Speaker 1 0:02

So my friends, how are you doing? My name's John. So nice to meet you. I'm going to get out ahead of this thing today and just let you know that on my shirt so you don't think about it. The entirety of this message, it says banks. Okay. That's what's on the other half. I don't know what it means. I just got a shirt that says banks. I'm not a big supporter of banks. There's nothing deeper than that. I'm not a big Wells Fargo guy. I just, yeah , outer banks. It could be anything, but I know you're going to sit here if I didn't tell you and you're going to say what's the other half of that word? So I want to get out ahead of it. Okay. We've moved on. We're good. How are we doing? The first service, I didn't do it and I had like 30 people come out to me like pull my shirt back. Like what does that, what does it mean? I'm going up. We're glad you're here. Welcome. We're continuing our kill the spider series. We are on week six. It's almost over. It's almost done. Have you enjoyed it? Like Jesse said, we're kind of doing some ugly stuff in our lives. Larry mentioned it last week. Make sure you're here next week. It's going to be so much fun. We have a big surprise for you. You do not want to miss out on that. You're going to be blessed by that. So make sure you're here. We have had so much fun. I have loved going through these spiders that we have done. If you're just now joined us, this series is called kill spider. This is an idea from a guy named Carlos Whittaker . It's a book that he wrote and we got this idea from him and it's kind of this, what would it look like in our lives if we didn't just cleaned out the spider webs, but we went to the root of the problem and we killed the spider. So we kind of entered this conversation through the lens of the seven deadly sins because many people are familiar with that and they're so true to all of us. But what I have loved so much about this series, I love word studies in general, but what I have loved so much is that we all kind of have this 30,000 foot view of these sins. Like if I just said pride, you kind of know what we're talking about. What I've loved is through Larry's vulnerability, through the stories that we've been telling, and through your stories too. I love getting to open up these words together and go down really far to the root of this where nobody can walk out of here on Sunday and say that one, I don't struggle with that one like we are and say , yeah, check that one, that one, that one. We're all so riddled with this disease of sin and it's so evident, but God's grace is amazing and it's good. And so I love that we get to open up this conversation, break these things open and say, all right, how do we shine light on this and how do we move forward and how do we grow? Because so often in life we just cleaned the spiderwebs because it's easy. It is so easy to just clean the webs. If I come over to your house and I don't see any spiderwebs, I'm not going to assume that you have spiders. I'm not going to assume that there is any problem with you, but if I come over and there's spiderwebs everywhere, I'm probably going to feel them on me. I'm going to tell my wife, grab your purse. We're out of here. These people are sick and they have a problem. My be extreme, but I'm not messing around with spiders, and that's the same thing in our lives. We can easily clean everything up and say, no , no. I don't struggle with any of that stuff, but I love that we're opening it up like, no, we all are, but let's grow together. Let's move forward together. So we've talked about pride and envy and slothfulness and greed and lust, and this weekend we're talking about gluttony. Society's most acceptable sin. Yeah, yeah. We're talking about gluttony. I swear Larry, just pick the ones he didn't want to talk about. Sloths and gluttony. Those are the ones he gave me. Come on, man. Joke. That's very funny. Larry, this is a big one. I'm excited about it. I think all of us struggle with gluttony in a very, very deep way. But like I said, we had these 30,000 foot view of these words. So when I say gluttony, you're probably thinking obesity, overeating, excess, a Baconator with extra bacon. You know, I witnessed this Thursday, a man eat eight rolls of sushi. That's, that's gluttony. And I was there with him. We had a lot of sushi. It was pastor Jesse. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. All you can eat sushi is the devil. Um, it's not a good thing. But when you study this word, you go deeper. There's so much more truth you can find for this. It's ugly. Just like all of these sins. So as I was looking up, one definition I really liked was an insatiable desire for more. That's what gluttony is. It's more, it's more, it's more. But my favorite definition was habitual greed because of the word habitual. See, this is so dangerous because it takes other sins and it makes them a habit. This is a lifestyle sin. This is so disgusting. This wants to take sin in your life and turn it into a habit. This is why I'm saying we all struggle with this, with this desire for more. It's dangerous because of this. It wants to raise your baseline for what you need in life. It wants to keep raising that. Does that make sense? Once they keep raising that based on, here's a story to help you out here. When I was a kid, I grew up in North Carolina, East coast who will shout out , uh , grow , grew up over there. We grew up financially strapped. You could say we didn't have a lot of excess money to do stuff. So our vacations growing up, it was normally labor day weekend because we've got that extra day off of work. My parents didn't have to take too much time off work. We go to labor day weekend at the beach. It's like a four hour drive, get a condo. But it wasn't luxurious by any means. My mom would still cook all of our meals. Me and my brothers and sisters was still fight all the time. I was normally right. I don't, I mean they're , they're terrible people. I'm just kidding. My dad would always wake up like two hours before everybody, like, Oh , are you going to sleep the vacation away? Yeah, it's vacation dad. But you're not a dad if you don't do that. You gotta kind of play that joke. That's what makes you a dad. I think it was a great vacation. I had so many great memories of that. But one year, I think it was like 13 my grandfather got a bonus at work, so he decided to give that money and in and spread it out amongst his children. Uh , so we got to go on a very extravagant vacation, the height of luxury Orlando, Florida, and we went to SeaWorld and universal studios and that was one of the best vacations of my life. And I probably have just as many memories from that one week as I do all the other vacations that we ever did. And then we went back after that one summer. That was our big vacation and we went back to normal vacations after that. And then I turned about 18 and I got the taste for my first cruise. I want to talk about luxury. You mean I can just eat all day and no one's gonna stop me? No one, they're going to actually help me. They're gonna bring me more. There is ice cream on tap. I can walk in and just cone after cone after cone . Oh that is, that is, I think that's what heaven will be like. Honestly, an ice cream machine that never ends and like the ice cream machine breaks on the crews like at noon every day . Cause these kids are just like chocolate all over their faces. And then I got older and I started making these plans, these own vacations for myself and I had that cruise experience. Well now I got to go on another cruise. Took me 18 years ago on a cruise. I'm not making that mistake again. I'm going to go every year. I might go two times a year and if I can't make two cruises a year, I still need to get that second week of vacation in a tropical location. So I'm going to at least Hawaii. I'll settle for Hawaii. I guess maybe an all inclusive in Mexico somewhere. That baseline got raised to where now if I want to take a weekend off, it's not vacation to me anymore. They may have to go up to bodega. It's a beautiful trip. It's just a little rest. Just taking a little breather, but that's not vacation. You with me? You understand that . Here's another example. When I was like 18 I got my first job leading worship. That was making a hundred dollars a Sunday. I know that's a lot of money. I know, and then I was also working at Chick-fil-A making about seven 25 an hour. I know it's hard to believe I'm very wealthy because of that. In my past I had more money than I knew what to do with back then. So much money now making more money than I've ever made in my life as an adult. I even have the dual income lifestyle. I have a wife where two incomes under one home and I have less money than I've ever had in my life. You understand? This is the next raise and I'll be able to start giving. It's the next raise and we'll get a little breathing room. But what happens? Oh my goodness, where did all my money go? Because you keep buying more. You need more, you need more, you need more. That's what gluttony wants to do. It wants to keep you chasing more and more, chasing down your disordered desires. Never being satisfied, but thinking you're so close. You're so close. One more promotion. One more. Raise one more car, one more Baconator and you'll be happy. I've never actually had a Baconator from being honest with you. I'm sure it's great. And what you find from that is that it leads to slavery. It traps you this desire for more, this baseline shift. It will trap you thinking that you need more and more. No one starts the job thinking they're going to work 80 hours a week and never see their kids. But there's that promise of more. And then they ended up getting trapped. Nobody starts the movie thinking they're going to eat the entire party size bag of lays, but it just happens. And then you find yourself there. You don't know how you got there and you don't want to be there. Paul talks about this in first Corinthians chapter six it's up here on the screen. Let's read it. You say, I am allowed to do anything but not everything is good for you and even though I am allowed to do anything, I must not become a slave to anything. We are free in Christ for freedom. You have been set free. It's true. We can do whatever we want to, but not everything is good for you. This is what Paul is saying. It's slavery. The more you get, the more you're going to be trapped by what you get. Yeah, you can do whatever you want to. That's not good for you. Let's keep reading. Next verse. You say food was made for the stomach and the stomach for food. This is true. The someday God will do away with both of them, but you can't say that our bodies were made for sexual immorality. They were made for the Lord and the Lord cares about our bodies. This is a kind of a slogan that would have been floating around Greece at this time. Food for the body, body for food, sexist for the body. The body is for sex. It's kind of a rationalization of what you're doing. I read this and I thought, I have no clue what this means, and then I realized, Oh, this is like an old school. Treat yourself like an old school. Yolo. You with me? Do whatever feels good. Thursday you aren't it. Treat yourself. You made it almost to Friday, right? We live by that. Whatever makes you happy, that's what you should do. It's written in our constitution that all people are born with the unalienable right for the pursuit of happiness. Whatever makes you happy is what you should do, and this is what Paul's saying, like you can do whatever you want. Yeah, go chase down happiness. It's going to become slavery. It's going to trap you, and here's what we find is that it wants to keep you full but never satisfy you. It wants to keep you full but never satisfy. We keep reading here. We all know this first. Don't you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy spirit who lives in you and was given to you by God. This is a gift. Friends, God in you, you're not belong to yourself for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body. Have you ever been in a , in a house of someone who's a hoarder and you're like, man, this is such a tiny little living space you have in a massive house cause you have so much stuff in here and you're like kind of sneaking along the walls to get through because all of it, or maybe it's not even a hoarder, just people who collect things. There's a little old lady in my church growing up, she collected dolls. I don't know why, and she had a whole room in her house devoted to her dolls, a whole room. And even if there wasn't enough room to put a bed in it, nobody's sleeping in there. You've got a bunch of dolls watching us the whole time. So weirdest thing, if you collect dolls, there is grace. God loves us all so much stuff. It's , it's forcing God out. That's what gluttony wants you . It wants to keep you so full. There's no room for the Holy spirit. There's no room for God. Seeing this time, it was believed that the temples were literally where the gods lived. These were their homes. That deity lived in that temple and they would put these, these idols, these images in the temple to signify the presence of this God, but there was no idol in the temple in Israel and now we are the temple. God lives in us and we're so full. We don't have any room for him. We're slowly shrinking it down like, okay, okay, don't take up too much room. You've got your spot. Stay there. Talk to you later. How many times did we say, I wish I could read my Bible to David . I just don't have any time. I wish I could pray and I don't have any time to do this or, or you've already carved out that little bit of time to read your Bible, but it's so scheduled that when God does amazing stuff and you're like reading the passage and words start popping off the page and you're like, Oh, this is so amazing. I wish I could stay here for another couple of minutes and just kind of think on this over what time is it? I've got to go. Or, man, I wish I could do rooted . I really do. But I don't have any time in my week nights because I'm so busy. And it might not even be with bad stuff. Maybe you're doing really good stuff, but you're so full, you don't have any room for God to do anything in you. And now you're dictating what God does through you because you've only given him so much. Or maybe you don't serve on Sunday because that's your only morning off and so you come. But that's about all you can do. You can't do anything else and it's gotta be your day. That's what you need. It wants to keep us full. My friends, this is slavery and it disorders our desires. The enemy is so good at taking these good things that God has given us. These desires are all from him. They'd been warped, they've been twisted, they've been messed up by the enemy and then disordered to become the chief end of man. The main thing we're chasing down, the only thing that's important to us is our happiness, our satisfaction, and we're slaves to that for more, for more, for more. How do we, how do we beat this spot? How do we kill this spider of gluttony? See a lifestyle. Sin needs a lifestyle solution, a lifestyle scent , habitual sin needs a habitual solution. Last week, pastor Larry , he talked about lust. If you miss that message, you can find it on our YouTube page. It was a great message and he looked at less through the lens of appetites and I want to build off of that and we're going to use the word desire as I've already done. Same thing. They're interchangeable and he said in his message that your appetites, your desires whisper now not later. So if lust is acting in the moment on your disordered desires, gluttony is what happens when you have a life of living by your disordered desires. So if this is a habit problem, we need to fix it. That's really our last week talked about the solution for fixing lust . He talked about neural pathways, which is a fancy way of saying habits. Your brain is full of them. It's a good thing that your brain forms habits. If your brain didn't form a habit, you would pass out. It's trying to create shortcuts so that you can do more so you can run harder and faster and better. The fact that I'm able to stand and rock back and forth while I'm moving my hands while talking and breathing and blinking and not falling, those are all habits. I can drive my car while eating a cheeseburger and listening to music and talking on the phone and shaving and all that stuff and I'll get home at some point, probably safely. I know what you're thinking. He doesn't need to shave. I know. I know Foley , we were as blessed as Jerry shank. Like goodness. Habits are good. That's the way God created your brain. But here's the problem. If your brain is always trying to make habits, you gotta be careful what you're doing because that means if you're doing bad things, you're going to form bad habits. So how do we change that? How do we fix this? We read in Romans chapter 12 verse one it's not on the screen, but it reads. And so dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and Holy sacrifice, the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. I believe the way to kill this spider is a lifestyle of worship, a lifestyle sin needs a lifestyle solution. A lifestyle of worship is how we kill this and how do we have a lifestyle of worship? It's offering ourselves. It's a daily rest in the presence of God daily routine, habitual. It's a lifestyle. That's how we combat this spider of Glen and if we keep reading, it says, don't copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. I love other versions of this passage will say by renewing your mind, when you look at the brains, you can see these neural pathways. You can see the path that habits are making and to create new habits means to change the path in your brain. You're altering the design of your brain by creating new habits. God was teaching about this before the psychologist ever got there, renewing your mind, forming new habits. Then God will. Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect renewing your mind, allowing God to step in, and you get the promise of a perfect fulfilled life. The world can't offer that. It's over here chasing down more so the way to live a lifestyle of worship is to allow God to reorder our desires. You see the Israelites a lot of times. Now , let me back up. A lot of times we think before we come to Christ and a lot of times this holds us back once we're Christians, that God doesn't care about my happiness, that God doesn't care about my life. He just wants to take things away from me. He's all about his laws. I can't do this. I can't do this. I want to be free. When the, when the law was given to Moses, this was the first time that the Israelites were free. This generation of Israel, they had never experienced freedom before. They had only known slavery to Egypt. That's all. They knew what the Egyptians taught them and it wasn't good. So when they go out in the wilderness, they're on their way to the promised land. God frees them. He says, look, this is the first time you've ever flourished. This is the first time you've ever tasted freedom and I want to set some guidelines, some parameters in your life to help you continue to flourish. In fact, they did a study on this a couple years ago with children on a playground and they took away the fence around the playground to see what would happen with these kids, and what happened is they just stayed really, really close together in the middle. They didn't explore, they didn't go out and then they put the fence back up and it was, it was an archi . They were running around in there just exploring the space within the confines of the cage. They weren't in a cage. It was a fence , but they should have been kids. Guidelines are good. God was giving the Israelites guidelines say like, Hey, look, you're , you're free now. This is the first time. Let's put some parameters up here and this is how you're going to have a better life, so don't kill each other. I know this might be the first time you're hearing this, but if you kill somebody else, it's not going to be good. They're going to hate it. It's just not good. And the first five of those is how you worship God. The first five of the 10 commandments relates to how you worship God and then how you relate to people, and then Jesus in the sermon on the Mount, Matthew five and six, he kind of retells the law because he's saying, you're missing it. You're getting like the don't kill people. We got that. I'm not trying to kill people, but you're still not flourishing. You're still not living the best life that you could, so yeah, don't kill them . You get that, but also don't hate them. If you don't hate each other, you'll also have a better life with one another, and then he wraps all of that up with a verse at the end of Matthew chapter six seek first the kingdom of God. How do you reorder your desires? You seek first the kingdom of God. You don't seek fame and intimacy and God, you don't seek money and pleasure and God, you seek first the kingdom of God and all of that stuff that you're worried about. All of that stuff that you're chasing will be added to you. Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you. How do you find fame? How do you find success? Start by seeking first, as God starts to reorder your desires, reordering our desires, and then we can find that he will begin to redeem our desires. Once we reorder our desires, we can see him begin to redeem our desires. Then these good desires that God had when they find their rightful place, we can be using them for him. Then this, this intimacy desire that we have that can become an act of worship, this desire for fame and popularity. When you look at it at its root, this desire to be known and loved by people, well in the correct light, we can use that as an act of worship. So I know that I said a lifestyle of worship. That's a big broad statement is literally on our wall out there in the lobby. If you haven't seen it, it's one of our core values here . Lifestyle of worship. What does it mean? Let's get practical here. We're a church of next steps. What are the next steps you can take here today? What is a lifestyle of worship look like in your day to day life? There's many things. You can do, many, many things, but it is always more than just showing up on Sunday for one hour. That is never enough because let's also be honest, your kids are probably giving you a hard time, so you missed the first song or two and then you dropped him off in the classroom and then you have to leave a little early to go pick them up so you can get to lunch after this. This is okay, we're glad you're here. It's more than this. This is great. Coming together and glorifying God and lifting up his name and singing worship songs and celebrating transformation through people's stories and then giving of our finances. That's a great thing. That's an act of worship as well. And then we open it, open up God's word, and we dive in and we get challenged by it. These are all great things, but there's six other days, so maybe a practice for you is to start reading your Bible and start small. Don't try to read the whole Bible in the first month. You're going to be, you're going to stop. As soon as you get to like Exodus , you're going to be done. It's going to get messy in there. All right? Just trust me. Start small. Maybe start with like one verse and just read one verse a day. Just start because I will say this practices, these practices are hard. When you begin, I'm going to sugar coat it for you. It is difficult to do these things, to renew your mind, to seek first the kingdom of God. This is difficult. It involves sacrifice of something else. We've been convinced that our desires are the only thing that are important and that's wrong. Seek first. Another practice you can maybe do is silence, silence, and solitude . Maybe you can redeem your car, ride to work and just turn the radio off and just sit and listen. Maybe prayer. Maybe you should start a prayer life with God. I love the people that are going through rooted right now. They just finished their prayer experience. It's so amazing. I love the stories that come out of that. I was just talking to my buddy who came out there this morning about the prayer experience. He's going through rooted and he's like, it wasn't long enough. I needed more. Every , it's the same story. Everybody goes through route and they say, I have to pray for how long? An hour and a half. I can't even watch Netflix for an hour and a half without getting on my phone, and then by the end of it, they're just like, man, I need more time because here's the difference. We're not just spouting off things. They're not just talking to God. We're also listening to God. That's what a prayer life is. It's a conversation with God. I'm talking, he's talking, he's listening. I'm listening. It's a conversation. Maybe a prayer life is something you can start, start small, maybe just start on your drive in start when you wake up in the morning, there's many things that you could do. Maybe a practice you could try is a fast, it could be one day, it could be one meal once a week, once a month, whatever it is. You can start with that by saying no to something to say yes to God so I'm not so full all the time. I'm going to say no to this so that you have room to work right now, God, and like I said, these are very difficult things when you first start them, but God's with you all the way. That's what it's about. If we want to grow, it's about movement. My example for that is there's another practice. I've been studying it for about a year now and it's so scary. I haven't done it for like a year. I've just been studying it and so me and my wife started it on a yesterday, yesterday, Saturday, and that's the practice of a Sabbath . Taking one day off and choosing to spend that day reflecting on the goodness of God, choosing to spend that day to rejoice in what God has done in the first six days of that week and then just resting in his presence. And the reason it's so difficult is the number one rule of our Sabbath is no phones, no social media. I know it's tough. Some of you just went up. No , I'm out. You know, it's so hard because when you turn your phone back on and you realize, man, I'm not that important. Nobody texted me. The world moved without me, man. My mom lied to me. I'm just kidding. She would never have said that. There's so many things we could do and if you're, and if you're listening to these practices and you're thinking, this sounds really cool, I'd like to try them out, but I have no clue how to start. Come talk to me. Come talk to somebody on staff. We'll help you form a plan for something. We'll help you pick a passage of scripture that you can read for the week. We'll help you establish a prayer life, whatever it is. I'll tell you more about the Sabbath if that was something you were interested in, but we really just want you to move because here's the thing. Your relationship with God is not about what you know. It's not about what church you go to. Your relationship with God is based around you or movement towards him. That's why we talk about next steps every single week and some of us may be sitting in this room and we're thinking, that sounds great, but I just can't do it. I am too full. There's too much stuff on my plate right now. I'm too far gone that I can't come back. We have a saying, we say it every single week. There's nothing so lost. It cannot be found. There's nothing so broken. It can't be mended and there's nothing so dead that it cannot be resurrected. We believe that. We've seen that and I have seen that in my life that there is nothing so lost that God cannot find it. You are never too full for God to not do a work in you, but it starts with maybe a first step and if that's you today and you want to take that first step, we have this free journal we want to give you. You can pick it up out there in the lobby. Megan is out there. She'll probably give you a hug. She's the greatest person in the world and you and it's a page for 21 days. Each day gets a page and you go through it and then at the end of it we'll call you. Like I said, Megan , so awesome. She likes to call people like 10 days into it she's like, I just can't wait 21 days. I've got to know what God's doing in your life because that's what happens when you open yourself up. When you make room, God starts to work. If that's you go pick this thing up. Maybe another practice you could do, maybe something you could do for this next season is we have a North gate yoga class called spiritual formations and it's going to be a continuation of this kill the spider series. Cause these series that we pick on Sundays where they're not random, we believe that this is going to do something in the life of the church. It's what we need to hear in this season of our life and when it stops we're like, man, I kind of want to keep talking about this cause it's really cool and you get to do that. If you go into this next North gate , you class, you can sign up in the lobby. That's another way to go, a step deeper into what God is doing, but it's always about taking a next step. There is a step to be taken. Will you pray with me? Father, we are so thankful that you love us, that you have grace that abounds for every mistake that you have. Love that overflows. God, we're , we're so tired of chasing down our desires, but we're missing that you want to give us a good fulfilling life in you that the way to find a rest, the way to find peace, that all this stuff, we find it in you God. So pray for each person

Speaker 2 29:42

in this room as they're , as they're processing, as they're thinking, God, I pray that you will reveal to them what is the next next step, the next season. God, I pray that you will begin by your spirit to just communicate with us. Which one do we need to do? What is something we need to carve out of our life? What is the next step we can take to allow more room for you?

Speaker 1 30:09

God, as we reorder our desires, I pray that you begin to teach us how to redeem them. Give you glory, give you praise from each one. If there's anyone in this room, God that doesn't feel like they're good enough, that feels like they're too far gone, I pray that you just wrap your arms around them , that your love will overcome them. God, you are good. It's in Jesus' name. Amen. We're so glad that you're here this morning. If you are making that step, make sure that you pick up this book out there in the lobby. We would love to talk with you. Like we said, next week is going to be a fun one. You do not want to miss it. We've got something really amazing plan for you. So we want to see you next week. But before you go, will you stand with me? I want to leave you with the blessing. And when we, when we, when we receive this blessing, we have this posture of receiving. So may you and your week, whatever you eat, whatever you drink, whatever you do, and you understand the weight that your body has God's and that is for his glory. Amen. We'll see you guys next week.