Monday Morning Sermon Quarterback.
You’ll Be Glad You Did: Part 6 – Andy Stanley, North Point Community Church
My wife thought we were in a TED Talk for a bit, but that’s okay. TED Talks can be powerful and life-changing.
This sermon revisited some themes that Pastor Stanley touches on regularly, the primary one being this: The easiest person to deceive is the person in the mirror.
We do more to undermine our own success than anybody else ever does.
Even if others cause problems in our lives, our responses and reactions to those people and those circumstances often exacerbate the issue more than the initial problems.
Further, if we are really honest with ourselves, we’d admit that most every problem we experience is primarily due to our own decisions and choices.
Our health choices. Our financial choices. Our relationship choices. Our job and school choices. When we’ve decided to quit when we know we should have pressed on. When we decided to stick with a situation beyond when we knew it was wise to do so.
But the ultimate point of the sermon was this: We lie to ourselves about all of those things.
We lie to ourselves about why we do what we shouldn’t do.
We like to ourselves why we do NOT do what we should do.
We make excuses. We think it only affects ourselves, but over time it damages relationships and causes us to miss out on so much life because we live in this little circle of self-deceit.
Our self-deceit turns into excuses which turns into blame which begins taking internal damage and distributes it out into the world.
Ouch.
So what is the truth?
Why do you do this or that or not do this or that?
Next time you find yourself going against your own standards, start digging into why. Just between you and you.
This is insidious and can start in something as simple as why you didn’t go for that walk you committed to going on this morning.
You can thank this sermon for my previous post too. That question is a good one to start with.
Another good one to start with is this: What are you afraid of?
From my quick analysis, ‘fear’ of some sort seems to be the most common initial answer to any question we ask ourselves if we’re veering off course.
I highly recommend checking out the sermon. You can click here to access it online (or visit YouTube where these tend to live forever).
