Enter Rest Through Transformation

The following video transcript has been lightly edited

The systems in your life are perfectly tuned for the results that you're getting. This is true for all of us. And in the midst of our lives, we face all kinds of challenges and busyness. But sometimes as we're living that life, franticness, frustration, disconnection, these are the kinds of things that set in for us.

And the reason is, is that because we have some sort of system in our life. Some sort of system of the way we deal with our emotions or the way we deal with people or how we manage our schedule or the way we're tied up with money and possessions. Any of these things have a system involved and those systems aren't working.

That's why we feel this sense of disconnection or franticness or overwhelm. And so in order for us to enter rest in the midst of the race of life, enter God's rest. which is peace and contentment and joy. We have to learn how to transform our systems. And that's how we're going to find the rest that we're looking for.

So I want to talk to you today about is three essential ideas that I think will help you transform the systems in your life. And they come from Paul, who's writing to the church of Rome. And he says, Hey, I want you to understand three things. I want you to understand the wonder and grace of God. I want you to then live in such a way that you're a living sacrifice, and you're going to do that, and it's a form of worship by renewing your mind.

And so here's the three essential ideas for us if we want to transform our systems in order to find rest. One, transformation begins and is sustained by grace. Two, it's going to take some work. So we have to embrace the wrestle. And three, we have to renew our minds. That's where transformation is going to come from.

So I want to sketch this out for you a little bit more. So how is it that transformation begins in the sustained by grace? Well, I don't know about you, but anytime I've tried to transform some sort of system in my life, I usually am met with a lot of resistance from myself. The things that I want to do, I find myself not doing, and the things that I thought I was going to do, those don't play out either.

And so maybe that's happened for you, maybe you have certain relational patterns that you're like, oh this keeps happening, or certain eating habits and those keep happening, or a lack of exercise, or a looking for money, whatever it is. And here's what I would say, is I think that one of the reasons transformation fails, is because we begin out of a place of condemnation.

We're frustrated with ourselves. We're disappointed with ourselves. Maybe some others are disappointed with us, and we're like, I gotta fix this so I can be better. But the message that Paul has sent throughout the book of Romans, and what he's trying to say, the wonders of God, is that God has transformed the whole world through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

He's brought grace into it, which brings renewal, rewrites the past, opens up the future. And we want to tap into that. Because that's what's going to fuel our transformation. Because when we're operating out of that place, then you and I are operating out of a place of love and peace and contentment. And that's the only way that we can really change these things.

Additionally, transformation takes a few steps forward and a few steps back. It's not a straight line process. We can't just execute it. And so we need to be reminded that the journey of transformation, which has success and failure and stagnation are all part of it and that we're loved, deeply loved through all of it.

And so that gives you and I the freedom to transform. So let me ask you. Do you feel like you are just absolutely immersed in grace? Do you think that in the midst of your life, you're always connecting? That you've absorbed the concept of grace? Because our world doesn't operate on grace. What we want to do is we want to just remind ourselves over and over and over again.

And that's maybe through prayer, scripture, conversation, coming here to church, singing songs. All these things have a different element to them. And they allow us to just be transformed, to absorb all that we can, to be submerged in God's grace, so that we can even begin the journey of transformation. So secondly, we want to embrace the wrestle.

Paul says that this is our act of spiritual worship, that we are to be living sacrifices. And what he means when he talks about living sacrifices, we're going to conform ourselves to the pattern of God's kingdom versus the patterns of this age. It means that we're all about love, we are against hate, we're about kindness and generosity and truth and forgiveness.

And to conform ourselves to that is going to put us in opposition with some of the ways the world works. And so that's going to take wrestle and sacrifice. I want you to think about it, any time you've transformed anything. And you've grown and you've learned, there's been some hardship in it. And so for us, like when we think about learning to ride a bike, it's not that we just get on the bike and start pedaling the pedals.

No, we have this moment in which we think we're ready and that adult let's go behind our seat and we pedal for a couple of pedals and then we crash and we got gravel in our knees and it hurts and it's painful. We don't give up. Then we get up and we try it again. And maybe this time we ride a little bit further.

But that's to say that transformation is going to take sacrifice. It's going to take undoing some things and redoing some things. And again, because we are operating out of grace, that's okay. We're at peace with all of it. But in the midst of it, it's our spiritual act of worship. And so as we sacrifice, as we embrace the wrestle, we get to experience God, because God meets us in this transformation to help us become fully human.

That's what we see in Christ. We see what being fully human looks like. And so for us, transformation is always becoming more and more like Christ. More and more peaceful. More and more trusting. More and more truthful. More and more forgiving. More and more merciful. And that's the transformation. That's the journey we are on.

Okay. So if we want to transform our systems has to begin and be sustained by grace. Second, we got to embrace the wrestle. It's going to be hard. There's going to be challenges. And then lastly, we want to renew our minds. Many of our systems are caught up in our mind. The way we deal with emotions, the way we respond to others, our craving for possessions or money, the envy we have.

The way we always overcommit. All these things, they begin in our mind. So what we need to do is we need to renew it. In order to renew it, we first have to understand what the system is. So we need to, to dig in. And we need to acknowledge what's working and what's not working. Second, we have to not just stay at the symptom level, but get underneath.

I don't know about you, but at any time that you have felt anxiety, Just telling yourself stop feeling anxious doesn't then relieve your anxiety. No, you have to get underneath.

Toyota is famous for always asking the question why five times to fully diagnose a problem. And I think the value of that practice is it gets us deeper and deeper on why am I doing this? What is the system? How is it built? Why, why, why? So dig in there and find it. Then finally, to renew your mind, you have to come up with a plan. Most of the time, to change a system, we have to operate it in a new way. And the truth is our habits and our past behaviors don't align with the new system.

So we have to imagine ourselves operating that way. And we have to predict and practice. And we have to go out there and deal with it differently, celebrate the wins, acknowledge the losses, go back to the drawing board, learn again, and to reshape and renew our mind. And if we're able to do these three things, if we're able to live out of grace, if we're able to embrace the wrestle, if we're able to renew our minds, then we'll be able to transform the systems that are creating the discontent and the wrestle and the hurt in our lives and enter into God's rest. Which I know is what all of us desire.

Hey, I hope this was helpful for you and I look forward to continuing the series next week. Take care.