really, really tough time because I was, you know, a new dad. And I realize that I wasn't having my hallowed quiet time. Right that place, right, goings been time with Jesus and study my Bible and pray and things like that. I was just trying to make sure that I got four hours of sleep because of my colleague a baby. And I was just trying to wake up and make it to work on time. And yet I felt this deep sense of guilt and disconnection from God because I felt that my gosh, God must be demanding more from me. And what I realize is I was really just in this flurry of activity for so long. And I thought that busy nous equaled meaning equal security equaled. I am loved by God and so we can see God is demanding If if we act from this mindset of of scarcity in this this mindset of disconnection We could also see churches just another task or event to attend. Right? And it just becomes kind of this road activity work can be crushing and exhausting, and so on and on. You can look at all these different parts of our lives where if we live from a mindset of scarcity from having to claw and fight and be busy in order to create meaning and significance, Um, it could be crushing. It can really crush us. I understand how this feels. We, Allie, and and I understand how it feels to wonder Is there more to life than this? Then it just being busy. Is there more to life and god than this? Um, I'm feeling disconnected from God and self and my work and others in nature to say All right, see you next week in the church parking lot before you head off to the restaurant and Luby's or something like that. And wonder is this it? Is this really all there is to life and gun? Or maybe you spend so much time in a concrete jungle on you're surrounded by silicone and colored pixels that you forget what it's like to be in all of creation. Is there more? I totally understand where you're coming from If you have asked these questions. And for the past eight years, the narrative for me that's really helped me reconnect with life and God has been Luke 15 in the story of the prodigal son. And here we see clearly what God desires God desires so much more than what, for example, the older son has to offer, and so often we focus on the younger son and that story. Remember the stories about two brothers and one brother goes off to a foreign land, too toe blow his inheritance on cocaine and whiskey and prostitutes and whore houses. And then the other son is the good son he he puts on its Sunday best, and he stays at home and he grinds it out. And he produces all his reports on time and, he says, looked at now, do you love me? And so the father in that story is constantly trying to bring his sons back to their true identity, which is you're in the family. You're my son. That's what matters. This is your identity. And so when I look at this story I can see myself when the older brother I know so often we focus on the younger brother. But the older brother, I can see myself in him and seeing that, you know, I just I think and expected if I just grind it out. And if I do enough Bible study and if I work hard enough and if I serve hard enough and if I do all these things enough, then I will be loved. And deep down, I'm afraid of not being loved. There's a lack of security, but there are other times when I can identify with a younger brother and I could be the one who goes off to to a foreign land. Whether that's, um, emotionally and spiritually just kind of avoiding God and sort of looking in different areas of my life for satisfaction, whether that's work or or something else. Um, I can go off to these foreign places and just kind of avoid my relationship with God, and then I come back and I think, OK, well, God will take me back from sorry for or you know, if I have enough dirt on my face and when the amazing thing is whether or not I take on the identity of the younger brother in Luke, 15 or the older brother. The father is always standing with arms wide open, and he's always the one who says, John, you're my son and that is your identity. And he's the one who brings the ring in the robe and shoes for my feet and says, You are a part of the family. Welcome back and this is where you belong. Turn your feet back towards home, Um, and so this this is my near. This is where I come back to do. Come back to center. Who does God say I am? What does he expect of me and who is God? How has he revealed himself? And in what ways am I seeing him in a different light? And so for you, my encouragement is don't stay in a far off country. You don't have Thio. Avoid God out of some sense of failure like you haven't done enough, but also don't stay outside of the party like the other. The older brother at the end of the story, who's who's so frustrated and disenchanted that that he doesn't even want to see himself as a part of the family because he's been working so hard and he feels like nothing is ever enough. Don't be. The older brother is also. But come back into the party. Come back into the family. You were made to be at home in the father's embrace. You were created to doom or than just survive or just wonder or just work. You know, once I heard the theologian Gordon Fi, who's one of my heroes in the world of New Testament theology, and he has an Assemblies of God background. So he's he's more charismatic. It's just such an incredible teacher. Um, and I heard him say once, You know, Ah, lot of times I hear people talk about life with God, and it's as if as soon as we come to the family of God, the father says, Okay, great. Now you need to get to work, go work. And he said, You know, I've never understood that because the greatest joy I have is a father is when I watch my Children play and I'm I'm watching them at rest and they're just playing. And there's this deep sense of satisfaction and I'm just watching them play, and I thought that was a great analogy. And so you were created to enjoy life. Thio enjoy play and to enjoy work. But to have joy because you have security and the father's embrace. That is where your meaning comes from, and you don't have to have a mentality or spirituality of lack and scarcity. But you can have, ah, mentality and spirituality of the Maur, of thriving of flourishing as one who's a child of God. And so the hope for this is that you would have satisfaction in your presence and has satisfaction and joy. And I had a counselor one time who said, You know, the goal of life is to be fully present with God and fully present with others, and that is where we find joy. And that's our heart for used to have this deeper connection with God, this vibrant friendship with God, and being present with him and present with others. And so this lasting, fulfilling that comes from finding meaning and purpose and powerful living out your destiny and your call to impact the world through what God says about you, who God says you are and there's joy in that. So it's possible to be transformed from being disappointed and being burnt out and overworked and feeling like, Gosh, I'm striving. I'm pushing for this, meaning to go from that to joy in the midst of your trial's even to go from being discouraged or feeling discouraged to knowing that you are never alone. And you have someone who has your back, who's always fighting for you, and that is the father to go from being constantly anxious and overwhelmed. I'm not doing off him. Am I doing enough for my kids and my good enough parent? Am I doing enough for my from for my family and my my good enough employees to having breast and peace and knowing that you are being fully present and that you're getting life from being fully present with others and having peace from knowing that God is with you in that and finally, to go from a lack of meaning? Rights is what we talked about the very beginning, a lack of meaning and purpose and calling to living from a place of knowing that your value is who gone says you are, and that will not change in the father's eyes. That does not change. It is your foundation. And so I'm gonna challenge you to ask these three questions. Where are you in life and do you feel busy and disconnected? What impact is this? How in your relationship with God in a relationship with others? In the final question, if there was one thing you could change about your present circumstances, what would that be? So first, where are you in life? Do you feel busy and disconnected? Secondly, what impact does this have on your relationship with God and others? And if there's one thing finally that you could change about your present circumstances, what would that be? Now I realize this is a process. You know, this is a this is a process and we wanna walk alongside you. And so, if you would, would invite us in and an honor us by joining our tribe, our tribe of deeply flawed human beings who desire Maur and who want to experience the more of life and God. Then please subscribe to our podcast for inspiration, information in application, and you can grab the freebie in the show notes and subscribe to our email. And in the weeks and months to come, we hope to drill down much deeper into some of these and many other topics. This is only the tipping point. We want to invite you to pursue the Maur of God. We want to challenge you to not give up, but seek and thirst for the abundant life that Jesus offers. Take Jesus at his word. If he said I came that you might have life and life more abundantly, take him at his word. It's not always easy, and it's not free of suffering. It's not free of accountability, but it is so worth it. We've been following Jesus for over 20 years now and some of those years overseas in high stress, um, cross cultural environments, and we're still coming into the more of life with God. We want to share it with you and believe there's more for you. Don't give up. Don't settle for surviving. Don't settle for your meaning being based on on Lee what you could produce with your two hands. Let's taste the cheesecake. Let's taste and see and know that God is good and live the more when you join us