Cultivate | Joy | Nathan Lewws

I'm shaking off the heavy net. I'm chasing out of my regrets. I'm going to caution to the wind. And I am not ashamed to praise like this. So I'm ashamed for this mess. But I say it's worth the risk. I came to get what Jesus said. No, I am not ashamed to praise like this. Where were those chains that I was held? I'm free, I'm free, I'm free. My sin is gone, I'm ready. I'm free, I'm free, I'm free. And look at what the Lord has said. I'm never going back to the bayons. I'll sing all these guys I feel. I'm free, I'm free, I'm free. Make God a prayer. Oh, Jesus, what is? I'm not free, I never quit. No one loves as good as this. And I don't get what anyone says. I'll never be ashamed to praise like this. Where were those chains that I was held? I'm free, I'm free, I'm free. My sin is gone, I'm ready. I'm free, I'm free, I'm free. And look at what the Lord has said. I'm never going back to the bayons. I'll sing all these guys I feel. I'm free, I'm free, I'm free.

Make God a prayer. You took a cross and you broke your body. You shed your blade, now the city gets you. My dead is played and my record is you. I couldn't do it, so you didn't call me. We sang, you took a cross and you broke your body. You shed your blade, now the city gets in. My dead is played and my record is me. I couldn't do it, so you didn't call me. I couldn't do it, so you didn't call me. I couldn't do it, so you didn't call me Jesus. You didn't call me. Where were those chains that I was held? I'm free, I'm free, I'm free. My city's gone, I'll get it. I'm free, I'm free, I'm free. And look at what the Lord has said. I'm never going back to the way I was. I'll sing all these guys I feel. I'm free, I'm free. Make God a prayer. [Music] We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots.

We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. We've all seen this out together with our roots. ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ You go, yeah, you go over for me ♪ ♪ To prepare a blessing ♪ ♪ You're amazing, yes you do ♪ ♪ It's more ♪ ♪ Than I could imagine ♪ ♪ More than I could find alone ♪ ♪ Oh I can't read it, it's right here ♪ ♪ On mountains drops ♪

♪ Yeah, you stay the same ♪ ♪ And in valleys alone ♪ ♪ No, you'll never change an eye ♪ ♪ I believe ♪ ♪ That I will see ♪ ♪ The joy this earned in all ♪ ♪ I'm going for you ♪ ♪ I see you've changed ♪ ♪ Your faithfulness ♪ ♪ Please ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ You go on and on and on and on and on ♪ ♪ Got of my presence ♪ ♪ Got of my future ♪ ♪ You write my story ♪ ♪ You hold it all together ♪ ♪ Got of my presence ♪ ♪ Got of my future ♪ ♪ You write my story ♪ ♪ You hold it all together ♪ ♪ Got of my presence ♪ ♪ Got of my future ♪ ♪ You write my story ♪ ♪ You hold it all together ♪ ♪ I believe ♪ ♪ That I will see ♪ ♪ The kindness of the Lord ♪ ♪ I want you there ♪ ♪ As seasons change ♪ ♪ Your faithfulness ♪

♪ Please ♪ ♪ Your faithfulness ♪ ♪ Please ♪ ♪ Your faithfulness ♪ ♪ Please ♪ (dramatic music) - God, we love you. We trust that you are faithful, you are good, because we have you, Jesus. We stand on your name, on your word. Our confidence is in you. And so, Church, let's sing this together. Let's speak the name of Jesus. Let's worship Him this morning. Let's sing. ♪ I just want to speak the name of Jesus ♪ ♪ Over every heart and every mind ♪ ♪ 'Cause I know there is peace within your presence ♪ ♪ I sweet Jesus ♪ ♪ Yes we do ♪ ♪ I just want to speak the name of Jesus ♪ ♪ 'Cause every dark addiction starts to break ♪ ♪ The clearing there is hope and there is freedom ♪ ♪ I sweet Jesus ♪ ♪ So I say ♪ ♪ Your name is power ♪ ♪ Your name is healing ♪ ♪ Your name is mine ♪ ♪ Break every stone home ♪ ♪ Shine through the shadows ♪

♪ We're right to fight ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ I just want to see the name of Jesus ♪ ♪ Over-fearing all anxiety ♪ ♪ To every soul I can't define oppression ♪ ♪ I speak to you today ♪ ♪ Your name is power ♪ ♪ Your name is healing ♪ ♪ Your name is healing ♪ ♪ Break every stronghold ♪ ♪ Shine through the shadows ♪ ♪ You burn like a fire ♪ ♪ And it's right here, church, let's sing ♪ ♪ Shout Jesus from the mountains ♪ ♪ Jesus in the streets ♪ ♪ Jesus in the darkness over every enemy ♪ ♪ Jesus for my family ♪ ♪ I speak the Holy Name ♪ ♪ Jesus, Jesus, Jesus ♪ ♪ Shout Jesus from the mountains ♪ ♪ Jesus in the streets ♪ ♪ Jesus in the darkness over every enemy ♪ ♪ Jesus for my family ♪ ♪ I speak the Holy Name ♪ ♪ Jesus, your name is power ♪ ♪ Your name is our healing ♪ ♪ Your name is life ♪ ♪ Break every stronghold ♪ ♪ Shine through the shadows ♪ ♪ Burn like a fire ♪

♪ Sing again, your name is power ♪ ♪ Your name is our healing ♪ ♪ Yes it is, your name ♪ ♪ Give our life, oh ♪ ♪ Break every stronghold ♪ ♪ Shine through the shadows ♪ ♪ Burn like a fire ♪ ♪ I just wanna speak the name of Jesus ♪ ♪ Over every heart and every mind ♪ ♪ 'Cause I know there is peace within your presence ♪ ♪ I speak Jesus ♪ Amen. - Well, good morning everybody. Welcome to Compass, where our mission is navigating people to God. We are one church in multiple locations. And one of those is at our All Red Campus. Can you join me in welcoming the men from our All Red Campus this morning? (audience applauding) Man, it's so good to have you guys with us. And hey, if I have not had a chance to meet you yet, my name is Nathan. I get to serve on staff here as one of the pastors. And I just wanna say thanks for being here with us this morning. I'm gonna kinda tell you a little bit about what's going on this Wednesday. I know CM gave you a ton of info about stuff coming up in the fall,

but I've got one more thing for you. This Wednesday, August 5th, gaining ground is back in action. Our first Wednesday at 6.30. So join us for coffee and breakfast tacos. It's also gonna be a great way to get plugged into a community group, like that video that you just saw. We will have gaining ground community groups that you can get plugged into. So please make sure that you are there, guys. 6.30 across the street, Compass Center, August 5th, coffee, breakfast tacos, and community. It's gonna be amazing. But here's what we're gonna do this morning. We're gonna continue on in this series that we are calling Cultivate. You may have seen a few different faces over the last couple of weeks, because what we do here at Compass is every single summer, Pastor Drew gets to take a riding break where he really gets to dive deep into some sermons coming up this fall. But the rest of the teaching team and the campus pastors, we get to, during this one summer series, pick one week and then we get to travel around to the different campuses and see all that it is that God is doing in and through Compass across the campuses. And so, man, we are excited about the opportunity to do that.

I am excited about the opportunity to get to be here with you today and to finish up this series called Cultivate, where we are looking at the individual characteristics of the fruit of the spirit that you find in the book of Galatians. So if you've got your Bibles with you or if you have the You version app, go ahead and flip on over to Galatians chapter five verses 22 and 23. Paul, the author of Galatians writes this, but the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Today, what we're going to do is we are going to look at the attribute of joy. If I'm honest with you this morning, I have a very complicated relationship with joy. It's something that I wrestle in toil with, and it's something that I have wrestled in toil with for the majority of my life, and because of that, this has been one of the most difficult sermons that I've ever written, because I've grown up in church. My dad has been a senior pastor my entire life, and so I have heard my fair share of messages and sermons and talks on joy, and they all sound really similar. They all end up talking about the difference between happiness and joy. The pastor ends up, a lot of times, saying something like where they start off with happiness and they're like, "Happiness, here's the definition. Happiness is entirely dependent upon your circumstances. Like if your circumstances are good, then happiness abounds. Like if the corporate deal closes, if your portfolio is up into the right, if your kid gets the first chair or makes that team, even if you get the front parking spot at target, then you're happy. It's like, man, too blessed to be stressed, brother, but when your circumstances take

a turn for the worst, I mean, that happiness just goes right out the window, doesn't it? Like the deal falls through and it costs you your business. Your kid slams their bedroom door in your face for the umpteenth time. Not only can you not find a close parking spot, you find one across creation from the store, and then when you come back out of the store, you find that you are the brand new owner of a massive doording in your driver's side door. In those seasons, it sounds more like too stressed to be blessed. And then the pastor will switch gears and then it'll be like, "That's happiness." Joy, though, we're going to dive into the biblical definition of joy and they end up getting really nerdy a lot of times, too, because they end up talking about like the Greek word for joy, and they're like, "The Greek word for joy is kara. Say that with me." "Kara," okay, you missed it, 8.30. It was early, but they did way better. We're going to try that again. Okay, "The Greek word for joy is kara. Say that with me." "Kara." Nailed it. Well done. But they do. They say, "Kara, the Greek word, man." What that means is it's a deep baseline satisfaction in who God is, not for what He can give you. And they end up talking about like, "Man, your joy can't be taken from you if He just place your faith in Creator God and you press into Him. And they're not wrong. All of that is true. But because of my constant struggle with joy, those messages don't—they don't tend to sit real well with me. They end up coming off to me a lot of times more like a self-help talk, and they just

end up making me angry. And so when I was asked to pick a characteristic to preach on during this series, man, I jumped at the chance to preach on joy because I was determined that I was not going to bring you something that was some trite, happy-go-lucky sermon that ended up sounding like that song from Monty Python's The Life of Brian. You remember what I'm talking about? When they're up on the cross and the guy ends up looking at the other guy, and he goes, "When you're chewing on life's gristle, don't grumble, give a whistle. Look on the bright side of life." You remember what I'm talking about? You're welcome. Man, I saw I dove into commentaries. I searched Scripture. I scoured the Internet, and I have realized that choosing joy was a huge mistake because I have found that what tends to happen is the Lord tends to use my sermon prep to teach me something about my own life, and I don't like what I'm learning right now because what I'm learning about joy, this whole idea of growing and gaining and cultivating joy is that adversity is the soil that cultivates joy, and I don't like that. Like I know that for muscle growth and endurance training, there has to be a level of resistance In order to grow, you have to push yourself past the point of comfort. I mean, nowadays that's just widely accepted data. But with something like joy, like adversity wasn't ever really a thing for me. Like I had always operated under the impression that joy and adversity were mutually exclusive. But that's not what we find in scripture. In fact, when you look at the entire breadth of scripture and in the Bible, we find the exact opposite. What we find is that adversity and joy

are actually intimately tied together because adversity is the soil that cultivates joy. Like take a look at what James, the brother of the one and only Jesus says in his letter. This is the first thing, this is how he starts his letter. This is what he says. Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. No, thank you. For when you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. I actually love the way that Eugene Peterson puts this in his message paraphrase. He writes, consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. Consider it a gift, an opportunity for great joy when trials and tests and troubles, when adversity comes at you from all sides. Why? Because those are the things that test and temper and strengthen you. It's just like my boys in Pokemon Shield on the Nintendo Switch. I have two young boys, I have Bennett who's 10 years old and I have Brooks who seven and they love playing Pokemon Shield on the Switch.

And the entire point of this game is like any other video game, like you go from battle to battle, you defeat the final boss and you become the hero of the game. But in this particular instance within Pokemon, what you do is you travel around and you battle these different gym champions. And when you beat that gym leader, that gym champion, you become the gym champion and you go around and collect all these badges, then you fight the champion of the world, you beat him and you become the champion of the world. But then in a turn of events, you end up battling this catastrophic ancient Pokemon, you end up defeating it, save the whole world and the world falls in love with you even more. And so when they first started playing this game, the battles were really, really easy. Like there's no real pressure or threat of losing as you learn the gameplay. But the thing that I noticed is that when they first started battling and winning, like there wasn't really any reaction. Like there may have been like a small emotional bump that you could pick up on whenever there was like a half-hearted like, ooh, let's go, you got Cook Sun. They get their confidence from their mom. But they just rolled through it like it was no big deal. It's just a part of the game. It's just what's supposed to happen. Like you're just supposed to keep on winning

and moving forward in the story until they suffered their first defeat. That's when I heard, oh, what? How did I lose? It's not fair, am I supposed to lose? I should have beat him. Tears were shed, nostrils were flared, fists were thrown. But man, after days of losing, when they finally won that battle though, I heard this guttural yes, let's go. Dad, I beat him. Fists were pumped, chests were beaten, fives were hide. (audience laughing) Man, see, when they were just blowing through battles like it was nothing, it was just meh. It's just what's supposed to happen. It wasn't until they faced adversity. The adversity of consecutive losses that they experienced joy on the other side. It is impossible for us to know the depths of a reality that we've never seen contrasted. See, comfort doesn't produce joy. All it really does is it produces a high baseline of expectation. And so when your circumstances are always good, it's just a part of how things are supposed to happen. That's just how things are working. But when trouble comes your way, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides,

The problem with that, though, is that we have a natural aversion to adversity and suffering. Like we are hardwired for survival and our brains and our bodies constantly fight for a state of normalcy. To get nerdy with it, it's a word called "hobianostasis." Have you ever tried to see how far you could swim underwater and hold your breath? Like, you know what happens in the pool every summer, right? You go to the pool and your friend looks at you and they challenge you, or you go with your kid or your grandkid and they look at you and they go, "Better could hold my breath longer than you." To which you reply, "Hold my boot soda." This is going to be the easiest win of my life. I've been swimming for decades, and so you go over to the edge of the pool, you limber up a little bit, and then you take a deep breath. You go underwater, you push off the wall, and you begin to glide down the length of the pool, like a majestic, slightly overweight sea lion. You get to the other wall, you do an underwater turn that would make an Olympian jealous, and you begin to make your way back down the length of the pool thinking, "This is easy. I could do this all day." But what's been happening while you've been swimming is that your muscles have been using up the fresh oxygen that you breathe in at the start, and they've been creating carbon dioxide. And so as you continue on underwater, your brain sensors start to go off, and they're a little casual, they sound kind of like the ship in Project Hail Mary to where it's kind of gentle, but warning, like warning, warning, oxygen levels low, carbon dioxide rising. Your body is starting to tilt out of balance, but then you reach that moment where your chest gets tight, your lungs begin to burn. Now those systems, though, are screaming at you. It's now, surface now, you need air, you're going to die. And you bust up through the surface, you take a deep breath, balance is restored, normal sea is achieved, and everything is how it's supposed to be.

What I'm continuing to learn is that we can't operate that way when we're cultivating joy. We have to fight our natural tendency. Look back at James, one with me real quick, we're going to be back in the message paraphrase for a little bit. James says this, "Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure your faith life is forced into the open and shows its true colors." And as if that wasn't hard enough for us to swallow, he continues on and says, "So don't try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well developed, not deficient in any way. Don't try and get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work." The adversity is the soil that cultivates joy, but you can't cultivate joy if you flee the soil. Like holding our breath underwater, honestly doing anything physical, like whether it's a run or a hike, like our natural tendency is to fight for a state of normalcy. That's why your brain always tells you to stop. Because we can also, though, even though we kind of go into those physical things, like we can endure for a little bit, can't we? And so like going underwater and holding our breath or going for a run or a hike, and even when adversity comes at us from all sides, we can go underneath a time of exertion for a period of time. But we all reach a point where we just want to hit the eject button and we want to return to safety. We all hit a point when our lungs begin to burn in our mind and our brain and everything inside of us is screaming, "Surface now, surface now." We actually find that very thing, a really famous character in the Bible goes through this very thing. His name is David, King David, the man after God's own heart experienced this very thing

before he became king. What's going on with David is he was anointed to be the next king of Israel, but he didn't immediately take the throne. He didn't immediately step into that kingship. He actually had to wait for over 10 years, a decade plus, before he took the throne. And so in 1 Samuel 22, we come to the beginning of life on the run for David. It's the start of the wilderness survival journey for him. And so after literally dodging spears on multiple occasions, David heads out into the wilderness to run for his life. He travels through a couple of different cities and towns, but he eventually makes it to this place called the Cave of Adolem out in the wilderness. And so 1 Samuel 22 verses 1 and 2 says, "So David left gaff and escaped to the Cave of Adolem. Soon his brothers and all his other relatives joined him there. Then others began coming. Men who were in trouble or in dead or who were just discontented. Until David was the captain of about 400 men. Man, so David has just taken a deep breath and he's starting his first lap under water. But he's surrounded by friends and family and good community though. He's good. He's under water, but he's feeling okay. But his time under water continues to stretch. Nobody knows for sure exactly how long, but experts and historians believe that David was on the run in the wilderness anywhere from 7 to 10 years. And so David begins to tire. His lungs begin to burn. And we read David Wright and Psalm 69.1, "Save me, O God, for the floodwaters are up to my neck." And then we read in Psalm 13, "How long, O Lord, will you forget me?" "Forever, how long will you look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand?"

It's a time under water continues to stretch for David. And then we come to 1 Samuel 27. And we read this. But David thought to himself, "Man, one of these days I'm going to be destroyed by the hand of Saul." The best thing I can do is escape to the land of the Philistines. Maybe then Saul will give up searching for me anywhere in Israel, and I'll slip out of his hand. He can't take it anymore. The distance is stretched too far for David. His brain hits the eject button. And he flees to enemy territory just with the hopes of just simply surviving. And I read that and I think, "Oh man, David, adversity is the soil that cultivates joy." But you can't cultivate joy if you flee the soil. And I would love to look down my nose at David in an attempt to make myself feel better, but I just can't. Because the story acts like a mirror for me. I found myself recently in this exact same place. Underwater, out of breath. I'd hit a very long, heavy marathon of a season filled with just intense frustration and stress and anxiety. And the distance between my starting line and where I was just continued to stretch. My lungs were burning and my tank was empty and my joy just completely leaked out. And if I'm continuing to be completely honest with you this morning, I still kind of find myself in that season. But through people close to me, people that I love and respect dearly, the Lord woke me up to a reality and a truth. And it was that I was fighting for an exit ramp. That I was headed down an exit ramp and off ramp because I didn't want to sit in the soil and then I was bailing. And for me, that escaped that exit ramp and this season was golf. And I look, golf is a healthy hobby, but I ceased playing a sport. What I was doing is I was managing an obsession to keep from drowning. Because what I realized was that I was completely withdrawing. I had completely withdrawn from my emotional reality. Like I lost myself in golf news and updates and I would sit on my phone or my iPad for hours watching YouTube golf or scrolling through Instagram golf travel. I began living vicariously through a screen. And because my real life felt so chaotic, man, I just desperately grasped it,

control anywhere that I could find it. And so I, like I started obsessively creating golf specific workout plans and then practice plans and I started staying up late at night, overthinking club components and options and tweaking equipment. And I just was trying to find the perfect combination to make everything fall into place. I began to find my pride and my worth in being a single digit handicap. And I was like, man, you're pretty good at this game. You could get even better than that. And you could find people would look at you even better. And so man, I just, I dug in and I was going to get better by the end of the year. And I was going to be a certain handicap number and all those different things. Because my thought process was man, if I could just win on a scorecard, then maybe, just maybe I could ignore the fact that I felt like I was losing everywhere else. Every single waking moment went to something about golf. Every spare dollar I earned, I just tried to figure out how I could buy more gear in order to fund the fix. And then it got so heavy that when my job got too hard, the anxiety and the stress and everything got so bad that it felt like the floodwaters were up to my neck. I was just a couple of days from sliding my resignation letter across the desk and quitting, walking away and just going and trying to start a business that would just let me play more golf every day. I wasn't just playing a game, I was fleeing the soil. I was using a hobby as an environmental anesthesia to completely avoid the heavy season that God wanted to walk me through. I was running into the land of the Philistines because I didn't want to sit in the cave anymore. And look, I've been plenty vulnerable with you already this morning. And so I'm just going to keep that trend going.

Like I hesitated in sharing that with you this morning because I really did feel like if I was going to share that, that I would tell you that like my exit ramp was golf and then you're going to look at me and you're going to be like, "It's just golf. Calm down, Jezebel." Like it's just golf, man. It's not alcoholism. It's just golf. It's not an affair or pornography. Like it's just golf. It's not drugs. It's not anything illegal or immoral. It's just golf, my guy. But the lesson that I'm learning and the reason I shared that with you is that I am learning that while golf isn't bad, an exit ramp doesn't have to be dramatic in order to destroy you. Adversity is the soil that cultivates joy, but you can't cultivate joy if you flee to soil. And remember, our natural instinct is to fight for a state of normalcy, for comfort. And I believe for us within the DFW area, that fight manifest in one of two ways. The first way is, man, we tend to just like pull ourselves up. We're going to slap some Texas grit on that thing. And we're just going to manhandle our way through this season as quick as we possibly can to get to the other side. The other way that it manifests itself is that we are just going to go down the road. And when it gets hard, we are just going to cut across six lanes of traffic and find the cheapest, closest, quickest exit ramp that we possibly can. The issue with that, though, is that grit and escape are just two sides to the same coin. Both are frantic attempts to bypass the cultivation and refinement of our souls. And we can't do that. Like, there's a reason that Paul used the analogy of fruit in Galatians five. And it's that sustained, rooted growth takes time. Like anybody remotely familiar with wine knows that the most highly prized

and sought-after bottles don't come from new vineyards. They come from what are referred to as old vines, some of which have been sitting in the same soil since the early 1800s. And it is only because they have gone through centuries of droughts, blistering heat, freezing winters, and changing seasons that they have been able to push their roots deep into the soil, pulling from an unfailing source of nutrients in life. See, we can't flee the soil. The seed has to sit in the But please hear me when I'm talking about staying in the soil of adversity, I'm talking about the normal heavy marathons of a broken world, navigating a frustrating career season or carrying a season of grief or enduring a difficult building season within a marriage. Like I am not in any shape, form, or fashion, talking about staying put in an abusive, toxic, or physically dangerous environment, even David himself fled from that. But when we're talking about walking through the normal grinding valleys of life, man, why is, why is sitting in the soil so completely necessary? Remember the differences between happiness and joy that we talked about at the beginning of this. Happiness is based upon your circumstances, kara, that nerdy joy is a deep baseline satisfaction in who creator God is, not for what he can give you. So sitting in the soil is necessary because it is the only environment that forces your spiritual root system to push past surface level comfort and finally anchor directly into the heart of creator God. So if you always run down an exit rant to escape the dirt, and you're not just escaping the pressure, you're escaping the cultivation. You're resetting the clock on your own spiritual maturity. You cannot grow a deep, unkillable harvest of joy if every single time the environment gets cold and dark, you dig up the seed and you flee. So let me, let me ask you something before you head out today. What's your exit rant? Like, what's, what's your exit rant?

Ask yourself, what am I currently running to in order to try and escape the exhaustion of this season? Sure, it, it may be the obvious things like the illegal or the immoral, it may even be a career or a hobby that completely consumes you, it may be the bourbon, it may be the mindless online shopping late at night, but I want to push you and challenge you to maybe look at those things in your life that are a bit more subtle. Something that may be a little bit more innocent at first glance. Maybe it's something that we would call the Zillow Escape, where you spend hours browsing homes online because you are desperately fantasizing about a change of scenery. Oh man, if I just, if I just had that kitchen, oh, if I just had that bathroom, if we just lived in that neighborhood, maybe your exit ramp is what we would call the youth sports general manager, where you're pouring 100% of your emotional energy into micromanaging your kid's athletic career, just so that you don't have to face down your roommate marriage. Is it an obsession with biohacking and tracking your sleep scores, just trying to force absolute control over your body because the rest of your life feels completely out of control? Maybe it's chronic over scheduling. And if I can push maybe just a little bit harder, maybe, maybe it's chronic over scheduling with church things, because you are here every single time the doors are open and you are fighting tooth and nail for us, for more opportunities for the doors to be open, and it's not necessarily because you want to desperately fall in love with Jesus more and more, but it's because you want to run away and not face your life outside these walls. What is your exit ramp? Every single one of these exit ramps or off ramps is just a cheap counterfeit version of joy. What's your exit ramp? Be honest, identify it. I want you to write it down either on a piece of paper in a notebook or the connection card in front of you, put it in a note in your phone, and I want you to close the exit ramp. Shut it down by eliminating it from your life for the next seven days, just seven days. At the end of those seven days, the Lord may prompt you to shut it down a little bit longer,

just seven days, from the end of this service today to the end of this service next week, shut it down, eliminate it. ramps and staying in the soil is the only way that we are going to cultivate joy. Because what I am learning is that adversity is the soil that cultivates joy. But you cannot cultivate joy if you flee the soil. Can I pray for you? God, I don't want to, but we thank you for this lesson. Got to pray for courage. The soil is dark and cold and lonely. And so, got to pray for courage to sit where you have us and the season that you have us. Because you are cultivating something in us. Got to pray for courage to take a look inside of our hearts and our souls and identify the exit ramp or exit ramps. Help us to shut those down. Now, we pray for patience in this season as well, too, as you cultivate. Growing stuff takes time. And I know I don't sit well with that. God, we thank you so much for Jesus who exemplifies all of this so perfectly. And it's in His name. Amen. We love you guys.