Steven Furtick - How To Sustain Real Change
This is an excerpt from: Flip It
Don’t fix things this year at the surface level. Don’t fix things this year, at the level that you see the problem. Seek the Lord and ask Him to show you where the sewage starts. Instead of just cleaning up crap all year, ask God to show you where it starts and where something comes out, is not usually where it comes from. That’s what Jesus was getting at with the Pharisees because they were offended. And so he took their offense as an opportunity to talk about the origin. And then he shared a little bit about the outcome.
And those are my three points for today. Just in case you have to leave early to watch a playoff game. I’ll give you all three up top: Offense, origin, outcome, and may this year be the year that you take notes in church with the Elevation Pen that our tithers generously provided for you. Three points, the offense, the origin, and the outcome. The offense is this, the Pharisees have caught Jesus disciples eating without any hand sanitizer, eating without any Purell, eating without obeying their oral tradition, that before you eat the meal, you’ve got to wash your hands.
And I want you to watch how Jesus flips it. Because what we tend to do, like the Pharisees, who were religious separatists, who felt the need to identify their righteousness by appearance, because it’s much easier to do that, than to cultivate righteousness through love and compassion and selflessness. I’m saying something today, y’all. And in fixing it at the level that it can be seen, they fix it in a way that does not produce or sustain real change. But Jesus is about to flip it. And he does this every time the Pharisees challenge him.
Now, these Pharisees came to him and they came all the way from Jerusalem. Look, look back at verse one. It says that some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem. These are the major leaguers These are not the AA Pharisees, and this is not the farm team. This is the big boys. And they come to Jesus and they ask, Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat. What’s the question? Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? If you came to church last year, you learned that Jesus is not only a savior, but he also has the ability to be a savage. So watch what he does. He takes their question, Why do your disciples break tradition? And in verse three, Jesus replied, Why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?
And God wants to know which one is more important, the traditions of men, or the truth of God. And it’s about time for some of us to decide, are we going to spend this whole year living out of tradition, or living according to truth? I challenge you this year to flip it. It is so easy to live with an invisible belief system, that regulates your responses in situations, and even your ideas of what is possible in your life. An unquestioned belief system is a dangerous thing. The phrases are significant, because the Pharisees are talking about the traditions of the elders. And Jesus is talking about the command of God. One is tradition. One is truth. And a lot of times we don’t know the difference, because for some of us, we give more attention to our traditions than we do to God’s truth.
Can I give you an example? May I? Sometimes people, would rather, I’ve noticed this, they would rather argue about things that they don’t agree about, then work together on things that they do agree about. Can I get you another example? Sometimes in my life, ways of thinking have been handed down to me, not necessarily by my parents, I love you mom. But just by the culture that I live in, and I never stopped to question, Where did this come from? I want you to write that phrase down if you’re the writing type. Where did this come from? Is this really from God? What an excellent question to start our year with. Where did this come from? Because where it comes out is not usually where it comes from.
And sometimes we are living out scripts that we have not even identified, the author of. To wonder, Why do I think it has to be done this way? Why do I assume that this is all I can be? Why have I told myself the story that everyone in my family was this way, and I’m going to be this way too, and it’s just a generational curse or a genetic defect? Why have I believed, that up until this point, it can’t change so it never will? This is when I live according to tradition rather than truth. But this is the year to flip it. Somebody shout, «This is the year to flip it». And this year, I’m not letting my truth flow from my tradition. I want my tradition to flow from truth. That is, I want my life to reflect my values, not necessarily my habits up until this point in time.
Jesus is so brilliant in the way that he flips their tradition, and says that, You are actually using God as a cover up for your dysfunctional behavior. But he has the ability to flip it, because he is truth. See, they’re talking about truth. He embodies truth. They think they know the truth. He is the truth. The way, the truth, and the life. They studied the Word of God, He is the word of God. They live in creation, He is the Creator. See where he’s coming from, is different than where they’re coming from. So what he knows is different than what they think. And his insight is greater than their opinion. And that’s why I want to know God’s heart this year, God’s thoughts, His ways are higher than my ways, his thoughts are higher than my thoughts.
So this is my year to ask the question about what I believe and the behaviors I’ve embraced. Where is this coming from? That’s the origin. The offense is this, they’re not washing their hands? Well, God never told the people, you have to wash your hands every time you eat. That’s, that’s great for OSHA, but it’s not from God. It’s great for your health, your well being, but it’s not in the Bible, it’s in the tradition. Because the elders would take the law of Moses and then they would put layers on the law, and layers on the law. And so they passed it around by word of mouth. And so they kind of started thinking what they thought God meant by stuff. And they started interpreting it according to their religious vantage point.
And by the time that Jesus showed up on the scene, there were so many layers on top of the truth, nobody could get to it. That’s why he had to come to show us that the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. Am I talking all right this year? Flip the flow. And start with what God says, not what you see. Because if I spend this whole year, fixing stuff, at the level where I can see it, Jesus said, it doesn’t even work that way in the human body. It doesn’t. You put it in your mouth, and I don’t mean to be offensive here. I mean, Jesus was offensive, but I don’t want to be. But Jesus said, You put it in your mouth but it doesn’t come out of your mouth. Do you get the picture or shall I continue?
I mean, occasionally, it comes back out of your mouth, but typically, unless something is really wrong, it doesn’t come out where it went in. It doesn’t come out in the same place that it came from. I’ve noticed this is true in so many of the areas of my life, where I’m trying to see change and improvement. Even in the area of my anger, I wonder sometimes when I’m driving down the road, and something comes over me, a demon called Legion comes over me. And I will think to myself, there is no way, that that woman, that 73 year old woman’s turn signal, could have made me as mad as I just got. I mean, if she if she were in my church, I would hug that woman. And here I am, thinking thoughts about this woman, maybe saying some words about this woman, in the safety of the sanctuary of my vehicle. And I’ve been wondering, where does this come from?
You know, that’s a great question to ask about the stuff in your life, if we can put it that way. Jesus said, it goes in your mouth one way, but it comes out in a different form. And a good question to ask about that stuff in your life is, where did it come from? How did I take that out on somebody who didn’t even do anything to me?
See, 'cause usually, where it comes out is not where it comes from. We don’t usually get angry and lose our temper with people who we’re actually mad at. We lose our temper with people who we know will forgive us. And now you’re taking out something on the people that you love the most. But where is coming out is different than where it’s coming from. And if we don’t get honest about what we need from God, this year, we will spend yet another year mopping up the floor without finding the pipe that was busted, that was causing the leak to begin with.
Come on, you know, this is the truth. A lot of times, when I’m angry, it’s not really even that I’m angry. It’s that I’m afraid. And rather than be vulnerable, in my fear, I’d rather express my fear through anger as a protective mechanism. And so I’m trying to work on my temper, but really what I need to work on is my trust. Because if I trusted God more, I wouldn’t be afraid and if I wasn’t afraid, I wouldn’t find an expression of anger. Where’s this coming from?
It’s great to make a list at the beginning of the year of the things that you’d like to do differently. But it’s better to find out where it’s coming from so you don’t just recreate a different issue that was caused by the same disease, because you only learned to take ibuprofen for the symptoms, but you never underwent the surgery to understand some of the beliefs beneath the behavior. Even in relating to people, I have to remember that even the way they’re treating me might not be a reflection of how they feel about me. It might be a reflection of how they feel about themselves. It might be a reflection of what they’re dealing with in their own time alone.
And the way that they push me away. And that’s why you really got to be careful not to let rejection take root in your heart. Because sometimes people are pushing you away, not because of anything that is undesirable about you, but it’s actually that the person finds themselves so undesirable, that they don’t know how to let anyone get close, because to let anybody close carries a risk with it, that they will be seen and found out to be less than which they already believe that they are, and you are spending all of your time trying to love someone who is unable to receive your love. And the rejection is not proof of your defection, it is proof of something in their own life, but where it shows up is not necessarily where it starts.