EMBRACING THE LIFE WE DON’T CHOOSE // UPSIDE DOWN

- Lately are two beautiful and jealous bundles of joy are boys. They have been waking up earlier than usual and bursting through the doors of our room while we desperately trying to clean to those last moments of early morning rest. And it's been hard guys. Like they wake up so early and they burst through the door. The other day, it was like, "I bought you a pippy!" And the other day, it was like, "I want a cuddle, which sounds cute, "but it ends up being like never repositioning themselves "like a thousand times in six minutes "and kicking you in the process while you're trying to sleep." And this morning, it was, "I don't want my orange, it's too squishy!" Like, what are you doing with that? Like, what do you say? Like, "Words are supposed to be squishy." (audience laughing) It's been hard guys. I mean, we have not been getting good sleep. It's been rough. And I thought to myself, you know, when Kristen and I decided to have kids, this is not what we signed up for, okay? The hugs and the kisses, the apple, I love you. You're always in my heart, which is quoted from one of my sons. Like, all that stuff, the watching cartoons and eating ice cream together, those are the stuff that we signed up for. That's what we chose, but this, hell no. This is not what we chose, which brings us to our pianitude today. Matthew 510, the word of the Lord says, "Blessed are those who are persecuted "because of righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. "Just stay with me, okay? "I'm tired of acting. "Okay, I'm tired of acting." I should have thought how this would connect the land, but this is probably the hardest beatitude for us, because this is so out of the realm of our reality and our experience. And so we read this and we think about the stories that we might have heard of martyrs, or people being persecuted overseas for their faith and their religion. Or maybe if you're in a certain second Christianity, you think you're getting persecuted in America, which I don't think is the case. But this one's tough. Like, how do you make sense of this beatitude in our modern day Western civilization? Well, we have to understand that in the church's first 300 years, it's believed that anywhere between three and 10,000 people were violently murdered in the Roman Empire just for worshiping Jesus. And the word was used for this kind of oppression, this kind of imprisonment, this kind of murder is persecution. But like I post, the question that we have to ask ourselves is does this passage even apply to us today? Like us here in modernity, Western civilization, us here in a country that practices religious freedom? But here's the thing that I want you to understand, persecution isn't just something that happened way back when in the past, it's something that's still alive and well happening today. Recent data shows that in 2023 alone, 4,998 Christians were killed for faith reasons, 90% of them in Nigeria. In fact, it's estimated that 14,776 Christian churches and properties were attacked in the same year and globally, around 365 million Christians are subject to high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith today. I knew friends who spent some time in the underground church in China where you could be arrested and executed essentially for simply professing the name of Jesus. And they would say that every time they gathered to worship, they would risk their very lives. They would risk imprisonment, torture, and execution just for owning a Bible. And it's like us, like what doesn't really cost us to get here to worship on a Sunday morning, maybe at an overpriced bright share, maybe we'd miss out on a brunch day or maybe a chance to sleep in in the morning. I think we really take for granted how openly and freely we can practice our faith, don't we? And so all this to say persecution is a reality in our world today, just maybe not for us here in this room. I would bet that the majority of us who gather here on a Sunday morning in San Francisco have never been through the kind of persecution that's described in scripture or maybe even the stories that I just told you in that way. And so what do we know about persecution? For the record, during the pandemic, there are a lot of Christians who are in an uproar at the government because they asked us to stop doing in-person gatherings and they were crying persecution. We're being, no, that's not persecution, that's just love your neighbor, okay, first of all. But second, yes, there are plenty of Christians in our country today who believe that we're under persecution. That's not what this attitude is talking about. That's not the kind of persecution that's described here in scripture. So does this passage even apply to us? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. And it really has to be because I got a preach on it for the next 30 minutes, right? So this passage does apply to us, but maybe not in the way that you and I think. Yes, this blessing is for those who are literally following Jesus at the cost of their very lives. But this blessing is also for the rest of us, but I'll be in a metaphorical and indirect way. But to understand how this blessing impacts us, we have to talk about formation. Stick with me, church. Now God forms us both by practice and by submission. I'm gonna explain that. Spiritual practices, right? They're all the ways that God forms us through the habits that we choose, right? We choose to read scripture. We choose to worship together in community on Sunday. We choose to pray. We choose to enter into silence and solitude. We choose to fast during lens for 40 days. Oh my God, that's a long time, right? The things we do do something to us as we do them, but they're chosen. The spiritual practices that we choose, but submission on the other hand, is the way that God forms us through the things that we don't choose. The circumstances in our lives that come, that we don't choose, it's the flat tire. It's the job of life. It's the cancer diagnosis. It's me walking in my living room, a grown man slipping on a little ribbon and throwing out my back for the week, right? It's all the things that we do not choose. That's a real story, by the way. And so while we may not be persecuted in the literal sense, the essence of persecution is something that you and I experience every single day of our lives. It's being presented with circumstances in our lives that we haven't chosen. Circumstances beyond our control that we would never willingly choose for ourselves. Can you understand a relate with that? Quaker missionary Thomas Kelly, he says that spiritual formation flows through four stages. And I'm just gonna go through really quickly. Stage one, vision, it starts with the vision of the person that you wanna become. See, for example, man, my vision is to look like Austin and to run like Austin, right? It starts with this vision. I'm gonna check you to see it. Make me look like Austin, okay, I have a vision. I have a person I wanna be. I wanna run a marathon. Stage two, you have to begin where you are right now, not where you hope to be. And so I gotta look in the mirror and say, this is reality. This is a 39 year old body. At the place that I'm at, this is how fast I can actually run. You have to start where you are. You'll start with who you want to be. Start with who you actually are today. Stage three, when you stumble and regress, AKA, throw out your back and you will, don't waste a second in the yields or regress. Get up, dust yourself off and begin again. All right, which is all great. This sounds like every TikTok coach, Instagram, influencer, telling you to do, you gotta start with the vision, you gotta start where you are and then you gotta start again when you fall. And there's a lot that we can learn in these first three stages about faith, but I'm not gonna get to notice something. All three of these stages put us in the driver's seat of our own formation. Right, they're all rooted in practices and choices that we willingly make ourselves. But there's a fourth stage, a final stage of formation that moves in a completely different direction. Stage four, let your life be willed through you. And Thomas Kelly's words, don't rig your teeth and cleanse your fists and say, "I will, I will, relax." Take your hands off the steering wheel, submit yourselves, you gotta let life be willed through you. What's he mean? He's saying that the deepest kind of freedom that you and I can find is not by more spiritual striving, but by submission. Submission to the circumstances of your life in this season. Submission to the obligation and the responsibilities, submission to the opportunities or the lack of opportunities, submission to the privileges and the blessings, and yes, even submission to the suffering of your present season. And you say, "Submit to all of it as if they were the perfect conditions through which God did form you and deal with you and mature you and grow you. Don't rush to get out of it, embrace it and submit to it." Now, when we see these four stages play out in the life of Peter, if you remember before denying Jesus, Peter, he was already deeply formed by spiritual practices. Right? He walked with Jesus. He participated in the miracles. He was taught, he was trained, he was sent out, he sat through so many of his teachings, yet despite all of the spiritual practices that Peter engaged in, there were still parts of his soul that needed to be formed and healed. And it's shown in the moment where he denies Jesus three times. You would think that Peter would be the kind of super-priced that would never have been in Jesus. But we see that practices alone, walking with Jesus Himself alone was not enough. He needed to be taught submission. A Peter was still under the belief that God's kingdom would come through his competence, through his striving, through his effort and not God's grace. And Peter was still trying to get God to join his story, not understanding that Jesus was inviting him to join God's story. We check it out. After Jesus dies and resurrects, when Jesus finds Peter on the beach, after Peter had denied him three times, after Jesus came back from the dead, we see that something has changed within him. Something has changed within him. Oh, really? Submission. Something was different about Peter. He had in that short period of time between denying Jesus and Jesus coming back. He had let life be wielded through him. It's submission, in a sense. In today's Beatitude, Jesus is making the claim that this kind of submission is an invitation into the deepest kind of blessing, into the deepest kind of maturity and healing that we could possibly find. In John chapter 21 verse 18 through 19, Jesus is very truly telling you, when you were younger, you dressed yourself and when it's where you wanted it. But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands and someone will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go. I feel it already. Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God, then he said to him, following. Another theologian, Javier Philippe, he says, there is another way of exercising freedom, less immediate and exciting, poorer, humbler and much more common. And one immensely fruitful, both human and spiritually. It is consenting to what we do not originally choose. And then the great Henry now, and goes on to say, Jesus has a different version of maturity. It is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go. What is Jesus and all these great spiritual thinkers alike saying? They are saying there is life and freedom and maturity when we learn to submit to the circumstances of life that we would never choose. They look anything hard that you have gone through. If you had a choice before you would do that thing, would you have chosen to go through it? But there was something in going through that struggle or difficulty or a valid season that formed something in you that could not have informed you otherwise. We see submission in the life of Jesus on the eve of his arrest, falling to his knees, praying out, my father, if it is possible, let this cup be taken from me yet not as I will, but as he was practicing submission to the circumstances. We love to pray, your kingdom come, your will be done. But praying that second part, your will be done, not so much. We don't really like praying that part. I don't know about you, but I grew up in a very religious setting where I don't know why, but most of us were like, okay, for some reason when we grow up, God is going to send us to the places we never want to go. Do you ever grow up thinking that? For me, for some reason, I don't know as a kid. It was always like God is going to send me to a third world country to be a missionary. And I just knew that was the destiny for my life for some reason. It's like I just had to understand that God is going to send me to the places I never want to go. I don't think that's how I think to think about that, especially as a child, but there is a great of truth in it. There are many seasons in life. There are many circumstances in life that we would never willingly choose for ourselves, but come just because of the circumstances of life. But those who are willing to be formed not only by practice, but by submission on the ones who are truly blessed. And so the question is, how do the circumstances that I don't choose become the conditions to which God can form me and heal me and which are me? It's really through submission. Submission is a holy passivity where I entrust my deepest healing to God. It's not a resignation, it's a, I'm just going to succumb to my circumstances. It's a willingness to trust that God has me, where He has me, for a divine purpose. It's like laying down on an operating table so that Jesus can you search for Him. I don't know if you've watched the Emmy nominated show, the pit. It's so good, right? And it's just a bunch of doctors following them around, right? It's going on the operating table and trusting that your doctors know what they're doing. Now, sometimes submission is prompted by conditions outside of us, right? It's like the suffering inflicted upon us through persecution or like the suffering we experienced through the betrayal and the relationship or like the suffering brought about by the circumstances of life. There are things outside of us that cause us to submit. But other times, submission is prompted by the conditions inside of us. Like the ordinary commitments that can strain our lives, also known as the limits. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So I want us to hone in on that a little more. What does it look like to submit to our limits? To the conditions inside of us that can cause us to submit. You may have heard the famous say, "How I have no limits." We heard that before. How is a place where you are a limitless? But here's the question I want to pose. What if limits don't actually hold us back? But what if limits actually set us free? Greatness to find our culture means transcending our limits. It's the professional athlete driven to break the record. I don't know if you saw it, but back in March. It's so much. It's so much. This month, the record for the fastest marathon was broken. Do you see that awesome? They broke it. They broke it. I don't know why I was just running out of me. They completed 26 miles and two hours and 35 seconds. That's four minutes and 35 seconds. The mile. Four to 26 miles. In our world, greatness is transcending and breaking through our limits. It's the pop artist torn all around the world to become the biggest star in the industry. If the business person climbing the corporate ladder to become the most successful person in their industry, greatness needs to do more than is expected, more than you thought you were capable of, more than seems possible. But greatness defined by scripture looks a lot more like embracing our limits, not transcending them. It's the Libyan's 257. In your relationships with one another, how does it say mindset as Christ Jesus? To being in very nature, God did not consider equality with God something to be used to His own advantage, rather He made Himself nothing by taking the very nature of a serving being made in human likeness. Greenness is a limitless God, taking on the limits of a human body. Greatness is the God of the universe, coming to earth as a helpless babe. Greenness is the creator of all the cosmos, limiting Himself to 33 years of ministry. While being planted in a relatively small region of ancient Palestine for all of his life, Ken Chimatsu, pastor of Canada, says, "Greatest human being who ever lived didn't strive to cram as much as possible into a short lifetime of roughly 33 years. Jesus let His life be limited by God's will and liberated by God's will." And in the end, this limitless God chose the ultimate human limit, He chose death. And so, greenness is a limited, unlimited God, a limitless God, choosing a limited experience. But how backwards is that from our cultural ethos, right? For us, if yellow, we want to cram as much experience as much life into our short time here on earth as much as possible. We want to break through the limits even when we're tired, even when we feel overworked. We want to break through all of that to achieve greatness. But we see here that greatness in a biblical sense is learning to embrace limits, not transcend them. So we see that there's a freedom, there's life, and there's joy, and healing that comes when we learn to submit to our limits. But why don't we? Why don't we submit to our limits? Why don't we stop work at 5 p.m. when we get off work? Why don't we stop over-exerting ourselves in relational circles and going to the parties that we know we shouldn't be going to? Why do we do these things to ourselves so that we constantly are trying to break through the limits of our lives? What drives us to pursue a limitless life? Well, I want to spend the rest of our time touching on three things that drive this pursuit of the limitless life and their ambition, expectation, and over-functioning. And I bet that most of us can relate to one or all three of these. The first is ambition. I don't know if you know who Thomas Merman is. He is a monk and a theologian who was at the height of his career in his late 20s. He was primed for a lucrative literary career, a global book tour, and a massive contract that would earn him lots of money. And yet, at the height of his success, he turned out all of it just to embrace the monastic life, a simple humble hidden life of prayer as a monk. Later in life when he was asked why. a young man, why at the hype of his success, why at the greatest moment in his career that would be a launching advert for the rest of his life, why did that moment keep turning his back on all of that and shows that we have the monastery? And this is what he said. If I had a message to my contemporaries, it was surely this. The anything you like, be madmen, be drunks and fools of every shaken form, I'm refreshing for theologian to say that. But it all pops at the whole thing. Success. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. And how, like, think about that. Our world, this is stupid. In our world, life is only meaningful if you're successful. If you get what you're going for, if you break through the events and achieve all the success, but when we make success, our main pursuit, we lose sight of how to live and enjoy life. People that you've known were successful, but weren't able to be present and enjoy all that they had, and she's successful. Success for them. We lose sight of ourselves, forget who we are apart from our performing, apart from our producing. And I bet many of us in tech, right? We understand that very true. That it's hard to separate who we are, our worth and our identity, our value apart from being productive and successful and performative. When we lose our being and all of our doing, and what it inevitably leads to is burnout. Now, Quaker philosopher, Parker Palmer, he says that burnout is not really about giving too much. I know that's what we think burnout is. I've done so much number now. But he's the artist that it's about giving too little. And he says that he says burnout is the condition of giving too much of myself to those furthest from me, and therefore having too little to give to the people closest to me. Can I tell you something? Your tech CEO is not going to be on your deathbed at the end of your life. Like, all the extra hours that you logged in at work, it's not going to really pay dividends in the end when all that really matters are those who are closest to you. And so this is what ambition does. This is the shadow side of ambition. The second is expectation. Other of us were driven beyond our limits by the weight of other people's expectations, right? We fear letting people down. And so we have never learned the art of saying no. And in aiming to meet everyone's expectations, we actually need no one's expectations. And we end up hurting ourselves. Now, can I say something that will free you and everyone in this room? It's okay to let people down. It's okay, end of your time, too. I'm seeking myself, too. Think about this. Jesus? I know we love Jesus. But Jesus led a lot of people down in his life, right? But although he led people down, he lived with perfect peace. Think about that for a second. Jesus retreated from the crowds, even though they wanted more from him. They wanted more content. They wanted more healing. Jesus was willing to be misunderstood by people and slept just fine at night without having to stick up for his name or defend himself. And Jesus turned out plenty of invitations to stay or go to do or to become. Jesus walked in perfect peace. This is one story where Jesus heals a paralyzed man at the pool of the Vesta. This pool, if you know, legend has it that this pool had the power to heal you. And so so many people from all over the region who had terminal diseases, they gathered at this pool, hoping that in stirring it and entering into it, they would find healing for themselves. Now, what's most interesting about the story, isn't what Jesus did? It's what Jesus didn't do. Jesus shows up at this spot with so many paralytic, so many people terminal illnesses and he heals one paralytic man and no one else. That's my stuff. Like, come on. Like, why would you do that? Jesus's like, why? But Jesus, He just cleans himself and He gives us this answer of why? And John 5th and 15, He says, very truly, I tell you, the son can do nothing by himself. He can only do what He sees His Father doing. There's a freedom that comes in learning to do only what we see our Father doing. Not our peer who's in the same career that we are and they're working way harder than we are. Not that person on Instagram that's doing this or that, but it just understanding what is faithfulness in my life look like because it doesn't necessarily look the same as yours. When we started Church Planning back in 2016, we sat with a prominent pastor from Hong Kong. His pastor is like full of millionaires and I was like, man, I'm kind of jealous. Just kidding. [laughter] And we asked the ask a question, you sat us down and he was like, Mickey Chris said, like, what do you think success is for you? Like let's say five years, ten years down the line, how would you know you would have been successful as pastors and church planners? You know, how are they going to be like, oh, how long people get saved? I don't know. No, no. Okay, everyone becomes the perfect embodiment of Christianity. Like, no. He's like, Mickey, the world will tell you that you measure success by the metrics of how many people come to your church, how much they give, how many people you disciple, how many people get saved. He says, Mickey, none of that is successful in the kingdom. He looked as dead in the eyes and I'll never forget this set of trajectory for our entire hospital career. He looked as, in the eyes of his said, Mickey, success in the kingdom of God is faithfulness. Nothing less, nothing more. Success is faithfulness to the life that God has called you to live. And so you can have a pastor that has ten thousand people in their congregation and they might not be successful. But you can have a group of 25 rebels and runaways in San Francisco. No one knows about your church, it's her day and you can be successful. The key is faithfulness. What would it look like to stop being driven by the expectations of others, by the expectations of culture of our world that's dominated by success? What would it look like to live without the guilds that comes from saying no? And just saying yes to what God has called us to, to just be faithful, to do only what we see our Father doing. So we have ambition and expectation, so the things that drive our pursuit of a limitless life with the third is over-functioning. And last, some of us we violate our limits by over-functioning. Over-functioning is a psychological term for one person, takes on too many tasks and responsibilities in a relationship. The over-functioning person finds a dysfunctional value in doing too much while the under-functioning relationship is inevitably coddled and enabled by the arrangement. This kind of dynamic plays out in workplace relationships, it plays out in romances, friendships, marriages, and even spirituality. Many of us never learn to keep the limit of doing only what we see our Father doing. And so with the very best of intentions, we assume the responsibility for healing every paralytic at the pulpit best that we take on the burden and responsibility of doing that which God never entrusted us to do. And that often leads us to spiritual pride where we pat ourselves on our back for being so spiritually mature and doing so much. And other times, maybe more than not, it leads us to spiritual guilt. Have you ever felt like, "I'm not doing enough. I'm not doing enough for my faith. I'm not doing enough for my work. I'm not doing enough for my relationship." Thomas Murray who goes on to say this is well about overfunctioning. He's as free from the laziness that goes about disguise as activity when activity is not required of me. Give me humility in which alone is rest. So we have a vision, expectation, and overfunctioning. Now the danger of these three expressions of the limitless life is that they're actually the very conditions that drive us to our very worst. So these three things are also the conditions that often lead us to our very best. Do you know what I mean? Like an ambition leads us to accomplish a lot of good for our world. And expectation, those who feel the expectations of others, often have great empathy for others as well. Those who overfunction, often overfunction in the name of compassion, seeing and need, and going out of their way to meeting. And so we see that there is good things about these three things. The limits are the confines within which our strengths are allowed to be strengths and not our destruction. We see that with ambition, expectation, overfunctioning, these are strengths that can actually lead to our destruction and our downfall. The limits are the setting that the atmosphere, the boundaries within which our strengths are allowed to be strengths and not our destruction. The confines within which our strengths will serve us rather than the other way around. We all have no limits. We often imagine freedom as a limit in this place where we think that limits are bondage. But what if it's the other way around? What if it's upside down? What if the very best gift, the deepest kind of healing, the fullest kind of life comes from embracing our limits rather than transcending them? Now, when I close with a few thoughts from Pete Scazero, his author of "Emotional Healthy Spirituality," a great book by the way, he defies limits as far available gifts, time, energy, and knowledge. So if you want to know what your limits are this season, they're what your available gifts, You're available time. available energy and their available knowledge. In other words, all of us were limited by all sorts of things like our personality type, our skill set, our relational commitments, our financial freedom, our constraint, our available resources. But I want to hone in on one particular type of limit that all of us can relate to. One that we all share in common and interact with constantly. But it's also the one that changes over the course of our lives and the limit that I'm talking about that you and I face within wrecking with every single day of our lives. The limit that I'm talking about is our life stage. College students have certain limits, parents of toddlers have others, single working professionals have others, newlyweds have others, all of us have different limits depending on the life stage that we find ourselves in. And so one thing that's constant in every season of life is that we will always have to navigate the constraints of limits that come with our stage of life. And our limits will always shit as we move from one chapter to another and do another. You know, we have in our community group we're talking about, you know, most of y'all know Chris Denheim as like you've met us when we had our kids. But we were so different before we had our kids y'all. We were talking about with our CT like, man, after church every Sunday we would go to Bobo, we would be there to work. You remember that team? We would go and get into like 4 p.m. We would go to hang out. Now we never show up. We didn't even show up to lunch last week because that's the time you melt down, right? It's so different. But we have learned to embrace the constraints of our stage of life. And I know in 10 years I'm going to miss having these constraints when our kids are old and they're complete teenagers. And we have all the time in the world. That's another stage. But in this stage we recognize these are the limits. And when we try to, when we try to break through those limits, we die. But we burn ourselves out. We try to when we first have kids. We just can't. And sure there's seasons of life when we have to carry a particular heavy weight for a time like when you have a home full of young kids or like when you're working multiple jobs to make, make, and to me, but maybe you're doing the medical residency or studying for the bar moving across the country. There are seasons of intense weight that we have to carry. There are seasons of intense running. There are brief occasions where we have to run at an unsustainable pace. But if that's where you find yourself permanently, you need to take a deeper look. Maybe the problem is outside of you. Maybe the problem is inside of you. You have been bought the lie that God's called you to live and pursue a limitless life. Now I'm going to end with the story and his invitation for today's be added to the invitation as this. The lesson in any and every season is tied to embracing our minutes with that season. So if you want to tap into the blessing for the season that you find yourself in, you're not going to find it. You try to get out of that season or break through the limits of that season. You're going to find it by embracing the limits that that season brings. So whether you're single or you're dating or you're marrying or you have kids, whether you're in the workforce or your class or school, whatever season you find yourself in, the blessing is going to come when you learn to embrace the limits of that season, the limit that you would never choose for yourself. In Eugene Pierce's biography, one of my favorite theologians, he's author of the message translation of the Bible. He shares his story about taking a high-contributor in his life with his adult son, Eric. And so Eugene and Eric are going to go on this high-contrib father and son. But what Eugene didn't know was that Eric's son had been processing some of his childhood wounds with his therapists for many, many months. And wounds that were really indirectly caused by his father, who was a pastor. As those therapists, he assigns him to write a letter to his dad and just to explain the hurt that he had experienced from his father. And so Eric decided to use his high-contribut as an opportunity to read this letter that he had written his dad about the ways that his father had hurt him. And so they spent the entire morning hiking together and they get to this summit, they're taking in the view, they're enjoying it. And Eric, he pulls out this letter that he had written to his father. And in tears, he reads about all the ways that his father, although well-intentioned and directly, hurts him while he was growing up. And he reads this letter to his dad explaining that how all throughout his childhood, his dad was always there physically. But there was always felt like he wasn't really all there. And that as a kid, he could feel that his dad's imagination was elsewhere, maybe in a sermon or a book or in the church. And so he always felt second and it wasn't because his dad was absent, his dad was very present physically. But because his dad wasn't truly present with all of himself. What Eugene was doing, when Son was expressing, was that dad viewed and living beyond your limits. And this is the consequence, this is the fallout when we live beyond our limits. We not only hurt ourselves, but we hurt the ones that we love the most. Now I read this and you can see how emotional right now, because I feel this. I feel the tension, even when I'm with my kids. I'm preaching on persecution to son, they're one of my gonna do what I'm thinking. And it takes me out of moments of the presence embracing the limits and the constraints of this season of my life. There's gonna be a season where I'm not around my son all the time. I read this statistic that broke my heart. They say 75% of all the time you're gonna spend with your kids happens before they turn 12. Is that crazy? So I feel this, I feel myself burst, trying to burst to these limits of my life every single day. But we have to learn to embrace the limits. That's where the blessing is found. So how do we receive the invitation to the blessed life in our hitting stage of life? It starts with embracing the limits of our season. One season of life for you and what does it look like to submit to and embrace the limits of your current season? And what are the things you should believe out of that? I want to invite us into a time of response. Why don't we close our eyes? Now let's just take a moment to pray and really reflect on the things that we feel like God might be saying to us this morning. Have you fallen for the lie that life requires limitlessness? Have you been pursuing a life beyond your means, beyond the constraints of the season of life that you find yourself in? Have you felt it difficult to let life be willed through you? To embrace the circumstances and the situation that you would never choose for yourself. Let's say God, even though I wouldn't have chosen this, I believe that you can do something in this and through this. I believe that my greatest blessing and maturity of formation can be found in the things that I would never choose for myself. This morning I feel like God is calling us to repent. And that's not feeling guilty or ashamed or like wallowing and self-pity. Repentance simply means I'm going to change my mind about this. I'm going to turn the other way. I feel like God is inviting us this morning repentance of three things to repent of ambition and unhealthy ambition to repent of succumbing and over-reserting ourselves because of the expectations of others and over-functioning. If you find yourself in life struggling with one or three of these things, just take a moment to say, "God, I repent. I don't want to live with success as the only thing that matters to me. I don't want to live burdened by the expectations of others. I don't want to live over-functioning and over-observing myself all the time. I give these things to you. Show me a better way. Show me what it looks like to practically embrace the limits and constrain the two of you in the end of season." As a God, would you give us the courage and would you give us the awareness to do only what we see our Father doing to live a life of faithfulness within the limits of our season? We thank you for doing that.