Welcome to the Illuminate Church podcast.
We hope today's message is encouraging to you.
In this series Unrest, we're talking talking about honoring
the Sabbath. As I will mention again later in
this message, the Lord said honor the Sabbath and keep it
holy. A day set apart, 24 hour period
of time where we seek to commune with God.
And as I said last week, this is just training ground that you
might do this all the days, not just one day.
But we cease from our regular work, which you can't do if you
have a job on all the other days, but you can still commune
with God on the other days. We cease from our regular work
for 124 hour period of time. We commune with God, we
appreciate His goodness, we appreciate the people He's put
in our lives, and we just recognize His glory.
We recognize how much we have to be thankful for in dedicating
this day to the Lord. Fun fact for you, Sabbath is a
noun. But occasionally I might text
somebody and say, are you Sabbath thing and make it a verb
and auto correct changes Sabbath thing to sunbathing.
Are you sunbathing? Like are you peeping like what's
going on here? Right?
No, but think about it this way. If you don't mind a little
pastor cheesiness, isn't sunbathing what Sabathine is to
bathe in the sun of God. Can you handle some cheesy
pastorness? Is that OK?
So are you sunbathing everybody who's sunbathing raised?
No, don't. God is trying to use autocorrect
to correct us automatically that if we would Sabbath, there might
be some correction. Helpful life giving correct
correction that happens to us. Today's message is called the
death of Chicken Little. If you're not familiar with
Chicken Little, Chicken Little is always exasperated because
the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling.
Almost like the boy that cried wolf, always worried, tense,
afraid something terrible is about to happen.
And if we will apply what the word of God has for us today, I
believe that we can put to death the spirit of exasperation.
And to take it a step further, the spirit of fear put it to
death by applying the word of God in our lives.
If you're ready, say I'm ready. Don't answer out loud, but are
you a fighter or a flighter Fight or flight, Remember these
two. I want to candidly confess
before you. Unfortunately, I am a flighter.
I want to be a fighter. But throughout my life, for
whatever reason, and I've shared many, many stories from this
platform. Once I was a kid, we had a
garage sale, this giant box of money.
We made all this money and the wind blew the box and all the
money went flying down the street.
I can still see it. We were living in Fort
Leavenworth, Texas. My dad was there at command
General Staff College, and I went running the other way.
Like all the money's going away. Like, well, go run and catch it.
Well you anyway, last week I told you that the second time my
brother broke his arm. And the first time my brother
broke his arm. I ran both times.
One time my younger brother was also skating with roller skates
around a swimming pool and he skated into the pool and those
lead weights took him down to the bottom of the pool and I
went running the other direction.
One time I was pulling out of my driveway in my car, I've told
you the story. And I backed into a bam, ran
into something. It was a truck that my dad had
borrowed. And instead of walking in the
house to tell him, I ran the other way.
I am a flighter. Get over it.
Fighting and fighting are both responses to fierce stimuli.
I'm going to use a word that may trigger you, but the word is
trigger. When we get triggered, we want
to fight or we want to flight. We want to say catch me outside.
How about that? Or we want to say catch me if
you can and run away. Both fighting and fighting are
exhausting and in general don't bring about actual solutions.
And in general, both are not restful fighting and fighting.
So we need to rethink fight or flight to put to death.
Chicken Little, if you have a Bible, open it up to Isaiah
chapter 30. If you need a Bible, raise your
hand and 1:00 will be brought to you that you can keep or you can
return or hope you keep it. Isaiah chapter 30, if you're
looking for Isaiah, just go kind of to the middle and flip a
little bit to the right. You're going to run into the
prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah prophet.
If you're brand new to church, just being somebody on earth
who's been given a message from God specifically for the nation,
it's usually a word of rebuke, usually like it is today.
Isaiah chapter 30, if you're ready to say yes, verse 15,
you'll see Isaiah starts with the words that declare that he's
a prophet. This is what the sovereign Lord,
the Holy One of Israel says. I'm now speaking on behalf of
God. Listen to these beautiful offers
in repentance and rest is your salvation in quietness and trust
is your strength. And here comes the human
condition. But you would have none of it.
You said no, we will flee on horses, therefore you will flee.
You said we will ride on swift horses.
Look at these last 6 words. Therefore your pursuers will be
swift. Do you see what God's saying
here? He's saying you say you're going
to run, so that's exactly what you're going to do.
And I want you to know when you start running, your pursuers are
going to run too. You cannot outrun the problems
that you think you can outrun, saith the Lord.
How exciting. Running is not really an option.
Running just delays and eventuality.
Running is sticking her head in the sand, putting our fingers in
her ears and blah blah, blah. You know that that that thing
God offers us a different option.
Instead of fight or flight, He gives us run or rest right here
in Isaiah chapter 30. You can flee or in repentance
and rest is your salvation and quietness and trust is your
strength. Do you want to trust God or do
you want to flee? Today?
Let's begin retraining ourselves.
We were doing a family devotion just the other night, and one of
the words that was in it was a recorded devotion we were
listening to was neuroplasticity.
You want to say it? Try it.
Neuroplasticity. Did you know that your brains
can be reformed physiologically? So whatever's going on now
doesn't have to go on forever. And when the enemy says it's
just never going to get better, that's a lie.
Because physiologically you can absolutely change.
And I'm believing God that if we will apply the principles of
Sabbath, we can retrain our brains to run from fight and
flight and into rest. What if instead of fighting, we
rested in God, trusted in God? What if instead of running away,
we rested in the arms of the Father?
Doesn't that sound more beneficial?
Actually has a hope of working out, resting in God.
Psalm 112. You don't have to turn there.
Let me just read verse one to you it says, praise the Lord.
Blessed are those who fear the Lord, who find great delight in
His commands to the extent that you obeyed them.
I love this command so much that I'm obeying it, and bless are
you when you obeyed his commands.
Pop quiz Hotshot, what is command #4?
Let me ask this side of the room, because this side don't
hear. Don't mountain.
What is command #4? There you go.
What's command #4? The Lord says if we delight in
His commands, we will be blessed, and one of His commands
#4 is the Sabbath. Better way maybe to think of
Sabbath is you get a rest day with God every week.
It's a command of God. Verse 6, Psalm 112.
Surely the righteous will never be shaken.
They will be remembered forever. They will have No Fear of bad
news. Their hearts are steadfast,
trusted in the Lord. Their hearts are secure.
They will have No Fear. In the end.
They will look in triumph on their foes.
When you read in the Bible with the devil meant to harm the
Lord, used for good, that's what we're reading right here.
The foe comes to you, seeking to defeat you and to devour you,
and in the end you, through the power of the Lord God, are
triumphing on your foes. When the car breaks down and
wants to make you get angry, you triumph over that.
When the diagnosis comes, you triumph over it.
When the job change comes, when the relationship dysfunction
starts to raise its head, you triumph on those.
When we follow the commands of God and one of His commands is
to rest. What I'm trying to say is that
the sky doesn't fall on those who properly rest the death of
Chicken Little. They will have No Fear of bad
news. It doesn't say they won't have
bad news. Jesus said John chapter 16, you
will have trouble. It's going to come.
The difference is those who obey the Lord, including rest, and
those who don't will have different responses.
Those who don't follow the Lord tend to give over to fight or
flight, and those who follow Lord tend to give over to rest.
If you missed week 1, I told the story of my panic attack at
35,000 feet in an airplane. My entire body, my entire soul
and spirit didn't feel like the sky was falling.
It felt like I was falling out of the sky, right?
And so I have this panic attack. But really the issue, as I said
in week 1 was accumulated stress.
You can imagine your soul as a backpack.
And in that backpack is all the stress of life, decisions to be
made, bills to be paid, people to please all these things got
your stuffing it in their timelines, deadlines.
All of this is in there week after week after week.
Just stuffing it in there, stuffing it in there.
And I had accumulated all of the stress of the my backpack took
me out in a panic attack and I experienced years of anxiety as
a result. What the Lord taught me in that
season is if you had been Sabbath thing resting with me,
then what you would have found is every Sabbath I would have
been your backpack unloader. Little by little.
Let's process this. Let's put this in right
perspective. Let me move this out of your
heart and as he makes room there in that backpack, then he adds
other things, Kingdom things there.
What an exchange. What a swap meet.
You bring your stress, He takes it and in place gives you the
things of heaven. What things?
Stay tuned. That's at the end of the message
today because he does like to pack the backpack with heavenly
things. I wrote this sentence a long
time ago to try to help me understand where Jesus said in
this world you will have troubles, but take heart.
I overcome the world and this is what I wrote.
God didn't promise our lives would be void of trouble.
He promised us that when troubles come we won't be void
of life. You understand.
And I wrote that before I went through my season of anxiety and
healing from it because of the Lord's goodness.
This sentence. God didn't promise our lives
would be void of trouble. He promised us that when
troubles come we would be void of life.
And then through the season, I added these 3 words.
If we rest, when we rest, He helps us to overcome the stress
in the world. Last week I showed you that
science is revealing, discovering what God has already
said. If you were here last week, you
might remember I said that science tells us we need 52 days
a year to rest. And God, what do you know, has
given us 52 Sabbaths a year. Coincidence.
I think not. Today I want to show you some
more, if you're willing. Are you willing say yes?
Now you got to put on your big brains for this next little
section. It's going to kind of feel like
a science class, but it's all pointing back to what God has
done for us to the Sabbath rest. I want today to introduce you to
your second brain. You may not have known you have
a second brain, but you do. The first brain we're going to
call brain, and it's just what you think brain is, all the
actions and now all that stuff going on in there.
Great. That's yours.
That's your first brain. The second brain, I'm taking
this term from a book called REST.
It's written by Alex SU Jung and Kim Pang.
It's a secular book. It's not has nothing to do with
the Lord. They just studied, researched,
scienced up rest, and they call this second brain the default
mode network. Default mode, You heard that
like factory settings set up at the default mode, right?
Let me get everything cleaned up and right.
Are you starting to see how maybe this part of the brain
works for you? The default mode network is the
resting brain that actually doesn't rest.
It's different parts of your brain that I'll show you here in
just a little bit, but it's very busy, this default mode network
when you shut off your brain. And most of us rarely engage the
default mode network because we rarely rest.
And so this whole part of your brain lays dormant and it's
essential to our survival, and it's why God put it there in our
brain. Brain, second brain.
Anyone here ever taken differential equations?
Yep, Yep. Remember these people because
they're smarter than you. I'm just kidding, maybe they
are. I took Differential Equations 1
and Differential Equations 2 at the University of Florida.
If you're not sure what Diffie Q looks like, it looks like this.
That gives me hives just looking at it.
I don't know about you. I get the heebie jeebies.
It was after the completion of Differential Equations 2 that
the Lord said to me, what do you think about being a pastor?
Instead I said good idea, this engineering stuff is for
somebody else in Jesus name they can have it.
Yep. I departed quickly from Diffie Q
and that was that was the end of my engineering career.
Hallelujah, God is good. Where was I?
Oh, differential equations. So what these scientists did was
they took all these nodes, these sensors, they put them all over
the brain and then they had people do these high level math
equations, specifically differential equations, and
they're working them working them.
And what they saw is these brains came to life like just
humming. They they had lights that light
up and just these parts of the brain are just working like big
time to work these math problems.
Then they took the same people said lay on the bed and don't do
anything and lay there for a long time.
And what they expected to see was the brain would go and go
lights out completely, nothing happening.
And instead, as this centers are, these other sections went,
these other parts of the brain went and they came to life and
then they were humming while the people or resting.
I can show you where the default mode network is located.
It's up there in the front. It's there.
That other thing called the posterior cingulate cortex,
whatever that is back over here, the medial perfrontal cortex,
the all these sections of the brain that were quiet during
Diffie Q all the sudden went boom and came to life while the
people were resting. And this is where your default
mode network is. The default mode network is
nearly as energized as a brain solving high level math
equations. What am I trying to tell you?
What does it mean? While you are resting, you are
still working. And some of you need to hear
that in here because you think of resting as a waste of time,
because you're a maximizer, achiever, workaholic.
Some of you need to hear that you are still getting stuff done
while resting. You are doing something and that
something happens to be nothing. While you're doing nothing,
something is happening. The default mode network, this
area of the brain is where greater creativity comes from.
The default mode network is where you get your emotional
judgment from. This is where sanity comes from.
Solutions arise. If you want these things to be
strong in your life, then you need to have the default mode
network turned on. And you know how to do that,
don't you? Rest.
Look at it this way. Rest.
This is funny way to say it is the exercise your default mode
network needs to produce greater effectiveness relationally,
spiritually, emotionally. If you feel out of sorts all the
time, stressed all the time, I would endeavor to say that you
may not be activating the default mode network very often,
if at all. They have this other term called
mind wandering. Mind wandering is where you have
a certain perspective, but then the default mode network takes
over and it begins to look at a problem from different angles.
It wanders while you're awake. You're setting your ways.
You got what you got right? But when you're resting, the
brain kind of shuts down and the other part wakes up and it
starts to look at things from another direction.
Have you ever heard anyone say, or you say yourself, let me
sleep on it? Anyone.
Come on, people talk to me. Yep.
What we're saying there is that somehow we've learned that if I
sleep on it, I do have a better perspective in the morning.
We don't know the science behind it until now.
The science is that when you're sleeping, your default mode
network goes on and your mind begins to wander and look for
solutions that you can't find when you're awake or when you're
not resting and you wake up in the morning.
Like, you know what? I got a renewed idea about this.
You ever get great ideas in the shower?
You know why they find that the brain goes into default mode
network in the shower? Because in the shower, you got
no responsibilities except to wash your hair, right or not.
Jason, Sorry, you laughed. I wasn't saying anything.
And your mind begins to wander. Sometimes on a long drive, the
white dotted line just going by you're in your mind just wanders
because you're not having to concentrate on anything.
When you get these great ideas, when you get that great idea,
that solution, that Eureka moment, science calls it a word.
It calls it illumination. How about that?
OK, I, I find it great. That's fun.
Only only me. OK, good.
All of this greatness happens if you activate the default mode
network, which only happens with rest.
And wouldn't you know it, God commanded us to rest.
Maybe God knows that I put this part of your brain in there to
help you, and that's accessed only when you rest.
Science is proving what God has said.
Do you want more? I got one more.
Anybody want more? All this points back to
Scripture, like we're talking a lot about Physiology, What about
Jesus? Like it all fits together.
You have an autonomic nervous system.
Maybe you remember this from Physiology classes way back
when, science classes, or maybe you're learning it right now in
school. The autonomic nervous system is
that part of our body that does stuff without us thinking about
it. It's just busy doing his job.
There's three parts to it. The first part is a circulatory,
respiratory part. You didn't know that you're
breathing until I'm making you aware right now that you've been
breathing this whole time. Or at least I think you have.
I'm pretty sure you have. And now that you're thinking of
it, you're aware that my lungs are going in and out and in and
out, and the air is passing through and they're like, I'm
breathing. Yes, but you weren't thinking
about it before then. Your heart is sending that
oxygenated blood all around your body to give life to your cells
and everything else that blood does.
And that's happening. You're not thinking beep, beep,
beep, beep, beep. It's all autonomic, which always
drove me nuts. Like, can we just say automatic?
What's this? Autonomics.
OK, whatever. The other parts are the
sympathetic and the parasympathetic.
These are parts of the autonomic nervous system.
The sympathetic and the parasympathetic are the parts of
your brain that regulate fight and flight.
The sympathetic is the accelerator, right?
The sympathetic is what helps you run from the bear.
It's defcon one. It's wartime.
It's time to fight or to run high alert.
The parasympathetic is the break.
The parasympathetic slows us down, tells us we're safe.
We move from DEFCON one to DEFCON 5.
This is peacetime. The parasympathetic.
Now, everybody lean in just a little bit, pay attention here.
I would say that there are some people in this room, maybe a
majority of people in this room who, because of life
circumstances, trauma, you name it, live with the sympathetic
switch always on. And you've lived that way for so
long you think it's normal. It's the air you breathe, the
water you swim in. Always stressed accelerator
mashed to the floor, always worried that something is about
to happen. Tensed up, stressed out,
switches on. I don't know if that's you.
Science has said we have an answer for you to move from the
sympathetic to the parasympathetic.
Listen to their list. This is what research says.
These aren't just ideas, but research has proven these things
work. Number one, these are not in any
order of importance. Spend time in nature.
You ever go to the beach and just feel like, yeah, it's too
hot here, let's go somewhere else, Practice meditation
wherever. I heard that word before to
meditate. Deep abdominal breathing.
If you ever want to try relaxing and shove oxygen to your bane
brain, reverse breathe. That means suck in your gut as
you're breathing in and blow it out as you're breathing out.
Shoves air up to your brain. Sympathetic to parasympathetic.
Repetitive prayer, science says, helps us go from sympathetic to
parasympathetic. How about this one?
Focus on a word that is soothing.
I got a suggestion. Focus on the word that is
soothing. This one you might disagree
with, but they say play with animals or children.
You also might disagree with this one.
Exercise, touch your toes. Progressive relaxation so you
feel relaxed from the feet to the knees all the way up to the
head, feeling each part unreleased, its tension, or the
last one. Do something you enjoy like a
favorite hobby. Now you all are brilliant
people. I thought I'd get at least an
Amen. So you know that what science is
telling us is the same thing that God has been saying since
the book of Genesis, which he codified that which means he
made it forever law in both Exodus.
Well, and he repeats it again that we get the the 20
commandments, the 10 commandments twice.
Fun for me to say, telling us to rest.
And then he sent us on Jesus so that we could live from the
place of his finished work and Sabbath, not just the 24 hour
period where we're not working, but every day of our lives with
him. Abraham Heschel is a Jewish
rabbi. He wrote my favorite book on
Sabbath, it's entitled Sabbath. It's a very old book.
I highly recommend it. It's a short read, but it is a
very rich read. He said Sabbath is the one day
we don't master civilization, we surpass it, meaning that
mastering civilization means that we become rat number one in
the rat race. Woo, I am king rat.
The problem is you're still a rat.
And Sabbath helps us to live beyond the reality of Americana.
We've talked about this in the series.
Wake up, do your job, go to bed, rinse and repeat.
Well, walking in the Sabbath brings you to this unhurried
peace and pace with the Lord your God, walking in step with
Him. We don't follow the beat, the
pattern of the world, we follow the beat and pattern of our
designer. Amen.
How? Here's the last scripture.
Oh no, I got 2. My bad.
Isaiah chapter 58. If you're in 30, flip to your
right 28 chapters. Isaiah chapter 58.
The very first word is you're flipping there.
That we're going to read in verse 13 says if and if there's
an if. What follows later then?
Is that what you said? Can I hear nothing?
Really. Look at this verse 13.
If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from
doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a
delight and the Lord's holy day honorable, and if you honor it
by not going your own way and not doing as you please or
speaking idle words, verse 14, then three things get packed
into your backpack. Your soul.
I told you they were coming. Here they are.
You will find joy in the Lord. I will cause you to ride in
triumph on the heights of the land and to feast on the
inheritance of your Father, Jacob.
Three things that God is willing to exchange for your stress,
your worry, your accumulation. Let me unpack those and pack you
with #1 Joy. We've taught this year before,
but if you haven't been around, joy doesn't mean happiness.
Yay. Joy means I recognize grace and
it follows with an emotion, and that emotion we call joy.
But it really begins. And recognizing God has been
better to me than I deserve. He sent his Son Jesus in the
midst of my darkest places. He was there and I'm flipping
the script. This isn't a dark moment.
This is where God was graceful to me, and that thing that rises
up in you as assurances of His promises and His presence, that
is joy. And when you Sabbath, you're
full of this joy. You get packed in with
recognizing His grace. We talked about a week one.
That Sabbath thing is less recuperation and more
appreciation. We appreciate His grace and
we're full of joy. Secondly, it says we will
triumph on the heights. Heights, when you read it
biblically, usually means one of two things, either influence or
victory. And this says triumph on the
heights. So it's not triumph on the
victory. That's really triumph and
influence, which means this you have an opportunity in your life
to influence other people from your victory or from your wound.
You lead with your wound, which means you have the victim
mentality. Well, this happened and that
happened. It's other people's problems and
me, me, me, me, me, me, me, and I have a reason and excuse to
behave the way I do. That's living influencing from
the place of a wound. But those who Sabbath and spend
time recognizing how good God is in connecting with Him, they
lead from a place of victory. I will not lead from my wound.
I will lead from the One who healed me.
I will influence my words, my thoughts, my behaviors will be
from a victorious place instead of a defeated place when I
Sabbath according to Isaiah, who's speaking for God.
And finally, it says that you will feast on the inheritance of
Jacob. Jacob is one of the fathers of
our faith, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
This is Jacob's inheritance. He was blessed to be a blessing.
So when you feast on his inheritance, you become blessed
to be a blessing, which means that God will pour out His
abundance in you, whatever that looks like, so that you can be a
blessing to others. And that happens when you
Sabbath joy leading from victory, blessed to be a
blessing. These are the things that the
Lord God will put into your backpack, your soul, when you
Sabbath. That's why Jesus said Mark
chapter 2. The Sabbath was made for man,
not man for the Sabbath. Just as my 20 bucks in my wallet
can't help Bill Gates's bank account, so any of my efforts
cannot help the Sabbath. The Sabbath is about sowing and
reaping. We don't sow The Kingdom of God
sows into us, and then the world reaps A renewed temp, a renewed
you. Praise God, showing you, showing
who He is through you. I have a friend for many, many,
many, many years who lived with a sympathetic switch on and he
thought it was normal. And then he began to learn how
to rest. And the most amazing thing that
he tells me is men. I used to get up at night, just
as everyone does, to use the restroom.
Then when I would get back to bed, sleep was kind of not
happening for a long time because my brain would.
And now he sleeps all night long.
So he learned to rest in his savior.
His life is a living testament to me and to you.
I wrote these down. Rest engages our default mode
network. Rest moves us from sympathetic
to parasympathetic. Rest moves us from fight or
flight to peace. Rest moves us from a house built
on sand to a house built on the rock.
Rest moves us from shaking in our boots at the face of the
enemies, instead looking at him and saying, who are you to defy
the armies of the living God? This is what rest does, and it's
not an invitation, it's a command.
That's so much God loves you. Would you receive his rest?
Would you bow your heads and pray with me?
Jesus, you promised that your word never returns void.
And we have spoken your words. We have heard your words.
God, help us now to live your words to do the Word and become
practitioners of rest. Lord, let it be said of the
people of Illuminate Church. They are experts at resting.
We declare your rest over every person here today and church.
Maybe you're here today and you've never received Jesus as
Savior. Let me tell you, there is no
rest for the unsaved. That is not meant to be a fear
tactic, it is just a confession of reality.
There is no rest outside of the hope of Jesus Christ.
Jesus went to the cross to die in our place so that we might
have eternal peace starting the moment we declare Jesus is Lord
and receive His invitation to salvation.
That's you here today. Then make the good decision.
Turn your heart by faith over to Jesus Christ.
I'm going to have the whole church pray, and if that's you,
pray along with them out loud through your mouth.
Everybody saying this in Jesus name, Father, I come to you and
confess that I am a Sinner in need of a Savior, and I believe
and I confess that Jesus is the Lord and receive him today as my
Savior. Thank you for forgiveness, thank
you for the Spirit, and thank you for eternal peace.
If you prayed that prayer just now for the very first time, you
have just become a Christian, not because you've gone to
church your whole life, but because you received His
invitation personally as Savior. I'm going to ask you to do 1
bold thing on the count of three in just a moment.
I'm going to have you. If you've prayed that prayer for
the first time today, raise your hand up as high as it will go.
Just signifying I'm in. It's me on the count of 3123,
hands going up before I can even count, praise you God.
Yes Sir. I see you sisters.
I see you, my sister, any others?
I see you, my brother. Just hold your hand up for a
second and an usher is going to bring something to you that's
very important. It's why I'm having you hold
your hand up, praise the Lord, thank you God.
I want you to know that those that come early and those that
come late get the same reward. Any others today?
Thank you Lord for those who are being saved and thank you for
hearing your church as we rejoice in Jesus name, Amen.
Thanks for joining us today. We hope God is speaking to your
heart through this message. If you'd like to connect with
us, you can text Connect to 4:07 588-0115 or visit Illuminate dot
Church. Have a great week.