A Beautiful Mind

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. If I don't look at St. Paul's life and look at it as balanced, I think it was a little off in some ways, but it was still a cool. He was able to rest. He was able to rejoice. He was able to be who he was in God's presence no matter where he was. So we're going to talk about this this morning. Today, I got a cold I think in Florence or somewhere. Sorry about that. I know, it's rough. It's rough. So I might cough a little. It's like eight days ago, so we're pretty good. But anyways, let's pray. Lord God, thank you so much for the fact that you did not create us to be slaves, to be enslaved, to be stuck in drudgery, to define ourselves by what we can do for you or for others. But we were created in your image, and we were redeemed by your Son. And so we just have intrinsic value because of your love and mercy and grace and promises towards us. Help us to just simmer in that over these few weeks, to learn what that means, to rest in your promises, to rest in your grace, to be still and know that you are our God and we are yours. So bless us this summer. Thank you for this July 4th. It's not a weekend. I don't know, Lord. But this time to celebrate this week, the freedoms we have in this country. We thank you for this country. We thank you for the freedom to worship you, the freedom to let go and not define ourselves by the rat race or by other people's opinions or what we can do, but be defined by you and your word. So open our hearts and our lives to that today. We pray, Lord, that you'd be with all wonderful Christian churches across this area. We thank you, Lord, for their gospel ministries and the fact that there's really only one Christian church in this area, yours. We're part of it. We thank you for that. We pray that you'd have a movement of your spirit, that many, many more people will enter into your rest. To enter into just trusting you and letting go and placing their whole lives into your care. That's what we want for ourselves today, too. All this we pray in Jesus name. Amen. Okay, so we're starting out in an odd place, maybe for you on this. It's a passage from Romans 12 that Davina talked about. Romans 12, verses one and two. And you can follow along on our app, I guess, or not our app, but the U version of the Bible. There's a note for the sermon. But Romans 12, one and two. And this is what Paul writes to the Romans and to all of us. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to rest, to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will. So you've heard the joke, probably a hundred different jokes on how many people does it take to change a light bulb? Or like how many church members does it take to change a light bulb? Change? My grandmother donated that light bulb. How dare you change it, right? That's kind of the idea, is a lot of people struggle, especially in Christianity, I think, with the idea of change. Now, when you ask people if they like change, they'll say, oh, sure, I like change. No, they don't. The only person, I think, Mark Twain said that likes change is a baby in a wet diaper. The rest of us struggle with it. We want things to change. We want circumstances to change. We want things around us to change, as long as I don't have to change. If I can get everything else to go, if everything could fall in line the way I want, that's kind of the way we're set up. People really don't like to change first. I want to stay in control. I want to stay and feel competent. If only I could find, and we kind of go down that road, if I could only find the right life partner, if I could only find the right job, if I could only get the right professors, if I could only find the right career path, if I could get on to America's Got Talent, then I'll be content, I'll be happy, I'll feel good about my life. Then my perspective will change. I like how Mark Buchanan in his book, The Rest of God, puts it. He says, we won't change our minds, our attitudes, until someone, God, a parent, a boss, a spouse, a child, a co-worker, changes our circumstances. We refuse to budge until someone moves a mountain. Our lives shuttle between an alteration of if only, what if, and as soon as. But this is not how God works. Under God's economy, nothing really changes until our minds do. So we're going to start this whole idea of rest, not with the most practical aspects right now. We're going to talk about a lot of methods or practices or habits that you could do. We are going to talk about how to add margin into your life. We're going to get there, but today we aren't starting there because that's not, if I just...