July 12, 2024 • 22 mins
Obedience unlocks the gift of God’s joy. In Mindset MasterClass Session 5, New York Times bestselling author Pastor Steven Furtick sits down with Brendon Burchard to discuss how the happiness we’re looking for is hidden in the things we’re resisting.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, this is Stephen Ferdeck. I'm the pastor of Elevation
Church and this is our podcast. I wanted to thank
you for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Hope this inspires you. Hope it builds your faith.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hope it gives your perspective to see God is moving
in your life.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Enjoy the message.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Welcome back to the Do the New You Mindset Masterclass.
By the way, if you're this far, you might as
well know there were some alternate titles for this conversation
between me and my friend Brendan Burchard. Brendan is one
of the most sought after performance coaches in the world,
so I thought we should call this segment Holy Ghost
Life Coach. And he was like, yeah, no, what about
(00:43):
what about Mindset master Class. I'm like, yeah, yeah, but
what have we called it? Like, what have we called it?
Speaker 2 (00:48):
After?
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Amen? You know? Because that's my heart, Like we all
say we believe this and in the book, I'm giving
you six truths to say over yourself. But after you
say amen, like yeah, I believe our last mindset. God
is not against me. He's in it with me, working
through me, fighting for me. I believe with God there's
always a way by faith, I will find it. I
(01:11):
believe Christ is in me. I am enough. I believe
I'm not stuck unless I stop now after I say amen,
which means, so be it?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
What action do I take? Right?
Speaker 1 (01:21):
And we're putting these conversations together as a gift to
you to take you deeper into what we shared in
the book, the six mindsets to become who you were
created to be, and this mindset, I really do need
a life coach, because I'll tell you what. Putting this
in the book to me almost felt like an act
of hypocrisy because the mindset this is the shortest one,
(01:45):
I guess and the hardest one for me. It goes
my joy is my job, and it's like, I don't
really want to call joy a job. Joy is supposed
to be a sensation, right It overtakes me with a
bite of a Hershey bar, or with the glimpse of
(02:06):
the sunset. You know, it doesn't have to be something decadent.
But joy is this rush that I experience that comes
from an event. And the more I study it Brendan
in the Bible, the more I study it in life.
I'm really hanging on to that quote from Brian Wilson
from the Beach Boys that I put in the book,
and he's had mental health challenges that a lot of
(02:26):
people know about. But you know, the Beach Boys music
is so happy and so sunny. And he looks at
the documentarian in this movie that I saw about his
life and he says, you know, I found out happiness
is really hard work, and that hit me. I'm like, yeah,
if we're just chasing happiness as an end result and
not really taking responsibility to own our emotions, that's what
(02:49):
we want to get into a little bit today with Brendan,
how to own your emotions so you don't run around
saying stuff like they didn't make me happy, or I
left that company because it wasn't making me fulfilled. Well, happiness, fulfillment,
all of those things aren't something that someone else can
(03:11):
make you. And I think that ownership process of our
own joy is a lifelong process, yes, a moment by
moment process. You know in the church, people say they
stole my joy, Then what in the world were you
doing putting it where they could steal it.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
You should have locked it up, You should have had
it somewhere safe.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
You should have put your joy somewhere other than just
how somebody else treats you. But really, like I told you,
in so many of these mindsets, these are the things
that I preach to me. Because nobody is going to
vote me for the naturally happiest human alive. That's not
my disposition. That doesn't mean that it can't be my destination.
(03:49):
Though I can become more joyful, I can become more grateful.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
I can practice these things.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
And that's why I brought the world's best life coach
to help me. So make me happy, Brendan, it's your
job make me happy, make me joyful.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
I don't know if I can make you happy. I'll
start with the coaching piece. He said. A second ago,
they stole my joy. And a lot of people say that.
I say, no one stole your joy. You gave them
your attention. Wow, that's what happened. You took your That's
what happened. What happened, No one took it. You gave
them your attention, you, you gave them your belief, you
(04:25):
gave them, you know, your thought pattern. Instead of owning
the fact that you control this. You're the gatekeeper up here,
you're the generator up here, You're the commander up here,
and when you know you own this, you start to
own your emotions. And I always love to tell people
there's a difference between emotion and feelings different. A nice
(04:48):
way to think about is we have impulsive emotions and
we have ongoing feelings. And let me give you a difference.
If you go into a haunted house, right and someone
jumps out the corner, that fear that hits you, that
is automatic, it's physical, and it's impulsive. Fear just hits you.
You get scared, right. But if you go home at
(05:09):
night and now it's seven o'clock at night, you're safe
in your house, the doors are locked, your husband or
your spouse is there, things are good, and you still
you start kind of getting spooked. I feel like something
as bad as going to happen. Now that ongoing feeling,
you're generating that with your thoughts. The first one you
meet it fear scared. That's impulsive, that's automatic. An emotion
(05:33):
is like that just happens in your body. A psychologists
found emotions pass usually in ninety seconds to three minutes.
The emotion actually pass. Now our thoughts really do take over,
and our thoughts are forming a story. Our thoughts are
telling us what something means. Our thoughts are either taking
command of us or we're in take command of them,
(05:54):
because we can say, wait, I'm in the house, everything's okay.
Oh I just got scared earlier, and I'm holding on
to that. Unhappiness is very similar. Something can happen, it's
an unhappy situation. Someone was mean to us, you know,
something awful happened. It makes me feel bad. There's grief there,
(06:17):
there's hurt there, and we can feel that like in
that immediate emotion, it's just like, ah, that I feel bad.
But if later on it's an ongoing feeling of happiness,
I promise you're architecting your thoughts in such a way
it's creating the ongoing happiness. So think about it. Is
the situations of your life, the bad events of your life,
(06:40):
are they still dragging on in the feelings of today.
That's where we say, oh, I got to take back
command of the architecture of my thoughts here, because that's
what's really screwing me up. That's what's stealing my joy
is I'm not architecting the thoughts. It would give me
that And then you hear me teach all the time,
I'm always sharing this idea that my dominant metaphor in
(07:05):
my life is about a power plant.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
I love it, and you'll listen to the power plant.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
This change your life? Is crazy, this changes my life
every day. Yeah, And the idea is, you know, the
power plant doesn't have energy. It actually generates energy. So
technically a power plant takes energy from one level of resource,
a rushing stream or solar or whatever. It's taking energy
from one level, lower level of utilization. It's transforming that
(07:35):
energy into a higher level of utilization, and it's transmitting it.
And I love it because the power plant doesn't have energy. Oh,
it's it's taking energy from one lower level, it's transforming
it and transmitting into a higher level. That means I
can do that in my own life. You know, I'm
feeling a low level of energy today. I don't have motivation,
I don't have joy, I don't have love in my heart. Actually,
(07:58):
I woke up kind of grumpy. Well, that's a low
level of utilization. It's my job. How do I take
the energy of the world or my situation, my life,
my relationships, and how do I take ownership as a
power plant? And how do I up level that? Why
do that with my thoughts. My thoughts are my turbines.
My thoughts are the thing that can spin that energy
(08:18):
up into a higher level. And now I can be
a person of goodness, I can be a person of cheer,
I can be a person of joy. And is that
choice to be the power plant of the feelings of
my life that has made my life more fulfilling because
before that I was at the whim of everybody else
and everything else. Because see, most of the world right now,
(08:40):
it's a pretty low level energy. There's a lot of
division and vitriol and hate and us against them. It's
low level. But you can say, I'm not going to
live in that mud puddle. I'm going to take the
water out of that mud puddle. I'm going to turn
it through these turbines of joy and faith and reasoning
(09:01):
and logic and a desire for an extraordinary life. I'm
gonna spin that up and boom, I'm gonna feel different
and transmit different.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yes. See, man, now you made me want to be
in church. I want it to be ten o'clock on
a Sunday morning. I want to him and beat three
organ because I want to talk about the power plant
and Jesus said, you will receive power when the Holy
Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses
in Jerusalem. Judea Samaria.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
What's that.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
That's taking the power and then transforming that power into
a witness.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
So you see what he just did.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
He said, I'm gonna give you power from another place,
and then i want your faith to be the turbine
by which you take what I've given you and take
it to the world. And that's so much more empowering
to me than it is to sit.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
There and go, Lord, give me joy.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
I'm trying to get people out of this pattern that
we have Brendan sometimes of going Lord.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Give me joy, give me joy, give me joy.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
And the Lord gave you somebody to help that would
have brought you joy if you would have helped that person.
And I also think that we should talk about this,
isn't the happiness that we want often hidden in the
thing that we resist.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Yeah, and you said it earlier about peace, and our
friend Trent Shelton talks about protecting your peace. So I
think the first part of our conversation today has all
been about generating it, about generating joy, generating the emotions
we want to feel being the power plant. But there's
another job we have. So if the first job we
have is being the generator, the second job we have,
(10:41):
which is really important today, is we got to be
the gatekeeper, the gatekeeper of our joy and our happiness.
He talked about the enemy, and sometimes the enemy is
taking that and we constantly continue abusing ourselves and taking
away our own happiness by engaging in things that we
know are bad for us or are not good. I'll
(11:01):
give you a convenient example right now about social media.
A lot of people don't understand that. All of social
media research has shown it doesn't make us feel good.
If you're generating and you're the creator, or you're doing
it to create relationships, it can be a very positive
and entertaining thing, but for most people actually creates a
low level of anxiety and stress. Because here's what happens
(11:23):
when you're scrolling. And this is really important to understand.
If you're in a bad mood, be careful about disengaging
from the world and going to social media. Here's what
they found from the research. This is amazing. When you're scrolling.
Every time you scroll past something, the brain has to
do three things. First, as you're scrolling, the brain has
to make a judgment, a decision. Is this worthy of
(11:44):
stopping and paying attention to? Is this worthy of my attention?
So immediate judgment is it worthy? Is it good? Do
I like it? Judgment? Second thing is comparison. Am I
like that? Do I do things like that? Does my
house look like that? Does my kitchen look like that?
Did I wear that thing like that? So we compare,
and then the third thing is we end up having
(12:07):
what's called contempt, which is division. We go, well, they're
like that, I'm not, And so think about that. Most
people scroll pass over a thousand posts a day, so
a thousand times you just wired your brain for more
judgment and for more comparison. Now, would you ever go
(12:30):
to teenager and go, here's what I want to do.
I want to train you all day to be more judgmental. Wow,
I want to train you all day to compare yourself
to more people. We know there's or negative behaviors, but
we do them. And most people are on now social
media an hour to two hours a day, consuming, not generating, consuming,
just like blindly scrolling through. And you have to understand
(12:54):
you're not being the gatekeeper of your own peace and
your own mind. Every time you're scrolling through, you're training yourself.
This is not scrolling passively. This is training. You are
training yourself to be more judgmental. That's why you're unhappy.
You judge everything. Why is everyone so judgmental today? Because
they train themselves a thousand times today. Why is everyone
(13:17):
comparing themselves? Why do we have us versus them? Because
we're comparing ourselves all day. We're not gatekeeping our minds.
It's just like when you hang around bad people. And
I know that's a bad phrase, you know to say
bad people, but you know, people whose behaviors cause negative
results in your life. The more you hang around them,
the more you become like them. Well, the more you
(13:37):
live in a land of judgment in comparison, the more
you become that, and it steals your joy. You're like, well,
it's stealing my joy. It's like, no, you scroll the
way your joy, and so I really want to be
attentive to that. Pay attention to the news you consume,
Pay attention to the people you're hanging out with, pay
attention to the quality of what you are consuming, Pay
attention to the quality of your entertainment, because all of
(13:58):
that is either isn't in the well or it's empowering you,
it's lifting you. And I think that that's the number
one reason most people aren't happy is because we live
in a consumptive society as and we're in that consumer
mindset and we're just taking everything in and now we're
comparing ourselves and we're judging everybody. It's hard to be
(14:19):
a happy person if I got to judge all day,
if I got to compare all day, and I'll say
this last piece about it, it's mentally exhausting. Remember it's
a thousand decisions. I just made a thousand decisions. No wonder,
no wonder. You get at the end of the day
(14:40):
and you're like, I just don't know why I don't
take more action. I don't know why I didn't decide
to write that book. I don't know why I decide
I didn't decide to write the song today. I didn't
know why I did. You know why you didn't decide
to do anything? Your decision bank account is bankrupt because
you gave away all your decisions to each scroll and
you do I didn't even know it. You're mentally fatigued,
(15:02):
you're not unhappy, You're exhausted.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
And I think it's a thief in the night. In
other words, we don't see it happening. It doesn't break
in in the middle of the day. Hey, here, I
am to steal your joy. I had so many many
thoughts about what you were saying that I will not
possibly be able to recap it as well as you
just said it. But let me ask you if I
heard this part right, Judgment destroys joy. When I'm wired
(15:29):
for judgment, it destroys my capacity for joy. And number two,
sometimes I don't lose my joy, like, oh I've lost
my joy? What happened? No, I leaked it little by little,
scroll by scroll, swipe by swipe, thing that I took
to heart by thing that I took to heart. Why
(15:52):
that's important to me is I don't want to just
approach this like a crisis management situation, when really it's
about decisions in the moment and training yourself. The training
piece is huge, because I'm not only taking responsibility for
my emotions, but the fact that if I'm not in
a good place, I am not.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Going to be any good.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Two or four of those around me that I'm called
to serve. So for those who think it's selfish, yeah,
I get it. The idea of just be happy at
all costs, or just make yourself happy, or after all
you deserve to be happy, Yeah, that can start to
get kind of empty for those of us who know
that there's a bigger purpose. And sometimes I'm supposed to
(16:36):
be sad because what I saw was sad, what I
went through was sad. Sometimes I'm supposed to have seasons
where I don't feel the most excited, and some of
those fallow seasons in my life led to the more
fertile seasons.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
And I have to learn to embrace that. So my
joy is my job.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Doesn't mean I'm always reaping blessings and singing praises. No,
sometimes it means I'm sowing in tears. But guess what
the Bible also teaches those who sow in tears will
reap enjoy. Now think about that. What is sewing it's
work and what is the consequence joy? I reap enjoy
(17:19):
when I sow in tears, which is why I want
you to work on this. That's why I go to therapy. Yeah, yeah,
that's not a confessional. I'm actually saying that, like I
tell you that I do physical exercise, of course I
work on my mind.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Of course I have to use that thing all the time.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
I don't have to do bicep curls to live, but
I have to think to live. I have to think
to speak, I have to think to process my life,
to decide what to do, to figure out how to respond.
So of course I'm going to find a gem for
my mind as a man thinking in his heart, So
is he? Do you owe this to the God who
(18:01):
gave you life to take the mind he gave you
and manage it and just get this as a baseline.
It's mind to manage, it's mind to manage you. Hear
this saying sometimes in physical exercise, you can't out train
a bad diet. Right, That's like a real popular thing.
I just heard this in our conversation Brendan. You can't
(18:26):
out gratitude a bad gatekeeper.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
M h.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
If you're just letting stuff in, letting stuff in, letting
stuff in, yeah, I'm gon fix it with a journal
for two minutes, even if it does have a cat
on the cover, and.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yourself all day and you're shocked you're not healthy.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
So let's stop letting it in and then just trying
to pray it out, let it in, pray it out.
Of Course, we all have to deal with negative things.
Of course, we're all from time to time gonna watch something,
see something. Of Course this is not black and white,
but what is important is that you make a decision
to own it. And I I just want everybody who's
a part of this. I feel like this do the
(19:03):
new you mentality. It starts out sounding surface like okay, yeah,
I'll do the new me, have my running shoes, I'm
gonna get after it. And this guy you know, knew me,
knew me, knew me.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I've heard it before.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
And then you start to realize, oh, it's not just
that I'm going to start doing things different. It's that
I am going to discover the me that was there
all along. And I just want to give you hope
for this that I believe there is great joy in
your future. I believe there is great joy in your present.
I believe that there are amazing things happening in your
(19:37):
life right now. It's okay if you can't see them.
I get to a place every once in a while
where I feel like I can't find anything that goes right.
But the difference is what do you do when you
find yourself there?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Do you stay in it? Do you blame it away?
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I want this to be a pivotal moment in your
life where you make the decision. My joy is my
job and it's very difficult to have breakthrough and blame
at the same time.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
And I want you to get through this.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Whatever the sadness was, whatever they did to you, whatever
caused it, I want you to see that there is
life beyond it. And so for all of us who
don't wake up singing the Hallelujah chorus, for all of
us who don't wake up wanting to even see a
human being, for all of us who feel like our
(20:35):
mood does this and that and the other, just know
that God is with you in all of it, and
he wants to bring forth joy, even if it means.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
You have to sow in tears.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
I want you to get your hard work of happiness mindset.
Stop thinking is something that's just either going to happen
or it's not. It's something that's going to come from
somewhere else. Be a power plant, baby, You got power
from on high, the power of the Holy Spirit, lives
in you and the turbine that's your tools, whether it's gratitude,
(21:05):
whether you're going to put on headphones and walk through
exactly what Brennan did, bringing gratefulness for people in your
life into your movement until you realize God has been
good to me, that you'll do it, and do it
and do it again until it becomes a part of you.
The Apostle Paul said, rejoice in the Lord always. I'll
(21:26):
say it again, Rejoice and again and again and again.
It's not a one time decision. It's a commitment in
every moment. I hope this helps you today. I hope
you feel happy right now. But if you don't, you
know a few things to do to help you get
there a little quicker and stay a little longer.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
I'll see you next time. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Special thanks to those of you who give generously to
this ministry. Is because of you that this ministry is possible.
You can click the link in the description to give now,
or visit Elevationchurch dot org slash podcast for more information.
And if you enjoyed the podcast, you can subscribe. You
can share it with your friends. You can click the
share button take a screenshot and share it on your
(22:21):
social stories and tag us at Elevation Church. Thanks again
for listening.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
God bless you.
Hey, this is Stephen Ferdeck. I'm the pastor of Elevation
Church and this is our podcast. I wanted to thank
you for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Hope this inspires you. Hope it builds your faith.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hope it gives your perspective to see God is moving
in your life.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Enjoy the message.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Welcome back to the Do the New You Mindset Masterclass.
By the way, if you're this far, you might as
well know there were some alternate titles for this conversation
between me and my friend Brendan Burchard. Brendan is one
of the most sought after performance coaches in the world,
so I thought we should call this segment Holy Ghost
Life Coach. And he was like, yeah, no, what about
(00:43):
what about Mindset master Class. I'm like, yeah, yeah, but
what have we called it? Like, what have we called it?
Speaker 2 (00:48):
After?
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Amen? You know? Because that's my heart, Like we all
say we believe this and in the book, I'm giving
you six truths to say over yourself. But after you
say amen, like yeah, I believe our last mindset. God
is not against me. He's in it with me, working
through me, fighting for me. I believe with God there's
always a way by faith, I will find it. I
(01:11):
believe Christ is in me. I am enough. I believe
I'm not stuck unless I stop now after I say amen,
which means, so be it?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
What action do I take? Right?
Speaker 1 (01:21):
And we're putting these conversations together as a gift to
you to take you deeper into what we shared in
the book, the six mindsets to become who you were
created to be, and this mindset, I really do need
a life coach, because I'll tell you what. Putting this
in the book to me almost felt like an act
of hypocrisy because the mindset this is the shortest one,
(01:45):
I guess and the hardest one for me. It goes
my joy is my job, and it's like, I don't
really want to call joy a job. Joy is supposed
to be a sensation, right It overtakes me with a
bite of a Hershey bar, or with the glimpse of
(02:06):
the sunset. You know, it doesn't have to be something decadent.
But joy is this rush that I experience that comes
from an event. And the more I study it Brendan
in the Bible, the more I study it in life.
I'm really hanging on to that quote from Brian Wilson
from the Beach Boys that I put in the book,
and he's had mental health challenges that a lot of
(02:26):
people know about. But you know, the Beach Boys music
is so happy and so sunny. And he looks at
the documentarian in this movie that I saw about his
life and he says, you know, I found out happiness
is really hard work, and that hit me. I'm like, yeah,
if we're just chasing happiness as an end result and
not really taking responsibility to own our emotions, that's what
(02:49):
we want to get into a little bit today with Brendan,
how to own your emotions so you don't run around
saying stuff like they didn't make me happy, or I
left that company because it wasn't making me fulfilled. Well, happiness, fulfillment,
all of those things aren't something that someone else can
(03:11):
make you. And I think that ownership process of our
own joy is a lifelong process, yes, a moment by
moment process. You know in the church, people say they
stole my joy, Then what in the world were you
doing putting it where they could steal it.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
You should have locked it up, You should have had
it somewhere safe.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
You should have put your joy somewhere other than just
how somebody else treats you. But really, like I told you,
in so many of these mindsets, these are the things
that I preach to me. Because nobody is going to
vote me for the naturally happiest human alive. That's not
my disposition. That doesn't mean that it can't be my destination.
(03:49):
Though I can become more joyful, I can become more grateful.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
I can practice these things.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
And that's why I brought the world's best life coach
to help me. So make me happy, Brendan, it's your
job make me happy, make me joyful.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
I don't know if I can make you happy. I'll
start with the coaching piece. He said. A second ago,
they stole my joy. And a lot of people say that.
I say, no one stole your joy. You gave them
your attention. Wow, that's what happened. You took your That's
what happened. What happened, No one took it. You gave
them your attention, you, you gave them your belief, you
(04:25):
gave them, you know, your thought pattern. Instead of owning
the fact that you control this. You're the gatekeeper up here,
you're the generator up here, You're the commander up here,
and when you know you own this, you start to
own your emotions. And I always love to tell people
there's a difference between emotion and feelings different. A nice
(04:48):
way to think about is we have impulsive emotions and
we have ongoing feelings. And let me give you a difference.
If you go into a haunted house, right and someone
jumps out the corner, that fear that hits you, that
is automatic, it's physical, and it's impulsive. Fear just hits you.
You get scared, right. But if you go home at
(05:09):
night and now it's seven o'clock at night, you're safe
in your house, the doors are locked, your husband or
your spouse is there, things are good, and you still
you start kind of getting spooked. I feel like something
as bad as going to happen. Now that ongoing feeling,
you're generating that with your thoughts. The first one you
meet it fear scared. That's impulsive, that's automatic. An emotion
(05:33):
is like that just happens in your body. A psychologists
found emotions pass usually in ninety seconds to three minutes.
The emotion actually pass. Now our thoughts really do take over,
and our thoughts are forming a story. Our thoughts are
telling us what something means. Our thoughts are either taking
command of us or we're in take command of them,
(05:54):
because we can say, wait, I'm in the house, everything's okay.
Oh I just got scared earlier, and I'm holding on
to that. Unhappiness is very similar. Something can happen, it's
an unhappy situation. Someone was mean to us, you know,
something awful happened. It makes me feel bad. There's grief there,
(06:17):
there's hurt there, and we can feel that like in
that immediate emotion, it's just like, ah, that I feel bad.
But if later on it's an ongoing feeling of happiness,
I promise you're architecting your thoughts in such a way
it's creating the ongoing happiness. So think about it. Is
the situations of your life, the bad events of your life,
(06:40):
are they still dragging on in the feelings of today.
That's where we say, oh, I got to take back
command of the architecture of my thoughts here, because that's
what's really screwing me up. That's what's stealing my joy
is I'm not architecting the thoughts. It would give me
that And then you hear me teach all the time,
I'm always sharing this idea that my dominant metaphor in
(07:05):
my life is about a power plant.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
I love it, and you'll listen to the power plant.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
This change your life? Is crazy, this changes my life
every day. Yeah, And the idea is, you know, the
power plant doesn't have energy. It actually generates energy. So
technically a power plant takes energy from one level of resource,
a rushing stream or solar or whatever. It's taking energy
from one level, lower level of utilization. It's transforming that
(07:35):
energy into a higher level of utilization, and it's transmitting it.
And I love it because the power plant doesn't have energy. Oh,
it's it's taking energy from one lower level, it's transforming
it and transmitting into a higher level. That means I
can do that in my own life. You know, I'm
feeling a low level of energy today. I don't have motivation,
I don't have joy, I don't have love in my heart. Actually,
(07:58):
I woke up kind of grumpy. Well, that's a low
level of utilization. It's my job. How do I take
the energy of the world or my situation, my life,
my relationships, and how do I take ownership as a
power plant? And how do I up level that? Why
do that with my thoughts. My thoughts are my turbines.
My thoughts are the thing that can spin that energy
(08:18):
up into a higher level. And now I can be
a person of goodness, I can be a person of cheer,
I can be a person of joy. And is that
choice to be the power plant of the feelings of
my life that has made my life more fulfilling because
before that I was at the whim of everybody else
and everything else. Because see, most of the world right now,
(08:40):
it's a pretty low level energy. There's a lot of
division and vitriol and hate and us against them. It's
low level. But you can say, I'm not going to
live in that mud puddle. I'm going to take the
water out of that mud puddle. I'm going to turn
it through these turbines of joy and faith and reasoning
(09:01):
and logic and a desire for an extraordinary life. I'm
gonna spin that up and boom, I'm gonna feel different
and transmit different.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yes. See, man, now you made me want to be
in church. I want it to be ten o'clock on
a Sunday morning. I want to him and beat three
organ because I want to talk about the power plant
and Jesus said, you will receive power when the Holy
Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses
in Jerusalem. Judea Samaria.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
What's that.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
That's taking the power and then transforming that power into
a witness.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
So you see what he just did.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
He said, I'm gonna give you power from another place,
and then i want your faith to be the turbine
by which you take what I've given you and take
it to the world. And that's so much more empowering
to me than it is to sit.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
There and go, Lord, give me joy.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
I'm trying to get people out of this pattern that
we have Brendan sometimes of going Lord.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Give me joy, give me joy, give me joy.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
And the Lord gave you somebody to help that would
have brought you joy if you would have helped that person.
And I also think that we should talk about this,
isn't the happiness that we want often hidden in the
thing that we resist.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Yeah, and you said it earlier about peace, and our
friend Trent Shelton talks about protecting your peace. So I
think the first part of our conversation today has all
been about generating it, about generating joy, generating the emotions
we want to feel being the power plant. But there's
another job we have. So if the first job we
have is being the generator, the second job we have,
(10:41):
which is really important today, is we got to be
the gatekeeper, the gatekeeper of our joy and our happiness.
He talked about the enemy, and sometimes the enemy is
taking that and we constantly continue abusing ourselves and taking
away our own happiness by engaging in things that we
know are bad for us or are not good. I'll
(11:01):
give you a convenient example right now about social media.
A lot of people don't understand that. All of social
media research has shown it doesn't make us feel good.
If you're generating and you're the creator, or you're doing
it to create relationships, it can be a very positive
and entertaining thing, but for most people actually creates a
low level of anxiety and stress. Because here's what happens
(11:23):
when you're scrolling. And this is really important to understand.
If you're in a bad mood, be careful about disengaging
from the world and going to social media. Here's what
they found from the research. This is amazing. When you're scrolling.
Every time you scroll past something, the brain has to
do three things. First, as you're scrolling, the brain has
to make a judgment, a decision. Is this worthy of
(11:44):
stopping and paying attention to? Is this worthy of my attention?
So immediate judgment is it worthy? Is it good? Do
I like it? Judgment? Second thing is comparison. Am I
like that? Do I do things like that? Does my
house look like that? Does my kitchen look like that?
Did I wear that thing like that? So we compare,
and then the third thing is we end up having
(12:07):
what's called contempt, which is division. We go, well, they're
like that, I'm not, And so think about that. Most
people scroll pass over a thousand posts a day, so
a thousand times you just wired your brain for more
judgment and for more comparison. Now, would you ever go
(12:30):
to teenager and go, here's what I want to do.
I want to train you all day to be more judgmental. Wow,
I want to train you all day to compare yourself
to more people. We know there's or negative behaviors, but
we do them. And most people are on now social
media an hour to two hours a day, consuming, not generating, consuming,
just like blindly scrolling through. And you have to understand
(12:54):
you're not being the gatekeeper of your own peace and
your own mind. Every time you're scrolling through, you're training yourself.
This is not scrolling passively. This is training. You are
training yourself to be more judgmental. That's why you're unhappy.
You judge everything. Why is everyone so judgmental today? Because
they train themselves a thousand times today. Why is everyone
(13:17):
comparing themselves? Why do we have us versus them? Because
we're comparing ourselves all day. We're not gatekeeping our minds.
It's just like when you hang around bad people. And
I know that's a bad phrase, you know to say
bad people, but you know, people whose behaviors cause negative
results in your life. The more you hang around them,
the more you become like them. Well, the more you
(13:37):
live in a land of judgment in comparison, the more
you become that, and it steals your joy. You're like, well,
it's stealing my joy. It's like, no, you scroll the
way your joy, and so I really want to be
attentive to that. Pay attention to the news you consume,
Pay attention to the people you're hanging out with, pay
attention to the quality of what you are consuming, Pay
attention to the quality of your entertainment, because all of
(13:58):
that is either isn't in the well or it's empowering you,
it's lifting you. And I think that that's the number
one reason most people aren't happy is because we live
in a consumptive society as and we're in that consumer
mindset and we're just taking everything in and now we're
comparing ourselves and we're judging everybody. It's hard to be
(14:19):
a happy person if I got to judge all day,
if I got to compare all day, and I'll say
this last piece about it, it's mentally exhausting. Remember it's
a thousand decisions. I just made a thousand decisions. No wonder,
no wonder. You get at the end of the day
(14:40):
and you're like, I just don't know why I don't
take more action. I don't know why I didn't decide
to write that book. I don't know why I decide
I didn't decide to write the song today. I didn't
know why I did. You know why you didn't decide
to do anything? Your decision bank account is bankrupt because
you gave away all your decisions to each scroll and
you do I didn't even know it. You're mentally fatigued,
(15:02):
you're not unhappy, You're exhausted.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
And I think it's a thief in the night. In
other words, we don't see it happening. It doesn't break
in in the middle of the day. Hey, here, I
am to steal your joy. I had so many many
thoughts about what you were saying that I will not
possibly be able to recap it as well as you
just said it. But let me ask you if I
heard this part right, Judgment destroys joy. When I'm wired
(15:29):
for judgment, it destroys my capacity for joy. And number two,
sometimes I don't lose my joy, like, oh I've lost
my joy? What happened? No, I leaked it little by little,
scroll by scroll, swipe by swipe, thing that I took
to heart by thing that I took to heart. Why
(15:52):
that's important to me is I don't want to just
approach this like a crisis management situation, when really it's
about decisions in the moment and training yourself. The training
piece is huge, because I'm not only taking responsibility for
my emotions, but the fact that if I'm not in
a good place, I am not.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Going to be any good.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Two or four of those around me that I'm called
to serve. So for those who think it's selfish, yeah,
I get it. The idea of just be happy at
all costs, or just make yourself happy, or after all
you deserve to be happy, Yeah, that can start to
get kind of empty for those of us who know
that there's a bigger purpose. And sometimes I'm supposed to
(16:36):
be sad because what I saw was sad, what I
went through was sad. Sometimes I'm supposed to have seasons
where I don't feel the most excited, and some of
those fallow seasons in my life led to the more
fertile seasons.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
And I have to learn to embrace that. So my
joy is my job.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Doesn't mean I'm always reaping blessings and singing praises. No,
sometimes it means I'm sowing in tears. But guess what
the Bible also teaches those who sow in tears will
reap enjoy. Now think about that. What is sewing it's
work and what is the consequence joy? I reap enjoy
(17:19):
when I sow in tears, which is why I want
you to work on this. That's why I go to therapy. Yeah, yeah,
that's not a confessional. I'm actually saying that, like I
tell you that I do physical exercise, of course I
work on my mind.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Of course I have to use that thing all the time.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
I don't have to do bicep curls to live, but
I have to think to live. I have to think
to speak, I have to think to process my life,
to decide what to do, to figure out how to respond.
So of course I'm going to find a gem for
my mind as a man thinking in his heart, So
is he? Do you owe this to the God who
(18:01):
gave you life to take the mind he gave you
and manage it and just get this as a baseline.
It's mind to manage, it's mind to manage you. Hear
this saying sometimes in physical exercise, you can't out train
a bad diet. Right, That's like a real popular thing.
I just heard this in our conversation Brendan. You can't
(18:26):
out gratitude a bad gatekeeper.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
M h.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
If you're just letting stuff in, letting stuff in, letting
stuff in, yeah, I'm gon fix it with a journal
for two minutes, even if it does have a cat
on the cover, and.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yourself all day and you're shocked you're not healthy.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
So let's stop letting it in and then just trying
to pray it out, let it in, pray it out.
Of Course, we all have to deal with negative things.
Of course, we're all from time to time gonna watch something,
see something. Of Course this is not black and white,
but what is important is that you make a decision
to own it. And I I just want everybody who's
a part of this. I feel like this do the
(19:03):
new you mentality. It starts out sounding surface like okay, yeah,
I'll do the new me, have my running shoes, I'm
gonna get after it. And this guy you know, knew me,
knew me, knew me.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I've heard it before.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
And then you start to realize, oh, it's not just
that I'm going to start doing things different. It's that
I am going to discover the me that was there
all along. And I just want to give you hope
for this that I believe there is great joy in
your future. I believe there is great joy in your present.
I believe that there are amazing things happening in your
(19:37):
life right now. It's okay if you can't see them.
I get to a place every once in a while
where I feel like I can't find anything that goes right.
But the difference is what do you do when you
find yourself there?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Do you stay in it? Do you blame it away?
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I want this to be a pivotal moment in your
life where you make the decision. My joy is my
job and it's very difficult to have breakthrough and blame
at the same time.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
And I want you to get through this.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Whatever the sadness was, whatever they did to you, whatever
caused it, I want you to see that there is
life beyond it. And so for all of us who
don't wake up singing the Hallelujah chorus, for all of
us who don't wake up wanting to even see a
human being, for all of us who feel like our
(20:35):
mood does this and that and the other, just know
that God is with you in all of it, and
he wants to bring forth joy, even if it means.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
You have to sow in tears.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
I want you to get your hard work of happiness mindset.
Stop thinking is something that's just either going to happen
or it's not. It's something that's going to come from
somewhere else. Be a power plant, baby, You got power
from on high, the power of the Holy Spirit, lives
in you and the turbine that's your tools, whether it's gratitude,
(21:05):
whether you're going to put on headphones and walk through
exactly what Brennan did, bringing gratefulness for people in your
life into your movement until you realize God has been
good to me, that you'll do it, and do it
and do it again until it becomes a part of you.
The Apostle Paul said, rejoice in the Lord always. I'll
(21:26):
say it again, Rejoice and again and again and again.
It's not a one time decision. It's a commitment in
every moment. I hope this helps you today. I hope
you feel happy right now. But if you don't, you
know a few things to do to help you get
there a little quicker and stay a little longer.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
I'll see you next time. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Special thanks to those of you who give generously to
this ministry. Is because of you that this ministry is possible.
You can click the link in the description to give now,
or visit Elevationchurch dot org slash podcast for more information.
And if you enjoyed the podcast, you can subscribe. You
can share it with your friends. You can click the
share button take a screenshot and share it on your
(22:21):
social stories and tag us at Elevation Church. Thanks again
for listening.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
God bless you.
Host
Steven Furtick
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